A University of Pennsylvania student who proclaimed she felt “empowered and happy” on the day Hamas terrorists launched their deadly attack against Israeli civilians has since been busted for stealing an Israeli flag on campus, according to reports.
Tara Tarawneh — a 2020 graduate of King’s Academy in Madaba, Jordan — was arrested Nov. 4 for allegedly stealing an Israeli flag from the front of a Campus Apartments house near the Ivy League campus, The Daily Pennsylvanian reported last week.
The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office charged Tarawneh — who once penned a column decrying “settler colonialism” as a “violent machine” — with theft and receiving stolen property, Penn’s Division of Public Safety stemming from the Oct. 28 incident, the outlet reported.
Tarawneh gave a hate-filled speech at a Philadelphia rally last month, with video of her addressing the pro-Palestinian crowd going viral, the Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn’s independent student-run media organization, confirmed.
“I remember feelings so empowered and happy, so confident that victory was near and so tangible,” she tells a crowd of the monstrous Oct. 7 attack.
“I want all of you to hold that feeling in your hearts. Never let go of it. Channel it through every action you take. Bring it to the streets.”
The disturbing footage drew widespread rebuke online, including from Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-Bronx) who denounced the video in a post on X last week.
“This is not a patient at a psychiatric hospital,” he wrote. “This is a student at an Ivy League.”
According to an online profile on artmejo.com, Tarawneh considers herself a passionate human rights activist who planned to study English Literature and Art at UPenn, and once wrote for Taleed Magazine.
In an article in The Daily Pennsylvanian published in September, the controversial coed promoted the then-upcoming Palestine Writes Literature Festival on the Philadelphia campus.
“For a land and a people who suffer from a history of colonialism, displacement and erasure, the festival is an extremely important site of cultural preservation,” she wrote in the Sept. 14 piece.
She denounced “settler colonialism,” calling it “a violent machine which seeks to exterminate any semblance of Palestinian existence, including Palestinians’ narrative of their own history.”
A spokesperson for the university declined to comment to The Post this week but referred a reporter to the president’s recent remarks denouncing antisemitism at a trustees meeting.
UPenn President Liz Magil acknowledged a rise in antisemitic acts on campus including “swastikas and hateful graffiti” as well as “chants at rallies” that she said “celebrate and praise the slaughter and kidnapping of innocent people, and that question Israel’s very right to exist.”
Magil said she was sickened, horrified and angry.
“I condemn personally these hateful – hateful – antisemitic acts and words, which are nothing but inhumane,” she said at the meeting earlier this month.
“And I assure you that Penn has and will investigate any act of hate on our campus and take full action in accordance with our policies and our laws.”
Tarawneh did not reply to emails from The Post seeking comment.
Radical Hamas terrorists stormed into Israel on Oct. 7 in a surprise attack that left 1,400 Israelis dead, nearly all of them civilians, with more than 220 others taken hostage by the militants.
Israel retaliated by launching an attack on the Gaza Strip — with the conflict sparking widespread clashes between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli demonstrators.
College campuses — including at other Ivy League schools Columbia, Cornell, Yale and Harvard — have been a hotbed for disturbing anti-Israeli protests.