Soon after the 9/11 attacks, in the throes of the Second Intifada, the dean of the divinity school began propagating an early version of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, leveraging his position at Harvard and as a scholar of Islam to resuscitate the demands of Arab countries from their boycott of Israel that dates back to the 1920s—before the country’s founding. At the divinity school, anti-Israel sentiment at Harvard was also taking a strange new turn: during orientation, I heard a senior university officer suggest that Israel may have been at fault for the 9/11 attacks. This was a wake-up call.

At the conference, I learned that the Harvard Divinity School had recently accepted a gift of $2.5 million from then-president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, who was promoting anti-Americanism and antisemitism through his research think tank, the Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow-Up, where, among other things, they attempted to resurrect the blood libel of medieval Europe. Zayed’s think tank would sponsor the translation of antisemitic texts into Arabic and disseminate them throughout the Arab world. …

In my first year at Harvard, it became clear to me that the university was more than willing to associate with an autocratic Arab leader and his think tank in exchange for a check. In other words, the university, its faculty, and ultimately, its values, were for sale.

[This contradicts the claims from Harvard specifically and Academia generally that this is a recent phenomenon. It’s not, and it has many contributors, not just the Zayed Center. The total embrace and enforcement of critical race theory pedagogy constructed the victimology framework by which anti-Semitism exploded, and we have seen hints of that for at least the last 15 years in required declarations of “privilege” for entry into collegiate students, especially in education programs. Anyone who’s completely surprised at this hasn’t paid attention. — Ed]