Claudine Gay has recently become significantly more famous, but in ways that she’s probably not thrilled about. The Harvard President has been widely criticized for her University’s meek initial response to a letter from school groups and faculty members who claimed that Israel was “entirely responsible” for the Hamas attacks of October 7. To her credit, she has tried to change course a bit since then, but antisemitism continues to flare up at Harvard, despite threats from major employers on Wall Street and in the legal profession to stop hiring their graduates if they engage in hatred of the Jews and Israel. Now, Ms. Gay is trying yet another tactic. She has convened an “Antisemitism Advisory Board.” That should fix everything, right? (Boston Globe)

She said she had assembled a group of faculty, staff, alumni, and Jewish religious leaders “whose wisdom, experience, and counsel will help guide us forward.” Among the advisers are Martha Minow, a Harvard professor and former dean of Harvard Law School; Geraldine Acuña-Sunshine, a vice chair of Harvard’s board of overseers; Harvard College’s dean of students Thomas Dunne; and a Harvard undergraduate, Nim Ravid, who is from Israel.

Last week, Harvard created a separate task force to help students who have faced intimidation and harassment after being linked, sometimes falsely, to the letter.

Gay’s announcement came almost three weeks after the controversy erupted at Harvard in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attack that killed more than 1,400 Israelis.

This advisory board was convened “in response to a resurgence of bigotry on campus.” While the use of the word “bigotry” is accurate, it’s also rather generic. Can Claudine Gay not bring herself to utter the word “antisemitic” aloud? Is she somehow incapable of specifically addressing the plight of the Jewish community?

Tucked into the excerpt above, you will notice a brief reference to another task force that Harvard set up prior to establishing the advisory board that will allegedly address antisemitism. It was covered at the university’s newspaper, The Crimson. It was a described as an “anti-doxxing task force” and it was immediately established not to help Jewish students, but to protect the people who signed off on the letter blaming Israel for the atrocities of Hamas.

Some of the students were complaining that they were being publicly identified and singled out with threats to their potential future employment or other forms of harassment. A few denied having been involved with the creation of the letter, and perhaps they deserve a bit of leeway if they can demonstrate that they denounced it as soon as they learned of it and/or attended pro-Israel rallies. But as far as the rest of them go, they need to stop whining. You made your pro-terrorist viewpoints clear and now you need to own them. Being held to account for your own choices is not “doxxing.”

It is also interesting to note that Claudine gay included on the antisemitism advisory board Harvard’s Dean of Students, Thomas Dunne. Would you care to hazard a guess as to who set up the anti-doxxing task force? You probably don’t need any additional clues. It was the same Thomas Dunne.

The new task force will be in operation until Nov. 3, at which point the task force will reassess its efforts to ensure that its work meets student needs, according to an email obtained by The Crimson. The message, dated Tuesday, was sent to doxxed students by Dean of Students Thomas Dunne.

“We are truly grateful for all the tremendous work that students have put forth in supporting each other through this most difficult time, and we appreciate the collaborative spirit in which students, faculty, and staff have come together to repel this repugnant assault on our community,” Dunne wrote.

So  within a week of the brutal Hamas attacks, Dunne was describing any backlash against the efforts to blame Israel for all of this as a “repugnant assault” on the Harvard community. And now he’s on the antisemitism advisory board? Talk about mixed messaging. Perhaps Dunne was under the impression that he was being recruited to advise people on how to be more antisemitic. If Claudine Gay is continuing to complain about people not taking her seriously or criticizing her response, she needs to take a moment and look in the mirror. The criticism is entirely deserved and there is still a wave of anti-Jewish sentiment and potential violence sweeping her campus.