Kenneth Roth’s Reward for Slandering Israel

Wall Street Journal | Dominic Green

After outcries over academic freedom, HKS reversed its decision not to award a fellowship to Kenneth Roth, the former director of Human Rights Watch. Green asks the question of whether the truth is inverted— “If there is a crisis of free speech on campus today, Mr. Roth isn’t its victim. If anything, he and Human Rights Watch are among its instigators.”

He goes on to say that “the only voices that are systemically silenced or absent on campus today are conservatives in general, and pro-Israel voices in particular” and that “administrators turn a blind eye to an organized campaign of calumny against Israel as an ‘apartheid’ state, which frequently spills into physical violence against Jewish students.”

One of the reasons behind this, Green argues, is Human Rights Watch, the organization Roth led. “In 2021, Human Rights Watch became the first global human-rights organization to accuse Israel of ‘the crime of apartheid.’ This is a modern blood libel, an abuse of legal and historical fact.”

Green recounts Roth’s’ record on Israel, including that “After Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that Israel must be ‘wiped off the map,’ Mr. Roth claimed in 2012 that this and similar statements weren’t incitement to genocide, only ‘advocacy.’”

Green also points out that this appointment is not without wider impact on Washington. “This isn’t merely an academic question. Public-policy schools like Harvard’s are part of the revolving door between government, academia and the private sector..these schools function as think tanks, facilitating valuable exchanges between academic theorists and real-world practitioners.” 

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Related:

Harvard Reverses Course on Human Rights Advocate Who Criticized Israel (1/19/23)

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