We have seen many disgusting spectacles on campuses in favor of the Hamas attack on Israel, including Students for Justice in Palestine using images of a paraglider to mock the 270 victims of the Rave music festival massacre.
Perhaps nothing has generated as much outrage, however, as the speech by Cornell History Professor Russell Rickford, a longtime Israel hater who we have covered when he hijacked a faculty event turning it into an anti-Israel rally. That so many faculty and students chanted along tells you something.
Rickford is obsessed with destroying Israel in a very sick way. So sick that he is all over the news for stating that he found the Hamas attack “exhilarating“. His comments were not out of context. I’ve listened to his entire presentation (which was posted on Facebook as part of the full event video).
I appeared on Fox Business today to talk not just about Rickford’s comments, but more broadly about the campus terror-supporting movements.
Partial Transcript (auto-generated, may contain transcription errors):
David Asman (00:00):…. I was exhilarated professor, that was just despicable. The fact that he was said over and over how exhilarating and exciting it was to see Hamas’ terrorist massacres. Has anybody asked him or has he given an apology for those statements?WAJ (01:39):No. In fact, according to the Cornell Sun student newspaper, he’s completely defending himself and he’s standing by those comments. And the university was very slow to react to this. They initially offered a very tepid response. Only after mounting pressure and media attention did they even mention him by name. And that stands in contrast to how they’ve treated other people, including me in the past.Asman (02:03):Well, let’s talk about that. What did they say to you after you had criticism for Black Lives Matter?WAJ (02:10):Right after George Floyd, and the rioting and the looting, I criticized the rioting and the looting. There was another professor in the chemistry department who also criticized that. We were met with immediate reaction from the administration. The university denounced that chemistry professor, the law school denounced me. And we were standing against violence. We were standing against rioting and looting. We were standing up for peace and we were quickly denounced by name.Now you have a professor who stands up for violence, who feels exhilarated by the mass murder, mass torture, and mass rape of Jewish Israelis and other Israelis. And the university’s very slow to react to him. It just shows how ideological things are on campuses.Asman (02:57):You think of how students’ lives are, and their minds are being distorted by what’s going on, by what they’re hearing from professors who, many of whom are idolized by some of the students. I’m just, do you think, and we have to keep this short, do you think that the university can reform itself or do they need the pressure of donors and alumni?WAJ (03:18):They need the pressure, dramatically. I don’t think they’re capable of reforming themselves. I’m not even sure if the universities are capable of reforming with that outside pressure because this ideology is so deeply embedded.Asman (03:32):Luckily we have a videotape of this professor saying these horrible things, and he’s not apologizing for them. I’m just wondering how many other professors are saying these things in private or perhaps in front of his classes.WAJ (03:46):Well, his viewpoint is shared, not the majority viewpoint, but there is a core group on campus at Cornell and elsewhere, which has bought into this sort of revolutionary ideology as regards to Israel, and they direct it to Israel and they direct it to the United States. So it is definitely present. We have a terrorism supporting problem on campuses that universities refuse to address.Asman (04:11):I wonder what parents think, parents who are putting up 60 grand or more for, for these education. Uh, thank you Professor. Best of luck to you and, and what you’re doing to try to set the record straight. Appreciate it.
I also appeared on ‘I’m Right‘ with guest host Mike Slater, to cover the same topic in more depth:
Partial Transcript (auto-generated, may contain transcription errors):
WAJ (00:54):This is nothing new from him. We’ve known about these sort of antics of his, I’ve covered it. My website, there’s other video. But he’s really a symptom. Not the problem. I mean, he’s a problem in his own sense, but he’s really a symptom of a deeper rot that’s taken place, Cornell and elsewhere, maybe worse elsewhere than a Cornell.This sort of revolutionary chic sort of thing where people who haven’t really accomplished or fought anything in their life are gung-ho on fighting and raids and killing and all that sort of stuff. It’s just a really toxic sort of ideology. It captures a portion of the campus, the students, some students really like it. I think most of the people in that crowd are students, although not all of them, because that didn’t take place on campus. It took place in downtown, in Ithaca.But there’s a percentage of students, you know, the ones who wear the Che Guevara shirts around and the Mao shirts around who don’t really understand it, who fall in for these professors who kind of egg them on. So that’s the deeper problem. But yeah, it’s kind of vile the things that he said.***WAJ (02:42):Ignoring the fact that hundreds of people were killed in that exhilarating moment. Hundreds of women were raped, children were tortured and butchered, babies were kidnapped. None of that seemed to matter. It’s his personal feeling, somebody who’s never accomplished anything in his life of revolutionary struggle from the safety of Ithaca, New York. [With no consideration of] what it means in the real world. It’s a really sickening sort of ideology. But like I said, we’ve seen it again with the students who glorify Mao, despite him killing tens, maybe hundreds of millions of people. So it’s really very sad,Slater (03:22):Do you ever like run into that guy on campus? Cornell’s not that big.WAJ (03:26):No. I’ve never run into him. I did see him at a rally once and I posted the video. He turns everything into ‘Free Palestine’. So no matter what the event is, as soon as he gets the microphone, it’s Free Palestine. Free Palestine. Free Palestine. The guy’s obsessed.You have to wonder why somebody like this is so obsessed, and I think it is a racial sort of thing. He fits Israel into the white oppressor category. He fits obviously Jews into the white oppressor category, and that’s part of the ideology. That’s fundamentally what intersectionality is and what critical race theory is. And that’s how it plays itself out on campus. And that’s why I say he’s a symptom of the problem. He is not the problem.
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