Harvard University Distances Itself From Speaker Invited to Address Kennedy School

By Hamodia Staff

The Harvard Kennedy School has issued a statement in which Dean Douglas Elmendorf of the school deemed comments by an invited guest as personally abhorrent, and emphasized that an invitation to speak at the Kennedy School does not imply an endorsement of the speaker’s views, the Harvard Crimson reported.

The latest controversy at Harvard, which has weathered intense criticism of antisemitic incidents involving students, staff and administration of the college, involved an invitation personally proffered by Professor Tarek E. Masoud, director of the Middle East Initiative, to Professor Dalal Saeb Iriqat, a controversial Palestinian who has made statements sanctioning the bloody massacre of Hamas on October 7.

Iriqat was invited to take part in the Middle East Dialogues series, in which Professor Masoud wrote in a post that he organized the series to help students engage in “hard conversations about hard things with people we don’t agree with.”

Although Masoud stated that he “obviously” disagrees with Iriqat’s views, he nevertheless believed that her views are important to hear in order to give students the opportunity to “fearlessly and rigorously” interrogate a range of perspectives on the conflict in Gaza and broader struggles in the Middle East

“If you are going to engage with Palestinians, you’re going to have to engage with these ideas,” he said. “My view is that we have to subject these ideas — and all the ideas that we encounter — to polite but rigorous inquiry.”

Besides for Iriqat, four other public figures were invited to be interviewed by Masoud for the “Middle East Dialogues” series: Jared C. Kushner ’03, the former senior advisor to president Donald Trump; Matt Duss, a former foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.); Salam Fayyad, the former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority; and Einat Wilf ’96, a professor and a former member of the Israeli Knesset.