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Cornell prof calls Hamas attacks ‘exhilarating,’ Stanford prof segregates Jewish students

Extreme examples of antisemitism by professors have emerged on some of America’s most elite college campuses in recent days after Hamas terror attacks killed more than 1,100 Israeli civilians, including infants, women and families.

Cornell University Professor Russell Rickford, speaking at a recent pro-Palestine rally in Ithaca, called the attacks “exhilarating,” according to video obtained by The College Fix.

At Stanford University, an instructor told her Jewish students to stand in a corner like “Israel does to Palestinians,” according to reports.

These two incidents are making headlines in the wake of the terror attacks that have thrust Israel into the global spotlight, prompting those who side with Palestinians to argue the Hamas attackers were some sort of freedom fighters.

“Hamas has shifted the balance of power,” Rickford, a history professor, told the crowd. “Hamas has punctured the illusion of invincibility.  … Nothing will be the same again.”

Rickford added that he abhors the targeting of children and civilians, yet added “but we are able to breathe — for the first time in years.”

“It was exhilarating. It was exhilarating, it was energizing,” Rickford said. “And if they weren’t exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence, by this shifting of the balance of power, then they would not be human. I was exhilarated.”

The professor’s comments were met with cheers of “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea!”

As The College Fix has previously reported, Rickford is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and has engaged in a variety of extreme rhetoric over the years.

The same day the video emerged, Cornell University issued a strongly worded statement condemning the terrorist attacks.

“The despicable atrocities perpetrated by the Hamas terrorist organization in Israel last week left the world reeling with shock, horror, anger and grief,” stated Cornell President Martha Pollack. “…I am sickened by statements glorifying the evilness of Hamas terrorism. Any members of our community who have made such statements do not speak for Cornell; in fact, they speak in direct opposition to all we stand for at Cornell. There is no justification for or moral equivalent to these violent and abhorrent acts.”

The New York Post reports that Rickford’s speech came “after a diversity and inclusion director at Cornell University was criticized for calling the Hamas attack a ‘resistance.’”

As for the incident at Stanford, Forward reports the instructor who segregated her Jewish students has been suspended.

“Rabbi Dov Greenberg, director of the Chabad Stanford Jewish Center, said he was told by three students who were in the room that the  instructor asked Jewish and Israeli students to identify themselves during a session for a required undergraduate course called ‘Civil, Liberal and Global Education,'” Forward reported.

“The teacher told the Jewish students to take their belongings, stand in a corner, and said, ‘This is what Israel does to the Palestinians,’ Greenberg said, citing the student accounts. The instructor then asked, ‘How many people died in the Holocaust?’ When a student answered, ‘Six million,’ the lecturer said, ‘Colonizers killed more than 6 million. Israel is a colonizer.'”

The lecturer, Ameer Hasan Loggins, “was a one-time teacher of Colin Kaepernick and credits himself with instructing the football player on radical leftist ideology,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.

In a statement to the National Post, Stanford’s media affairs division said the report “is a cause for serious concern. The instructor in this course is not currently teaching while the university works to ascertain the facts of the situation.”

Rickford and Loggins are not the only scholars cheering on the deadly developments. As The College Fix reported last week, several academics took to social media in support of Palestine’s “decolonization” in the wake of Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians.

MORE: Violence, threats, tears: Israeli supporters face aggressive pro-Palestinian campus protests nationwide

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Fix Editor
Jennifer Kabbany is editor-in-chief of The College Fix.