Harvard, Brown took gifts from “State of Palestine”

May 9, 2024

By Stephen Dinan

Reprinted from The Washington Times

Harvard University and Brown University collected more than $2,000,000 combined from Palestinian entities in recent years, according to a report released Wednesday that questioned what the universities had to do in exchange for the funds.

Transparent Government Spending; Open The Books, a spending watchdog, said Harvard collected $1,575,000 in funds from the “state of Palestine.” Brown received $643,000.

And Indiana University of Pennsylvania, northeast of Pittsburgh, received $7,300,000 from entities labeled, the “State of Palestine” and “Palestinian Territory Occupied.”

“American universities taking six-figure foreign funding from an area of the world dominated by terrorists raises all kinds of questions,” said Adam Andrzejewski, founder of OpenTheBooks.

The report comes as college campuses are wracked with conflict over Israel’s war with Hamas. Pro-Palestinian students accuse the Jewish democracy of a “genocide” in the Gaza Strip, where Israeli troops are trying to root out the Hamas organization that launched the murderous terror attack on Israel in October.

Protesters have dug in on demands that schools divest from Israel to express their sentiments about the ongoing war.

Some schools’ tolerance for the students has worn thin as protests turned into encampments and began to disrupt classes and, in some cases, block students from crossing campuses. Police have been called to oust encampments at some high-profile schools.

OpenTheBooks said the Palestinian money may be “radicalizing American students.”

OpenTheBooks said Harvard hasn’t revealed much about its use of the money but Indiana University of Pennsylvania is using most of its money to cover tuition and fees of Palestinian students.

Then there’s Brown, where the money went to create a professorship dedicated to Palestinian studies. It was the first American school to endow such a position.

The post was held by Beshara Doumani from 2012 to 2020. He went on to become president of Birzeit University in Palestinian territory from 2021 to 2023.

OpenTheBooks said Birzeit is “a hotbed of terrorism” with Hamas-affiliated students winning the most seats on the school’s student council. They triumphed over students affiliated with Fatah, the faction that rules in the West Bank

Brown’s Palestinian Studies program says its mission is to “shape the agenda of knowledge production of Palestine and the Palestinians.”

OpenTheBooks counters that there is no such entity as “Palestine.”

“Neither the U.S. State Department nor the United Nations recognize Palestine as a country. The ‘State of Palestine’ is a political fiction that provides cover for numerous terror organizations funded by Iran and others,” Mr. Andrzejewski wrote.