Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) sent a letter to Harvard University leadership on Thursday asking why the administration has yet to discipline anti-Israel campus protesters who allegedly accosted and assaulted an Israeli student.
During an October 18 “die-in” demonstration intended to signal opposition to Israel’s retaliatory strikes against Hamas after the October 7 terrorist attack, multiple keffiyeh-clad protesters surrounded an Israeli first-year business student, grabbing, pushing, and yelling at him.
Harvard has since engaged a law firm to conduct an independent investigation of the incident, and as Stefanik wrote in her letter, local prosecutors are currently in the process of scheduling court hearings for two of the assailants.
On March 25, though, the victim’s legal representation “learned that the ‘Clerk’s Hearing’ in the criminal case has been postponed to May 7.”
“One of the assailants in the incident, a Harvard Divinity School graduate student, is scheduled to graduate in May 2024. Due to this postponement, the assailant will gain the lifelong distinction of being an alumnus of Harvard despite having committed a well-documented antisemitic hate crime against a fellow student,” Stefanik wrote.
The firm representing the victim, Holtzman Vogel, wrote a letter in March to the attorney Harvard retained to conduct its internal investigation asking why the probe had not progressed since it began.
