Erekat at Harvard: Sign Petition About Media’s Silence

The Harvard Kennedy School of Government is among the most prestigious graduate schools for public and social policy in the world. The school’s alumni include prime ministers, parliamentarians, and other global leaders.

Harvard just announced one of the new Fellows for the school’s Future of Diplomacy Project: Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian politician who is also an architect of the infamous 400 million dollar a year Martyr’s Fund. This is a  Palestinian government program that pays salaries to terrorists, in part using foreign aid money from our tax dollars.

Erekat also promotes BDS, the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” movement whose stated aim (according to its founders) is to bring about Israel’s total destruction. Saeb Erekat has a long history of poisoning the conversation about Israelis and Palestinians with misleading statements and even outright lies, bringing both sides farther from peace.

Harvard is allowed to hire people who support racism, hatred and violence if that’s really how it wants to educate the new generation of young adults. But we have a right to know about it, and the media has a responsibility to tell us the full story: so we can make our own, fully informed decisions. So far, the media coverage has been disturbingly lacking on this topic of meaningful importance to our lives.

Therefore, we the public, hereby ask all relevant media outlets to cover this story completely, responsibly, and with full context: so that the students, parents and philanthropists among us can make fully informed decisions about which educational institutions we wish to attend and support, and which we would prefer to avoid.