Newly surfaced video shows a confrontation at a recent demonstration on Harvard University’s campus, where pro-Palestinian protesters surrounded a student chanting ‘shame’ after he tried to film them.
Video of the confrontation was posted to X on Wednesday, but the incident occurred on October 18, when Harvard students staged a ‘die-in’ on the campus of Harvard Business School (HBS).
The brief clip shows some half a dozen protesters surrounding a man and holding up keffiyehs, the traditional scarves of Palestinians, to block his view as he attempts to walk away from them.
Aerial news footage of the protest from NECN-TV shows the same man holding his phone aloft among the protesters, as rally organizers surround him with the cloth blockade and even appear to shove him at times.
In a public statement, HBS Dean Srikant Datar called the confrontation ‘troubling,’ saying the man swarmed by the protesters was a Harvard MBA student, and that reports on the incident had been filed with Harvard’s campus police and the FBI.
Newly surfaced video shows a confrontation at a recent demonstration on Harvard University’s campus, where pro-Palestinian protesters surrounded a student chanting ‘shame’
A Harvard spokesman declined to comment on the incident when reached by .com on Wednesday night.
The protest in question was a ‘die-in’ organized by the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee and Harvard Graduate Students for Palestine, at which demonstrators lay on the ground holding signs to protest Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.
The protest came 11 days after Hamas launched its unprecedented October 7 surprise attack on Israel, killing some 1,400, mostly civilians.
Emotions were running high, just one day after the deadly October 17 blast at al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, which Hamas blamed on Israel and said had killed hundreds.
That attribution for the hospital blast raced around the world, but US and UK intelligence sources have since called it false, backing Israel’s claim that a failed rocket launch by Islamic Jihad within Gaza hit the hospital.
The Harvard protest started at the school’s main campus in Cambridge, and proceeded as a march to the HBS campus in Boston, where demonstrators held the die-in and called to ‘stop the genocide in Gaza.’
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says at least 8,796 Palestinians in the narrow coastal enclave, including 3,648 children, have been killed by Israeli strikes since October 7.
According to the Harvard Crimson student newspaper, which reported from the October 18 protest, the man targeted by the pro-Palestinian demonstrators was a ‘disruptor’ who attempted to film the faces of the protesters.
‘Demonstrators yelled “shame” at the disruptor as he left,’ the Crimson reported.
Protesters encircle a man (with arms up), moving through the yard during the October 18 protest, holding up keffiyehs (scarfs) before he slips into a nearby building
A pro-Palestinian ‘Die In’ comprised of Harvard students and their supporters, took place on the lawn behind Harvard Business School on October 18
Dakar, the dean of Harvard Business School, addressed the confrontation in a statement last week, saying: ‘the pro-Palestinian demonstration that crossed from Cambridge onto our campus last Wednesday, which included a troubling confrontation between one of our MBA students and a subset of the protestors, has left many of our students shaken.
‘Reports have been filed with HUPD and the FBI, the facts are being evaluated, and it will be some time before we learn the results of an investigation.
‘But the protest has raised questions about how we address freedom of speech, hateful speech that goes against our community values, and security and safety for everyone at the School,’ said Dakar.
Dakar condemned antisemitism, Islamophobia and hate speech, and called for ‘robust dialogue and the expression of divergent points of view’.
‘Some protestors at Wednesday’s demonstration held banners and chanted words widely understood to call for the end of Israel—inciting the eradication of a nation and its people,’ the dean wrote.
‘There is no place for hateful speech on our campus. It violates our community values—values that hold all of us to a higher standard than simply protecting free speech,’ he added.
Last week, Harvard University President Claudine Gay assembled a group of advisors to help address antisemitism on campus, following a number of disturbing incidents that gained national attention.
Harvard University President Claudine Gay told Jewish students that she has established a task force to eradicate antisemitism from the Ivy League campus
Gay told a Harvard Hillel-hosted Shabbat dinner on Friday that she wanted to make it ‘absolutely clear’ that ‘antisemitism has no place at Harvard.’
‘For years, this university has done too little to confront its continuing presence . No longer,’ she said.
Gay, who became president of the university earlier this year, has been criticized for failing to rebuke a widely circulated letter from several student groups, blaming Israel for the October 7 Hamas attack.
The letter laid the blame for the attack entirely on the Israeli government and included zero criticism or condemnation of Hamas or the violence.
Gay’s failure to urgently disavow the letter was disturbing to some students, faculty, and alumni – some of whom publicly cut financial ties with the elite university.