Illustrative Harvard University students displaying a pro-Palestinian sign at their May 2022 graduation ceremony. Photo: Reuters/Brian Snyder

Across the US, dozens of college student groups declared solidarity with Hamas on Sunday, cheering the Palestinian terrorist group one day after it invaded Israel from its enclave in Gaza and murdered hundreds of Israelis and took dozens more captive in a shocking surprise attack.

Scenes of Hamas terrorists abducting children and desecrating dead bodies have circulated worldwide and invoked global outrage. However, several chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at places such as Brown University, the University of Maryland, Tufts University, and the University of California-Los Angeles have described the attacks as a form of “resistance,” demanding acceptance of what they said is “our right to liberate our homeland by any means necessary.”

Additionally, 31 student groups at Harvard University issued a statement blaming Israel for the attack and accusing the Jewish state of operating an “open air prison” in Gaza, despite that the Israeli military withdrew from the territory in 2005.

“We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” said the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee. “In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence.”

Responding to the statement, Larry Summers, former US Secretary of the Treasury under the Clinton administration and former president of Harvard University, criticized the student groups for justifying terrorist violence and called out the school’s administration for not disavowing support for terrorism.

“The silence from Harvard’s leadership, so far, coupled with a vocal and widely reported student groups’ statement blaming Israel solely, has allowed Harvard to appear at best neutral towards act of terror against the Jewish state of Israel,” Summers tweeted on Monday. “I cannot fathom the administration’s failure to disassociate the university and condemn this statement.”

Public intellectual Robert P. George, in his own statement said, “31 — yes 31 — Harvard organizations have declared that the murders, rapes, kidnappings, and other atrocities committed by Hamas against innocent people are in now way the fault of Hamas but are rather entirely the fault of…Israel. Something is deeply, deeply wrong in academia.”

On Monday, Columbia University students issued a separate statement accusing “fascist, racist, and colonial Israeli governments” of oppressing Palestinians and violating human rights.

Asaf Romirowsky, a Middle East expert and the executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, told The Algemeiner that the statements issued by anti-Zionist college students  are “morally obscene.”

“Cheering mass murder in the name of de-colonialism should be the final red line exemplified by the latest student groups who ‘hold the Israeli regime responsible for all unfolding violence,'” said Romirowsky. “Endorsing horrific mass murder is reprehensible on every level, and if we do not isolate these actions and comments, Islamic antisemitic terrorism in the academy will proliferate and rot our institutions of higher education.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.