Harvard Hires PLO Executive to Mentor Students
Clarion discovers over $2.6 million in donations from the Palestinians to Harvard
Harvard University named Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat — who serves as secretary general of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) — as a fellow at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Erekat, a man who called random stabbing attacks on Israeli citizens by Palestinian terrorists “self-defense,” will be charged with mentoring students and giving seminars in the school’s “The Future of Diplomacy Project.”
PLO member Erekat is one of four new fellows appointed by the school to the project. Commenting on the appointments, faculty chair Nicholas Burns said that the new fellows “will strengthen our capacity to learn the lessons of effective diplomacy and statecraft.”
In the course of research to our new documentary film Covert Cash (see below), Clarion Project discovered that the Palestinian Authority (PA), which essentially serves as the governmental arm of the PLO, made six donations to Harvard between the years of 2017 and 2019. The donations totaled $2,625,000.
The film asks, among other questions, what type of return on their investments are these foreign governments getting from their donations to American universities?
Since its inception, the PA has pleaded poverty and solicited donations from the world community. As of December 2018, the U.S. government had given the Palestinian Authority $5 billion in taxpayer dollars since 1994 (post the Oslo Accords). The European Union is one of their largest funders of the PA as well. Besides being used to line the pockets of top PA executives, Israel maintains that a good portion of this donated money has been used for terror.
The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964 with the purpose of “liberating Palestine” through armed struggle. Most of the enormous amount of violence perpetrated by the group over the years has been aimed at Israeli civilians.
The PLO was considered by the United States to be a terrorist organization until the Madrid Conference in 1991.
In 1993, the PLO ostensibly recognized the right of Israel to exist, yet continued to perpetrate terror attacks against Israel. It coordinated those attacks during the 2000–2005 Second Intifada and afterwards with the Palestinian Authority, its governmental arm.
Erekat has been involved in every Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiation since 2000 – all failed endeavors (most likely due to the fact that he explicitly stated in a 2014 interview with Al Jazeera, “I will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state”).
Nevertheless, Erekat will now bring his “expertise” – both as a diplomatic and as the author of 14 books on foreign policy, oil, conflict resolution and negotiations – to Harvard, where students at one of the most prestigious foreign policy schools in the country will be educated by him.
More facts about Erekat:
- In 2015, Erekat compared Israel to ISIS saying, “There is no difference between the terrorism practiced by the group led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Israel’s terrorism”
- He called Israel’s expansion of settlements “terrorism” at a time when settlements had seen nearly zero physical expansion for 25 years. In negotiations with then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Erekat admitted that the settlements took up only 1.1 percent of the areas Palestinians wanted for a state
- Erekat denies archaeological evidence of the Jewish history in Jerusalem
- Erekat claimed his family had lived in Israel for 9,000 years, yet evidence shows that the family comes from the Huwait region of Arabia
EDITORS NOTE: This Clarion Project column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
