Jewish civil rights group seeks to overturn dismissal of MIT antisemitism lawsuit

Jewish students have consistently maintained that MIT’s response to antisemitism was delayed and paled in comparison to any action that it would have taken had the group subject to the discriminatory behavior been anything but Jewish.

By Dion J. Pierre, The Algemeiner

The StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice (SCLJ) has filed an appeal to overturn the dismissal of a lawsuit accusing the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) of responding to an explosion of antisemitic harassment and intimidation on campus with “deliberate indifference” to the welfare of Jewish students.

“MIT failed its Jewish and Israeli students and violated the law repeatedly,” SCLJ said in court documents, shared with The Algemeiner, filed with the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

“Properly considered, these allegations demonstrate MIT deliberately dragged its feet for months, only ever acting when the pressure and potential embarrassment due to its inaction boiled over, and even then, took only minimal action that fell far short of its legal obligations. These allegations also describe MIT’s selective enforcement of its rules to the detriment of its Jewish students.”

In August, US District Court Judge Richard Gaylore Stearns — who was appointed to the bench in 1993 by former US President Bill Clinton (D) and served as a political operative for and special assistant to Israel critic and former Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern — tossed the suit in a ruling which accused the Jewish plaintiffs of expecting MIT officials to be “clairvoyant” in anticipating a surge of antisemitism on campus following Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel last year.

Stearns also rejected SCLJ’s argument that pro-Hamas demonstrators at MIT intentionally violated the civil rights of Jewish students by, as is alleged, calling for a genocide of Jews in Israel and perpetrating numerous other acts of harassment and intimidation.

“Plaintiffs frame MIT’s response to the conflict largely as one of inaction. But the facts alleged tell a different story,” Stearns wrote in his decision.

“Far from sitting on its hands, MIT took steps to contain the escalating on-campus protests that, in some instances, posed a genuine threat to the welfare of Jewish and Israeli students, who were at times personally victimized by the hostile demonstrators. MIT began by suspending student protesters from non-academic activities, permitting them only to attend academic classes, while suspending one of the most undisciplined of the pro-Palestine student groups.”

SCLJ argues that this decision was incorrect, having failed to consider key facts supported by both the public record and other documents that the plaintiffs reported.

“MIT’s response to this campaign of harassment was anemic. For instance, in response to the November 2, 2023 protest targeting individual Jewish professors and the office of MIT’s Israel internship program such that the staff and protesters felt trapped in their offices, MIT punished no students and sent no police,” the organization continued.

“In response to the November 9, 2023 protest in Lobby 7, MIT warned students to protect themselves … rather than remove the students flagrantly violating MIT policy.”

Jewish students have consistently maintained that MIT’s response to antisemitism was delayed and paled in comparison to any action that it would have taken had the group subject to the discriminatory behavior been anything but Jewish.

“In the past five months, I’ve become traumatized,” Talia Khan, a student, told a US congressional committee in March, describing the situation at the university.

“MIT has become overrun by terrorist supporters that directly threaten the lives of Jews on our campus. Members of the anti-Israel club on our campus have stated that violence against Jews who support Israel, including women and children, is acceptable. When this was reported to President Kornbluth and senior MIT administration, the issue was never dealt with. Then, administrators pleaded ignorance when we reminded them that no action had been taken, saying that they either forgot about it or missed the email.”

Khan went on to recount MIT’s efforts to suppress expressions of solidarity with Israel after the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7. Such efforts included ordering Jewish students to remove Israeli flags from public display while allowing Palestinian flags to fly across campus.

It is a “scandal” Khan explained, alienating Jewish students, staff, and faculty, many of whom resigned from an allegedly farcical committee formed on antisemitism.

Staff were ignored, Khan said, after expressing fear that their lives were at risk, following an incident in which a mob of anti-Zionist activists amassed in front of the MIT Israel Internship office and attempted to infiltrate it, banging on its doors while “screaming” that Jews are committing genocide.

“No action was taken to discipline this behavior,” she continued.

“We have DEI administrators, an inter-faith chaplain, and faculty who have openly supported Hamas as martyrs, harassed individual Jewish students online, and publicly supported antisemitic blood libel conspiracy theories. The MIT administration seems only to listen to those faculty and members of the MIT corporation who help them continue to gaslight Jewish students and faculty, telling us we’re being over dramatic and should just ‘go back to Israel if we don’t feel safe studying here.’”

MIT has continued to struggle with deterring antisemitism and extremism. This fall semester, a pro-Hamas group launched a smear campaign which accused a computer science professor of promoting “apartheid and genocide” by conducting research supported by grants from the Israeli Ministry of Defense.

The group then resorted a month later to creating “Wanted” posters featuring the professor’s face and plastering them across the campus, prompting a denunciation from MIT president Sally Kornbluth, who has herself been criticized for failing to respond sufficiently to the misconduct and vitriol of pro-Hamas students.

Following her statement, a group calling itself the Jewish Alumni Alliance at MIT argued that Kornbluth’s alleged negligence fostered the environment she has now been forced to condemn.

In the past, Kornbluth has suspended anti-Zionist groups for breaking campus rules, but she has always maintained that she does not necessarily disagree with the content of their speech.

For many observers, her official stance countenanced and even energized the radicalization of the student body, which perceived her comments as an implied approval of their ideology by not outwardly condemning it.

Recent developments point to a reckoning with these policy decisions. Last month, the university banned from campus a student who penned an article which argued that violence is a legitimate method of effecting political change and, moreover, advancing the pro-Palestinian movement.

Titled “On Pacifism,” the article — published in the MIT student publication Written Revolution and flanked by images of members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated terrorist group — argued that activists have failed to stop Israel’s war against Hamas and sunder the US-Israel relationship because of “our own decision to embrace nonviolence as our primary vehicle of change.”

The author, PhD candidate Prahlad Iyengar, continued, “One year into a horrific genocide, it is time for the movement to begin wreaking havoc, or else, as we’ve seen, business will indeed go on as usual …We have a duty to escalate for Palestine, and as I hope I’ve argued, the traditional pacifist strategies aren’t working because they are ‘designed into’ the system we fight against.”

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