The Age of Hypocrisy: Let's talk about 'stolen land'...

Why are American students protesting about a country far away, saying its inhabitants should "give back the stolen land" when they should be saying it about themselves?

Pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel demonstrators rally near Columbia University in New York on November 15, 2023. (SPENCER PLATT / Getty Images via AFP)

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You can listen to me read this essay here:

Embattled Harvard President, Claudine Gay has resigned. I doubt she will be hurting financially. She will keep her job as a tenured professor, along with her $900K annual salary, if not more.

In Gay’s resignation letter, she did not apologize, nor did she even mention the rising antisemitism Jewish students face on campus. Rather, she blamed it all on ““racial animus”. It was “frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats”. Not against Jewish students, but against her.

She then went on to praise herself:

“When my brief presidency is remembered, I hope it will be seen as a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity — and of not allowing rancor and vituperation to undermine the vital process of education.”

Don’t you just love those words “rancor and vituperation”? Where would we be without the intelligentsia to guide us?

Oh, the hypocrisy.

Al Sharpton in shaming mode. Photo: David Goldman/AP

Al Sharpton called Gay's resignation “an attack on every Black woman” and “an assault on the health, strength and future of diversity, equity and inclusion”.

More hypocrisy.

Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education at PEN America said, “We should not hold university leaders to impossible standards….”

Ugh, certainly not!

Hypocrisy on overdrive.

Harvard’s board or what it calls The Corporation (a title just dying for a movie to be made about it) held onto Gay as long as it could. But, hey, let’s be real here. If they really practiced DEI, they’d have a Native American president from the Massachusetts tribe, not a black woman—what does Gay have to do with anything? In fact, the entire board would be made up of Native Americans.

No, forget that. They would give all the stolen land back to the Native Americans. And every other university would do the same. Because, after all, “the United States expropriated nearly 11 million acres of Indigenous lands” to build today’s “celebrated land-grant university system”. What right do they have to blather on about diversity, equity and inclusion.

Oh, but surely, they have done more than enough “restitution”. I mean, these are the principles upon which they are founded, right? They set the example for the rest of us. They teach our children!

Yeah, about that….

But first let’s get an idea of just how high and mighty these hypocrites are.

With Harvard’s $53 billion Endowment, it is the wealthiest university in the world with an economy bigger than that of 120 nations. Harvard University’s two highest-paid faculty members, Michael L. Tushman and Carliss Y. Baldwin, taught at Harvard Business School and earned more than $1.5 million. Harvard Management Company president and CEO N.P. Narvekar makes over $7 million per year.

If you’re lucky enough to be employed by Harvard, you know you’ve made it to the top of the heap.

With Gay’s ousting, I’m not sure how I feel about “House Republicans carrying out a ‘long overdue’ cleansing of Ivy League higher education’s ‘institutional rot,’” since our government suffers from that same rot, on both sides of the aisle. However, I do agree wholeheartedly with House GOP Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik when she says:

“Billions of taxpayer dollars go to these institutions. And not only do you have Jewish students who are being physically assaulted and harassed on campus, but you have a lot in these offices of DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] that are antisemitic by definition.”

Whether or not you agree with the outcome, Stefanik did a brilliant job during the hearings. So, too, did conservative journalists behind the scenes who broke many of the plagiarism accusation against Gay. Journalists like Aaron Sibarium, a “Gen Z reporter trying to bring investigative journalism to conservative media”, and Christopher Rufo, who the New Yorker accused of “inventing a conflict over critical race theory”.

It’s more than frustrating that Gay was ousted over Plagiarism charges that appeared very suddenly and conveniently rather than Harvard admitting to the far more serious charges of antisemitism on campus.

Still, I hope some good will come out of this, not just one side “cleansing” the other in an ongoing exchange of tit for tat with no lasting changes to show for it.

Today a Politico article warned:

Jewish lawmakers in California whose legislative session was shut down by a cease-fire demonstration this week say this is an unprecedented moment in American political life where the far-right and far-left are aligned in dangerous, antisemitic beliefs about Jews.

Liberals and Conservatives alike need to wake up and realize they are purposely being pitted against one another. Moderates on both sides need to come together if they are to win against extremism.

Less than 2 percent of Harvard staff describe their political leanings as “conservative” while more than 80 percent are “liberal” or “very liberal,” according to The Crimson’s annual 2022 survey. I guess when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion, conservatives are not part of the equation.

The uber-privileged class didn’t build their exclusive club by being generous and kind or by letting just “anybody” in. They got there by jealously guarding the gate; bleeding underlings dry while condescendingly “acknowledging their pain and suffering”.

The youth of America who are telling Israel to “give back the stolen land”, do not understand how hypocritical they are. How can they when they are not taught actual history? The lies are so deeply entrenched among young Americans that a majority say they believe Israel should be “ended and given to Hamas.”

Yes, it’s true that 66% think Hamas’s October 7 massacre constituted genocide. But it’s also true that 60% think the massacre of Jews was justified because they deserve it.

This means more than half of American youth believe the genocide of Jews is justified.

This didn’t happen overnight. Back in November of 2021, the Harvard Crimson reported on protestors chanting:

“Free, free Palestine,” and “No peace on stolen land”.

In 2021, after fighting erupted between Gaza and Israel, the Anti-Defamation League reported 17,000 tweets using variations on the phrase “Hitler was right” between May 7 and 14, at the height of the war. This rhetoric has only escalated, with Israeli flags featuring Swastikas being waved on campuses.

Oberlin College, Ohio

In November of this year, a coalition of 34 Harvard student organizations signed a letter saying they "hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence following decades of occupation”, adding that "the apartheid regime is the only one to blame."

These protests reached a crescendo with the war this year, manifesting itself in events like this Harvard pro-Palestinian ‘die-in” that happened in October.

Actual history, not propaganda, states that:

Jews have lived in the land of Israel for nearly 4000 years, going back to the period of the Biblical patriarchs (c.1900 BCE). The story of the Jewish people, Israel, its capital, Jerusalem, and the Jewish Temple there, has been one of exile, destruction and rebirth. In its 3000 years of history Jerusalem has been destroyed 17 times and 18 times reborn. There has always remained a Jewish presence in the land of Israel and in Jerusalem, and the Jewish people as a whole always dreamt of returning to and rebuilding it.

The concluding words of Israel’s national anthem, ‘HaTikvah’ (‘The Hope’) summarize that aim:

“The hope of 2000 years:/ To live as a free people/ In our own land,/ The land of Zion and Jerusalem.”

All of this history is not only being ignored, but also being rewritten.

Gamal Abdel Nasser who ruled Egypt from 1954, referred in 1960 to David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister of Israel, as the greatest war criminal of the century. Not Hitler, he said, because Hitler liquidated the nation of a state whereas Ben-Gurion liquidated an entire nation-state. Nasser subsequently used the expression “Zionist Nazism.”

Arab writers expressed sympathy for Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi organizer of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, who was put on trial in Israel. In examining the motives that might have stimulated the sympathy for Eichmann amongst Arab writers, Harkabi wrote that the Arabs’ hatred of Israel and sense of injustice impelled them to equate the loss of Palestine with the Holocaust and to regard the Nazi holocaust as a kind of “advance retribution” for the crimes of Zionism. 

…the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies has revealed that between late 2019 and late 2020, the comparison of Israel to the Nazis appeared in 36% of antisemitic expressions by elected politicians from both ends of the political spectrum.

When you learn that Penn and Harvard raked in $19.7 million from Qatar and Saudi Arabia in the last two years, the propaganda being parroted by students across American that Zionists are the new Nazis becomes easier to understand.

Such hypocrisy.

Which protesting Harvard student can say their history on the land goes back 2000 to 4000 years? None. It’s only those pesky Native Americans driven off their land who can claim that.

For most Americans, tracing our families back 200 years in this country would be a lot. We are the imposters. We are the ones living on stolen land. Why are American students protesting about a country far away, saying its inhabitants deserve genocide for what they have done to the “Indigenous people” when they should be saying it about themselves.

Here’s another fun history fact:

Contrary to conventional “wisdom,” most Arabs in British Mandate Palestine – and most of the 320,000 1948 Arab refugees – were migrant workers and descendants of the 1831-1947 Muslim immigrants from Egypt, the Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, as well as from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, North Africa, Bosnia, India, Afghanistan, etc.. Britain enticed Arab immigration and blocked Jewish immigration.

So, most of the Arabs in Israel and Gaza were immigrants, too, no different from all of us in America. No different from most people in the world, in fact, because that is the history of mankind. One group moving in and displacing another. How do we decide who needs to “go back to where they came from”? How far back in history do we go? This obsession is an absurdity.

Above is Jennifer Gardner with her daughter proudly wearing a sweatshirt proclaiming that all of the state of Israel is Palestine - that there is no room for Israelis in this land. Perhaps she doesn't understand why this is offensive and threatening not only to Jews but to all inhabitants of Israel.

Most Westerners probably don’t know, or don’t want to know that the Gaza war has “dramatically increased the sense of solidarity with Israel among its 21% Arab minority…. Asked if they feel part of the country, 70% of Arab citizens polled said "yes", up from 48% in June…. the highest finding for the sector since it began such surveys 20 years ago”.

Why might that be? Perhaps because they don’t want to live under Hamas terrorists (no, they aren’t freedom fighters), nor do they want to live under Sharia Law. They would much rather live under their so-called oppressors.

How do you suppose Native Americans feel about the fact that almost all, if not all of the United States’ most prestigious universities are built on stolen land.

I can tell you one thing for sure; they don’t go around blowing themselves up and killing as many innocent civilians as possible in the process. Would we all deserve it if they did? By the logic of the protestors, we would—and the protestors should be the first to submit themselves to the bombs.

But since this isn’t happening, it must mean these enlightened universities have done all they can to compensate the Native Americans they have so brutally wronged—yes?

No.

In order to understand the heartless corruption of these “Land Grab Universities”, we need to go back to the Morrill Act of 1862.

In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, which distributed public domain lands to raise funds for fledgling colleges across the nation. Now thriving, the institutions seldom ask who paid for their good fortune.

Behind that myth lies a massive wealth transfer masquerading as a donation. The Morrill Act worked by turning land expropriated from tribal nations into seed money for higher education. In all, the act redistributed nearly 11 million acres — an area larger than Massachusetts and Connecticut combined. But with a footprint broken up into almost 80,000 parcels of land, scattered mostly across 24 Western states, its place in the violent history of North America’s colonization has remained comfortably inaccessible. 

Approximately 10.7 million acres were taken from nearly 250 tribes, bands and communities through over 160 violence-backed land cessions, a legal term for the giving up of territory. 

The returns were stunning: To extinguish Indigenous title to land siphoned through the Morrill Act, the United States paid less than $400,000. But in truth, it often paid nothing at all. Not a single dollar was paid for more than a quarter of the parcels that supplied the grants — land confiscated through outright seizure or by treaties that were never ratified by the federal government. From the University of Florida to Washington State University, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the University of Arizona, the grants of land raised endowment principal for 52 institutions across the United States.

By the early 20th century, the grants had raised $17.7 million for university endowments, with unsold lands valued at an additional $5.1 million…. Altogether, the grants, when adjusted for inflation, were worth about half a billion dollars. 

You can find the data here, showing how the Morrill Act turned Indigenous land into college endowments.

Here are a few examples:

• In California, land seized from the Chumash, Yokuts and Kitanemuk tribes by unratified treaty in 1851 became the property of the University of California and is now home to the Directors Guild of America.

• Cornell University obtained almost 990,000 acres of expropriated Indigenous land through the Morrill Act, as well as the University of Southern Florida, the University of Connecticut, University of Illinois, and Northwestern.

• UC Berkeley was built on the land of the Ohlone people and currently possesses ancestral remains and tribal artifacts that have not yet been returned to Native Americans.

• In Missoula, Montana, a Walmart Supercenter sits on land originally ceded by the Pend d’Oreille, Salish and Kootenai to fund Texas A&M.

• In Washington, Duwamish land transferred by treaty benefited Clemson University and is now home to the Fort Lawton Post military cemetery. Meanwhile, the Duwamish remain unrecognized by the federal government, despite signing a treaty with the United States.

• Colorado located nearly half of Colorado State University’s grant on land taken from the Arapaho and Cheyenne less than a year after the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, in which U.S. forces brutally murdered more than 200 members of those tribes.

• The 150,000 acres selected for the University of Arizona — once the home of the Pima, Yuman, Tohono O’odham, Navajo and Apache — were nearly all seized without payment.

Today, more than 500,000 acres unwillingly donated by tribal nations to land-grant colleges remain held in trust for at least 12 universities. In fiscal year 2019 alone, those lands produced more than $5.4 million in revenue for colleges.

Hundreds of violence-backed treaties and seizures extinguished Indigenous title to over 2 billion acres of the United States. Nearly 11 million of those acres were used to launch 52 land-grant institutions. The money has been on the books ever since, earning interest, while a dozen or more of those universities still generate revenue from unsold lands. Meanwhile, Indigenous people remain largely absent from student populations, staff, faculty and even curriculum.

Dealing with the problem of where to put all those displaced Indigenous people, Indian reservations were created. I guess you could say sort of like a bunch of “Gazas”.

There are about 300 reservations in 36 states, “intentionally situated away from metropolitan areas and especially in areas not deemed desirable by white populations”, according to Harvard’s own words.

Remember my essay, Silence in the Sahara when I wrote about My World Project and the art the Hoopa children shared with the children in the Sahara Desert. Here’s how they portrayed their world.

Their art speaks for itself. No more to be said except to repeat the Bible verse:

Hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.” ~ Matthew 7:3-5

Harvard University is located on prime land that now includes Boston and Cambridge, stolen from the Massachusetts tribe. So, what did Harvard actually do to make restitution?

According to Harvard’s website they “pay respect to the Massachusetts Tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself which remains sacred to the Massachusetts people.”

How, exactly, do they do this?

What kind of a question is that? They just did—on their website, in writing. That’s called an “Acknowledgement of Land and People” and it makes up for everything.

Harvard also has a Native American Program with a Native American executive director, Kelli Mosteller. Okay, she’s from the Oklahoma tribe, but at least she’s not some imposter. When asked about new initiatives, Mosteller responded:

“One of the most significant things that we’re doing is bringing back the Harvard Powwow.”

They had one back in September that promised to “protect Indigenous futures”. I’m not sure how it did that, but…who am I to judge, I don’t have a Harvard University degree, so I’m probably not smart enough to figure it out.

Check out this cool “Acknowledgement of Land and People” from Columbia University.

Columbia University proudly placed a plaque in a courtyard, recognizing that the campus was built on traditional Lenape territory. In 2021, they even promised to create a memorial garden honoring the Lenape, although I couldn’t find out anything about it actually being made.

They went the extra mile by inviting a renowned Siberian anthropologist who had recently received a 5-million euro “visionary” scholar grant for the study of disappearing Indigenous cultures, to collaborate with Princeton students on the performance of a ballet on Indigenous themes that premiered in Richardson Auditorium. Princeton is built on Lenni-Lenape land, too, so it’s really impressive that they all worked together to make this event happen.

Maybe that’s the problem with Israel. They haven’t put up any “Acknowledgement of Land and People” plaques.

Maybe they need to give out more multi-million-dollar grants to people from other countries, who have nothing whatsoever to do with the Palestinian plight, to create a ballet telling their story. Maybe then, people will stop telling them to “give it all back”. They will have proved how much they care.

The more you dig into it, the more hypocritical it becomes.

The reality is that this is the history of the human race. To the winner goes the spoils. Nowhere is that reality more evident than in the United States. At least get rid of the hypocrisy. Self-righteous protestors should stop acting like they have any right to tell another country what they should do when their own power, wealth and success are the result of the very thing they are accusing others of doing.

For many of us, our immigrant ancestors are a source of inspiration. Everyone has their perspective, and I’m sure if we were to follow the first settlers on their journey across America we would sympathize. Likewise, if we were to follow the Native Americans on their journey, we would sympathize, too.

I am of Mennonite stock. My mother can trace her ancestry back to the 17th Century. At that time, Mennonites were persecuted and killed in the Netherlands by the Catholic Church. They were then invited to Russia by Catherine the Great because they were hardworking, whereupon they were again persecuted and killed. My family immigrated to Canada as farmers. I have wonderful memories of visiting them.

My grandfather was a traveling preacher and for much of my mother’s childhood she lived in a barn with sawdust on the floor. She often went hungry. She never displayed any anger about this. She never railed against the Netherlands or Russia, demanding restitution or to get her ancestors’ land and titles back, since her ancestors were of noble birth. One of her ancestors traveled to Spain to entreat the King to stop the Inquisition from torturing Anabaptists/Mennonites. He died in prison there. Did my mom demand an apology and restitution from the Catholic church? Nope. Did she become part of a Mennonite terrorist group and start blowing up Catholic churches? There are no such groups.

The Netherlands never did anything for the Mennonites. So far, they haven’t even erected a plaque or commissioned a ballet.

Everyone has a story to tell of some injustice. But most of us have let it go. Somehow, it’s the Jews who are always the monsters. Somehow, it’s the Jews who have stolen the land and need to give it all back—to immigrants like you and me, when they have a longer history in Israel than any of us in America can boast.

We must conclude that if Harvard professors and students truly want to practice what they preach, they should refuse to teach or attend classes until Harvard gives the land back to its rightful owners, the Indigenous people who were there in the first place.