Saturday, December 9, 2023

Hamas Atrocity Footage Screened at Harvard ‘Much Worse’ Than Previous Version

By Jimmy Quinn

Friday, December 07, 2023

 

The footage of Hamas’s atrocities screened at Harvard University this week was “much worse” than the version that was initially screened for journalists and political leaders starting in late October, as Israel races against time to get the word out about what happened before widespread apologism for the massacre sets in.

 

For weeks, Israeli officials have screened a 43-minute video of Hamas’s October 7 atrocities in a campaign to combat rampant denialism of the crimes. The first screening took place in Jerusalem that month, and it has since been shown to audiences across the U.S. and elsewhere. As part of that campaign, Israel brought similar, but updated, footage to Harvard on Monday, for an event hosted by the school’s Chabad.

 

“It’s worse; it’s much worse,” an IDF official said of the latest version of the atrocity video during a briefing with journalists in New York this week.

 

Although the official did not elaborate on the specific nature of what made this update worse than the footage screened previously, he said that it is now 46 minutes long and that it has been updated “because we are receiving more and more information as we go.” (Though many government agencies are involved in decisions surrounding the screenings, the IDF compiles and edits the footage, this official said.)

 

National Review was at the first U.S. screening of the footage, in New York, for a group journalists in October. The video has since been shown in Congress, at the U.N., and at a number of other venues for civil-society audiences.

 

That video compiles horrific footage taken on October 7 from a variety of sources, including security cameras, mobile devices, and GoPro cameras worn by Hamas terrorists. It shows the terrorist group’s massacre of civilians in Israel’s south, at the kibbutzes along the Gaza strip and the Nova music festival. Israeli officials have explained that they will not release the video in its entirety out of respect for the victims’ families.

 

Harvard is the first college at which any of this footage has been screened so far, and the IDF official explained that 300 people from different student groups, university administration, and faculty were present for it. Although Harvard president Claudia Gay was already in Washington in advance of this week’s now-infamous congressional hearing, Harvard’s undergraduate college dean joined the screening, according to the official.

 

Harvard has been a hotbed of Hamas apologism since October 7, with more than 30 student groups blaming Israel for the mass slaughter of civilians in an open letter the night of the mass killings. And following a bungled response to a question about students’ calls for genocide of Jews at Tuesday’s hearing, Gay has faced widespread calls for her ouster.

 

Bill Ackman, a hedge-fund executive who has vocally criticized Harvard’s leadership over its handling of October 7–related campus incidents, was also at the screening on Monday, the Harvard Crimson reported.

 

“We understand as time goes by, we learned this sadly also in our history, that very fast, we’re seeing how people are questioning what happened on the seventh of October and misguiding, misdirecting. It’s misinformation, disinformation—it’s both,” the IDF official said.


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