University of Florida President and former Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) on Sunday railed against the silence by some universities on Israel’s ongoing conflict with Palestinian militant group Hamas.
“You got so many universities around the country,” Sasse said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” “Let’s speak about every topic under the sun — Halloween costumes, microagressions. But somehow in a moment of the most grave, grotesque attacks on Jewish people since the Holocaust, they all of a sudden say there’s too much complexity to say anything. It doesn’t make any sense to us.”
Multiple U.S. colleges and professors became involved in controversy over their reactions to the Israel-Hamas conflict following the militant group’s onslaught of surprise attacks on Israel last week that initially left hundreds of people — mostly civilians — dead.
Harvard University notably came under fire last week after the Palestine Solidarity Committee — a student group on campus — published a statement that said they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
The letter, co-signed by 33 other Harvard student organizations, was released hours after Hamas’s multipronged Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Two days later, Harvard released a statement that stopped short of addressing the controversial letter while noting they are “heartbroken” by the unfolding events in Israel and Gaza.
Harvard University President Claudine Gay released a follow-up statement the next day in which she emphasized the group does not speak for the entire school.
When asked of what Sasse, a Harvard alum, thought of Gay’s follow-up statement, Sasse said, “Well, it’s not really my — my purpose to comment on what’s happening on other campuses, particularly, but I’ll say this in general, there’s just way too little education happening on a lot of elite campuses in America right now.”
“There’s been such a focus on victim ideology for so long and such a … limited focus on actually reading texts. When these university presidents want to say these issues are too complex … I mean, we have … raped girls, stolen, kidnapped grandmas, we have a massacre at a concert, we have intentionally targeted schools and babies,” Sasse said. “This isn’t morally complex. It’s easy to condemn evil as evil.”
Sasse reportedly released a letter to University of Florida students last week in strong support of Israel, writing, “I will not tiptoe around this simple fact: What Hamas did is evil and there is no defense for terrorism. This shouldn’t be hard,” according to Fox News.
“And so we just did two basic things. We announced that we’re going to protect our Jewish students, and we’re going to protect speech,” Sasse said Sunday.
Fighting in Israel and Gaza has claimed more than 3,600 lives — mostly civilians — from both sides, with thousands more injured since the militant group Hamas’s multipronged surprise attack on Oct. 7. At least 27 Americans are among the dead in Israel, the State Department said Saturday.