Harvard Crimson ad asks if anti-BDS Harvard profs “only care about certain lives”
If Americans Knew | August 30, 2017
A full-page advertisement in today’s Harvard Crimson asks, “Do some Harvard Professors only care about certain lives?” (View ad here and at the end of this post.)
The ad refers to a statement signed by 71 Harvard professors in the health, medical, and life sciences fields that opposed the international academic boycott of Israel.
Their statement was subsequently featured in a full-page Boston Globe advertisement in May paid for by the New England Chapter of the American Jewish Committee (AJC).
The AJC ad featured the headline “Could an academic boycott of Israel put a child’s life at risk?” accompanied by a photo of a small child in an oxygen mask. The AJC ad and professors’ statement opposed the boycott on the ground that it could interfere with potentially life-saving collaborative research and then indirectly lead to loss of life.
Today’s Crimson ad, placed by the nonprofit organization If Americans Knew, says that since the professors cared about potential loss of life, they expected that the professors would also be willing to sign a statement against the direct, ongoing loss of life caused by Israel.
Accordingly, If Americans Knew sent each professor who had signed the AJC statement a letter documenting the ongoing harm being done to Palestinian children by Israeli policies and asked them to sign a statement urging Israel “to engage in active measures to support the safety of Palestinian children.”
The letter to the professors included information with clickable links documenting Israeli actions harming children. The information is also included in today’s Crimson ad:
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Palestinian children are being shot, imprisoned by the thousands, and subjected to what amounts to torture by the Israeli military (Human Rights Watch, Defence for Children International)
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Israeli military incursions, occupation and blockade are depriving Palestinian children of basic necessities of life, making hundreds of thousands homeless and tens of thousands orphans (United Nations Relief & Works Agency, Al-Amal Institute for Orphans)
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Palestinian children in Gaza are suffering severe psychological trauma, malnutrition, stunting, and depression due to Israel’s 10-year blockade and bombing attacks (UNICEF)
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Palestinian children are being denied desperately needed medical care, with Israel at times preventing children in Gaza suffering excruciating and sometimes fatal health problems from traveling to outside hospitals (Physicians for Human Rights – Israel)
The Crimson ad names all 71 Harvard professors who signed the anti-boycott statement, and reports that none would sign the statement asking Israel to support the safety of Palestinian children.
The ad concludes:
In the 80s, many Harvard faculty members supported campus boycott and divestment initiatives aiming to pressure companies to cut ties with apartheid South Africa, so it’s disappointing that some can’t see the urgency of the boycott movement today.
We hope these professors will take the time to look into Israel’s treatment of Palestinian children and reconsider where they stand.
The ad refers readers to iakn.us/globe-ad to see citations for the statements regarding Israeli actions.
(An additional 31 professors from other universities also signed the AJC anti-boycott statement.)
Text of the statement concerning Palestinian children that the professors declined to sign:
We, the undersigned, urge Israel to engage in active measures to support the safety of Palestinian children, including ending the practice of imprisoning and torturing Palestinian minors, allowing medical supplies and life necessities into Palestinian areas, permitting Palestinian children to leave those territories to seek necessary medical treatment, desisting from military invasions in which large numbers of children are killed and injured, and adhering to international conventions regarding the rights of children, noncombatants and populations under occupation.
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Book Review
Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism
An Essay on the Book Peter Hotez Wrote to Prove It
Lies are Unbekoming | July 13, 2026
Peter Hotez, in his 2018 book Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, describes his daughter at her pediatric appointments. Rachel “would cry longer and with much fiercer intensity than our other children.”¹ The sentence appears once. Hotez does not return to it. Rachel is one of four Hotez children. Among them, she is the only one on the spectrum, and the only one whose reaction to the injections her father describes in these terms.
Peter Hotez is not a random pediatrician. He holds an MD and a PhD. He is Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, Co-Director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development, and founding editor-in-chief of the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. He served as a U.S. Science Envoy under the Obama administration. In the years after 2020 he became one of the most visible defenders of vaccination policy on American cable news, and in 2022 was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for developing a low-cost COVID vaccine. His 2018 book was the opening statement in that public role. His daughter is the girl the title is defending.
The book runs to two hundred pages. Roughly two thirds of them are Rachel. Her first words, her flights across the neighborhood, her sneakers thrown from a moving car onto the Merritt Parkway at sixty miles per hour, her decades of intellectual disability that leaves her at twenty-five sorting donated clothes for fourteen dollars a day at Goodwill.¹ The other third argues that none of this can be attributed to the injections.
The book has an unusual quality. It is not, in the strict sense, a defense of the vaccine schedule. It is a father’s project to explain his daughter without implicating his own life’s work. Front to back, the book reads like the case Hotez was building against himself. … continue
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