jeb :
The federal judge who has dismissed a series of antisemitism cases—by the Trump administration against Harvard, by Jewish students at MIT, and by a Harvard Business School student, Yoav Segev, who was assaulted by anti-Israel protesters—turns out to have his own history as a student anti-Israel and anti-war activist.
The judge, Richard Gaylore Stearns, also found in a separate case that "Harvard failed its Jewish students." Yet the new information puts these rulings in a fresh light, at least for some who remember the context. "So 54 years later, Richard Stearns finally gets his revenge on the Jews," is the way a longtime New York Post editorial writer, Eric Fettman, put it.
In 1972, "Rick" Stearns was a campaign aide to Senator George McGovern, the Democrat who would go on to lose to Richard Nixon in a 520 to 17 Electoral College landslide. Stearns’s history as an anti-Israel activist erupted into a campaign firestorm. Delegates favoring other candidates at the Democratic convention circulated background information about Stearns. Stearns himself called in the press and attempted to disavow his past positions. Advocates for Nixon used the material in the general election to portray McGovern as anti-Israel.
In June 1967, as vice president of the United States National Student Association, Stearns signed an "Open Letter to President Johnson by Middle East Specialists" that appeared as an ad in newspapers nationwide. It voiced "alarm" about what the ad called the "disaster" of "America’s losing the Arab world." The ad demanded Israel’s "total military withdrawal" from the territories it had won in the Six Day War.
Just as Israel’s enemies do today, the 1967 ad-signers framed the demand as if they really had Israel’s interests at heart. "It is no favor to Israel to allow her in the flush of short-term military victory to deepen the divisions and antagonisms which separate her from those neighbors amidst whom she must dwell," the ad said.
Just as Israel’s enemies do today, the 1967 ad-signers accused pro-Israel advocacy groups of hurting America’s interests. "Pressure groups, wherever they may be and however vocal, cannot be permitted to obscure America’s lar
2026-08-19 21:25:13