Ibrahim Bharmal, a graduate student at Harvard University who was charged with assaulting a Jewish student at an anti-Israel protest in 2023, has received a $65,000 fellowship from the Harvard Law Review.
Bharmal will work for the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an antisemitic and anti-Israel organization that has provided moral support for terrorism and terrorists.
The Boston Globe reported earlier this week:
Two Harvard graduate students, accused of assaulting a Jewish student during a pro-Palestinian demonstration at the university’s business school nearly two years ago, have been ordered to complete a pretrial diversion program, a judge ruled Monday.
Elom Tettey-Tamaklo and Ibrahim Bharmal, who are both 28, each also must attend in-person anger management classes, complete 80 hours of community service, and enroll and complete an eight-hour conflict-resolution class, court records show.
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In an impact statement read in court, the victim, Yoav Segev, balked at the pair’s “lack of accountability and shameful behavior during and following the assault.”
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In February, the same judge dismissed hate crimes against the two men, but let misdemeanor counts of assault and battery stand.
Ira Stoll, writing at The Editors, reported:
Harvard Law Review, which the federal Secretary of Education announced this week is the subject of a discrimination investigation, is awarding a $65,000 fellowship to the student who faced misdemeanor criminal charges for assaulting a Jewish student during an anti-Israel campus protest.
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Harvard Law Review’s website describes the fellowship by saying it “supports recent Harvard Law School graduates with a demonstrated interest in serving the public interest through their work and scholarship. It enables fellows to spend a year working in a public interest-related role at a government agency or nonprofit organization. Each fellow will receive a $65,000 stipend. At the end of the fellowship year, each fellow is expected to publish a piece of legal scholarship that draws on the fellow’s work during their fellowship year in the Law Review’s online Forum.”
The “public interest-related role” for Bharmal is to be at the Los Angeles office of the California Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR California’s work includes things like advocating against arms sales to Israel and advocating for the arrest of Prime Minister Netanyahu. It’s not clear how either of those are a good use of Harvard Law Review money, let alone in the “public interest,” and it’s fairly unbelievable for Harvard Law Review, with a board that includes Harvard professors, to be funding such a fellowship at a moment when Harvard is in a high-profile, $3 billion standoff and court battle with the Trump administration over the university’s left-wing bias and pervasive antisemitism.
CAIR is a radical organization whose executive director, Nihad Awad, praised the October 7 terror attack by Hamas against Israel.
As Breitbart news has noted:
In 2007-8, CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the terror financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. That case, in turn, led the FBI to discontinue its work with the organization. In 2009, a federal judge ruled that the government “produced ample evidence to establish” the ties of CAIR with Hamas, the Palestinian terror organization. The United Arab Emirates labeled CAIR a terrorist organization in 2014 (a decision that the Obama administration opposed).
Moreover, the Los Angeles chapter of CAIR has a particularly troubled history. It recently objected to measures to protect Jewish houses of worship from antisemitic mobs, and in 2015 it offered to help the family members of the two ISIS terrorists who carried out a mass shooting in San Bernardino in December 2015. The director of the Los Angeles chapter of CAIR also said the U.S. was partially to blame for the attack.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
