Introducing Michel DeGraff, MIT Professor and Antisemite

Wait till you attend a course he concocted.

By Hugh Fitzgerald

It’s not only the students shouting “from the river to the sea/Palestine shall be free” (a call for Israel’s destruction and its replacement by a 23rd Arab state) and “globalize the Intifada” (which is a call for killing Jews everywhere) on college campuses who spread antisemitic hate; there are also, sad to say, professors. And at MIT, famous for its Infinite Corridor, and its students who once measured the length of the Mass. Ave. bridge using smoots (for which see here), and for a sign on a warehouse wall to your left as you drive from MIT to Central Square that reads “Storage Warehouse, Fire Proof” but all the driver sees, from a certain vantage point, with the left letters hidden, is “Rage Warehouse, Ire Proof” which of course contradicts itself, and never fails to amuse — well, me.

Now one of those academic antisemites, MIT Professor of Linguistics Michel DeGraff, has carried on a campaign of slander and harassment against two MIT graduate students that has upended their lives. One lives in fear for his family’s safety; the other has left both MIT, and an academic career, forever. More on their torment, and their tormentor, can be found here: “Two Jewish students sue MIT, tenured professor for antisemitic harassment, doxing,” by Mathilda Heller, Jerusalem Post, June 29, 2025:

Two Jewish students have sued the Massachusetts Institute of Technology due to antisemitic discrimination they allegedly suffered at the hands of both the university itself as well as a tenured professor.

The Sussman v. MIT suit was filed on Wednesday, June 25, by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which is acting on behalf of the two.

The 71-page suit – viewed by The Jerusalem Post – claims that linguistics professor Michel DeGraff violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including via harassment on social media and in mass emails. The rest of the suit addresses antisemitic incidents involving other students.

Here’s a bit more about Michel DeGraff: He’s Haitian by origin, the head of the MIT-Haiti program, and a “Haitian creolist.” He tells us that his “scholarship focuses on Creole studies and the role of language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation. He has advocated for the recognition of Haitian Creole as a full-fledged language.” Need I say more?

One of the two students in the suit is Lior Alon, an IDF veteran and postdoctoral student at MIT. Alon said that, in 2024, he was publicly doxxed by DeGraff, who posted his name and photo on social media and tagged Al Jazeera.

DeGraff then penned an article in the French paper Le Monde in which he named Alon and said, “like many other Zionist counter-protesters, [Alon] participates in well-rehearsed propaganda that erases anti-Zionist Jewish students.”

The two doxxing incidents resulted in Alon being harassed by strangers in public, including at his child’s daycare, the suit continued.

Following the incidents, Alon formally contacted MIT President Sally Kornbluth to tell her he was frightened for himself and his family’s safety and asked for the posts to be deleted. The email said, “I have been subjected to antisemitic harassment and defamation by a professor, including online doxxing, which has made me and my family fear for our safety.” Kornbluth never responded to the message, the suit said.

“Not only did President Kornbluth’s silence and MIT’s inaction cause harm to Alon, but MIT’s failure to act also emboldened Prof. DeGraff, and his harassment of Jews escalated as a result.”…

Could it be that Sally Kornbluth, still struggling Laocoon-like in the coils of DEI, didn’t want to tangle with a Haitian professor? She could already imagine the charges of “racism” that would be hurled at her if she were to do her job properly and sanction, or dismiss, that Caliban on the Charles, Michel DeGraff. So she didn’t answer Lior Alon’s anguished cry for something to be done. She kept silent.

Michel DeGraff, like most antisemites, is obsessed with Israel. A professor of linguistics, he nonetheless has concocted a course that has little to do with linguistics and a lot to do with his extreme hatred for the people who live in what he knows is the colonial-settler ethnic cleansing, genocidal state of Israel, that little Sparta built on land stolen from the Arabs, a land where apartheid is practiced, and so on, and so bloody forth.

The second Jewish student, William Sussman, who was working towards his PhD, complained about the hateful rhetoric, following which the professor sent a series of mass emails to the department – copying in Kornbluth – accusing Sussman of being a real-life example of a Jewish “mind infection.”

What is “mind infection”? Is it a trick of the diabolically clever Jews, to “infect” the minds of others with lies about the Middle East and the persecuted Palestinians? Isn’t this charge akin to those made about Jews who “control all the media/banks/businesses” in the world? Perhaps Professor DeGraff could provide us more details about this sinister Jewish-spread “mind infection.” After all, if it is as dangerous as he apparently believes, he ought to be sharing his evidence with all of us.

And what will happen to Professor DeGraff, the Haitian creolist, who on social media and in emails sent campus-wide conducted a relentless campaign of harassment and hate directed at Lior Alon and William Sussman? Will he be dismissed for having carried on this vilification against two students that led one of them to leave MIT, and end forever his academic career, and another to fear, with reason, for his family’s safety? Will tenure be allowed to protect him, or will the MIT administrators discharge him as they ought, in decency, to do?

By Sara Dogan

One of the foremost principles of higher education is the pursuit of the truth through free and open discourse, no matter where it may lead. Yet over the past several decades, few places in America have become more hostile to free speech than our universities. These institutions of higher education have often lived up to their ivory tower reputation, becoming cloistered echo chambers of leftist thought where voicing a dissenting view is cause for abrupt dismissal or being hauled before a disciplinary board and sentenced to reeducation.

The last year has brought an apparent shift in these attitudes. In the wake of rising anti-Semitism and the pro-Hamas campus rallies and occupations that were sparked by the terror group’s October 7 massacre, university administrators seem to have had a sudden change of heart. Free speech, once considered suspect, is now declared to be of paramount importance to the healthy functioning of a university, even—or perhaps especially—when the group being targeted by it is Jews.

In defending Penn’s hosting of the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, which featured multiple speakers well-known for their anti-Semitism, Former Penn President Liz Magill released a statement naming free expression as one of the university’s foremost values. “We unequivocally – and emphatically – condemn antisemitism as antithetical to our institutional values,” she wrote. “As a university, we also fiercely support the free exchange of ideas as central to our educational mission. This includes the expression of views that are controversial and even those that are incompatible with our institutional values.”

Columbia University’s former president Minouche Shafik, who resigned following her failure to rein in pro-Hamas demonstrations on campus, similarly pledged that the university administration “are committed to academic freedom and to ensuring that all members of our community have the right to speak their minds”  and argued before Congress that “We believe we can confront antisemitism and provide a safe campus environment for our community while simultaneously supporting rigorous academic exploration and freedom.”

Responding to pro-Hamas protests on campus, the University of Louisville’s former President Kim Schatzel described why they must be permitted to continue, saying, “The answer is that as a public university, the University of Louisville’s restrictions on such speech—no matter how offensive the content—would constitute a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution that protects free speech…”

These sentiments might forecast a step in the right direction—if only they were consistent. But at far too many campuses, the same administrators that have defended the free speech rights of Jew-haters, Hamas supporters, or radical gender activists have blatantly failed to secure the same rights for those with opposing views.

It is time that we hold these university administrators to account for their double standards in protecting free speech on campus and withdraw federal funding from those who do not immediately rectify this duplicity.

The following report names the most egregious perpetrators of these double standards in free expression as Ivory Tower Hypocrites. These are universities whose leaders have permitted woke leftist activists, including those affiliated with the terrorist group Hamas, to run roughshod over campus rules and violate codes of conduct—not to mention moral decency—with impunity, while failing to extend even basic free speech protections to students and faculty with opposing views. The rule of the mob has no place in academia.

We call on the universities implicated in this report to take immediate action to review and standardize their policies on free expression to protect all viewpoints equally and to further institute harsh penalties for those who disrupt organized events or speakers. We further call on all alumni of these universities to withhold any further donations until they have been sufficiently convinced that these severe defects in equal protection have been remedied. And we urge President Trump and Congress to investigate these clear violations of federal law and withhold funding to those universities who fail to uphold equal standards in protecting free speech.

#1: University of California-Los Angeles
#2: Columbia University
#3: University of Pennsylvania
#4: Georgetown University
#5: University of Louisville
#6: Wake Forest University
#7: University of Nevada-Las Vegas
#8: University of Illinois-Chicago
#9: George Mason University
#10: University of Washington

Read the full report HERE. 

The Top Ten Jew-Hating Academic Departments in American Universities

#1: San Francisco State University, College of Ethnic Studies

#2: University of California-Santa Cruz, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department

#3: Columbia University, Center for Palestine Studies

#4: University of Pennsylvania, Middle East Center

#5: University of Minnesota, Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies

#6: University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies

#7: University of Colorado-Boulder, Ethnic Studies Department

#8: University of Maryland-College Park, Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

#9: University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, Department of Latina/Latino Studies

#10: Northwestern University, Asian American Studies Program

Introduction:

Ever since October 7^th, 2023, when Hamas launched its barbaric attack on innocent Israeli civilians—slaughtering over a thousand innocent people, raping and mutilating women, massacring children and the elderly for kicks—the world has borne witness to the atrocious Jew hatred housed in our most prestigious colleges and universities.

Across the nation, on nearly every major university campus, students took to the streets—not to decry Hamas’s brutality but to applaud it as a valid act of “resistance” against their “colonial oppressors.” Chanting genocidal slogans—“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “Intifada, Intifada,” “Resistance is Justified, When People are Occupied”—these students, often accompanied by faculty, cheered for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.

The revelation that American campuses are hotspots of Jew hatred may seem sudden for some, but in truth this hatred and prejudice has been percolating for many years, aided and abetted by the universities themselves. For the past two decades, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has shone a rare spotlight on the genocidal Jew hatred emanating from our college campuses and raised the alarm. Now, the world at large is witnessing how much ground we have already given up in this fight.

In the midst of this turmoil, the presidents of our major universities have found themselves trapped by their own complicity, forced to condemn the undeniable Jew hatred that roils their campuses while attempting to obscure their own role in abetting it.

As the Freedom Center has relentlessly documented, American universities have played an undeniable role in funding and providing a veneer of legitimacy to anti-Semitic student organizations like the Hamas-funded Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Students Association. What has received less attention—but should in fact be highlighted as American universities’ worst offense—is the Jew hatred promoted by official departments and institutes of the universities themselves.

Millions of dollars in both public and private money is funneled into academic departments and centers, housed at America’s most prestigious universities. These official organs of the university actively promote Jew hatred, glorify in Hamas’s violence against Israeli civilians, and spread genocidal lies about Israel being an “apartheid” and “settler-colonialist” state. They invite speakers and host conferences whose entire purpose is to cast aspersions on the Jews and their homeland of Israel.

Whole academic departments and institutes, under the official auspices of their prestigious universities, violate every principle of academic integrity to cast their lot with the barbaric Hamas terrorists in order to bring about the destruction of Israel—all while the presidents of those same universities declare themselves horrified by growing anti-Semitism on campus. They fuel the atrocious Jew hatred that has overtaken both students and faculty on campus and turned the halls of academia into training grounds for the next generation of jihadists.

The following report will expose the blatant hypocrisy of American universities and their leaders, who express horror at the outbreak of anti-Semitism on campus yet spend millions funding academic centers and departments which actively promote that same Jew hatred.

We call on the universities implicated in this report to take immediate action to discipline these academic centers and departments which openly defy university policy to promote Jew hatred. If they should fail to do so, we urge Congress to withhold all federal funding until they eliminate this cancer in their midst.

Read the full report HERE.