The Cornell Daily Sun, a student-run newspaper at Cornell University, has removed a graphic attributed to Professor Karim-Aly Kassam that depicted Nazi SS bolts inside a bloody Star of David, placed on the back of a figure with clasped hands before a keffiyeh-style backdrop, reported JNS.
The image, dated 2024, was published alongside Kassam’s opinion piece titled “Thousand and one eyes for an eye,” which marked the two-year anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 terror attack and accused Israel of “ruthless destruction and killing.”
Editor-in-chief Julia Senzon explained the decision to remove the image, telling Fox News it “may plausibly cause visceral harm to our readers based on the historical context of the ‘SS’ symbol.” The article was republished without the drawing.
The piece also compared Israeli rhetoric to Nazi propaganda, citing an Israeli official’s statement about Hamas and claiming it was applied broadly to Palestinian Arabs.
Cornell Law Professor William Jacobson criticized the publication, telling the New York Post the graphic “reflects the normalization of Holocaust inversion, both on the internet and now on Cornell’s campus.”
He added, “It is specifically inside a bloody Jewish star. No reflection of it being even related to Israel, and it clearly is pursuing the idea that Jews are the new Nazis. I think it’s obviously highly offensive.”
Cornell is among the universities to have come under fire for its handling of rising antisemitism on campus since the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
The most egregious incident at Cornell saw a student arrested after threatening to kill Jews on campus.
The menacing messages, posted on a forum about fraternities and sororities, alarmed students at the school in upstate New York and led to students being advised to stay away from the school’s kosher dining hall.
The student, Patrick Dai, later pleaded guilty to posting the threatening messages. He was sentenced in August to 21 months in prison.
In another incident, Cornell History Professor Russell Rickford was placed on “voluntary leave” after widespread public outcry when he was recorded at an off-campus anti-Israel rally cheering the Hamas attack as “exhilarating” and “energizing”.
Rickford later apologized for his comments and was back teaching at the school this past fall.
In April of this year, the Trump administration froze federal funding amounting to more than $1 billion for Cornell University.