It is reasonable to expect that those who comment at this time on Israel’s policies towards Palestinians must also denounce the Hamas’ October 7 massacre in Israel. But, however objectionable it may be, they have a constitutional right not to. Still, other options can be deployed against them, and they are.

More than 30 student groups in Harvard University’s Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) posted a letter that began, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” The PSC stated on its website, according to Fox Business, that it was "dedicated to supporting the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, justice, and equality through raising awareness, advocacy, and non-violent resistance."

Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, posted on X, formerly Twitter, that "a number of CEOs” had asked him if Harvard would release the names of members of the PSC coalition “so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members," Fox Business reported.

"I would like to know so I know never to hire these people," stated Jonathan Neman, co-founder and CEO of the Sweetgreen restaurant chain.

"Same," added David Duel, CEO of EasyHealth, a health care service provider.

They did not have to wait long for names. Accuracy in Media (AIM) paid for a billboard, carried on a truck around Harvard Yard that displayed names and photos of students, headlined, “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.” AIM is funded, according to The Guardian, by Informing America Foundation (IAF), which itself received funds from the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, “a longstanding funder of rightwing causes whose founder and namesake sits on the IAF’s board.”

AIM also bought domain names for students associated with the letter and announced the creation of individual websites on them and calling on Harvard to punish them. Students’ names were disclosed on a website with the label “College Terror List, a Helpful Guide for Employers,” which Stanford graduate Maxwell Meyer compiled, The New York Times reported.

The Davis Polk & Wardwell law firm withdrew job offers to three law students who signed on to public statements supporting Palestinians, Reuters reported. The Winston & Strawn law firm canceled an offer to the president of the Student Bar Association at New York University law school, CBS reported.

Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management company, told Fox Business that his company has a long-standing practice of vetting prospective employees through background checks that consider their past public statements.

Harvard and other schools, denounced as being soft on students, face loss of donations and board members. Israeli billionaire Idan Ofer and his wife Batia quit the executive board of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

At the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), “donors are pushing for the resignation of the president and the board chairman, after a Palestinian writers’ conference on campus invited speakers accused of anti-Semitism,” The Times reported. UPenn officials had said that the Palestine Writes Literature Festival would include speakers with a history of making anti-Semitic remarks. Festival executive Susan Abulhawa, a Palestinian American unaffiliated with UPenn, rejected that claim.

Still, cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder has threatened to stop donations unless UPenn does more to counter anti-Semitism, CNN reported. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, said he sent two persons to take photos at the festival and two others to listen to the speakers, who, he said, were “anti-Semitic and viscerally anti-Israel.”

It should be no big surprise that Harvard is a special focus of this cancel culture drive. Last year, Douglas Elmendorf, dean of the Kennedy School, vetoed an offer of a senior fellowship to Kenneth Roth, who served for nearly 30 years as executive director of Human Rights Watch which monitors human rights conditions in 100 nations. It was deemed hostile toward Israel for giving it a low rating, even though, as Roth pointed out, he is “Jewish and was drawn to the human rights cause by my father’s experience living in Nazi Germany.”

Elmendorf reversed his decision after he came under “a wave of protest and media coverage.” By then, Roth had become the Thakore Family Global Justice and Human Rights Visiting Fellow at UPenn. The Nation reported.

The sustained attack on college students and their schools seems to be part of a wider campaign to discredit proPalestinian advocates, The Guardian reported. NPR and the BBC dropped advertisements for a new book, “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story,” by Jewish American author Nathan Thrall, due to “listener complaints;” several promotional events in the U.S. and the United Kingdom were canceled. Palestinian American humanrights lawyer and activist Noura Erakat said she appeared live on CBS and ABC but the segments were not aired online. Erakat said when she appeared on MSNBC’s “Katy Tur Reports” she was asked repeatedly about Hamas.

Some Palestinian American analysts told The Guardian they had similar experiences, including at CNN. Thay said scheduled appearances were canceled after producers asked what they would say and did not like the answers.

The Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce acknowledged pressuring a Hilton hotel into canceling a US Campaign for Palestinian Rights event in Houston at which Michigan’s Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian American, was to be the main speaker. The Council on American-Islamic Relations said a Marriott hotel in Arlington, Virginia, dropped its annual banquet citing security reasons. Samira Nasr, the first non-European American editor-in-chief of Harper Bazaar’s, had to recant an Instagram post after a backlash from the magazine and the fashion industry. Nasr, daughter of a Lebanese father and a Trinidadian mother, had posted, “Cutting off water and electricity to 2.2 million civilians … This is the most inhuman thing I’ve seen in my life.” She later apologized for her “deeply insensitive and hurtful comments” and said she was “not in any way sympathetic” to Hamas.

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, which The Guardian described as “a secretively funded rightwing pressure group,” accused Los Angeles Times managing editor Sara Yasin of sympathizing with Hamas. Yasin, a Palestinian American, had reposted on X an article written by an Israeli in an American Jewish magazine critical of the assault on Gaza. The LA Times rejected the accusation, stating, “Any suggestion that Sara Yasin sympathizes with Hamas is inaccurate, irresponsible and reckless.”

The Unterberg Poetry Center at New York’s l92NY suspended its Christopher Lightfoot Walker Reading Series after several literary figures announced a boycott following the cancelation of a reading by Vietnamese American professor and writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose novel "The Sympathizer" won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. Some members of the poetry center’s staff resigned, The New York Times reported. 92NY was founded 150 years ago as the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, The Times said, adding that its website said its mission is to serve “the social and spiritual needs of the American Jewish community.”

Nguyen was among more than 750 artists who signed an open letter in The London Review of Books calling for an immediate cease-fire and claimed that Israel’s “unprecedented and indiscriminate violence” in Gaza constituted “grave crimes against humanity,” The Times said.

Several companies, including Google, Facebook’s parent Meta, Amazon and Intel, pulled out of the Web Summit, one of the world’s largest technology conferences, after its founder and CEO, Paddy Cosgrove, posted on X: "War crimes are war crimes even when committed by allies, and should be called out for what they are.” As the boycott grew, Cosgrave posted a more conciliatory message, followed by an apology. He resigned on Saturday.

All of this, and more, is taking place amid what looks like a concerted propaganda campaign to shut down talk of the Palestinians’ plight and to fuel American outrage by likening the Hamas massacre to the 9-11 terrorist attacks and the atrocities committed by the Islamic State (ISIS). If so, it is obviously working.