A Cornell professor doubled down in an interview Wednesday after calling the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks “exhilarating” and “exciting,” according to the Cornell Daily Sun.
“It was exhilarating, it was energizing, And if they weren’t exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence, by this shifting of the balance of power, then they would not be human,” Cornell Professor Russell Rickford said about Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel at a Sunday pro-Palestinian rally in Ithaca, New York.
Rickford told the Daily Sun he was referring to the “first few hours,” which seemed like a “symbol of resistance.”
“What I was referring to is in those first few hours, when they broke through the apartheid wall, that it seemed to be a symbol of resistance in the Palestinian struggle,” Rickford told the Daily Sun.
The first few hours of the Palestine-Israel conflict on Oct. 7 were the beginning of a massive Hamas terrorist attack on Israel that killed 1,300 Israelis, many of them unarmed women and children.
“It really signaled that the Palestinian will to resist had not been broken. In subsequent days, we learned of some of the horrifying realities. I want to make it clear that Hamas is a fundamentalist organization. It’s important to note that in some ways, the fundamentalism of Hamas mirrors that of Israeli leadership,” Rickford told the Daily Sun.
Rickford’s areas of focus include post-World War II African-American political culture, transnational social movements, and the “Black Radical Tradition,” according to Cornell University’s website. Rickford is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, according to The Ithaca Voice.
Rickford previously advocated for the toppling of statues in 2020 in a piece for the left-wing website Africa Is a Country.
“If in fact, we believe in the West in the rhetoric that we spout about equality, about human rights, then we must recognize the tremendous disproportionality, the tremendous unevenness, the injustice, and the hypocrisy of Western support in celebration of Israeli war crimes, and the equation of any form of Palestinian resistance with terrorism,” Rickford told the Daily Sun.
Rickford and Cornell University did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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