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Cornell student paper retracts cover art with bloodied Star of David, Nazi symbol

“I think it’s obviously highly offensive,” a law professor at Cornell University told the “New York Post.”

Cornell University
McGraw Tower and Uris Library at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., with Morrill Hall and Cayuga Lake in the background. Credit: Dantes De Monte Cristo via Wikimedia Commons.

The Cornell Daily Sun, a student paper, removed an image attributed to Karim-Aly Kassam that depicts Nazi SS bolts inside a bloody Star of David on the back of a figure with its hands clasped behind its head in front of a keffiyeh-style pattern, Fox News reported.

Julia Senzon, the paper’s editor-in-chief, said the drawing “may plausibly cause visceral harm to our readers based on the historical context of the ‘SS’ symbol,” according to Fox. The paper republished the opinion piece by Kassam, an international professor of environmental and indigenous studies, without his drawing, which appeared to be dated 2024.

The piece, titled “Thousand and one eyes for an eye,” notes the two-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack and accuses the Israeli government and military of “ruthless destruction and killing.” It also compares the Jewish state’s rhetoric—by citing an Israeli official’s statement about Hamas and claiming it was applied to all Palestinians—to “what the Nazis said about another peoples living in Europe to justify their genocide.” (JNS sought comment from the Cornell Daily Sun.)

The image is captured in archived versions of the page.

William Jacobson, a clinical professor of law at Cornell University and director of the Securities Law Clinic, told the New York Post that the drawing “reflects the normalization of Holocaust inversion, both on the internet and now on Cornell’s campus.”

The graphic “is specifically inside a bloody Jewish star,” he told the paper. “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,” he added.

Jessica Russak-Hoffman is a writer in Seattle.
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