Professor Russell Rickford returned to teaching at Cornell University after a brief “voluntary leave” following his public celebration of Hamas’s October 7 attacks on southern Israel, which he described as “Exhilarating,” the New York Post reported on Sunday.
On October 7, Hamas invaded Israel, murdered some 1200 people, and took over 250 hostages. The use of sexual violence during the attacks was well documented, and the invasion saw the largest number of Jewish deaths in a single day since the Holocaust.
“It was exhilarating, it was energizing ….I was exhilarated,” Rickford said in October, later apologizing for his statements.
Rickford made his initial comments during an Oct. 15 pro-Palestinian rally on the Ithaca, New York, campus. Standing in front of banners arguing that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, he announced, “Hamas has challenged the monopoly of violence” and “shifted the balance of power.”
Claiming that even “Palestinians of conscience” were “able to breathe for the first time in years,” Rickford continued, “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. I was exhilarated.”
Rickford later retracted his comments in a statement published in the campus newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun.
“I apologize for the horrible choice of words that I used in a portion of a speech that was intended to stress grassroots African American, Jewish, and Palestinian traditions of resistance to oppression,” he wrote. “I recognize that some of the language I used was reprehensible and did not reflect my values.”
Rickford’s place at Cornell
The professor will be teaching African Americans Vision of America and Socialism in America and a seminar this upcoming semester.
Cornell confirmed to the New York Post that it had not disciplined Rickford. Cornell VP of University Relations Joel Malina claimed that while Rickford’s comments were “reprehensible,” they were protected by his rights to free speech.
“Given that Professor Rickford’s comments were made as a private citizen in his free time, the university’s academic leadership has concluded that Professor Rickford’s conduct in relation to this incident did not meet that high bar” to warrant otherwise, Malina said in his e-mail.