Martin Kramer is an American scholar of the Middle East at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Shalom Center. He holds various degrees from Tel Aviv University, Princeton University, Columbia University and Princeton University. His focus of expertise is in Islam and Arab politics.
At the February 2010 Herzilya Conference in Israel Mr. Kramer made a speech that incited many Harvard students to speak out against him and claim he was basically promoting genocide of the Palestinian people. The students’ open letter condemned his speech and also asked that he be removed from Harvard University as a scholar. Below is the excerpt of the comment he made.
“Aging populations reject radical agendas, and the Middle East is no different. Now eventually, this will happen among the Palestinians too, but it will happen faster if the West stops providing pro-natal subsidies for Palestinians with refugee status.
Those subsidies are one reason why, in the ten years from 1997 to 2007, Gaza’s population grew by an astonishing 40 percent. At that rate, Gaza’s population will double by 2030, to three million.
Israel’s present sanctions on Gaza have a political aim—undermine the Hamas regime—but if they also break Gaza’s runaway population growth—and there is some evidence that they have—that might begin to crack the culture of martyrdom which demands a constant supply of superfluous young men. That is rising to the real challenge of radical indoctrination, and treating it at its root.”
At the time he made these comments he was a National Security Studies Program visiting scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.
Students at Harvard believed his comments were racist and dangerous and banded together to write a letter asking that the Weatherford Center remove him from their program immediately. Here is a short excerpt from the letter.
We are disturbed by the racist and inhumane comments of Martin Kramer, Visiting Scholar at the National Security Studies Program at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. We have become even more alarmed that rather than taking a dissociating or even strictly neutral stance against such extremist and hateful statements, the Weatherhead Center issued a defensive response.
Mr. Kramer’s public call to halt food, medicine, and humanitarian aid—which he calls “pro-natal subsidies”—would read as a cruel joke if it did not so egregiously violate the most basic norms of human decency. Such statements have been echoed by people in power and have even been directed at Israel’s Palestinian citizens: At the same conference in 2003, Israel’s current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Palestinian citizens of Israel a “demographic threat.”
Harvard University’s Stephen Walt did responded to the students and other constituents by saying that while Kramer’s remarks were “appalling” and “horrific” they did not rise to level of calling for acts of genocide as the students had claimed. The Weatherhead Center also rejected the idea of dismissing Kramer saying the accusations were baseless and they rejected any attempts to restrict “fundamental academic freedom.”
