Cornell University on alert after violent threats to Jewish community

Cornell University has been placed on high alert after a series of “horrendous, antisemitic” online threats were made against its Jewish community, school officials said on Sunday night.

The university said that it notified law enforcement over the weekend after threats directed at Jewish students and the Center for Jewish Living were posted on Greekrank, a discussion board unaffiliated with Cornell.

The threats were posted under pseudonyms including “hamas,” “jew evil,” and “jew jenocide”.

One post called for students to follow Jewish students home and “slit their throats”, while others said “jewish people need to be killed,” and “‘israel’ deserved 10/7,” student newspaper The Cornell Sun reported.

Another threatened to “shoot up” a building housing the university’s kosher dining hall.

The University’s Jewish Center Cornell Hillel said in a statement posted to Instagram that it had advised students and staff to avoid the building “out of an abundance of caution”.

A community alert sent by the Cornell University Police Department for the entire city of Ithaca said that “evidence suggests the targeted locations were intentionally selected because of perpetrator’s bias”.

Campus police are currently investigating the posts, the university’s president Martha Pollack said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Cornell Police have also notified the FBI of a potential hate crime, she said.

Ms Pollack condemned the posts, saying: “Threats of violence are absolutely intolerable, and we will work to ensure that the person or people who posted them are punished to the full extent of the law. Our immediate focus is on keeping the community safe; we will continue to prioritize that.”

She added: “We will not tolerate antisemitism at Cornell. The virulence and destructiveness of antisemitism is real and deeply impacting our Jewish students, faculty and staff, as well as the entire Cornell community.

“This incident highlights the need to combat the forces that are dividing us and driving us toward hate.”

New York Governor Kathy Hochul also condemned the posts, calling them “disgusting” and “hateful”.

In a statement posted on X, she said that New York State Police will “take any steps needed to keep students safe”.

“The disgusting & hateful posts on a message board about Jewish @Cornell students is the latest in a series of concerning incidents on college campuses,” she added.

It comes just days after the University’s campus was defaced with graffiti that included messages such as “F*** Israel” and “Zionism = Racism”.

Meanwhile, earlier this month, a Cornell professor was forced to take a leave of absence after he called the Hamas attack on Israel that left 1,400 dead “exhilarating” and “energising”.

Rows have erupted across college campuses in the US ever since since Hamas militants attacked Israel back on 7 October.

At Harvard University, a group of 33 student organisations led by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee came under fire after it released a now-deleted statement on social media arguing that Israel’s “apartheid regime” had created the impetus for the war on the same day as the attack.

A similar row developed at the University of Pennsylvania, with megadonors calling for the university’s president to resign, after the college hosted a Palestine Writes Literary Festival to which polarising figures such as Professor Marc Lamont Hill were invited.

Yale, NYU, and Stanford have also been caught up in similar rows over the escalating tensions.

Israeli officials have said that more than 1,400 Israelis were killed in the Hamas attacks.

Meanwhile, over 8,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli retaliatory airstrikes on Gaza, the ministry said.