Introducing Michel DeGraff, MIT Professor and Antisemite

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It’s not only the students shouting “from the river to the sea/Palestine shall be free” (a call for Israel’s destruction and its replacement by a 23rd Arab state) and “globalize the Intifada” (which is a call for killing Jews everywhere) on college campuses who spread antisemitic hate; there are also, sad to say, professors. And at MIT, famous for its Infinite Corridor, and its students who once measured the length of the Mass. Ave. bridge using smoots (for which see here), and for a sign on a warehouse wall to your left as you drive from MIT to Central Square that reads “Storage Warehouse, Fire Proof” but all the driver sees, from a certain vantage point, with the left letters hidden, is “Rage Warehouse, Ire Proof” which of course contradicts itself, and never fails to amuse — well, me.

Now one of those academic antisemites, MIT Professor of Linguistics Michel DeGraff, has carried on a campaign of slander and harassment against two MIT graduate students that has upended their lives. One lives in fear for his family’s safety; the other has left both MIT, and an academic career, forever. More on their torment, and their tormentor, can be found here: “Two Jewish students sue MIT, tenured professor for antisemitic harassment, doxing,” by Mathilda Heller, Jerusalem Post, June 29, 2025:

Two Jewish students have sued the Massachusetts Institute of Technology due to antisemitic discrimination they allegedly suffered at the hands of both the university itself as well as a tenured professor.

The Sussman v. MIT suit was filed on Wednesday, June 25, by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which is acting on behalf of the two.

The 71-page suit – viewed by The Jerusalem Post – claims that linguistics professor Michel DeGraff violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including via harassment on social media and in mass emails. The rest of the suit addresses antisemitic incidents involving other students.

Here’s a bit more about Michel DeGraff: He’s Haitian by origin, the head of the MIT-Haiti program, and a “Haitian creolist.” He tells us that his “scholarship focuses on Creole studies and the role of language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation. He has advocated for the recognition of Haitian Creole as a full-fledged language.” Need I say more?

One of the two students in the suit is Lior Alon, an IDF veteran and postdoctoral student at MIT. Alon said that, in 2024, he was publicly doxxed by DeGraff, who posted his name and photo on social media and tagged Al Jazeera.

DeGraff then penned an article in the French paper Le Monde in which he named Alon and said, “like many other Zionist counter-protesters, [Alon] participates in well-rehearsed propaganda that erases anti-Zionist Jewish students.”

The two doxxing incidents resulted in Alon being harassed by strangers in public, including at his child’s daycare, the suit continued.

Following the incidents, Alon formally contacted MIT President Sally Kornbluth to tell her he was frightened for himself and his family’s safety and asked for the posts to be deleted. The email said, “I have been subjected to antisemitic harassment and defamation by a professor, including online doxxing, which has made me and my family fear for our safety.” Kornbluth never responded to the message, the suit said.

“Not only did President Kornbluth’s silence and MIT’s inaction cause harm to Alon, but MIT’s failure to act also emboldened Prof. DeGraff, and his harassment of Jews escalated as a result.”…

Could It be that Sally Kornbluth, still struggling Laocoon-like in the coils of DEI, didn’t want to tangle with a Haitian professor? She could already imagine the charges of “racism” that would be hurled at her if she were to do her job properly and sanction, or dismiss, that Caliban on the Charles, Michel DeGraff. So she didn’t answer Lior Alon’s anguished cry for something to be done. She kept silent.

Michel DeGraff, like most antisemites, is obsessed with Israel. A professor of linguistics, he nonetheless has concocted a course that has little to do with linguistics and a lot to do with his extreme hatred for the people who live in what he knows is the colonial-settler ethnic cleansing, genocidal state of Israel, that little Sparta build on land stolen from the Arabs, a land where apartheid is practiced, and so on, and so bloody forth.

The second Jewish student, William Sussman, who was working towards his PhD, complained about the hateful rhetoric, following which the professor sent a series of mass emails to the department – copying in Kornbluth – accusing Sussman of being a real-life example of a Jewish “mind infection.”

What is “mind infection”? Is it a trick of the diabolically clever Jews, to “infect” the minds of others with lies about the Middle East and the persecuted Palestinians? Isn’t this charge akin to those made about Jews who “control all the media/banks/businesses” in the world? Perhaps Professor DeGraff could provide us more details about this sinister Jewish-spread “mind infection.” After all, if it is as dangerous as he apparently believes, he ought to be sharing his evidence with all of us.

And what will happen to Professor DeGraff, the Haitian creolist, who on social media and in emails sent campus-wide conducted a relentless campaign of harassment and hate directed at Lior Alon and William Sussman? Will he be dismissed for having carried on this vilification against two students that led one of them to leave MIT, and end forever his academic career, and another to fear, with reason, for his family’s safety? Will tenure be allowed to protect him, or will the MIT administrators discharge him as they ought, in decency, to do?