Meet Russell Rickford, Who Found Oct. 7 ‘Exhilarating’

[Craving even more FPM content? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more. Click here to sign up.]

The New York Post reported Thursday that “the Cornell University professor who last year called Hamas’ depraved Oct. 7 attack ‘exhilarating’ sparked more outrage Wednesday after taking part in an anti-Israel march on campus where protesters chanted, ‘Long live the intifada.’” More on Russell Rickford’s reappearance in the anti-Israel protesters’ ranks can be found here: “Cornell professor who cheered Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack sparks more outrage after marching in anti-Israel protest,” by Carl Campanile and David Propper, New York Post, September 19, 2024:

Associate history professor Russell Rickford walked with dozens of demonstrators as they spewed slogans against Israel, with one Jewish student calling the controversial instructor’s presence at the protest “insane” and another accusing him of “emboldening hate.”

Rickford was the only faculty member accompanying anti-Israel and pro-Hamas demonstrators on September 18. The participants were calling for support of an Intifada, a violent “uprising” of Palestinians against the Jews of Israel, akin to the Second Intifada.

Photos and videos obtained by The Post show Rickford clapping along with the chants as he walked with a keffiyeh around his shoulders and wearing an Ivy cap on his head — similar to the hat he wore last year when he made his shocking statements.

Intifada is the Arabic word that in English means “uprising” or “shaking off.”

In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, intifada has been used to describe violent Palestinian protests against the Jewish state, according to the American Jewish Committee. The White House has previously condemned the phrase.

Protesters eventually crashed a career fair that was held on campus where school officials said they pushed past school police officers — though it does not appear Rickford was part of that disruption from footage posted online.

The instructor gained notoriety when he celebrated Hamas’ sneak assault on the Jewish state that killed 1,200 Israelis and sparked the war in Gaza.

“It was exhilarating, it was energizing … I was exhilarated,” Rickford said at the time — though he later apologized for the shameful speech.

While Cornell called the comments “reprehensible” last year, it noted the words were protected under the First Amendment. He was out for the past year on voluntary leave amid the outcry, but was allowed to return to teach at the Ivy this semester….

The First Amendment applies to governments, federal, state, and local, and to public institutions, including public universities. But it does not apply to private institutions such as Cornell University.

Rickford is unrepentant. Clearly his expression of regret last year for calling himself “exhilarated” at the news of the Hamas attack on October 7 — what he minimized as merely a matter of poor word choice, was not sincere, but meant only to tamp down calls for his firing. It worked, and he took a voluntary leave for the rest of the academic year. Now he’s back on the protest line, demanding an “Intifada” that would mean the destruction of the one Jewish state, the expulsion of its Jewish inhabitants, and its replacement by a twenty-third Arab state.

Russell Rickford, now allowed back on the Cornell campus to teach, after being put on “voluntary” leave following his “I was exhilarated” remark last October, no doubt believes himself to be invulnerable. The Cornell administration has proven itself to be pusillanimous by allowing him back on campus. Had it stuck to its guns, and fired him as a faculty member, Rickford would have sued for reinstatement. But the university could argue that he cannot claim a First Amendment right of free speech because Cornell is a private institution. Furthermore, the university could accuse him of taking part in hate speech by calling for the destruction, by means of an “Intifada,” of the only Jewish state in the world, and by describing as “exhilarating” the atrocities carried out by 6000 members of Hamas who smashed into Israel on October 7 and proceeded o torture, rape, mutilate, and murder 1,200 Israelis.

Imagine a professor at a private college declaring that he found the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921, in which hundreds of blacks were killed by white mobs, “exhilarating.” He’d be fired the next day, and no court would order his reinstatement. Why should Russell Rickford be spared a similar result?