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<\/a>In a recent development that almost seems too absurd to be true, Bill Ackman has declared that the stories about his wife, Neri Oxman,\u00a0being caught plagiarizing were motivated by antisemitism!<\/a><\/p>\n The question arises: Are we being na\u00efve, or could it be possible that major universities are making a grave mistake by allowing individuals like Ackman to gain a foothold? Perhaps this is precisely why there were restrictions on their significant influence in universities back in the 1920s. I find myself wondering about the perspective Jared Taylor might offer on this matter. It\u2019s intriguing why Taylor opts for silence amidst this perplexing phenomenon.<\/p>\n JEA:<\/strong>\u00a0The\u00a0Guardian<\/em>\u00a0refers to Bill Ackman, the Jewish billionaire hedge fund manager, as \u201cchief among the campaigners celebrating the resignation of Claudine Gay as president of Harvard University.\u201d[1]<\/a>\u00a0Ackman was one of the first Jews who accused Gay of anti-Semitism and of plagiarism. Ackman tweeted no less than 100 times about Gay to his one million followers, saying things like she ought to be fired immediately for not addressing the issue of anti-Semitism on campus at Harvard on the eve of the Israel-Hamas war.<\/p>\n Ackman emphasized that a prestigious institution like Harvard shouldn\u2019t tolerate individuals like Gay, citing allegations of plagiarism against her as a clear reason for her unsuitability. Ackman added that the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion movement was the \u201croot cause of antisemitism at Harvard.\u201d[2]<\/a>\u00a0But as the\u00a0Guardian<\/em> reported, there\u2019s more to Ackman than initially meets the eye and ear:<\/p>\n \u201cAckman\u2019s campaign came after \u2018years of resentment,\u2019\u00a0the New York Times reported<\/a>, in part because his donations to Harvard did not give him greater influence over the university.\u201d[3]<\/a><\/p>\n Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at Yale University, seemed to agree with the\u00a0NY Times<\/em>\u00a0when he said:<\/p>\n \u201cBill Ackman is a pernicious influence on American education. He thinks his money equals wisdom, and even if it doesn\u2019t, he thinks it gives him the right to bully at will. Time to stand up to people like him. He\u2019s odious.\u201d<\/p>\n Let\u2019s take a quick pause and consider the perennial question: Was the real issue about Gay\u2019s plagiarism? The answer resoundingly suggests otherwise. Ackman\u2019s wife, Neri Oxman, a tenured Israeli-American professor at MIT, has also been found to be a plagiarist. The discovery occurred just a few days after Ackman was complaining about Gay\u2019s plagiarism and after Gay resigned from Harvard. As the\u00a0Daily Beast<\/em>\u00a0itself puts it, Oxman \u201cplagiarized passages of her 2010 doctoral dissertation.\u201d[4]<\/a>\u00a0The\u00a0Daily Beast<\/em>\u00a0continued:<\/p>\n \u201cOxman engaged in a \u2018similar pattern of plagiarism\u2019 in her dissertation, according to Business Insider, plagiarizing from papers found in Nature, the Royal Society of London and a 1998 book published by Claus Mattheck, a German physicist. Oxman responded to Business Insider\u2019s story via X, formerly Twitter, saying she was double checking her work to determine if there are indeed any errors. \u2018When I obtain access to the original sources, I will check all of the above citations and request that MIT make any necessary corrections,\u2019 she said. \u2018I regret and apologize for these errors.\u2019\u201d[5]<\/a><\/p>\n In his relentless quest to get Gay fired over the charge of plagiarism, Ackman argued that \u201cStudents are forced to withdraw for much less.\u201d[6]<\/a>\u00a0The central question now is pretty much simple, will Ackman relentlessly ask MIT to fire his wife? Commenting on Gay, Ackman said: \u201cRewarding her with a highly paid faculty position sets a very bad precedent for academic integrity at Harvard.\u201d[7]<\/a><\/p>\n What about Oxman, Bill? Would that apply to her as well? If not, wouldn\u2019t that be an infallible sign of double standard and duplicitous act? Identifying this hypocrisy doesn\u2019t require a genius. And it was only a matter of time that much of the media would call out Ackman. As Mike Solana puts it:<\/p>\n \u201cWhen he says \u2018I love you,\u2019 but Ackman said would they accuse you of plagiarism<\/a>, I would burn the institutions to the ground, and salt the earth where they once stood, let there be a thousand dark ages, and you, lordess of my castle laboratory, my dark queen for eternity.’\u201d<\/p>\n Another commenter declares:<\/a>\u00a0\u201cReal talk, kids. If I look like this at age 47, and my husband\u2019s a billionaire, you can catch me plagiarizing every thirty seconds and I will not give a flying fuck.\u201d<\/p>\n Once again, when Oxman was caught red-handed, Ackman again declared that it is \u201ca near certainty that authors will miss some quotation marks and fail to properly cite or provide attribution for another author on at least a modest percentage of the pages of their papers. Some plagiarism is due to the laziness of the author. Laziness is not a great excuse for a member of the faculty, but it does not seem like a crime to me. It is more a reflection of the competency and motivation of the faculty member. In the real world, employees can be fired for being lazy, but this can be challenging to do under the tenure system.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n There is more to Bill Ackman than meets the eye:<\/p>\n \u201cIn addition to copying from fellow scholars and her academic mentee,<\/a>\u00a0BI\u00a0noted 15 instances\u00a0<\/a>in which Oxman copied sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia without providing any attribution. For instance, Oxman copied hundreds of words from the Wikipedia entry on \u2018Weaving\u2019 without adding quotation marks. (To conduct its analysis, BI used archived versions of Wikipedia to review the exact language that appeared on the site in 2010, when Oxman\u00a0published her dissertation<\/a>.)<\/p>\n \u201cSince BI published its report, critics have claimed that the story is a tit-for-tat response to Ackman\u2019s own plagiarism charges against Gay. That\u2019s almost certainly true, although\u00a0an internal review<\/a>\u00a0nonetheless found that the article was \u201caccurate and well documented\u201d with \u201cno unfair bias.\u201d Nevertheless, Ackman has threatened to sue BI and its related corporate entities, in what may well become the next example of billionaires\u00a0trying to punish<\/a>\u00a0the free press for unflattering coverage.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile Oxman herself has admitted that she should have\u00a0used quotation marks<\/a>\u00a0and has apologized for the mistakes, Ackman has attempted to deflect the charges against his wife, tweeting that Wikipedia\u00a0is somehow exceptional<\/a>\u00a0as an \u2018open source platform\u2019 and that, therefore, copying from it should not count as plagiarism.\u201d<\/p>\n Norman Finkelstein puts it best:<\/p>\n \u201cAckman: Jews don\u2019t plagiarize; only schwarzes do! Jewish billionaire William Ackman was<\/a>\u00a0angry that Harvard students\u00a0opposed genocide in Gaza.\u00a0 He was angry that Harvard president Claudine Gay didn\u2019t suppress the students\u2019 First Amendment right to speech and assembly.\u00a0 He then demanded that Gay be ousted because she supposedly committed plagiarism.\u00a0 Gay was ousted.\u00a0 When a Jewish billionaire says that the Black president of Harvard must go, she goes.\u00a0 But then it was discovered that Ackman\u2019s wife, an Israeli-born former lieutenant in the Israeli air force, committed plagiarism.\u00a0 Ackman is now hopping mad.\u00a0 Only schwarzes are supposed to be punished for plagiarism.\u00a0 Ackman is now threatening to expose plagiarism among faculty at MIT (where his plagiarizing\u00a0wife taught). I for one am relieved that Ackman didn\u2019t order his wife to drop 2,000-pound bombs on MIT.<\/p>\n It appears that Ackman might retain a semblance of common sense, despite years seemingly steeped in Talmudic\/Israeli ideology. However, he seems unable to employ that fragment of common sense, as he realizes it would dismantle his entire ideological framework.<\/p>\n Obviously Oxman\u2019s plagiarism does not mean that she needs to get fired, according to Ackman himself. Oxman wrote on Twitter: \u201cPart of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate.\u201d[8]<\/a>\u00a0Take it from\u00a0Business Insider<\/em>:<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s a starkly different approach than the one he took toward Gay after she stepped down earlier this week\u2026. \u2018Gay was accused, accurately in at least some of the cases, of using verbatim text from outside sources and, though in most cases the source was cited, it was not marked as quoted text,\u2019 Jonathan Bailey, a plagiarism expert, told Business Insider. \u2018That seems to be pretty much what happened here with Oxman.\u2019\u201d[9]<\/a><\/p>\n The next project for so-called conservative activists or people who are concerned about plagiarism like Elise Stefanik, Phillip Magness, Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet, who rightly condemn Gay for not giving proper credit, should involve questioning individuals such as Ackman. They should ask why people like Ackman can\u2019t condemn their own peers (or wives) for the same behavior they accuse others of. If these activists fail to do so, it could indicate that they\u2019ve been influenced or incentivized to act as puppets.<\/p>\n Neri Oxman Was Tied to Jeffrey Epstein<\/strong><\/p>\n There is one last thing about Bill Ackman and his wife that should be brought to the light. In a 2019 article entitled \u201cA meeting with Jeffrey Epstein led to a gift \u2014 and, now, regrets,\u201d Deirdre Fernandes of the\u00a0Boston Globe<\/em>\u00a0declared that<\/p>\n \u201cOxman\u2019s lab, Mediated Matter, received $125,000 tied to Epstein over the years. And because MIT did not want the disgraced financier to use the gift to help rehabilitate his reputation, Oxman was told it would be kept confidential. The 2015 meeting offers a window into how the Media Lab was at once concerned about the optics of taking money from Epstein \u2014 a convicted sex offender who had by then served a 13-month sentence for soliciting a minor for prostitution \u2014 and also tempted by his potential to donate and encourage others to give to the research center\u2026 Oxman, 43, who is currently on maternity leave, said Ito and some of the brightest minds at MIT seemed to have given their endorsement of Epstein.\u201d[10]<\/a><\/p>\n MIT, we are told, \u201creceived around $800,000 in funding from the now-deceased sex offender<\/a>.\u201d Oxman herself wrote a letter or dossier saying that this was actually confidential money. Oxman, \u201calong with other professors, were invited to dine with Epstein on several occasions, though she said she never attended. And in 2017, Ito requested that her design lab, which often produced donor gifts for the university, send a token of appreciation to Epstein: a grapefruit-sized, 3-D printed marble with a base that lit up. It came with a pair of gloves to avoid getting fingerprints on the surface. She complied, and asked lab members to mail it to Epstein\u2019s Manhattan address.\u201d[11]<\/a><\/p>\n When Oxman was getting too comfortable with Epstein, one student actually emailed her saying, \u201cHave you read the articles about this Jeff Epstein? He seems pretty shady. . . . Just wanted to point it out in case you weren\u2019t aware.\u201d Oxman responded by saying, \u201cJoi [Joichi Ito] and I are aware.\u201d[12]<\/a>\u00a0Fernandes writes, \u201cIn the e-mail string, Oxman added that \u2018Jeff E.\u2019 should always be \u2018confidential.\u2019\u201d[13]<\/a><\/p>\n Did Bill Ackman know about this? Of course. This is again from the\u00a0Boston Globe<\/em>: \u201cjournalists have asked questions of MIT about Oxman\u2019s lab sending the gift to Epstein. According to e-mails obtained by the Globe, Ito asked Oxman how she wanted to respond to media questions. Oxman\u2019s husband, William Ackman, a hedge-fund billionaire, in a phone conversation and e-mail to Ito raised concerns about Oxman\u2019s name being tied to the Epstein situation\u2026\u201d[14]<\/a>\u00a0Here is what Ackman said:<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t want to see her forced into a position where to protect her name she is required to be transparent about everything that took place at MIT with Epstein. Once her name appears in the press, she will face a barrage of questions, and anything other than perfect transparency to the media will make her look like she is hiding something. This has regretfully become a witch hunt.\u201d[15]<\/a><\/p>\n It\u2019s becoming evident that Gay\u2019s dismissal wasn\u2019t about plagiarism. Bill Ackman had a specific agenda in mind. His wife is an American-Israeli, and obviously she would more than likely support what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians in Gaza. Therefore, Ackman had to dress his ideology in light of an academic violation linked to Gay. In any event, Oxman was hardly the only Israeli or Jew who plagiarized.<\/p>\n So, the big question was, why did Gay get fired? Why didn\u2019t Ackman raise this plagiarism issue before the Israel\/Hamas war? As\u00a0Business Insider<\/em>\u00a0has reported, the main reason was that Gay did not properly handle the massive protests against \u201cIsrael\u2019s bombardment of Gaza on Harvard\u2019s campus.\u201d[16]<\/a><\/p>\n Gay\u2019s position at Harvard came to an abrupt end when she appeared before Congress last December to address the issues of anti-Semitism on Harvard campus. Ackman alleged that certain students were advocating for the genocide of Jews on campus, while Gay took no action to address the situation. MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan responded to Ackman by saying: \u201cNobody was calling for the genocide of the Jews. You\u2019re echoing Stefanik\u2019s lies and stunts, which is another reminder of why you\u2019re on the right, like she is.\u201d[17]<\/a><\/p>\n Gay was not the only college president who had to appear before what one ought to call the Sanhedrin to answer questions of anti-Semitism on campus.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/picture>\n