A University of Pennsylvania student has been arrested for stealing an Israeli flag on campus, according to the New York Post.
The Jordanian student, Tara Tarawneh, was arrested for allegedly stealing the blue-and-white Israeli flag from the front of a campus apartments house near the University of Pennsylvania campus, the Daily Pennsylvanian reported last week.
The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office charged Tarawneh with theft and receiving stolen property stemming from the Oct. 28 incident, the newspaper reported.
At a pro-Palestinian rally in Philadelphia last month, Tarawneh said of Hamas' gruesome Oct. 7 attacks on Israel: “I remember feeling so empowered and happy, so confident that victory was near and so tangible. I want all of you to hold that feeling in your hearts. Never let go of it. Channel it through every action you take. Bring it to the streets.”
Video footage of Tarawneh's vitriolic statements drew widespread condemnation online, the New York Post reported, including from Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., who denounced the video in a post on X last week.
“This is not a patient at a psychiatric hospital,” he wrote. “This is a student at an Ivy League.”
According to her online profile, Tarawneh considers herself a passionate human rights activist who planned to study English literature and art at UPenn, while she once wrote for Taleed Magazine. She is a champion of the "Palestine Writes Literature Festival" on the Philadelphia campus.
“For a land and a people who suffer from a history of colonialism, displacement and erasure, the festival is an extremely important site of cultural preservation,” she wrote in a Sept. 14 piece for the Daily Pennsylvanian.
In the article, she denounces “settler colonialism,” calling it “a violent machine which seeks to exterminate any semblance of Palestinian existence, including Palestinians’ narrative of their own history.”
At a recent campus trustees meeting, President Liz Magill acknowledged a rise in antisemitic acts on the Ivy League campus, including “swastikas and hateful graffiti,” as well as “chants at rallies” that she said “celebrate and praise the slaughter and kidnapping of innocent people, and that question Israel’s very right to exist.”
“I condemn personally these hateful — hateful — antisemitic acts and words, which are nothing but inhumane,” she said.
“And I assure you that Penn has and will investigate any act of hate on our campus and take full action in accordance with our policies and our laws.”
In September, UPenn alumni, including the philanthropist Ronald S. Lauder, pleaded with Magill to cancel or strongly condemn the Palestinian literary conference, The New York Times reported. Citing free speech, she declined, while acknowledging that some of the speakers had a history of remarks considered to be antisemitic.
“As a university,” she wrote in a statement, “we also fiercely support the free exchange of ideas as central to our educational mission.”
Since then, some of Penn’s most influential alumni and benefactors, including Lauder, the former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, “Law & Order” creator Dick Wolf, and Marc Rowan, chief of the private equity giant Apollo Global Management, have withdrawn funding from the university.
“There has been a gathering storm around these issues,” Rowan said on CNBC. “You know, microaggressions are condemned with extreme moral outrage, and yet violence, particularly violence against Jews — antisemitism — seems to have found a place of tolerance on the campus, protected by free speech.”