Patrick Dai and the Cornell University ‘Anti-Semitic Death Threats’ (2023)

The successful Hamas surprise attack on Israel on 7th October 2023 and the genocidal Israeli reprisals on the Gaza strip changed a lot of things for many people and it also triggered many spontaneous pieces of activism.

Some good, some relatively pointless and others rather silly.

Patrick Dai’s response – a junior studying engineering at Cornell University – was very much in the latter camp since he began writing on the internet how ‘“he would bring an assault rifle to campus and shoot all you”, threatened to “stab” and “slit the throat” of Jewish men, rape Jewish women and throw their bodies off a cliff, and behead Jewish babies.’ (1)

The principal target for his threats appears to have been the ‘Center for Jewish Living’ on Cornell’s campus (2) and while it is understandable that Cornell would both take these threats seriously and report them to the FBI (who ultimately found Dai rather quickly by tracing his IP). (3)

Rabbi Eli Silberstein of Cornell’s Lubavitch Chabad group – aka the Roitman Chabad Center - actually had a rather sane take on this before Dai was arrested:

‘These antisemitic posts were designed to sow panic and hysteria, which they, unfortunately, succeeded at generating. The fact is that by showing panic and fear we play into their schemes. The administration should respond to this with the fullest seriousness… the rest of us should take it for what it is - a cowardly threat and nothing more.’ (4)

And you know Rabbi Silberstein was right: Dai was clearly shitposting as we’d say and didn’t really mean what he said. He was just an angry Asian - and probably left-wing - Cornell student upset with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in the wake of Hamas’ surprise attack on 7th October 2023.

The fact that he did disrupt classes (5) and clearly upset the jews at and around Cornell (6) is understandable even from an anti-Semitic point view, but the fact that Dai is now trying to wriggle his way out of the consequences by claiming he was ‘suicidal’ at the time, has been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) – probably Asperger’s Syndrome – and now claims that he ‘posted the awful things online in a misguided attempt to reveal the atrocities of Hamas’ is simply ridiculous. (7)

Dai said some stupid things online and faces prison time as well as a hefty fine but doesn’t have the balls to simply say ‘Screw you’ to the jews and take his sentence like a man. Instead, he is trying to plead special circumstances and whine his way out the consequences of publicly offending jewry.

That is just pathetic.

References

(1) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/01/cornell-university-student-alleged-antisemitic-jewish-threats-court

(2) Ibid.

(3) https://www.thejc.com/news/world/student-arrested-in-connection-with-antisemitic-threats-at-cornell-to8f69t9

(4) Ibid.

(5) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/02/cornell-university-cancels-class-arrest-antisemitic-jewish-student-threats

(6) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/01/cornell-university-student-alleged-antisemitic-jewish-threats-court

(7) https://nypost.com/2024/04/10/us-news/cornell-student-patrick-dai-admits-to-making-antisemitic-threats/