A Pennsylvania religion professor and campus activist was arrested Tuesday for allegedly making violent threats to a Jewish woman’s family online.
Haverford College professor Guangtin Ha’s career studying topics such as “global blackness” and “the gender of sound” was interrupted when the FBI tied him to social media posts advocating a second Holocaust and doxing the victim’s residence, court records show. The 42-year-old scholar, affiliated with Faculty for Justice in Palestine as of 2024, is now in a Pennsylvania detention site on a charge of harassment and intimidation causing fear of death or injury.
Ha focused much of his scholarship on race and ethnography, writing about black and Chinese cultures in a respectful tone that he allegedly did not extend toward Jews when posting from anonymous online personas, according to prosecutors.
“The goyim have woken up, jew,” he allegedly told the victim in February from the X account “America1stLM,” according to the Justice Department. “Run. Flee. Leave. Blurring your home on google map and installing a security camera next to your mailbox won’t help.”
“Eliminate the jewish cockroaches. Exterminate the jewish state … you will have nowhere to go,” he allegedly told her in May from another account with “Goyim” in its name. “Your family has no future in the US. Give it another 10 years, and you shall see a true holocaust.”
Ha also posted “HH” in April, a slang online term for “Heil Hitler,” the DOJ alleged.
Court records do not yet list an attorney for Ha. Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
“I am deeply distressed by these allegations and want to state in the plainest of terms that any form of harassment or discrimination based on identity is unacceptable, antithetical to our values, and has no place at Haverford,” Haverford College President Wendy Raymond said Tuesday about the arrest. “Professor Ha, who was on sabbatical leave and not teaching this academic year, has been placed on administrative leave and barred from campus while the criminal process moves forward.”
Before being accused of supporting Nazis, Ha criticized “Zionists” from a public social media account in 2024 by calling them Nazis. The Jewish legal group Deborah Project cited his and other Haverford College employees’ actions in a 2024 lawsuit accusing the school of antisemitic discrimination. The Deborah Project later praised Haverford College as “a model for other schools” for settling the lawsuit and committing to better practices.
Ha also co-wrote a 2024 op-ed in the school’s newspaper on behalf of Faculty for Justice in Palestine that demanded an “inclusive learning community” for anti-Zionist students, claiming they endured rampant racism.
Prosecutors listed “devastating, lasting effects” of his alleged anonymous posts in a Tuesday motion for pretrial detention. The victim’s spouse moved out of their home with their three children and would not let the children play in their front yard or wait for their school bus due to the threats, according to the DOJ.
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“They have purchased curtains to prevent any person from seeing inside the home and have considered moving from their home entirely,” the motion reads. “They recognized from the content of the posts that the stalker had access to their home and knew the name of their infant child.”
“The defendant has demonstrated a hateful obsession with the victims, and his proximity to them creates a clear danger that necessitates his detention pending trial,” prosecutors wrote.