We, Bowdoin students, have entered the Dark Ages of learning about Israel. Last semester, contributors to Israel-related campus programming seemed forced to hide face, having to funnel their $80-some thousand dollars through largely anonymous alumni groups and multiple shell organizations.

If you haven’t been paying attention, public relations professional Neal Urwitz ’06 flipped the script with his informative and proudly named contributions to this newspaper and its comment sections, rendering him a fount of knowledge for those desperate to learn about Israel and make sense of the genocide charges it faces from authorities such as the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

I was thus deeply disturbed when a friend leveled a serious charge against the public relations professional’s own script—specifically, that he ripped his core premise straight from a viral 2014 tweet: “Plot idea: 97 percent of the world’s scientists contrive an environmental crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires and oil companies.”

I must stand by our trailblazing alum, for he has not plagiarized, but provided an adaptation; by substituting human rights experts for “scientists” and swapping “environmental crisis” with genocide, he has created something new.

Moreover, the scrappy coalition of truth seekers that he has identified as providing key evidence against the genocide hoax are far from oil companies. For example, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) is actually a nonprofit, and in an extraordinary coincidence, was founded by another nonprofit with a five-letter initialism: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Sure, oil companies have donated to two other key players—the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Center for New American Security (CNAS)—but these centers are arguably more dependent on donations from non-oil companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, as well as the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. We are so lucky that charitable governments and selfless arms contractors fund uncompromising investigations that clarify the human rights situation at hand!

OK, so, the public relations professional has clearly adapted a good idea, rather than plagiarized it. But this is no run-of-the-mill adaptation—it is a remarkably bold one, and we have Bowdoin to thank for it. After all, while unfortunate (as he has deftly pointed out) that Bowdoin professors no longer teach the need for “complexity,” he attended our college at a time when they did. This critical educational rigor has enabled him to take several audacious moves unprompted by the tweet. Three of my favorites are:

1. Dismissing the possibility that a genocide is occurring in a single sentence by merely identifying a facet of Israel’s carnage in Gaza that is shared by nearly all genocides. Nobody would summarily deny the genocides in Rwanda or Cambodia on the basis that “a large plurality of casualties” were “fighting-age men”—never mind complain that genocide accusations against Pol Pot constituted “demonization.” Leave this stunt to a professional!
2. Misquoting FSJP’s remark that anti-Zionist Jews have been among the primary victims of harassment; then denying this could be true; then linking as evidence an article about the UCLA’s 2024 Palestine Solidarity Encampment, which included numerous anti-Zionist Jews and ended after a mob of neo-Nazis and Zionists hospitalized 25 encampers with pipes, knives and fireworks.
3. Within the same day, mocking the idea that “genocide is at least one logical end of Zionism,” then adding a comment of agreement to Larry Shapiro’s argument that Israel’s recent military actions are a requirement of fulfilling the Zionist project.

Ultimately, my favorite move of the public relations professional is chiding professors for “[hiding] behind anonymity” in FSJP op-eds (as if an op-ed about Palestine could get you deported—grow up, professors!), writing that “you cannot get away with [anonymity] in the professional world,” while citing and encouraging commenters to read reports from WINEP, which has a policy of disclosing no information about its donors.

This is precisely the innovative thinking and problem solving that will get you a job at CSIS, CNAS and WINEP—jobs that might solve the common pitfall of crushing college debt, a phenomenon that the public relations professional so compassionately reminds us of twice in his most recent piece!

As he points out, Bowdoin has lost its rigor, and indeed, my homework consists of coloring books and jigsaw puzzles. While I usually excel at the latter, I can’t seem to fit together a few of the pieces he has provided. For example, why does Zionism (which he has suggested is not an ethnonationalist ideology) encourage immigration from Jewish people around the globe while the Palestinian right to return is a “nonstarter”? My stunted educational development precludes me from explaining this, but I trust that he will take to the pages of this newspaper to resolve this prima facie contradiction.

Sadly, many Bowdoin students these days would deny Israel’s right to defend itself, but thankfully, we have a public relations professional, and it seems like nothing will stop him.

Thank you, Mr. Urwitz, for your pro bono work!

Caleb Packard is a member of the Class of 2026.