Disgraceful Israeli prof calls IDF baby killers

In the sterile halls of Ben-Gurion University, where minds are meant to wrestle with the abstract—complexity, computability, the elegant dance of algorithms—Dr. Sebastian Ben Daniel prefers a different battlefield.

A lecturer in computer science, armed with a Ph.D. from the same institution, he’s carved a niche pondering how many bits of “help” a problem demands. Yet beyond the lecture hall, under the pseudonym “John Brown,” he’s traded theorems for Molotov cocktails of rhetoric, lobbing accusations that sear the nation’s already fraying seams.

At a time when Israel fights on seven fronts—rockets raining, hostages enduring unspeakable torment in Gaza’s depths—Ben Daniel has chosen not enlightenment, but incitement.

The charge is as stark as it is damning. “IDF soldiers are baby murderers because they were trained to be baby murderers,” he allegedly declared, a statement Yoseph Haddad, a prominent Arab-Israeli activist, branded a “blood libel”—a venomous echo of history’s darkest slanders.

The sentiment aligns with his public record—writings for +972 Magazine, Haaretz, and Middle East Eye, where he’s decried the IDF’s drone strikes as “automated killing” and skewered the judiciary for shielding soldiers.

His critics, from Im Tirzu to Channel 14, claim he’s gone further, dubbing religious Zionists “death eaters” and soldiers the architects of infanticide. Over 600 students, many fresh from IDF service or juggling reserve duty, have signed a petition demanding his ouster. They sit in his classes, he lectures, and—if the accusations hold—he condemns them as monsters.

This is no mere academic spat. Israel teeters on a razor’s edge—Hezbollah to the north, Hamas in the south, Iran’s shadow looming, and four other fronts grinding on. In Gaza, hostages rot in tunnels, their screams swallowed by concrete, their families clinging to scraps of hope.

His defenders—those who see a martyr in his defiance—might argue he’s a truth-teller, a gadfly pricking a militarized conscience. His CV glitters: a mind honed on theoretical computer science, a voice amplified in progressive corners.

But what truth justifies this? To call soldiers “baby murderers” before students who’ve worn the uniform, to smear an army bleeding to protect a nation, is not courage—it’s sabotage. Haddad’s fury rings truer than Ben Daniel’s posturing: “We fight anti-Israel voices hijacking campuses worldwide, but to find them entrenched here, in our own halls, is unbearable.”

The university hasn’t moved to sack him—not yet. The saga churns on. Im Tirzu bays for his head; his allies cry persecution. But the stakes dwarf their squabble. Every word Ben Daniel hurls risks more than his tenure—it erodes the fragile unity holding Israel together. “He’s not worthy of an Israeli ID,” Haddad spat, and hyperbole aside, the sentiment lands. This is a man who thrives on provocation while others bury their dead, who lectures on algorithms but can’t compute the cost of his venom.

We don't need Ben Daniel or his kind.

We don't like him and we don't want him, and more than that, we are ashamed to call him an Israeli and a Jew. Because what kind of Jew does that to his own people, deep in the trenches of war, surrounded by baying Palestinians and Muslims who wish for nothing but our destruction?