Antisemites to the Left of Me, Nazis to the Right: Stuck in the Middle With Jews
Bruce Stockler
The Algemeiner
Wed Nov 07 2018
...On April 11, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jewish students at Columbia University in New York erected a booth to honor the memory of the six million. But they were attacked by anti-Israel student groups who screamed, shouted at, and taunted the Jewish students with hate speech, including: “From Gaza to the plaza, globalize the Intifada” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”
This is pure hate speech. What’s more, the slogans cited above quote the founding ideology of the terrorist organization Hamas, whose charter explicitly calls for the obliteration of Israel and the murder of every Jew in the nation.
That incident is not isolated — it is part of an organized, intelligent, and insidious campaign to demonize, terrorize, intimidate, and silence Jewish students, faculty, and administrators, no matter where they fall on the spectrum of support for Israel....
...Columbia University has been ground zero for antisemitism disguised as Middle East political theory. (Of course, the entire University of California network puts up very big numbers in the antisemitism game.) Hamid Dabashi, a Columbia professor who teaches Iranian studies and comparative literature, wrote two Facebook posts in May directed at Israel and Zionists. He called Israel a “key actor” in “every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world” and criticized “diehard Fifth Column Zionists working against the best interests of Americans.”
Columbia’s long and hate-filled syllabus includes poet Tom Paulin, who was given a visiting professorship in 2002 despite declaring that American Jews who reside beyond Israel’s 1967 boundaries “should be shot dead.” Jewish students were routinely intimidated and discriminated against by Joseph Massad, a Columbia professor of modern Arab politics who — guess what? — compared Israelis to Nazis. And there was the 2009 campus visit by Iran’s Holocaust-denying and wannabe-Israel-obliterating president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, which Columbia President Lee Bollinger defended as “an affirmation of freedom of speech.” Asked if he would invite Adolf Hitler to campus, John Coatsworth, dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, actually said: “If he were willing to engage in a debate and a discussion, to be challenged by Columbia students and faculty, we would certainly invite him.”
I don’t understand why American Jews haven’t boycotted Columbia University....
