Colleges and Title VI: Stopping Anti-Semitism
Sarah Sterm
Jewish Policy Center
Tue Apr 07 2020
...Today, Rashid Khalidi occupies the Edward Said Chair of Middle East Studies at Columbia University. He is also dean of Columbia’s School of International Studies. It doesn’t seem to faze anyone at Columbia that Khalidi served as a spokesman for Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization when the PLO was one of the world’s leading terrorist organizations.
Khalidi has led the boycott, divest and sanction (BDS) movement at Columbia. He has made statements to the press, including one to Chicago’s National Public Radio station in January 2017, using Nazi-like allusions to Jews, saying “supporters of Israel in the Trump administration infest the U.S. government.”
Prof. Joseph Massad, in his convoluted logic, has called Zionism “anti-Semitic.” The 2004 film Columbia Unbecoming, exposed Massad’s academic malpractice, telling a Jewish student in his class who tried to defend Israel she has “no bone in this fight” because she has “green eyes” and is not a “true Semite.”
Hamid Dabashi is yet another Columbia professor. Dabashi teaches Iranian studies and comparative literature. He wrote two Facebook posts on May 8, 2018 defaming Israel and Zionists. In one, he calls Israel a “key actor” in “every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world.” He also criticizes “diehard Fifth Column Zionists working against the best interests of Americans.”
Columbia University, which has long been a recipient of Title VI funding, has been a particularly prominent defender of unapologetic promoters of anti-Semitism, hiding under the guise of academic free speech. In September 2019, the university hosted Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who has called Jews “hook-nosed people who rule the world by proxy.” In 2007, Columbia rolled out its red carpet for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who infamously said that the Holocaust was “a myth” and that “Israel should be wiped off the map.”
Of course, Columbia would not apply such a standard of academic freedom and free speech to faculty or speakers bigoted against black people, women, Latinos, or homosexuals....
