College and University Monitor

IN THE WORLD of Hamid Dabashi, supporters of Israel are "warmongers" and "Gestapo apparatchiks.

" The Jewish homeland is "nothing more than a military base for the rising predatory empire of the United States.

" It's a capital of "thuggery" - a "ghastly state of racism and apartheid" - and it "must be dismantled.

" A voice from America's crackpot fringe? Actually, Dabashi is a tenured professor and department chairman at Columbia University. And his views have resonated and been echoed in other areas of the university. Columbia is at risk of becoming a poison Ivy, some critics claim, and tensions are high. In classrooms, teach-ins, interviews and published works, dozens of academics are said to be promoting an I-hate-Israel agenda, embracing the ugliest of Arab propaganda, and teaching that Zionism is the root of all evil in the Mideast.