Columbia University: Anti-Semitic Police State

Now there is a slogan for you. I hope the dumb bastards try to sue me too.

In case you don't remember (read my earlier posts here and here) Columbia U. had impaneled an anti-Israeli comission to look at charges of anti-Semitism at the university. Lo! and Behold! They didn't find any! (What were the chances?)

Instead the panel faulted, as I predicted, the Jewish students. From the New York Sun:

The faculty committee appointed by Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, to investigate a series of student allegations against professors in the Middle Eastern studies department issued a report yesterday largely clearing the accused scholars of blame. At the same time, committee members described a polarized classroom environment in which pro-Israel students disturbed lectures and seminars with inappropriate interruptions.

The message is clear: If you are going to persist in being a damn dirty Jew at Columbia University you better learn how to take it and don't you dare get uppity.

According to one student, senior Ariel Beery, one of the campus's most outspoken critics of the professors, a Columbia spokeswoman told him that students were not being shown the report yesterday "for your own good."

Late last night, however, after some of the students who made the charges demanded to see the report, the administration relented and showed it to them.

"The report only focuses on three incidents, and we brought to them a lot more incidents that were not reported and they made no mention of them," Mr. Beery said.

The public complaints, aired in a documentary video, "Columbia Unbecoming," produced by a pro-Israel group based in Boston, have focused national attention on the treatment of Jewish students and how Israel is portrayed and researched at one of the nation's most prestigious universities.

The committee's report - four months in the making and the product of dozens of interviews with students and faculty members - represents a significant victory for Columbia's Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures.

One of the incidents not mentioned by the report involves assistant professor Joseph Massad, who allegedly told a class that it was Israelis - not Germans or Palestinians - who shot to death the Israeli Olympic athletes in the 1972 Munich Massacre, according to one of Mr. Massad's former students.

Mr. Massad's alleged interpretation of events is sharply contradicted by historians, who say the 11 Olympic athletes were murdered by their Palestinian hostage-takers in a botched rescue operation conducted by German authorities. Historians have debated whether some of the athletes died in the crossfire between German police and the kidnappers, but the notion that the athletes were killed by Israeli gunfire has not been given credence.

The committee gently criticized Mr. Massad in its report for purportedly threatening to expel a female Jewish student, Deena Shanker, from his classroom in 2002 when she asked him whether the Israeli military warned Palestinian Arab civilians of the West Bank before launching military strikes there. "That provoked him to start screaming, 'If you're going to deny the atrocities being committed against the Palestinians then you could leave the class,'" Ms. Shanker told the Sun last fall.

Yep. Nobody here but us non anti-Semites.

So where does the "police state" part come in? Also from the Sun:

In an effort to manage favorable coverage of its investigation into the complaints, the university disclosed a summary of the committee's report only to the Columbia Spectator, the campus newspaper, and the New York Times. Those newspapers, sources indicated to The New York Sun last night, made an agreement with the central administration that they would not speak to the students who made the complaints against the professors.

The Sun obtained a copy of the report without the permission of the university administration. Last night, when a reporter from the Sun came to Low Library, the central administration building, for a copy of the report, a security guard threatened to arrest the reporter if she did not leave the building.

Isn't Columbia University's commitment to the central tenets of American democratic society heart warming?

It is sad to say but maybe Jewish students should think twice about going to Columbia University. Actually, maybe they simply shouldn't go to Columbia. I can understand not wanting to be intimidated off of campus, and I applaud the courage to stay in such a climate, but on the other hand it is the Jewish student's tuition that is helping to pay the salaries of these bigots. I cannot think of a better place to begin divestment.

The whole thing makes me sick.