Ramallah on the Hudson: Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies - by A. J. Caschetta

...If Columbia University abides by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism (as adopted by both the State Department and Department of Education), it will have to re-examine both the work and influence of the Center for Palestine Studies, where the professors for the liberation of “Palestine” are trying to turn the Upper West Side into the Upper West Bank.

A. J. Caschetta..
The Tower..
19 November '18..

The Trump administration may have closed the PLO’s Mission in Washington, D.C., but its Morningside Heights Mission is open for business. I refer to Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies (CPS), an Ivy League clearinghouse for PLO propaganda and the demonization of Israel. Call it the PLO’s American academic wing.

When the CPS opened more than eight years ago, founding co-director Rashid Khalidi promised that it would avoid doing “anything that’s directly related to any political activism.” This is laughable. What Khalidi meant is that the CSP would not participate in anti-Israel activism, but this is a lie. The faculty members who comprise the center’s experts are rivaled only by the faculty of Birzeit University for their anti-Israel advocacy.

It might, in fact, take a Center for Palestine Studies to examine thoroughly the history of Palestinian organizations devoted to political violence. But instead, Columbia has assembled the anti-Israel all-stars of academia, such as Joseph Massad, who has called for “the continuing resistance of Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories to all the civil and military institutions that uphold Jewish supremacy.” Another member of CPS is Hamid Dabashi, who wrote that Israel is a “key actor” in “every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world.”

In addition to being a professor at Columbia’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the CPS, Khalidi also happens to be a former member of the PLO, as Martin Kramer has shown. Not since Columbia hired former Weather Underground member Kathy Boudin at its School of Social Work has it given a platform to “reformed” terrorists. At least Boudin expressed remorse, even if it was insincere. Not so Khalidi, a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS ) advocate whose views have remained consistent since his PLO days, though they are now masked in the academic patois of post-colonialism.

Brinkley Messick, the CPS’s other founding co-director, hyped it as the first academic center devoted to the study of Palestinian Arabs. “Very simply,” he gushed, “there’s never been a dedicated space … for this kind of research.”

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Columbia University vs. the Jews, Again - by Rafael Medoff

...Israel, however, is not a debating society. Unlike Columbia University, it faces daily terrorist attacks and constant threats to its national existence. From the safety of Morningside Heights, university officials can welcome Nazis, rock-throwers, antisemitic poets, and terror-sponsoring dictators without having to worry about the consequences. The Israelis, who are forced to address real-world issues such as life and death, have to be a little more cautious as to whom they let in.

Rafael Medoff..
The Weekly Standard..
08 May '18..

The president of Columbia University this week criticized Israel for expelling an American professor who endorses Palestinian terrorism. That’s the same Columbia University which has never apologized for expelling a student who protested the university’s friendly relationship with the Nazis in the 1930s.

The new controversy concerns Columbia law professor Katherine Franke. When Palestinians unleashed a wave of stabbing attacks on Israelis in October 2015—which Israel’s prime minister characterized as “Palestinian Islamic terrorism”—Prof. Franke responded with this tweet: “Palestinian resistance 2 Israeli policy isn’t ‘Islamic terrorism’ - it’s anti-colonial resistance.” Prof. Franke is also one of the leaders of the Academic Advisory Council of the organization “Jewish Voice for Peace,” which promotes the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.

When Franke sought to bring a 19-person delegation to Israel last week, she probably had some inkling that her positions and activities might result in Israel denying her admission. (Certainly such antics could keep a foreigner from entering the United States. Non-citizens who “endorse or espouse terrorist activity” are denied entry to the U.S. under Sec. 212 (3)(b)(IV)(bb) of the U.S. Criminal Code.) Unsurprisingly, the Israeli authorities turned Franke away. At which point Columbia University president Lee Bollinger jumped in, declaring: “I think it is wrong for a country to deny entry to a visitor because of his or her political beliefs.” That appeared in a New York Times column headlined “Israel Banishes a Columbia Law Professor for Thinking Differently.”

But Israel does not deny entry because of a person’s political beliefs or thoughts. In fact, 15 of the 19 members of Franke’s delegation were allowed to enter, despite their unabashedly unfriendly beliefs and thoughts. (The declared purpose of the delegation was to “witness” what they called Israel’s “history of systematic displacement and institutional racism” against Arabs.) Among the delegation’s members was Tammika Mallory, co-chair of last year’s Women’s March and an outspoken supporter of the antisemitic Rev. Louis Farrakhan. Mallory has been participating in Farrakhan’s rallies “regularly for over 30 years,” she has acknowledged. And yet “oppressive” Israel allowed her to enter.

(Continue to Full Article)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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BDS, Israel and Jew Hatred. Fighting Back Cannot Be Optional - by Jonathan Tobin

...It might be more pleasant to opt out of this battle and to ignore the “Israel Apartheid” smears or accept BDS advocates as misguided but well-intentioned activists. But the ultimate cost of such acquiescence will be far higher than the inconvenience associated with fighting back. When Israel is delegitimized, so, too, will be Judaism eventually. American exceptionalism means that the rising tide of global anti-Semitism hasn’t taken hold on these shores the way it has in Europe or elsewhere. Yet if BDS movements are not labeled for what they are — expressions of anti-Semitic hate — then Americans will be taking a fearful step towards acceptance of the European disease that is making Jewish life increasingly untenable in Europe.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
17 March '16..

Earlier this month, pro-Israel students scored a public relations coup when they managed to steal a little of the public relations thunder from the organizers of an “Israel Apartheid Week” at Columbia University. In response to a faux “apartheid wall” that was supposed to be a representation of Israel’s West Bank security fence that was erected in front of the school’s iconic Low Library steps, members of Students Supporting Israel put up a 12-foot tall inflated Pinocchio to mock the lies of their opponents. However, in an act that was symbolic of the anti-Israel bias of many campuses but especially at Columbia, the student government demanded that Pinocchio be taken down. Yet this act of repression brought more attention to the counter-protest thus serving the purpose of the pro-Israel students.

Yet a JTA report about the battle over Israel at Columbia focused more on the fact that for the most part, Jewish students at the school were “laying low” during the week of protests. Even some Jewish activists on campus seem to think the best strategy in dealing with “Apartheid” week, which has become an annual event throughout academia in this country and elsewhere, is to just ignore it. One Hillel director from another school quoted in the story said the problem wasn’t just that it was impossible to have an elevated dialogue about the Middle East via demonstrations and other events. It’s that they fear that engaging in conflict with Israel-haters, even when they engage in anti-Semitic speech, is a turnoff for most Jewish students.

Most college students are conflict averse. College is such a fun place. When you make a space a conflict space, our fear is that people won’t want to come in.

These sentiments were echoed by Emory University historian Deborah Lipstadt, who spoke on a panel with me at a conference on global anti-Semitism that was held last weekend at Kean University. Lipstadt is worried that too much of Jewish identity in America is bound up with Holocaust observances and fear of anti-Semitism. She thinks that if parents send their children off to school being told to be “on guard” against anti-Semitism that operates under a thin veil of anti-Zionism, they will simply go to ground and discard their Jewish identity.

Lipstadt is right about the way Americans have allowed the Holocaust to define Jewish identity, something that was aptly illustrated by Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders. When asked about his Jewish identity in one of the Democratic debates, he responded that he was proud to be Jewish and that it “is an essential part of whom I am as a human being.” But the only example of anything Jewish the famously non-observant socialist would mention, as having meaning to him was the memory of the Holocaust. As Charles Krauthammer aptly observed about what Sanders said, it was the sort of response that summed up the views for all too many American Jews. While there is nothing wrong and indeed much that is important about remembering the Holocaust, the sole focus on that sad chapter of history gives short shrift to all of the myriad gifts and wonders that is the Jewish heritage of faith, religious studies, language, and the miracle of modern Israel. That failure to embrace a positive approach to Judaism is part and parcel of the demographic collapse of non-Orthodox Judaism that was laid bare in the 2013 Pew Survey on Jewish Americans.

But to acknowledge this problem does not excuse a willingness on the part of too many Jews as well as non-Jews to look the other way as a BDS (boycott, divest sanction) movement aimed at Israel establishes a beachhead for anti-Semitism on American campuses. It may not be “fun” to stand up for Israel or to oppose instances of anti-Semitism that are becoming endemic at all too many institutions of higher learning, but silence can’t be an option.

Intimidation 101

With a skillfully crafted curriculum and required reading list filled to the brim with anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic sentiment, Massad had no intention of teaching history—he planned on rewriting it.


Daniel Hertz
Columbia Spectator
18 April '10

As an engineering student at Columbia, the issue of bias in the classroom has been, for the most part, nonexistent—unfortunately, this is, in my experience, not the case for a significant number of classes in the department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS, formerly MEALAC). Despite the constant reminders of professors’ one-sided agendas, I have always tried to take as many of these classes as possible. This semester, my curiosity for the subject led me to check out the class titled “Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Society,” taught by the renowned Joseph Massad. Although I entered the class with a hopeful outlook, it only took a handful of lectures for Massad to prove so many of his detractors right—he not only made his biases obvious but also embarrassed me in the process.

After attending a few lectures, I was still unsure as to whether I wanted to register and remain in the class. While Massad’s reputation had preceded him for the most part, his statements were often tainted with a hue of partiality, making me, and several other students, extremely uncomfortable. With a skillfully crafted curriculum and required reading list filled to the brim with anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic sentiment, Massad had no intention of teaching history—he planned on rewriting it.

The course began with an extremely “brief” introduction to the history of the land. Starting in the 16th century and briskly moving into in the 19th and 20th centuries, Massad had completely avoided the historical context that would nullify his own agenda. During these first few lectures, there was absolutely no mention of the 3,000-year-old Jewish presence in Israel, which is backed by an exhaustive amount of both written and archeological proof. In his subsequent description of the founding of Tel Aviv, Israel’s major economic hub and richest city, Massad once again turned history upside down. Through the use of disturbing anecdotes and baseless accusations, Massad claimed that Tel Aviv was built through a process of Arab labor and expulsions by Jews, disregarding the plethora of proof that discredits these allegations, including dozens of photographs before the city’s founding and endless official British documentation describing the city as built and inhabited by only Jews.

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NY Post: Iranian Regime Front Group Funds Columbia, Rutgers

Tamar Sternthal
CAMERA/Snapshots
23 November 09

More than two years ago, my colleague Dexter Van Zile blogged here:

If Ahmadinejad is an intellectually dishonest and cruel tyrant who oppresses his people, denies the Holocaust, intimidates scholars and intellectuals and is intent on destroying Israel, as [Columbia University President] Lee Bollinger says he is, then why give the man a podium at Columbia University?

The $100,000 question. Literally. Today the answer presents itself via the New York Post , which reports:

Anti-Israel, pro-Iran university professors are being funded by a shadowy multimillion-dollar Islamic charity based in Manhattan that the feds charge is an illegal front for the repressive Iranian regime. . . .

Federal law-enforcement authorities are in the midst of seizing up to $650 million in assets from the Alavi Foundation, which they charge funnels money to Iran-supported Islamic schools in the United States and to a syndicate of Iranian spies based in Europe.

In one of the biggest handouts, the controversial charity donated $100,000 to Columbia University after the Ivy League school agreed to host Iranian leader and Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, according to the foundation's 2007 tax filings obtained by The Post.

Rutgers professor Hooshang Amirahmadi, former head of the school's Center for Middle Eastern Studies and president of the American-Iranian Council, a nonprofit advocacy group, unabashedly has touted Hezbollah and Hamas as legitimate organizations and not terrorists.

Between 2005 and 2007, the Alavi Foundation donated $351,600 to the Rutgers Persian language program, a spokesman for the school acknowledged. The university would not comment further.

Besides funding Ahmadinejad's appearance at Columbia, the Justic Department accuses the Alavi Foundation of funneling money to Iran's nuclear program, the Christian Science Monitor reported.

Related: Bought and Paid