CUNY taps antisemite to probe campus antisemitism

City University of New York appoints a fox to guard the henhouse.

By Robert Spencer, Front Page Magazine

The real pandemic today is not COVID or monkeypox, as beloved as both are among fearmongers and hysterics everywhere. The real pandemic is absurdity, as the City University of New York (CUNY) has just reminded us.

In its infinite wokeness, CUNY has assigned a former official of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to investigate an antisemitism complaint. This would be like assigning a former Klansman to investigate a racism complaint, but no one minds. After all, to note the incongruity would be “Islamophobic.”

The Daily Caller reported Wednesday that CUNY “assigned its chief diversity officer, Saly Abd Alla, the former civil rights director of CAIR’s Minnesota chapter, to investigate an email sent by Kingsborough Community College (KCC) professor Jeffrey Lax, accusing its president of anti-Zionist antisemitic discrimination.”

Lax’s reaction was precise and succinct: “We don’t want Jews here. That’s the message that it sends.”

According to The Daily Caller, Lax “noted that Alla is in charge of overseeing all discrimination investigations at the ‘single largest urban university in the country,’ which encompasses 25 campuses and close to 300,000 students. ‘When you have someone from CAIR leading a discrimination office throughout the university, you are the biggest cause of the antisemitism.’”

Yes, indeed.

It’s important to remember that although the establishment media persists in considering it a neutral civil rights organization, CAIR is actually an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department.

CAIR officials have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements about how Islamic law should be imposed in the U.S. (Ahmad denies this, but the original reporter stands by her story.)

CAIR chapters frequently distribute pamphlets telling Muslims not to cooperate with law enforcement. CAIR has opposed virtually every anti-terror measure that has been proposed or implemented and has been declared a terror organization by the United Arab Emirates. CAIR’s Hussam Ayloush in 2017 called for the overthrow of the U.S. government. CAIR’s national outreach manager is an open supporter of Hamas.

Not surprisingly, CAIR has a long history of antisemitism.

IPT News reported in December 2021 that the Simon Wiesenthal Center included CAIR on its list of the world’s top 10 anti-Semites. IPT noted that “top CAIR officials repeatedly have said they do not believe the Jewish state has a right to exist. CAIR co-founder and Executive Director Nihad Awad called Tel Aviv ‘occupied’ in a speech last month, praying that, ‘inshallah [God willing], it will be free later.’”

What’s more, “CAIR officials also repeatedly equated Israel’s military, the IDF, to ISIS terrorists, vilified ‘Israel [and] its supporters’ as the ‘enemies of God and humanity,’ and pushed anti-Semitic conspiracies linking programs which take American police leaders to Israel lead to ‘deadly police shootings’ of Black people in America.”

The director of CAIR’s San Francisco chapter is the notorious Zahra Billoo, who “told an American Muslims for Palestine conference that ‘polite Zionists,’ which she defined as everything from the Anti-Defamation League to campus Hillels and ‘Zionist synagogues,’ are ‘enemies’ who ‘we need to pay attention to.’”

Instead of firing Billoo, as virtually any other organization would have done (except for far-Left BDS-ridden ones), CAIR defended Billoo, saying that it “proud of ‘the courage she demonstrates in her civil rights work.’”

CAIR “condemned what it called an ‘online smear campaign against our sister and colleague, Zahra Billoo.’”

The director of CAIR’s Michigan chapter is Dawud Walid. According to Focus on Western Islamism Walid has said that Jews to have “incurred the wrath of Allah.” Likewise “in January 2012, Walid declared that a follower of Muhammad who called for the mass killing of Jews (which the Qur’an recounts) had made the correct ruling.”

This is an age in which absurdity and insanity are not just accepted, but celebrated and glamorized, and so when an item of this kind comes across the transom, it no longer carries the electricity it would have just a few years ago: it’s just another day in the clown world where no one at all is laughing.

AntisemitismCAIRCUNYNew York City