Crushing this vile antisemitism is not equivalent to restricting academic freedom, which is the disingenuous complaint of Left-wing professors who pretend to value the First Amendment while advocating for the eradication of Israel and Jews.
By Mark Tapson, Frontpage Magazine
Columbia University, where student protesters in 1968 stormed and occupied many university buildings, forcing the resignation of the university’s president, is again at the center of the news for campus radicalism.
As FrontPage Mag has reported, Columbia grad student and green card-holding alien Mahmoud Khalil, spokesman for the pro-Hamas student group Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), has become what The New York Times called “the public face of protest against Israel” at Columbia.
In addition to participating in a takeover of the library at Columbia affiliate Barnard College, he has referred to the October 7 attacks as a “moral, military, and political victory” and asserted that CUAD is fighting for nothing less than the “total eradication of Western civilization.”
To the shock and outrage of Jew haters on the Left, the Trump administration stepped in where the complicit Biden administration never would have, and arrested this terrorism-fomenting alien with possible deportation to follow.
“This is an individual who organized group protests that not only disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish American students and made them feel unsafe on their own college campus, but also distributed pro-Hamas propaganda, flyers with the logo of Hamas,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at last week’s briefing.
“This administration is not going to tolerate individuals having the privilege of studying in our country and then siding with pro-terrorist organizations that have killed Americans.”
And that’s not all. Trump also threatened to cancel $400 million in federal research contracts and grants to Columbia unless the school tightened disciplinary procedures and asserted greater control over academic departments to stem antisemitism at the school, particularly in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
Last week Columbia caved – pledging, for example, that masked demonstrators must show identification when asked, that protests will generally not be allowed in academic buildings, and that several dozen public security officers will be empowered to make arrests.
On Sunday, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said on CNN’s State of the Union that the school was on the “right track”: “Columbia is demonstrating appropriate cooperation with the Trump administration’s requirements, and we look forward to a lasting resolution,” she wrote in a statement the following day.
“Columbia’s early steps are a positive sign, but they must continue to show that they are serious in their resolve to end antisemitism and protect all students and faculty on their campus through permanent and structural reform,” said Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service.
But many radical professors objected. As classes at Columbia resumed Monday after spring break, about 50 professors chanting “Defend our research,” “Defend our teaching,” and “Defend our students” protested Columbia’s concessions outside the campus gates.
According to The New York Times, the professors declared they hoped to be the vanguard of a resistance movement among fellow academics.
“We need to stand up, all of us,” Michael Thaddeus, a Columbia math professor, told the crowd. “We need to organize, from the grass roots to the national level. If we lead, our leaders will follow.”
Stand up for what, exactly? Antisemitism? Hamas? Palestinian celebrations of the torture, gang rape, kidnapping, and slaughter of Israelis? Exactly what objection do these academics have to ending the violent intimidation of Jews on their campus?
“What is happening to Columbia now is what the erosion of democracy looks like,” fear-mongered Political Science professor Virginia Page Fortna.
“We’ve studied what’s happened to universities in authoritarianism,” warned Anya Schiffrin, a senior lecturer at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. “We’ve seen what happened in Spain under Franco, in Turkey, in India and in Hungary. It’s a mistake to think it won’t happen here.”
On the contrary, what won’t happen here on American campuses – thanks to the Trump administration – is proliferation of the murderous Jew hatred we have seen surging at universities in major Western cities worldwide in the wake of the October 7 attacks.
Crushing this vile antisemitism is not equivalent to restricting academic freedom, which is the disingenuous complaint of Left-wing professors who pretend to value the First Amendment while advocating for the eradication of Israel and Jews.
Columbia University has been a hotbed of Left-wing academic activism for many decades.
In Freedom Center founder David Horowitz’s 2006 book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, nine of those 101 professors taught at Columbia – more than twice as many as at any other university named in the book.
Those professors were Lisa Anderson (Middle East Studies), Gil Anidjar (Comparative Literature), Nicholas De Genova (Anthropology), Manning Marable (Black History), Joseph Massad (Modern Arab Politics), Hamid Dabashi (Islamic Studies), Eric Foner (History), the late Todd Gitlin (Journalism), and Victor Navasky (former publisher of The Nation) – check out their linked profiles at Discover the Networks, the Freedom Center’s online encyclopedia of the Left.
Of those nine, De Genova is now at Princeton, and Marable, Gitlin, and Navasky have since passed away.
The others continue to spread their subversive influence at Columbia – some more openly than others. Joseph Massad, you may recall, publicly celebrated the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre in Israel, calling it “astounding,” “awesome,” and “incredible.”
He teaches a Columbia course on Zionism, which is like having Mussolini teach a course on democracy.
Now Columbia’s surrender to Trump has lit a fire under other such activist professors at the school. Monday on WBUR’s Here and Now, Reinhold Martin, President of Columbia’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, asserted with the Left’s customary hyperbole that “We’re in New York in 2025 with echoes of Frankfurt and Berlin in 1933. That’s the context in which we need to understand this.”
No, the context Americans need to understand is that many of our most prestigious so-called institutions of higher learning are actively supporting terror organizations such as the Jew-hating jihadists of Hamas, meaning that Jewish and openly Zionist students are being discriminated against, if not literally terrorized on campus.
As Jihad Watch’s own Hugh Fitzgerald wrote,
I wonder what Joseph Massad, Rashid Khalidi, and Hamid Dabashi are now thinking. Their scandalous reign is over. The time when they could bully Jewish students in the classroom, or assign a skewed reading list brimming with ani-Israel bias, or lecture in their classroom about the sheer wonderfulness of Hamas and the monstrousness of the Jewish state, and hire only faculty who, like them, were relentlessly anti-Israel, are now over. Fun while it lasted for these professorial bullies, but for them, the days of wine and roses are definitely over. Now the grownups are being put in charge of Middle East Studies at Columbia.
Indeed. As Bob Dylan once sang in a different context, the times they are a-changin’.
