Tag Archive for: academia

How Academics Can Show Support for Israel at Graduation Ceremonies

Last year, as the 2023-2024 academic year came to an end, I was feeling fortunate to be teaching at the Rochester Institute of Technology, a school that had successfully stopped the anti-Israel madness that had taken over much of academia. Since several friends had children who were completing their degrees, I decided to attend the graduation ceremony, something I hadn’t done since the pandemic.

But marching in an academic ceremony posed a problem since faculty are expected to wear their academic regalia. My New York University doctoral robe stands out in a crowd. It is purple (for the NYU Violets, truly a fearsome mascot) with black panels bearing 2 badges with the school’s symbol and the year 1831 denoting its founding year. But as an NYU alumnus who is somewhere between disillusioned and disgusted with my alma mater, I have lost the pride I once felt wearing it.

NYU has been on a downward spiral in the last two decades, becoming a hub of anti-Israel activism. With its Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, Iranian Studies Initiative, and Middle East and Islamic Studies department, NYU is the embodiment of the Palestinization of academia. In 2020, after it had become clear that NYU had turned against Israel in every conceivable way, I began referring to it as the Gaza of Greenwich Village.
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I could have rented a plain black doctoral robe and blended in with the crowd, but instead I chose to wear my outfit, after making a minor alteration signifying my feelings about NYU by attaching a 2″ x 3″ Israeli flag over one of the torch badges. Call it restorative justice.

I considered using hook-and-loop tape to secure it, but in order to make it more permanent, I sewed it on. I was ready for the ceremony.

When the chair of my department couldn’t attend the ceremony and asked for volunteers to take his place, I offered to fill in.

In the end, I was tasked with walking in the procession, leading the English majors on stage, and then shaking their hands while giving them their “diplomas” (faux leather slip covers with a letter indicating that their actual diplomas would arrive soon).

Considering all the garish outfits academics wear at convocations, a minor alteration such as mine probably went largely unnoticed. From those who did notice, I received a few evil-eyed glares, but no one said anything negative to me. In fact, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive – quite a few thumbs up, a couple high fives, and many knowing smiles. One colleague hugged me with tears in her eyes.

I later wondered what would have happened if I had worn the outfit to an NYU graduation, or an Ivy League graduation.

RIT has no Middle East studies department and no SJP chapter. Very few of the faculty are in favor of eliminating Israel and promoting Hamas. According to the AMCHA Anti-Zionist Barometer, RIT has a nearly perfect record of 0 or “Negligible” with “Little to no anti-Zionist faculty presence/activity found.” It has no “Faculty for Justice in Palestine” (FJP) chapter, has issued no FJP statements, and held no FJP activities. No departments have issued statements condemning or calling for an academic boycott of Israel. The only stain on its otherwise-perfect record comes from five faculty members who have “endorsed a publicly-accessible statement or petition in support of an academic boycott of Israel.”

By contrast, NYU is at the top of the AMCHA barometer, listed as the number 1 anti-Zionist campus in America, with the highest possible score of 5 or “Extreme.” It has a chapter of “Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine,” has held 30 FJP events and issued 14 FJP statements. Worst of all, NYU has 127 faculty boycotters (the most of any school on the barometer), making the NYU motto Perstare et Praestare (“To Persevere and Excel”) true but bitterly ironic.

Academics of America, if you have ever felt shame over how your profession has responded to October 7…

If you oppose an Intifada in America…

If you believe the terrorist organization Hamas must be annihilated…

If you believe Israel has a right to exist…

In short, if you are not a fashionable anti-Zionist…

Then I invite you to join me this graduation season by attaching an Israeli flag to your doctoral robe — on the left side, over your heart. Be part of a silent, dignified response to the last two years of protests, demonstrations, encampments, and intimidation masquerading as righteousness and protected under the aegis of academic freedom. Use your academic freedom to let the Mahmoud Khalils, Joseph Massads, and Bassam Haddads of the world know that you stand with Israel and against Hamas.

The more severe the anti-Zionism on your campus, the more courage it will take, but that’s where it is needed the most. And the more anti-Zionist the school where you earned your Ph.D., the better your robe will look.

An Israeli flag will help remove some of the antisemitic stink from a Yale University doctoral robe. The blue-on-blue color scheme looks good too.

An Israeli flag will help restore some dignity to a Harvard University robe, which even Harvard’s president would probably agree is necessary.

It stands out nicely on an orange Princeton University robe.

And it matches perfectly with a baby blue Columbia University robe, where it is probably needed the most.

Send a photo of yourself in your properly-altered doctoral outfit, to aj@investigativeproject.org the Investigative Project on Terrorism and we’ll put it on our website. Extra points for photos from the ceremony.

And congratulations on completing the 2024-2025 academic year and standing up to the mob.

AUTHOR

Chief IPT Political Correspondent A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Milstein fellow. This article has been cross-posted with the author’s permission from IPT News.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

EXCLUSIVE: Email Exposes How Boss Of NIH-Funded Alzheimer’s ‘Amyloid Mafia’ Shakes Down Critics

The father of the dominant theory of Alzheimer’s disease told another eminent researcher he is “causing harm” by criticizing his theory in an email obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

For three decades University College London neurogeneticist John Hardy and like-minded scholars have been so dominant in promoting the theory that amyloid-beta plaques are the root cause of Alzheimer’s that some journalists and critics have referred to proponents as the “amyloid mafia.”

But recent high-profile retractions and allegations of fraud in hundreds of other papers have threatened to undermine the clique’s supremacy. None of Hardy’s work has been retracted, but he has cited papers with evidence of image manipulation in 58 of his papers.

He is not alone: 77,655 Alzheimer’s papers cite the hundreds of papers compromised by manipulated evidence, according to a February book by Science reporter Charles Piller. Forty-six Alzheimer’s researchers, including major contributors to the amyloid hypothesis, have authored papers with evidence of manipulated data.

In an email to University of Texas at San Antonio neurobiologist George Perry — who is critical of the “amyloid mafia” — Hardy downplayed the impact of revelations of alleged fraud on the field.

“Sometimes you have to know when to say you were wrong,” Hardy said to his critic in the April 5, 2025, email. “It is time to fold because now you are doing harm.”

The email was obtained through a Texas Public Information Act request.

Hardy did not respond to a request for comment. Perry declined to comment.

“Hardy saying George [Perry] is ‘causing harm’ by challenging him doesn’t sound very scientific to me,” said Rudolph Castellani, a Northwestern University neuropathologist who has collaborated with Perry, in an interview with the DCNF. “We can’t even challenge them, we’re just supposed to do whatever they say?”

The stakes are high. More than 8 million Medicare patients have some diagnostic evidence of Alzheimer’s or a related dementia, according to a March study. Drugmakers have invested billions in amyloid-targeted drugs but neurologists are divided on their safety and efficacy.

AUTHOR

Emily Kopp

Contributor.

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All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Trump Administration Wants Colleges to Reveal Foreign Donors

The Trump administration is not letting up in its determination to make American colleges and universities shape up and fly right. First, it has asked the universities to supply the administration with information on what they have been doing to record, punish, and prevent antisemitic acts on their campuses. Second, the administration has asked them to furnish the government with information on DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs that are enforced at the schools, so that their observance of the law, or failure to do so — the law as set out in the 2023 Supreme Court decision that struck down Affirmative Action programs for college admissions — can be judged. And now the Trump administration wants colleges and universities to reveal what foreign money they have accepted, with particular attention to moneys coming from China and Qatar, two countries that do not share our values, and are, indeed, hostile to us.

More on this request for more information on foreign “influencers” of American universities can be found here: “Trump order will prevent Qatari, Chinese influence at schools, ed. sec. says,” by Michael Starr, Jerusalem Post, April 24, 2025:

A Wednesday executive order from US President Donald Trump will require transparency in foreign university funding, with Education Department Secretary Linda McMahon emphasizing that the order would address the problem of Chinese and Qatari influence in American academic institutions.

Trump’s order called for McMahon to take all appropriate action to enforce preexisting laws on foreign funding to universities and to demand the disclosure of more details about the donations, their sources, and purposes.

McMahon and Attorney-General Pam Bondi were ordered to hold institutions that failed to properly disclose foreign funding accountable, and to conduct audits and investigations where appropriate.

The order explained that legislation on foreign funding in higher education had not been robustly enforced, with blame leveled at former US president Joe Biden’s administration. Trump accused Biden of undermining investigations into foreign funding by moving the task out of the Education Department, and supposedly undoing his previous term’s work.

The previous Trump administration had opened 19 investigations into undisclosed foreign funds, according to the order, leading to the reporting of a further $6.5 billion in foreign funding.

Trump’s new administration suggested that as much as half of reportable foreign gifts were not being disclosed, and funds that had been reported supposedly did not detail their true sources.

A Wednesday White House Fact Sheet claimed that $60b. in foreign gifts and contracts had flowed into American academic institutions over several decades, and only 300 institutions self-reported about the matter each year….

$60 billion given by foreign donors to American colleges and universities is a staggering sum. It is rarely given out of the goodness of their hearts, but funding from certain countries is more worrisome than that from others, because this money forms part of sustained campaigns to buy up influence on campuses, by paying for faculty to teach subjects that will be in line with the donors’ desires. Foreign donors can, provide scholarships to their own nationals, judged politically reliable, to study in America, and influence their classmates, or provide scholarships to American students to study in their countries, where they will be subject to round-the-clock propaganda. The Chinese might pay an American university to take Chinese students or faculty, who will then be able both to spread propaganda, but also, if in the sciences, potentially steal secrets from American researchers. This has already been happening far too often. Qatar has poured money into Middle East Centers filled with native speakers of Arabic, where certain subjects — “contemporary Palestinian literature,” or “the literature of Palestinian resistance,” or “Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ Reconsidered” — might be the subject of courses that would please the donors in Doha.

The request had also sought a list of visiting researchers, scholars, students, and faculty, and details about foreign students who had been expelled or had their credentials cancelled.

These requests do no more than request of universities what they were already required to do under the 1965 Higher Education Act. That is, universities are required to report to the government on “foreign gifts, grants, and contracts” received, and provide information as to the individuals involved in such donations. Why should this be controversial? Doesn’t the government have a right — a duty — to make sure that malign foreign governments are not managing to plant agents in American universities, either to propagandize for those governments, or for their favorite causes, or to nurture, among the American faculty who receive funding from them, a cadre of professors who may brainwash American students? How many departments of Middle Eastern Studies have even one faculty member who is well-disposed to Israel? And what about the continuing scandal of Chinese researchers working at American universities, insufficiently vetted, who have turned out to be stealing the work of American researchers?

Qatar may be the largest foreign donor to American colleges. It is also the main supporter of the terror group Hamas, to which it has donated billions of dollars for weapons and to pay the salaries of combatants. Most of Hamas’ leaders live securely, and luxuriously, in Doha. Of course the Qataris will want to support Middle East Studies programs that can be staffed with faculty who will be well disposed not just to the Palestinians, but also to Hamas. Think of the effect of the key professors — Joseph Massad, Rashid Khalidi, and Hamid Dabashi — at Columbia’s Department of Middle East Studies, whose courses would not be out of place at Bir Zeit University, and who have managed to prevent the hiring of any faculty who do not share their pro-Palestinian views. The Qatar Foundation has been pouring money into Columbia, and if the federal government continues to withhold $400 million in funding for the university, Qatar could easily step in and make up the difference.

All the administration wants is to be kept fully informed of what foreign money has been, and is being, spent on American higher education, what programs or individuals are being funded, what sums are being provided, and whether there is any reason for alarm about the effects of that funding coming from countries that have very different values from ours, and do not wish us well, such as China, such as Qatar. What’s wrong with that?

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Harvard Should Emulate Hillsdale College, Reject Federal Money

Harvard has until recently been receiving $2.2 billion in federal funding, largely for research grants for medical research. The Trump administration has now withheld that amount, and promises it will continue to withhold that sum as long as Harvard does not explain how it is now, and how it intends in the future, to protect Jewish students on campus from manifestations of antisemitism. A second request from the government is that Harvard end its DEI programs that make race and ethnicity, not merit, the bases upon which decisions as to admission and faculty hiring and promotion are made. These requests seem eminently reasonable to me, but not to the grand panjandrums in Massachusetts Hall.

The historian Victor Davis Hanson takes Harvard to task for its refusal to comply with those requests from the administration, and if Harvard continues with its refusal, he suggests that the university should at least end its reliance on $2.2 billion in federal grants when it has so much money — more than $50 billion — in its endowment, that could easily fund whatever programs the federal government’s cuts would now endanger.

More on Victor Davis Hanson’s suggestion to Harvard can be found here: “Opinion: Harvard could go full Hillsdale College and set itself free,” by Victor Davis Hanson, Tribune Content AgencyApril 20, 2025 

Harvard University has rejected various demands of a presidential commission on antisemitism.

The task force wants to persuade Harvard to ensure Jewish students on its campus are no longer harassed, or else lose its federal funding.

Harvard retorts that it won’t be bullied by Washington.

Among its other requirements, the Trump administration also warned Harvard to cease using race as a criterion in its admissions, hiring and promotion, contrary to law….

Despite all of Harvard’s platitudes, its classrooms are still being disrupted. Jewish students remain fearful.

And what would Obama say if, for example, African-American students at Harvard were harassed on campus by masked disrupters?

Or Black studies classes were crashed by students wearing scarves over their faces as they vented their hatred? Would he press the Trump administration to force Harvard to honor federal civil rights protections?

Remember, Harvard is a private university with a largely untaxed endowment of over $50.2 billion. Yet again, it still receives some $2.2 billion — now suspended — in federal funds.

The administration task force is not forcing Harvard to run its university according to its version of federal dictates.

Instead, the Trump commission is simply warning Harvard that if, in addition to its huge sources of private funding, it still wishes continuance of some $2.2 billion in public money from the federal government, then it must comply with existing laws and executive orders.

Does Harvard remember the embarrassing testimony of its former president, Claudine Gay?

She failed to assure a congressional committee that Harvard had taken action against openly hostile antisemitic student protesters during its growing protest movements.

Claudine Gay also turned out to be a serial plagiarist, whose scholarly works consisted of four short articles, at least two of which contained large bits written by, but not credited to, others. Claudine Gay is black; might DEI explain her otherwise incomprehensible appointment as Harvard’s president? And why, one wonders, after she was forced to resign in disgrace, did Harvard agree to continue to pay her the presidential salary she had been receiving of $900,000 a year?

Apparently Harvard does not care enough about the wellbeing and safety of its Jewish students to assure them, and the federal government that has asked for such information, of all the ways it is now, or will in the future, be combatting antisemitism on its campus.

And Harvard cares so little for the notion — now so truly brave and even revolutionary — that merit alone should determine which students are admitted, and which faculty are hired, and then promoted. Apparently Harvard thinks it is worth the loss of $2.2 billion in federal money so as to be able to discriminate on the basis of race and ethnicity. What a victory!

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Dems Rally for ‘Non-Violent’ ‘Palestinian’ Columbia Student Who Writes About Collecting Bombs

“And embrace my gun…”

Now that a judge ruled that Columbia U’s Mahmoud Khalil can be deported, and Momodou Taal who urged taking a cue for Hamas has self-deported, Democrats and the media are swarming to defend another one of these foreign students being shoved to the exit.

Mohsen Mahdawi, also of Columbia U, presumably anticipating his own ‘Shalom’ message, went off to an immigration officie in Vermont in the hopes of getting ‘naturalized’, instead he was asked to leave America.

Democrats are furious.

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen Peter Welch along with Rep. Becca Balint, claimed that booting Mahdawi was “immoral, inhumane and illegal.”

According to his lawyers, Mahdawi, a so-called “Palestinian” is also a “committed Buddhist who believes in “non-violence and empathy as a central tenet of his religion.”

According to reality, Mahdawi told 60 Minutes that he could empathize with the Hamas atrocities of Oct 7. He also wrote a poem celebrating a terrorist that contained the words, “I will breathe home… / And fill my shame / And clean my gun / And collect my packages, my bombs / And embrace my gun…”

This won’t stop Democrats or the media from fighting for him because this is what they support.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Marco Rubio’s Letter on Mahmoud Khalil

Oh, dear. The administration’s stormtroopers are running wild through the land, smashing the storefronts of businesses owned by Democrats, closing down every school that does not display the Ten Commandments, abducting all foreigners who didn’t register as Republicans, and whisking them away to a re-education camp in Alaska.

That, at least, seems to be the view of Marianne Hirsch, a Columbia University professor who grew up in Communist-ruled Romania, in a piece she has just published in The Forward. America today reminds her of life under the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, as you can see here: “Columbia Prof. Marianne Hirsch: Mahmoud Khalil Arrest Reminds Me of Growing Up Under Authoritarianism,” Democracy Now!April 10, 2025:

Columbia University professor Marianne Hirsch’s new article in The Forward is titled “I grew up under a terrifying authoritarian regime. Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest is right out of their playbook.” She tells Democracy Now! that seeing footage of the ICE arrests of Khalil and Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk “brought back these feelings of terror that I had as a child.” Hirsch grew up in Romania under the authoritarian regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu and says she sees parallels between the climate of fear she was raised in and the repression of speech and protest on campuses today. Hirsch, who is Jewish, condemns the “anticipatory capitulation” of universities, like Columbia, to the Trump administration’s threats to pull funding and says “the reason for this was never to fight antisemitism, but it was to decimate academia.”

Ignoring Hirsch’s hysteria — which is only a slight exaggeration from what Mahmoud Khalil’s lawyers have been claiming — we should look at what the government has now said, in the two-page letter by Secretary of State Mario Rubio submitted to the court that contributed to the decision that the government had a right to revoke his green card and deport him. The letter (or memorandum) submitted by Secretary Rubio invoked a 1952 law, the McCarran-Walter Act, that gave the federal government the authority to keep out, or to deport, foreigners whose presence would compromise an important foreign policy goal of the American government. Rubio’s memo, which was undated, was released by Khalil’s legal team on Thursday, the day after the Trump administration submitted it in an immigration court filing. It does not accuse Khalil of any crime. But Rubio writes that Khalil’s continued presence in the U.S. would have “potentially serious adverse foreign consequences, and would compromise a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest.”

What are those “adverse foreign consequences”? Well, Khalil’s noisy support for Hamas, a designated terror organization, and a threat to our ally Israel, is one such “adverse consequence.” It undermines support for the war on terrorist groups such as Hamas. When Khalil led students to chant “From the river to the sea/Palestine shall be free,” he was calling for the obliteration of the Jewish state and the expulsion, or murder, of its Jewish population. The survival of Israel is one goal — a major one — of American foreign policy that Mahmoud Khalil seeks to undermine. When the campus brownshirts scream “Intifada Everywhere,” they are no longer expressing just anti-Israel animus, but calling for the destruction of Jews everywhere.

More on the letter submitted by Secretary Rubio can be found here: “Trump administration lays out its evidence for deporting activist Mahmoud Khalil,” by Joel Rose and Adrian Florido, NPR

…Khalil and his lawyers also dispute the charge of antisemitism.

“What is the antisemitism?” Van Der Hout said during a Zoom meeting with reporters on Thursday. “It is criticizing Israel and the United States for the slaughter that is going on in Gaza, in Palestine. That’s what this case is about.”

“What is the antisemitism?” one of Khalil’s lawyers indignantly asks. How about the wild charge by the protesters, led by Khalil, who insist that the Jewish state is “committing ethnic cleansing and genocide” — a charge that has only one purpose, to whip people up enough so that they engage in anti-Israel and antisemitic behavior. This charge of “genocide” is not rational criticism, but an antisemitic canard intended to blacken the image of the one Jewish state, and constitutes as well an incitement to violence against Jews. After all, if the Jewish state commits “genocide,” and Jews everywhere support Israel, that must mean they support “genocide.” So, of course, Khalil and his followers want to “Globalize the Intifada.”

At the very least, those protesters on the Columbia campus should not be allowed to scream their hatred of Israel at Jewish classmates, shouting them down if they tried to say a word in support of Israel, temporarily holding hostage Jewish students who had merely been walking to class, roughing others up, and attempting to shut down any classes taught by Israeli or Jewish professors, and invading and then vandalizing campus buildings. And that is exactly what happened on the Columbia campus, with Mahmoud Khalil leading the protesters in their chants as they denounce Israel’s “genocide” and call for Israel’s destruction, and egging them on to do still more, such as harassing Jewish students, disrupting classes taught by Israeli professors, even encouraging students to enter and vandalize campus buildings. And through all this mayhem, interruption of classes, destruction of university property, antisemitic chants calling for Israel to be destroyed and replaced by a 23rd Arab state, the leader of the pack on Morningside Heights has been Mahmoud Khalil, now pretending to be a “martyr for the cause of freedom of speech,” though he was eager to have his demonstrators silence, by shouting down, anyone trying to express a pro-Israel sentiment.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

At the University of Chicago, Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee

The pro-Hamas brownshirts at the University of Chicago noisily insist that they are only exercising its “right to free speech” when they demonstrators chant “From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free,” which, rightly understood, is a call for the destruction of Israel and its replacement by a 23rd Arab state. They are exercising their “right to free speech” when they harass Jewish students who are walking across the campus, or when they try to disrupt classes taught by “Zionist” professors. They call the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil by the government a violation of this Hamas collaborator’s “right to free speech.” But they are not about to accord the same “right to free speech” to pro-Israel groups on campus such as Maroons For Israel. More on this double standard can be found here: “Palestinian Supporters at My School Don’t Want Free Speech; They Want to Silence Jews,” by Joachim Sciamma, Algemeiner, March 26, 2025:

On March 11, 2025, University of Chicago students took to the quad, just as final exams were beginning, to oppose the arrest of Columbia University encampment organizer Mahmoud Khalil.

Khalil is accused of distributing pro-Hamas propaganda, including material labeled from the “Hamas Media Office.”  The University of Chicago student demonstrators invoked our school’s principles in defense of freedom of expression — labeling the arrest a violation of Khalil’s right to free speech.

Unfortunately, these protestors only agree with free speech when it is content they agree with….

Consider the following example: In February 2025, Israel confirmed that civilian hostages, Ariel, Kfir, and their mother, Shiri Bibas, had been murdered in Hamas captivity. Ariel was 4 years old, and his little brother was 9 months old when they were kidnapped….

Although the Bibas family’s true cause of death has been proven by forensic evidence, some of my peers at the University of Chicago still believe the terrorist propaganda that they perished at the hands of Israel.

In response to the murders, Maroons for Israel — the pro-Israel student organization on campus, of which I am the President– placed a University-approved installation on the Swift quadrangles in memory of Kfir Bibas on Monday, March 3.

By Friday, March 7, it was defaced; as far as we can tell, it was vandalized in broad daylight….

And that’s not the first time their hypocrisy has been on display. Last November, our approved banner explaining the danger of “globalize the intifada” rhetoric was dismantled and left in a dumpster.

Also, during an encampment on campus last spring, our approved installations were destroyed every evening, like clockwork, and every morning we had to rebuild them….

These students are also disrupting speaker events, and attempting to shut down opinions they disagree with. They called for the boycott of what they labelled “Zionist classes.” They invoke the principle of free speech when it suits them, but show open disdain for it otherwise….

Those anti-Israel “free speech” advocates tore down pro-Israel installations put up on the University of Chicago campus, not once, but every night. They defaced and tore pieces from posters with photographs of 4-year-old Ariel and 9-month-old Kfir Bibas, both of them murdered — strangled — by Hamas operatives. They pulled down the banner of a pro-Israel group explaining what the sinister slogan “globalize the Intifada” means, and left it in a dumpster. They want students to boycott “Zionist” classes. They want “free speech” for themselves, but wish to silence every possible expression of pro-Israel sympathies. The motto of these anti-Israel and antisemitic campus groups is the same everywhere, from Columbia to Berkeley: “Free Speech For Me, But Not For Thee.”

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Another Pro-Hamas Student Faces Deportation

The story of the Trump administration’s detention of Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national at Georgetown University, for having ties to the terror group Hamas can be found here: “US seeks to deport pro-Palestinian Georgetown University student,” Reuters, March 20, 2025:

US President Donald Trump’s administration has detained an Indian man studying at Washington’s Georgetown University and is seeking to deport him after deeming him a harm to US foreign policy, the student’s lawyer said on Wednesday.

The US Department of Homeland Security accused Badar Khan Suri of ties to the Palestinian terror group Hamas and said he had spread Hamas propaganda and antisemitism on social media, according to a statement it shared with Fox News….

After the Trump administration arrested Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil for his ties to terrorism, Muslims and far-left activists accused it of violating Khalil’s free speech rights. But free speech had nothing to do with it. Khalil was arrested for supporting the aims of Hamas, a terrorist group. He led chanting mobs on the campus, who surrounded and held captive some Jewish students, screaming in their faces, while happily harassing and roughing up others. These Jewish students testified that as a result of such violence, they lived “in fear.” At a deportation hearing for Mahmoud Khalil, the administration will have an opportunity to prove its case, presenting the evidence it has amassed on Khalil’s support for Hamas and its stated aim of obliterating the state of Israel. In the end, despite the noisy protests in his favor by an alliance of far-left and Muslim activists, I think he will indeed be deported. The only question is where? He was born in Syria, and no doubt the new jihadist regime would be willing to take him in. Or, if he wants to live more luxuriously, he could ask to be sent to Qatar which, like Mahmoud Khalil himself, is a devout supporter of Hamas. Mahmoud Khalil’s links to Hamas consist of his parroting Hamas propaganda, both orally, as he led assembled mobs of protesters chanting anti-Israel and antisemitic slogans, including “From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free” and “Intifada Now” around the Columbia campus, and in writing, with the antisemitic leaflets his group wrote and left around the campus, including flinging them into a classroom where an Israeli professor was trying to teach.

The latest candidate for deportation is Badar Khan Suri:

Suri is a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, which is part of the university’s School of Foreign Service. His arrest was first reported by Politico….

The Saudi-funded Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding was founded by John Esposito — the name of its greatest benefactor, Alwaleed Bin Talal, was added later — who is an energetic defender and promoter of Islam. The Center is devoted to persuading Christians that they have nothing to fear either from Muslims or from the faith of Islam, and Christians are encouraged to believe that Islam and Christianity are compatible, whereas Judaism remains worrisome for both.

Suri’s wife, Mapheze Saleh, is a US citizen, said his lawyer. Saleh is from Gaza, according to the Georgetown University website, which said she has written for Al Jazeera and Palestinian media outlets and worked with the foreign ministry in Gaza. Saleh has not been arrested, the lawyer added.

Suri’s wife writes for Al Jazeera, the pro-Hamas news channel funded entirely by the government of Qatar. Qatar has provided refuge to several of the top Hamas leaders, including Khaled Meshaal and the late Ismail Haniyeh, and given huge financial support to Hamas as well, some $1.8 billion to date. Saleh has not been detained, or threatened with deportation, as yet; she enjoys a higher degree of protection, against deportation, as a U.S. citizen, than her husband.

Pro-Palestinian protesters are antisemitic if they call for the destruction of the only Jewish state, and the expulsion or killing of all of its Jewish inhabitants, so that it can be replaced by a 23rd Arab state. They are antisemitic if they surround and hold captive, however briefly, Jewish students, while screaming such slogans as “Intifada Now” at Jewish — not Israeli but Jewish — students. They are antisemitic if they harass and even pummel Jewish students who simply had the misfortune to be walking across the campus while a protest was going on.

Now one protester has self-deported back to India. Ranjani Srinivasan, a 37-year-old Indian student in a doctoral program in urban planning at Columbia University, self-deported after her visa was revoked by the US Department of State on March 5. The State Department cited security concerns related to her involvement in alleged activities “supporting Hamas” and was a “terrorist sympathizer.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, in a post on X, called Srinivasan a “terrorist sympathizer,” saying that those who “advocate terrorism and violence” must not stay in the US.Now she’s gone for good, well aware that the evidence that would have been presented in a deportation hearing would be damning, and once on the public record, could end her chances of future employment, both in the U.S. and in her native India. She could, of course, always find work in Qatar, where support for Hamas is considered a distinct plus.

These deportation efforts ought to scare the wits out of those students — and non-students who ever since October 8, 2023 have found their way onto various campuses to join in the anti-Israel and antisemitic fun — who have had a high old time of it during the last year on their campuses, harassing Jewish students, calling for Israel’s destruction, demanding “Intifada Now” all over the world, invading and vandalizing campus buildings by scrawling antisemitic slogans on the walls, and praising what they call the “resistance” by Hamas on October 7. Now they are entering a world of woe, entirely of their own making. After a half-dozen of these deportations are successfully carried out, we’ll see just how quiet our campuses can become.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Muslim University Student Who Plotted Jihad Massacre is Latest Failure of Officials Who Vet Migrants

The officials who vet migrants are bound as a matter of policy to ignore that there is any such thing as an Islamic jihad, so vetting failures of this kind are bound to happen.

“Egyptian Student Added to CIS National Security Vetting Failures Database,” by Todd Bensman, Center for Immigration Studies, January 10, 2025:

An 18-year-old Egyptian student at Virginia’s George Mason University who now stands charged with multiple terrorism offenses related to a mass casualty plot on Israel’s consulate in New York is the latest addition to the Center for Immigration Studies National Security Vetting Failures Database. The entry brings the total number of analyzed failure cases to 50.

In March 2023, the Center published the database collection to draw “remedial attention” to ongoing government vetting failures lest they “drift from the public mind and interest of lawmakers, oversight committee members, media, and homeland security practitioners who would otherwise feel compelled to demand process reforms”, according to an explanatory Center report titled “Learning from our Mistakes”.

The FBI arrested Abdullah Ezzeldin Taha Mohamed Hassan on December 17, 2024, for allegedly plotting a mass casualty attack on the Israeli consulate in New York. The case is pending in the Eastern District of Virginia.

Hassan, an Egyptian National, entered the United States in July 2022 as a juvenile and lived in Falls Church, Va., although as of January 2025 the visa granted for him to enter had not been publicly reported.

As a juvenile, he may have entered with parents or relatives on a temporary non-immigrant visa, such as a tourist visa or a J-2 student exchange visa, or even on an F-1 student visa, as there is no age limit for student visas. The U.S. State Department would, however, approve any of these visa types and conduct a personal interview of minors older than 14, like Hassan, who was 15 at the time.

However it was that Hassan entered, perhaps even if he illegally crossed a land border and claimed asylum, he was clearly already radicalized as an Islamic extremist, a circumstance that visa adjudicators or even federal law enforcement agents at the border, apparently could have discovered in his online social media accounts.

This is knowable because, within weeks or months of the juvenile Hassan’s 2022 entry, his social media accounts alerted the FBI, which sent agents to interview him “due, in part, to Hassan’s support for ISIS online”, the recent charging documents said.

Although no charges were filed in 2022, at some point soon after the FBI interviews, the U.S. government reportedly decided a mistake had been made. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) put Hassan into deportation proceedings, which were pending by the time he enrolled in George Mason University (GMU) to study information technology, probably in 2023 or 2024.

Hassan was still an enrolled active student in the summer and fall of 2024 when FBI agents were again actively investigating him undercover and saw him on the GMU campus, an agent affidavit said.

Again, Hassan’s online activities on several X social media accounts had drawn FBI attention. The bureau sent in an undercover agent online upon discovering that Hassan, who portrayed himself as an admirer of Osama bin Ladin and ISIS branches in Afghanistan and West Africa, was openly fantasizing about killing infidels and wanted to martyr himself in a mass-casualty attack.

Court documents reveal examples of Hassan’s alleged posts of him musing about killing Jews and, in one case, noted that a football player’s forehead was a “sniper’s dream”.

In one X account, Hassan boastfully shared an AI analysis of his profile that stated: “Based on our AI agent’s analysis of your tweets, you are a young radical Islamist extremist who is obsessed with jihad and violence against perceived enemies. Your tweets suggest a deep-seated hatred and intolerance towards those of other faiths, particularly Jews.”

“Yep I am an extremist,” Hassan later posted….

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Trump Lays Down the Law on Anti-Semitism in Universities

In Trump’s first term, Jews were declared to be a minority group protected by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. And now, just weeks away from beginning his second term, Trump has laid down the law, in a speech he just gave at a rally against antisemitism in Washington. American universities that fail to combat antisemitism on their campuses should expect severe repercussions, including the loss of accreditation and of federal research contracts. More on Trump’s determination to stamp out campus antisemitism can be found here: “Trump to universities: Stamp out antisemitism or lose accreditation,” by Mathilda Heller, Jerusalem Post, November 14, 2024:

All American universities must end campus antisemitism or they will lose accreditation, President-elect Donald Trump promised during a rally against antisemitism in Washington.

To “defeat antisemitism and defend Jewish citizens in America,” Trump said he would inform every college president that if they do not “end antisemitic propaganda,” they would lose accreditation and federal support.

He did not say they “may lose” accreditation. Trump said they will lose accreditation, and their share of the billions of dollars in federal support that universities receive. A double blow to their finances and reputation.

“We will not subsidize the creation of terrorist sympathizers, and we’re not going to do it – certainly [not] on American soil,” he said.

Trump added that once in the Oval Office, he would inform all educational institutions that if they permit violence or harassment against Jewish students, they will be “held accountable for violations of the civil rights law.”

“It’s very important – Jewish Americans must have equal protection under the law, and they’re going to get it,” he said. “At the same time, my administration will move swiftly to restore safety for Jewish students [on campuses] and Jewish people on American streets.”…

Those wet-behind-the-ears stormtroopers will no longer be allowed to harass and attack Jewish students. They won’t be able to march around the campus, entering lecture halls to disrupt classes taught by Jews and Israelis, or entering campus buildings in order to vandalize them, as they did on April 28 to Hamilton Hall at Columbia University, in an attempt to pressure the administration to divest from Israeli companies, and to cut institutional ties to Israeli academic institutions. If universities do not take forceful action against those who are fomenting a climate of antisemitism — something that very few of them did this past year — then they stand to lose their accreditation, which means their students would no longer have access to federal financial aid. In addition, earning a degree earned from an unaccredited school can also hold little value to employers and disqualify someone from attending graduate school. In addition, the federal government funds billions of dollars in research projects conducted at universities; that money could dry up if not enough is done to fight antisemitic acts on campus.

Many universities have shown themselves incapable of dealing with the surge in antisemitism on their campuses since October 7, 2023. Deploring antisemitic acts, declaring sympathy with Jewish students, promising solemnly to do better, is not enough. Nor are those slap-on-the-wrist punishments, where a handful of the worst offenders are suspended from campus for a term, and then that suspension is immediately lifted. Columbia University administrators considered caving to the demands of anti-Israel students, including agreeing to financial divestment from Israel-linked companies, as the just-released report from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce makes clear. And at Columbia, after dozens of marches by those screaming about “genocide in Gaza,” the harassing of Jewish students, the seizure of campus buildings, the setting up of tent encampments, a grand total of four students received temporary suspensions. “Harvard cut language condemning Oct. 7 attack as ‘violence,’ reference to hostages from statement on massacre, House GOP report shows,” by Josh Christenson, New York Post, October 31, 2024:

Harvard University President Claudine Gay and other administrators intentionally cut language condemning Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 massacre of more than 1,200 civilians as “violence” and references to their Israeli hostages from an official statement after the brutal attack, a stunning House committee report revealed Thursday.

The GOP-led House Education and Workforce Committee in a 122-page report found that the Ivy League university leaders made “an intentional decision” to water down their Oct. 9 statement that still failed to condemn Hamas’ attack, according to documents, some of which were obtained via subpoena.

“We denounce this act of terror,” reads an earlier draft of the statement that was jettisoned.

Then-Harvard Law School Dean John Manning, who has since become the school’s provost, successfully lobbied against adding more language that referenced the hundreds of hostages taken by Hamas.

“The violence hits all too close to home for many at Harvard,” states the earlier draft. “Some members of our community have lost family members and friends; some have been unable to reach loved ones, and others fear that their loved ones may have been taken hostage.”

The administrators also opted against denouncing a joint statement from 31 Harvard student groups holding Israel “entirely responsible” for Hamas’ atrocities.

On many campuses, including Harvard, Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Michigan, Jewish students have reported a climate of widespread antisemitism that has been tolerated by administrators. Lawsuits accusing Harvard University of tolerating antisemitism and making it unbearable for Jewish students to study there are ongoing.

Now Trump has set down the law, threatening to take away both accreditation, which would means no student access to federal financial aid, and research funds, from colleges and universities that fail to deal adequately with antisemitism. A new sheriff is in town.

Gaudeamus igitur.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Anti-Israel Brigades Are Out In Force On Campuses Again, But For How Long?

The morally obtuse, the dimwits, the historically ignorant, the antisemites are all out in force again this fall on campuses from sea to shining sea. But there are signs of university administrators becoming fed up, and determined to crack down on those who actually harass and physically attack Jewish students, vandalize university buildings, and call for the destruction of the only Jewish state and the expulsion, or killing, of its Jewish population. One of the students who has been firmly dealt with is one Prahlad Iyengar, a doctoral student at MIT who published a manifesto calling for “violence” by anti-Israel demonstrators. For his pains, he has been banned from the campus. That could lead to his expulsion. More on his case, and on other campus follies, can be found here: “‘Time to Begin Wreaking Havoc’: MIT Student Calls for Violence to Oppose Israel, ‘Escalate for Palestine,’” by Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner, November 6, 2024:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has reportedly banished from campus a student who penned an article which argued that violence is a legitimate method of effecting political change and, moreover, advancing the pro-Palestinian movement.

First reported on Tuesday by the MIT Coalition Against Apartheid (CAA), an anti-Israel group associated with National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), the school’s decision — as of yet unconfirmed by MIT officials — stands to reverse an impression that MIT lacks the resolve to punish students who use the campus to break university rules while holding raucous demonstrations against the world’s lone Jewish state.

Titled “On Pacifism,” the article — published in the MIT student publication Written Revolution and flanked by images of members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated terrorist group — argued that activists have failed to stop Israel’s war against Hamas and sunder the US-Israel relationship because of “our own decision to embrace nonviolence as our primary vehicle of change.”

All those chants calling for an end to the Jewish state, all those takeovers and vandalizing of university buildings, all the bullying of Jewish students, have not been enough to change policy in Washington. What is required to have an impact, this MIT student says, is real “violence.” We’ve “achieved nothing” because that “genocidal war in Gaza” goes on. Only when we use violence — only when we start to beat up Jewish students, pro-Israel faculty, and campus police — will we get results. He doesn’t explain exactly how such violence will convince others to go along with a pro-Hamas policy. We are left to guess.

The author, PhD candidate Prahlad Iyengar, continued, “One year into a horrific genocide, it is time for the movement to begin wreaking havoc, or else, as we’ve seen, business will indeed go on as usual … As people of conscience in the world, we have a duty to Palestine and to all the globally oppressed. We have a mandate to exact a cost from the institutions that have contributed to the growth and proliferation of colonialism, racism, and all oppressive systems. We have a duty to escalate for Palestine, and as I hope I’ve argued, the traditional pacifist strategies aren’t working because they are ‘designed into’ the system we fight against.”

In a statement distributed by the CAA, Iyengar accused MIT of weaponizing the disciplinary system to persecute him….

“Weaponizing the disciplinary system” just “to persecute him”? What a blend of conceit and persecution complex. MIT has only decided that someone who calls for violence on campus is a physical threat to both students and faculty, and the university has a perfect right to remove him from that campus. Nothing has been “weaponized.” Nor is Prahlad Iyengar being selected for “persecution.’”

Apparently Prahlad Iyengar also thinks that history teaches that “protest movements throughout history” have only succeeded when they abandoned nonviolence as a tactic. What can he be thinking of? Not Mahatma Gandhi’s peaceful protests against the British rulers of India that won that country’s independence. Not the civil rights movement in America led by Martin Luther King, that insisted on nonviolence. Not Nelson Mandela’s campaign to end apartheid in South Africa. Does Iyengar not realize how it was precisely the tactic of non-violence that was responsible for the success of all of those movements?

The pro-Hamas student group Coalition Against Apartheid (CAA) is now calling on students to harass David Randall, an associate dean, until he “relents and revokes” Iyengar’s punishment. There is the threat. There is the violence. By calling so pointedly for Randall to be targeted for harassment — you can use your imagine as to what that harassment could include, from threatening phone calls day and night, hacking of his computer, garbage strewn on his lawn, vandalizing his walls with slogans about “Free Palestine” and “Stop the Genocide,” even screaming at him whenever he appears on campus outside his office — his life can be made most unpleasant. One hopes that because it called for harassing an associate dean for performing his duties, the CAA at MIT will be permanently shut down.

In September, during Columbia University’s convocation ceremony, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a group which recently split due to racial tensions between Arabs and non-Arabs, distributed literature calling on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s movement to destroy Israel.

How amusing it was to see Palestinian students feeling discriminated against by their “non-Arab brothers,” who apparently would not let them arrogate to themselves all the leadership roles in the pro-Hamas protests at Columbia University.

University administrators who until now have been doing far too little, and sometimes nothing, about the pro-Hamas bullyboys who last year storm-trooped their way across campuses, yelling at, surrounding and holding briefly captive, and even assaulting, Jewish students, vandalizing university buildings, scribbling their antisemitic slogans on walls, calling for “violence” as the only way to get their messages across, are now encountering a new atmosphere, an unwillingness by those in Washington who supply universities with so much support to tolerate their inaction. The MIT doctoral student Prahlad Iyengar has now been banned from campus — a harbinger, one hopes, of punishments to come. Let’s hope that his banning is followed up by his permanent expulsion from MIT. And may other pro-Hamas students, and not only at MIT, begin to worry that with Trump’s return to office, and with the massive and devastating report on antisemitism on campuses that has been compiled by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce and just been released, there will be no more tolerance for those who spread their hatred of Jews and of Israel on campuses. Pull down your tent encampments, put away your bullhorns, roll up your Palestinian flags, and return to your studies, all you Hamas supporters — that is, if you care to graduate.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

College Presidents Turned to Sen. Schumer and Dems to Protect Them From Congressional Oversight on Antisemitism

Schumer advised that “universities political problems are really only among Republicans”

The House Committee on Education and the Workforce report on antisemitism is filled with damning materials, but some of the most damning bits of it deal not just with the reality of campus antisemitism and how university leaders covered it up, but the complicity of the Democrats in those cover-ups.

The description of contacts between Sen. Schumer and Columbia University leaders has already gone viral.

On January 4, then-President Shafik explained to Shipman and her fellow Co-Chair David Greenwald that she had met with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who advised Shafik that “universities political problems are really only among Republicans.” The Senator’s staff recommended the “best strategy is to keep heads down,” and when asked, Schumer and his staff indicated they did not believe it was necessary for the University’s leaders to meet with Republicans. Greenwald echoed this, writing in response, “If we are keeping our head down, maybe we shouldn’t meet with Republicans.”

Columbia University Chairs conversation on Senator Schumer

Sen. Schumer had once claimed to be a ‘shomer’ or ‘protector’ for the Jewish community.

The report reveals that he was actually a ‘shomer’ for campus antisemites.

Columbia University leaders were hoping that Democrats would take the House to protect them from further congressional oversight.

Days later, Greenwald exchanged text messages with his immediate predecessor Jonathan Lavine, about the Committee’s investigation and how they hoped Democrats would retake the House. On January 7, Greenwald sent Chair Emeritus Lavine a recent New York Times article about the expansion of the Committee’s investigation into campus antisemitism. Lavine responded, “Let’s hope the Dems win the house back. Greenwald replied, “Absolutely.”

Columbia University Chairs conversation on Senator Schumer (cont.)

That’s damning when it comes to Columbia University and for Congressional Democrats who were seen as protectors and defenders of bigotry.

AUTHOR

RELATED ARTICLE: Twelve Hours of Antisemitic Incidents

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Columbia Students Can Support Terrorists, But Can’t Read

“Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.”

A woke educational system politicizes everything, it also produces functional illiterates who only know how to be outraged at the things they’re told to be outraged at. (This is often mislabeled as teaching ‘critical thinking’.)

The consequences of replacing Shakespeare with Amanda Gorman are more than just wokeness, but a student body that even in Ivy League schools can’t read.

Literally. Can’t read a book.

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

Why are those students even there would be a question. But the answer is pretty obvious. Quite a few of those students are there for reasons other than merit. But beyond that they’re the products of public school systems that pursue every possible gimmick and fad except actually teaching basic skills.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

Why read books when you can go with teacher to a protest rally instead?

Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

And they also need their “mental health days”. And their “self-care”. And why should they be expected to do anything anyway?

Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen.

If only we paid public school teachers like NBA players…

In the face of this, the educational system is doing what it always does, lowering its standards.

Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”

Andrew Delbanco, a longtime American-studies professor at Columbia, now teaches a seminar on short works of American prose instead of a survey course on literature. The Melville segment used to include Moby-Dick; now his students make do with Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” There are some benefits—short works allow more time to focus on “the intricacies and subtleties of language,” Delbanco told me—and he has made peace with the change. “One has to adjust to the times,” he said.

Indeed.

And with some more adjustments, the curriculum will be reduced to toxic masculinity, studies, the 1619 Project and How to Support Hamas.

The public school system is a radioactive mess that does nothing but eat endless money and fund Democrat organizers while radicalizing and tainting young minds.

College today is mostly worthless.

Policy should follow those realities. We need schools, we do not need a public school system. And at this point widespread use of college should be reserved for specialties, not for a liberal arts that is dying off anyway.

AUTHOR

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

At Columbia, the Antisemitic Plot Thickens

At Columbia, the antisemitic plot thickens.

“Three Columbia Deans Placed on Leave Pending Investigation,” by Eliana Johnson, Washington Free Beacon, June 20, 2024:

Three of the Columbia University deans caught exchanging dismissive text messages during a May 31 panel on anti-Semitism have been placed on leave as the university investigates the incident, a spokesman for the school said Thursday.

As part of the college’s alumni reunion week, Columbia College administrators, knowing of the alarm expressed by many alumni at the stories of antisemitic harassment of Jewish students by anti-Israel and pro-Hamas demonstrators on the campus, and the claims by Jews that they received no support from the administration, decided to put on a show. Jewish students would be allowed to publicly air their complaints, as participants in a panel discussion on May 31, in the presence of several Columbia College deans, faculty members, and members of the alumni reunion classes, who would be able to observe this airing of grievances, as a way to allay fears that the college administrators were not doing enough to address the Jewish students’ claims of harassment and violence.

“The Dean of Columbia College informed his team today that three administrators have been placed on leave pending a university investigation of the incident that occurred at the College alumni reunion several weeks ago,” the spokesman said.

That dean, Josef Sorett, who also took part in the text exchanges, “reiterated his commitment to learning from this situation and other incidents over the last year to build a community of respect and healthy dialogue.”

The three deans placed on leave, Susan Chang-Kim, Matthew Patashnick, and Cristen Kromm, were captured—along with Sorett—exchanging derisive and anti-Semitic text messages. The texts included Kromm’s use of vomit emojis to refer to a Columbia University rabbi’s op-ed sounding the alarm about the eruption of anti-Semitism on campus and Patashnick’s accusation that one of the panelists, Columbia Hillel director Brian Cohen, was taking “full advantage of this moment” for its “fundraising potential.”

A Columbia spokesman said the school had no comment regarding why Sorett, who took part in the text exchanges, was not placed on leave or on the propriety of Sorett making the announcement that his colleagues are under investigation. Likewise, the spokesman declined to say who would conduct the investigation, to whom the results would be reported, and whether the results would be made public….

We still don’t know what Dean Sorett himself expressed when he took part in the exchanges among the three deputy deans. Did he join in the unseemly, unsympathetic, and downright antisemitic mocking of the Jewish students who testified? Or did he denounce the deputy deans in his own emails, and tell them to stop? His own emails will now be subject to investigation by— one assumes — an outside committee.

When the investigation — perhaps by an outside law firm — is complete, one hopes that the three deputy deans, following their display of antisemitic amusement at the Jewish witnesses testifying as to how they have been mistreated on campus, without any support forthcoming from the administration, will be discharged. As for Dean Sorett himself, much will depend on whether his emails show him scolding the deputy deans, or remaining silent, or joining in the general hilarity. If it is the latter, then he, too, must go.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

From Quotas to DEI — The Evolution of Campus Anti-Semitism

If anything, the fallout from DEI shows how anti-Semitism in academia has come full circle. 


As a legal studies professor in the community college system, I was asked to teach a new course on basic student skills mandated for undergraduates at all state colleges and universities. Though I initially agreed to do so, I changed my mind upon discovering that the curriculum includes a component on “diversity, equity and inclusion,” which seeks to indoctrinate rather than teach. In addition, the ideology underlying DEI depicts Jews as oppressors and Israel as a colonial occupier, promotes anti-Israel revisionist history, and has been instrumental in facilitating the antisemitic encampments and riots currently plaguing campuses across the country.

When asked by a well-meaning colleague whether I could somehow use DEI to facilitate constructive dialogue about antisemitism, I said it was impossible because of core progressive tenets that draw on classical anti-Jewish stereotypes and conspiracy theories.

If anything, the fallout from DEI shows how antisemitism in academia has come full circle.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jews in the US and Europe had to overcome strict quotas to gain acceptance to universities, and once enrolled were often subjected to discrimination, ostracization, and harassment. The quota system persisted well into the twentieth century, and during the 1930s, many American universities were amenable to Nazi sympathies, racial antisemitism thrived, and dehumanizing stereotypes prevailed in classrooms, fraternities, and dormitories.

It was socially unacceptable after the Holocaust for institutions to be forthright in their prejudice, however, and admissions quotas grew more subtle or were relaxed entirely. Campus antisemitism was no longer as monolithic as it once was, and Jews experienced varying degrees of acceptance across a wide spectrum. Many institutions welcomed Jewish students and faculty while some were less inviting; and this pretty much remained the norm until 1967.

After the Six-Day War, terrorism against Israel and global Jewish targets increased, liberals embraced the Palestinian Arabs, and there was a seismic shift in the way antisemitism was expressed in academia. Though it is a modern political construct without historical foundation, Palestinian Arab “national identity” provided the vehicle for mainstreaming Jew-hatred through pretextual philosophical lenses and revisionist historical narratives.

When Israel was no longer regarded as an underdog deserving of sympathy, it became acceptable to apply pejorative stereotypes to her as a Jewish state by camouflaging them as political criticism. Indeed, delegitimizing Israel became common in intellectual circles, even though it required her detractors to engage in tortured sophistry using moral relativism, moral equivalence, or historical revisionism.

Thus, antisemitism and anti-Israel hatred were repackaged as academic theory and taught in the classroom.

Moral relativism was employed to criticize Israel while exonerating her enemies from culpability for brutality and terrorism. This view repudiates the concept of absolute morality, holding instead that standards of right and wrong are culturally relative and there are no universal ethical constants. Some moral relativists believe, as did Jean-Paul Sartre, that ethics and morality are purely subjective and not amenable to absolute standards.

In the view of many moral relativists, hatred and terrorism against Israel are not inherently wrong because such conduct arises in cultures where it is organically acceptable. And since the atrocities of October 7th were considered rational acts within the society that nurtured the perpetrators, moral relativists have not been inclined to condemn them in absolute terms. They might find rape, torture, and murder reprehensible when perpetrated by common criminals (or on them, ed.) , but not when inflicted by Hamas as acts of “resistance.” Conversely, moral relativists have no problem chastising Israel for seeking to destroy Hamas and dismantle its infrastructure.

The relativist view evaluates acts of violent antisemitism against the perception of Arab victimhood. Thus, because Islamists believe Israel’s very existence is illegitimate and victimizes all Muslims, even the barbaric atrocities of October 7th can be considered morally justifiable. According to this view, no sovereign nation would ever be permitted to defend itself – even when its civilians are raped, tortured, and murdered – if the aggressors are seen as victims and therefore morally superior to their perceived oppressors.

The doctrine of moral equivalence, in contrast, compares disparate positions or actions and holds that they are equally good or equally bad, and that no party to a conflict is ethically superior to any other. This concept was elucidated by William James in his 1910 essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War.” As applied to Israel, it means that Hamas’s atrocities are no less moral than Israel’s acts of self-defense. A crass example of this was the International Criminal Court’s recent decision to issue arrest warrants for Bibi Netanyahu as well as Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh for war crimes and crimes against humanity. That is, the ICC (which has a long history of anti-Israel bias) would not charge Hamas terrorists without also charging the Israeli Prime Minister for supposedly equivalent conduct.

Regardless of which syllogism they use, anti-Israel academics must also engage in historical revisionism to claim that Jews are strangers to the Mideast, Israel is a colonial state, and Palestinian Arabs are a repressed indigenous population. Moreover, they must rewrite history to erase the fact that Jewish nationhood goes back 3,500 years and is reflected in the archeological, literary, and scriptural records. In contrast, the Palestinian Arab narrative is only about sixty years old and is a modern political creation based on a rejection of Jewish history.

In the decades since 1967, these philosophical paradigms have dominated university classrooms, where professors undercut Israel’s legitimacy, validate a Palestinian Arab myth devoid of historicity, and imbue antisemitic hatred of Israel with academic credibility. Ironically, many of these professors also preach the concept of “natural law,” which eschews religion and instead posits the existence of universal moral standards cutting across time and culture. But conceding the existence of any kind of absolute morality – whether religious or natural – undermines the precepts they use to intellectualize anti-Israel hatred (and exposes their logical inconsistency).

When confronted with the incongruity of their paradigms, these academic critics usually default to blaming the victim by attributing anti-Israel extremism to Jewish provocations – a view that ignores both ancient history and modern reality. Indeed, Jewish faith and culture never taught hatred of Arabs, and Jews never subjugated Muslims at any point in their history. The lynchpin of this position is the myth that Israel was created on the ruins of an indigenous nation of Palestine – which in fact never existed.

Such revisionist claims are absurd because Jews never persecuted or colonized Arabs or Muslims. Really, it was the Jews who were subjugated and abused under Islam and had their ancestral homeland usurped through conquest and forced dhimmitude.

As noxious as these theories were when introduced into the classroom, they did not typically manifest in widespread violence against Jews on the campus street. However, since the advent of DEI and validation of the twin myths of Palestinian Arab victimhood and superseding indigeneity, campuses have erupted in vicious protests, Jewish students have been threatened, harassed, and assaulted, and demonstrators have chanted “from the river to the sea…,” “death to Israel,” and “gas the Jews.” Rather than restore order by punishing antisemitic violence, university presidents have actually negotiated with the mobs, dignified their grievances, and in some cases agreed to their demands.

And they have utterly failed their Jewish students.

In what universe could administrators from Harvard, UPenn, Columbia, and other elite institutions be seen as acting responsibly? Their failure to assert authority indicates either cowardice or complicity and goes far beyond the enabling of hate-fests like Israel Apartheid Week and divestment campaigns by vapid student governments and advocacy groups.

Most of the offending universities have conduct codes that penalize the exercise of speech when it (a) is deemed hurtful to black, gay, Muslim, female, or trans students, (b) is supportive of conservative or traditional family values, or (c) gives rise to “microaggressions” upsetting to progressive sensibilities. Clearly, they have no problem suppressing speech that violates leftist ideology or quashing dissent. But they will not protect Jewish students from physical harm, eject outside agitators from their property, expel students for terrorizing others, or condemn antisemitism without qualification.

For Jewish students and faculty (excluding those radicals who identify with antisemitic, pro-Hamas progressives), the fear and loathing experienced today is reminiscent of that faced by earlier generations – particularly during the Nazi era, when racist antisemitism suffused American academia. Though conspicuous antisemitic intimidation and harassment were discouraged during the latter half of the twentieth century, anti-Jewish violence has returned with a vengeance, thanks in no small measure to the fundamental disdain for Jews and Israel inherent in DEI ideology and baked into the modern progressive agenda.

Some institutions have recognized this and are dismantling their DEI programs, but most lack the honesty to admit their ethical malfeasance or the fortitude to correct it.

©2024. Matthew Hausman, J.D. All rights reserved.