As Caroline Glick, the Jerusalem Post’s superb columnist and editor, puts it in a scathing letter to Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, “Columbia today is not a fount of liberalism in the spirit of John Stuart Mill but an incubator of hatred and lies,” lies and hatred directed against both the U.S. and Israel. The death of the vitriolic, imitation-terrorist Edward Said (who was caught on camera hurling rocks at Israeli forces at the Lebanon border) should have been greeted with a sigh of relief from Columbia: instead, as Glick points out, the university endowed a professorship in his name and conferred it on Rashid Khalidi, another anti-Semitic, anti-American terrorism apologist.
Khalidi is in congenial company. Joseph Massad was appointed in 1999 to the same Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures. Jonathan Calt Harris in the New York Sun gives a run down on some of his “academic” contributions. “The Jewish state is a racist state that does not have a right to exist.” This was Massad in a lecture at Oxford University. Poverty is caused by “the racist and barbaric policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.” Massad ridicules the very existence of a “so-called Islamic ‘threat’” and blames the United States for what passes for it: the suicide bombing in Beirut in 1983, in which 241 Marines were killed, was payback for “U.S. imperialist aggression.” The Holocaust is a self-serving Jewish rewrite of history invented for reasons of propaganda. And on and on in the same vein.
As Glick points out, anti-Americanism and anti-Semitic poison are not confined to the Middle East Studies department but permeate such departments as English, History and Political Science, making Columbia “a clearinghouse for lies posing as scholarship that then enter the public sphere and infect our culture in this time of global war.”
Columbia is now embarked on a major fund-raising campaign from alumni as it seeks to expand its campus northward. This offers a splendid opportunity for graduates to inform Bollinger and his fund-raisers what they think of the university’s direction.