COLUMBIA'S ANTI-SEMITES

New York Post ^ | 1/03/05

[kattracks]

The ever-clueless New York Civil Liberties Union has leaped head-first into the ongoing controversy sur rounding alleged anti-Israel bias and intimidation of students at Columbia University by siding — surprise, surprise — with the accused professors.

Indeed, the NYCLU - proving that it doesn't need Norman Siegel in charge to look through the wrong end of the telescope - charges that an investigation into the students' charges is "likely to descend into an inquisition."

Actually, there's little chance of that: As The New York Sun reported, Columbia President Lee Bollinger has stacked the deck of his fact-finding committee, choosing members who all have a record of left-wing activism — and two of whom themselves have a public record of anti-Israel bias.

But this is not, as the NYCLU claims, simply an attack on the "ideological or political views" of members of Columbia's Middle East Asian Language and Culture Department.

It is, in fact, a demand for the very kind of academic freedom that the NYCLU claims to support — a genuinely free exchange of ideas without harassment or intimidation.

At issue are charges raised in a recently released documentary film that the department has become less a home for intellectual debate than for anti-Israel polemics — with issues like Arab terrorism and oppression in the Muslim world deliberately swept under the rug.

More disturbingly, students complain that they have been actively harassed by individual professors for expressing pro-Israel views.

The controversy has focused particularly on Joseph Massad, a non-tenured professor of modern Arab politics and unabashedly harsh critic of Israel. In one well-publicized incident, Massad allegedly refused to answer a student until he disclosed how many Palestinians he had killed as an Israeli soldier.

[GeronL]

no surprise at all

[FormerACLUmember]

The ACLU hates observant Jews almost as much as it hates Christians. But IslamoFascist enemies of America like the hateful professors in question?: We LOVE you!!

[GeronL]

The ACLU doesn't even bother to hide it, it is amazing how any supporters they have

[The Spirit Of Allegiance]

the students' charges is "likely to descend into an inquisition."

update on an old joke: "Mommy, Mommy, can we use your curling iron to play Spanish Inquisition with the ACLU?"

Honey, my curling iron is broken, but here's Daddy's soldering iron...."

[muawiyah]

Institutional anti-semitism has been a big thing at Columbia for many decades. They actively discourage smart Jewish kids from New York City from even bothering to apply there.