by Sara Dogan
October 7th was “the stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance” against “cruel colonizers.”
[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
Editor’s note: Since the barbaric Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7th, American universities have become an undeniable locus of Jew hatred within our nation. Much attention has deservedly been paid to the radical campus groups like Students for Justice in Palestine who call for the genocide of the Jews and cheer the terrorists of Hamas. What has received less attention—but should in fact rank as the universities’ worst offense—is the Jew hatred promoted by official departments and institutes of the universities themselves. In the case of our campuses, Jew hatred is “the call coming from inside the house.”
The Freedom Center is exposing these academic institutes and programs as “The Top Ten Jew-Hating Academic Departments” in a new report. We will be publishing one school per day as a series on Frontpage. The Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University is #3 on our list.
In the days following Hamas’s barbaric October 7th massacre of Israeli civilians, university campuses across the nation became a focal point for—and a symbol of—the Jew hatred that infects our culture. One of the foremost examples on that list is Columbia University, where just one day after the attacks, twenty campus organizations signed a statement excusing Hamas’s butchery as justified “resistance” and claiming that “The weight of responsibility for the war and casualties undeniably lies with the Israeli extremist government and other Western governments.” Students marched through campus chanting for “Intifada” and the annihilation of the Jewish state and the genocide of the Jewish people. An Israeli student was physically beaten with a wooden stick in front of the famous Butler Library on Columbia’s campus after he objected to an individual tearing down posters of the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas.
On October 27, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik released a statement claiming to be “shocked to hear of several antisemitic incidents in just the last couple of days” and stating that “antisemitism, like any form of bigotry, is an assault on everything we stand for at Columbia.” President Shafik’s words might carry more weight if Columbia’s own Center for Palestine Studies hadn’t been promoting Jew-hatred and spreading vile Hamas propaganda for over a decade.
Columbia officially opened the Center for Palestine Studies in 2010, the first American university to dedicate an institute to the study of Palestinian Arabs. Specifying that its mission is “supporting and defending the academic freedom of students, faculty and schools in the Occupied Territories,” the Center makes no pretense of intellectual objectivity and makes clear through its events and the faculty it hires that it supports the BDS movement which was designed to further the goals of terrorist groups like Hamas and to delegitimize, weaken and destroy the Jewish State.
The faculty in charge of the Center reads like a who’s-who list of academic Jew-haters. The original co-directors of the Center were Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi and Barnard College professor Nadia Abu El-Haj. Khalidi is known for his extreme hostility to Israel which he has called “racist” and “basically an apartheid system in creation.” El Haj has condemned academic researchers in Israel, claiming that the work of archaeology in Palestine/Israel is a screen for the “ongoing practice of colonial nationhood” and that the assumption that ancient Israelite kingdoms were once located in the land that constitutes modern-day Israel is a “pure political fabrication.” Brian Boyd, the current co-director of the Center with El-Haj, is a leader in the genocidal BDS movement against Israel and has pushed for the American Archeological Association to boycott Israeli universities. While not officially affiliated with the Center, notorious Columbia history professor Joseph Massad also belongs on this list for publishing an article calling the October 7th attacks “awesome” and “the stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance” against “cruel colonizers.”
The official Center website states that it was created to honor “the specific scholarly legacy of Professor Edward Said at the university where he taught for forty years.” The late Edward Said was a Columbia professor who preached in his academic writing and his extracurricular activities that Israel was both illegitimate and also a colonialist state. He was a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Palestinian National Council until 1991 when he resigned because he thought Yasser Arafat’s policies were too moderate towards Israel.
Describing the Center for Palestine Studies as “Ramallah on the Hudson,” author A.J. Caschetta explains that “Columbia has assembled the anti-Israel all-stars of academia, such as Joseph Massad, who has called for ‘the continuing resistance of Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories to all the civil and military institutions that uphold Jewish supremacy.’ Another member of CPS is Hamid Dabashi, who wrote that Israel is a ‘key actor’ in ‘every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world.’”
Events hosted by the Center have included a speech from BDS movement co-founder Omar Barghouti, who has compared Israel to Nazi Germany, on “Palestine’s South Africa Moment?” and a Teacher’s Workshop on “Citizenship and Nationality in Israel/Palestine” which included the false Hamas series of maps—a form of cartographic genocide which depicts the invasion and colonization of Arab “Palestine” by the Jews—on its event poster.
In recent years, the Center for Palestine Studies has hosted innumerable events featuring anti-Semitic speakers and rhetoric. In November 2018, “The Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University cohosted a three-day “Second International Meeting for Science in Palestine” with the Hamas-funded student hate group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and several other pro-BDS groups. During one panel, Columbia Professor Michael Harris argued that, “Including Israel as a full partner in the European Research Network effectively meant the importation of Israel systemic racism into the European research state.” The academic boycott against Israel is a part of the Hamas-funded BDS movement. Another speaker, Khury Petersen-Smith frequently alluded to “Israeli apartheid” and echoed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories by claiming “the playbooks that the right wing [globally] is using to go after progressive academics was developed by Zionists.”
In February 2019, The Center for Palestine Studies (CPS) at Columbia held an event titled “Unsettling Spaces: Technologies of Violence in Palestinian Jerusalem,” during which speaker Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian echoed age-old anti-Semitic blood libels against the Jewish people claiming that “Israel does weapons tests on Palestinian children,” and “They’re making money out of this. Making money over children’s bodies and children’s lives.”
In April of 2023, the Center for Palestine Studies (CPS) at Columbia co-hosted an event titled “Race and Catastrophe: Lessons from Palestine.” During the program, speaker Sherene Seikaly, an Associate Professor of History from UC-Santa Barbara, demonized Israel and promoted the genocidal Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel, praising the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) for passing a resolution in support of BDS and calling it “revolutionary.”
The previous month, in March of 2023, CPS held another event promoting Jew hatred titled, “We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I.” Featured speaker Raja Shehadeh, and Professor Rashid Khalidi, one of the original directors of CPS, both spewed anti-Semitic propaganda. Shehadeh repeatedly referred to the founding of Israel as the “Nakba,” an Arabic term meaning “catastrophe” that is used to delegitimize Israel’s status as a nation. He also promoted the “right of return” for Palestinians which would mean the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. Khalidi commented on Shehadeh’s book, demonizing Israel and asserting that it exists on “stolen” land, noting “there are aspects of Israeli planning and its diabolical forward-looking plan to absorb and completely strangle and destroy Palestine in the interest of turning it into the greater land of Israel… this constriction of the Palestinians into enclaves or better described as you did as ghettos is an ongoing process. It’s not done. It continues all the time… Israeli settlements building more settler units, expanding into more stolen land and so on and so forth.”
The events listed above are only a tiny fraction of the anti-Semitic conferences and speakers sponsored by CPS over the years.
For its blatant Jew-hatred, promotion of terrorist violence against
Israel, and elevation of Hamas propaganda to the realm of scholarly
discourse, Columbia’s Center for Palestine Studies clearly belongs among
the top Jew-hating academic departments in America.
Previous articles in series:
[1] ‘Jew-Hating’ Asian American Studies Program Exposed at Northwestern University.
[2] UIUC’s Department of Latino Studies Endorses ‘Jew Hatred’.
[3] U. Maryland Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies: A Case Study in ‘Jew Hatred’.
[4] University of Colorado-Boulder Ethnic Studies Department: Shilling for Hamas.
[5] UNC Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies: Celebrating October 7th.
[6] U. Minnesota Dept. of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies: A Vile Font of Jew Hatred.
[7] University of Pennsylvania Middle East Center: Platforming Jew Haters.
Sara Dogan is the National Campus Director for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
She has written extensively on issues including academic freedom and
anti-Semitism on campus.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/columbia-university-center-for-palestine-studies-cheerleaders-for-hamas/
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