Dear , Do you want to keep track of antisemitic and anti-Israel activities at Columbia University? Subscribe to our newsletters with your personal email address and visit our website. |
|
|
Professor Hamid Dabashi Struggles to Distinguish Israel from ISIS May 26, 2020 "If a tenured member of Columbia's Department of Middle Eastern South Asian and African Studies and Center for the Palestinian Studies is unable to distinguish a liberal democracy from a terrorist cult of murderous zealots then surely President Bollinger must be concerned about the quality of academic research and instruction coming out of that department." Read more... Update: Two days after the publication of our blog post Hamid Dabashi closed his Twitter account! For our new readers, read our other blog posts regarding Dabashi. The summary is here. |
|
|
Sarah Stern on Reforming Title VI-Funded Middle East Studies Centers Sarah Stern, founder and president of the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET) [a CU-Monitor recommended organization] spoke to participants in a May 22 Middle East Forum webinar (video) about her efforts to fight anti-Israel bias at federally funded Middle East studies centers in the United States. Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965 was established to provide funding for foreign language and area studies instruction at institutions of higher learning because it was "felt that the Soviets ... had a better knowledge of foreign languages and cultures," Stern explained. Numerous Middle East studies centers at American universities have received funding under this program. In the last several decades, however, "the pure rigorous discipline of Middle Eastern Studies has been substituted by nothing more than really paltry propaganda" that hardly serves the national security goals for which the Title VI program was established. Most of the 15 or so Title VI-Funded Middle East studies centers are "incredibly both anti-Israeli ... [and] sometimes antisemitic." To make matters worse, Title VI requires recipients to provide training workshops for teachers in kindergarten through 12th grade, which Stern calls "trickle down propaganda." Determined to fight this problem, in 2008 Stern's EMET was part of a coalition that successfully pushed Congress to approve an amendment to Title VI of the HEA designed to ensure that grant recipients demonstrate a "diversity of perspectives" and "wide range of viewpoints." However, when Stern met with Department of Education (DoE) officials under the Obama administration, she was shocked to discover that the "diversity of perspectives" clause was being interpreted to mean that the DoE personnel evaluating the grant applications should be racially diverse. "They said some of the readers of the grant application should be black, some should be white, some should be Hispanic, and that was their diversity of perspectives. And I said, 'I think it's pretty obvious, if you read the law, that the legislative intent was for a diversity of perspectives within the classroom.'" During the Trump administration, DoE officials who met with Stern were more accommodating. "I explained what the law was, and they said, 'Okay, from now on, people that are applying for the grants have got to write an essay about what it is that their universities are doing to comply with the statutory requirement for a wide range of viewpoints and a diversity of perspectives'." Another statutory requirement of Title VI funding that many of these centers often shirk is "promot[ing] access to research and training overseas, including through links to overseas institutions." The directors of at least eight Title VI Middle East studies centers have endorsed the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) agenda, Stern noted, which discourages study abroad and other contacts with Israeli universities. Unfortunately, prodding the DoE to investigate Title VI Middle East studies centers and hold them accountable remains an uphill battle. Beginning last year, three Republican members of congress have written to DoE urging it to investigate Title VI violations – Reps. Denver Riggleman (about Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies), George Holding (Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies), and Paul Gosser (the University of Arizona's Center for Middle Eastern Studies). But only the Duke-UNC Consortium has been investigated so far, and in that case, according to Stern, "the Department of Education caved" and the consortium "is still getting its funding." Many of these Middle East studies centers are also in violation of federal law by not reporting millions of dollars in grants they receive from autocratic Middle East governments, especially Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The Higher Education Act requires universities to report any foreign donation of $250,000 or more. "So, in so many ways these universities are out of compliance with the law, and they need oversight, they need accountability, [and] nobody's watching them," Stern warned. |
|
|
Jewish College Students Stand Up to Antisemitism on Campus We are living amidst a global awakening of reevaluating systemic racism, and the ways in which minorities are persecuted and mistreated. During this wave of change, a group of Jewish college students from across the country at universities including Columbia, Cornell, Stanford, Yale, UChicago, and USC — who have never met in person — have launched a platform to highlight the experience of Jewish students on campus. Read more... |
|
|
Using Title VI to Combat Antisemitism on Campus |
|
|
Columbia University and Barnard College |
|
|
What Does B.D.S. Stand For? by Eva Wyner and Sophia Breslauer Columbia Political Review May 3, 2020 This past November, the Columbia College Student Council (C.C.S.C.) debated for the fourth time whether or not to attach a B.D.S. referendum to the student election ballot. The referendum, if passed, would urge Columbia University’s administration to participate in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (B.D.S.) movement that targets Israel and its economy. At the C.C.S.C. meeting where the referendum was discussed, pro-Israel students were mocked by B.D.S. advocates. We were told by a member of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (C.U.A.D.), the primary advocates for the B.D.S. referendum, that “the Jewish religion has been co-opted by white-supremacists.” Such language is used only for rhetorical effect, in a slanderous effort to connect Jewish students that advocate and defend Israel with the worst elements of American society—who are themselves antisemitic. Opponents of the referendum fear the hate-inducing rhetoric that was uttered by attendees of the C.C.S.C. meeting will now spread to the rest of campus. Let’s talk through the dangers of a B.D.S. referendum at Columbia. Read more |
|
|
Columbia University professors of Jewish Studies (Seth Schwartz, Michael Stanislawski, Mika Tal and Rebecca Kobrin) signed "A Letter on Annexation and Apartheid in Israel". As Richard Cravatts of Accuracy in Academia wrote in his piece titled "Jewish Studies Professors for Palestine", "The opening paragraph of this odious, virtue-signaling screed reveals that these so-called professors of Jewish Studies are either ignorant of history, law, and fact or are so biased against the Jewish state that they are unable to assess what is strategically and politically necessary for Israel to do to secure its rightful sovereignty." |
|
|
New York’s universities stand up against BDS and anti-Semitism by Asaf Romirowsky and Benjamin Weinthal New York Daily News May 1, 2020 Columbia, for its part, is the same university that gave a platform to the then-president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in 2007. Iran’s regime is the world’s top state sponsor of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Tehran plays a role in supporting BDS activists and campaigns across the globe. The Iranian regime-sponsored al-Quds rallies, which were called into international action in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran’s militant regime, support BDS. The annual al-Quds event calls for the abolition of the Jewish state. Still, Columbia President Lee Bollinger rightly opposes the upcoming undergraduate student BDS referendum recommending that Columbia divest from eight companies doing business with Israel that profit from work in the disputed West Bank territory. Bollinger appears to have internalized the growing danger presented by the link between anti-Semitism and the BDS campaign at his school. In a statement, he places BDS in the context of the widespread rise of Jew-hatred. “When a swastika appears on campus, it is not just an isolated event. When there is a rising anti-Semitism in this country and around the world, even a single instance of it in any context is more alarming than it might otherwise be,” wrote Bollinger. Read more |
|
|
Useful Topics for Pro-Israel Advocates on Campus |
|
|
Einat Wilf on the West's Indulgence of Palestinian Delusions The Tikvah Podcast The so-called “right of return” is one of the the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’s thorniest issues. During Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, as many as 700,000 Arabs fled or were driven from what had been mandatory Palestine. Since then, and unlike most of the world’s other refugee populations, the official number of Palestinian refugees has not declined, but exploded. The United Nations has decided that the refugee status of the Palestinians passes down from generation to generation, so that children born today are classified as refugees in the same way their grandparents were—an attitude that is contrary to its policy for all other displaced groups. And as a consequence, even when neighboring Arab countries make an effort to integrate Palestinians and their descendants, they are counted as refugees. Why did this happen? In The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace, Einat Wilf and Adi Schwartz explain that the persistence of the Palestinian refugee problem is part of the broader Palestinian war—waged not only with rockets, knives, and bullets, but also through international bodies, NGOs, and the media—against the very existence of the Jewish state. They also show how Western indulgence of this manufactured problem has harmed the effort to achieve an end to the conflict. This week, Jonathan Silver sits down with Einat Wilf, a former Knesset member, to discuss the roots of the refugee problem, the role it plays in the Palestinian war against Israel, and why peace will never be achieved until Palestinians abandon the dream of destroying the Jewish state. Listen here |
|
|
|
|
