Having assumed his role as Columbia University’s 13th president, Dwight Eisenhower defined in typical military succinctness the mission of the venerable school that produced (by today) more than 100 Nobel Laureates:
“The principle purpose of education,” he said, “is to prepare the student for effective personal and social life in a free society.” This writer can attest that this is exactly what Columbia did, even long after Eisenhower’s stint.
Blessed with a sterling gallery of professors – such as broadcast legend Fred Friendly, former New York Times correspondent Donald Johnston, author Barbara Belford, former UPI East Europe correspondent Donald Shanor, and New Yorker magazine’s Nick Lehman – we learned how to investigate news, how to build a magazine feature, how to craft a documentary film, and how to recount events, formulate ideas, and express thoughts.
They all had different backgrounds and specialties, but there was a common denominator: the pursuit of truth. And that was true not only for the journalism school, which taught us that our task is to write history’s first draft, but for the entire university, where the search for truth, the toleration that it entails, and the freedom that it demands were articles of faith.
That is why it was natural in those days to see students of all faiths going to pray in the same building, Earl Hall. Such was the pluralism of the institution that, perhaps more than any other, both embodied and fueled New York’s time-honored liberalism. It was in that spirit of tolerance that Eisenhower ignored McCarthy-era voices that demanded he reject a request from Communist Poland’s government to establish a Polish Studies chair.
Yes, Columbia’s location at the heart of the American nation’s metropolitan nexus invited political mayhem even in its infancy. In 1775, an angry mob stormed president Myles Cooper because he opposed the American Revolution which had just erupted. Cooper, an Anglican priest, fled to England and never returned.
Not to mention what happened at Columbia in 1968, when antiwar protesters disrupted studies and eventually forced president Grayson Kirk to resign.
It follows, one would think, that the mayhem of recent days at Columbia is but a link in a chain, yet another chapter in a 270-year-old institution’s elaborate history of student activism, social involvement, public leadership, and political debate.
If only it were.
Violence in Butler Library and Hamilton Hall is a hijacking
THE VIOLENCE between Butler Library and Hamilton Hall was not a protestation of an opinion, a law, or a policy. It was a hijacking. Inspired by the violence of the jihadists they admire, Columbia’s demonstrators hijacked a university and, while at it, served their heroes’ broader aim, which is not to better the Western civilization that Columbia University helped build but to defeat it.
The first thing the mob on Columbia’s lawns made plain was that it does not espouse the ideas for which it claims to fight.
“Free Palestine,” the slogan they chanted, insinuates that the free world is depriving the Palestinians of their freedom. In fact, the free world – including a succession of Israeli governments – has repeatedly offered the two-state solution, meaning a free Palestinian democracy. It didn’t happen because the Palestinians’ leaders repeatedly rejected the offer: in 1937, in 1948, in 1967, in 1993, in 2000, and in 2007.
Palestinian leaders not only forfeited freedom, they actively fought it. In the West Bank, they held no general election for 19 years. In Gaza, the same Hamas that Columbia’s protesters hail first murdered the elected Palestinian government’s officials and then banned freedom of association and speech, killed gays, and systematically violated women’s rights.
Since this dictatorial record is well-known, the question arises: Why would despotism’s supporters invade a major democratic bastion, “vandalizing property, breaking doors and windows, and blockading entrances,” as a message I just received from Columbia’s Alumni Relations Office reports?
Clearly, freedom is not this riot’s engine. Oppression is. That’s why protest leaders like Mahmoud Khalil, a Lebanese graduate student who is America’s guest, or Khaymani James, the college senior who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” are always there when it comes to what happens between Palestinians and Israelis – but are never there when it comes to Turkey’s occupation of Cyprus, Russia’s molestation of Ukraine, Syria’s gassing of its people, or Iran’s emasculation of women, students and dissidents.
No, the rioting at Columbia was not about the freedom, democracy, equality, justice, or peace that the Middle East craves. It was about their eradication.
THE RIOTING on American campuses was fueled by Muslim groups, both within and outside campus; cheered, and possibly encouraged, by Russia and China; and joined by the kind of impressionable ignoramuses that America’s high schools mass produce.
Yes, an American student leader who says “Zionists don’t deserve to live” is an antisemite in terms of his emotions, but in terms of his knowledge he is also ignorant, clueless as a bird that across his country there are thousands of synagogues hoisting the Zionist flag in their sanctuaries; that almost every one of 7 million American Jews is a Zionist as are tens of millions of non-Jews including the American president and all his predecessors down to Harry Truman, even Jimmy Carter.
Clearly, there has been some serious subversive activity on America’s campuses in recent years, and the FBI will now have to find its engineers, expose their methods, and break their tools.
Why? Because what the Columbia riots’ masterminds are really after is not Israel. They are after America, the West, and the free world.
The Jews of the 2020s, like the Jews of the 1930s, are but the warm-up act. And Israel is the best place to start, because libeling the Jewish state today, like libeling the Jewish people yesterday, excites everyone, says everything, and costs nothing.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.