The Naked Truth
How the warnings about our Colleges & Universities were ignored
Columbia University in New York has been in the spotlight. Over 100 students were engaged in an anti-Israel protest, chanting slogans like “death to [the] Zionist state” and “intifada, intifada” among other such statements. Several students have been suspended, including a student named Isra Hirsi, daughter of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.
The Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel (IBSI) has and always will stand against Jew hatred, whether it comes from Christians, Muslims, Blacks, Whites, academia, or anywhere else. In doing so, however, our fighting would be in vain if we simply shut our eyes and ears and parroted the talking points we hear around us.
The truth is, what is happening at Columbia University, much like what is happening on other campuses like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, UC Berkeley, and MIT is what is called a trainwreck in slow motion. The anti-Israel, anti-Jewish rhetoric has been preached in the lecture halls by professors for decades. This may be a surprise to some who read this, but it was not a surprise to many leaders in this space.
In 2004, IBSI coalition partner Dr. Charles Jacobs, and his team produced a documentary about Columbia University professors’ aggressive anti-Israel indoctrination. The film is linked here and entitled Columbia Unbecoming. Once completed, it was presented to a large group of pro-Israel organization leaders from all over the country. Charles expressed his frustration as each of them refused to share the documentary.
With this film we tried to warn everyone what was coming. It was a smallish problem then. If you nip cancer in the bud, you might cure it, but if let to metastasize you have what we now face on American campuses - a tsunami of Jew-hate, well organized and well funded that is fast becoming to dominate campus culture.
Back then the problem was the radical professors who intimidated and harassed Jewish students. Now it’s the entire left-wing student groups on campus plus the Arab and Muslim students plus all money that Arab and Muslim regimes donate to American universities that do not have to be publicly disclosed.
Charles continued:
We showed this film to Jewish leaders across the country and they fled. They wanted no conflict. They were fat and happy, and also on the left. I mean we met with the top Jewish leaders and they dismissed us. Now some of them wish they had paid attention and developed a strategy to fight back.
To this day, even when the Jewish community is under siege, the Jewish Establishment has no new strategy and is making the same mistakes as always. So we wrote a book: Betrayal: the Failure of American Jewish Leadership to tell the truth to the American Jewish community, not to trust your “leaders.”
One person, Liel Leibovitz, did the right thing. He was a young lefty student at Columbia and he believed the Arab professors when they told him they were only doing scholarship and being moderate. and he was against the film. Now he grew up and, like a real mensch, wrote in Tablet magazine that he was wrong then and we were right. If only more people learned to allow that they can be wrong.
Nobody should be mistaken….this is also against America, and Christianity, and traditional values. The Jews are in the front line fighting for Western Civilization .. Here and in Israel.
Unfortunately, what is happening at Columbia University will not change anything, no matter how much we think and hope it does. Nothing will change because we are not going after the real threat on college campuses, which is the propaganda that has been allowed to flood our schools for decades.
Nothing will change as long as we have leaders who are afraid to call out evil regardless of who commits it, and regardless of who may get angry. Nothing will change as long as we have organizations staying silent when Qatar pumps money into schools but get very loud when it’s time to go after a Congresswoman’s daughter or a particular professor at a particular time. That is not justice; that is what we call a dog-and-pony show. It is an attempt to win donors over, obtain more funding, and keep the cycle going. In some cases, it also does nothing for Black and Jewish relations; sometimes it makes things worse. IBSI Founder & CEO Dumisani Washington explained this in December 2022 in his piece The Hypocrites Who 'Fight' Antisemitism.
If that sounds harsh, think of how Jewish and pro-Israel students have been suffering on campus, particularly these past 20 years. Being beat up for wearing a kippah is harsh. Being spat on for observing Passover is harsh. Having your mezuzah ripped off your doorpost and being told a bigger oven will be needed for you and your Jewish friends is harsh. Being told by your professor you have no voice in the Middle East conflict, and that you are not really a Jew because your eye color or hair texture is harsh. Looking out of your window and seeing large groups of students chanting Death to Israel is harsh. How we’ve been using these students as pawns in our supposed fight against Jew hatred is perhaps the harshest.
As Israel advocates, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and put our hands in the mud like never before. Let’s get to work, not to elevate our brand but with the ultimate goal of putting ourselves out of business.
As someone who has been following you for many years, I can attest that this sadly is all too true. The writing was on the wall, and those who were shouting out the warnings were dismissed (or worse - ridiculed) by left leaning community leadership everywhere. Thank you for staunchly standing your ground and keeping with the truth, and continuing to stand fir Israel.
Great piece. I think that some of the smaller universities, especially Canadian ones, have an advantage due to their anonymity, they tend to avoid the media cycle unless it's something huge. So they can suck up to radical students and get rid of anyone who stands up to them. Until I said I stood with Israel I had never met our VP, she had never expressed any interest in anything but photo-ops and posting milquetoast Disney type commentary on every national and international event. I think the really problem is the death of critical thinking, oppressor vs. oppressed, death bad, no bombing good, that's really as far as students go. And then you get reflexive fearful obesience to anyone who isn't a white male and had some identity credits, thus in my case all it took was a nasty, radical prof to walk up the human rights office and say this prof hurt my feelings when he called Hamas Nazis and the administration stages a little competition as if they were running a faux empathy Olympics. and I am done, off work, banned, with terminiation announced three weeks before they even showed me a complaint. It's absurd. It's frightening. https://www.freedomtoffend.com/p/i-am-being-thrown-in-the-slowly-grinding?lli=1