Columbia Embraces Another Anti-Israel Professor

http://www.americanthinker.com/comments.php?comments_id=91

Columbia University is adding yet another anti-Israel extremist to its illustrious faculty. Mary Robinson, former United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, has been hired to teach in Columbia‘s Department of International and Public Affairs and to serve as a senior research scholar at Columbia Law School‘s Human Rights Institute.

Don’t be fooled by her noble-sounding former title, she has sanctioned “all available means” - which implicitly includes suicide bombings and other terrorism - to fight Israel. She has blamed the victims of terror in Israel, rather than the terrorists as responsible for terrorism. She has cited treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay as an example of human rights violations, and she actively defends the anti-Semitic hate fest in 2001 in Durban, South Africa.

Daniel Pipes, the renowned authority on Islamism, says that Columbia, the University of Chicago and Georgetown have become the three centers for Middle East studies which are now hotbeds of anti-Israel hysteria in academia. Particularly in the case of Columbia, one might think this would be a bad strategy for the school given the high proportion of Jewish alumni (a third or more), who are also disproportionately large contributors at the university.

However, Columbia knows that some Jews will continue to give money to their prestigious alma mater, in large part to insure their kids or relatives’ future acceptance. Such is the corrupting influence of a hunger for prestige.

But a second and equally troubling issue is that Jews , in many cases, are pleased with the growing anti-Israel sentiment, whether on campus or in other venues. In fact, in some cases, Jews are promoters of it. In Newton, Massachusetts, Jewish residents are a primary force behind the decision by the town’s cable TV system to begin broadcasting a collection of Arab TV networks, all characterized in their own countries by their anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and, and anti –American propaganda, including such gems as Hizbollah TV (Al Manar), Al Jezeera, and other “fair and balanced” purveyors of the news of the Middle East.

Perhaps the residents of Newton can listen in and learn from the Friday afternoon sermons from the mosques in Gaza, calling for death to the “pigs and monkeys” . Defenders of the broadcasts claim that Americans need to see what the rest of the world is seeing, and presumably to understand why they hate us. Watch these programs, and it will be obvious that they hate us because they are taught to hate us.

The Jewish Chomskyites - those who want Israel gone, are increasingly winning the establishment media war. They appeal to the softer Jewish left’s guilt about Israeli settlements and the occupation. Then there are the Tony Judts - the academic Jews who have gotten tired of defending Israel or talking about it, so let it be gone. And then there are the influential, successful professional Jews who care more about preserving their offspring’s place in the establishment than picking a fight with their alma mater over Israel, and getting a black mark for doing so.

If Israel is gone in 20 or 50 years, in large part because support from its only ally waned, we will have plenty of fingers to point, but all too late to accomplish anything.

See more on this Topic