Here is the third chapter in my columns on the enemies of America:
The tipping point for the mainstream media occurred when The New York Times betrayed national security secrets with no journalistic justification. The New York Times and other members of the mainstream media have long demonstrated their pernicious anti-American bias, but this merely made it clear beyond contradiction.
Then the Democratic Party’s leaders refused to denounce the traitorous “General Betray Us” ad because they were unwilling to offend MoveOn.org, the George Soros-backed anti-American institution. I concluded this was the tipping point for the Democratic Party, with its leadership firmly in the hands of the MoveOn.org crowd and the rest of the far left of American politics. After I reached that conclusion, it was reaffirmed by the U.S. Senate vote on condemning the ad. Twenty-five members of the Senate refused to vote to condemn the ad (including Sens. Clinton, who voted no, and Obama, who dodged the vote), thus making it even more obvious that the Democratic Party now belongs lock, stock and barrel to the far left.
Now comes the third great tipping point: Columbia University honors Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by inviting him to speak. How can a university in New York City, the target of 9/11, invite this terrorist who now orchestrates the murder of American soldiers everyday, who is in charge of a worldwide terror network that has America and the rest of the free world in its crosshairs, this man who routinely proposes and threatens genocide, vows to exterminate Israel and while planning a second holocaust denies the first one, the man now actively developing nuclear weapons, which he admits will be used to commit genocide, to blackmail the world and to do cataclysmic mischief, the man who heads a government now imprisoning journalists and scholars, including one of Columbia’s own alumni, Dr. Kian Tajbadkshs? What’s worse, Columbia University does this in time of war.
Note the irony: Columbia bans R.O.T.C., which trains young men to protect us from international terrorism, but invited a man who spends his time and resources figuring out how to kill Americans. This is made even all the more incredible by the recent action of the University of California Board of Regents - it rescinded an invitation to former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers, one of the most distinguished scholars in America. He was to speak at a private dinner but was cancelled when 300 faculty members protested his comments that there may be a difference in aptitude between men and women for science. That tells you something about the state of American universities - they cancel a most distinguished scholar but honor and welcome a murderer and a madman.
The explanation is that there are many on the faculty and administration of Columbia University who are kindred spirits of Ahmadinejad, who think like him, talk like him, and share his deep-seated hatred of America and American values.
So no one should be surprised that Columbia University honors America’s enemy No. 1 in time of war. In fact, if this were still the season of graduation, Columbia would have probably given this certified murderer of American soldiers and civilians an honorary degree.
The explanation for this treasonous conduct can be found in David Horowitz’s classic book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. Let me introduce you to some of those Columbia professors and you will soon understand why Columbia University and many other elite institutions are among America’s most dangerous enemies.
Prof. Nicholas De Genova of Columbia University is one of the star America-haters in Horowitz’s book. He told 3,000 students at Columbia, “The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military.” This same professor called for “a million Mogadishus,” the disaster in Somalia that took 18 American lives. De Genova also said, “U.S. patriotism is inseparable from imperial warfare and white supremacy. U.S. flags are the emblem of the invading war machine in Iraq today. They are the emblem of the occupying power.”
Prof. Joseph Massad condemns Israel as a racist state and calls for its destruction. He has said, “Every racist state should be destroyed. ... The Jewish state does not have the right to exist.”
He favors terrorists killing civilians and makes no distinction between civilians and soldiers.
His so-called scholarly books are filled with egregious errors, and his teaching is not designed to provide a balanced view, as he himself admits in teaching materials on a course called “Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Society.” The course notes state, “This purpose of this course is not to provide ‘balanced’ coverage of the views of both sides but rather to provide a thorough yet critical overview of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict.” His view of Zionism is that it is inherently “anti-Semitic.” As with so many of these teachers, they do not advocate their views only out of the classroom but are also in the business of indoctrinating their students.
A Columbia University-mandated investigation in 2005 found that Massad screamed at pro-Israeli students. He claimed he could not remember the incident, but the investigation found otherwise. He said his Jewish critics had targeted him for being “pro-Jewish.” The university, of course, took no action against him (just as they took no action against the students who attacked the Minutemen who were giving a presentation at Columbia).
Prof. Lisa Anderson believes that the 9/11 attack by Muslim terrorists is a response to “the fact of American political power in the world, and the fact of inequitable distribution of power within the United States.” She views the U.S. as an unprovoked aggressor in the war against terror and against the terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq. She is the dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, which tells you something about the general view of that school and the university in general.
She was instrumental in bringing Massad to Columbia, who, as indicated above, calls for the destruction of Israel. He paints Palestinian suicide bombers as noble “anti-colonial resistors” and says there is a similarity between Palestinian terrorists in jail for murder and World War II-era Jews in Nazi concentration camps.
Prof. Eric Foner’s work has been described in a lengthy review by liberal intellectual historian John Diggins as follows: “Foner is both an unabashed apologist for the Soviet system and an unforgiving historian of America.”
Foner says anti-American hostility is warranted by America’s historical record: “A study of our history in its international context might help to explain why there is widespread fear outside our borders that the war on terrorism is motivated in part by the desire to impose a Pax Americana in a grossly unequal world.”
Foner takes his definition of patriotism from Paul Robeson, recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize, who proclaimed that “American Negroes” would not fight to defend America in a war against the Soviet Union.
Prof. Manning Marable, according to Horowitz, is “a lifelong Marxist and member of the Communist Party faction called ‘The Committees on Correspondence’” of which Angela Davis was also a member.
Typical of his work was a project to get rid of “repressive” laws, which are those barring felons from casting a vote. He blames the inequities of American society on the white middle class.
Prof. Hamid Dabashi claims that Israeli Jews “have a congenital predisposition toward brutality. There is an endemic prevarication in this machinery, a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture.” Dabashi condemns all Israelis (men, women and children) as cold-blooded and physically repulsive oppressors: "[A] half century of systematic maiming and murdering of another people has left its deep marks on the faces of these people, the way they talk, the way they walk, the way they handle objects, the way the greet each other, the way they look at the world.”
This is crude, obvious and overt racism, but the racism and anti-Semitism is apparently O.K. at Columbia, as the administration there never has a response to it. Horowitz writes, “This is a striking double standard for a university administration that otherwise is ready to act quickly and harshly against any violations of ‘sensitivity toward others.’”
Horowitz concludes his book by noting that the 100 professors portrayed in the book are all too representative of what goes on at Columbia and other universities: “Consequently, far from being eccentric or peripheral figures the professors in this volume are integral to the intellectual life of the institutions they inhabit and to the course of higher education in America.”
He concludes, “Thus the problems revealed in this text - the explicit introduction of political agendas into the classroom, the lack of professionalism in conduct, and the decline in professional standards - appear to be increasingly widespread throughout the academic profession and at virtually every type of institution of higher learning.”
What can you do about it? First, graduates and everyone else should stop making donations to institutions like Columbia University. Second, everyone should put pressure on elected officials to stop giving tax money to support to such institutions, especially the so-called state schools. Third, support and contribute to those fighting this trend, including Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture and his online newsmagazine FrontPageMag.com. Fourth, you may want to educate yourself further on these issues. Horowitz’s two books on the subject are a good place to start: The Professors and Indoctrination U. Finally support Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week, sponsored by HorowtizFreedomCenter.org. It will take place at colleges and universities beginning on Oct. 22 across the country, including at Penn State and Temple, where former Sen. Rick Santorum will be a speaker. It is a protest against censorship of those who want to publicize the dangers of Islamo-Fascism. See the box accompanying this story.
Perhaps the most important thing you can do is to stop relying on the mainstream media for your news. Outlets such as The New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, NPR and CNN are so biased in their reporting that they give a false picture of the world and virtually ignore vital issues such as what’s going on at our colleges and universities. You have to read outside the mainstream media or you won’t have a clue and will tend to draw the wrong conclusions about almost every major public policy question.
Herb Denenberg, a former Pennsylvania insurance commissioner and professor at the Wharton School, is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the National?Academy of Arts and Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.
