We know that it’s happening with growing intensity at college campuses across the country. But it’s especially frightening when it happens so close to home: A Lincoln University tenured professor, Kaukab Siddique, spouting anti-Jewish and anti-Israel venom, calling for the destruction of Israel and promoting Holocaust denial.
The professor, who captured national attention with the release of an incendiary video of a Labor Day rally in Washington, appears to have kept his views out of the classroom but not necessarily off the campus altogether.
Jewish organizations are proceeding cautiously, clearly upset and outraged over the professor’s comments, but anxious not to act rashly. No one wants to make this a black-Jewish issue.
The professor himself is Pakistani, not African-American. But the school in Chester County is historically a black college. As State Sen. Anthony Williams suggested on the eve of a meeting to press the university’s president, Lincoln needs to adhere to its legacy as a place of refuge from prejudice and discrimination, not a place where such views are tolerated.
The institution is trying to distance itself, contending, as its spokeswoman did, that the issue “has nothing to do with the university” because the professor was espousing his personal views outside the campus. But that’s not enough. Whether the university should or even can fire a tenured professor is up for debate. What’s not debatable is that such remarks are repugnant, and need to be repudiated loudly and clearly by all who understand that venomous hate has no place in our society.