Columbia must do more to root out hate on campus — starting in the faculty lounge

New York Post

3 days ago

Columbia University's long-overdue crackdown on the dozens of students who violently took over Butler Library, and the agreement it reached Tuesday with the White House, mark significant if belated steps toward accountability.
For nearly two years, these students have occupied campus buildings, spread terrorist propaganda, praised convicted terrorists, posted Nazi-style antisemitic flyers, smashed doors, disrupted classes, harassed Jewish students and openly endorsed 'liberation by any means necessary' — including the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre.
Backed by Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of over 90 pro-terror student groups, they have platformed speakers linked to US-designated terrorists, called for the death and expulsion of Jews and Israelis, and urged Hamas to target Jewish Americans.
Now they are finally facing consequences.
Yet after months of calling for accountability, I take no pleasure in their expulsions and long-term suspensions.
Let's be clear: the students who stormed Butler Library got exactly what they deserved.
Any functioning society must mete out penalties for those who break the law, and college campuses, which play a central role in shaping young Americans, must uphold that principle.
Still, as I watch the surge of anti-Jewish, anti-Israel and anti-American hate rise on campus, I can't help but ask: What if the administration had acted sooner?
Could earlier intervention — as I have been calling for since Oct. 12, 2023 — have prevented this descent into terror-glorifying chaos?
Could these students — many of whom came to campus with limited knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — have avoided radicalization if the university had acted earlier?
Would it have been spared its current reputation as a hub of antisemitic and anti-American extremism?
It shouldn't have taken lawsuits, federal scrutiny and campus-wide chaos for Columbia's leadership to finally do the right thing.
But now that the administration finally seems ready to take antisemitism and support for terrorism seriously, the effort mustn't stop with students.
If these disciplinary actions are more than just a PR stunt — unlike the quiet reversal of suspensions after the violent Hamilton Hall takeover and the administration's habit of speaking out of both sides of its mouth — then the university must confront the source of the ideology that fueled this movement.
Because the truth is these students didn't invent this hatred; they learned it on campus.
They were radicalized by Columbia professors who called Oct. 7 a 'military action,' who expressed 'jubilation and awe' at the rape, murder and torture of Israeli civilians and who cheered on their violent takeover of university buildings.
Many of them tenured and untouchable, they've long escaped consequences.
But if Columbia is genuinely committed to solving this crisis, it must begin by holding faculty members accountable for their role in fueling campus unrest — and addressing the ideology behind their students' actions.
Columbia, like many North American universities, has become a breeding ground for what I call 'American Intellectual Antisemitism,' a belief system that casts Jews as white settler-colonialists conspiring to ethnically cleanse Palestinians in an effort to create a Jewish supremacist ethnostate.
Unlike the loud, swastika-waving hatred of the far right — with its grotesque and conspiratorial caricatures of Jews as society's omnipotent parasites — academia's insidious form of antisemitism cloaks itself in scholarly jargon and moral pretense.
Dressed up in flimsy scholarship and ideological distortions, it rewrites history, ignores archaeological and scholarly records and reframes violence as justice.
By manipulating words like 'oppression' and 'decolonialization,' it recasts ancient bigotry into fashionable academic critique — but make no mistake, it is antisemitism all the same.
Unless Columbia directly confronts the professors who indoctrinate students into this worldview, its crisis will only deepen.
While students like Mahmoud Khalil (who still refuses to condemn Hamas for slaughtering civilians) and Mohsen Madawai (who once led a Fatah student group and praised his cousins in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad) are the public face of this movement, its true architects are the professors.
The responsibility — and the blame — rests with them.
The surge of illegal pro-Hamas encampments on American campuses last year revealed that, left unchecked, campus unrest can quickly escalate into a national crisis.
The question now is not only what actions Columbia will take to pull this bigotry out by its roots, but whether other universities will learn from its grievous mistakes.
At a time when antisemitism and support for terrorism are reaching record highs, one thing remains crystal clear: What begins in the faculty lounge doesn't always stop at the campus gates.
It's time to confront the academic machinery that fuels this hatred and dismantle it at the source.
Shai Davidai is an activist, podcaster and former professor at Columbia University who is currently writing a book on American Intellectual Antisemitism.