Columbia Now Faces an Expensive Day of Reckoning A cost to the Jew-haters and brownshirts. by Hugh Fitzgerald
https://www.frontpagemag.com/columbia-now-faces-an-expensive-day-of-reckoning/
On many American campuses, antisemitic nitwits have ever since the beginning of the war in Gaza storm-trooped around, calling for the disappearance of Israel and its replacement by a 23rd Arab state (“From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free”), expressing a wish for homicidal violence against Jews (“Intifada Forever”), and accusing the Jewish state of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” (“Stop the Genocide”). The worst of these offenders have been the pro-Hamas demonstrators at Columbia University, who have created that awful mess — physical and moral — on Morningside Heights, whom Columbia’s administrators have until now been treated with kid gloves, creating an environment where anti-Israel and antisemitic behavior goes largely unpunished.
Now the Trump administration wants Columbia’s tolerance for antisemitism to be investigated. Columbia, after all, receives $5 billion from federal contracts and grants, and that money which be at risk if Columbia is weighed and found wanting in its failure to protect Jewish students and faculty from the antisemitic bullyboys and brownshirts who threaten them, harass them, surround and hold some of them prisoner, while attacking others, and interrupt, in order to shut down, the classes taught by Israeli and Jewish professors. More on the Trump administration’s investigation — by three different federal agencies — of Columbia, and the possible action by the government to be taken against the university, can be found here: “Columbia’s Choice: Hamasnik Anarchy or Taxpayer Cash,” by Seth Mandel, Commentary, March 4, 2025:
The biggest myth regarding the campus anti-Semitism crisis is that it’s about speech. It is a self-serving myth: Institutions and activists that want to disregard their abuse of Jewish students will fall back on the claim that any attempt to hold them accountable for their actions is actually an attack on free speech.
Columbia University is learning what happens when that disingenuous trick starts to backfire: Students and professors take it as a license to do whatever they want, people end up in the hospital, and the government steps in to say this cannot continue to be done on their dime.
The Biden administration was fearful of standing up to the Hamas youth groups on campus. The Trump administration is happy to do so. Thus we have the announcement that three government agencies—Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the General Services Administration—will be reviewing federal contracts and grants with Columbia totaling around $5 billion.
Crucially, the announcement clearly avoids the penalizing of mere speech:
“Americans have watched in horror for more than a year now, as Jewish students have been assaulted and harassed on elite university campuses,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. “Unlawful encampments and demonstrations have completely paralyzed day-to-day campus operations, depriving Jewish students of learning opportunities to which they are entitled. Institutions that receive federal funds have a responsibility to protect all students from discrimination. Columbia’s apparent failure to uphold their end of this basic agreement raises very serious questions about the institution’s fitness to continue doing business with the United States government.”…
One can easily understand why pro-Hamas activists would try to conceal the reality of anti-Semitism under a façade of free expression: The truth is much darker. In many cases, what they are doing is plainly illegal, as is the universities’ allowance of it. In the very best of cases, their actions are simply vile. In both situations—that is, in every case almost without exception—they are the party that is curtailing the freedoms of others. That is obvious even if the brownshirts aren’t wearing brown shirts and the white-hoods aren’t wearing pointy pillowcases on their heads….
Appeals to Columbia’s administration, and especially to its president Manouche Shafik, by Jewish students and faculty who have been harassed or attacked or had their classes disturbed, have not led to anything. The students and non-students who took over Hamilton Hall, where they proceeded to do several million dollars in damage, and held hostage four members of the janitorial staff who were trying to prevent them from vandalizing university property, have not been punished. While hundreds of students (and many non-students) have been involved since 2024 in pro-Hamas protests on the Columbia campus since October 7, 2023, less than two dozen have been suspended, and even then they have soon been reinstated, save for two Barnard girls and three graduate students who, however, are expected to ultimately be reinstated. A total of three Columbia students have been expelled. That is not much of a deterrent.
Now Columbia faces investigations about its failure to adequately assure the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students and faculty, and its failure, too, to properly punish the pro-Hamas students who engaged in vandalism of university properties and held four janitors hostage. Three separate federal agencies are involved in these investigations — Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the General Services Administration. The five billion dollars that Columbia receives each year from federal contracts and grants are now uncertain. Appeals to morality have not worked to change the invertebrate behavior of Columbia’s administrators. Now the prospect of a huge financial loss may stiffen their spines.
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