Nightmare at Columbia

Columbia University President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik skipped the December 5 House Education Committee Hearing on anti-Semitism at their institutions that disgraced the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT. President Shafik was invited to the hearing, but she was otherwise engaged. She was speaking at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai. Some might say that she sensed stormy weather.

Yesterday the committee reconvened to hear from President Shafik and Columbia’s leadership team. They were better prepared than their colleagues who appeared at the December 5 hearing. Listening to their testimony, one could not help but understand what an ant-Semitic cesspool Columbia University has become. The New York Post story on the hearing is here.

If you know any Jewish students or teachers at Columbia, you have undoubtedly heard about the sickening climate of hate on campus. It is shocking. It may be as bad at Columbia as any comparable institution in the United States.

Committee Chairman Virginia Foxx and committee member Rep. Elise Stefanik warmed up for the hearing with a press conference featuring Jewish Columbia students. I have posted the video below.

President Shafik appeared before the committee with the co-chairs of the school’s board of trustees, Claire Shipman and David Greenwald, and David Schizer, a law professor and former dean of Columbia’s law school. Schizer and Greenwald are Jewish. They did not labor to put a pretty face on the campus scene.

I watched the hearing live online at C-SPAN yesterday morning. I have posted full video of the hearing below. The hearing had highlights, lowlights, and moments of comedy, but most of all it captured the inescapable reality of this moment in the United States. Every remedial development at Columbia took place in anticipation of yesterday’s hearing, and yet the cesspool remains.

Committee Democrats took a variety of approaches to the witnesses. Some were decent, some disgraceful (“but Trump,” what about “Islamophobia”?), and then there was our own Ilhan Omar.

Readers may recall our role in exposing Omar’s marriage to her brother for fraudulent purposes. Yesterday she sought fraudulently to help Columbia minimize its anti-Semitism — while a pro-Hamas/anti-Israel “protest” was in progress on campus. One has to wonder if the Columbia leadership really appreciated Omar’s “help.” Omar herself is into flaunting her anti-Semitism. At this time one somehow doubts that the leaders of Columbia crave the Ilhan Omar seal of approval.