The Palestinian Center at Columbia

, Malcolm A. Kline, 1 Comment

If Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies gets any more anti-Israel than it already is, it will have to register as a foreign agent.

“In 2015 and 2016, of the 44 Israel-related events sponsored by the Center for Palestine Studies, 41 included anti-Israel, pro-BDS speakers,” Leila Beckwith and Tammi Rossman-Benjamin write in an op-ed which appeared in The New York Daily News. “During the same two-year period, Israel-related events sponsored by Columbia University’s other two Middle East studies departments — the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies department and the Middle East Institute — also overwhelmingly included anti-Israel, pro-BDS speakers.”

“Columbia’s three Middle East studies departments hosted 46 events with pro-BDS speakers in 2015 and 2016, more than double any other U.S. school.” Benjamin and Beckwith are co-founders of the AMCHA Initiative, “which combats anti-Semitism in higher education.”

“Not coincidentally, academic boycotters constitute two-thirds of the Center for Palestine Studies’ core faculty, and both of its directors have endorsed an academic boycott of Israel. About half of the tenure-track faculty in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies are academic boycotters. And the Middle East Institute’s director and the majority of its executive committee have endorsed an academic boycott of Israel.”

The founder and current director of CPS at Columbia is Rashid Khalidi, who is a friend of former president Barack Obama but not of Israel.