‘If Columbia can’t protect Jewish students on their campus, they should lose federal funding and have their tax-exempt status revoked,’ Mike Lawler posts on X.

 

By Matthew Sedacca and Chris Nesi | New York Post

An anti-Israel student club at Columbia University freely distributed a new hateful newspaper on campus Friday — peddling antagonistic rhetoric calling Jews “colonists” and “subjugators.”

While the Ivy League institution denounced the publication, the hate-fueled group Students for Justice in Palestine openly handed out its inaugural edition of “The Columbia Intifada.”

The group printed 1,000 copies of the rag, which contains about a half-dozen articles with titles including “Zionist Peace Means Palestinian Blood,” “The Myth of the Two-State Solution” and a handy “Guide to Wheatpasting” — a method of vandalizing public surfaces with propaganda fliers or other messaging.

Allowing such a publication to take root on campus is “outrageous,” said New York Congressman Mike Lawler, who represents voters in Rockland, Westchester, Putnam and Dutchess counties.

Westchester/Rockland/Putnam Congressman Mike Lawler (R-NY) 

“If Columbia cannot protect Jewish students on their campus, they should lose federal funding and have their tax-exempt status revoked,” [Lawler] wrote in a post on X.

“And for those students here on a visa engaged in an “intifada” against American students of the Jewish faith? Deport them,” he raged.

Columbia itself denounced the newspaper’s publication, including its unauthorized association with the school by name.

The university suspended the group last November for repeatedly violating school policies, including with its “threatening rhetoric and intimidation.”

“Using the Columbia name for a publication that glorifies violence and makes individuals in our community feel targeted in any way is a breach of our values,” a school representative said in a statement to The Post on Friday.

“As we have said repeatedly, discrimination and promoting violence or terror is not acceptable and antithetical to what our community stands for. We are investigating this incident through our applicable offices and policies.”

The hateful group’s four-page spread includes no bylines or any information connecting the articles to their respective authors, nor is there any solicitation for outside perspectives or reactions from readers.

The only words on the front-page masthead is a quote from a poem by woke extremist scholar Sophia Armen, which reads, “You, genocider — who remembers you?”

The publication and distribution of the anti-Israel newsletter rattled some Jewish students.

“When I see stuff like that, the title, ‘Myth of the Two-State Solution,’ these people don’t want peace,” said Brooke Chasalow, 20…

…a pre-med junior who spent the previous two years in Israel through the dual-degree Tel Aviv University-Columbia University program.

Chasalow, who described herself to The Post as “moderate” on the Middle East conflict, said the conflict between Israel and Palestine is complicated, and she criticized protesters such as those behind the new incendiary paper for trying to turn it into a “black and white issue.”

She added that the university should be monitoring for hateful language, including the headlines printed in the SJP newspaper.

“I don’t think we should encourage that stuff,” she said, adding, “Free speech is a wonderful thing, but it’s not ‘any speech.’ “

Still, she said, the paper was an improvement from the chaotic protests on campus last year.

“If they’re going to put out newspapers, that’s easier to ignore. They’re not screaming, ‘Globalize the intifada!’ in my face,” she said.

But another Columbia student who declined to give her name or age said she is “supportive” of the radical publication.

“I encourage the diversity of ideas in a school when we’re being censored,” she said without elaborating further.

Some faculty members shared Chasalow’s point of view.

Gil Zussman, a professor of electrical engineering at Columbia, lived in Israel during the Mideast’s bloody second Intifada.

Two violent uprisings by Palestinians in Israel’s recent history are known as the first Intifada (1987-1993) and the second Intifada (2000-2005), in which terrorists besieged the nation with violence, often including horrific attacks against innocent civilians, with the stated goal of bringing the Jewish state to its knees.

The Antidefamation League says slogans referencing Intifada “call for indiscriminate violence against Israel, and potentially against Jews and Jewish institutions worldwide.”

Zussman said the fact that copies of the newspaper were being handed out on campus Friday — and being promoted on social media by an anti-Israel staff collective known as the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine at Columbia, Barnard, and Teachers College — was “very concerning.”

“During the second Intifada, over 100 suicide bombings took place in Israel, and numerous buses exploded, resulting in over 1,000 people murdered,” he said.

I lived in Israel through that horrible period. The fact that faculty imply that such violence could or should be imported to Columbia is extremely irresponsible.”

Columbia University has been one of the epicenters for disruptive and at times violent anti-Israel protests on campus since Israel’s war with Palestinian Hamas terrorists started in October 2023 when the Islamic extremist group launched a horrific coordinated terror attack, killing 1,200 Israelis. ##