How Columbia and America have changed

For me, Columbia University was always an oasis of green trees and marble columns in the heart of New York. Now, it’s really dark and scary—midnight at the oasis.

The usually relaxed green zone where students loved to throw frisbees or lounge on the grass became a kind of combat zone, a Middle Eastern tent city. Only the camels and the grenades were missing.

The tent-dwellers were masked radicals who emulated and extolled Hamas, the Islamist terror group that invaded 20 Israeli towns and villages, beheading babies, and raping and kidnapping women (and men).

By their nature, dictators and terror groups commit atrocities, then strenuously pretend to be victims.

HAMAS (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya) means Islamic Resistance Movement in Arabic, but Hamas is not “resisting” anything. And it’s not a victim.

Hamas already controlled and ruled Gaza. It grabbed part of Israel. That’s not resistance. That’s invasion. 

In this case, it was like the horror movie—Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Some of Hamas’s tactics and goals look a lot like Hitler’s Nazis—murdering as many Jews as possible.

Meanwhile, Hamas supporters sound remarkably like the Hitler Youth during their attacks on Jews, gypsies, and others in the 1930s. See how far we’ve come?

In 21st-century America, Islamist Nazism proudly walks the campuses, streets, bridges, and airports.  Put on a mask, an Arab-style head scarf, and act like you own the place. It’s my way or the highway—or actually it’s my highway, too. 

The same bullying methods of Hamas supporters are used from Los Angeles to London, from Persia to Paris. They shout “Death to the Jews,” “Death to Israel,” and even  “Death to America.”

Columbia.

The word itself is the poetic name for America. As in the song “Columbia the gem of the oceans, the home of the brave and the free.”

But now when people hear Columbia they think of the horrible things that may happen to America, if people do not wake up to the new Islamic Nazism walking our streets.

Columbia’s masked radicals (some students, some clearly not) threatened Jewish students, promising that they and their heroes in Hamas would continue attacking Israel and Jews whenever and wherever they could.

This week is my seventieth birthday, and I have very fond memories of growing up in New York and attending Columbia, where I completed three degrees, before getting a fourth degree in Cairo and a fifth in Israel.

I know a bit about what works in academia.

When I was studying at Columbia College, I felt it was the best undergraduate school in the Ivy League, better than Harvard and Yale. Columbia’s classes were the smallest of all the undergrad schools in the Ivy League—usually fewer than 20 per class. Our teachers knew us by name, and you had nowhere to hide.

The workload was heavy, stressing “The Great Books,” making Columbia’s curriculum more challenging and more classical than almost any other school. We had to read and discuss everything from Homer, Aristotle, and Plato, to Lenin, Locke, and Freud, as well as the Bible and Shakespeare, because of the core courses that every Columbia student was required to take.

This gave us a foundation in Western learning, culture, and literature. It made us better citizens.

We actually knew the difference between a democracy and a republic, between loud, strong criticism and protest and unjustified incitement to violence.

We could separate between totalitarian states (like Nazi Germany and today’s Iran) and corrupt authoritarian regimes (Russia and Ukraine).

None of my teachers babied me or worried about “triggering me” with the wrong pronoun or tough questions. Columbia was a challenging environment; not a “safe zone,” but it was safe.

Columbia’s campus was safe, and I, a yarmulke-wearing observant Jew, was never afraid to walk the campus.

Even in my Middle East studies and Arabic classes at Columbia, my fellow Arab and Persian students never threatened one another. We often disagreed, but we could listen to and learn from each other.

Columbia’s challenge is to get back to where it was and where it might yet be. That’s also the challenge for America.

Dr. Michael Widlanski is the author of Battle for Our Minds: Western Elites and the Terror Threat (Threshold-Simon and Schuster, 2012), and Can Israel Survive A Palestinian State? (1990). He was strategic affairs advisor in Israel’s Ministry of Public Security, editing captured PLO documents. Earlier he advised Israeli negotiation teams at the Madrid and Washington talks in 1991-92. Dr. Widlanski was a visiting professor at Washington University in St. Louis in 2007-8 and at the University of California, Irvine in 2014, taught political communication for two decades at The Hebrew University and Bar Ilan University.  Earlier he was a reporter at The New York Times and Cox Newspapers, war correspondent for Israeli Army Radio and Diplomatic Correspondent for Israel Television in English (IBA).

Image from X.