The Middle East Institute at Columbia University hired a new faculty member this year: Mohamed Abdu.
In January, before he was hired, Abdu gave an interview to a socialist podcast and declared his support for Hamas.
This from frontpagemag.com.
Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona
Later, Abdu helped organize a student protest to disrupt a talk by Hilary Clinton. And to belay any doubts about his sympathies, he went on Facebook to set the record straight:
Yes, I’m with the muqawamah (the resistance), be it Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.
He, too, wrote in a post four days after Hamas attacked Israel, rejecting:
[The] false reports accusing Arabs and [moslems] of decapitating the heads of children and being rapists.
Abdu’s statements—to be crystal clear—were all publicly known and reported before Columbia decided to hire him.
Given the above information, an existential question has been asked:
Should federal funds go to those who
inculcate hatred of Israel or praise Hamas?
Some U.S. Senators do not think so, and they have sent a series of questions about the matter to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.
More on their query can be found here: Senate Republicans question Department of Education Middle East studies grants, by Marc Rod, Jewish Insider, November 15, 2024:
Two Senate Republicans wrote to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona on Thursday, raising concerns about federal funding for Middle East studies allegedly provided to anti-Israel professors on college campuses.
The letter, from Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) focused on National Resource Centers and Foreign Language Area Studies grants provided by the Department of Education.
A recent report by a nonprofit group that scrutinizes government spending alleged that $22.1 million of those funds have gone toward Middle East studies programs and, specifically, to professors with strident anti-Israel views.
According to the report and letter, one grant to Columbia University supported a course taught by Professor Joseph Massad, who praised the Hamas Oct. 7 attack as ‘a stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance.’
The senators also wrote:
The Biden-Harris administration should not channel American taxpayer dollars toward extremist professors who inculcate their students with hatred of America’s strongest ally—and sole democracy—in the Middle East.
This potential abuse of taxpayer funds is not just wasteful but may run contrary to the intent of the programs and the law.
Professor Joseph Massad finds the mass rape, torture, mutilation, and murder of 1,200 Israelis—and American and European citizens—by Hamas a designated terror group by the American government to be “awesome” and “a stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance.”
[Massad] also expressed his hope that the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, would lead to the destruction of the Jewish state. This was of a piece with many decades of anti-Israel and antisemitic venom coming from Massad.
A documentary film about the Columbia Middle Eastern Studies program, Columbia Unbecoming, shows Massad comparing Hamas’ war against Israel to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, with the terrorist organization playing the role of the beleaguered Jews and the Israelis cast as the new Nazis.
Massad also has taken part in anti-Israel activism on and off campus.
In a 2015 talk at Cornell, for example, he advised students on how best to demonize Israel, suggesting that with Europeans, Israel should be accused of “colonialism,” while in America what worked best was accusing Israel of racism. Massad frequently shows up at anti-Israel rallies to offer his support and advice. Should he be given tens, or even hundreds of thousands of federal dollars, to support his “scholarly research”?
Though not mentioned by name in the letter sent by Senators Blackburn and Lummis, another Columbia professor supported by federal funds is Hamid Dabashi, who has spent the last two decades making incendiary comments about Israelis and Jews.
Dabashi claimed in a 2018 Facebook post (now deleted):
Rich and powerful [Zionists]
controlled the American government.
He repeated this antisemitic conspiracy theory about the all-powerful Jews, in several other social media posts; when they were reported on, he deleted them. He has compared Gaza to Auschwitz, and Israelis to Nazis—a comparison he makes frequently. And when various media outlets reported on these posts, Dabashi scrubbed them. Like Massad, Dabashi is also active in anti-Israel campus activities, including moderating events by Students for Justice in Palestine, a group the university has since suspended for inciting violence against Jewish students.
Again, should federal funds not be cut off from those who inculcate hatred of our most loyal ally, Israel, and its people?
Should there not be a policy at the Department of Education that prohibits providing federal funds to individuals who endorse in any way a group designated as a terrorist organization by the American government?
Is it not time for a complete audit of all the recipients of the National Resource Centers and Foreign Language Area Studies grants provided by the Department of Education, to ensure none of that money goes to the likes of Joseph Massad, Mohamed Abdu, and Hamid Dabashi, enthusiasts for Hamas?
