Cornell Prof: Official 'Didn't Understand' ISIS Conversation
Friday, 27 Mar 2015 08:06 PM
By Cathy Burke
Pushback from Cornell University students to revelations that a top administrator was open to the idea of a campus group supporting the Islamic State (ISIS) has been "a little too quick," says Cornell law professor William Jacobson.
Speaking on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV on Friday, Jacobson, director of the Securities Law Clinic at Cornell's Law School, said there's nothing abhorrent about the Project Veritas video.
"There's nothing wrong with undercover investigative journalism," he said.
But he added it was nevertheless shocking.
"I just could not imagine that this assistant dean of students actually understood what he was saying," he said. "It's just unimaginable that somebody would actually make a statement that 'yes, come and welcome.' My initial feeling was that he probably didn't fully understand what he was being asked.
"He could not possibly have understood it, because we are not the sort of campus where that would be welcome. So, I really didn't know what to make of it," he added.
But Jacobson also said that college president David Skorton, who called the James O'Keefe undercover video a "smear," was attacking "the messenger."
"The student newspaper came out against James, so did one of the local papers, but people were maybe a little too quick," Jacobson said. "We don't know what the whole story is. We only know what we've been shown."
Yet, Jacobson said, students are less concerned about the video than are administrators.
"At an administrative level, at a public relations level, they're extremely concerned because this is, Cornell has had some problems on campus with anti-Israel students that made the news, and so I'm sure at an administrative level, they're a lot more concerned than they probably are at a student level."
Cornell was included on a list of campuses with the allegedly worst anti-Semitic activity in 2014. The list was compiled by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a conservative group based in Southern California.
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