Over 100 Columbia professors sign letter defending students who supported Hamas’ ‘military action’
By Melissa Koenig
Published Oct. 30, 2023, 12:54 p.m. ET
More than 100 Columbia University professors signed a letter Monday defending students who supported Hamas’ “military action” in Israel on Oct. 7 and called on administrators to protect those students from “disturbing reverberations” on the Manhattan campus.
As top donors vow to stop giving money to the university amid a swell of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, professors demanded that the administration protect demonstrators from doxxing efforts from trucks dubbing them “Columbia’s Leading Anti-Semites” and halt its educational outposts in Israel.
The Ivy League staffers also demanded that the administration “cease issuing statements that favor the suffering and death of Israelis or Jews over the suffering and deaths of Palestinians.”
“As scholars who are committed to robust inquiry about the most challenging matters of our time, we feel compelled to respond to those who label our students antisemitic if they express empathy for the lives and dignity of Palestinians and/or if they signed a student-written statement that situated the military action begun on Oct. 7 within the larger context of the occupation of Palestine by Israel,” the letter reads.
“In our view, the student statement aims to recontextualize the events of Oct. 7, 2023, pointing out that military operations and state violence did not begin that day, but rather it represented a military response by a people who had endured crushing and unrelenting state violence from an occupying power over many years,” they wrote of the brutal terror attack that killed more than 1,400 Israelis, most of them civillians.
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https://nypost.com/2023/10/30/metro/columbia-professors-sign-letter-defending-students-who-supported-hamas-military-action/
