Antisemitic Students at Columbia today
The Germans killed six million Jews during the Holocaust. National Socialism was the name of the regime, but even those ordinary Germany who were not member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) were antisemitic and took part in the genocide against the Jewish people.
Today we have a serious problem with countries who celebrate Nazi crimes and Nazi collaborators, like Lithuania, Latvia or Ukraine. Ukrainian historian Marta Havryshko teaches at Clark University in the United States. She wants peace for Ukraine, as the header of her X-Account reads. She is against the Russian aggression in Ukraine, against Putin and all kinds of Russian ultra-nationalism and also antisemitism. However, her main interest is Ukraine. Most people in the US believe support for Ukraine is a good idea. In fact, a diplomatic solution – envisioned by then Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett in April 2022 – is still the only realistic solution to that conflict. Ukraine today honors the antisemite Stepan Bandera and many other Nazi collaborators. In Germany, we too have streets, places, buildings or parcs named after former Nazis or perpetrators during the Holocaust. The investigation is still ongoing – 80 years after the Holocaust happened. Ukraine, though, is going the other way, they are renaming streets after Holocaust perpetrators and antisemites.
If you believe this is ‘Putinist’ propaganda, take a look on X. On October 9, 2024, Ukrainian historian Marta Havryshko posted on X the following:
Why do some Ukrainian fighters wear patches of “Ruthenia Lion” that refer to the Waffen SS Division Galicia emblem? The best explanation was provided by Roman Ponomarenko, chief “Azov historian”, and officer of 12th Special Operations Brigade “Azov”. “Currently, thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are fighting on the Eastern Front with the emblem of the “Golden Lion” on their equipment, while their opponents are decorated with Soviet symbols. That’s why our 2023 reflects the situation of 1944 in many ways”, he wrote on his Telegram on 80thanniversary of Division. Not Skabeyeva, not Solovyov, or other Kremlin propagandists, but Ponomarenko himself explicitly draws parallels between Ukrainian soldiers who resist current Russian aggression to Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in WWII. He equalizes Putin’s Russia with Stalin’s Russia and believes that “times change, but the enemy stays the same”. He glorifies Division fighters and believes they must be granted the official national status of fighters for Ukraine as OUN and UPA members did due to the 2015-memory laws. Ponomarenko promotes his idea through books, articles, interviews, and public talks. Most importantly, he disseminated his ideas to thousands of members of the Azov movement. In 2017, he started to be a lecturer for the National Corps, and in 2022, he joined the Azov Brigade. Through his lectures, Ukrainian soldiers learn about “true freedom fighters,” whose image was deliberately “distorted” by Soviet propaganda then and Kremlin propaganda now.
This is about a Pro-Holocaust, Pro-Nazi Ukrainian unit and soldier.
Silence in the West, as if these tendencies did not exist on the Ukrainian front, where Jews were killed during the Shoah and these Ukrainian soldiers are very well aware of this and celebrate her forerunners and then Nazi collaborators.
Many thousand kilometers away in New York City we have another form of antisemitism taking place. Here people celebrate the worst massacre against Jews since the Holocaust: Oct. 7, 2023, when Muslim and Palestinian men butchered, gang raped, beheaded, burned alive, cut hands off, and shot 1200 Jews and other people in southern Israel in Kibbutzim, Moshavs, cities and at the Nova Music Festival.
A new resolution from over 100 student groups at Columbia University – an Ivy League University – supports this genocide by a resolution published a few days ago. They urge Columbia University to divest from Israel.
The antisemitism of “Columbia University Apartheid Divest” (CUAD) is obvious:
However, the University’s weaponization of policy to silence students enables the atrocities that Israel has subjected Palestinians to for decades – atrocities that began when Zionist militias violently forced over 700,000 Palestinians, 75 percent of the population, out of their homes in 1948, and which have continuously escalated with virtual impunity since.
The entire open letter does not at all talk about the genocidal massacre of Oct. 7. This massacre was committed by the Palestinian brothers in arms and Palestinian brothers in mind of many of these Columbia students. These elite students have not a single word about Jihad, Islamism, genocidal antisemitism, anti-Zionism and the butchering of civilian women, men, babies, kids and elderly people, including Holocaust survivors.
Instead, they promote hatred of Jews and Israel:
Over 10,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s bombs and thousands more are expected to be killed via starvation and dehydration. The brutal onslaught over the last month is but another chapter in over 75 years of violence, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people – funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars, and further enabled by financial investments made by institutions like Columbia University.
As those who killed the Jews in the Holocaust are called Nazis, and those who celebrate the old Nazis in Ukraine are framed as neo-Nazis – how do we call those parts of the Muslim and Palestinian population and their allies who try to kill all Jews today and who see October 7 as first start in that direction? What might be a correct name for these students? They support Islamists murderers and their fan-base, Hamas, Islmic Jihad, Hizballah and all other Palestinian, Arab or Iranian antisemites or the Houthis in Jemen.
As if Israel had occupied the West Bank of Gaza for 75 years! That indicates, that not 1967, but 1948 is their problem – they hate Jewish self-determination.
This disgraceful declaration of CUAD should be a reason to throw all these undersigners out of Columbia – that is not free speech, that is a call for genocide. They celebrate (!) their Palestinian murderers from Oct. 7.
As a former Ivy League employee and former Post-Doc at YALE University I urge Columbia University to take all necessary steps to stop these students from acquiring any degree from Columbia or any other University. They are fanatics and not interested in scholarship at all.
Scholarship would be critical of many Israeli policies, but not of the very existence of the Jewish state.
Scholarship would analyze the connection of Nazi Germany and the Palestinian history.
Scholarship would analyze Muslim antisemitism in history and in particular in recent years since 9/11 and since 10/7.
Scholarship could analyze the very troubling and dangerous policies of Netanyahu, his failure to prevent 10/7, his religious-nationalist-fascist coalition partners and his abandonment of the hostages.
But this truly disgusting declaration is celebrating that the Palestinians took hostages! Otherwise they would have called to dismantle Hamas and to release all hostages – but they did not.
And of course, these ‘kids’ have ‘Jewish’ friends who prefer suicide over a Jewish state. Old news. Take Otto Weininger and Jewish self-hatred as an example.
In any case, this anti-Zionist and antisemitic declaration is a shame for Columbia. Remember: these students have VERY rich parents or donors (take Arab countries as an example, or Iranian foreign policy) and these parents and donors have to be held accountable for what their anti-Jewish kids are doing.
Finally, and ironically or not, many in the pro-Israel camp have no problem at all with pro-Holocaust soldiers in today’s Ukraine and the glorification of Ukrainian Nazis, antisemites and Holocaust collaborators. These pro-Israel advocates, many in Germany at least, hate Russia almost as much as these Ukrainian neo-Nazis hate Russia, while pretending to be against all forms of antisemitism.
Well, many are only against antisemitism as long as it derives from Muslims, Palestinians and left-wingers.
Think about it.