Columbia U Endorses Right to Engage in Terrorism

The NY Sun reports that the latest pedagogical atrocity at Columbia University is the endorsement by professors of a right to engage in terrorism as a "right of resistance". You know, kind of like the Iraqi Baathists "resisting" US troops in the country, or how the Germans had the right to "resist" Jews in 1942. Here is part of that report:

"One of the more positive developments related to the controversy over Middle Eastern studies at Columbia University is that professors who teach in the field no longer enjoy immunity from criticism. Without checks and balances or, as Columbia law school dean David Schizer put it, when controversial opinions are “encrusted as orthodoxy,” professors are given license to misrepresent contested or weak ideas as undisputed fact. Such a state of affairs at Columbia helps to explain why the director of Columbia’s Middle East Institute, Rashid Khalidi, has felt free to misstate international law as relates to the killing of Israeli soldiers.

"On at least four occasions, Mr. Khalidi has publicly stated that Palestinians have the legal right under international law to resist Israel’s occupation.... He was quoted as saying, 'Killing civilians is a war crime, whoever does it. But resistance to occupation is legitimate in international law.' "

Needless to say, according to the Geneva conventions only lawful combatants are given permission to kill other combatants in the course of armed conflict. And never mind that even killing Israeli combatants is part of the campaign of fascist aggression by the Arab world to eradicate Isreal and exterminate its Jewish population. You know, "resistance" again.

There is however a little bit of good news in the struggle against Ivy League campus jihadniks. Princeton's Near Eastern Studies Department, home of the legendary Bernard Lewis, is resisting being recruited into the anti-American anti-Semitic jihad. Rachel Zabarkes Friedman, writing in National Review Online, uncovers little pockets of pre-post-modernist campus sanity.

She adds:

"The Columbia controversy has brought sustained attention to what Middle East scholar Martin Kramer argued several years ago in his important study Ivory Towers on Sand. Middle East studies has become blatantly politicized, with many professors abrogating their responsibility to even try for balance in the classroom. Schools that allow for genuine diversity in this area are, according to analysts, few and far between. And at one such school, Princeton - some would say the only such school - proponents of ideological conformity are itching to prevent a rising-star scholar with dissenting views from receiving a tenured post in his department."