Columbia President Minouche Shafik allows chaos and antisemitism to rule she must go

Columbia University President Minouche Shafik must resign or be fired immediately.She is a stain on our university system, on the city of New York and on the moral and cultural fabric of our society.I am a lifetime New Yorker. I know the city as if it were a small village. I served as a member of the state Legislature. I served as borough president of Manhattan, and I served as City Council president.I have spent the last week walking throughout the area of Columbia University.What I have seen feels like a nightmare of unreality. Only someone who is functionally brain dead or a consummate liar can deny what is blazingly obvious: At the center of the “occupation” and “protest” is compulsively vicious Jew-baiting, Jew-hatred, anti-Americanism and hysterical insistence on Israel’s obliteration.I could literally not walk five paces without seeing or hearing the most horrendous verbal and, in many instances, physical assaults on Jews, Judaism and Israel.

In particular, the hitherto inconceivable sentence “We Are Hamas!” was shouted so often, it was still echoing in my brain hours after I returned home. This point is of significance because it has become automatic to suggest every act against Hamas is actually an act against “Palestinians,” invariably women and children.I have yet to see a single media report that comes to terms with this horrifying reality I witnessed — with one exception.Only the New York Post has managed to give an accurate portrait of the particular nature of the hatred I saw.There is no group — black, white, Hispanic, gay, lesbian, trans — I have ever observed being targeted in the city of New York as Jews have been targeted at Columbia, which for decades was the mecca of liberal, Jewish values and the landing spot for intelligent, learned Jews eager for a robust education in the humanities, arts or sciences.The urgent need for President Shafik’s forced resignation or firing is supported by four pillars of reason.1.

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