Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - An Insider's Account of Columbia's Pro-Hamas Protests - with Shai Davidai

Episode Date: April 26, 2024

Share on Twitter: tinyurl.com/5n6bswst Since 10/07, no faculty member at Columbia University (or any university for that matter) has been more outspoken about the shocking and staggering rise in antisemitism than Shai Davidai. He brings his first-hand accounts to our conversation today. Shai is Assistant Professor in the Management Division of Columbia Business School. He received his PhD from Cornell University in 2015. Prior to joining Columbia Business School, Shai spent a year as a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University and 3 years as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at The New School for Social Research. Since Columbia students established the most recent pro-Hamas encampment on the Columbia campus days ago, Israeli-born and raised Shai Davidai has been barred from campus. Having just now arrived in Israel, Shai joins us in Tel Aviv today to describe what exactly has been happening since 10/07, the early signs of antisemitism he identified at Columbia well before 10/07, and the common misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the rhetoric and incitement being used by a number of Columbia student organizations and faculty. You can follow Shai on X here: @ShaiDavidai

My very first day where I saw for the first time an actual pro-Hamas protest at Columbia was on October 12th. And I was shocked because I realized it was not politics, it was not ideology, it was hate. And that night I came home after the kids went to sleep and I just burst out into tears and weeped like I think I've never wept in my life. And my wife asked me, what's happening? And I said, I saw the anti-Semitic beast. It is 12 o'clock p.m. on Friday, April 26th here in Tel Aviv. It is 5 o'clock a.m. in New York City as New Yorkers get ready to start their day. I'm here this afternoon with Shai Davidei, who just arrived in Israel from New York City. We're here together in Tel Aviv at the headquarters of Startup Nation

Central. Shai, you just pointed out to me that we are sitting around the corner from where you were at a startup some years ago before you made the trek to America to pursue academia, where you are right now, which is you're a professor at Columbia University at the business school. Exactly, yeah. Just 30 seconds on where you worked and what your life was before you. I used to work in a place called TLV Media that was doing optimization for advertising on the internet. In 2008, 2009, I used to have lunch right around the corner. And literally, I worked there till,

you know, a month before I left for graduate school in the United States. Okay. So just to set up this conversation, you are a professor at Columbia. At Columbia. I'm an assistant professor of management at Columbia Business School. Okay. And the reason your name and your voice will be recognizable to this audience is you have become, you have been one of the most prominent voices at Columbia trying to inject some semblance of sanity to what was otherwise a pretty insane situation at Columbia, not just at Columbia, but you're at Columbia and that's where you've been teaching. You're Israeli. You are back in Israel right now for the first time since October 7th?

The first time, last time I was here was over the summer and getting off the plane. It's the first time that I really breathed in deeply and felt that I belong for the first time since October 7th. And I've been living in the US for 14 years. My kids are American. My wife was born in Tel Aviv, but she's American. And New York City has made us feel unwelcome. And that's very hard for me to say. It's the first time I'm saying this out loud, but it's very difficult for me. And I'm not the kind of guy to pack up and leave. I'm the kind of guy to fight and make sure that, no, I should be welcome and everyone should be welcome,

Jews or non-Jews. And that's what it's all been about. So I mentioned to you before we started recording, when my wife and I were heading to the airport on Sunday before the Seder, we were arriving here Monday for the Seder on Monday night and my sisters, my wife just blasted out a tweet, something along the lines of, I'm on my way to the airport to fly to Israel where my teenage sons will feel more welcome and safer than they do on the Upper West Side. And it was an observation that was very obvious to her. And it invited an extraordinary response.

Like, it's one of those things, you get on the plane, you fly, and then you don't think twice about something, and then you land, and it's like there's this explosion. You've been dealing with a lot of this kind of reaction. And the reaction could be divided into several categories. One category was vitriol directed at her from critics of Israel. Another reaction was American Jews saying, I totally get it. I totally, I never thought I would feel it. You, Campbell, summarized in one sentence exactly these emotions that have been swirling for months. And then the third reaction was from

Israelis when we got here, because the number of Israelis that we've only been here for a few days, we got here Monday at noon, we went right to a Seder Monday night. So we've been here a few days, a week, a little less than a week. And everywhere we go, Israelis say to us, how are you? How are you doing? And we are sitting here saying, whoa, whoa, we're worried about you. I mean, you were subjected to this genocidal massacre or attempted genocidal massacre on October 7th. You're dealing with rebuilding your country.

You're dealing with a nation that's shattered, and you're worried about what's happening to Jews in America? Yeah, I mean, I think that this is the first time, at least in our generation, the first time where Jews of the world, in Israel and in the diaspora, realize that our safety in New York City and our safety in Paris and our safety in Melbourne and our safety in Kibbutz Be'eri are all linked.

It's not different. We're all linked. It's all part of the same movement. When movement when fatah youth and the pflp and the official spokesperson of hamas cheers on the radical organizers at columbia and at stanford and nyu and anywhere like almost every college in the u.s cheering them on and saying like you give us strength strength, you realize that there's nothing different. Like our fates are linked, our destinies are linked. Like Jews cannot be free in New York City if they're not free in Kibbutz Be'eri and Nachal Oz, and if we're not free in the tunnels in Rafah. And I think we're all realizing this now.

And it's interesting that you mentioned the tweet because that that has been my story and this is something that I've been saying from the very first moment this is not the Shia Davidai story this is the story of the message this is the stories of the Jews because my very first real tweet social media activism was on October 12th it was the day where I saw for the first time an actual pro-Hamas, pro-Islamic jihad protest at Columbia. And I was shocked because I realized it was not politics, it was not ideology, it was hate.

And that night I came home after the kids went to sleep and I just burst out into tears and weeped like I think I've never wept in my life and my my wife asked me what what's happening and I said I saw the anti-semitic beast that Bialik wrote about that Herzl wrote about and I tweeted about that that's my my personal experience and people started retweeting that, if you want to know what it's like being a Jew in the U.S., read this. And at first I was very, it was perplexing because I didn't see this as like me writing for the Jews. It was like me writing about my own experience. But I realized that that, just like your your wife's tweet

like it's an experience if it's so so many of us and i'm saying like when i say many like millions of us are feeling right now and that's why i've kept going since october 12th because i don't no one needs to know what shai davidai thinks i mean my wife does but the world doesn't need to know and and the world shouldn't care what Shai Levidai thinks. But as long as I am tapping on to the collective experience and can give voice to the collective experience, then I have an obligation to keep going. So I want to, just for our listeners, I know many of our listeners are familiar with you, but for those who aren't, I want to just spend a moment on your background. So you were working

in Israel at startups, and then you went in 2009 to the United States to pursue your graduate. August 2010, yeah. August of 2010. And you got your graduate degree where? So I spent five years at Cornell. I got a PhD in social psychology with a great advisor, Tom Gilovich, one of the greats of social psychology with a great advisor Tom Gilovich one of the greats of social psychology my wife my wife who was my girlfriend at the time got a master's degree at Columbia during that time after graduating I spent a year at Princeton at the School of International Public Affairs and then

three years as an assistant professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research, which is a small, very liberal, or as we find out, illiberal school in downtown New York, and then moved to Columbia in 2019. And how'd you wind up at Columbia? In 2018, I felt like I had enough with where I was. I felt that many of my colleagues, not in the psychology department, but at the new school, were engaging in performative politics. What we're seeing now, but they were just spending hours just talking about what it is to be liberal versus progressive. And while people were suffering on the streets, and I felt like this is too much to me this is too much and I and I wanted to move somewhere else and Columbia Business School just had a job and I I applied okay and so and what do you teach at Columbia Business School I teach

negotiations and have you always and I just want to pre-October 7th you've always felt as a Jew as an Israeli you have felt comfortable there That's a complex question because there were instances, right? So the first time that I did not feel comfortable was when Dave Chappelle went on SNL and gave a 10 minute rant, basically an anti-Semitic rant, right? Talking about the Jews controlling the media. And on Monday morning, I went to the office and I was expecting people to be up in arms, just like they would be if Dave Chappelle attacked any other group. And no one said anything. So I tweeted something about the silence of my so-called social justice warriors

who are my colleagues. And that was my first and only tweet about anti-Semitism until October 12th. So I think what was happening to me and to a lot of other Jews in academia and in New York and in the United States in general is there were many, many incidents, right? There was the Charlottesville Jews will not replace us. There was the Tree of Life shooting. There was the Charlottesville Jews will not replace us. There was the Tree of Life shooting. There was Kanye West. And every time something happened, we treated it as an isolated incident, right? So Charlottesville, oh, that's just some crazy MAGA. Tree of Life, oh, that's some lone wolf with a gun.

Kanye West, oh, it's a mental health issue, which it was, but it doesn't. Bipolar disorder doesn't make you antisemitic. It just allows you to express your hatred for Jews, you know, every time. But after October 7th, when I looked at all the instances, these seemingly isolated incidents and tied them together, it was like connect the dots for kids. And I realized, oh, this spells antisemitism. And that's when it really dawned on me. Before we get into Colombia, where we are now, can you just describe your politics, kind of where you sit politically pre-October 7th?

Just where you sit politically in Israel and in the US, because you live in both worlds. Yeah. Honestly, my politics don't matter. I know that people want to know my politics, but I can – I don't have – government policy. And I think there's an effort by many critics of Israel today to just dismiss people like you as knee-jerk defenders of Israel and Israeli government policy. And I think it's important to establish, certainly that's not the case with you. It's not the case with most. Most Israelis I know are tougher on Israel than non-Israelis. So this is not a function of, you know, Israel is above any criticism. Yeah. So when people ask me about my politics, I tell them about my values,

right? Because what we're seeing in the United States is people have a political identity, and then they shape their values based on the political identity. And that is warped. We should have values and then pick our politics based on the whoever politician or party that most fits our values. So my values are of equality, of liberalism, of democracy. The best example is over the summer, I was here in Israel over the summer and I was very, very-

Summer of 23. Summer of 23, right. And I was very- So this is the Israel over the summer and I was very, very. Summer of 23. Summer of 23, right. And I was very. So this is the peak of the judicial reform. Exactly. Debates, yeah. And I was very, very involved in the pro-democracy protests against the Netanyahu government. And, you know, and I said then and I say it now, I'm long on Israel and short on Netanyahu. And in one of those protests,

one of the big protests against the judicial reform, I got punched by an undercover police officer in Tel Aviv. So does that show my politics? No, it shows my values. I can tell you who I voted for up until 2010. I have always voted for Meretz. Which is all the way on the left. It's the most left of the Zionist parties,

meaning that it's a party that is the most left two-state solution, civil rights, equality, liberty, but still recognizes Israel as the Jewish homeland. Right. So it's to the left of Yesh Atid, which is your Lapid's party. Oh, yeah, way left of Yesh Atid. Left of labor, of what remains of labor of a pie. So it's far left.

Yeah. I mean, my grandparents, they've always voted labor. My sister was in one of the first cohorts of Seeds for Peace in the mid-'90s, met with Al Gore. Seeds for Peace in the mid-90s met with Al Gore. Seeds for Peace, which was focused, for our listeners, focused, it was a program, it was like a camp program, right, to bring Palestinians and Israelis and Jews from the diaspora together in a camping environment to spend time and get to know each other and build bridges and break down barriers. Exactly. She was there in, I think it was like in Colorado and her best friend was a Palestinian woman, teenager from East Jerusalem. So that's our values. That's my values. My wife is a translator. And on October 6th, my parents were visiting New York City and we had dinner,

Shabbat dinner. And they asked her, what are you, what are you working on? She was working at the time, translating a book by Breaking the Silence, which is a very, very critical organization of Israel's policies, not Israel, Israel's policies. So, you know, and even my wife and I, we don't agree on everything. And, and, but our values are at, we need to aspire to the most democratic state that we can have here in Israel. And we need to aspire to the strongest democracy we can have in New York. And your politics in the U S. Again, in the U S politics are warped when,ped. When Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are Democrats, I'm ashamed to call myself a Democrat. But I would also never call myself a Republican because you got Marjorie Taylor Greene. So my politics are of being a moderate rather than extreme. I think the

story that everyone's telling is of left and right in Israel, in France, where I have family in Brazil, where I have family and in the US. No, the story is moderates versus extremes. There is no difference between what's happening now when the Proud Boys storming Capitol in January 6th. January 6th and October 7th are the exact same story, different ideologies, different methods, but it's the exact same story. It's extremists that are trying to force the majority of moderates to conform through force, through violence. Okay, so now I want to go to October 7th. And you talked about that you tweeted something out on October 12th. So can you just describe what life was like for you on the Columbia University campus in those

early weeks following your first speaking out, which was October 12th? Again, you didn't have, you now have become, you're like a force of nature. I'm not, I'm saying, I know you wouldn't say that, I'm saying it. But back then you were, I mean, you were known at the Columbia Business School, but you were otherwise a relatively obscure figure in the kind of national dialogue. And now you're, now the whole country and the whole world has questions or scrutinizing to some degree, or at least paying attention to what's happening in Columbia, and you've been in the middle of that. So just describe the early weeks, and then we'll get to now. I don't want to do now yet, but I want to just get to those early weeks and what you saw happening and what you were thinking. Just to give you – I know you're Startup Nation.

So just to give you the numbers, before October 7th, I had about 800, 900 followers on Twitter. The vast majority were academics, and it was just like a nerdy discussion of all of our papers, teaching styles, stuff like that. Oh, how you'd love to go back to that time. This morning I had 83,000 followers on Twitter. I joined Instagram two and a half, almost three months ago, and I have 62,000. I still don't understand. And again, it's not me. It's the message.

So October 7th happens one of the very first thing that i did that morning was text uh the one of the vice deans at columbia business school who's israeli and i said i need to talk with the dean we need to take care of our jewish and israeli students the dean was extremely uh costis malgarz um who's the dean of the business school incredible guy was extremely supportive and helped us organize something for October 11th. That was the first time I've cried in front of my students. We just met there and it was just a grieving session. a student pulls out a letter that was written by students for justice in Palestine, which I've come to call them students for jihad in Palestine

because that's what they really stand for. And in that letter that was published on October 9th, they refer to yesterday's event as an historic day for the Palestinian resistance. October 7th. Yeah. So they started writing the letter on October 8th. And it basically a letter that celebrates, justifies excuses, the rape, the murder, the

kidnapping, the torturing, everything we saw. And I looked the Dean of the business school straight in the eyes and I told him, and it says that they're going to have a protest on October 12th. And I look him in the eye and I say, is this is not free speech this is intimidation this is taking sides with the terrorists that we are still fighting on the ground to stop them from killing more civilians and i know for a fact that the president of columbia university saw that letter because early the next day on 8 a.m. the dean of the business school was in a meeting with the president of the university and all other deans

about the planned protest and told her what we conveyed. So she knew from October 12th, she read the letter, she saw what they stand for and she did nothing. So on October 12th was that first protest. And I told my wife, Fyoden, I have to go. I have to go and be there for our Jewish students. I need to stand there right at front. And luckily, nothing got out of hand that day. But I went there and it was like a mob. And at first when I would call them a mob,

people say, don't call them a mob. That's offensive. But no, you need to see it through your own eyes. A mob, marching as a mob, chanting everything that we've become accustomed to and normalized, you know, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Or when they say it in Arabic, Palestine will be Arab, Palestina Arabiya. Meaning no Jews. No Jews or Jews under someone else's control. There is only one solution, intifada revolution.

I've spent my entire life advocating for a two-state solution and now this mob is saying, no, there's only one solution, an intifada, suicide bombing in buses, suicide bombing in buses, you know, suicide bombing in cafes, you know, shooting, randomly shooting civilians on the street.

That's their one solution. That's their one state solution. No, that's not their one state solution. That is their solution. They don't even care what comes next. For them, it's the violence. We don't want two states. We want all of 48 like all the

things that we've become accustomed to because their violence their rhetoric has become so violent so quickly um i it was there on october 12th and then after the mob finished parading on campus they they walked outside of campus 116th and broad Broadway in New York City, walked two blocks down and one block to the west and did the exact same thing outside of the craft center for Jewish life where Hillel and all the Jewish students were hiding. So this is the Jewish student community, the Jewish community student facility, the craft center. And that's where the Jewish students were literally hiding. They were hiding. It went on lockdown on October 12th. So I started tweeting about that.

So I want to quote from here. I tweeted this out the other day. This is a statement from the National Students for Justice in Palestine, so the umbrella group for all these different groups, one of which was on Columbia. And it's a long statement explaining their mission, which they issued immediately after October 7th. And they talk about the resistance, the demonstrations that are going to begin post-October 7th. And they say that this is a call to action. And this call to action, and I'm quoting here, calls upon us to engage in meaningful actions that go beyond symbolism and rhetoric.

And the statement continues, resistance comes in all forms, armed struggle, general strikes, and popular demonstrations. All of it is legitimate and all of it is necessary. Now, when they say resistance comes in all forms, including armed struggle, and all of it is necessary. Now, when they say resistance comes in all forms, including armed struggle, and all of it is legitimate and all of it is necessary, armed struggle, they're not just talking about Hamas slaughtering Jews in Southern Israel.

They're talking, this is Students for Justice in Palestine, a US-based organization talking about what resistance and demonstrations mean in the United States and on college campuses in the United States. So they are legitimizing, if not glorifying, violence anywhere. Yeah, let me tell you. So if you scroll down to their official statement, you'll see here's the chants that we want to hear in all the universities, right, showing you it's not grassroots, not spontaneous. But you'll also see here's the chance that we want to hear in all the universities, showing you it's not grassroots, not spontaneous. But you also see here's the hashtags.

And one of the hashtags they used in that exact document is hashtag Al-Aqsa flood, which is the name of the operation, so-called the massacre, that Hamas spokespeople gave to the massacre of October 7th. So basically they're equating, they're making synonymous the attack on October 7th that massacred 1,200 Jews and took over 200 hostages with, they're using the same language to describe what, no, again, obviously we haven't seen in the United States an actual, the equivalent of October 7th, but the point is they're reveling in the same kind of language and people hear what they want to hear. So people hear this kind of language and they think they're being inspired to take action, even violent action. More than that, what they are saying,

and they have been consistently saying from the beginning, and I've been archiving this and screaming about this and no one was listening, is they're not saying we support them. They're saying we are them. We are Hamas. We are the PFLP. We are the Islamic Jihad. I want to give you two other things about Students for Justice in Palestine. One, and I'm not suggesting anything nefarious. I'm just pointing out a fact.

The Instagram account for Columbia's Students students justice in Palestine was not active. It was reactivated on October 6th. So it had gone dormant before October 7th? Yeah. Everyone can scroll. I mean, anyone can scroll and see. On October 6th, they put a picture of Israel's map and basically saying all of it is ours. On October 6th.

On October 6th. And again, I'm not saying that- They knew. I'm not saying that they knew. I don't know. But I'm saying this is a fact. The other thing is what people need to understand about Students for Justice in Palestine- What time did they do that?

Do we know? Because it could be that they did it late in the day in October 6th. It was already October 7th in Israel, so they knew it was getting going. I would have to check, but it doesn't matter. it doesn't matter it does not matter if you if you're no no if your first reaction to murdered babies and raped teenagers is we're back right yeah but i'll say another thing and this might be a bit long but what is students for justice in palestine it was just to just for this students for justice palestine is the what historically and i know you for Justice in Palestine. It was... Just for our listeners, Students for Justice in Palestine is what historically,

and I know you and I have a different view of it now, but historically it has been one of the more extreme pro-Palestinian student groups on Western... No. No, it has never been pro-Palestinian.

It has always been pro-Hamas. And this is the problem. When we... Yeah. Yeah, so I want... But just what most people would have known of it, and then you can clarify. What most people would have known is that there were student groups on American campuses that were politically active on the issue of Palestinian self-determination.

That's what a charitable description of what Students for Justice in Palestine was. It was there are campuses, there are organizations on college campuses that are supportive of Israel and defend the U.S.-Israel relationship and are Jewish community-oriented. And then this was an organization that was supporting or advocating for the rights of Palestinians and Palestinian self-determination, a Palestinian state. That would be the charitable description of it. No, I'm sorry. No. Okay. No, because they have never – and from the very first beginning, they have never been pro-Palestine.

They have been pro-armed resistance. And when we... Eve, going back... Yeah, let me... So when we call them, we meaning when the media, the New York Times called them pro-Palestine, and they still do, they are doing a disservice for Palestinians

because they're basically saying the only way to support Palestine is armed resistance. And we know that many, many Palestinians oppose Hamas, oppose Islamic Jihad, oppose the PFLP. So Students for Justice in Palestine war was started by a man called Hatem Bazian, who when he was a graduate student at Berkeley, he was also a fundraiser for an organization

called the Holy Land Foundation. The Holy Land Foundation was an organization that was disbanded by the US Treasury in the early 2000s for giving material support for Hamas. So the person that started Students for Justice in Palestine, he then went on to raise money for Hamas. This is why I say from the very first moment, they were not pro-Palestine, they were pro-Hamas.

Now, when this guy graduated from, you know, he got his PhD and he's now a doctorate. He's a tenured professor at Berkeley. And he started this new organization called American Muslims for Palestine. Sounds innocuous, you know, sounds great. Berkeley. And he started this new organization called American Muslims for Palestine. Sounds innocuous. You know, sounds great. Why wouldn't American Muslims be for Palestine? I think that's great. But when you look under the cover, nine out of the 12 people that are on the board of

American Muslims for Palestine have been on the board of either the Holy Land Foundation or other organizations that were disbanded by the US Treasury for giving material support for Hamas. Jonathan Shanzer from the FDD, was a think tank for freedom, democracy and defense, gave over a dozen congressional briefings about Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine. So American Muslims for Palestine's executive director, I forget his name, I think it's Abu Sharid, he wrote a blog post on Al-Qassam Brigade's website, the military wing of Hamas in 2014 when the three teenage Jewish kids

were kidnapped and murdered in the West Bank. He wrote a blog post about that. And AMP, American Muslims for Palestine, they have a grassroots educational outreach person also who has a rap sheet of anti-Semitism and support for Hamas. He's the person that is in charge of coordinating all of their chapters around the United States. And the last thing I would say about Students for Justice in Palestine, if you go on their website, even now, they say we have more than 200 chapters across Turtle Island. Sorry, across occupied Turtle Island.

Do you know what Turtle Island is? I didn't know either. Luckily, they had in parentheses, it says the United States and Canada. So they refer to the United States and Canada as an occupied territory that needs to be liberated. This is what I've been telling people. This is not about Jewish people. I mean, it is about the Jewish people, but it's not just about the Jewish people. It's not just about Israel. It's about the United States of America. That is why in their protests, they burn down US flags. They say down with the USA.

And you can see in one of the videos of it, one of my students captured, a student of mine at Columbia went up to a protester and asked, what do you think about bin Laden? What do you think about 9-11? And the guy says, the guy did what had to be done. And then they asked him, they were like, they were shocked. So the student asked him, this is on camera. He says, are you serious? And he said, I said what I said. And that's what I've been saying from the past six months. Like this is not just about antisemitism. This is about support for terrorism. This is a continuation of the war on terror.

Just instead of being fought in Mosul and Kabul, it's being fought in New York City and in Palo Alto. Morningside Heights. Yeah. Okay, so you mentioned some of these terms. I get asked this all the time because I just interviewed Michael Powell from The Atlantic, and he made a very interesting observation.

He said, listen, the language they're using at Columbia, the anti-Israel protesters, when you hear the language, everyone can hear what they want to hear. He said when he pressed some of the organizers of the anti-Israel demonstrations, they had a very nuanced way of explaining what the river from the river to the sea meant. Or they had a very nuanced way of explaining what the river, from the river to the sea meant, or they had a very nuanced way of what globalized the intifada means. So they can explain it to someone like a reporter in a way that sounds, that it has peaceful intent, peaceful aspirations. It's not about slaughtering Jews. And then of course, when reporters aren't paying attention, but people have iPhones that aren't filming, you can hear some of the ugliest interpretations of this language. So I want to

really, I just think it's important. Again, we have a lot of listeners who aren't Jewish on this podcast. I want, and I get asked this question from, I just had an email, the person's going to know who I'm referring to. A friend of mine was WhatsAppping me the other day saying, you know, this line sounds kind of innocuous when they say this or they say that. So I want to just explain what this language means. So let's start with- Well, before we break down specific slogans, I do want to say two things and that might help people understand. One is, I'll say three things, blood and soil. What does that connote to you?

Extreme nationalism. Extreme. Right. It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't say violence. Blood and soil was the chant, but the Hitler youth used the chant. Extreme nationalism. What about all lives matter?

Is there anything, if you just heard this out of context what is all lives do you not believe that all lives matter of course and i know but but the thing is that we know that within the context of the u.s racial tensions all my all lives matter means black lives don't matter well in the peak of of yeah the post george floyd Floyd killings protests in summer 2020, when people would say all lives matter, many, including those in Black Lives Matter, said what you're saying is, is you're saying that-

And we listened to them because that was their lives. You know, when an African-American person suffers, I suffer with them. It's not that I'm being, you know, like, oh, I want to be sympathetic. No, I suffer with you, right? that i'm being you know like oh i want to be simply no i suffer with you right just like if an lgbtq individual suffers just like if a an immigrant from south south america suffers just like when anyone suffer when when a poor white man suffers

i suffer with them right so when they when they tell you like look i know that the words that you think you say are innocuous. They are not innocuous. And racists, they always have a way of finding, you know, finding the terms that will sound innocuous but are actually a dog whistle. But I do want to read to you quotes from one of the main organizers of the illegal encampment at Columbia right now. So this is the anti-Israel demonstrations encampment. Not anti-Israel, pro-Hamas. It's different because Hamas doesn't just hate Israel. And I'm not gonna say his name or their name

because that person is a student and I'm still a professor. But I'll give you some quotes. The person that leads people from the river to the sea and all this stuff, all these innocuous things. Zionists don't deserve to live. And this is from an article from yesterday from the daily mail that quoted him james warned zionists who may want to meet up and fight that he fights to kill then when they were asked by a columbia employee do you see why that's a problematic in any way this person responds no

and then and then they go on and say I feel very comfortable very comfortable calling for those people to die when asked about the seriousness of taking someone's life this person said sometimes it's necessary to murder people they went on to say this is a current student of Columbia this is the leader this is not some some random student this is one of the main leaders of what's happening right now at columbia they went on to say there should not be zionists anywhere and then they definitely were hoping that i was going to walk back the i fight to kill he said cackling then he said he, he does fight to kill. And that is why no one has fought him since middle school.

Zionists don't deserve to live comfortably, let alone Zionists don't deserve to live. And then this person, just so you understand the context of it all, because everybody loves context now. This person on October, I want to get the date right because I think the facts are extremely important.

On October 9th, 321 a.m. So while Hamas terrorists are still massacring Israelis and Jews and non-Jews in Israel, he posts free Palestine with the Palestinian flag. This is for him, free Palestine, raping of teenage girls. And that's the leader. So when people, when hypocrites like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar and AOC and Cynthia Nixon, you know, people that are just trying to paint this as peaceful protests. If this was about any other group in society, the United States would have shut down six months ago and would have not done anything until the problem was resolved. But because the problem is Jews, here we are. When they say Zionists, we have to do everything to eliminate Zionists, I think it's important to understand you would be hard-pressed today. I know there's a small, tiny, tiny, tiny fringe minority, but they're very loud, but they're not large numbers. But other than the fringe minority in the Jewish community, you would be hard-pressed today to find a large number of Jews who don't consider themselves Zionists, meaning the overwhelming majority of Jews are Zionist, some fervent Zionist.

And by the way, also many, many Christians are Zionist. So this person, but this person at Columbia is calling for the killing of Christians in America. But my point is saying I have a problem with Zionists and Zionists should be killed is code for I have a problem with Jews. You can't say I have a problem with Zionists and Zionists should be killed is code for I have a problem with Jews. You can't say I have a problem with Zionists, but if you're just not a Zionist, I'm cool with you, because like they're saying the quiet part out loud, that they know Zionists are Jews and Jews are Zionists, and that's this modern form of the way this oldest a-hatred is expressed. So I want to go, okay, so I want to just throw some of these terms out at you, and we can explain it, because to your point, the language can sound innocuous, and the people who try to explain it to the press are trying to do it in a very innocuous way.

And, okay, so the next one is globalize the intifada. Let's start with from the river to the sea. Okay. Because I think, I'm sorry, but, you know. Go ahead. When they chant from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. And then when they're oppressed, they say, we mean free for everyone, democracy, blah, blah, blah.

Not even explaining how that works with Hamas, who's massacring Jews, but forget that. That's what they say they mean. When they chant it in Arabic, they say from water to water, meaning from the river to the sea. So that just, again, so that means from the Jordan River all the way to the west, to the Mediterranean all the way in the east.

So that is, it's all of Israel. Exactly, they say from water to water, palestina arabia, Palestine will be Arab, because they know they will not be questions about that. So they change free to Arab. In Arabic, they're saying what they mean. In English, they're saying what you want to hear. So that's one.

Okay, hold on. Before we get to that, Khaled Machel, who's one of the leaders of Hamas, international Hamas, meaning he's not based in Gaza. I've referenced this a few times on this podcast. A couple months ago, he was giving an interview on Al Arabiya, the Arab satellite channel. He was in Turkey, and he was asked, so the U.S. government, the Biden administration, is pushing for a two-state solution, so you will get a Palestinian state. So is this where you are? And he says, no, we're not interested in a two-state solution. We're interested in a one-state solution.

That is, we are in charge of everything, he said, from the river to the sea. And he said, from Rosh HaNikra to Eilat. So from north to south. So he's basically saying everywhere. And then the other thing I would add is my- I'll one-up you. Yeah. Well, I'll two-up you. I'm sorry. Okay. One, he has been saying this from 2012. There's a quote of Khaled Mishel when he was the head of Hamas.

When he was head of Hamas in Gaza. In Gaza. Yeah. Of him saying, Palestine will be free from north to south, from river to sea. This is from 2012. The phrase did not originate on Columbia's campus. It originated in Hamas. Second thing I would say, a few months ago, he was interviewed and asked, what do you think about the students in American universities chanting basically your chants,

your slogan? And he said that it empowers them and emboldens them. So now you understand the protestors on Columbia and at Stanford and Berkeley and all these other places, they don't support Hamas. They see themselves as Hamas. And Hamas sees them as part of them as well. It's symbiotic. Okay, so now globalize the intifada.

That's another one that's everywhere. Let me be charitable for them for a second. Yeah. When the literal meaning of intifada means shaking off, meaning protesting, removing your quote-unquote oppressors. And that's what they say they mean. That's their way out. In the Israeli-Palestinian context, there have been two intifadas.

Just two. 100% of the intifadas in the Israeli-Palestinian context were violent, violent uprisings that specifically targeted not soldiers, not the armed forces, but civilians. Okay, but so let's just, again, in the interest of informing here. So the first intifada began in 1987. It was sparked in the Jabali refugee camp in Gaza. Again, charitable interpretation of what that intifada was. It was protest against military or rebellion or resistance to military occupation of Palestinian life and demands for Palestinian self-determination of Palestinian political rights, of Palestinian equal rights. This is what – OK.

But again, when we're doing charitable you know charitable interpretations we have to do this consistently you can also do a charitable interpretation for the phrase juden frei that the nazis were shouting and and from their perspective explain that with that term juden frei means free of jews and if we were and the nazis were saying we're gonna we're gonna but if we if we want to be charitable to the Nazis, from their perspective, they said that they want to be free of Jewish control of the media, Jewish control of businesses, Jewish control of the banks,

Jewish control of academia. So they weren't talking about final solution. They were saying, we just want Jews out of these control of spheres of our lives. Exactly. And, you know, which the Jews weren't. But if we're going to do charitable interpretation for Hamas, we need to do charitable interpretations for the KKK, for the Nazis, we need to do charitable interpretations for the Proud Boys and for West Baptist Church.

Okay, fine. No, but I think because you and I get it, but non-Jewish Americans listening, they're like, yeah, let's be charitable to them. It's like, we can, but we need to be charitable to every terrorist organization and every terrorist regime, not just for Hamas. Fair.

So the Intifada begins in 1987, and then obviously the second Intifada, we call the second Intifada is in 2000, which was these suicide bombing campaigns in major, in cities across Israel, killed well over a thousand civilians. And thousands of Palestinian civilians, by the way. They were also caught in the web of Hamas, in the intifadas. So that's what intifada was defined here. And what I've been struck about globalized the intifada is if a

Palestinian activist in the West Bank or Gaza says the intifada was about shaking off, to use the definition you use, which is, as you said, the exact translation, shaking off the Israeli occupation, really shaking off Israeli military occupation, however violently expressed, what does it mean to globalize it? Because what I hear when I hear globalize is, so now we have to go after the tools of Israeli oppression globally, except there are no quote unquote tools of Israeli military occupation or oppression globally. So I hear in that is they want justification for going after the surrogates, supporters, and enablers of what in their minds is the occupation, which as you described earlier from that Students for Justice in Palestine statement, basically means any Jew.

Do you know what's the most successful export of Hamas to the world? What they have globalized most successfully, they invented? The suicide bomb. Hamas invented the suicide bomb. Not the Taliban, not ISIS, not Al-Qaeda. Hamas invented the suicide bomb, and that's their number one, maybe the only export to the world. When they talk about globalizing,

this is what we're globalizing. And we've seen the suicide bombs in Iraq. We've seen the suicide bombing in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, we then see it in Paris and Madrid and London. They want to globalize that. Okay. So another term we see are references to Qasam. So there was that incident on the campus where some Jewish students were speaking or organizing. They were singing Hatikvah. They were singing Hatikvah. I didn't realize that. Okay. Some Jewish students were singing Hatikvah. They were singing Hatikvah. I didn't realize that. Okay, some Jewish students were singing Hatikvah. They were singing the Israeli national anthem, which literally means the hope.

And a pro-Hamas activist stands in front of them with a sign that says, Al-Qassam Brigades, your next target, with an arrow pointing at Jewish students. American Jewish students, not Israeli Jewish students, American Jewish students. Al-Qassam Brigades is the military wing of Hamas, the exact wing that was in charge of the October 7th massacre. And they were the first Hamas unit in. They were the first wave of terrorists into Israel on October 7th. Al-Qassam Brigades is the arm that right now

is holding 133 hostages, including three U.S. citizens. So the students, protesters at Columbia, are targeting Hamas operatives to target American Jewish students and encouraging them to keep three U.S. hostages in tunnels in Rafah, you know, denying them their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Another sign you see on campus is referring to our rockets. Not Hamas' rockets, not their rockets, our rockets.

The first person plural, the use of the first person plural shows you everything you need to know about what these quote unquote peaceful protesters are all about. They are not anti-war. The other statement we hear is go back to Poland or go back to Europe. So what's that about? Getting rid of the Jews. That is ethnic cleansing. It's basically saying- We're hearing students at Columbia tell Jewish students, go back to Poland. Yeah, I've been told. You've been told. I've been told. And I've actually, a few weeks ago, posted a, it was kind of tongue in cheek, but I posted a poll on my Twitter

saying my paternal grandparents are from, my paternal grandmother was born in Latvia. My paternal grandfather was born in Haifa. My maternal grandparents were born in Romania. Where should I go back to? And the irony, of course, is that as you and I are here in Tel Aviv, you walk around the streets of Tel Aviv and the majority of people you will see here are not from Poland or Eastern Europe. They're from Morocco, Iran, Iraq, Yemen. I mean, the diversity of this place. Do you want to talk about people of color? comes from a family, what we call Sfar Adi Ta'or, which is basically people that have been in Jerusalem

for hundreds and hundreds of years. Where should he go back to? You know, it's just, it's hate. It's words that are supposed to convey yet conceal hate. It's the analogy I've given, which is very straightforward and completely applicable,

is it would be the equivalent of white Americans protesting, say, affirmative action and saying to black students, go back to Africa. That would be horrific. And the same, like, imagine them protesting DACA, the Dreamers Act, and saying, go back to Mexico, to people that were born and raised in the U.S.

I would be marching in the streets against that. I have marched in the streets against that. The other one I saw was, and we can play the audio. So what is that about, burn Tel Aviv? Now, you and I are sitting in Tel Aviv right now. It is, as I often tell people, the most liberal, progressive city one could possibly imagine. It's the only one of the – it's probably the only city in the entire Middle East where an openly gay man or an openly trans individual can walk and be themselves. It's also the first Hebrew, meaning Jewish, city ever established. And personally, it's the city where both my 4-year-old niece and my 93-year-old grandmother live.

And that's what Columbia students and faculty, we should talk about the faculty, are calling to burn down. Because the problem is not the students, it's the faculty. Well, I want to come to that. So I interviewed a woman named Maya Roman about a month ago. It was on the six-month anniversary of October 7th, who has had two cousins that were, two family members who were taken hostage in Gaza.

One of them was released, Yarden Roman was released in the November deal, and then she has one other relative, Carmel. Yeah, I met Gil. Gil has come to our marches in Central Park several times. He's an incredible person, and he's an educator. He's an amazing guy. I love him not just as a Jew or as Israeli.

I love him as an educator. Yeah. And so Maya told me in our podcast, I had her on my podcast, she said that when her cousin Yarden was being held and she got to know these Hamas operatives that were

guarding her for however long it was, 50 plus days I guess. And at one point she said to them, what's your vision for us Jews? I mean, I don't know how she phrased the question, but this came up and they said, oh, well, we're building a caliphate. We're building an Islamic caliphate. And that's what all of Israel is going to be, is a Muslim caliphate. It's a Muslim empire. And she said, well, what about the Jews that are living there? And he said, well, they can be there. It's a Muslim empire. And she said, well, what about the Jews that are living

there? And he said, well, they can be there. We'll be in charge. Every time we mention the fact that Hamas is a Muslim organization, we have to make it clear that it's a fundamentalist Muslim organization. Most Muslims in the world, including most Muslims in America, disagree with Hamas, are extremely peaceful individuals. They hate terror. They are not anti-Semitic, right? But it's the extremism. That's the problem. It's the extremist.

And people in Dearborn, Michigan, some people are also planning a caliphate, not just in Gaza, Dearborn, Michigan. And they have people supporting them in New York City at Columbia, right? Most Muslims vehemently oppose that. But unfortunately, extremists gets, you know, airtime. So when apparently, according to Maya, when Yarden was talking to these Hamas guards guarding her and they laid out this vision for what would be here, she basically described Tel Aviv.

I don't know if Tel Aviv by name, but she basically said, you do realize it's a pretty progressive place. Like there are women have rights and there are, you know, gays and lesbians and it's a very tolerant, vibrant, flourishing place. And they were like, well, no, that, you know, and so when people say, my only point is when people say burnt, they were saying, no, that's not going to be allowed. I don't know how exactly they said it. I'm paraphrasing.

But where I'm not paraphrasing is when people say burn Tel Aviv to the ground, it's not just burning a city to the ground. It's burning one of the most liberal, progressive, pluralistic, secular cities on the planet. Not in the Middle East, not in the West, on the entire planet. It's the idea of burn Western values to the ground, not in the Middle East, not in the West, on the entire planet. It's the idea of bearing Western values to the ground, right? It's the same thing as when radical students and faculty, the pro-Hamas faculty at Columbia and other schools are cheering on the Houthis, right? The Houthis are the Yemen-based terror organization that- That still have slavery. Yeah. Forget the fact that they still have institutionalized slavery.

Forget the fact that they routinely execute, publicly execute gay men just for being gay men. And forget the fact that in Houthi-controlled areas, women cannot leave the house, their home, without a male chaperone. Forget all of those facts. There are also, the Houthis right now at this very moment are shooting missiles at American ships, at US ships. And you have faculty at Columbia like Joseph Massad

and Hamid Dabishi and Catherine Frank and George Saliba and Hatem Bazian in Berkeley and all these other faculty around the country. And then you have the students cheering on the Houthis. And their chant is, Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around, meaning American ships. They are cheering on those that are shooting missiles

at U.S. troops. To me, that's the story. It's not Israel. It's not Jews. It's definitely not shai davidai the story is that this is the war on terror and universities many universities have been taken over by those that support and are actually part of the terror i now want to ask you about the faculty yeah because the students are a big part of the story. And yet what we saw with the most recent encampment is there was talk about the NYPD coming in to remove the most,

breaking up the most recent encampment and the faculty come out and show solidarity with the- No, they don't show solidarity. They show leadership. Here's my concern. The students will grow out of it. When you have to pay rent and not your parents pay rent, or God forbid when you have to pay a mortgage, you're no longer a Marxist. You're no longer a revolutionary. But come August, the faculty will get a new crop of 17 and 18 year old students whose minds they can brainwash. At Columbia, we have someone like Joseph Mossad. Joseph Mossad is a professor at the Middle East Institute at Columbia.

He's a tenured professor. On October 8th, meaning that he started writing this on October 7th, on October 8th, he published a blog in electronicintifada.com praising... Which is, just explain what that is, electronic. It's like a platform for... Look, it's a Hamas,

it's a bullhorn for Hamas, but it's based in the US and they are doing nothing illegal, so they can do that. It's free speech. Joseph Mossad published a blog post saying that the massacre of October 7th was, and I quote, awesome.

Now, lest you don't understand exactly what he means, at the top of the blog post, there's a picture. And the picture is of the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, with guns a-blazing. Okay? So we got him. We got Hamid Dabishi, who has said so many horrible things about Jews throughout his career that it's hard to even find what it is. And he said that Zionism is the root of all evil.

You have Catherine Frank, a professor at the law school, who has said that Israeli students who have served in the IDF, which I remind everyone is mandatory service, Israeli students who served in the IDF are a danger on campus. She doesn't care, you know, basically she doesn't care what they believe in. Just by serving in the IDF, being Israeli makes them a danger. You got George Saliba, you got Joseph Howley, you got Susan Bernofsky, you got a letter of a hundred, more than a hundred

professors at Columbia who signed on a letter calling October 7th a military response, raping teenage girls, kidnapping Kfir Bibas, who is a nine month old baby baby for them is a military response now in 2004 there was a movie called columbia unbecoming it's on youtube everyone can find it it's 43 minutes long and in columbia unbecoming it's a it's a movie made by jewish students about their experiences with these exact same people joseph masad hamid the bishi George Saliba. The university knew about this in 2004, and they even had a committee investigating Joseph Mossad. And who was on the committee? All his friends and allies, who then found him, you know, innocent.

He then got tenure. So this is not something new. This has been percolating under the surface by these pro-Hamas professors. And the last professor that I want to mention, because this person deserves an honorable mention, Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Chair of History in the Department of Middle East Institute. Middle East Studies. Middle East Studies at Columbia, yeah. And he's one of the most well-known historians of the Middle East. Yeah. And he's one of the most well-known. Well-known historian. Historians of the Middle East.

Yeah. All you need to know about Rashid Khalidi is Google Rashid Khalidi, PLO spokesperson, 1970s. The PLO was the main terrorist organization killing Jews. His wife was a writer. Rashid Khalidi's wife was a writer for Wafa, the PLO's newspaper. And she was the assistant dean of graduate studies at Columbia. This goes deep. And I have been warning people about this for six months.

And Jews have been warning about this for two decades. And no one has been paying attention. And you and I both know why. Let's fast forward to right now. The president of Colombia, do you know her? She has never replied to my emails. Okay. Do you know much about her history?

I know what everyone knows from Wikipedia. She was born in Egypt to a Muslim family that fled during the Nazi revolution in the mid 50s. The Nazi revolution. Yeah, Nazi revolution. She grew up in the US and the UK. She's a baroness. She was, before Columbia, the president of London School of Economics.

She left under dubious circumstances after being named personally in a lawsuit by a professor at the London School of Economics in a, sorry, millions of pounds lawsuit against the university for harassment and discrimination. So she initially authorized the NYPD to come onto campus and remove and arrest close to 100 people the day she was testifying before Congress. No, so she testified in Congress on Wednesday, last Wednesday. She lied under oath, and we need to make that clear.

She lied under oath. This was on April 19th? I believe it was 19th. She was caught by Representative Elise Stefanik lying under oath, and she said, you know, she lied about a professor, Dr. Muhammad Abduh being terminated because he's the person that was hired after October 7th and said that he is not- April 17th, not April 19th, sorry. That she lied about Dr. Muhammad Abduh who said that he identified with Hamas and Hezbollah,

that he's been terminated. And Elise Stefanik said, no, right now he's in the illegal encampment. Would you like to change your testimony? That means that she lied. She lied about Joseph Mossad no longer being the chair of this committee, he's still the chair. She lied about him being investigated. He said he's not being under investigation. She lied several times under oath.

The very next day, to create some media appearance or something, kind of like how Trump brought in the guards to disperse the White House so he can get a photo op with a Bible. She made a whole show of bringing in NYPD to disperse, to arrest some of the illegal encampment. They arrested 108 protesters, including Ilhan Omar's daughter, who's one of the main organizers, and who is one of the people in the House Education and Workforce Committee who's investigating Colombia for the terrorist activity. So... The committee is investigating it.

The committee is investigating it. The committee is run by the majority, by the House majority, which are the Republicans. She's in the minority on this committee, but she still has a role in this committee's investigation. Her daughter is in the middle of these. So she's a double agent. She is supporting Hamas on campus and then investigating, in quotes, investigating support for Hamas on campus. Right.

So she made this whole scene, President Shafiq, of bringing in the police in a very New York City turnstile manner. Two hours later, they were back on campus emboldened with more tents. And this has been going on today's day nine of the illegal encampment. And I want to make something clear because people say, like, what could she do? On day one, she could have turned on the sprinklers. On day two, she could have turned on the sprinklers. On day two, she could have turned on the sprinklers. Day three and four and five and six and seven and eight. Turn on the sprinklers would have dispersed everyone.

Yeah. Would you camp in a muddy encampment where you can't because it's wet? Of course not. But it's not an unable, it's an unwilling. And couldn't she ask Mayor Adams to bring in the NYPD to remove people like she did last week? Yeah. And she got a lot of flack and she's afraid. So very now- She got a lot of flack from faculty? What's the pressure point? What's she afraid of? Who is she afraid of? I don't know because-

I mean, if the faculty, can they express a vote of no confidence in some way on her that would put her job in jeopardy? When you make more than a million dollars a year, all you're concerned about is keeping your job for another month. And that's what she does. She might be afraid of the Qatari money that she gets for the Ducha campus. She might be afraid of losing her pro-Hamas supporters on the faculty. She might be afraid of losing control of the studentamas supporters on the faculty. She might be afraid of losing control of the student body. I don't know. But Columbia University... But she's also watched what's happened to Claudine Gay

and what's happened to the president at Penn. So she's got to wonder, wait a minute, if I don't get ahead of this and get a handle on it... No, no, but we got to remember, Claudine Gay was not forced out because she can't save a genocide of the Jews is bad. She was forced out because of plagiarism. I understand. But there was, yes, but there was a series of events that were catalyzed. Same thing happened to Liz Gill at New Penn.

I'm just saying she can see where the trajectory goes. How is she not looking at this and saying, I have pogroms basically on my campus and the whole world is watching. The whole world is watching. Because she doesn't care. She doesn't care. She might care, but not enough. Her care for the Jewish students and faculty and staff doesn't pass the threshold of action. That is why she's negotiating with the Hamas organizers on

campus, with the faculty, and the only people that are not in the negotiation table are the Jews. The only, like you would think that me being the most vocal proponent of the Jewish students on campus since October 12th, you'd think that I would be part of those negotiations to make sure that whatever agreement they get with the terrorists, that the Jewish students would be safe, but she doesn't care. That is why I have never, she's never reached out to me since October. Neither have any of the trustees reached out to me since October. David Greenwald and Claire Shipman, who made a huge deal of like how Columbia is perfect place on Congress. They've never even thought about reaching out to me. The one person who's speaking out and saying like, hey,

the Jews are in danger here. Listen to the Jewish students, not the faculty, not the staff. Listen to the 19-year-old students. They have never had the human decency of reaching out. We don't care. Okay. I want to... You know what?

Can I also say something about the mayor? Yeah. Because I've been speaking with the mayor's people for days now, asking them like, if this was the KKK illegal encampment on campus, you would have found a way. If this was Proud Boys,

you would have found a way. If this was the West Baptist Church saying kill all LGBTQ students, you would have found the way. You need to find a way, even though it's a private institution. And also, you have to remember, it's not just at the university. It's in all New York City. Jews have been changing their names on Uber.

Jews have been taking off their mezuzahs. Why are you not acting to restore safety for Jewish students? Earlier today, I was shot down by the, let me get his title exact, Menashe Shapiro, a Jew, who's the deputy chief of staff for Mayor Eric Adams. He shot me down on Twitter saying, yeah, we're doing everything, blah, blah, blah, basically. So I want to say something about that because, you know, Mayor Adams, you remember when he said we're not okay? Yeah. He speaks so beautifully.

He doesn't act. I tapped Menashe Shapiro, his deputy chief of staff, telling him that I would like to speak with the mayor about the concerns of Israeli and Jewish faculty, staff, and students throughout the city. I would be happy to speak with you whenever you have the time. Thank you so much. You know, he said, thank you for reaching out. You know, he tried. We never, never followed. He never followed through. I texted him again, October 25 25 and it just didn't happen it just never followed through on february 1st i sent him

this thing where there were posters on campus depicting all israelis as skunks there's a picture of a skunk in blue and white with the Israeli flag saying, beware skunk on campus. You know, never got a response. In April 16th, I sent him a series of videos from protests in the city, not in Colombia, in the city, but within our lifetime, within our lifetime is this domestic terror organization for lack of better words, who in 2021 beat Joey Bogle to a pulp only because he was Jewish after one of their protests. Send him a video where they say that every,

that burn it all down, meaning America, burn it all, where they burn American flags, which is their freedom of speech, but it shows their intentions, where they said about Bin Laden, but he did what he had to do. I never got a response from him, never got a response. So, and again, and again, I've been sending the mayor's people since October 23rd, and they've never done anything. They're passing the buck to Colombia's president because we're saying it's a private institution. So, you know, basically we don't care. Well, my kid, my eight-year-old kid is a Jew and a Zionist.

And he goes to public school in New York City. And he is not President Shafiq's concern. He is Mayor Eric Adams' concern. So Mayor Eric Adams said we're not okay. Well, I'm telling you now, you're not part of we. We are not okay because you are not doing anything. And it's unfortunate for me to see because I'm aligned with his politics and he seems like a great guy, but he's a politician and I'm not. I'm just someone who cares.

And you're saying your eight-year-old is experiencing in public schools this kind of... Well, my eight-year-old personally hasn't yet, but another kid in school, another Israeli in art class, they had free time to draw. And he drew two things. He drew the Star of David, and he drew that sign for the release of the hostages. And his teacher came up to him and said, you can't draw that. That can be provocative to some people. And this is in a very, very, I would say, bougie public school in New York City.

The students at Columbia. So Columbia is a world-class educational institution, one of the great educational institutions in the United States in the world. I agree. This feels different to me from, say, the protest during the, not that I was alive or aware then, but I've studied it, the Vietnam War protests, where there were fierce disagreements. Sometimes the debates went off the rails, but they were basically mostly populated by students who didn't want to serve in Vietnam and were protesting the idea that their people their age were being used in their words as cannon fodder for this war, ultimately 56,000 Americans killed in the Vietnam War.

Again, one can disagree with the policies and debate the policies, but there was a basic understanding of what was going on and then there was a debate about whether or not the US should be involved there. I'm watching this play out at Columbia and other campuses, and I'm thinking the narrative, the settler colonialists, the settler colonial narrative, the genocide narrative, these are just factually, factually incorrect. There's no truth to it. And there's this whole movement that has been fomented around just insane misinformation. One of the best education institutions in the world. Like what has been going on at this school?

I know you don't work in the admissions department, you teach, but what kind of students have schools like Columbia been not only admitting, but seeking out? They've been seeking out a certain kind of student and they've got them. They got it because you see them populated all over now. And by the way, to your point, it's not just what they say about Israel. It's a proxy for what they feel about America and the West. What's happened here? How has this happened? Yeah. So first of all, I have to say the comparisons to the Vietnam protests are just so wrong and are doing an injustice to the brave men and women who oppose the Vietnam War.

Because those protests were anti-war. They were not pro-Viet Cong. They weren't chanting, yay, Viet Cong, kill another American soldier. They're saying, let's stop the war. What they're saying now, the protests now, are not anti-war. They are pro-Hamas. So it's doing a disservice to them. Yeah. I will say David Horowitz from the Times of Israel, I just heard him quoted saying, the language that's being used on American campuses today is the rhetoric of mass murder. They are using rhetoric that advocates for mass murder. If they are using October 7th as a symbol for action, it is the celebration and the call to action for mass murder. Exactly. But to your question of what is going on, it's two-pronged. One is in admissions.

These universities, and Columbia is no different, but these many, many universities, their admission rate is so low, basically means that almost all of the students coming in have perfect GPAs in high school, have perfect SAT scores. So they start selecting them on something else, what we call the holistic student. So what do you select for? You select for social activism. And you select for the people that are most vocal in their social activism. Now, when I was in high school, I used to volunteer in the Sheba Hospital in the Teenage Cancer Awards playing chess and checkers with students. Which is the largest hospital here in Israel.

I used to volunteer. It's not far from where we are. It's outside of Tel Aviv. In youth organizations, in day camps. This is not what many of the students who are protesting, that's not their background. Well, you're saying it's not what the college admissions department are seeking out. They are looking for social activists. Meaning political activists.

Yeah. But what we're seeing now is not politics. Right. I'm right. Political sounds too conventional. It's too conventional. They're looking for activists. Activists in the United States right now, many of them are really, really, really good people.

Some of them are instigators. And that's the people that get in. But that's from the admission part. From the education part. You can go and spend four years in the Department for Middle East Studies, and for four years not hear one opposing view about Israel. Because, for lack of a better word, the Zionist or pro-Israeli or even moderate voices have been purged from Columbia University,

and I think many other universities. And that's not how you get critical thinking. Critical thinking happens when you go to one class and the professor is extremely convincing. And when you go to another class and that professor is extremely convincing. The problem is that they don't agree with each other. So you spend some time in your dorm with friends or you go get a drink with friends or you walk around in the park and you try to make sense of that. And you pull, you know, from each professor's class, you pull some ideas that, you know, what can you agree with? And that's when you become a critical thinker. And these universities and Columbia at the top has

given up on critical thinking. It's indoctrination. When you go for four years and you only hear one view, and it doesn't matter if it's about Israel or anything else, you become indoctrinated, right? And look, many of the things that Columbia and other schools are indoctrinating students, I agree with. I agree with. You know, in my values, I agree with trans rights. But I think we should also have opposing views on campus. Smart, research-based, thought-out opposing views. Not so we can weaken my conviction, but to strengthen my conviction. Because it will force me to think more critically about my own values.

It will force me to think more critically about my own values. It will force me to think more critically about how I view the world and then reject all the things that are not strongly based and keep the things that are really based in science and research. But Columbia has given up on that. Two final questions before we wrap. One is the press tends to focus on this very small, but clearly very vocal segment of the pro-Hamas demonstrations that are Jewish, that they say there are some Jewish students in the encampment. What is your response to that? I've got a lot of flack for what I'm going to say right now, but I'm not a politician.

My only belief is in the truth, so I'm going to say what I believe in. Our people have always had kapos. We've always had yudin ruts. Going back to the second temple, we've had the high priest who cooperated with the Greeks and the Romans, who were trying to annihilate us. We've always had those Jews who either have been brainwashed or believe that this can somehow save them. And my view is you're fighting me, but I'm fighting for you. Because just like Israel accepted the Kapos and the Judenrats, they will accept JVP, Jewish

Voice for Peace, because it's not a huge achievement to be on the last train to Auschwitz. So I understand the press. It makes a sensational story. And by the way, the pro-Hamas mob, they are pushing those Jews to the front and center. They don't care about their views. They only care about the fact that they are Jews. In the same way that racist whites push the few African Americans who say that racism doesn't exist. Just because an African American says that racism doesn't exist doesn't make it true. Racism exists.

Just like in the same way that homophobic and transphobic individuals push the one or two lgbtq individuals who say no i feel perfectly fine they push them to the front because they're a fig leaf so of course we're always going to have those jews yeah i uh yeah i i have um it's a phenomenon that has um existed for uh for some time and um like i said it's a very very small uh group you know the new york times had this piece the other day some some jews at columbia feel i forget what the line was under pressure or stressed some jews do as though there's a division and there are some who who are and they never like during post george floyd protests they didn't say some blacks are opposed yeah remember remember when dennis rodman

uh flew to north korea to hang out with kim jong-un some americans love north korea right so why why being war why why have sanctions you know you you understand understand the craziness. People that a lot of them are seekers of attention. And we have faculty like Susan Bernofsky. I personally know her. I personally know her. My wife was her student. She's a Jew.

Hamas won't stop and ask you, where were you? What did you stand for? They didn't stop to ask you, where were you? You know, what did you stand for? Like, they didn't stop to ask Vivian Silvan, the peace activist who was murdered, butchered. She dedicated her life to coexistence with Palestinians. And she was butchered by them. She was murdered on October 7th. And they didn't, and they

don't stop to ask, you know, nine-month-old Kfir Bibas, the baby who can't even speak, where do you stand on this? A student I know at Harvard told me that early on after October 7th, when the anti-Israel protests were beginning, he was struck that they made sure to always, quote unquote, feature one of these Jewish activists. And it was always just one or two or three because there weren't that many of them. But just by having them there, it had this legitimizing. It's a brilliant strategy. It's a nefarious strategy. And by the way, if you look up Jews for Hitler, there were Jews for Hitler. So maybe we shouldn't have fought Hitler because there were

Jews for Hitler. My final question for you, Shai, is where do we go from here? In other words, give me some hope. Let's end this because it's a pretty dark time. And I think what's interesting about you and I both being in Israel right now, I think one of the things that struck me about being with Israelis is as awful as what they have been dealing with and as shattered as the country feels, there is a sense of agency. People have agency here. They say, okay, we got blindsided, we got massacred, we are going to be dealing with this trauma for a long time, but we also have the capacity to fight back. And we also have the capacity to restore security. And I feel that part of the

trauma for American Jews and British Jews and Canadian Jews and Australian Jews and French Jews, whoever, is the lack of agency, the sense that they just feel like sitting ducks in this country that they had become fully integrated into and were fully assimilated into. And they felt like equals, not only equals, very influential citizens in their respective countries in the diaspora. And now they feel like all that influence and all that power is kind of meaningless because we don't have just basic agency as Jews. Tell me where we go from here.

Where we go from here is an understanding, not Jewish people, Jews and non-Jews in the United States, understanding that what we're facing is terrorism and support for terrorism on American soil. And understanding that this is not a political issue. This is not left versus right. This is about extremism. And we need to make sure that we fight extremism of any sort in the United States. What that means is there are some actionable things we should be doing.

The first and foremost we should be doing is passing some sort of legislation about educational finance reform. Just like we have campaign finance reform, who we want to have complete transparency when we vote for a politician to make sure that no one's buying them off. We need to know exactly where Columbia and Harvard and Berkeley and all these other schools are getting their money. Because we know they're getting money from Qatar and China and Russia and many in the axis of quote-unquote resistance. We need to know who is buying real estate in our faculty and students'

minds. And we need to know exactly. And we know that a lot of these countries use this funnel money through proxies. Universities that get even $1 of federal funding should be completely transparent of whatever sources of income they have. That's one thing. To fight terrorism, you need to know who's paying for it. The other thing is we need to have accountability, complete accountability. And with students, that means that if you support terrorism, and I don't care if it's terrorism against Jews or against African Americans

or against immigrants or against, I don't care if it's terrorism against Jews or against African Americans or against immigrants or again I don't care you're out you're not our nation's best you're out we also need accountability for faculty now that's more complicated because faculty have the tenure system I'm not tenured by the way so I I face accountability but faculty that don't have tenure, but have tenure don't face accountability. They can do whatever they want. They can sit, they can stand in the middle of campus and celebrate 9-11 and call for five more 9-11s, and no one can do anything to them. We need to find a way to restore accountability in academia. I'm not smart enough to say what the way is.

And then the third thing is, we need to find a way to restore accountability in Congress. When Congress member Ilhan Omar has an obvious, obvious conflict of interest, where her daughter is one of the organizers of the pro-Hamas protests where the committee that she serves on is investigating those protests. That's an obvious, obvious conflict of interest. When Rashida Tlaib receives money from the lobbying arm

of American Muslims for Palestine, who supports National Students for Justice in Palestine, who supports Hamas, who fundraises for Hamas, or has fundraised for Hamas. When Rashid Atlaib gets money, when we don't have accountability. We need accountability in Congress, we need accountability in academia, and we need to wake up. We need to wake up. The Jews have woken up, not because we chose to woke up, because we were forced to wake up on October 7th. And Americans need to realize, non-Jewish Americans need to realize that they

need to wake up as well, because it's coming. And all you have to look at is who is supporting the student protests right now. I wrote a list today because I saw who's tweeting about it. The Ayatollah of the Iranian, the IDRC, right? The fundamentalist Ayatollah of Iran expressed his support for the universities the Hamas official Hamas spokesperson expressed his support for the protests on American colleges the PFLP and the Fatah youth in Gaza so basically Hitler youth expressed their support for what is happening on U.S. campuses. There is an axis of resistance. It's Iran, it's Hezbollah, it's Hamas, it's the Houthis, and it's college campuses in the U.S. And until people realize that, nothing will change.

My biggest concern is that they'll realize it a moment too late. Shad Avidai, we will leave it there. Thank you for meeting here in Tel Aviv, this island of liberalism and true progressivism in a sea of... You know what Tel Aviv literally means? Tel is hill and Aviv is spring. It's a hill of spring. It's rejuvenation. It's hope for everyone. And, you know, I'm going to walk out of here and I'll probably see, you know, within 10 minutes, a genderqueer Palestinian man. Right. Israeli Arab.

Israeli Arab. Yeah. In Tel Aviv. Yeah. And I'll see an Orthodox Jew and I'll see a Druze Israeli and I'll see all different races and nationalities and ethnicities in this so-called apartheid state. This is where we've gotten to that reality and what people think of reality are completely two different things. But it's great being here. Thank you for having me. Thank you.

It was an important conversation. I hope we can do it again. Until then, we will leave it there. And Shabbat Shalom. Shabbat Shalom. And by the way, if people want to follow you, I know they're... Yes, it's very simple. On Twitter and on Instagram,

it's Shai Davidayim. All right, Shai Davidayim. We'll post it in the show notes. Again, thank you. And Shabbat Shalom and continued Chag Sameach, despite the madness. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Hu ergo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor. Thank you.