75 Columbia U Profs Call Hamas Atrocities on Israelis “Military Action” in New Letter

Edited by:  Fern Sidman

A letter signed by over 75 professors at Columbia University in New York City defended the claim that the heinous atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians on October 7th can be viewed as a “military action” that must be put “within the larger context of the occupation of Palestine by Israel,” as was reported by Algemeiner.com.

An earlier statement from students at the university said, “if every political avenue available to Palestinians is blocked, we should not be surprised when resistance and violence break out,” the Algemeiner.com report indicated. The new letter, titled “Grave Concerns About the Well-Being of Our Students,” sought to defend this statement.”

In their letter, the Columbia University professors claim that students that hold pro-Palestinian views at the university have been “viciously targeted with doxing, public shaming, surveillance by members of our community, including other students, and reprisals from employers,”  according to the report on the Algemeiner.com web site.

“In our view, the student statement aims to recontextualize the events of Oct. 7, 2023, pointing out that military operations and state violence did not begin that day, but rather it represented a military response by a people who had endured crushing and unrelenting state violence from an occupying power over many years,” the professors’ statement continued. “One could regard the events of Oct. 7 as just one salvo in an ongoing war between an occupying state and the people it occupies, or as an occupied people exercising a right to resist violent and illegal occupation.”

Algemeiner.com also reported that the statement from the Columbia professors also appeared to defend the students’ calls for the Morningside Heights university to cancel all academic partnerships with Israeli institutions and the false description of Israel as an “apartheid state.” Also noted in the letter from the professors was that the student letter demanded “the university cease issuing statements that favor the suffering and death of Israelis or Jews over the suffering and death of Palestinians, and/or that fail to recognize how challenging this time has been for all students, not just some,” Algemeiner.com reported.

Algemeiner.com also reported that among those professors who gave their imprimatur to the letter were some high profile academics such as Nadia Abu El-Haj, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Mahmood Mamdani and Rashid Khalidi.

The statement came two weeks after an Israeli student at Columbia University was beaten with a stick on the school campus by another student in an apparent hate crime, the Algemeiner.com reported. The professors made no mention of the incident in the letter.

On October 12, the New York Post reported that according to the New York Police Department, the 24-year-old Israeli student was assaulted right outside Butler Library, located at 535 W. 114th St., after an argument over the war that Hamas launched against Israel escalated into a physical altercation. The suspect, identified as Maxwell Friedman from Brooklyn, was arrested and charged with assault the Post report said. The victim, who was studying at Columbia’s School of General Studies, chose not to seek medical attention at the scene.

The victim reported that the incident was connected to his identity as an Israeli. The Post report said that he claimed that he confronted the woman after witnessing her tearing down flyers displaying the names and pictures of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas.

Following the October 7th invasion by Hamas, a large rally was held on Columbia’s campus in which demonstrators waved Palestinian flags and chanted “From the river to the sea” — a slogan commonly used to refer to the erasure of Israel from the map — and “Palestine is here and proud.”

Prominent American universities such as Columbia and Harvard, among others, have faced widespread backlash from students, alumni, and donors in the wake of what many argue were insufficient responses to anti-Semitism on campus since Oct. 7, as was reported by Algemeiner.com.

Hamas’ Oct. 7 onslaught was the deadliest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.