The three deans include Cristen Kromm, the former dean of undergraduate student life; Matthew Patashnick, the former associate dean for student and family support; and Susan Chang-Kim, the former vice dean and chief administrative officer.
The suspension of the deans is the latest example of how Ivy League schools have moved to squash any speech critical of Israel or simply challenging the view that students who express pro-Palestinian sentiment are inciting antisemitism.
Columbia has been the spotlight of the student protest movement in solidarity with Gaza over the past several months.
Colombia University officially said they believe anti Zionism is antisemitism.
Columbia Task Force for Dealing With Campus Protests Declares That Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitism
This is ironic because in the opinion piece by Rabbi Hain published in the Columbia student newspaper, he complains that
For years, Columbia’s Palestinian freedom movement has differentiated between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, affirming that one can be critical of Israel without being anti-Semitic. But by using the October 7 attacks as a rallying point for the movement, attendees of the campus rally can no longer argue that their activism differentiates between the two. They are now saying the quiet part out loud: Dead Jews don’t matter.
So here he’s trying to accuse pro-Palestine students for conflating Anti-Zionism and antisemitism, when in fact groups like the Anti-Defamation League and American Israel Public Affairs Committee have been doing this exact same thing for years! And now even the US Congress is in on the action.
This is precisely why conflating to two is wrong: it dilutes the term “antisemitism” so much that people start to roll their eyes when they see it being weaponized to silence criticism of Israel, which then makes it harder to protect Jewish people from actual anti-semitic attacks.
Israel’s media manipulation often seems to be shockingly short-sighted. They’ll lie about something that will get discovered within a week but do it anyway despite how it discredits their later efforts. Remember that calendar of terrorists doing shifts in the hospital guarding hostages? It was just the days of the week in Arabic. Like there’s no way the IDF doesn’t have someone who can read Arabic readily available. So why lie about that? It’s almost immediately debunkable. They’ve grown overconfident due to the long term special relationship and lobbying efforts, but those sorts of thing can be destroyed if treated carelessly.
Discrediting charges of anti-Semitism for short term benefit is right in line.
What does it matter? Anyone with the power to do something against them, doesn’t care about their lies and supports them unconditionally. All they need to do is control their internal media cycle so that the “wins”, no matter how fake, are present enough that the Israeli citizens don’t care about the correction a week later, because there’s a new lie to get behind.
They’re taking a page out of Russia’s playbook and it’s working.
