After Columbia University’s president was filleted by a House Committee earlier this month and the spotlight was turned on the mobs taunting and intimidating Jewish students there, Columbia’s faculty served angry notice that they expected to be in charge, not the university administration. Faculty would decide what was anti-Semitism, whether it was real or imagined and whether anything needed to be done about it.

Proclaimed the faculty.

Here’s a problem.

Within hours of Hamas’ Oct. 7 mass slaughter of 1,200 Israelis who were acting like colonialists by dancing at a music festival and sleeping in their beds, Columbia faculty were already out there defending the slaughter, issuing statements that the dismembering, burning alive, gangland-style execution, rape and kidnapping of innocents had to be “contextualized.” Prominent professors raced one another to pronounce the mass murders “astounding,” “striking,” “innovative,” and “awesome.”

That was before Israel lifted a finger in its own defense, before the supposed “genocide” that Columbia’s campers indict Israel for – the supposed “genocide” that they claim they are protesting.

So that when they claim that the encampments are about this supposed “genocide’ – Israel responding to an attempted genocide in order to prevent further genocidal attacks – they are being, well, mendacious.

But at Columbia, mendacity metastasizes worse than anti-Semitism.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of raw annihilationism at Columbia, we learn from its faculty that there’s nothing to see here.

Interesting.

Here is what Columbia’s mobs have been screaming in recent days:

“We’re all Hamas!”

“Oh,  Hamas, hit Tel Aviv!”

“Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here!”

“7th of October is going to be every day for you!”

“We don’t want no two states; we’re gonna take all of it!”

And so forth.

A toxic brew of raw anti-Semitism, support for the murder of Jews barely prettified as “anti-Zionism,” huge amounts of Middle Eastern petrodollars and the ever-fashionable call for Israeli’s obliteration has made Columbia a deeply diseased enterprise, perhaps a terminally diseased one.

Columbia’s new line is that the hate comes not from its community but from outside agitators. This line fared poorly last week, when a video surfaced of one Khymani James, a Columbia student, repeating endlessly that Zionists “don’t deserve to live,” that they should all be killed and that he would do the killing himself. “The existence of them and the projects they have built, i.e., Israel, it’s all antithetical to peace. So yes, I feel very comfortable – very comfortable – calling for these people to die,” James said. “Be glad, be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists,” he added.

Asked if he had any concerns about these statements, he replied “No. Taking someone’s life in certain case scenarios is necessary and better for the world.”

As for the line that the anti-Semitism isn’t coming from Columbia students? James is not only a Columbia student, he is actually one of the leaders of Columbia’s anti-Israel demonstrations. His own statements demonstrate his bona fides as a full-throttled endorser of Hamas; he is very well-suited indeed to be head of Columbia’s chapter of Friends of Murder, Incorporated.

When the video went viral, James, whose stated goal was to be in Congress, knew what to do. He had “misspoken,” he said.

So what now?

The notion that Columbia’s stakeholders, or for that matter those of Harvard, MIT or the University of Pennsylvania, are obliged to continue subsidizing these institutions is not an intuitive one. The same is true of American taxpayers, who are not required to forever indulge the use of federal funds to support institutions that thumb their noses at civil rights laws. And if there were ever a time to scrutinize the billions of dollars in Qatari and Saudi cash that purchase Mideast studies centers and sympathetic faculty members, now is that time.

Like some other institutions, Columbia has gotten away with protecting anti-Semitism for too long. The proverbial chickens have come to roost in unfortunate ways. It is past time to do something about it.

Jeff Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald.

Khymani James, seen here after resigning from the Boston Student Advisory Council in 2021, has stated as a Columbia University student that Zionists “don’t deserve to live.” (Staff photo by Nicolaus Czarnecki/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald)