Michael Oren: FBI must investigate money trail behind campus antisemitic protests

Starting April 17, pro-Palestinian students at Columbia University established the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, launching a campaign demanding that the university divest from Israel. The New York-based Ivy League school joins universities across the United States, such as Emerson, Vanderbilt, Yale, and the University of California, Berkeley that have seen similar protests, along with a rise in reported antisemitic incidents.

The Media Line spoke to former Israeli Ambassador to the US and Columbia alumnus Michael Oren, who expressed deep concern over the situation. He described the current campus climate as "intolerable, unacceptable, and exceedingly dangerous," impacting not only Jews but also the broader Western society. Oren traced the origins of these sentiments back to the 1960s youth revolutions. 

After their initial failure, he said, these movements embedded themselves in academia, subtly promoting anti-establishment ideologies over decades. “They went back into the campus and spent 50 years instilling their ideas into students and professors to inspire government officials and corporate executives on this particular set of self-declared anti-establishment ideas as trojan horses for antisemitism.” 

Anti-war protests of today are actually pro-war

Oren drew parallels between the 1968 anti-war riots and today's campus movements, which he views as pro-war due to their exclusion of Israel.

This shift has notably affected disciplines like American Studies, which have become distinctly anti-American, Oren continued. He also pointed out that even some Jewish academics have joined the anti-Israel chorus, failing to recognize the potential negative consequences for themselves. “They fail to see that this path also ends badly for them.”

Reflecting on Passover, Oren cited the Haggadah's story of the Wicked Son, which he believes mirrors the stance of those who don’t identify with their own people and criticize Israel's defenders. “It's the best image for these people who keep saying that if you defend Israel, you’re a bad Jew. Eventually, they’ll become one of the bad Jews themselves. This movement is a deep-seated cultural trend that has taken decades to evolve, and undoing it may also take decades,” said Oren.

Oren criticized university administrators for not taking a firmer stand earlier. “These demonstrations are orchestrated and funded from outside. These aren’t spontaneous demonstrations,” he said. He called for an FBI investigation into the protests' origins, emphasizing the threat they pose to campus safety. “Jewish students, professors, and staff can’t go on campus. 

Oren stressed the limits of free speech, particularly when it incites violence or supports terrorism, “which, by the way, is illegal in America,” he said.

“These people need to be prosecuted, but in the end, this isn’t a job for local police. This requires federal agencies to stop foreign agents from sewing chaos in America and its allies,” concluded the former ambassador.

Ariel Beery, a 2005 Columbia graduate, echoed Oren's sentiments about the long-term origins of these antisemitic trends. Beery discussed the strategy of Israel's enemies, who, unable to defeat Israel militarily, have turned to soft power and funding guerrilla groups to challenge Israel. "These protests represent the soft-power strategy of Israel's enemies," he stated.

“Anti-Western interests recognized that the leverage point was students and professors,” he said. “Many of these academics would shape many minds, so even if a small percentage of those students remain anti-Zionist years after flirting with the idea, the compounding effect becomes significant.”

Anti-Western values are prolific

Beery also highlighted the influence of certain academic and financial practices at Columbia during his time there. “As a student at Columbia from 2002 to 2005, I worked at the Middle East Institute as a research assistant. One of my regular duties was to type up and send thank you notes from the director to various donors, most of whom were oil companies or their proxy organizations and foundations. Nearly none of these were reported by the university at the time,” he said. 

“Many donations,” he asserted, “are made just below the legal reporting requirement.”

“As a research assistant at the Middle East Institute, I observed how donations just below the legal reporting requirement influenced the curriculum," he revealed. According to Beery, these contributions supported courses in local high schools that presented a curriculum biased against Israel, perpetuating negative perceptions among young students.

“One day, the new director, Rashid Khalidi, who sat on a newly donated Edward Said Chair, asked me to send a letter he wrote to Saudi Aramco,” shared Ariel.

“In the letter, he thanked them for their generous donation to enable professors from the institute to teach a course on Middle East studies in local high schools using a curriculum not friendly toward Israel. Courses such as that one have persisted for decades. This is one reason hundreds of high school students in New York find the motivation to protest Israel and target their teachers. Such programs were regularly sponsored, a visible example of how Israel’s enemies worked first to capture academic departments and then to propagate messages throughout the next generation of politicians, business, and community leaders,” Ariel concluded.