Once upon a time, my family was radical. Fortunately my parents were motivated by love, and yes ambition, but ultimately not by love of conflict. That’s a long story. In today’s news we have a matter of some import - which is how to deal with the territorial beast inside all of human hearts.
What we are talking about are very much the matter of revolutionary dreams. They are the dreams hosted by some students and faculty of Columbia University as represented by CUAD - Columbia University Apartheid Divest and its putative leader Mahmoud Khalil.
What I’m trying to entertain here is an archive of long form blogging or whatever you might like to call the writing I have done since 2003, now hosted at Substack. I have been provoked by an individual in the unusually open comments section in my retrospective of the sort of asymmetrical warfare which is now the commonplace of the wretched of the earth. Some have the temerity to call this sort of action ‘free speech’, but I think it’s more accurate to call it ‘culture war’. As information is the ammunition, some of it of mass destruction and some of it pure dud, I will spend some time editing it my way.
So we start here:
Columbia University Apartheid Divest Who we are.pdf
Columbia University President Dr. Minouche Shafik resigns months after campus protests.pdf
Columbia removes three deans from power for ‘very troubling’ antisemitic text messages CNN Business.pdf
Columbia student group retracts apology of member who said ‘Zionists deserve to die’.pdf
Essay Columbia University President What I Plan to Tell Congress Tomorrow.pdf
I Was a Columbia Student Journalist. Here’s What to Know About Mahmoud Khalil. 1.pdf
I am a Palestinian political prisoner in Louisiana. I am being targeted for my activism Mahmoud Khalil.pdf
Responding to Federal Action Office of the President.pdf
This archive is a zip file
MD5 (CUAD_Package_2025-03-21.zip) = 5fc10852ed1cc70e8a85b90a42fa360d
Comments are open here. If you have any suggestions for more documents that should be kept in mind always and forever, once this matter is off the current radar, please give a suggestion. They will be rendered into PDF and then zipped and the archive updated as will the name and date and MD5 signature. In time, I may add a PGP signature.
This is our opportunity to share those documents we find most convincing as they are produced by any and all media. I will always provide them for our mutual educational purpose and never behind a paywall, which I believe is the substance of fair use.
Comments will be closed on the original post here:
The Problem With Empowerment
I have a gripe against empowerment. It is that we expect wonders to occur by symbolic acclaim. Merit be damned.
As graduate of Columbia '64, the biggest single take away from the CUAD documents is that two totalitarian belief systems - Jihadism and Wokism have joined forces - and undermined a critical role of universities - the conscientious transmission of culture from one generation to the next to equip the rising generation with as much knowledge and understanding as possible to navigate the future and whatever it holds. My mother graduated from Barnard in '34, my father from Columbia in '35. Both feared, as the 1930s unfolded, that totalitarianism - either Communism or Fascism - would prevail. History doesn't repeat, but it sure rhymes. Furthermore, the peculiar alliance between Jihadism and and the left is not new. V S Naipaul's Among the Believers documents the fate of the Iranian left in the revolution of 1979. It may help understand how the left began forming its alliance with the Muslim world to know that one of my professors in the English Department, Lionel Trilling, was the mentor of Palestinian Edward Said who developed the idea of Orientalism - a key contribution to the post colonial canon. Likewise Barack Obama graduated from the English Department in 1983 when these developments were well advanced. By 2020 Yeonmi Park the North Korean defector graduated from Columbia and expressed her disappointment that Woke ideology had come to exclude other views in all her classes. I believe the failure of University faculty and administrators to stand up to the protests of the 1960s - cowardice in the face to violence potential or actual - destroyed the moral core of higher education and therefore its authority to enjoy a privileged role in our culture and civilisation. The current situation at Columbia is indicative of how far Higher Education has destroyed itself.