Columbia University on Steroids: Israeli Lobby on the Roll

It was an unbelievable scene at NYC Columbia University as an invited guest speaker was excoriated by its president publicly on stage. The object of President Bollinger's unhinged attack was Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who was in the US to attend UN ceremonies. The agenda that prompted this attack was purely from the Israeli lobby playbook; Columbia president Bollinger even mentioned in his tirade the fact that there were many Columbia alumni living in Israel, so we assume he was also stroking his donor base. Apart from undermining any pretense of academic freedom, Bollinger demonstrated intense bad taste and crude manners by insulting an invited guest. If Bollinger had such contempt for the man, why invite him? He apparently tried to have it both ways: to welcome but with insult. Student substantive issues with the Iranian were adequately addressed in the question and answer period, once the guest speaker finished. Bollinger's action was over the top, brash Israel lobbyist stuff that has brought the US convicted Israeli spys, Pollard and Livingston, and now two more men from the principal American Israeli lobbyist organization under indictment for espionage. Bollinger should be fired for his robotic exuberance for pushing squalid Zionist party line propaganda unsuccessfully masked as academic freedom. It was a diplomatic incident. As usual Condoleezza does not know what to do...

Massed outside the gates of Columbia were angry crowds waving Israeli and American flags, and placards with a swastikas superimposed over Ahmadinejad face. Some demonstrators wore Yarmulkes. The Iranian leader reportedly promised to destroy Israel, not the USA, so why all this angst on the shores of the Hudson River? Bollinger perhaps reacted to the roar of the crowd. It was quite a colorful, animated display by some folks from Manhattan and it was not even Christmas time. Saddam promised to burn Israel. Khrushchev promised to bury the US – none of this happened. It was all hyperbolic propaganda. Mature nations can handle this verbiage and not over-react in a strung out, rabid, extremist way.

As despicable as he was described, the Iranian brought a little unintended humor to the intense gathering when he replied to a question on homosexuals in Iran by declaring that Iran does not have them like in the US. They certainly exist there and are executed based on five witnesses to such acts. Over there, however, they do not have gay rights parades with marchers dressed as cavorting drag queens and sugar plum fairies, but they do have Shiite self-flagellation parades on religious holidays where the marchers publicly draw blood on their bare backs and chests. Not yet ready in the US for a mutual exchange of values. As far as freedom of speech in Iran, it exists on Persian blogs at least to the extent where it is obvious Ahmadinejad is not always a hero and has serious detractors.

My association with Columbia University was the result of a military assignment to attend Columbia University and was part of a US Army graduate program to train me as a Russian expert. I had just completed nearly a year of intense Russian language training, so my Russian language capability was better than most students there, unless it was a Russian exchange student. In the late fifties I reported for registration at Columbia in my military uniform and was told immediately that for my own good, I should not wear my uniform to classes – that it attracted less attention was okay with me, but I asked why since President Eisenhower had been President of the University until shortly before his election. The response was that military organizations are inimical to academic environments. I had no problems socially or politically from the left wing faculty and students. After all, part of my curriculum was the study of Marxism/ Leninism and Columbia at that time provided a teeming petri dish.

Most of my subjects of study were associated with the Russian Institute at Columbia. It was reputed to be the best in the country on Russian/Soviet studies at the time and that is why the Army picked the school. I had to compete for admission as any regular graduate student. This association between Columbia and the Army was terminated a few years later as Columbia and the Army quarreled over admission of active military students.

The Russian Institute faculty was almost all composed of Central and Eastern European Jewish professors, either first generation or born there; uncertain whether they were secular or not. One thing for certain, I never heard a hint of Zionist propaganda or the mention of Israel. For example, a leading expert on Communism at the time was Leonard Schapiro in London, who had just published a magnum opus on the history of the Soviet Communist Party. It was mandatory reading for us. Columbia University arranged for Schapiro to come to Columbia for a short time to lecture and attend our seminars, where the students could question him. The leadership of the Russian Revolution were mostly all Jews except Stalin and Derzhanski, so all this made good sense to me at the time to understand any possible ethnic thought process. It still does as an analytical tool as I witness the interplay of theory and practice in modern political and religious movements. Despite the fact there were no Red banners in the crowd or pictures of Lenin outside the gates of Columbia, especially with the anti-fascist swastikas, there was still just a little déjà vu that took me back to the holiday tumult of 60's Red Square in Moscow.

Compared to Indiana University where I received an AB, the student body at Columbia had far more fervor and intellectual energy. Maybe it was because I was at the graduate level then, but it was also that the student body came mainly from intensely competitive big cities rather than the isolated farms and small towns of the Middle West. The intellectual environment was also highly charged by NYC talk shows hosted by Gore Vidal, Bill Buckley and David Susskind. The issues at the time that were defined by them became important subjects and sparked debates in the student body.

After my year at Columbia I was assigned to Europe to be immersed in a Russian environment for two years, which included travel to the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union. My home base was an Institute in Bavaria where I had as instructors former Russian military officers from the Vlasov Army; the Vlasov Army was a military formation composed of Russians captured by Germans in WWII. They were turned and used as German auxiliary forces. In some cases they were used in the murderous suppression operations, as in 1944 in the Warsaw Uprising. Most were deported to the Soviet Union– to Stalin – by the Allies after the war, where they were brutally killed as traitors. For example, the leader, General Vlasov, was hanged by the throat on a meat-hook on display in Red Square. Someone in the US had the sense to keep some of these thugs in the West to be useful in the Cold War. To a man, they were survivors; all changing sides at least two times. All spoke only German and Russian. They all were cut throats in some way or another and were a sharp counterpoise to my gentle intellectual professors at Columbia. Their hard-eyed world view was to prove far more valuable to me than those of the professors, as I was later assigned mano a mano duties with the Soviets in the Cold War.

Bollinger's performance at Columbia with high viz. pandering to the Israeli lobby saddened me, as it projected a once great university now turned into a crass tool of the Israeli Lobby that now promotes a foreign agenda. Much has changed since my attendance there over 50 years ago and it would be an interesting academic exercise to determine how this change was wrought – the why is easy to determine.

This week also witnessed the US Congress brand the IRANIAN Revolutionary Guards as terrorists. The move was led by the Israeli Nuncio in the Senate, Joe Lieberman. Many believe this move establishes the predicate for the US invasion or attack on Iran, which is a major Israeli foreign policy goal – if you do not believe me, watch how the neocons pee in their pants with joy as this resolution is used to promote war with Iran. It worked for the invasion of Iraq, so why not try it again for Iran? One difference now is that there are Admirals in charge of CENTCOM and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; they may not roll over as easily as the Air Force and Army generals that blindly led the US into Iraq. The Navy produced Zumwalt and Rickover who could think for themselves. Let's hope this tradition survived in the Navy flag ranks and acts as a fail-safe to more foolish wars. Even the top tier of the Democratic Party Presidential candidates pathetically now expect the Iraqi war to continue through their terms. Both Democrats and Republicans are prepared to vote funds to continue the Iraqi War indefinitely. Is there, in the USA, anybody in power who does not have an Israeli ring in their nose? And that includes our sycophant dears of the Media.

After Ahmadinejad's brief stop in the USA, he went to visit Latin American leftist regimes where he was hailed as a hero of harsh public treatment by the American Israeli Crusaders in NYC, in the belly of the beast. He and Venezuela's Chavez clicked their glasses to celebrate oil over 80 dollars a barrel and fall of the dollar to less than 60 cents on the Euro; a currency now used and mandated to buy Venezuelan and Iranian oil. Americans soon better learn to be addicted to kosher pickles, knishes and matzo ball soup more than oil. Colonel Robert E Bartos USA RET