Columbia University’s Trump-mandated Middle East Review led by pro-Hamas professors
A Columbia University review committee includes members with histories of defending Hamas and hosting figures like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, drawing scrutiny under a Trump-era mandate.
The university defended the panel as diverse, even as it faces criticism over anti-Israel bias and other controversies, including a recent survey showing widespread antisemitism on campus.
A Columbia University committee charged with reviewing the school’s Middle East programs under a Trump-era funding deal is facing scrutiny for some of its members’ anti-Israel positions.
Two members, humanities dean Bruno Bosteels and political theorist Timothy Mitchell, signed an Oct. 2023 letter framing Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre as “an occupied people exercising a right to resist,” as reported by The Washington Free Beacon.
“One could regard the events of October 7th as just one salvo in an ongoing war between an occupying state and the people it occupies, or as an occupied people exercising a right to resist violent and illegal occupation, something anticipated by international humanitarian law in the Second Geneva Protocol,” the letter stated.
Mitchell has also signed divestment petitions and once wrote that the Second Intifada “made briefly visible the consequences of Israel’s continued occupation and expanded colonization of the West Bank and Gaza, an expansion facilitated by the Oslo accords of 1993 and disguised under the name of ‘the peace process.’”
Another member of the panel, Lisa Anderson, dean emerita of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, invited Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to campus during her tenure.
The seven-member panel will advise the administration as part of a federal review tied to more than $400 million in funding.
“The personal views expressed by faculty members are just that, personal views,” a Columbia University spokesperson told Campus Reform. “Those personal views do not represent, nor are they endorsed by the University.”
“This committee of seven faculty members represents a wide range of perspectives and experiences, including members who have served on the University’s Antisemitism Task Force and signed petitions against BDS,” the spokesperson added.
As Campus Reform has previously reported, Columbia University has repeatedly made headlines in connection to alleged anti-Semitism on its campus.
In June, Columbia released a survey-based report finding most Jewish students feel unwelcome: 62 percent said they weren’t accepted for their religious identity, 53 percent experienced religious discrimination during 2023–24, and only 34 percent reported belonging.
Acting President Claire Shipman called the results “difficult to read” amid rising anti-Semitic violence on campus nationwide.
Additionally, Columbia’s website promoted a non-credit course by historian Rashid Khalidi accusing the U.S. and Israel of “genocide” in Gaza. Though moved off campus, the class description alleges a century-long campaign to dispossess Palestinians.
