The sorry state of Columbia University’s treatment of Jews is apparent to all. The administration, teachers and student-led groups have participated in the harassment, intimidation and assault on Jews and Jewish life on campus before the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led massacre and very significantly thereafter.

It is now manifest that graduates of the school – including some Jews, remarkably – have bonded with Hamas and rationalized its barbarism and whitewashed its antisemitism.

Consider anti-Israel Jewish alum Anna Baltzer. According to her Wikipedia page, Baltzer has written a number of books, and it seems that Noam Chomsky is a fan of her 2014 book “Witness in Palestine,” which details “Palestinian resistance” against the existence of Jews in the land of Israel. On November 12, 2023, shortly after the Hamas-led massacre, she wrote on the socialist-jihadi site Common Dreams an opinion piece titled “Hamas Didn’t Attack Israelis Because They Are Jewish,” in which she attempted to argue that Hamas killed Israelis because Israeli Jews are White supremacist colonial invaders, not because of their religion.

It is willful and blind stupidity.

Hamas’s foundational charter makes very clear that it views the conflict as a religious war against Jews:

• “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.” (Opening)
• “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.” (Preamble)
• “raise the banner of Jihad in the face of the oppressors, so that they would rid the land and the people of their uncleanliness, vileness and evils.” (Article 3)
• “Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews)… there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him” (Article 7)
• “Nothing in nationalism is more significant or deeper than in the case when an enemy should tread Moslem land” (Article 12)
• “In face of the Jews’ usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised…. the Palestinian problem is a religious problem, and should be dealt with on this basis.” (Article 15)

The Charter would go on to spin a bunch of Jew-hatred conspiracy theories lifted from the forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which has NOTHING to do with the conflict in the land.

• “In their Nazi treatment, the Jews made no exception for women or children… [Jews] attack people where their breadwinning is concerned, extorting their money” (Article 20)
• “With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein…. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.” (Article 22)
• “The Zionist invasion is a vicious invasion… using all evil and contemptible ways… infiltration and espionage operations on the secret organizations… aim at undermining societies, destroying values, corrupting consciences, deteriorating character and annihilating Islam. It is behind the drug trade and alcoholism in all its kinds so as to facilitate its control and expansion…. Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people.” (Article 28)
• “the ferocity of the Zionist offensive and the Zionist influence in many countries exercised through financial and media control.” (Article 30)
• “The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.… here is no way out except by concentrating all powers and energies to face this Nazi, vicious Tatar invasion. The alternative is loss of one’s country, the dispersion of citizens, the spread of vice on earth and the destruction of religious values… fight with the warmongering Jews.” (Article 32)

So how does this Ivy League-educated anti-Israel Jew deal with these facts? She pointed to Hamas’s revised charter of 2017 which says in Article 16 “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.”

If this were true, why did Palestinians throw a 69 year old wheelchair bound American Jew war veteran off a ship when he wasn’t an Israeli? Why did Palestinians shoot up a synagogue in Rome? Why did Palestinians separate Jewish passengers who weren’t Israelis to be hostages when the Arabs hijacked planes?

The list of Palestinian anti-Jewish non-Israeli physical attacks is long.

Hamas and its leaders have long denigrated Jews, calling them “the brothers of apes and pigs,” and told their followers that “Jews are a people who cannot be trusted,” among many other insults.

The list of Palestinian anti-Jewish non-Israeli verbal attacks is long.

Surely Baltzer knows all of this. So why make an argument that is plainly untrue, and why do it to fellow Jews?

While not all Jews are pro-Israel (or eat kosher, live in Israel, celebrate Jewish holidays or a variety of things that are inherently Jewish), some – like Baltzer – are anti-Israel. They may hate some government policies, the entire government, or the entire state. They may actually not hate Israel but are eager to see local Arabs achieve a state of their own.

Yet one needn’t be pro-Israel to acknowledge that Hamas is a deeply antisemitic genocidal jihadist death cult.

So how can people like Baltzer willfully ignore the deep Jew-hatred of Hamas? How and why do they try to convince fellow Jews that despite everything Hamas says and does, its radical views of Islam and jihad are somehow not toxic to Jews everywhere?

It’s a variant of the Stockholm Syndrome. In the case of Stockholm, an abused person develops a strong bond with their abuser and defends their actions in a strange twist of empathy. In this iteration, which I call the Columbia Syndrome, the root source is not purely from the ABUSER’S actions, but from the desire of someone to purge a part of their identity.

In an effort to rid oneself of a component of the Jewish collective – Israel in this case – a person bonds with someone who similarly attacks that element (Hamas, here). The fact that the abuser is not solely focused on that narrow element, or gives some soft talking points as cover to mask the general hatred in order to enlist people to the cause, is excused. The person suffering from Columbia Syndrome wants to expunge a core association so profoundly, that they will empathize with groups or people who despise them completely.

Columbia University did not originate this phenomenon and the phenomenon is not confined to anti-Israel Jews. People like Peter Beinart (Yale alum) have long been attempting to shield antisemites like Rep. Rashida Tlaib of charges of Jew-hatred. Brown University held a panel discussion about antisemitism which included Jews and non-Jews that echoed each other that Jews are not indigenous to the land of Israel, and to combat antisemitism one needed to be anti-Israel. Student groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow routinely link arms with those with extensive antisemitic credentials.

But Columbia stands above the rest.

Home to Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi, the school has long served as a fountain of denial of Jewish history and heritage. Today it is home to Joseph Massad, who celebrated the October 7 massacre of Jews and said that the Jews of the Old Testament are really “Palestinian Hebrews.”

Columbia is a campus where people yell “we are all Hamas!” and student leaders say “be grateful that I am not going out and murdering Zionists.”

Columbia is where students hoist banners calling for an “intifada” and point to Jews to be the next victims for Hamas.

Columbia is where socialist-jihadi politicians come to fawn on students harassing Jews.

And Columbia is located in the largest Jewish diaspora community in the world, New York City. The university has the largest percentage of Jews of all the Ivy League schools, according to Hillel, and likely the largest Jewish alumni network of the Ivies.

Jews on campus and Jewish alumni witness the vocal anti-Israel fervor and must make a decision of how to respond: fight, flight, join or ignore. Many students worked very hard to gain admission to the institution to get a good education, and are loathe to leave the school or exert the physical and mental energy required to fight the tide of hatred. The majority of Jewish students are left with the choice to either listen to the toxicity or join the seemingly popular horde.

The Columbia environment echoes the school curricula of UNRWA, the temporary United Nations agency to care for descendants of Palestinian Arabs who left Israel at its founding. They are lied to that Jews are “colonialists” and “invaders” who “stole the land” from local Arabs. They are taught that all of Israel is an illegal “Zionist project” which should be terminated and handed to the stateless Arabs of Palestine (SAPs).

In such framework, Columbia Jews hear teachers and students echo the Democratic Socialists of America who argue that every Israeli Jew cannot be considered a civilian and is fair game for Palestinian Arabs “deploying violence to liberate themselves.”

Israeli Jews are no longer victims and Palestinians can longer be considered terrorists in such mindset. Even Arab men stabbing children to death while they slept, as happened in 2011, was supported by 51% of Arabs in Gaza. Some Columbia allies of SAPs may find the actions and associated support for killing children abhorrent but believe it has context for which Israel is solely to blame.

The depravity is appalling but it is part of the culture; it is deeply embedded in the Palestinian historical narrative at this point. The “allies” of SAPs have ingested the toxicity, including anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian Jews. What may have begun as just wanting SAPs to have freedom or an objection of Israeli policies, became a marriage made in hell.

Anti-Israel Jews try to cleanse Palestinian terrorists of antisemitism to rationalize their allegiance and to get fellow Jews to join the self-immolation. Rather than rethink the dangerous dynamic, the anti-Israel Jews affix themselves to people who want to see them dead – after they help destroy Jewish relatives.

People suffering from Columbia Syndrome are not only convinced that they are acting rationally but also morally. Like Jews who push for laws to ban the ritual slaughter of meat or circumcision, they concoct moral arguments for such actions. Driven by their profound desire to amputate part of their ethnicity and culture, they embrace people and movements which want to decapitate them.

Too many Jews are suffering from Columbia Syndrome in which they join forces with Hamas and other vicious antisemites to amputate any tinge of Zionism in their comportment. While Stockholm syndrome is understood by society to develop from a trauma-related experience, unfortunately, Columbia syndrome is viewed by a socialist-jihadist culture as a form of moral awakening.