U.S. foreign policy is being shaped by people, educated at elite universities, who have been steeped in a worldview deeply hostile to Israel and the West. While headlines since Oct. 7, 2023, might suggest that this is a new phenomenon, it’s actually been going on for decades.
That such institutions have become beholden to outrageous ideas — that Zionism is racist, that Israel is an apartheid state committing genocide against the Palestinians, that Israelis are settler-colonialists with no connection to that part of the world — is bad enough.
But even worse is that, due to the very fact that they are elite, they are training grounds for policymakers, intelligence analysts, diplomats, professors, and journalists. In those roles, these people not only shape world events, but also how those events are perceived.
When faculty at and alumni of such universities propound antisemitic and anti-Western theories, they are lending those theories a prestigious imprimatur. They are creating and upholding a permissive structure for vicious ideas with deadly consequences, both here and abroad.
Let’s take Columbia University as an example, whose Task Force on Antisemitism released its fourth and final report earlier this month.
Much of the problem at Columbia stems from the intellectual legacy of Edward Said, who was a professor of literature there. Said’s work is foundational to the modern-day anti-Israel movement, whose ideas bleed so easily into outright antisemitism.
In Orientalism, Said denied that knowledge and scholarship can exist for their own sake — they are manifestations of power. Per Said, “Every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.” In The Question of Palestine, Said applied his theory to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, casting Israelis as colonial interlopers analogous to racist white settlers in Africa.
This philosophy was revolutionary at the time. In the years since, it has become trite. One of its main proponents has been the Middle East Studies department at Columbia University, whose endowed chair is named after Said. The emeritus holder of that chair, Rashid Khalidi, is a former spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization. He withdrew from teaching when Columbia adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism.
Long before the Oct. 7 attacks, which he called “awesome,” Joseph Massad, Said’s protégé and a professor at Columbia, was notorious for comparing Israel to Nazi Germany. He once wrote that “the ultimate achievement of Israel,” which he has disparaged as a “racist settler colony,” was the “transformation of the Jew into the anti-Semite, and the Palestinian into the Jew.”
Columbia saw fit to have Massad, who has called Zionism a “genocidal cult,” teach a course on … Zionism.
Another Columbia professor, Hamid Dabashi, has opined that the “oppression” of Palestinians has created within Israelis a “subsumed militarism, a systemic mendacity with an ingrained violence … [that] has penetrated the deepest corners of what these people have to call their ‘soul.’” In another antisemitic rant, he wrote that Israel is behind “every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world.”
This hateful worldview long ago molded how Columbia faculty continue to approach the Middle East. According to the task force’s report, “Columbia lacks full-time tenure line faculty expertise in Middle East history, politics, political economy, and policy that is not explicitly anti-Zionist.”
It has escaped containment beyond those fields. In a required introductory course at the Mailman School of Public Health, a professor told more than 400 entering students that certain Jewish donors had given to Columbia because they were “laundering blood money” — an antisemitic trope.
A Jewish student was confronted aggressively and told, “It’s such a shame that your people survived in order to commit mass genocide.”
A professor slandered the Israeli military, of which I am a proud veteran, as an army of murderers, and singled out a student who had served as one of those “murderers.”
These examples reflect an ideology prominent in the Ivy League education that generations of diplomats, elected officials, and bureaucrats have used to justify their place in forming U.S. foreign policy.
And it’s not just the Ivy League.
The Middle East Forum, which I lead, has extensively documented the connections between faculty and advisory members at Georgetown University’s flagship Islamic studies center and a terror-linked Islamist organization. Another MEF investigation revealed that a professor teaching a mandatory course for American students at Northwestern University’s Qatar campus co-founded an organization that laundered over $1 million to Hamas.
Georgetown and Northwestern, like Columbia, train future leaders and opinion-shapers.
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The examples that could be cited are legion. The main point is that American foreign policy is being steered by elites educated in an academic culture that is reflexively hostile to Israel, pro-Islamist, and fundamentally anti-Western.
Every policy failure, every diplomatic concession, every betrayal of an ally traces back to these lecture halls. The results are not academic — they are measured in body bags.
Gregg Roman is executive director of the Middle East Forum.