A Columbia University committee conducting a Trump-mandated review of the Ivy League school’s Middle East programs includes anti-Israel faculty members who have justified Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and defended notorious anti-Semites.
Two members, Bruno Bosteels and Timothy Mitchell, signed a letter saying Oct. 7 merely represented “occupied people exercising a right to resist.” A third, Lisa Anderson, invited onto campus two Palestinian terror financiers: former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and former Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Another panelist, Karuna Mantena, demanded protections for an anti-Zionist professor who called Hamas’s rape of civilians a lie, while a fifth, Rhiannon Stephens, employs an anti-Israel radical who promotes violence. Two members have, however, publicly supported Israel.
The seven-member committee was formed to advise senior vice provost Miguel Urquiola in his review of Columbia’s regional programs, starting with the Middle East, which has been a flashpoint in the disputes that have roiled the university since Oct. 7, with critics citing its faculty members as a leading source of anti-Semitism. The review is required under Columbia’s deal with the Trump administration to restore more than $400 million in federal funding, but the committee’s anti-Israel makeup could put the university back in the hot seat.
Bosteels, the dean of humanities and a communism scholar, and Mitchell, a professor focused on colonialism, signed an Oct. 30, 2023, open letter arguing that student groups that justified Hamas’s attack merely aimed to “recontextualize the events of October 7, 2023.”
“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,” the letter reads.
Other signatories include Columbia’s Rashid Khalidi, who blamed Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israeli “settler colonialism,” and Joseph Massad, who lauded the terror attack as “awesome.”
Mitchell’s signature should come as no surprise, considering he co-wrote in a 2003 article that the Second Intifada—in which terrorists killed over a thousand Israelis—”made briefly visible the consequences of Israel’s continued occupation and expanded colonization of the West Bank and Gaza.” And between 2014 and 2023, he signed four letters demanding Columbia divest from Israel.
Anderson, the dean emerita of the School of International and Public Affairs, meanwhile, has a long history of defending anti-Semites. While serving as dean, Anderson invited Ahmadinejad—a Holocaust denier who called for Israel to be wiped off the map—to speak at Columbia, though that ultimately fell through.
She did, however, bring Qaddafi to campus to discuss how “democracy is going to be understood in Libya, in the United States, in the world.” Alongside its long list of human rights violations, the Qaddafi regime financed several Palestinian terror groups, including the Black September Organization, which massacred 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic games.
In some ways, Urquiola’s committee echoes another panel Anderson sat on some 20 years ago. The group reviewed more than 60 anti-Semitism complaints filed against professors in the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures Department, but found only three—two of which were filed against Massad—particularly concerning, and determined there was no pervasive anti-Semitism.
Critics accused the committee of bias, arguing that its members held anti-Israel views. Anderson, in fact, caught flak from Israel supporters for taking a Saudi Arabia-paid junket to the kingdom in 2004. She also served as Massad’s dissertation adviser several years earlier. When the investigation was announced, she signed a letter sent to then-Columbia president Lee Bollinger defending Massad against a “campaign of defamation” and said complaints filed against anti-Israel professors marked “the latest salvo against academic freedom.”
Massad was never punished—and was tenured four years later.
A fourth member of Urquiola’s review committee, Mantena, a political science professor, signed a petition calling on then-secretary of state Antony Blinken to issue protections for Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, an anti-Israel Palestinian professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shalhoub-Kevorkian was suspended and later arrested and detained by Israeli police on suspicion of incitement for accusing Zionists of lying about Hamas’s atrocities, including rapes, while justifying the need to abolish Zionism in March 2024.
Mantena also teaches the course “Anticolonial and Postcolonial Political Thought,” which involves “reading key anticolonial texts” and examining views “sharply critical of the complicity of Western political thought and modern practices of imperialism, slavery, and global inequality.”
Stephens, another panelist reviewing Columbia’s Middle East programs, is the co-director of the Center for Science and Society. The center is home to Hadeel Assali, an “environmental justice” lecturer who called Charlie Kirk a “dead nazi” soon after his murder and endorsed Palestinian “resistance in ALL its forms” shortly after the Oct. 7 terror attack. It also employs Rebecca Jordan-Young, who served as a “protest marshal” to help secure the perimeter of an illegal encampment in April 2024. The following September, Jordan-Young donned a curly pink wig and clown makeup as part of a protest.
A university spokesman defended the inclusion of the anti-Israel professors, noting the review committee “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.”
“It is inaccurate to suggest that any subset of committee members determine the views of the committee,” he said. “In fact, the committee members work strictly in an advisory capacity to the Senior Vice Provost. Recommendations will be made by the committee acting as a group and are not binding.”
Two committee members, in fact, have defended Israel. Alex Raskolnikov, a tax law professor, and Clémence Boulouque, an associate professor of Jewish and Israel studies and member of Columbia’s anti-Semitism task force, signed a letter defending Columbia’s ties to Israel.
“Columbia benefits from ties with Israeli faculty, students, research, and technology,” the letter read. “To treat Zionism as an illegitimate and fundamentally oppressive movement is to ignore history and to deny Jews a measure of empathy and respect.”
Boulouque told the Washington Free Beacon that the committee members’ wide array of viewpoints and expertise is “deeply important in striking a balance of perspectives and lending more objectivity to our work.”
“No one committee member is dominant in this regard and our recommendations to the Senior Vice Provost will reflect that,” she added.
Urquiola, meanwhile, has kept a low profile. He, Anderson, Stephens, Mitchell, and Bosteels did not respond to requests for comment, while Raskolnikov declined to comment. Mantena said she was traveling and could not respond by press time.
