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when the snipers terrorized the environs of Washington, D.C. For Outpost readers who have not yet tuned in, we strongly recommend the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board's civilized (no cross-shrieking) and highly intelligent review of the week on CNBC Friday nights (Eastern time, 9-10 p.m.) Viewers will not only have the opportunity to hear Mr. Henninger, but editor in chief Robert Bartley, Paul Gigot, Dorothy Rabinowitz, and Susan Lee among others. Congratulations to the New York Sun for exposing Mayor Bloomberg's appointment of Omar Mohammedi, general counsel for the New York Chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) to New York City's Human Rights Commission. This embarassed the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Community Relations Council into protesting an outrage they had hitherto ignored. CAIR was founded in the early 1990s by people linked to Hamas, which is on the State Department's list of terror organizations. Not surprisingly, CAIR has defended both Hamas and Hezbollah, seeks to unfreeze the finances of the Holy Land Foundation, which funnels money to Hamas, and on its website suggests that the Bush administration or the Israelis were the ones really behind the destruction of the World Trade Center.
Bloomberg's spokesman, Edward Skyler, defended the appointment, saying they were appointing an individual, not an organization. We await the appointment of a prominent member of the Ku Klux Klan to the human rights commission on the grounds that he never personally burned crosses on anyone's lawn.
Jews tend to be generous in donations to the colleges and universities they attended. Perhaps it's time for them to rethink when asked for donations to elite colleges with faculties involved in anti-Israel and anti-Semitic agitation (many of them with disproportionately Jewish student bodies). That includes Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia. At least at Harvard, President Larry Sommers protested the anti-Semitism underlying the campaign at Harvard to force colleges to "divest" from companies that do business with Israel. The presidents of the other schools have not been heard from. Columbia, home to the notorious Edward Said (and a leading advocate, naturally, for divestment), is actually inviting an anti-Israel clone, Rashid Khalidi -- who likens the creation of Israel to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and compares Israel's treatment of Palestinian Arabs to the Holocaust -- to fill an endowed chair named for Said. As Daniel Pipes has observed: "He [Khalidi] is extreme. He is inaccurate. He is apologetic to tyranny and radicalism. That's what Columbia likes."
Americans For a Safe Israel
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Outpost - 12 - November 2002