IVY’S COWARDLY ‘RIVER’ DANCE

As Columbia University’s president insisted Wednesday that the Ivy League school was doing all it could to crack down on rising antisemitism, the campus remains filled with a slew of professors who have a history of spewing controversial remarks. The Morningside faculty includes:

JOSEPH MASSAD

A professor of modern Arab politics and history, Massad has been teaching at the Ivy League school for the past 25 years. Massad, who earned his Ph.D. at Columbia in 1998, teaches within the university’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, according to his faculty bio.

The tenured academic has faced widespread calls to be fired ever since he referred to the Oct. 7 attack inflicted by Hamas terrorists as “awesome” and a “stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance.”

“The sight of the Palestinian resistance fighters storming Israeli checkpoints separating Gaza from Israel was astounding,” he penned in an 1,800-word essay published 24 hours after the bloodshed.

“Perhaps the major achievement of the resistance in the temporary takeover of these settler-colonies is the death blow to any confidence that Israeli colonists had in their military and its ability to protect them.”

A student-led petition calling for him to be axed over those remarks has received more than 78,000 signatures.

HAMID DABASHI

Dabashi is a professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at the Ivy League school. He is also the current director of undergrad studies within the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department.

He’s come under fire in recent years for a slew of controversial social-media posts, including a sincedeleted one in which he blamed Israel for every “dirty” problem in the world.

“Every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious happening in the world just wait for a few days and the ugly name ‘Israel’ will pop up in the atrocities,” he wrote on Facebook in 2018, as cited by the Jewish Journal. His remark was in response to a New York Times article that accused Israeli intelligence of gathering dirt on President Barack Obama’s thennational security aide.

In a separate Web post, Dabashi allegedly bashed Zionists as “hyenas” — sparking calls from a pro-Israel student group for the professor to be rebuked.

MOHAMED ABDOU

Abdou was brought on as a visiting Columbia scholar for the spring 2024 semester and teaches a weekly class on “Decolonial Queerness & Abolition.”

A Columbia website bio describes Abdou as “a North African-Egyptian Muslim anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, abolition and decolonization.”

Just days after the Oct. 7 attack, Abdou controversially declared on social media, “Yes, I’m with Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.”

KAYUM AHMED

Ahmed, a former director at billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, is now a law lecturer within Columbia’s school of public health, according to his bio.

He has previously been ripped for allegedly indoctrinating his students to hate Israel via his lectures, The Wall Street Journal reported.

In a video from one of his lectures prior to the Oct. 7 attack, Ahmed labeled Israel a “colonial settler state” that has “oppressed indigenous populations” and “displaced” Palestinians.

KATHERINE FRANKE

Franke, a law professor and activist, has been teaching at the school since 1999.

She was brought up during Wednesday’s hearing by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) for controversially saying, “All Israeli students who served in the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] are dangerous and shouldn’t be on campus.”

It wasn’t immediately clear, though, where Franke made the remark.

Franke also recently penned an op-ed in The Nation criticizing Columbia University, in part, for threatening academic freedom and “waging war on dissent.”

“The university is under pressure to root out any students or faculty critical of Israel — and it’s already caved,” the law professor wrote.