Navigate to News section

U.S. Universities Sold Out for Iranian Money

By hiring pro-Ahmadinejad professors, says ‘NY Post’

by
Hadara Graubart
November 23, 2009

The New York Post reports that a shady Iranian charity organization has been donating big bucks to Columbia University and Rutgers University to support the hiring of pro-Iran, anti-Israel faculty. The Alavi Foundation seems to have been under the thumb of Iran’s government and has also been found to have supplied money to Iranian spies in Europe; Federal authorities are now attempting to seize the organization’s funds, which total as much as $650 million.

Among the results of what Michael Rubin, an Iran expert at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, describes as “the ivory tower…prostituting itself for money” were Columbia’s hosting of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2007 and its hiring of Professor Gary Sick, who has expressed the following:

He [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] made it very clear that, whether he is talking about ‘wiping Israel off the map,’ or ‘erased from the pages of time,’ or whatever the quote is, what he means is that there should be a free referendum among the peoples of the Palestine that existed to the partition in 1948 to vote about the kind of a government they should have. He is confident that, in a free vote, Israel and Israelis would lose that vote and it would turn out to be something else: a unitary state, probably run by the Palestinians.

Hadara Graubart was formerly a writer and editor for Tablet Magazine.