Columbia welcomes hate speech as long as it’s anti-Semitic

By Post Editorial Board
September 24, 2019 | 7:59pm

Columbia University, it turns out, is happy to host one kind of hate speech: On Wednesday, a blatant anti-Semite will address the school’s World Leaders Forum.
Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s prime minister, is known for calling Jewish people “hook-nose” and claiming “Jews rule the world by proxy.” In June, he told the Cambridge Union, “I have some Jewish friends, very good friends, they are not like the other Jews, that’s why they are my friends.”
Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, told The Post that the invite is beyond the pale.
“It is nothing short of astounding that a university that prides itself on being a place of tolerance and inclusion will be handing the microphone over to a leader who has … been quoted saying that the ‘Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.’”
This follows such earlier Columbia lowlights as President Lee Bollinger’s welcoming of Iranian then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, another proud Jew-hater.
Bollinger says, “This form of open engagement can sometimes be difficult, even painful. But to abandon this activity would be to limit severely our capacity to understand and confront the world as it is.”
We look forward to him citing that standard the next time a controversial speaker who isn’t an anti-Semite gets invited to campus.