April 7, 2008
By FrontPage Magazine
Over the next several days, Frontpage will publish profiles of individual chapters of the Muslim Students Association and Muslim Student Union on a variety of campuses around the country, showing how they work to advance the cause of radical Islam and to lead the effort to stigmatize Israel. These profiles are compiled in our new booklet, “The Muslim Students Association and the Jihad Network.”
To read the introduction, click here, the first profile “The MSA at UCLA,” click here, the second profile “The MSA at Berkeley, click here, the third profile, “The MSU at UC Irvine,” click here, and the fourth profile, “The MSA at Brown,” click here. – The Editor
The Muslim Students Association of Columbia University (MSA-CU) is among the oldest campus chapters of the national Muslim Students Association. Membership in MSA CU consists of both undergraduate and graduate students. MSA-CU’s mission is to “create a strong Muslim community on campus, helping Muslims strengthen their faith, gain knowledge about their religion, build Islamic character and interact with other Muslims.”68
In February 2006, MSA-CU was one of 52 Muslim organizations that signed the following press release denouncing a Danish newspaper’s recent publication of a series of cartoons lampooning the founder of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad: “We are protesting the newspapers’ insult to Islam. … Freedom of expression is not absolute.”69
At the invitation of MSA-CU, the Holocaust-denying, Hezbollah-supporting academic Norman Finkelstein came to Columbia to deliver a March 2006 speech titled “Israel and Palestine: Misuse of Anti-Semitism, Abuse of History.”
According to a report in the Columbia Spectator, Finkelstein declared that “regardless of intent, Israel is in effect guilty of state terrorism.” He also accused Columbia University President Lee Bollinger of “intellectual terrorism” for his refusal to support an anti-Israel divestment campaign or to depict Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as “apartheid.”70
During an October 2007 event titled Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week (whose mission was to educate U.S. college students about the goals of radical Islam), MSA CU Vice President Amreen Vora complained that guest speaker David Horowitz had wrongly suggested during his speech that the word “jihad” meant “holy war” rather than spiritual “struggle,” which she claimed was its true definition. When Horowitz asked Vora whether she would be willing to publicly denounce the terrorist group Hamas, which along with the Muslim Brotherhood created the Muslim Students Association,
NOTES and SOURCE: Front Page Magazine