Hey Tariq (Helio)

[audtatious]

Looking for your opinion on what this is all about:

Mideast Parley Takes Ugly Turn At Columbia U.http://www.nysun.com/new-york/.../8725/

Is this normal sentiment in College systems or just this College? I'm not sure how accurate or truthful the article is but I know if something similar happened with whites talking about blacks then the crap would surely hit the fan.

I'm not making a point (other than Obama's associations - lol ), just trying to figure out what these people really want and expect to gain as they seem to hint at one thing but say something completely else.

[heliochrome85]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Sun

my guess is that if there was any fodder for such a view, the sun magnified it. That being said, my impression is that most institutions, save ole miss maybe, tend to lean very very left. My school certainly did. I would suspect that Columbia, in NEW YORK, would be more Pro-Israeli, than Anti-Israeli.

I would take this bit of newsreporting with a "huffington post/michelle malkin" size grain of salt.

[audtatious]

That could be true. The Sun is known as a Conservative alternative to the NYTimes, the question is how much of this is sensationalized.

[heliochrome85]

well, it folded as of sept 30. i remember it as a source for sensational journalism, and rabid pro-israeli reporting. Hardly unbiased at all.

[smockers83]

Bollinger is talked about at the University of Michigan as a good university president (he was president there before Columbia), but that was too long ago for me to know about.

Bollinger is also big in free speech, so to see these types of forums and ones like when Ahmadinejad visited doesn't really surprise me. Controversial, yes, but it is free speech of the main opposing view of this country. The question that stayed in my mind as I read the article was, "So, how many of these forums to the pro-Israelis have?"

I'd also like to know how much of it was sensationalized because here at U-M, there was little of this out in the public, at least to my knowledge, with very large Jewish and Middle Eastern populations. If there was stuff like this, the University wanted to portray the two groups as tolerant as they had forums of discussion of acceptance and what not. There have been many cases as of late where U-M has tried to instill tolerance on its campus between different groups. The University has also been said to be involved in censorship as they terminated their contract with their contracted publisher because the publisher was going to publish a controversial anti-Semitism book.