A century ago, Columbia students protested Nazis — today they cheer for their ideological heirs, Hamas.
Nearly a century ago, Columbia students staged mass protests against the university’s friendly relations with Nazi Germany.
Today, Columbia students are protesting in support of Hamas terrorists who mimic the Nazis.
How did this strange role reversal come about?
In December 1933, Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler invited the Nazi German ambassador to the United States, Hans Luther, to speak on campus.
Students staged a huge protest rally against Luther.
Some years ago, I interviewed one of those protesters.
Nancy Wechsler — later a distinguished Manhattan attorney — told me: “Hitler had been in power for almost a year already — enough was known about his totalitarian and anti-Semitic policies that his representative should not have been welcomed on campus.”
It was at the anti-Luther demonstration that Nancy met her future husband, James Wechsler, editor of the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spector.
He would later serve as editor of the New York Post.
President Butler shrugged off the protests.
Ambassador Luther represented “the government of a friendly people” and therefore was “entitled to be received . . . with the greatest courtesy and respect,” he insisted.
Butler claimed the protests were themselves a form of “persecution.”
Columbia continued to pursue friendly relations with Nazi Germany, as Stephen Norwood recounted in his study, “The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower.”
The university participated in student exchanges with Nazi Germany — even after a Nazi official boasted his country’s students were being sent abroad to serve as “political soldiers of the Reich.
