‘Anti-Semitic Smear’ Found at Columbia
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Anti-Semitic vandalism was found in a bathroom at a Columbia University building yesterday, two days after a noose was found hanging on a black professor’s office, university and police officials said. In a statement sent to the campus community, the president of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, called the vandalism, found in Lewisohn Hall, an “anti-Semitic smear.” Mr. Bollinger said it had been quickly removed from the bathroom and was being investigated.
“I also want to reassure you that we have utmost confidence in our Public Safety officials and in the NYPD,” Mr. Bollinger said.
Police officials confirmed that a caricature of a man wearing a yarmulke above a swastika had been found scrawled in black ink on a bathroom stall door.
The incident occurred amid a flap between Columbia University Teachers College officials and the police department over surveillance video that could help identify a suspect in the noose incident. After the noose was found early Tuesday, police officials said they immediately asked for access to surveillance footage that might help identify a suspect. According to police, Teachers College initially refused and only agreed to turn over the tapes after the police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, held a news conference Wednesday in which he said the delay was slowing down the investigation.
Teachers College representatives said the graduate school was cooperating with police and that privacy concerns had led them to ask for the subpoena. “We are giving the tapes to the police,” a school spokesman, Joe Levine, said. “It is happening.”
An NYPD spokesman, Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, said police were “disappointed and surprised” at the school’s initial refusal to hand over the tapes.
“It is always important in an investigation to get information as quickly as possible,” Mr. Browne said. “It gives the perpetrator less time to concoct a story or cover their tracks.”
On Wednesday, Teachers College faculty, students, and local elected officials denounced the noose incident at a rally in which the target, Madonna Constantine, vowed that she would not be silenced.
The two incidents come on the heels of several hate incidents around the city and the country, including a series of swastikas painted on synagogues and homes in Brooklyn Heights last month, and a conflict in Jena, Louisiana that involved white high school students hanging a noose from a tree near their school. The cases also come shortly after Mr. Bollinger invited President Ahmadinejad of Iran to speak at Columbia’s campus. Mr. Ahmadinejad reiterated his doubts about whether the Holocaust happened during his speech.
“I feel that people in the Columbia community are begging for some boundaries. It’s not a good reflection on us,” a professor and the coordinator of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, Judith Jacobsen, said in a phone interview.
The dean of general studies at Columbia, Peter Awn, whose office is in Lewisohn Hall, called the anti-Semitic incident “distressing” in an e-mail to students yesterday.
“These kinds of hateful crimes directed against the Jewish community or any other individuals or groups will not be tolerated,” Mr. Awn, a comparative religion scholar, wrote. “I have been a member of the Columbia faculty for 30 years and know that we as a community stand for values that are completely antithetical to such vile and hate-filled images.”