The Islamophobic crusade was launched in earnest at the peak of George W. Bushs prestige when the neoconservatives and their allies were riding high. In 2003, three years after the collapse of President Bill Clintons attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian issue and in the immediate wake of the invasion of Iraq, a network of Jewish groups, ranging from ADL and the American Jewish Committee to AIPAC.....

gathered to address what they saw as a sudden rise in pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses nationwide. That meeting gave birth to the David Project, a campus advocacy group led by Charles Jacobs, who had co-founded CAMERA, one of the many outfits bankrolled by Chernick.

With the help of public relations professionals, Jacobs conceived a plan to take back the campus by influencing public opinion through lectures, the Internet, and coalitions, as a memo produced at the time by the consulting firm McKinsey and Company stated.

In 2004, after conferring with Martin Kramer, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the pro-Israel think tank where Chernick had served as a trustee, Jacobs produced a documentary film that he calledColumbia Unbecoming.

It was filled with claims from Jewish students at Columbia University claiming they had endured intimidation and insults from Arab professors. The film portrayed that New York City schools Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures as a hothouse of anti-Semitism.

In their complaints, the students focused on one figure in particular: Joseph Massad, a Palestinian professor of Middle East studies. He was known for his passionate advocacy of the formation of a binational state between Israel and Palestine, as well as for his strident criticism of what he termed the racist character of Israel.

The film identified him as one of the most dangerous intellectuals on campus, while he was featured as a crucial villain in The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, a book by the (Chernick-funded) neoconservative activist David Horowitz. As Massad was seeking tenure at the time, he was especially vulnerable to this sort of wholesale assault.

Isnt this the same s**t in your other topic? There is no war on islam just a lot of whinging little b***hes like yourself

When the controversy over Massads views intensified, Congressman Anthony Weiner, a liberal New York Democrat who once described himself as a representative of the ZOA (Zionist Organization of America) wing of the Democratic Party,

demanded that Columbia President Lee Bollinger, a renowned First Amendment scholar, fire the professor. Bollinger responded by issuing uncharacteristically defensive statements about the limited nature of academic freedom.