Ever since a new Columbia president (Jennifer Mnookin) was appointed by the trustees back in January, many have been wondering if she would do anything to try and change Columbia’s reputation as “Vichy on the Hudson”. The reason for this reputation is obvious if you try to get on the Columbia campus, which historically has always been open. Nowadays to enter the campus you’ll need to show your papers (or QR code) to the guards at “Checkpoint Charlie”. This is because of the necessity of “keeping the Columbia community safe.”
If you try and figure out what “safety problem” the checkpoints and the large new security force are there to protect against, you’ll quickly realize that the danger is that you might hold up a “Free Palestine” sign and start shouting anti-Israel slogans. If that happened, people would take pictures and video, soon social media and the New York Post would be full of stories about “anti-semitic violence at Columbia”, and Steven Miller would again take away the university’s federal funding.
Since Mnookin was appointed, the question many people have been asking is whether she would take action to remove “Checkpoint Charlie” and restore free access to the campus. Most local politicians have now taken a stance against the closing of the gates, often pointing out that it was probably illegal (a city street, 116th street, runs through the center of campus). With a new mayor (Mamdani) and new local congressional representative (Darializa Chevalier) possibly applying more pressure, most people were assuming Mnookin would have to reopen the gates.
Today she gave her answer to the question, which could be summarized as “No Way”. More specifically she announced the following steps:
- Appointment of another committee, charged with advising her not on how to get rid of “Checkpoint Charlie” but with tuning how the QR codes work (i.e. “further increasing access”).
- As of 8am tomorrow, accompanied minors under the age of 12 will no longer need their own QR code.
- A new structure will be erected in front of “Checkpoint Charlie”, the “Checkpoint Charlie Kiosk”. The Kiosk staff will be responsible for dealing with the annoying small crowd that accumulates daily of people whose QR code isn’t working, tourists whose guidebook tells them to visit the campus, parents who want to accompany their child onto campus, children above the age of 12 without their own QR code, etc.
If you want to better understand how Columbia ended up where it is, you can read the 36 previous postings in this series. In retrospect, this is all about support for the ongoing Israeli campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide, which continues with daily slaughter of civilians and demolitions of their homes and communities in Gaza, the West Bank, and now southern Lebanon. The Fascist regime now ruling the US both enables this and has effectively used bogus accusations of “antisemitism” to damage and exert control over prominent institutions they consider to be enemies.
The campaign to paint anti-genocide demonstrations as “antisemitic”, violent and threatening to people’s “safety” began not under Trump but under the Biden administration. For a clear explanation of the logic of these accusations, I can recommend the writings of Scott Aaronson, especially his essay on Deep Zionism. In his view, Palestinians want to murder him and his family. To him what’s going on in Gaza is not genocide but the necessary murder of the families of those who want to murder his family (for some reason he feels that this should be done with “middle-finger raised high”). If you chant pro-Palestinian slogans, you too want to murder his family. Hard to argue with the idea that allowing potential murderers on campus is a safety concern, so, here we are.
Update: The Columbia Spectator has an article about this. They point out that advisory committee is not new, but was announced back in January 2025 (see here). Mnookin’s announcement doesn’t mention this or say anything about what happened to the older version of the same committee.
For the ten billionth time, my side is the one that never wanted anyone’s children to die. As what used to be called a “moderate liberal Democrat” before the world’s current insanity, my ideal outcome was always for the Palestinians to accept one of the many peace proposals put forward by the United Nations, President Clinton, etc. and agreed to by multiple Israeli prime ministers. Then Palestinian kids would grow up in peace and prosperity and so would Israeli kids, both staying on their respective sides of the line except where agreed for mutual benefit, as with any random pair of neighboring countries on earth. That’s still my ideal outcome.
Your side, Peter, is the one that thought it would be awesome to engineer a situation where Jewish kids would continually face slaughter in their beds, rocket fire, suicide bombings, kidnapping, rape, watching their parents be executed in front of them, etc. etc. unless Israel waged wars that would (like basically all wars throughout history) result in many civilians on the other side getting killed. For if Jews — having learned something from the Holocaust — failed to submit to collective suicide, they could then be painted as villains who thirsted for Palestinian blood. It’s been a fundamental tic of Western civilization for 2000 years that Jews and only Jews are expected by everybody to immolate themselves as a precondition of being acceptable human beings — something you’d understand if you’d ever engaged with the long history of antisemitism, other than as an eager participant in it.
And this is why my little thought experiment set you off: because it made the stakes too clear. You really do think that it’s perfectly reasonable for the world to force Jews to choose between pushing button A that kills their own kids, and button B that kills someone else’s kids — and that if the Jews pick button B, then “blood be on them” for eternity (while no blood is on those who forced the choice). You believe that, but your civilized veneer hates being reminded of it.
“But look,” people say, “at all the prominent progressive Jews, like Brad Lander and Scott Wiener and Dana Nessel, who’ve agreed to Jewish self-immolation — provided only that some ‘good Jews’ like themselves might be spared!” Yes — and these past few months, we’ve spectacularly witnessed even those Jews getting denounced as Zionist scum, shouted down and banned and excluded from every progressive space. Simply because they’re Jews. Just like most Jews who aided the Nazis ended up in the gas chambers themselves. It’s hard to imagine a more decisive proof of what I’m saying.
Which brings us to Columbia. It’s strange: when I talk to most STEM faculty at Columbia, they tell me their political views are much closer to mine than to the protesters’, and also that they’ve never met Peter Woit, who they’re vaguely aware of as a sysadmin on campus with an angry blog. But then there’s the Middle Eastern Studies and humanities departments of Darializa Chevalier and Mahmood Mamdani, where the default attitude really is to cheer Jewish death — and that’s the side with which our angry sysadmin has chosen to ally himself.
The reason your campus now has a checkpoint, Peter, is that your allies have made clear that the instant the checkpoint goes down, they’ll resume taking control of campus buildings, holding janitors hostage, screaming “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” and generally creating an atmosphere for Jews that wouldn’t be tolerated under Title VI for one nanosecond if we were talking about any other minority.
Peter, if your allies’ final negotiating position wasn’t “all Zionists get slaughtered,” there are a thousand ways they could make that explicit and clear. They could support a two-state solution in which Israel gets to still exist. They could even say they support a one-state solution, when and only when the US or some other country makes a binding commitment to absorb Israel’s Jews once the Palestinian majority decides to expel or kill them, the dream into which they’ve been indoctrinated since birth for generations and from which they’ve never once wavered.
But, Peter, I predict that your allies will never agree to that or any other compromise that would explicitly keep my family members alive, because “blood be on them” really now is their central animating belief. They, strangely and ironically, are the ones who want the environment and worldview of the 1935 University of Berlin, much more than even the incompetent lying fascist narcissists who currently run the US.
Scott,
You have succumbed to a genocidal mania, and have signed on with those responsible for the ongoing large scale Israeli campaign to murder civilians, drive them from their homes and take their land. The reason that the majority of the US and world population are complaining about this is not that they’re antisemites who want to kill you and your family.
What you have done is provide a very clear example of how the genocidal mindset works. You go on in this delusional way about how everyone wants to kill you and your family, with the root of the delusion the desperate need to justify the murder of the families of your enemies. Your “Deep Zionism” tract is going to go down in history as showing the workings of a mind devoted to justifying genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Darializa Chevalier, who you cite approvingly in this post, was at the ghoulish rally on October 8, 2023 to celebrate the murder of 1200 Jews the day before. Mamdani’s wife also erupted with joy in her social media as the news of the massacre spread. They knew the risk to their reputations; they simply couldn’t contain themselves.
So no, Peter, you can no more convince me that your allies don’t yearn for the deaths of my family members, than you could convince me that the gas chambers were actually just delousing stations.
What I find much more interesting here is what your repetitive, chatbot-like responses — “fascist!” “genocide!” without ever responding substantively to points like the one I just made above — reveal about you. I’ve always been, as I put it 20 years ago, a mere “mercenary in the string wars.” I knew that there were deep technical arguments on both sides of the vociferous debates around SUSY, AdS/CFT, counting black hole microstates, etc., and I knew that, unlike with quantum computing, foundations of QM, AI, etc, I didn’t know nearly enough about quantum gravity to make independent judgments. But one part that always mystified me was the pure, unmitigated contempt in which you were held by essentially ALL string theorists, with the only variation being in how willing they were to express that contempt publicly. Why not engage with Peter in good faith? I’d sometimes implore my string friends.
Only now, seeing your shrill and robotic responses to my every attempt to express my moderate, anti-genocide, pro-staying-alive worldview, do I feel like I’ve finally gotten a glimmer of understanding. Did the string theorists hit this same firewall of sneering incomprehension, the same mindless repetition of slogans beneath an articulate veneer? Did they find it similarly boring and unproductive to argue with? Did they say: let me argue with Penrose, with Ashtekar, with other well-informed string skeptics, but not with this, not with a slogan-bot?
Scott,
Justifying your support for the ongoing slaughter of civilians, driving people from their homes and stealing their land with “Darializa Chevalier and Rama Duwaji want to kill me and my family” isn’t very convincing. Neither are your charming ad hominem attacks.
If you concede it’s true that Darializa Chevalier and Rama Duwaji want to kill me and my family, then you’ve conceded the entire argument. For if they want to kill my family, then surely so do the tens of millions of like-minded people all over the Western world, including your allies at Columbia. And surely the Palestinians themselves, who circulate Mein Kampf and dress toddlers up as suicide bombers, want to kill my family!
But if all that is true, then Israel’s wars have to be understood in a totally different moral framework than the one you’ve been using. As far as >90% of Israelis are concerned, these are not wanted wars of conquest and genocide, but unwanted wars of survival. Indeed, in a deep sense, they’re simply a continuation of the Allied war against Nazism — literally, against a Middle-Eastern fragment of the Axis Powers that eagerly supported Hitler and the Final Solution and has never renounced its support or done any soul-searching about it — 80+ years later.
Scott,
This is just a bunch of absurd and idiotic excuses for killing people and taking their land away. You come off as not just a genocidal maniac, but an idiot to boot.
For 2000+ years, pretty much no one has ever gone wrong betting on the mendacity of the declared enemies of the Jews (or “rootless cosmopolitans,” or Zionists, or any other overlapping term in concept-space), or the enormity of what they’d do to the cosmically hated minority the instant they had the power to do it. So it’s a bet that I have zero hesitation about making again today.
All,
Please no comments arguing with Scott, or one way or another about what Israel is doing. The topic is the closed campus here at Columbia.
Scott’s comments I think are very useful at explaining the situation here, which otherwise is very hard to understand. There are lots of other Scotts around who share some version of his paranoid fantasy that anti-genocide protesters want to kill their family. Some of these Scotts are on the Columbia board of trustees or have a lot of influence on them, which explains
1. Why the traditional open campus is now considered “unsafe” (people who want to kill Scott’s family could get on it).
2. Why there was an intense and successful campaign to paint peaceful demonstrations at Columbia as violent and anti-semitic (the demonstrators wanted to kill Scott’s family).
3. Why the trustees (some of whom thought the demonstrators wanted to kill their families) quickly gave in to a list of illegal demands from the Trump administration (these were largely written by a group at Columbia which thought the demonstrators wanted to kill their families).
The local issues here are of course small potatoes compared to the massive ongoing and unstoppable phenomenon of Israelis killing innocent civilians and taking their land, on the grounds that these people want to kill their families.
I’d like everyone reading this to recognize what Peter is doing: as he has for years, he aggressively refuses even to entertain the question of whether it’s true or false that Hamas, which as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood took direct inspiration from the Nazis in addition to Islamic fundamentalism and which is supported by a majority of Palestinians, really does want to murder all Jews simply because they’re Jews; whether that’s been the goal since before there were any settlements or any West Bank occupation or even a modern State of Israel; whether Hamas’s goal is now enthusiastically supported by a large fraction of the Western world, perhaps by a majority of young adults on both the left and right fringes, and certainly by Peter’s allies at Columbia.
In a way, one can understand Peter’s plugging his ears and singing whenever the question comes up. Perhaps he realizes on a subconscious level that, if he ever were willing to entertain the question on its merits, its answer would overturn his whole worldview on this subject. So, for the sake of resolving his cognitive dissonance, my relatives have to die, a very small price from his standpoint.
Scott,
Sure, many members of Hamas would like to murder all Jews (including their children, “with middle finger raised high”). Some though likely see Jews the way Ben-Gvir/Smotrich/the Israeli government see Palestinians: they just want to murder enough of them to make the rest leave and give them their land back.
Thinking that murdering all Jews
“is now enthusiastically supported by a large fraction of the Western world, perhaps by a majority of young adults on both the left and right fringes, and certainly by Peter’s allies at Columbia.”
is conclusive evidence of mental illness. Seek professional help.
FYI a DOJ whistleblower also spoke out against the Trump admin’s antisemitism investigations recently https://www.democracynow.org/2026/8/21/antisemitism_universities_trump
I think any reasonable person can see the attacks were politically motivated. Extremely disturbing implications for higher ed, freedom of speech etc.
I actually agree that the worst fringe of Israeli politics, including Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, is morally comparable to the most “liberal” and “pragmatic” elements of Hamas. On the one hand, that’s a stinging condemnation of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich; on the other, it underscores just how far the situation is from moral symmetry, even now, and certainly back when the conflict started, when there was no occupation, no settlement enterprise, Ben Gurion willing to accept whatever tiny sliver of land the UN offered, and the Palestinians under al-Husseini decided to try to kill all the Jews anyway, continuing the Nazi Holocaust that al-Husseini had sought to support and aid from Berlin while it was happening.