Columbia’s Pulitzer disgrace: Among the winners of the Pulitzer prizes announced on Monday: the “Palestinian poet” Mosab Abu Toha, honored for his commentary in the New Yorker on the horrors Israel has wrought in Gaza. It took just more than 24 hours for his insane public statements to surface.
“How on earth is this girl called a hostage?” he wrote of 28-year-old IDF soldier Emily Damari, who was abducted by Hamas. Of another hostage, Abu Toha complained, “These are the ones the world wants to share sympathy for, killers who join the army and have family in the army!”
Columbia’s fingerprints are all over the decision to award Abu Toha the prize. Acting president Claire Shipman sits on the Pulitzer board alongside the president of Columbia Journalism School. “Deliberations over the prize winners take place on the Columbia campus,” the Free Beacon’s editors write, and the administrator of the prizes, Marjorie Miller, is a Columbia employee.
Miller wouldn’t tell us whether the board was aware of Abu Toha’s public statements before giving the award, but she did say the “selection process for each award is based on a review of the submitted works.” For our editors, the “Trump administration officials currently negotiating with Shipman and her colleagues about whether the school will enter into a consent decree with the government can only consider taxpayer support for the university based on its submitted works. The latest is a middle finger.”
READ MORE: Columbia’s Pulitzer Disgrace
The radicals are back in action: A mob of masked activists took over Columbia University’s Butler Library on Wednesday, forcing students to abandon their final exam study sessions. The activists renamed the library for a Palestinian terrorist. Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), the school’s most anti-Semitic student group, took credit for the action on social media.
“Video footage shows around a hundred masked radicals in dark clothing storming Butler Library, pushing their way past a campus security guard at the building entrance,” writes our Jessica Costescu. “Once inside, the agitators passed out pamphlets that endorsed Hamas’s violence and chanted, ‘There is only one solution, intifada revolution,’ ‘We want divestment now,’ and ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ while using megaphones and banging on drums.”
The group renamed the library after Basel al-Araj, a Palestinian terrorist killed in a 2017 shootout with Israeli forces. CUAD later issued demands including “full financial divestment from zionist occupation,” an “academic boycott” of Israel, and “amnesty” for all disciplined students and faculty.
Acting university president Claire Shipman authorized the NYPD to enter campus after the anarchists refused to show I.D. Police arrested nearly 100 inside Columbia’s gates and clashed with protesters who attempted to impede them.
READ MORE: Columbia Radicals Take Over Campus Library, Forcing Out Students Studying For Finals
Still senile: Joe Biden offered a muddled defense of his decision to seek reelection in his first major interview since leaving office. “What happened was, I had become what we set out to do, no one thought we could do, and become so successful,” he told the BBC. “Things moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away.” Now it makes sense!
“There’s no doubt Biden believes his claim that he was ‘so successful’ as president, but most Americans do not agree,” writes our Andrew Stiles. “According to a Gallup survey released in February, just 39 percent of Americans said they had a favorable view of Biden, which was by far the lowest result among living presidents.”
Biden’s comments came in response to questions about why he didn’t bow out sooner considering many Democrats now view his run as a “catastrophic blunder.” But few of them “have been willing to acknowledge their own enabling roles in the debacle.” As Stiles notes, a “series of books about the 2024 election have revealed new details about the extent to which leading Democrats plotted to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline from American voters who were already skeptical of his ability to serve another four years as president.”
READ MORE: Biden Defends Decision To Run Again Despite Age Concerns: I Was ‘So Successful’ It Was ‘Difficult To Walk Away’
Away from the Beacon:
- A page out of the Biden playbook: The president of Pennsylvania’s Haverford College showed up to testify in front of the House Committee on Education and Workforce on Wednesday with giant flashcards reminding her that calls for genocide are “abhorrent” and violate the school’s policy, that Israel is not a “genocidal state,” and that she needs to “be measured and disciplined” and “maintain body posture.”
- Donald Trump, speaking to Hugh Hewitt, gave Iran an ultimatum when it comes to its nuclear facilities: “Blow them up nicely or blow them up viciously.”
- Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared to mock Joe Biden’s mental fitness during a House hearing on Wednesday, answering a Democrat’s question about who was president in 2024 with, “One believes President Biden.” Democrat Rep. Gregory Meeks (N.Y.) was not amused: “Do you believe in the Constitution of the United States?”
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