A Stanford lecturer teaching a required class called College 101 announced he was going to be teaching a lesson on colonialism and preceded to divide up the class by people’s ethnic or national background into either colonizers or colonized. He has now been pulled from the classroom while the school investigates. According to students who were there, this is what happened:

…students in one of the classes said the lecturer began by blaming the war on Zionists — supporters of maintaining Israel as a homeland for Jewish people — and saying that Hamas’ actions were part of the resistance.

“He then asked Jewish students to raise their hands,” separated those students from their belongings, and said he was simulating what Jews were doing to Palestinians…

“He asked how many Jews died in the Holocaust,” and when students said 6 million, “he said, ‘Yes. Only 6 million,’ ” she said…

…the lecturer asked everyone in the room to say where their ancestors were from, and labeled each one a “colonizer” or “colonized,” depending on where they were from. When one student reported being from Israel, students said the lecturer responded: “Oh, definitely a colonizer,”…

Rabbi Dov Greenberg leads the Chabad Stanford Jewish Center. He spoke to three of the students involved and told Forward they were afraid to say anything for fear of being punished by the lecturer.

Greenberg, the Chabad rabbi, said the students he’d spoken to were afraid to speak up in class out of fear that they would be penalized grade-wise. “What are they going to do — get in a fight with their teacher at Stanford?” he asked. But he said all three were traumatized by the experience. The teacher “didn’t say anything that happened to the Israelis,” Greenberg said. “He ignored that. He said, ‘Hamas is a legitimate representation of the Palestinian people. They are not a terrorist group. They are freedom fighters. Their actions are legitimate.’”

The rabbi added: “He’s saying Israel is worse than the Nazis and Hamas is innocent. This is what Jewish students face at Stanford and other places. They’re feeling isolated, under attack and threatened.”

Stanford released a statement which mentioned the lecturer is being investigated. No telling how long that will take. Unless the students are all lying, this unidentified person is probably going to be out of a job.

Pro-Hamas protests have been happening at schools around the country but in one case at Columbia University things turned violent.

A 19-year-old female suspect allegedly assaulted a 24-year-old Israeli School of General Studies student with a stick in front of Butler Library around 5:40 p.m. on Wednesday, the student and a New York Police Department spokesperson told Spectator.

The suspect was taken into custody and charged with one count of assault, according to the NYPD spokesperson. The spokesperson said the student, who spoke to Spectator on the condition that he be identified by his initials I.A. citing fears for his safety, suffered minor injuries, including a laceration to his hand.

The story behind this is pretty weird.

I.A. and a group of other students encountered the woman earlier Wednesday when they were putting up signs in Uris Hall with the Hamas kidnapping victims, a friend of the victim told the newspaper.

She asked to help the group, telling them she was Jewish, and eventually stayed with them throughout the morning, the friend said.

Then, around 5:30 p.m., I.A. and four friends were outside Butler Library when they saw the suspect ripping the posters down, he told the Spectator.

When the group approached the teen — who now had a bandanna obscuring her face — she allegedly hurled obscenities at them and rushed at I.A. with a stick, he told the paper…

By the time the scuffle was broken up, I.A. had bruised one hand and broken the ring finger on the other, he told the Spectator.

Why would you volunteer to help put up the signs only to later tear them down? This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me but I guess it does to some kind of campus radical. I.A. has said he won’t be coming back to campus for a few days because he doesn’t feel safe.