Saliba has repeatedly denied the allegations and says he thinks the motivations of the accusers are part of a larger political movement.

“I would not be surprised if they hired a very good actor...to say charges against me that are total fiction,” Saliba says. “It is intellectual harassment...these are scare tactics.”

The film was produced by the David Project, an organization formed in August 2002 in response to a nationwide “ideological assault on Israel” on campuses and in the media, according to the group’s website.

Rachel Lea Fish, director of the David Project’s New York office and a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, says that the issue at Columbia is part of a nationwide trend.

Two years ago, Fish spearheaded an effort to force Harvard administrators to return a controversial $2.5 million gift from the president of the United Arab Emirates because of his ties to an allegedly anti-Semitic think tank.

“I think what we are trying to do is to shine a light on what is happening at many Middle East departments across the country,” she says.

But Columbia senior Eric J. Posner says that there is no problem at Columbia—except for the fact that the opinions in “Columbia Unbecoming” do not reflect student thought on campus. In an effort to make his view public, Posner has compiled the testimonies of 26 MEALAC supporters in the Columbia community, about double the number that appeared in the documentary.

Posner says that during his time at Columbia, he has never seen any of the behavior described in the film.

“The few times I’ve ever seen anyone break etiquette in a classroom at Columbia, it was always a student being abrasive and emotional,” Posner wrote in an e-mail.

SEEKING PEACE

Critics on both sides of the issue often compare the idea of reaching harmony at Columbia to the prospects of achieving peace in the Middle East—difficult and unforeseeable in the near future.

In December, Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger appointed a “grievance” committee to investigate charges of intimidation across the university’s campus—not just within the MEALAC department. The committee has met with more than 50 students, professors, and administrators to date and expects to issue a report within two weeks.

But both sides of the debate seem to have their own grievances to air over Bollinger’s commission.

Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), the group that organized last Sunday’s conference at Columbia, has alleged that many committee members hold conflicting personal ties to the professors under scrutiny. They say that two members of the committee signed a call for divestment from Israeli companies, one member was the dissertation sponsor of Massad, and they allege another has publicly compared Israel to Nazi Germany.

Judith S. Jacobson, assistant professor of clinical epidemiology at Columbia and also the New York coordinator for SPME, says she thinks the choices for the committee were “highly questionable.”