The most frightening aspect of Mahmoud Ahmadenijad's talk at Columbia was the cheers he received. When Ahmadinejad asked why Palestinians should pay the price for the Holocaust that they had nothing to do with, members of the audience cheered.

The so-called “price” the Palestinian Arabs paid for Jewish immigration was dramatically increased economic prosperity, longevity and medical care. The price they paid for their attempt to create a second Holocaust was to become refugees. It was Arab massacres of Jews in the 20s and 30s and the Arab revolt that led the British to conclude that the only hope for peace in Palestine was to partition it into a Jewish and Arab state. That hope for peace was met with a declaration by Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League that, "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades." It was the Arab decision to destroy Israel when partition was implemented in 1948 and to urge fellow Muslims to get out of the way that created the refugees. If the Palestinian Arabs had not attempted to repeat the Holocaust and exterminate the Jews in 1948 there would be no Palestinian refugees. If after 1948 the Arabs had chosen to give those refugees homes instead of using them as propaganda tools there would be no refugees. If they hadn't radicalized the Palestinian refugee population they might not have made it suicidal for Israel to reabsorb them.

Ahmadinejad and professors in Columbia's anonymously funded Middle East department would have us believe that the Palestinian Arabs played no role in the Holocaust. Under the leadership of Palestinian-born Haj Amin al-Husseini, admiringly known as the Fuhrer of the Muslim World, the Palestinian Arabs organized the Nazi scouts modeled after the "Hitler Youth" and attacked defenseless Jewish civilians in hospitals, movie theatres, homes and stores. Haj Amin al-Husseini recruited the notorious Muslim "Hanjar troopers," a special Bosnian Waffen SS company, which slaughtered 90% of Bosnia's Jews and burned countless Serbian churches and villages. He personally lobbied the Führer against the plan to let Jews leave Hungary, fearing they would immigrate to Palestine. He protested when Adolf Eichmanm tried to cut a deal with the British government to exchange German POWs for 5,000 Jewish children, with the result that those children were sent to death camps.

The SS, under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, provided both financial and logistical support for massacres of Jews in Palestine. The British under pressure from the Palestinian Arabs blockaded the coast so that Jews fleeing Hitler's Europe could not get in. An eyewitness named Ike Arane, who was called "Ari Ben-Canaan" in the film Exodus, testified about the outrageous cruelty of sending escapees back to Hitler. He was part of a group that were attempting to smuggle Holocaust survivors into Palestine on a ship called the Haganah. He testified how his ship was rammed by a British destroyer and how a British soldier clubbed to death Bill Bernstein, one of the crew, when he came to defend some of the Holocaust survivors on the ship. The British then placed the 4,500 Holocaust survivors on three ships and sent them back to France. The passengers refused to disembark for three weeks, so they were sent to Germany.

The cheers Ahmadinejad received at Columbia are a shocking manifestation of a resurgence in the kind of hate that made possible the British brutality that killed Bill Bernstein and the Holocaust survivors on the Haganah. Oil-funded propaganda combined with latent anti-semitism and large-scale immigration of anti-semitic populations has turned Europe into a cauldron of simmering anti-Israel hate that has led to academic boycotts of Israel, and that hatred and ignorance is manifesting itself on American campuses such as Columbia.