Columbia Daily Spectator

Who is Qasem, you ask? Well, it turns out he once represented a convicted al-Qaeda member who was also brother-in-law of one of the 9-11 hijackers and again is now Mamdani's chief counsel.

This same guy back in 2001, six days after the September 11th attacks, also wrote this for the Columbia Spectator.

He wrote, quote, the resentment these terrorists felt towards the United States was rooted in political realities shaped by our country's policies.

our government has supported dictatorial and repressive regimes across the middle east and elsewhere for years it's total in total disregard of the aspirations and better interests of the indigenous populations of those regions this is again chief counselor to the mayor of new york and i got to say sorry counselor i think you need a reality check let's not forget Al-Qaeda and its founder, Osama bin Laden, were in fact inspired by this man, Saeed Khatoum, one of the intellectual fathers of the Muslim Brotherhood and perhaps the Islamic theorist most responsible for modern Salafist jihadism.

You know who was not one of those? Ramzi Kassam.

In the Columbia Spectator days after 9/11, he said, "This is not a battle of good versus evil.

Acts of violence were gratuitous only in the sense that they targeted citizens.

It is to these populations' credit that they didn't dehumanize us the way that we dehumanized them."

So in a way, I was kind of spoiled.

I had a really good – now, I will say my first experience with a really shit-ass editor was at the Columbia Daily Spectator.

I went to Columbia in 1981.

Obviously, I went to the school paper.

And then in short order, R.J. Mattson, who you might be familiar with, the future cartoonist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

And also now he's at Roll Call.

um he he uh ended up he appeared in my old spot and i was like and he never shrunk and i was like i can see clearly now the rain is gone also i couldn't help noticing the fact that uh the his lead character looked re who was the romantic interest in his strip which was called college walk looked remarkably like uh one of the top editors at the paper coincidence no perhaps but um anyway that so i was suspicious oh wow struck the columbia daily spectators suck my dick i'm out of here i'm over gonna go for go work for the girls never had any problem at barnard at all worked there my entire career college career um so yeah that was your turn

so i went on to um went on to college and uh then uh got on did you draw at

So Columbia had been having a showdown before this.

And as my friend who was on the other of the Columbia Spectator, Paul Starr, who wanted to become a renowned professor at Princeton, he was always saying, well, what about us at Columbia? We're out here occupying things too.

But again, because of Harvard, because Harvard is Harvard, and because there were all these dramatic scenes of students being hauled out of this building, it did – I think, crystallized attention in a way that it had not been before.

And the death toll for Americans kept going up.