Columbia U. Prof Calling for Police Escort amid Anti-Israel Protests Was a ‘Defund the Police’ Advocate

Columbia U. Shai Davidai
David Dee Delgado /Getty
Alana Mastrangelo

A Columbia University professor is speaking out against anti-Israel protestors and calling on police to protect him. The professor, however, has a history of anti-police activism.

On Monday, Columbia Business School assistant professor Shai Davidai, who is Jewish, attempted to lead counter-protestors against an anti-Israel demonstration known as a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” but was denied access to campus after his ID was deactivated, according to a report by Columbia Daily Spectator.

As Breitbart News reported, the professor was also denied access to the university’s main campus on Friday, ostensibly for his own safety from an anti-Israel mob.

On Sunday, Davidai sent an email to Columbia administrators, including University President Minouche Shafik, warning them that he planned on arriving to campus on Monday to sit in the middle of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and called on the school to provide him with a police escort while he did so.

“Last I checked, I am still a professor at Columbia University,” Davidai began in his email, which he shared in an X/Twitter post.

“Therefore, I plan to go tomorrow, Monday morning, and sit peacefully right in the center of the illegal encampment that you have allowed the pro-Hamas mob to establish in the middle of campus,” the professor continued.

Davidai then accused university administrators of “completely fail[ing] to protect the safety of Jewish students,” adding that he is therefore “requesting approval to have a police escort of at least 10 cops with me.”

The professor indicated that he wanted his police escort to consist of officers from the New York Police Department, adding, “I would ask for escort from the school’s Public Safety, but they have proven themselves useless versus these mobs, and I do not want to put their lives at risk.”

“We will be coming. I am an employee and they are your students. You have a responsibility to protect our physical safety,” Davidai concluded in his email.

While the professor is demanding that law enforcement protect him, Davidai has made anti-police remarks in the past, accusing officers of using their weapons “disproportionately on black men.”

“Aren’t you worried that the evil racist police will shoot people?” author and filmmaker Mike Cernovich asked Davidai in the comment section of his post, sharing an April 2021 post from the professor, in which he wrote, “Lawmakers give police offers the ammunition which they then use disproportionately on Black men. Should we hold lawmakers accountable?”

Davidai, meanwhile, is currently under investigation by the university due to allegations of harassing students. The professor has more than 50 complaints against him, Shafik said, according to a report by CNN.

But Davidai told CNN that he has never called out a student by name, only “pro-Hamas” student organizations and professors.

“They’re investigating me for the entire reason this hearing was held in the first place,” he said. “Columbia is investigating me for my social media tweets and only my social media tweets.”

As Breitbart News reported in October, Davidai called Shafik a “coward” while blasting the university for failing to respond to “pro-terror student organizations” on campus in the wake of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack in Israel.

On Tuesday, Davidai addressed “all the journalists” reaching out to him for comment in an X/Twitter post, in which he likened Columbia University to Nazi Germany.

“I promise, I will try to get back to each and every one of you,” he wrote. “In the meantime, I want you to consider this: To the best of my knowledge, the last time that a professor was denied access to their own university for being Jewish was Nazi Germany.”

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.

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