An upstate imam urged student activists to “take out” an outspoken, pro-Israel Columbia University professor who’s returning to the embattled Ivy this fall after a year of antisemitic hate.
Vassar-educated, Utica-based imam Tom Facchine made the plea about business school professor Shai Davidai during an Aug. 20 webinar called “Islamic Political Activism” with various Columbia student groups which promoted and broadcast it.
“That Shai Davidai guy: How do we get him in trouble? How do we create a situation in which he’s in jeopardy?” Facchine, 35, asked. “If you’re able to take out somebody like that and make an example, that might shut up a hundred more.”
The Jersey-born Facchine left Christianity to become atheist, found Marx in college and converted to Islam in 2010.
Davidai alerted Columbia honchos about the imam’s screed and the university launched a probe using outside security experts who concluded that the rhetoric “did not create conditions that require enhanced security measures,” according to an email from VP of public safety Gerald Lewis to Davidai and shared with The Post.
Undaunted by the imam’s “direct threat,” the professor told The Post: “I will not be silenced – I know I’m speaking the truth.
“It feels like they put a target on my back – with the explicit goal to take me down, to get me fired, to make up complaints about me.”
Davidai gained notoriety last October for his viral video blasting the school for failing to protect its Jewish students against terror-supporting mobs and vowing that he would never send his daughter to Columbia.
The nontenured Israeli native and married father of two was barred from campus at the end of last semester and has been under investigation by Columbia’s Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Office. He’ll be back this fall.
The machinations of “Imam Tom,” who enjoys espresso, hiking, and bird watching, according to his bio at the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, are indeed dangerous, the professor said.
“This is not some run of the mill, uninformed individual [whipping] up students,” he added of the popular Muslim YouTube figure who serves as the resident scholar of the Utica Masjid mosque. “This is a radical extremist who knows exactly what he’s saying.”
Three days after the Hamas massacre on Oct. 7 that left more than 1,200 dead and 250 kidnapped, Facchine gushed that he supports the Palestinian “resistance” “100 percent – no ifs, ands or buts,” adding there are “no equivocations, no apologies, no condemnations.”
Any rebuke of the murder, rapes, dismemberment and decapitations are akin to “criticiz[ing] the table manners of a starving person,” he said.
He’s been shown filming outside of Columbia at the height of the tensions, encouraging the encampments that have engulfed the beleaguered school.
A Columbia spokesperson said, “Discrimination and harassment including hate language, calls for violence, and the targeting of any individuals or groups based on their beliefs, ancestry, religion, gender identity, or any other identity or affiliation have no place at Columbia.” Facchine did not return calls for comment.
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