NY imam calls to ‘take out’ pro-Israel professor at Columbia

( JNS) An imam based in the city of Utica in upstate New York on Aug. 20 called on students to “take out” pro-Israel Columbia University business school professor Shai Davidai.

“If you’re able to take out somebody like that and make an example, that might shut up a hundred more,” Imam Tom Facchine said during the webinar titled “Islamic Political Activism” hosted by the Columbia University branch of Students for Justice in Palestine.

Instagram removed the video and permanently banned it from its platform, Columbia’s SJP said, according to The College Fix, which covers higher education and campus news.

Davidai posted the segment to his X account.

“That Shai Davidai guy: How do we get him in trouble? How do we create a situation in which he’s in jeopardy,” Facchine said.

Facchine, 35, was born in New Jersey and educated at Vasser College. He quit Christianity and became an atheist, and then a Marxist, before settling on Islam in 2010, when he converted, according to the New York Post.

Students for ‘Justice’ in Palestine at @Columbia invited an imam who instructed them to target me and “create a situation” that gets me in trouble pic.twitter.com/NF6vhxZINh

— Shai Davidai (@ShaiDavidai) August 24, 2024

The university launched a probe of Facchine’s comments with outside security experts, who concluded that his rhetoric “did not create conditions that require enhanced security measures,” the school’s vice president of public safety Gerald Lewis told Davidai, the Post reported.

“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 told the paper.

Davidai entered the spotlight last October for his viral video blasting the school for failing to protect Jewish students against terrorism-supporting mobs, and for not banning pro-terrorism organizations on campus. He swore he would never send his daughter to Columbia.