Anthony Zenkus is a “racial justice, income inequality and climate justice” activist, who was “trained by vice president Al Gore as a presenter in his Climate Reality Project, and has been an organizer with Occupy Wall Street, the fight for a $15 minimum wage and an ally in the movement for black lives,” per his biography on the Columbia University website.
Zenkus, who is a senior lecturer in social work at Columbia and a senior adjunct social work faculty member at Adelphi University in New York, also opines about antisemitism and Israel on social media, which has drawn the attention of the watchdog Canary Mission and others.
“Arabs didn’t perpetrate genocide against Jewish people. Europeans did. Palestinians didn’t turn boats with Jews escaping the Holocaust away: The United States did,” Zenkus wrote on Feb. 18. “Antisemitism is not a creation of Palestinians and Muslims. Why are they being punished for the crimes of Germans and Americans?”
On Dec. 16, the lecturer wrote: “Nothing excuses murder, rape or hostage taking. That said, one day of atrocities doesn’t justify 70 days of constant indiscriminate bombardment, destruction or hospitals, U.N. schools, refugee camps and vital infrastructure resulting in 19,000 deaths. But here we are.”
Three days after Hamas’s attack, he wrote that “Hamas committed atrocities which constitute war crimes” and “Israel has also committed war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza for decades. And Israel has done far more of them and is illegally occupying land and that they are an apartheid regime.”
Among the other posts that Canary Mission documented, Zenkus wrote on Nov. 13, “Hamas is not an existential threat to the state of Israel. If anything, Netanyahu and his policies are. I’m done wasting time with genocide apologists.”
Zenkus drew ridicule for his comment about Palestinians being blamed for German and U.S. crimes.
“And the Jews left Egypt, Iraq, Yemen and Iran on a vacation,” one commenter wrote.
“There were more Jewish refugees than Arab ones after Israel was born; they were abused, raped, murdered and driven out of Arab lands,” wrote Jake Wallis Simons, editor of the Jewish Chronicle in London. “The wartime Palestinian leader was literally a Nazi and ally of Hitler who drooled over the Final Solution.”
“Almost every Arab and Middle Eastern country ethnically cleansed Jews from their land,” wrote Kassy Dillon, a Daily Wire reporter and former JNS news editor.
“Arab nations ethnically cleansed Jews out of the entire Middle East. This person teaches at Columbia,” wrote Jon Levine, a New York Post reporter.
Columbia is being sued for an alleged “virulently hostile” environment for Jews.