So said Michael Rubin, an Iran scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, regarding the Alavi Foundation’s gift of hundreds of thousands of dollars to Columbia University and Rutgers University for Middle Eastern- and Persian-studies programs that employ professors who have been apologists for the repressive Iranian regime.

The New York Post describes the “charity”as

a shadowy multimillion-dollar Islamic charity based in Manhattan that the feds charge is an illegal front for the repressive Iranian regime . . .
Federal law-enforcement authorities are in the midst of seizing up to $650 million in assets from the Alavi Foundation, which they charge funnels money to Iran-supported Islamic schools in the United States and to a syndicate of Iranian spies based in Europe.

A Columbia spokesman expressed — what else? — “surprise” that the foundation had direct ties to the Iranian government. Thus the public is supposed to believe it coincidental that the university consented to host Iranian leader and Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad just after receiving $100,000 from the foundation.

Campuses that accept such donations are corrupt, pure and simple, and they are permitting themselves to be incubators of Islamist extremism. In the case of the Alavi Foundation grants, as Rubin rightly says, ”This is all about Iran laundering their policies through academe.”

Shame, shame on Columbia and Rutgers, which should return these tainted moneys forthwith.