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Assad Aide Joins Ivy League
posted on July 11, 2012Controversy surrounds Columbia University’s admittance of Sheherazad Jaafari into their graduate School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). According to David Fine at Tablet, the 22-year-old is “linked closely to the atrocities” of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Fine, a junior at Columbia, writes that Jaafari helped Assad “reach out to and spin foreign press as his regime murdered over 15,000 of its own people and tortured countless others.” Columbia has stood by Jaafari’s admission. Fine quotes Jay Lefkowitz, a Columbia alumnus and former Bush official, who said, “I would be concerned about imposing litmus tests based on ideology in the admissions process.”