In a recent Village Voice artice Nat Hentoff provides important if hardly surprising information about Charles Jacob, the man who is trying to force Columbia University to confront some umpleasant truths about itself. As you can see, Jacobs is the kind of man who knows evil when he sees it and then does his best to fight it:

"Hardly any attention has been paid, however, to Charles Jacobs, the founder of the David Project. I first heard of him years ago when I saw in Harlem's Amsterdam News that Jacobs had given a speech at Columbia University exposing, before it was in the papers, the enslavement, killing, and gang rapes of black Africans in the south of Sudan. (He was wearing a bulletproof vest because of death threats from people who claimed to belong to the Nation of Islam.)

I called Jacobs in Boston, learned that he had founded the American Anti-Slavery Group, and began a long series of columns, here and elsewhere, about those atrocities.

Because of Jacobs and, among others, black pastors throughout this country, black leaders such as Congressman Donald Payne of New Jersey and talk show host Joe Madison, white evangelicals, and schoolchildren in Denver and other cities, much money was raised to redeem thousands of slaves through Christian Solidarity International.

In addition to his work at the David Project, Jacobs is involved in protesting the genocide in Darfur, and is writing a Sudan Reader—an annotated collection of readings and documents about the brutal record of the National Islamic Front government of that country and the failure of the world, particularly the United Nations, to stop the current horrors in Darfur.

Interestingly, Professor Dan Miron, a scholar of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature at Columbia's Middle East studies department, commenting on the charges of anti-Israel bias among some of his colleagues, told The New York Sun:

"Israelis are put to a test that is not applied to anyone else. You will not hear any murmur about the people of Sudan but . . . Israel is singled out in a way that is racist." For the rest click here.