The New York Sun's Eli Lake reports:
Last week's Columbia University conference on democracy in Libya was co-sponsored by a university known the late 1970s and 1980s for publicly hanging student dissidents.
The conference, held on the Columbia campus on March 22 and 23, featured participation from professors and students at al-Fatah University, whose Tripoli campus was fitted with a gallows on which to perform public hangings of dissidents to mark the April 7, 1976, anniversary of student demonstrations there. The practice of public hangings at the university persisted between 1978 and 1988, according to opposition groups.
The dean of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, Lisa Anderson, told The New York Sun last week that the Libyan government had no role in financing the conference, as was alleged by Mohamed Eljahmi, the brother of an imprisoned human rights leader, Fathi Eljahmi.
Yet the official literature for the conference lists "the international green book center" as one of the event's co-sponsors. According to a spokesman for Libya's embassy in Cairo, Egypt, that institution is funded entirely by the Libyan government through its secretariat of culture and information.
"This belongs to the secretariat of culture and information," the embassy's press attache said when asked about the center named for the Libyan leader's book on society, politics and culture that distils the state's organizing ideology.
More here.
Mohamed Eljahmi responds to Columbia's University's claim that the Libyan government had nothing to do with the conference here.
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