There is a troubling story unfolding in Queens, New York, in which school officials and local Democrats have charged College Republicans with stoking racism and xenophobia.

Siraj Wahhaj, a radical Muslim cleric who authorities in 1995 identified an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was last week invited to Queens College to speak on the subject “How Islam Perfected Thanksgiving.”

Wahhaj testified in 1996 for convicted terror plotter Omar Abdel Rahman, who was charged with attempting to bomb New York’s Lincoln Tunnel and the United Nations. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was recently assailed–justifiably so, considering the imam’s history and inflammatory rhetoric–in the press for inviting Wahhaj to an event with local Muslim religious leaders to discuss the Ft. Hood tragedy.

Despite Wahhaj’s altogether sordid and troubling past, the imam was invited with open arms to campus of Queens College by the Muslim Student Association (MSA), whose members just days before attended a College Republican film screening event of an anti-radical Muslim film and reportedly laughed and muttered “good” as beheading footage of American businessmen and the collapse of the World Trade Centers aired.

At a debate following the film, one MSA member said, “If I had enough money I would be part of the jihad army, I would kill all the Jews,” according to one College Republican present. Another spoke of getting a “bomb.”

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The discussion over quality in higher education and maintaining standards of academic excellence in American colleges took an ugly turn March 2nd when Harvard law professor and former Clinton Administration lightning rod Lani Guinier declared that standardized testing is racist.

Guinier’s remarks were part of a televised forum on C-SPAN about the “state of the black union” in America, during which she told moderator Tavis Smiley that standardized testing, such as that used in the college admissions process, is a form of “modern scientific racism.”

For those of you who cannot quite recall Guinier’s brief appearance on the national political stage, she was Bill Clinton’s choice for assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1993.  I recall some initial excitement over the fact that a black woman had been nominated for such high position but her nomination quickly unraveled as her record came to light. 

Guinier’s agenda of pure racial quotas and proportional racial representation in local elections was so profoundly radical that Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun, the only black woman in the U.S. Senate at the time, urged Clinton to withdraw the nomination, which he did.

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