Screen shot of the page, filled with attacks

Hundreds of posts appeared today on Columbia’s Facebook page an unofficial Facebook page for Columbia University unaffiliated with the university declaring support for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, the Washington Post reports. The furor is apparently a backlash against a Wall Street Journal story that ran this morning, quoting Columbia prof Hamid Dabashi: “This whole arrangement between Syria and Iran is in deep trouble because of the Arab Spring. The geopolitics and the Arab street are changing and it’s leaving them exposed.”

A few sample comments:

♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥ BASHAR AL ASSAD ♥

The Syrian people is the only one who has the right to grant legitimacy to the president, who leads his country and is not entitled to Mrs. Clinton to give legitimacy to one or the impartiality of it.

All syrian people love Bashar Al Assad

Apologies are beginning to appear on the page, such as:

On behalf of the Syrian people, please accept my most sincere apologies for the charade taking place on your page today. This is the doing of the farcical “Syrian Electronic Army”, a Facebook page that has made it its mission to mass-spam pages of various foreign newspapers, universities and international bodies with endless broken-English pro-Assad platitudes. It has been closed down by Facebook over and over but it keeps being resurrected by the same group of pro-Assad imbeciles. -cont’d

But by now the stream has slowed a little and exchanges such as this are adding a touch of humor: