MY ALMA MATER SLIPPED UP IN ITS HIRING: A visiting professor at Columbia Law School makes some points which seem obvious, but I never expected to hear them expressed by a member of the faculty there:

Nothing the UN has done in recent memory justified a shift in earlier attitudes. On the contrary, in the past year the UN sponsored a vicious antiSemitic World Conference "Against" Racism in Durban that wrongly characterized the "plight of the Palestinian people" as one of racial persecution, fanned the flames of anti-Semitism and provoked irrational passions that undermined both the cause of peace and of human dignity.
...Seeking to rid itself of a serious image image problem in view of its highly selective interest in terrorism, the Security Council last fall adopted Resolution 1373. It called upon member states to report back about action they had taken to combat terrorism. Defining terrorism was omitted. Reports poured in - more than 150 by now - and those from Arab states repeatedly invoke the Arab Terrorism Convention. It says armed struggle "by whatever means . . . against foreign occupation and aggression for liberation and self-determination" is not an offense [while excluding any such action directed at Arab states]. Those reports are being considered by the council's Counter Terrorism Committee, which is making sure no posssible queries or criticism of this distinction leak out.
Not that such criticism will ever be forthcoming. Syria - one of the nations the American State Department has designated as a state sponsor of international terrorism - is on the Security Council wreaking havoc. The council is now a platform for continuous advocacy of terrorism as a strategy of this state's political interests. These interests, shared by the rest of the Organization of Islamic Conference, were sufficiently powerful at the UN to defeat in January the adoption of a Comprehensive Convention Against Terrorism. The OIC is holding out for a license to kill Israelis.
The Security Council call for a Jenin investigation, and continuing efforts at the council to draw fire away from Palestinian terrorism, is part of familiar UN strategy. For years, the UN has been the Palestinians' personal, well-financed advocate. There are hugely disproportionate numbers of UN resolutions on Israel (19 in the 2001 General Assembly, eight in the 2002 Human Rights Commission) while allegations of human-rights violations anywhere else are routinely ignored. Nothing ever on China or Syria, for instance. There are myriad reports over decades on Israel by three UN bodies and by an entire UN division dedicated to Palestinian rights. All of this goes on while Israelis are kept on the outside as the only UN state not permitted to stand for election to the full range of UN bodies.
In the din, the UN endgame has been obvious for years. The UN has the answers: Jerusalem belongs to Yasser Arafat, as General Assembly resolutions have proclaimed. Enormous numbers of Palestinian refugees should be able to return so as to destroy the Jewish character of the state of Israel, according to the UN Durban Declaration - now metastasizing its way through the entire anti-racism program of the UN. And these "solutions" should be imposed by international intervention under UN auspices.
...In short, the UN turns the war on terrorism, and the meaning of human rights, on its head. Suicide bombing is right. Self-defense is wrong.

For a more usual reflection of how Columbia Law School responds to the war on terrorism, see these reflections from the most recent alumni magazine. While the fora took place not long after 9/11, the reactions haven't aged well.