Antisemitism/Anti-Israel- on Campuses
Academic intifada
Melanie Phillips
Jews and Honkeys Need Not Apply
Steven Vincent
Princeton's
Anti-Israel Jihad
Lee Kaplan
Columbia
University's One-Sided Conference About Israel
Oleg Preusner
Dershowitz
Speaks On MEALAC, Israeli State
Morgan Sellers
LISA ANDERSON:
APOLOGIST FOR ACADEMIC RADICALISM
Hugh Fitzgerald
FrontPageMagazine.com, May 3, 2005
A faculty member at Columbia since 1986, Lisa Anderson is described in her biography as “one of this country’s most eminent scholars of the Middle East and North Africa.” But Anderson is the author of one book, The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830-1980, and only an editor, co-editor, or contributor of articles to other books. Most recently, she was one of the four co-editors of The Origins of Arab Nationalism, with Rashid Khalidi, Muhammad Muslim, and Reeva S. Simon.
Administration is apparently her forte and primary interest: setting up conferences, fund-raising, putting out fires, and the other hectic vacancies of modern university life, seems to agree with her. She currently serves as the dean of the School of International and Public Affairs; she has been president of the Middle East Studies Association. In addition, she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Carnegie Council on Ethics, the Social Science Research Council, and is co-chair of Human Rights/Middle East.
Her most recent achievement was in raising money, almost entirely from Arab sources for an “Edward Said Chair in Middle Eastern Studies.” Though Edward Said was neither a scholar or teacher of either Islam, or of the Middle East, but a celebrated polemicist, Anderson found nothing peculiar in naming this chair after him—rather as if one had decided to create the “Noam Chomsky Chair in American Political Theory.” Indeed, she managed to raise $4 million, and was instrumental in keeping the sources of that funding secret for as long as possible. Much effort had to be expended to persuade Columbia to reveal those sources, though New York State Law requires such information to be reported when it involves foreign funds.
And finding the perfect occupant for the chair, she held it for him until such time as he, Rashid Khalidi, could extricate himself from the University of Chicago, and arrive to sit on it himself. She gushed that she “can’t "honestly think of a better person to recruit to Columbia.” In the whole wide world of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, to bring to the university that once boasted Joseph Schacht, and Arthur Jeffery, and Richard Gottheil, she could not “honestly think of a better person.”
A keen student of politics, in her recent Presidential Address to MESA did concede, in politic fashion, that “we [the members of MESA] need to be able to acknowledge the failings of our work without embarrassment.” But, she added, “we must also assertively deploy our unparalleled expertise to provide unique insight and understanding of the Middle East.”
In her insistence that the “unparalleled expertise” of the members of MESA, which could “provide unique insight and understanding,” should be unhesitatingly accepted by American policymakers, she quoted the Italo-American journalist Alexander Stille, on how, during World War II, the American government hired “numerous professors, scholars and intellectuals of varying backgrounds including Herbert Marcuse, Erik Erikson, the art historian Richard Krautheimer.”
But Anderson failed to note that these people were refugees from the Nazis who understood the Nazi mentality and had no loyalty to the ruling ideology of Germany; their sole loyalty was to Western democracy. There are people similar, in being refugees from the world of jihad and radical Islam—that is, the defectors from Islam, such people as Ibn Warraq and Ali Sina. But Anderson has no time for them.
Instead, she seems to think that the members of MESA need to be listened to, their views simply accepted, they and their views both free from critical scrutiny. She urges this, despite the fact that many of them have repeatedly demonstrated a keen desire to defend radical Islam, to deflect all critical scrutiny of Islam, and to attack not merely the Bush Administration, but the United States, indeed the entire West. Through the “colonial” or “postcolonial” project (that little word “postcolonial” can extend the “project” indefinitely into the future, for it has no apparent date of expiration) that they invoke in so much of what they write or speak, they are more akin to apologists for, or agents of, radical Islam, rather than anything like what scholars in the Western tradition at least attempt to emulate, or claim to admire.
Anderson is not only a thoroughly political animal, but keenly aware of status. One senses in her words, and in her recent behavior (including a reaching-out to Martin Kramer, that most acute of the critical analysts of Middle Eastern academic studies), that she is more than dimly aware that the ground is shifting. Though the tone is firm there is an undertone of alarm:
To sustain the remarkable—and remarkably important—position we [the members of MESA] hold in society, as both scholars and citizens, we have two obligations. We must do what we do—proudly, confidently, and energetically. We must be constantly, restlessly open to new ideas, searching for new evidence, critical of received wisdom, old orthodoxies, and ancient bigotries, always creating and criticizing ourselves, each other, and our world.
We cannot be idle when polltakers are roughed up or jailed because their findings are politically unpalatable, when students are told to report on faculty whose partisan commitments may be politically unpopular, when research is discredited not on its merits but by the sources of its funding, whether in Iran or Saudi Arabia or Egypt or the United States.
As the Commencement Speech banalities flow (“old orthodoxies” versus “new ideas;” the challenge of remaining “critical of received wisdom” and deploring “ancient bigotries;” the need to be “always creating and criticizing ourselves”), one realizes what is going on, in the subliminal subtext. Others may not criticize MESA; that is unacceptable, intolerable, and illegitimate. We will keep it all in house, thank you very much. And she takes pains to deplore the critique of that “conservative polemicist” Daniel Pipes, the Harvard-trained medieval historian whom she tries to wish away.
Her MESA Presidential Address begins, tellingly, with a denunciation of “bigoted rhetoric.” Symmetrical denunciation is a rhetorical strategy she favors. She deplores (and how easy it is to do so) the sight of Mahathir Mohamad receiving a standing ovation, from the rulers of 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Countries, after he said “the Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy: they get others to fight and die for them.”
But she allows herself to believe that this formal speech by a head of state to 57 applauding heads of state is offset, in its significance, by a remark made to the members of his church by the much-decorated American soldier General William G. Boykin, who described Muslims as worshipping not a “real God” but an “idol,” and further saying that Islamists wanted to destroy the United States “because we are a Christian nation.” Had this remark been made to the members of NATO (minus Turkey), and received applause, even that would not have been a precise parallel, for Boykin is not the head of a country, and his remark is not nearly as malevolent as was that of Mahathir Mohamad, and even the NATO members are not self-defined as “Christian” powers.
This imbalance, posing as balance, is found in her intellectual collaborations. She has, for example, been a contributor to the books of John Esposito, and his defense of Islamists in the past has been echoed by her own, in which she suggested that, “if Islamists” were given a voice, and power, their violence, and their putative threats, would die down. But this did not happen in the Islamic Republic of Iran; nor in Saudi Arabia. This being-brought-into-the-government theory of self-pacification has not applied in Sudan. Where exactly has a fervently Islamist regime been put into power that became softened and less fanatical as a result? Where? If anything, the reverse holds – whereby Islamists are on better behavior the further they are from power.
But while a busy “contributor” to this or that book of essays edited by her friends, she has not overlooked her other responsibilities. One grateful graduate student, who wrote about “colonialism” and the “construction of Jordanian identity,” the now notorious Joseph Massad, has thanked her, in that well-known graduate-student-hoping-to-turn-dissertation-into-book-and-career-style, for all her efforts. His slow but sure rise to tenure was interrupted not by his virulent anti-Israel and anti-American screeds published in the pages of Al-Ahram and elsewhere, but by accusations that he harassed and intimidated Jewish and Israeli students. She, in turn, must have thought well of Joseph Massad, for with Lisa Anderson as a reference and supporter, he never had to leave the area, unlike so many recently-doctored students, but obtained a teaching post right where he was, an internal hire, at Columbia’s Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC).
During Anderson’s tenure as Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs exciting things have happened. The place bubbles over with Bulletin-Board-announced Things to Attend. The illusion of education requires all sorts of this busyness which may mean something—or nothing. In September 2002 the School of International and Public Affairs co-sponsored an African Studies Institute seminar called “South African Conversation on Israel and Palestine,” where the chair of the sponsored seminar, Professor Mahmood Mamdani, made clear that the analogy of Israel’s activities with apartheid in South Africa was clearly understood. He was joined in this scholarly enterprise, and denunciation of Israel’s tactics in suppressing terrorist attacks by Jeff Halper, head of the Israel Committee Against Housing Destruction, Barnard anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj, and Andre du Toit, a visitor from the University of Cape Town.
All sorts of events pertaining to Israel—rallies, petitions, Palestinian film festivals, a special showing of “Jenin, Jenin” about a non-existent massacre—have also accompanied the school years, year after year, during the period when the single most powerful and relevant administrator was Lisa Anderson.
But stung by accusations of harassment and intimidation, for months Columbia bobbed and weaved. On December 8, 2004 a Special Committee was appointed, of Columbia faculty and administrators, but of no one from outside the university, and entrusted with the deliberately circumscribed task of investigating, not MEALAC, but only the charges of harassment and intimidation against several professors, including Joseph Massad. No doubt Dean Anderson was flabbergasted to find herself appointed to that committee, given her close and friendly relationship as the overseer of Massad’s thesis, and as one of his references.
And on March 28, 2005 that Committee, as the whole world knows, disregarded almost all of the coherent and articulate and entirely believable testimony of students, found exactly one of the many accusations credible, and slapped, daintily, and most unwillingly, two little wrists held out at the conclusion of the farce.
But one piquant detail only became known publicly in mid April 2005. On November 5, 2004, the very Lisa Anderson who was appointed to investigate charges of intimidation and harassment made by students against Joseph Massad and two others, had signed a letter, along with 23 other members of MESA (the Middle East Studies Association). That letter decried press reports about anti-Israel professors as “the latest salvo against academic freedom at Columbia” and suggested that similar reports about students who had praised Massad were more credible than other reports focusing on the allegations of his bullying. The letter asked Mr. Bollinger to be cautious in investigating such charges. And the letter Lisa Anderson signed, a month before the man to whom it was sent appointed her as an influential member of an investigating committee, contained this as well:
We understand that you have asked a Provost of the university to look in to the matter. This is certainly an appropriate step if there are any genuine grounds for concern regarding these allegations. Such a response, however, because it has been made public, may also indicate that the university is open to politicized pressure from the outside to silence debate and dissent on Columbia University’s campus.
The invocation of “academic freedom” as an apotropaic talisman that will ward off, in all circumstances, charges of bullying, harassment, and intimidation – which have nothing to do with “academic” freedom. The notion that those doing the intimidating are, when charged with such, able to turn the tables on people who have endured such behavior for years, who are in a position of weakness (what students, graduate or undergraduate, dare to challenge professors – and how many of them endure all kinds of slights, so that only the most intolerable of situations, anywhere, are ever made public?) – nonsense.
All this time Anderson knew what she had written, and knew perfectly well that Bollinger had received that letter, and yet had gone ahead and a month later appointed her to the Committee. So she had a clear sign that he had read, and agreed, with that letter, and was going through the motions with as clear a signaling of nudge-nudge-wink-wink as can possibly be imagined. That was what Lisa Anderson must have been thinking.
But what was Bollinger thinking?
(Hugh Fitzgerald wrote this piece for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, which is designed to critique and improve Middle East Studies at North American colleges and universities.)
Top
THE HAIFA AND
BAR ILAN BOYCOTT
Fania Oz-Salzberger
Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2005
On the eve of Passover, the British Association of University Teachers (AUT) took a decision to boycott two of Israel's eight universities -- Haifa and Bar Ilan -- for their alleged collusion with the Israeli government in its mistreatment of the Palestinians. Haifa was also accused of curbing academic freedom. This decision is breathtaking, and will surely feature in the annals of the European radical left and its perverse contribution to peace in the Middle East.
The AUT's secretary-general stated that the ban "should take the form described in the Palestinian call for academic boycott of Israeli institutions." The guidelines, available on the Web site of the Palestinian Bir Zeit University, demand that -- "in the spirit of international solidarity" -- scholars world-wide abandon any form of academic and cultural cooperation, collaboration or joint projects with Israeli institutions, suspend all forms of subsidy to them, and withdraw investments already made.
Although the guidelines mercifully "exclude from the above actions . . . any conscientious Israeli academics and intellectuals opposed to their state's colonial and racist policies," at least one renowned Israeli civil-rights activist was sacked from the editorial board of an international journal of linguistics during a previous round of boycotts. Her only crime was to have been a faculty member at Bar Ilan University, which, by virtue of its formal academic involvement with a Jewish college in the West Bank, is deemed worthy of a wholesale international ban.
The University of Haifa -- my university -- is a different story. This model Jewish-Arab institution, a most unlikely candidate for boycott, was declared to be untouchable by the AUT "until it commits itself to upholding academic freedom, and in particular ceases its victimization of academic staff and students who seek to research and discuss the history of the founding of the state of Israel."
The story embedded here is well worth telling, but not in the way the AUT tells it. "On May 15, 2002," the AUT boycott document declares, "Dr. Ilan Pappe, senior lecturer in Political Science at Haifa University, was sent a letter notifying him that he faced trial and possible dismissal from his position . . . . [T]hese accusations related to Dr. Pappe's efforts to defend a 55-year-old graduate student, Teddy Katz, whose Master's thesis was under attack by an Israeli veteran's organization because it documented a massacre of 200 unarmed civilians by the Haganah (the pre-state army of Israel) at a village called Tantura, near Haifa."
This, to put it plainly, is false. Mr. Katz's thesis was based almost solely on transcriptions of oral interviews he conducted with elderly Palestinian former residents of Tantura, who allegedly witnessed a massacre of their kin by Jewish soldiers. When veterans of the Israeli army force that attacked Tantura sued Mr. Katz for libel, a district court ruled that the empirical evidence was grossly manipulated in the course of transliterating the tapes. Mr. Katz had put words in the mouths of his interviewees that were never uttered. He agreed to apologize to the veterans, telling the media that radical activists -- including Dr. Pappe -- had led him astray.
On the basis of this ruling, the University of Haifa decided to reverse the impressive "97" grade already awarded to the thesis, and, in a mood of appeasement, asked Mr. Katz to rectify and resubmit his work. It was then sent out to five external examiners, a majority of whom failed it. It is fair to note that all examiners wished to remain anonymous.
Dr. Pappe, Mr. Katz's unofficial mentor, is an anti-Zionist scholar of great political energies who has been calling for a boycott of Haifa, his own university, for several years. He was, indeed, challenged by a colleague to an internal university disciplinary hearing, not for his connection to the Katz affair but for his enduring efforts to sabotage the institution for which he worked. Dr. Pappe's academic freedom was never on the agenda, and the university authorities did not dismiss him. Last Wednesday, the university's rector finally urged him to quit his job voluntarily. Assuming that several British and Palestinian institutions would happily offer him an academic post, his insistence on remaining a fully paid member of racist and colonialist Haifa University is something of a mystery.
Many of Dr. Pappe's colleagues, including this writer, are baffled and angered by his stance. But that is as far as it goes: Israeli public and campus discourse is rife -- and comfortable -- with clashes of opinion. Personally, I'd invite him to coffee, a guest appearance at my seminar, and a tough conversation -- any time.
All this seems to have escaped the fact-finding capabilities of our British colleagues. The AUT disregarded not only the methodological nature of the decision to fail Mr. Katz's thesis, but also the meticulous judicial investigation. (In fact, the AUT ought to have called for an international ban on contact with the Israeli judiciary, for having ruled that Mr. Katz had libeled Israeli veterans.) What is worse, the AUT never sent anyone to check out the facts at Haifa, and, I am told, never asked the university for its response. Minimal standards of due process were not met.
No one in the AUT has acknowledged the plain fact that Haifa University's classrooms, dozens of its approved and published theses, and long shelves in its library, display a broad array of historical and sociological research of modern Israel -- work that is often as critical as Mr. Katz's, yet far better substantiated.
As a scholar of British history, teaching at Haifa with a doctorate from Oxford, I am, presumably, a target for this boycott. My colleagues and I will henceforth depend on the goodwill of non-AUT British academics -- or on Britons of a non-boycotting temperament -- in order to get invited to conferences, sit on advisory boards, and have our work published, reviewed and funded. In practice, I do not expect victimization. By and large, our colleagues in Britain will probably keep us within the free market of ideas. After all, as I tell my students (Jews and Arabs, incidentally), British thinkers pioneered the idea of free speech -- indeed, at about the time when British ships roamed the high seas looking for places to colonize. So this story is not about endangered careers, nor even about the free flow of learning. It is about moral outrage. Perhaps, also, it is about anti-Semitism.
The AUT got it wrong in just about every possible way. First, by opting for an academic boycott. They say it worked in South Africa, which is, in the very least, doubtful. But South African universities practiced apartheid. At Haifa, a fifth of the student body consists of Arab-Israeli citizens. A growing number of faculty, including former and present heads of departments and the new dean of research, are Arabs. Are they facing boycott, too, or does the AUT wish to see certified proof of non-Jewish denomination with every article submitted for publication in a British academic journal?
On a purely pragmatic level, this boycott will not work with Israelis. Despite its socialist pedigree, it smacks of the finger-rapping British governess. It oozes moral superiority. England expects every Israeli academic to do his duty? Thank you, but we're not impressed. We are too deeply entangled with British history ourselves.
Secondly, there is the issue of singling out Israel. Oh yes, Israel is occupying the West Bank and -- until August -- also the Gaza Strip. The occupation has lasted 38 years, and it has caused Palestinians much suffering. Their human and civil rights are being breached. About 60% of Israelis who answered the most recent polls are willing to end occupation in return for a secure peace. True, a large minority of Israelis still wishes to keep some of the West Bank under Israeli rule, and the University of Bar Ilan sends lecturers to settlements there. That is apparently a sin.
It is obviously a far greater sin than wholesale brutality, or else the AUT would have boycotted Chinese universities before and after Tiananmen Square, or Russian universities as the occupation of Chechnya grew bloody. Israel is singled out because it's easy game -- and because the AUT is not really in the business of promoting peace or reconciliation. It is in the business of delegitimizing Israel.
Thirdly, there is the timing. The boycott vote was held on the eve of Passover. This, in British terms, is a crime far worse than discrimination or hypocrisy: it is bad taste. (Still, let's try not to be so cynical as to assume that this was a premeditated way to prevent many Jewish members from attending the meeting.)
Fourthly, timing again. Israelis are now bracing themselves to disengage from Gaza. The majority of moderate supporters of disengagement is well represented in academia, among students and teachers alike. To help us muster political and moral strength for the most crucial inner conflict in the history of Israeli society, our colleagues in the U.K. are giving us a little kick in the ankle. How apt.
I, therefore, have two humble requests from the British Association of University Teachers.
First, do check your facts again -- assuming that all this sound and fury is about facts at all. Second, just in case my résumé happens to please your political palate, don't extend any kindness to me by saying that peaceniks like myself are off the hook. I am proud of being boycotted along with the University of Haifa as long as your deplorable decision stands. Don't chaperone me back into international scholarship under the patronage of the politically correct. This, I gather, is not what John Stuart Mill had in mind.
(Fania Oz-Salzberger is senior lecturer in the School of History and the Faculty of Law at the University of Haifa.)
BRITISH ACADEMIC
INTOLERANCE
Editorial, Jerusalem Post, April 12, 2005
Something unsavory is happening in Great Britain. Oona King, Labor MP for Bethnal Green, was pelted with onions and eggs by Muslim constituents Sunday when she participated in a memorial to Jewish victims of WWII's last German V2 missile attack on London. London's Mayor Ken Livingstone likened a Jewish journalist to a Nazi concentration camp guard, and on April 20 British university professors may decide to boycott Israeli academics.
All the above are inextricably linked. All are products of unprecedented antagonism towards Jews and all things Israeli. The pretext is Israeli policy but that cannot, for instance, account for the atmosphere of hate towards Jewish students on British campuses.
Only yesterday this newspaper published excerpts from a speech by Luciana Berger in which she explained her resignation from the National Executive Committee of the National Union of Students.
Berger argued that if anyone at the NUS conference were to "allege that Jews are an evil, manipulative people who want control of the world, there would no doubt follow rounds of furious speeches supported by endless clapping." Yet pamphlets saying just that were being freely circulated in the building in which she spoke.
With these the prevailing sentiments in Britain's halls of academe, it's little surprise that the Association of University Teachers' annual council in Eastbourne will next week consider boycotting three Israeli universities – Hebrew University of Jerusalem (for constructing student dormitories on allegedly Arab land), Bar-Ilan University (for ties to colleges in the territories) and Haifa University (for refusing to accept Teddy Katz's masters thesis alleging a massacre at Tantura in 1948).
Also facing boycott are individual Israeli academics who won't condemn their government's policies. In other words British lecturers will associate only with those of their Israeli colleagues whose views they countenance.
This in itself does not attest to minimal respect for freedom of expression and thought. The projected blacklist is about as tolerant and liberal as Nazi book-burning.
Indeed if British academics wished to experience real academic freedom they would be well advised to spend some time at the very campuses with which they wish to sever all ties. These are far from ideologically homogeneous institutions. Indeed many of the most outspoken critics of Israel's struggle to defend itself hail from Israel's own ivory towers, among them Ilan Pappe, under whose auspices Katz composed his "massacre" account. Katz was sued by 1948 war veterans for libel and found by an Israeli court to have falsified evidence. During the trial he recanted and apologized. He subsequently attempted to recant his own recantation and appealed the court's verdict to the Supreme Court, which rejected his appeal.
A boycott by its nature is the antithesis of freethinking. Moreover, this is not an unfortunate isolated misunderstanding.
A similar blacklist attempt failed to win a majority two years ago. But now, Sue Blackwell of Birmingham University reportedly claims, chances for an anti-Israeli majority have improved especially because of "a clear public call from the Palestinians for the boycott. We now have that, in writing."
This in itself should raise profound questions both here and abroad. Why is it that, just as the Palestinians are about to receive the greatest unilateral concession ever from Israel, they urge a boycott? It is hardly the manifestation of goodwill that would encourage Israelis to support yet greater existential risks.
Consequently, more than all else, the impending debate in Eastbourne should generate a response here. At the end of the day, how Israelis react is far more significant than the support for a repugnant resolution by foreign lecturers, who either do not know us or will not allow knowledge to dilute their prejudice.
With the stage set for Eastbourne's hostile extravaganza, all Israeli universities – those singled out and those spared for now – should announce unconditional solidarity with any boycotted Israeli institution or individual. Indeed it wouldn't be asking too much in the name of true intellectual liberty for our schools to cut off ties with any ostracizing counterparts.
Two years ago Oxford University threatened to suspend a professor who refused to accept an Israeli doctoral candidate merely because he was Israeli. Israel's own universities can afford to do no less.
Ultimately, however, such intolerance among Britain's university teachers for the most open and pluralistic universities in the region's only democracy is pitiable, and will prove an embarrassment – like the UN's since-repealed "Zionism is racism" resolution – to the institutions that sully themselves by engaging in it.
Top
WHO'S TURNING UP THE
HEAT ON PALESTINIAN ACADEMICS?
Norman W. Cohen
Jerusalem Post, April 16, 2005
Dear Sally Hunter,
As an expatriate Briton now living in Israel, I find it hard to describe my shock and feeling of betrayal at the proposed action of the Academic Union of Teachers to boycott Israeli academics.
I was born and brought up in England, imbibing the British attitude to fair play. How, I wonder, could that attitude have become so eroded in the mere 20 years since I left my home in Leamington Spa to live in Jerusalem?
Since I emigrated to Israel, untold horrors have taken place in many parts of the world. Millions have been slaughtered, raped and tortured and whole towns and villages have been wiped out, but I cannot recall any AUT efforts to boycott the academics from the countries that perpetrated these crimes.
I have no recollection, but perhaps I didn't read the British papers thoroughly on those days, of any protests being made by the AUT against Palestinian academics when one of their terrorists blew up a bus in Tel Aviv, killing and mutilating dozens. Among those murdered that day was my cousin Yoni Jesner, from Glasgow, a 19-year-old British citizen taking a year off to study Judaism in Israel before taking up his place to study medicine in London.
Neither did you censure the Palestinians when the No. 32 Gilo bus was decimated just down the road from my home, killing a good friend of mine, a brilliant doctor who had helped many handicapped children, and also many of my young friends and neighbors.
Did you say one word in protest when Ariel Zarner, the handsome, warm-hearted 17-year-old boy who had sat next to me in my synagogue every week since he was a child, was gunned down by Palestinian gunmen, along with his fellow students, as they sat studying the Bible?
I do not recall any AUT effort to boycott Arab academics as a result of these atrocities, even though elections in Arab universities on the West Bank are consistently pro-Hamas and thus there is a clear case that these universities agree with the murders.
I am deliberately focusing only on those horrific acts of terror carried out by Palestinians that affected me personally. It would be impossible for me to record, or you to read, the thousands of murderous acts of terror that have been perpetrated against Jews and Israelis over the years since I have lived in Israel, and for the many years before the State of Israel even existed or the term "Palestinians" was coined.
I was born in Coventry and lived there during the Blitz. I served for five years in the British army, going over to France on D-Day, and witnessed many acts of brutality and cruelty. None of them, however, compare with attacks on women and children on buses, in the streets, and in places of entertainment using explosives containing nuts, bolts and nails that have previously been dipped in rat poison in order to inflict the maximum injury.
When can we hear your censure of those academics whose countrymen, relatives and friends planned and carried out these atrocities?
Yours sincerely,
Norman W. Cohen
Top
ACADEMIC INTIFADA
Melanie Phillips
FrontPageMag.com, 13 April 2005
Here we go again. Later this month, Britain’s Association of University Teachers will debate a proposed boycott of Israeli academics. This is almost three years to the day since the campaign for such a boycott was first launched, when Professors Steven and Hilary Rose proposed it in a letter to the Guardian. Although the attempt largely failed, it ushered in a climate of virulent intolerance on campus in which two Israeli academics were sacked from a journal, an Israeli student discriminated against in admissions, and a number of papers from Israeli academics returned unopened.
The Prime Minister’s office said that Tony Blair was ‘appalled by discrimination against academics on the grounds of their race or nationality’ and that ‘universities must send a clear signal that this will not be tolerated’. But it was tolerated, and the unpunished academics did not give up. In March 2004, more than 300 of them signed an open letter in the Guardian asking the leaders of Israeli universities to reveal whether they supported government policies.
They finally managed to reopen the issue at a conference held last December at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. The conference, organised by the school’s Palestinian Society, was called ‘Resisting Israeli Apartheid: Strategies and Principles’ and launched a new boycott organisation, the British Committee for Universities in Palestine. This drew up a manifesto calling on academics to break links with Israel by refusing to work with Israeli institutions, referee academic papers, grant applications or attend conferences.
Even before the AUT debates the new boycott call, the Israel Science Foundation, the biggest government funder of Israeli research, has already found itself a victim of the Israel blacklist, receiving two rejections from British academics to review an application. The Guardian reported that an unnamed academic described his ‘utmost respect’ for the scholar whose grant he was asked to review, but refused on the basis that it was Israeli money and he disapproved of Israel’s actions towards the Palestinian people. ‘I hope you understand this is nothing personal,’ he added.
The AUT has been here before, too, having first debated an Israel boycott two years ago when it was defeated after an acrimonious debate. But now, the tactics are more sophisticated. In a tactical manoeuvre to get the motion accepted, it does not commit the union to implement a boycott but merely requires that the full text of the boycott call be circulated to all members.
There is yet another twist to this resuscitated campaign. For the boycott would not be extended to all Israeli academics -- only to those who refuse to denounce their government’s policies in the occupied territories. The motion would generously exclude ‘conscientious Israeli academics and intellectuals opposed to their state’s colonial and racist policies’.
This requirement to denounce Israel as the price of continued social acceptance is doubly disgusting. First, it is of course a monstrous inversion which turns Israel, the victim of unbroken annihilatory Arab terror for the past half century, into the regional bully while sanitising Palestinian aggression.
Second, it represents a profound betrayal of the cardinal principle of intellectual endeavour, which is freedom of speech and debate. If anyone had ever told British academics that there would come a time when they would punish colleagues because of the views they held, and would treat them as pariahs and try to destroy their livelihoods in order to intimidate others into toeing the sole approved political line, they would have been incredulous. In the western tradition the universities are, after all, the historic custodians of free intellectual inquiry and open debate. Censorship, suppression of ideas and intellectual intimidation are associated with totalitarian regimes which attempt to coerce people into the approved way of thinking.
The motion has already been compared to McCarthyism. This is too kind. However cruel, illiberal and arbitrary that disturbing period was, a number of those who were hounded subsequently turned out to have actually been communists. By contrast, Israeli academics are to be persecuted for failing to denounce their own country for seeking to defend its citizens against genocidal mass murder. A more appropriate comparison would surely be the forced conversion of the Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages, or the show trials under Stalinism. For in true totalitarian tradition, only those in the pariah group who denounce their own will be permitted to have a livelihood. To survive in the cradle of free expression, Israelis will have to betray their own people in the cause of hatred and lies.
But who can be surprised? For this is a natural development from the implicit -- and sometimes explicitly stated -- assumption that courses through British intellectual circles in the ongoing hate-fest against Israel, that only those British Jews who denounce Israel’s policies can be considered to be British; anyone who supports Israel is guilty of ‘dual loyalty’. Since defending Israel is a thought-crime which thus calls into question one’s membership of a nation, it follows that Israel’s academics must similarly find called into question their membership of the academy.
What is notable about the AUT motion is that it reflects the truly shocking ignorance of the region’s history and current political reality, the resulting deep gullibility to propaganda based on lies, and the consequent vicious double standards and prejudice that now characterise British received opinion on the subject of Israel.
An unidentified academic has defended the boycott ‘as a means of registering my protest against Israelis’ lack of respect for human rights and continuing illegal occupation of Palestinian land.’ This parrot mindlessly repeats the mantra of the left about the ‘illegal occupation’ in apparent ignorance of the fact that a) the occupation is perfectly legal under international law as the defensive measure against attack that it was; b) that it is not ‘Palestinian land’ at all but territory that belonged to the British colonial power until it was illegally occupied by Jordan and Egypt and is now -- since they have washed their hands of it -- most fairly to be described as no-man’s land; and c) that parts of these territories, such as Hebron, are the sites of Jewish settlement of great antiquity, predating the Arab colonisation by several centuries but where Jews were massacred and from which they were driven out by Arab occupiers. If we’re talking colonisation here, the Jews of Palestine were the historic victims.
And of course, no other people than the Jews is to have their livelihood or membership of the community of civilised nations made conditional on how they think. No other people is to be forced to take a particular political line as the price of intellectual acceptance. The fine consciences of those calling for this action do not extend to proposing similar boycotts on any of the world’s myriad dictatorships: no boycott of Syria, for example, for the occupation of Lebanon; or China for the oppression of Tibet; or the Sudan for the small matter of the genocide of some two million-plus Africans.
Yet these are our university teachers, the very people responsible for shaping the assumptions of a society, whose own profound ignorance, prejudice and twisted morality are now on such conspicuous display. Rather then maintain their historic role as the disinterested custodians of truth and objectivity, university academics have become the principal promulgators of an agenda to delegitimise the state of Israel and, by doing so, delegitimise the claim to peoplehood of one people and one people alone in the world: the Jews.
And many of those involved in this despicable enterprise have been Jews from both Israel and the diaspora -- none of whom, it goes without saying, has ever boycotted Palestinian academics, even at the height of the Palestinian terrorism onslaught. The particular psychopathology which causes such Jews to march behind the banner of genocide against their own people -- and all in the cause of ‘human rights’ -- is worthy of academic study in its own right. These Jewish quislings -- to call them ‘self-hating’ is misleading since many of them inordinately love themselves -- have done untold damage, since they provide Judeophobes with the fiction that hating Israel cannot be anti-Semitic.
Not all academics, of course, go along with the boycott; indeed, many are appalled. The British National Postgraduate Committee has issued a statement saying that a boycott attempt based on nationality encourages discrimination and goes against the principle of judging academic work on its merits alone. It inhibits progress in areas that benefit humanity, cuts the UK off from leading research, prevents collaborations, and encourages discrimination against some students and staff within the UK.
Nevertheless, despite such evidence of a residual decency the universities have become the swamp in which this virus breeds. In the grip of a group-think that causes them to genuflect to victim-culture and the deconstruction of western morality and the concept of truth, a dismaying number of our supposedly finest minds have been transformed from people who spread enlightenment to those who cast darkness before them. In Britain, being educated no longer means being elevated. On the contrary, it has begun to seem that the more highly educated the person, the deeper the ignorance and the more virulent the prejudice.
Intellectuals assume they are in the vanguard of progress, and that because of their superior brain power are superior human beings. In fact, the higher reaches of learning and the fundamental tenets of human decency are often strangers to each other. From the time of the French revolutionary terror, intellectuals have been listed amongst the principal enemies of humanity. In the 19th century they energetically promoted eugenics in order to eradicate lesser breeds and create a world peopled by finer individuals like themselves. They supported Stalinism until the Hungarian uprising opened the eyes of some but by no means all to the tyranny they had watched unfold but somehow never seen. And as the British writer Paul Johnson observed in his book ‘Intellectuals’, Mussolini had many intellectual followers, as did Castro, Nasser and Mao Tse-tung, while Hitler performed well among teachers and university professors.
As he concluded: ‘Violence has always exercised a strong appeal to some intellectuals. It goes hand in hand with the desire for radical absolutist solutions’. With the collapse of communism, the intellectuals of the universities have alighted upon a neat replacement instrument to bring about their radical absolutist solution to the existence of the west -- the destruction of Israel, and with it the Jews who first gave the west the civilisation they so despise.
Top
JEWS AND HONKEYS NEED
NOT APPLY
Steven Vincent
FrontPageMagazine.com, April 8, 2005
Call it the anti-Zionist trifecta. On March 14th Norman Finkelstein, DePaul University professor and author of such books as The Holocaust Industry and Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History spoke at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University. Sponsored by the Pittsburgh Palestinian Solidarity Committee, Mr. Finkelstein was actually the second anti-Israeli speaker the PSC brought onto campus. On February 3, the PSC welcomed Ali
Abuminah, founder of the so-called “Electronic Intifada,” a website dedicated to promulgating information on Israel’s “37-year-old occupation” of Palestine. “You have to question what Arab students see in common between someone like Ali Abuminah and Norman Finkelstein,” comments Aaron Weil, executive director of Pittsburgh’s Edward and Rose Berman Hillel Jewish University Center.
But it was the third speaker that caused more than questions to arise from Pittsburgh’s Jewish community. On February 17th Malik Zulu
Shabazz, leader of the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense, came onto the campus ostensibly to talk about “black empowerment in education.” Instead, the firebrand lawyer, rap singer and follower of former Nation of Islam official Khalid Mohammad presented a rambling exegesis on black victimization, the crimes of white America and the perfidy of the Jews.
Declaring his intention to “pin the tail on the racist honkies at Carnegie Mellon University,” Mr.
Shabazz—standing before a backdrop of lynching photographs and flanked by several “security guards”--asserted that the city of Pittsburgh was “racist as hell” and that racism at CMU “drips to the core of this university.” Encouraged by shouts from the audience and his entourage, Mr. Shabazz adduced several arguments, among them that Jesus was black, Moses “lifted” the Ten Commandments from the ancient Egyptians, the Anti-Defamation League was established by gangster Meyer Lansky to bring “illegal alcohol, dope and drugs” into America, blacks and not Israeli Jews are true Semites, Israel is a “terrorist” state and Theodore Herzl has “blood on his hands.” Other observations Mr. Shabazz broached were that George Washington raped black women, the word “picnic” originated from “pick a nigger to lynch” and that he himself was not an anti-Semite. He provided no evidence to support his claims.
During the question and answer period, Mr. Shabazz asked Jews in the audience—about a third of which was white—to identify themselves. When several raised their hands, he asked if they believed in Jesus, and when they said no, asked “See, how can we accept you?” According to several eyewitnesses, including Jeffrey
Cohan, Director of Communications and Public Affairs for the Pittsburgh branch of United Jewish Federation, the talk took on the attributes of a “hate rally.” Although Mr. Shabazz wore a black suit and fur overcoat, “his guards were dressed in paramilitary jumpsuits with berets and acted like they were carrying out military drills,” Cohan says. “They marched up and down the aisles, chanting and shouting.” A few minutes into the speech, the electricity was cut off, pitching the room into a darkness barely lit by audience members who turned on the lights of their cell phones. As one young CMU faculty member remarked, “It was the most terrifying thing I have ever experienced.”
Listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as one of 40 people on America’s “radical right” to watch, Malik Zulu
Shabazz—born Paris Lewis—graduated from Howard University, and went on to work for disgraced Washington, D.C. mayor Marion Barry. In 1989, the SPLC reports, Mr.
Shabazz—then calling himself Zulu King Paris—helped cut a rap album called “Rise, Black Man, Rise.” After joining the Nation of Islam, he was instrumental in organizing that group’s 1995 “Million Man March” in Washington; he then followed his mentor Khalid Abdul Mohammad, who left the Nation of Islam in 1997 to direct the New Black Panther Party, which had formed in 1990. (The NBPP has no affiliations with the original Black Panthers, many of whose surviving members have disavowed the new group.) When Mr. Mohammad died in 2001, Mr. Shabazz became the NBPP’s director. In 2003, he formed another activist group, Black Lawyers for Justice, and even found time to cut another rap album entitled “Amerikkka’s Most Hated.”
Mr. Shabazz came to CMU at the invitation of Spirit, an African-American student organization. Originally, the Black Power leader was to receive $300 for his educational remarks from CMU’s Center for African American Urban Studies, but the center rescinded the offer when they learned more about his identity. The school’s senate also barred Spirit from paying Mr.
Shabazz.
If the New Black Panther sought to inspire enthusiasm among African-American students, he seemed to have only limited effect. Several Spirit members approached Jewish students after the event, Mr. Cohan says, to apologize for his comments. Perhaps discomfited by Mr. Shabazz’s controversial arguments, Spirit president Abigail Cyntje did not return several phone calls requesting comment. CMU seemed equally reticent to discuss the issue; inquiries were directed to university spokesman Michael Murphy, who also did not return calls.
Interestingly enough, one person who did wish to speak about this imbroglio was Mr. Shabazz himself. “I am not anti-Jewish. I believe in the revelations of the Torah, and in the teachings of Judaism,” he emphasized in a phone interview. “My battle is against white racism.” As for the
NBPP, “We are not a hate group,” Mr. Shabazz stressed. “We are a group that tries to heal and repair black people from hate crimes perpetrated on them.”
The activist lawyer admitted that he had come to speak about the “roles and responsibilities of black students,” but circumstances forced him to deviate somewhat from the topic. “I was walking into a hostile environment,” he explained. “CMU is a white university, and I am a controversial speaker. Even before I showed up I began receiving hostile e-mails. We heard that white students would attempt to pack the room.” He also believes they tried to stop him from speaking by cutting off the lights. Moreover, Mr. Shabazz claims was the promised honorarium was $2,000, not $300. “I don’t believe in turning the other cheek,” he said. “When I’m attacked, I fight back.”
Although whites may not have appreciated the insights contained in his speech, “It was received positively through the black community,” Mr. Shabazz claimed. When asked about the Spirit members who later expressed embarrassment over his rhetoric, the New Black Panther scoffed, “There was so much pressure brought against Spirit students, they probably feared that funding for their organization would be cut off it they didn’t apologize. I think I gave a great lecture, one that should be studied by black students in the future.”
“Look,” he concluded, “people call me an anti-Semite and hatemonger, but no one says I’m lying. No one is saying that my comments about Zionism or Theodore Herzl are wrong. If someone thinks I’m teaching the garbage of anti-Semitism, then let themchallenge what I’m saying. And that includes David Horowitz,” he added, referring to the publisher of Frontpage Magazine. “I would like to challenge him to a debate. Let’s discuss these issues face to face, in public.”
While that may or may not happen, one point is clear: Jewish groups like Hillel and the UJF are monitoring the situation carefully. “We’re not talking about a situation like at Columbia or Berkeley and CMU is working with us,” says Mr. Weil. “Still, when three speakers in a matter of weeks come onto campus expressing anti-Israel sentiments, it creates a dangerous situation. We have a moral obligation to stand up against hate.”
Top
As students resume classes at Columbia University today after their winter break, they will face the telltale summonses of college life: Go to class, surf the Internet, sleep, pursue romance, sleep.
And a new one: Testify about the alleged misconduct of their professors.
Every Monday and Friday until its work is done, a novel faculty panel will make itself available to hear narratives from students and faculty members in the hope of sorting out a virulent dispute that has rattled the university for months. If anything is clear in this very unclear quarrel, ostensibly over supposed intimidation of Jewish students by pro-Palestinian professors in the Middle East and Asian languages and cultures department, it is that it has already produced some unbecoming fallout.
It has led one professor, who denounces the whole matter as a "witch hunt," to abandon one of his signature courses. It has prompted a faculty member in the medical school, not at all directly involved, to send an e-mail message to an implicated professor that he is a "pathetic typical Arab liar" and should leave the country. There have been death threats. Students have been labeled as "ignorant" and "liars" by teachers. Perhaps it is not surprising that one professor caught in the whirlpool came down with shingles.
Academic squabbles often go this way, packed with more crass melodrama than the worst reality shows. Clashes in the inherently ungentle halls of academia inevitably touch raw nerves when the context is the tinderbox of the Middle East, when personal identity can be at stake. For some members of the Columbia community on the sidelines, this is gripping theater. As one professor blithely put it, "This is blood sport for me, and I love it."
Determining the boundaries of this dispute is a slippery exercise. At root it is about some Jewish students and recent graduates, who could number several dozen, contending that in recent years they felt mocked and marginalized by pro-Palestinian professors. They have not, however, pointed to any grade retribution. Complaints of this sort have buzzed around campus for some time, but the issue flared into international news in late October, when the news media was shown a film, "Columbia Unbecoming," which had been made at the behest of unhappy Jewish students at Columbia by a pro-Israel group in Boston called the David Project.
The quarrel has also become about whether the department in question, known by the acronym Mealac, is heavily unbalanced in favor of Palestinian sympathizers, not that anyone entirely agrees what "balance" means in academia and whether it is even warranted. And the whole matter has come to be wrapped in the broader cloth of academic freedom.
In no small way, it has also evolved into a test for Columbia's president, Lee C. Bollinger, himself a target of considerable criticism over his handling of the matter.
The dispute has led to abstruse questions being posed, like, "Can a professor officially intimidate a student who is not his student?"
The Columbia contretemps is perhaps the most public expression of a polarization that also festers at other campuses. Indeed, the David Project intends to do films elsewhere, and said that early interviews have already been shot. A somewhat similar dispute happened in 2002 at the University of Chicago, though its provost, Richard P. Saller, said the allegations were more vague and largely judged untrue - one professor had the very good alibi of being in Mongolia at the time of an alleged incident - and the resolution reasonably tidy.
Some Columbia accusations are quite specific, though hard to evaluate stripped of fuller context, but several faculty members say they feel something is there. Dan Miron, a pro-Israel professor in the Mealac department, said that for five years dozens of Jewish students have told him of "rude" and "snotty" treatment by colleagues. "These students didn't look like disturbed people who would invent these things," he said.
The half-hour Columbia film, which has been expanded from its original version, shows 14 students and Rabbi Charles Sheer, who recently retired as director of Columbia's Hillel chapter and who says he has heard numerous intimidation complaints. Some students in the film point to certain shortcomings. It conflates professors' inflammatory written passages with faculty-student friction, muddling what is being contested, and just 6 of the 14 students speak firsthand of incidents.
Two allegations have gained the most traction. One involves a sidewalk encounter between Lindsay Shrier, who has since graduated, and her professor, George Saliba, during which she says he told her that because she had green eyes she was not a Semite and could not claim ancestral ties to Israel. The second transpired at a small lecture off campus at which Tomy Schoenfeld, a student who had served in the Israeli Army, says that when he tried to question Prof. Joseph Massad, the professor first asked him, "How many Palestinians have you killed?"
In a response printed in the campus newspaper, The Columbia Spectator, Professor Saliba said he did not recall the conversation but believed that Ms. Shrier misunderstood. Professor Massad said through an e-mail message, "It is inconceivable that I would ever respond to a member of the audience in the manner and context that he describes."
Another much-discussed assertion involves Deena Shanker, a Barnard senior not in the film. She said that Professor Massad sometimes ridiculed her questions and during one class exchange yelled at her to get out. (She stayed.) "People in the class were like blown away," she said. At least one other student agrees with this account. In another e-mail message, Professor Massad said Ms. Shanker's version is an "outright lie."
'One Big Fish Soup'
Somewhere in the backdrop to all of this, many feel, is the long shadow of Edward Said, the outspoken advocate for Palestinians and Columbia scholar, who died in 2003, and the increasingly vocal, pro-Palestinian viewpoint at Columbia and other campuses in recent years.
Rashid Khalidi, the director of Columbia's Middle East Institute, said he thinks too many things are being dumped into "one big fish soup" that inflates the student complaints. "Have some students felt intimidated?" he said. "Sure. But should we all be getting our knickers in a twist and agitated? I think not."
He added: "It's particularly piquant to me to hear people who have never taken a Mealac course talking about this. It's like me talking about the astrophysics department."
Three professors, in particular, have been joined at the center of this storm: Professor Massad, Professor Saliba and Professor Hamid Dabashi. The allegations against them, at least those made public so far, vary in texture. Professor Saliba, who teaches Arabic and Islamic science, has chiefly come up for the "green eye" incident. Professor Dabashi has been mentioned for canceling a class to answer his "moral duty" to attend a Palestinian rally and seems implicated chiefly for his published political viewpoints.
Professor Massad, however, fills a category of his own. More complaints have been directed against him. Some students refer to one of his courses as "Israel Is Racist." He is also the most vulnerable, the only one lacking tenure.
Yet all three have been affected. Professor Dabashi, who was born in Iran, said he has become self-conscious about what he says and has canceled several appearances.
"I feel a duty to spread criticism of things I don't believe in," he said. "But I'm wondering for what? A two-headed monster is being made out of me." He replaced the greeting on his voice mail message with a generic one in the hope of dissuading the surge of hate calls. A month ago, he said, he contracted a case of shingles, a virus that has symptoms that can be worsened by stress.
What's most painful to him, he said, is students questioning his two children, both Columbia undergraduates, about his beliefs. He said he tells them, "Stay away from politics."
"To me, these are dark ages," he said. "This is not the United States I moved into in 1976. I don't recognize it. I'm in sort of moral shock."
Professor Massad, a Jordanian-born Palestinian, said he, too, has been swamped with hate mail, defiled as a "camel jockey" and "Islamic Fascist." He said nonenrolled hecklers attend his lectures to provoke him. He said he has chosen not to teach his most controversial course, "Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies," in the coming semester, because of the emotional toll and because he worries it might jeopardize his tenure.
In a recent class, when a student's cellphone rang, Professor Massad did reach for humor by telling her he would not order her to leave, the protocol of his co-teacher, because he did not want to intimidate her.
As for the students, Ariel Beery, the School of General Studies student body president and a proponent of the film, mentioned that classmates sometimes taunt him as a "fascist" and "racist."
Dozens of Mealac students, including Jewish and pro-Israel undergraduates, have come forth to defend the professors. "I've had an overwhelmingly positive experience with the department," said Erin Pineda, a Barnard junior and Mealac major. "Sometimes even I don't like some of the answers I get. But that's a far cry from intimidation. By its nature, this is not like a biology department."
Why this dichotomy? Some anti-Mealac professors say the pro-Mealac students have been indoctrinated. Some pro-Mealac professors say the anti-Mealac students are, in effect, hicks, products of sheltered environments where pro-Palestinian views are absent. One faculty member suggested that there is "no underestimating how ignorant college students are."
Ms. Shanker, who grew up in the small town of Goshen, N.Y., where, she said, Israel is rarely discussed, said to this point: "I think that argument is ludicrous. We're not idiots."
Balanced vs. Unbalanced
A curious facet of the dispute is that for the most part, the complaining students seem much less angry than people on the periphery. For instance, Mr. Schoenfeld, who took only a few Mealac courses and has graduated, said he has no problem with the department and did not find it unbalanced. He does not think Professor Massad should be fired.
On the other hand, an assistant professor in the medical school sent an e-mail message to Professor Massad, saying: "Go back to Arab land where Jew hating is condoned. Get the hell out of America. You are a disgrace and a pathetic typical Arab liar."
Alan Brinkley, Columbia's provost, told the school's dean to advise the professor that such messages are unacceptable.
Many Columbia professors are worried foremost about the implications for academic freedom.
"I've been teaching 33 years and I've always thought we all knew what was appropriate faculty deportment," said Andrew J. Nathan, a political science professor who is dubious about the students' charges. "Now it is not clear to everyone that the classroom is where the faculty is in full control. I teach a course called Introduction to Human Rights. We had a whole week on the torture memos of the Bush administration. Now I'm starting to wonder whether there's somebody in my class of 143 students who might grieve against me, that I indoctrinated them, that they went through emotional suffering to hear about these things."
Robert Pollack, a professor of biological sciences, said: "Many professors have offensive opinions. If the answer to whether you can have those opinions is no, then we're cooked as an institution."
Mr. Bollinger has been assailed by faculty members for too weakly defending the rights of professors and failing to contain the controversy. They suspect he is boxed in by the demands of fund-raising and the university's ambitions to expand its campus. "There has been an administrative silence," Professor Pollack said, "when there should be a ringing endorsement of academic freedom."
Mr. Bollinger, who said he finds the dispute "very painful," maintained that he is trying to safeguard both faculty and student rights. "Many people, perhaps understandably, do not grasp what's at stake," he said. "They see one side of it, one aspect of it. This can't be reduced to a single line of thought."
Pro-Israel professors on campus, who have been conspicuously quiet, say they feel cowed and nervously out of fashion. "Many Jewish faculty members feel uncomfortable with this whole issue and wish it would go away," said Stephanie G. Neuman, a senior research scholar and the director of the university's comparative defense studies program, who has taught at Columbia since the 1970's. "Most of them come out of the same leftist, assimilationist background as I do. We're uncomfortable with the idea that the left has abandoned Israel and maybe abandoned Jews. We're in cognitive dissonance."
It is impossible to gauge the institutional damage from the quarrel. Some faculty members say alumni have told them they will withhold donations. Other professors say some parents are directing their children elsewhere. "Parents of Jewish students have said to me, given the turmoil at Columbia, I think I'll send my kid to Penn," one professor said.
Mr. Bollinger says he doubts repercussions will be pronounced. One thing the university has promised is to construct better grievance procedures, even though administration officials said students rarely grouse about professors. And Mr. Bollinger says the university has more work to do to in enriching the curriculum and adding to the scholarship in the Middle East department.
A Panel's Tall Task
The five-member faculty committee investigating this dispute has itself been maligned, especially by those displeased with the Mealac department. They contend that the committee includes insiders disposed toward the accused professors, including some who have signed Israel-divestment petitions. Some students from the film are considering not talking to the panel. Mr. Bollinger said he has faith in its composition.
Clearly, the panel faces a tall task. Some incidents reduce to a student's word against a professor's. There is the matter of what constitutes intimidation. Some faculty members argue that a professor cannot intimidate someone who is not his student, because the professor wields no power. If the committee agrees, that would toss out the Tomy Schoenfeld allegation, since he was not in Professor Massad's class.
The committee hopes to sort through this dispute by the end of February. No one imagines its conclusions will be the final word. The fight is too pitched and will not stop.
The other day, Mr. Bollinger said he found viewpoints of Professor Dabashi "deeply personally offensive."
Asked to respond, Professor Dabashi came back: "I find him 10 times more outrageous. What sort of president is he?"
"It's time we need to step back," Ms. Shanker said. "It's
getting personal. I actually really like the Mealac department. But I've been
called a liar. I'm not even sure how to react to that. This is getting
ridiculous."
Top
It’s common knowledge that Middle East Studies programs at America’s elite universities have become ground zero for violent anti-Israel incitement, featuring professors, courses and conferences that excuse—and in some cases, even support—Palestinian terrorism.
It comes as no
surprise, then, that
Once
again, another Arab-financed and sponsored curriculum on another
prestigious American university campus seeks to further roil the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, calling for the dismantling of
More than anything else, the fellowship description of “Society under Occupation: Contemporary Palestinian Politics, Culture and Identity” reads like a Palestinian propaganda pamphlet:
“Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has now persisted for over thirty-seven years, during which time the number of Israeli settlers in the occupied territories has grown to hundreds of thousands and Israeli control over the territories has been strengthened by the use of checkpoints, by-pass roads, military engagement and, most recently, the construction of a wall separating Palestinians from Israel and from one another. Despite living under occupation, as refugees, or outside their homeland, Palestinians have maintained a vibrant cultural and political life. In 2005-2006, the Institute will focus research on contemporary Palestinian life, both under occupation and in the diaspora. We wish to explore Palestinian culture, society and religious life, as well as Palestinian national identity and contemporary Palestinian political, legal and ethical thought. We also hope to examine Palestinians’ understanding of dispossession and occupation, and their visions of a post-occupation future.”
This
description is blatantly biased against
That
the 37 years of “occupation” are a response to an Arab world that has
vowed, since
Yet
the fellowship description continues by stating that the Palestinians are
“living under occupation as refugees” and are “outside their homeland.”
Since 98 percent of the Palestinian population in the
By implication, “checkpoints and bypass roads” are also mentioned in the fellowship description as if they exist to deny Palestinian Arabs their rights. Checkpoints have been proven to stop suicide bombers sent and paid for by the Palestinian government, as well as the smuggling of armed terrorists who murder Israelis, even non-Jews. That bypass roads were created because Palestinians shoot at Israelis on the highways in the West Bank isn’t clarified, nor is the fact that West Bank Palestinian Arabs, after passing a security check, are then free to use those same bypass roads.
And of course, the Security Fence erected to keep out suicide bombers that the Palestinian Authority praises as martyrs and rewards with money is a “wall,” separating the Palestinians from the Israelis—according to the fellowship.
According
to Miguel Centeno, the acting director of the Institute for Transregional Study
at
When I asked Centeno about the program description, he maintained that it was unbiased. I detailed my criticisms as outlined above and he responded, “We cannot write a proposal that takes in all claims by each side.” He continued, “The job of the University is not to make ideological choices.”
“Not even to mention terrorist attacks and their effect on Israelis?” I asked.
“I
feel perfectly comfortable with the paragraph as it stands,” replied Centeno
in an irritated tone. “It was approved by
When I had asked Centeno for the name of the author, he initially declined to reveal it but finally said, “You can assume I wrote it.”
The
announcement for the fellowship on Princeton’s own website makes clear that
the description’s perspective will be the “theme” of the university’s
Middle East studies department through 2005 and 2006; that is, that the
Palestinians are dispossessed as a result of Israel’s existence, and that
Israel is subjugating them and using military might against them without
provocation, thus keeping them from their “homeland.” In short, the course
is little more than an Arab-subsidized activism program against
Centeno
himself claimed that he has no objection to
On the subject of Palestinian and Arab terrorism, Centeno said he hoped the program would help people to “understand” terrorism, “not excuse or condone it, but explain why terrorism occurs, why does a society produce this?”
It
is a near certainty that the program will blame Palestinian terrorism on Israeli
“occupation,” “checkpoints” and “military engagement” and not on the
thugs who run the PLO and encourage such activities among the Palestinian
population as they steal their foreign aid money. Terrorism has become
something to be explained and understood in
Further
inspection of the previous fellows and visiting professors under the program
reveals that even the Israeli or Jewish academics in the department are chosen
for their anti-Israel zeal. Past recipients have included Yoav Peled of the
political science department at
Richard
Falk, another past fellow, wrote in The Nation that the
Sylvain Cypel, a former reporter for Le Monde (the French and EU have been notorious for funding PLO terrorist groups), was another fellowship recipient. Cypel regularly writes of Israeli “oppression.”
Of
even greater interest is past fellowship recipient Anders Strindberg. Despite
common knowledge that the Christian population in the
Strindberg’s
rants against
One has to wonder if Strindberg has even heard about the 2002 siege of the Church of the Nativity, where Christian priests were held hostage by terrorists from the PLO. When the church was finally freed, it was discovered that the Palestinian terrorists inside had defecated on Christian shrines and stolen all the gold icons.
But
Strindberg is just one example of
Centeno
can’t see the abject bias in the fellowship description for his department’s
theme for next year, because such demonization against
Centano
insisted that all programs in his department are funded directly by the
university, but even programs funded by
Any
effort to bring peace to the
The
War of 1948 (started by the Arab world) left a greater number of Jewish refugees
who fled to
Step
by step, our universities are becoming like the indoctrination centers that
exist in the universities of the totalitarian Arab world.
Columbia
University's One-Sided Conference About Israel
Oleg Preusner
Campus-Watch.org, February 7, 2005
Columbia University's panel "One State or Two: Alternative Proposals for Middle East Peace" presented a biased, tendentious Israel-bashing program on Monday, January 31, that provided more heat than light. The very title was a dead giveaway: a one-state solution is widely understood to be a code word for the disappearance of the Jewish state and its replacement violently and/or demographically by an irredentist Palestinian majority.
The evening, nonetheless, began on a largely sober note with an overview of the Islamic Middle Ages by Professor Mark Cohen of Princeton. He spoke of the intolerance of monotheism, broad brushing all three Abrahamic faiths. He did, however, stress that Jews did a lot better under the Islamic rule during the Middle Ages than under Christianity. Anti-Jewish prejudices in the Middle Ages in the Islamic realm "did not have the same salience as anti-Semitism in Christian Europe," he explained. He underscored dhimmitude (the second-class status of Jews and Christians—Peoples of the Book) as a relatively benign form of both ethnic toleration and social discrimination. Compared to the Catholic Inquisition, the poll tax and various other civic humiliations Jews suffered in the Arab world were fairly tolerable. After all, he reminded his audience, anti-Semitism, as such, came to the Arab in the nineteenth century largely via Christian Arabs and French missionaries in the Levant. Until then Jews had not been persecuted qua Jews, but simply as one disfavored minority among others.
Cohen differentiated two interpretations of Arab treatment of the Jews in the Middle Ages—the conflict school and the harmony school. The latter viewed social and economic attitudes towards minorities as on the whole friendly, if somewhat stern and discriminatory; the former as riddled with interminable dispute and socially sanctioned degradation. Adherence to the conflict school led by extrapolation to a preference for a contemporary two-state solution, while belief in the harmony school propelled one in the direction of the one-state alternative. Cohen, in the end, subscribing to the conflict school, favored the two-state solution to the present Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The harsher, ideologically accented part of the evening began with Dr. Rashid Khalidi's presentation. He spent a few tortured minutes stating that the talk he was giving was not the talk he wished to present because of time limitations, implying that he had heavier artillery in store. He declared that he was not speaking in favor of any one solution and that he came with no concrete proposals for peace in hand. However, he quickly underscored that Israel's national sovereignity was won at the expense of another people's and that its continued appropriation of Palestinian land boded ill for the future. He said he was far more interested in structural rather than discursive features of the Middle East, in the actual reality on the ground—walls, watchtowers and roads—rather than declarations and demarches issued by the powers-that-be. Largely pessimistic about the future, he appeared dismissive of the recent warming in Israeli-Palestinian relations.
Dr. Khalidi proved to be mere preamble to Dr.Joseph Massad's philippic against the Jewish state, which he declared in no uncertain terms had not only expelled the Palestinian Arab majority and confiscated its property, but continued to prevent its rightful return. He almost always prefixed or suffixed the phrase "the Jewish state" with such adjectives as "racist" or "apartheid." Gaza and the West Bank were invariably termed "bantustans." Any state defining itself as specially Jewish was, in Massud's lexicon, ipso facto labeled racist and beyond the pale. The two-state solution, he argued, "was asking diaspora Palestinians to commit suicide." Only within the confines of a bi-national state, he explained, "can Palestinians be repatriated… and Jews become equal citizens." In order to bring this "equitable" solution about, Israel must be sufficiently weakened by boycott and divestment for starters. Only a change in the balance of power in the Middle East, Massad averred, could bring to fruition his longed-for solution. (Some might even be forgiven the unholy thought that Massad's arguments necessitate Mossad's existence).
Not to be undone, Dr. Ilan Pappe of Haifa University, who some have named "the Noam Chomsky of Israel," gave his own gloss on history, promising to add further polish and refinement to Dr. Khalidi's position. He quickly reminded his audience that Israel controls 80 percent of mandatory Palestine, while the Palestinians are stuck with a mere 20 percent. He selectively ignored the historically recognized fact that 80 percent of the Palestine promised to the Jews as their national home by Lord Balfour was lopped off by Winston Churchill in 1922 and given to the Arabs as the kingdom of Trans-Jordan.
Dr. Pappe's heavily sardonic tone served to portray Israel in the worst possible light as a blunt force riding roughshod over liberty-loving Palestinians. He privileged the Palestinian right of return, while contradictorily insisting that nationalism was even a more baleful force in the world than religion itself. He too invoked apartheid imagery whenever and wherever possible, daubing South Africa and Israel with the same thick brush.
Dripping sarcasm, Pappe described an Israel desperate to "whiten" its population, searching high and low for light-skinned immigrants. To appreciative laughter, nods and titters from parts of the audience, he recounted Israel looking for possible "Hebraic" tribesmen in the mountain fastnesses of Peru, the alluvial plains of India and the equatorial heart of Africa to bring to the Jewish state, while obstinately refusing entry to Palestinian Arabs. "The preoccupation with Israeli demography is the basis of discrimination," he further explained.
Dr. Pappe saw little hope for a two-state solution. "As a salesman," he declared, "I would he hesitant to offer it." Preventing millions of Palestinians from reclaiming their land and homes was so large and insufferable an injustice in his own mind that nothing short of comparison with Nazi Germany would do. The Haifa University professor concluded by saying that as long as Israel denies the "naqba" (Arab defeat of 1948), no peace can ever be achieved. It is much like asking "Israel and Germany to reconcile if Germany were today involved in Holocaust denial."
Sponsored by Qanun (the Arab students in Columbia University's School of Law), the Human Rights program of SIPA (Columbia's School of Public Affairs), office of the University Chaplain, Student Services and the Student Senate, the evening, top heavy with rehearsed post-colonial rhetoric—the contemporary stock-in-trade of any number of academic satrapies—offered little in the way of balance, probity or human rights.
[Oleg Preusner is a New York writer. This analysis was prepared at the
request of Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, to monitor,
critique and review Middle East Studies in North America.]
Top
Dershowitz
Speaks On MEALAC, Israeli State
Morgan Sellers
Columbia Spectator, February 8, 2005
The accusations against Columbia's Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures department and the tensions surrounding the issue were on clear display yesterday afternoon as Alan Dershowitz addressed a packed house in Lerner Cinema.
Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University, is a civil libertarian lawyer best known for defending high profile clients like O.J. Simpson in his murder trial. He also wrote numerous books including The New York Times bestsellers Chutzpah and The Case for Israel.
Yesterday's event was sponsored by Columbia Students for Israel; Koleinu, Columbia Law School's Israel advocacy club; the New York Roundtable; and Columbians for Academic Freedom.
Dershowitz's talk was a critique of the current allegations of intimidation and academic bias at Columbia as well as a defense of Israel. It was also an open commentary on the recent MEALAC debate, in which he staunchly defended students rights, warned against anti-Zionism as well as anti-Semitism, and criticized the overall atmosphere for Middle East issues on Columbia's campus.
"The prospects for peace in Israel itself are greater than they would be on this campus," he said. "People who deride Israel as a racist, apartheid, Nazi state ... those are not just rhetorical statements, they are barriers for peace--they encourage the terrorists."
He criticized the position expressed in a panel held last week by Joseph Massad, assistant MEALAC professor, who argued against a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "I do not believe that those who advocate it genuinely believe that a one-state solution would create a secular binational democratic state," he said. "The demographics are such that a "secular binational" state would certainly become yet another state with Jews serving, if they could at all, as second class citizens."
Dershowitz also said that the line between anti-Zionism--the trigger of the events described in Columbia Unbecoming, a film made by the Boston based David Project documenting student testimonials regarding the academic bias of certain professors÷ and anti-Semitism was not clear, and that the two are related.
"This [Israeli] administration is moving toward peace," he said. "One would expect to see ... that the amount of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in the world and our college campuses, and even the amount of anti-Zionism would be reduced dramatically. It's not happening."
While Dershowitz acknowledged that he did not have first hand knowledge of the current allegations of intimidation and academic bias, he criticized both the specific allegations that have been brought forth in recent months, as well as the overall makeup of the department, which has a reputation of being pro-Palestinian.
"Columbia University is failing to educate its students in the nuances of the situation," he said. "There is no alternative perspective presented to the students on this campus."
He encouraged students to cooperate with the ad hoc committee established by the University to investigate the allegations, but urged students not to accept "biased" results. If the committee returned with a decision that was "affected by the ideological makeup" of the members, he suggested the creation of a second committee composed of individuals with no connection to Columbia.
Throughout his talk, Dershowitz emphasized that discriminatory statements against supporters of Israel should be treated like those pitted against any other group, such as females, African-Americans, or gay students.
"A teacher is not entitled to discriminate based on the viewpoint of the student in the classroom," he said. Dershowitz went on to sharply criticize a letter sent by the New York Civil Liberties Union that defended the academic freedom of professors.
After the talk, Dershowitz said he welcomed the "tough questions," and opened the floor to audience members who wished to speak. A number of students criticized the speaker for his controversial views on torture. In 2003 he published a book entitled Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge, in which he argued in defense of "regulated" torture given that it exists in the world.
One of the students, holding a sign that read "torture defender not welcome," argued for the presence of a pro-Palestinian perspective at Columbia. "I find it refreshing when the minority view gets a center place on this campus," she said.
But Dershowitz maintained his position, saying "this is
the most unbalanced university I have come across when it comes to issues
related to the Middle East."
Top