Emily — Emergency to defend Columbia University Professors
Topic(s): Academic Freedom? | Comments Off on Emily — Emergency to defend Columbia University Professors(Once again I urge all of you who feel comfort in the false construct that you are living in a “blue” state, in a “liberal” and “open-minded”. “democratic” society where freedom reigns to please take note of what is happening at Columbia University. )
Urgent Call to Action: Defend the Middle Eastern and Asian Languages
and Cultures (MEALAC) Department at Columbia University! (details below)
Today’s front page Daily News Article is the latest in a series of attacks
on free speech at Columbia University. Although it started with the Middle
Eastern studies department, the accusations in this article are against
professors in several departments. A number of important professors are
coming under attack for simply criticizing Israeli and United States
policies in the Middle East. Please read the article below. Write to the
Daily News in protest and attend the emergency organizing meeting to roll
back the witch hunt of Columbia University Professors.
Special Report: Columbia is at risk of becoming a poison
Ivy, some critics claim, and tensions are high. In classrooms, teach-ins,
interviews and published works, dozens of academics are said to be promoting
an I-hate-Israel agenda, embracing the ugliest of Arab propaganda, and
teaching that Zionism is the root of all evil in the Mideast.
FULL STORY
New York Daily News – http://www.nydailynews.com
Hate 101
By DOUGLAS FEIDEN
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Sunday, November 21st, 2004
It’s a capital of “thuggery” – a “ghastly state of racism and
apartheid” – and it “must be dismantled.”
A voice from America’s crackpot fringe? Actually, Dabashi is a
tenured professor and department chairman at Columbia University. And his
views have resonated and been echoed in other areas of the university.
Columbia is at risk of becoming a poison Ivy, some critics
claim, and tensions are high.
In classrooms, teach-ins, interviews and published works, dozens
of academics are said to be promoting an I-hate-Israel agenda, embracing the
ugliest of Arab propaganda, and teaching that Zionism is the root of all
evil in the Mideast.
In three weeks of interviews, numerous students told the Daily
News they face harassment, threats and ridicule merely for defending the
right of Israel to survive.
And the university itself is holding investigations into the
alleged intimidation.
Dabashi has achieved academic stardom: professor of Iranian
studies; chairman of the Middle East and Asian languages and cultures
department; past head of a panel that administers Columbia’s core
curriculum.
The 53-year-old, Iranian-born scholar has said CNN should be
held accountable for “war crimes” for one-sided coverage of Sept. 11, 2001.
He doubts the existence of Al Qaeda and questions the role of Osama Bin
Laden in the attacks.
Dabashi did not return calls.
In September in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, he wrote, “What
they call Israel is no mere military state. A subsumed militarism, a
systemic mendacity with an ingrained violence constitutional to the very
fusion of its fabric, has penetrated the deepest corners of what these
people have to call their soul.”
After the showing of a student-made documentary about faculty
bias and bullying that targets Jewish students, six or seven swastikas were
found carved in a Butler Library bathroom last month.
Then after a screening of the film, “Columbia Unbecoming,”
produced by the David Project, a pro-Israel group in Boston, one student
denounced another as a “Zionist fascist scum,” witnesses said.
On Oct. 27, Columbia announced it would probe alleged
intimidation and improve procedures for students to file grievances.
“Is the climate hostile to free _expression?” asked Alan
Brinkley, the university provost. “I don’t believe it is, but we’re
investigating to find out.”
But one student on College Walk described the campus as a
“republic of fear.” Another branded the Middle East and Asian languages and
cultures department the “department of dishonesty.”
A third described how she was once “humiliated in front of an
entire class.”
Deena Shanker, a Mideast and Asian studies major, remains an
admirer of the department. But she says she will never forget the day she
asked Joseph Massad, a professor of modern Arab politics, if Israel gives
warnings before bombing certain buildings so residents could flee.
“Instead of answering my question, Massad exploded,” she said.
“He told me if I was going to ‘deny the atrocities’ committed against the
Palestinians, I could get out of his class.”
“Professorial power is being abused,” said Ariel Beery, a senior
who is student president in the School of General Studies, but stresses he’s
speaking only for himself.
“Students are being bullied because of their identities,
ideologies, religions and national origins,” Beery said.
Added Noah Liben, another senior, “Debate is being stifled.
Students are being silenced in their own classrooms.”
Said Brinkley: If a professor taught the “Earth was flat or
there was no Holocaust,” Columbia might intervene in the classroom. “But we
don’t tell faculty they can’t express strong, or even offensive opinions.”
Yet even some faculty members say they fear social ostracism and
career consequences if they’re viewed as too pro-Israel, and that many have
been cowed or shamed into silence.
One apparently unafraid is Dan Miron, a professor of Hebrew
literature and holder of a prestigious endowed chair.
He said scores of Jewish students – about one a week – have
trooped into his office to complain about bias in the classroom.
“Students tell me they’ve been browbeaten, humiliated and
treated disrespectfully for daring to challenge the idea that Israel has no
right to exist as a Jewish nation,” he said.
“They say they’ve been told Israeli soldiers routinely rape
Palestinian women and commit other atrocities, and that Zionism is racism
and the root of all evil.”
One yardstick of the anti-Israel sentiment among professors,
critics say, is the 106 faculty signatures on a petition last year that
called for Columbia to sell its holdings in all firms that conduct business
with Israel’s military.
Noting that the divestment campaign compared Israel to South
Africa during the apartheid era, Columbia President Lee Bollinger termed it
“grotesque and offensive.”
That didn’t stop 12 Mideast and Asian studies professors –
almost half the department – and 21 anthropology teachers from signing on, a
review of the petition shows.
To identify the Columbia faculty with the most strongly
anti-Israel views, The News spoke to numerous teachers and students,
including some who took their courses; reviewed interviews and published
works, and examined Web sites that report their public speeches and
statements, including the online archives of the Columbia Spectator, the
student newspaper.
Their views could be dismissed as academic fodder if they
weren’t so incendiary.
Columbia’s firebrands
In the world of Hamid Dabashi, supporters of Israel are
“warmongers” and “Gestapo apparatchiks.”
The Jewish homeland is “nothing more than a military base for
the rising predatory empire of the United States.”
a.. Nicholas De Genova, who teaches anthropology and Latino
studies. The Chronicle of Higher Education calls him “the most hated
professor in America.”
At an anti-war teach-in last year, he said he wished for a
“million Mogadishus,” referring to the slaughter of U.S. troops in Somalia
in 1993.
“U.S. patriotism is inseparable from imperial warfare and white
supremacy,” he added.
De Genova has also said, “The heritage of the victims of the
Holocaust belongs to the Palestinian people. … Israel has no claim to the
heritage of the Holocaust.”
De Genova didn’t return calls.
a.. Bruce Robbins, a professor of English and comparative
literature.
In a speech backing divestment, he said, “The Israeli government
has no right to the sufferings of the Holocaust.”
Elaborating, Robbins told The News he believes Israel has a
right to exist, but he thinks the country has “betrayed the memory of the
Holocaust.”
a.. Joseph Massad, who is a tenure-track professor of Arab
politics. Students and faculty interviewed by The News consistently claimed
that the Jordanian-born Palestinian is the most controversial, and
vitriolic, professor on campus.
“How many Palestinians have you killed?” he allegedly asked one
student, Tomy Schoenfeld, an Israeli military veteran, and then refused to
answer his questions.
To Massad, CNN star Wolf Blitzer is “Ze’ev Blitzer,” which is
the byline Blitzer used in the 1980s, when he wrote for Hebrew papers but
hasn’t used since.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon can be likened to Nazi
Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, he once declared.
“The Jews are not a nation,” he said in one speech. “The Jewish
state is a racist state that does not have a right to exist.”
Massad didn’t return several calls. On his Web site, he says
he’s a victim of a “witch hunt” by “pro-Israel groups” and their “propaganda
machine.”
a.. George Saliba, a professor of Arabic and Islamic science.
His classroom rants against the West are legendary, students have claimed.
One student says his “Islam & Western Science” class could be
called “Why the West is Evil.” Another writes that his “Intro to Islamic
Civilization” often serves as a forum to “rail against evil America.”
A recent graduate, Lindsay Shrier, said Saliba told her, “You
have no claim to the land of Israel … no voice in this debate. You have
green eyes, you’re not a true Semite. I have brown eyes, I’m a true Semite.”
Saliba did not return calls.
a.. Rashid Khalidi, who is the Edward Said professor of Arab
studies. He’s the academic heir to the late Said, a professor who famously
threw a stone from Lebanon at an Israeli guard booth.
Columbia initially refused to say how the chair was funded. But
The United Arab Emirates, which denies the Holocaust on state TV channels,
is reported to have provided $200,000.
When Palestinians in a Ramallah police station lynched two
Israeli reservists in 2000 – throwing one body out a window and proudly
displaying bloodstained hands – the professor attacked the media, not the
killers.
He complained about “inflammatory headlines” in a Chicago
Sun-Times story and called the paper’s then-owner, Conrad Black, who also
owned the Jerusalem Post, “the most extreme Zionist in public life.”
Reached at Columbia, Khalidi declined to comment on specifics.
“As somebody who has a body of work, written six books and won
many awards, the only fair thing to do is look at the entire body of work,
not take quotes out of context,” he said.
a.. Lila Abu-Lughod, a professor of anthropology, romanticizes
Birzeit University in the West Bank as a “liberal arts college dedicated to
teaching and research in the same spirit as U.S. colleges.”
But it is well-established that Birzeit also is the campus where
Hamas openly recruits suicide bombers, stone-throwers and gunmen.
As in her published works, Abu-Lughod gave a carefully nuanced
response when reached Friday by The News:
“The CIA has historically recruited at Columbia, but that’s not
the mission of Columbia. The mission of Birzeit is to educate students, and
they’re working under very difficult circumstances to do that.”
____________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
Urgent Call to Action: Defend the Middle Eastern and Asian Languages
and Cultures (MEALAC) Department at Columbia University!
Emergency organizing meeting in defense of MEALAC:
Monday, November 22 at 6:00 PM
Intercultural Resource Center of Columbia University
552 West 114th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam
1/9 Train to 116th Street/Columbia University
For more info email: defendmealac@yahoo.com
MYTH: Students with pro-Israel sympathies are marginalized and
intimidated at Columbia University.
FACT: The Zionist perspective dominates campus life and is represented
in dozens of classes and student groups at Columbia. A small number of
intensely pro-Israel students with the backing of the David Project, a
private Boston based Zionist group, are behind the accusations. In their
film, “Columbia Unbecoming”, they initiated a campaign based on
misrepresentations, distortions and lies that has created an atmosphere of
intimidation and censorship on campus.
In recent weeks the MEALAC Department has been the target of a
politically motivated intimidation campaign. Although the students behind
Columbia Unbecoming claim that their film documents harassment on campus,
the reality couldnt be farther from the truth. Instead, the film is
twenty-five minute collection of unsubstantiated claims. The film
systematically excludes the views of satisfied MEALAC students- Jewish and
non-Jewish alike. The makers of the film claim that their purpose is to
uphold academic freedom and integrity. The reality is that their film part
of a witch-hunt to silence criticism.
Although it is tempting to dismiss the David Project initiative as the
work of inconsequential extremists, the film continues to have a devastating
impact. Under the pretext of protecting students, President Bollinger and
both New York and national news media have all lent credibility to the
uncorroborated claims. Last week President Bollinger announced an official
University investigation of MEALAC, although he has never met with any of
the accused professors. The New York City Council has warned that if the
University investigation “comes up dry” they will launch their own
investigation. Because of the slanderous attacks and intimidation Professor
Joseph Massad will not be teaching his class on Israel and Palestine in the
spring.
This new attack on MEALAC is part of a larger campaign against critics
of the US and Israel and their role in the Middle East. Groups such as
Campus Watch and the David Project were formed to counter the increased
presence of critical voices on campuses. At a time when Arabs, Muslims and
South Asians are still being deported, detained and harassed, it is more
important than ever that we respond. Columbia University is not immune to
this climate. The administration has handed over the information of
international students to the Department of Homeland Security and has not
addressed anti-Arab and Islamophobic incidences on campus.
Columbia University is in the national spotlight and what happens here
will have repercussions beyond our gates. If they succeed in silencing
alternative viewpoints at our university it will give further confidence to
those working to eliminate dissent across the country. Not only are the
lives and careers of specific Columbia professors on the line but also the
tradition of academic freedom and dissent is at stake.
We call on those who abhor the attempt to narrow political debate at
Columbia to stand up, speak out and organize against this attack.
Students, Professors and Community members are encouraged to join us
in our effort to mobilize support for the academic freedom of MEALAC.
” First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was
not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because
I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not
speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me and
there was no one left to speak out for me.”
-Pastor Martin Niemvller
For more info email: defendmealac@yahoo.com