New
York Sun Staff Editorial
October 22, 2004
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/3639
"I
think something extremely important is happening on our campuses. They are now
turned into sites for cultivation of critical judgment for responsible
citizenship in what we hope will remain a free republic. Even as late as five
years ago no one would have dared stand on the steps of the Law Library on
Columbia Campus and condemn the military thuggery of people like Ariel Sharon.
Innocent people in Jenin, Kandahar, Shalamcheh, or Baghdad are brutally
massacred and no one would have dared to condemn these acts publicly. But not
anymore."
- Hamid Dabashi, speaking to the Electronic Intifada online magazine,
September 30, 2002
Professor
Hamid Dabashi, chairman of Columbia's notorious Middle East and Asian Languages
and Cultures (MEALAC) department, is quite correct to point out that
"something extremely important" is happening on our campuses. While
Mr. Dabashi would celebrate this change - summarized as a growing hatred for
America and Israel among students and faculty members - we believe it
represents one of the most troubling trends in higher education and a critical
problem for Columbia University. It has become increasingly clear that
Columbia's standing as one of the great research universities in the nation is
jeopardized by a contingent of professors whose disdain for Israel, America,
democracy, and freedom has a remarkable influence over Columbia's curriculum
and quality of its research. To appreciate how commonplace and accepted
anti-Israel sentiment has become at Columbia, one simply has to take a look at
the Web site Columbiadivest.org, the home page of a recent effort at the
Morningside Heights campus to persuade Columbia's administration to divest its holdings
in companies that sell arms and military hardware to Israel. More than a third
of the full-time faculty of the MEALAC department signed the petition, as have
a total of 107 Barnard and Columbia faculty members. Signers of the petition
include Joseph Massad, a non-tenured professor of modern Arab politics who
teaches a course on Middle East nationalism. Mr. Massad is not shy about his
hatred for Israel, a country whose legitimacy as a Jewish state he denies and
whose policies he routinely calls "racist." He is the professor, as
described in an underground film produced by the Boston-based David Project,
who upon completing a lecture refused to answer a question from an Israeli
student but ordered the student to say how many Palestinians he killed as a
soldier. Rep. Anthony Weiner is absolutely correct to call, as he did
yesterday, for Columbia to fire him.
Another
signer is Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said chair of Arab studies and author of
"Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in
the Middle East." Mr. Khalidi, whose professorship was funded with
$200,000 from the United Arab Emirates, is on record condemning terrorist
attacks against Israeli citizens, but he has also said he condones attacks on
Israeli soldiers in areas he describes as occupied territories, violence that
he describes as "resistance." His recent book was riddled with errors
and anti-Jewish themes.
We
recognize that the vast majority of the Columbia community is untainted by
these hatreds. But these are the professors whose loathing of Israel, dismissal
of Israel's security concerns, and contempt of Israel's democratic values
cannot be explained or rationalized but are best understood as irrational
expressions of anti-Semitism.
The
fact that these professors share views that are abhorrent to a great majority
of Columbia's community has not stopped them from shaping Columbia's research
and teaching of subjects related to the Middle East. Take, for example, a
course called "Hate" taught within the Mealac department by
comparative literature professor Gil Anidjar. Mr. Anidjar's interest isn't
Islamic fundamentalism and its spread through the Middle East, but Jewish
self-hatred and how it relates to Israeli culture and Zionism.
Columbia
and other schools affected by this anti-Western strand of thought require
leadership. Columbia and Barnard need leaders who can state clearly that their
schools do not side with enemies of freedom and democracy. Columbia's
president, Lee Bollinger, has criticized the divestment campaign but has so far
defaulted when it comes to confronting the academic issues or returning the
money from the United Arab Emirates. Astonishingly, he told the Daily News that
he appointed a committee that found not only no bias, but not even any "claims
of bias." The way to begin correcting the situation would be with a grand
gesture. A Columbia honorary degree for Prime Minister Sharon would be one way
to do it. So would firing Mr. Massad, or giving back the money from the United
Arab Emirates, or disciplining Mr. Khalidi for the errors in his book. Then
Columbia could set about hiring some teachers who display genuine critical
judgment.