THE SPINE NOVEMBER 14, 2007
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Poor Lee Bollinger. He has done much of the dirty work for the faculty Left at Columbia University, especially in maintaining the regime and regimen installed by Edward Said. Columbia is now the primary academic center of hostility to Zionism and Israel in the United States. Just look at its Middle Eastern offerings and professors. So is the Left grateful that the university president has made decision after decision to protect its standing among the post-colonial whatever? Not at all. After all, Bollinger had been having trouble with his trustees and some of his most distinguished professors about the dramatic institutional bias. So, when -- for the second time in two years -- the School for International and Public Affairs (with a dean whom he had appointed) invited Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak, the pressure was on. Ah, said the "free speech for everyone" president to himself, "I'll let him speak but I'll tell him off, too." Brilliant! Oh, such brilliance.And suddenly the issue has become one of politesse. Bollinger's rebuke of the holocaust-denying and genocide-threatening tyrant "sullied the reputation of the University with its strident tone," reads one point in a letter denouncing the president and signed by more than 100 faculty. Oh, yes, Bollinger's fit of distemper also "allied the University with the Bush administration's war in Iraq." All of this is described in an article in Wednesday's Times and Tuesday's Sun.It is in the Sun that you can read which faculty make up this list: the newly tenured archaeology professor Nadia Abu El-Haj, Lila Abu-Lughod, Qais Al-Awqati, and this is just the first three. Rashid Khalidi also signed and George Saliba. Plus Hamid Dabashi, accused of anti-Semitic bias by Columbia students, here's in his own words are his views about Israelis:
Half a century of systematic maiming and murdering of another people has left its deep marks on the faces of these people. The way they talk, the way they walk, the way they handle objects, the way they greet each other, the way they look at the world. There is an endemic prevarication to this machinery, a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture.
And, yes, Mahmood Mamdani and Zainab Bahrani. There you have the core of the Middle Eastern faculty. At least one Jew in the department has also signed: Mark Mazower. Then there are the radicals by genetic inheritance: Peter Marcuse and Eric Foner. About the Jews: there are almost certainly more Jewish signatories than Muslims. In fact, as usual, Jews are attracted to a certain self-righteous radicalism; and, if it has an anti-Jewish undercurrent, the more pleasant to sign.
2 comments
Was Tony Judt's name on the list?
He is an example of a Jewish hard leftist who in the words of Mitchell Cohen:
"Anti-Semitism and the Left that Doesn’t Learn"
"LAST YEAR, Denis MacShane, British Labour Parliament Member, chaired a committee of parliamentarians and ex-ministers that investigated rising anti-Semitism in Britain and beyond. “Hatred of Jews has reached new heights in Europe and many points south and east of the old continent,” he wrote recently in a very brave article in the Washington Post (September 4, 2007). He describes a wide array of incidents. “Militant anti-Jewish students fueled by Islamist or far-left hate” seek on campuses “to prevent Jewish students from expressing their opinions.” There is “an anti-Jewish discourse, a mood and tone whenever Jews are discussed, whether in the media, at universities, among the liberal media elite or at dinner parties of modish London. To express any support for Israel or any feeling for the right of a Jewish state to exist produces denunciation, even contempt.”
MacShane points out that this sort of behavior is distinct from specific disputes about this or that Israeli politician. Criticism, the investigatory committee “made clear,” was “not off-limits.” Rightly so; the same should be true with the policies and office- holders of every government on the globe. But MacSchane also warns that something else has been going on, that old demons are reawakening and that “the old anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism have morphed into something more dangerous.” The threat, he says eloquently, doesn’t only concern Jews or Israel, but “everything democrats have long fought for: the truth without fear, no matter one's religion or political beliefs.”
What is “truth without fear” when we speak of the relation between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism? Is it to be found in Tony Judt’s declaration to the New York Times that “the link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is newly created”? (January 31, 2007). How a historian—or anyone else—could assert this is astonishing. Consider what it airbrushes out of the twentieth century—the anti-Semitic binge of Stalin’s later years, just for starters.
And surely Judt, who is based at New York University and is now taking what has turned into obsessive anti-Zionist campaigning to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris [1] NYU’s Remarque Center, which defines its goal as “the study and discussion of Europe, and to encourage and facilitate communication between Americans and Europeans” is opening a center there and Judt, its director, will, according to its website, inaugurate it not with an address European or French politics or transatlantic relations but rather: "Is Israel Still Good for the Jews?" recalls the arrests and assassinations of the leading Jewish cultural figures of Soviet Russia on the grounds that they were “Zionist agents of American imperialism.” Surely a historian of Europe like Judt—who was once a hard leftist but then rose to intellectual celebrity in the United States in the 1980s (that is, during the Reagan era) by attacking all French Marxists for not facing up to Stalinism—recalls the charges of “Zionist conspiracy” against Jewish communists who were victimized in the Czech purge trials in the early 1950s.
If he doesn’t recall them when he speaks to the New York Times, he might check them out in his own book on postwar Europe. There he cites Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, urging Czech Communists to investigate the “Zionist plot” among their comrades. Surely a historian of Europe, especially one who now refers to himself as an “old leftist,” recalls the campaign in 1967 and 1968 to cleanse Poland of “Zionist” fifth columnists (I suppose they were the Israel Lobby of the Polish Communist Party). If Judt doesn’t recall it when he talks to the New York Times, he might again look at his own book which cites Polish Communist chief Wladyslaw Gomulka’s conflation of his Jewish critics with Zionists. Since he is a historian of Europe and not the Middle East, perhaps Judt hasn’t noticed how “anti-Zionism” in broad swaths of the Muslim and Arab media has been suffused by anti-Jewish rhetoric for decades—rhetoric against “al-Yahud” not Ehud Olmert or Ehud Barak.
Remember how air-brushing was done in the bad old days? Trotsky (or someone else) would suddenly disappear from a photo. Lenin or Stalin and the cheering crowds would still be there. The resulting picture is not entirely false. Does all this make Judt an anti-Semite? The answer is simple: no. It does make his grasp of the history of anti-Semitism tendentious. And tendentious history can be put to all sorts of pernicious use."
Read the rest here:
dissentmagazine.org/article
- jacksondyer
November 15, 2007 at 12:12am
OK, Lee Bollinger is not a fool. He is not what Lenin called a "useful idiot." Which leaves
- Anonymous
May 1, 2008 at 3:00pm