[Shadow_Group] New York Daily News Attacks Anti-Zionist

[shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca]

On some level you have to appreciate this article.  While the
zionists leading the witch-hunt on campus are trying to hide their
political attacks behind absurd claims of "academic freedom," the
Daily News is much more up front about their political motivations.
 They don't like "Arab propaganda," aka anyone critical of either
Zionism or U.S. imperialism.

Just to clear up a few factual mistakes in the article:

*Anti-zionism isn't anti-semitism.  Not at all.

*It's not "many" or even "some" students and professors attacking
the MEALAC Department here.  It's a tiny number of hard-core
zionists continuing a battle that they've been waging for years now
against critics of Israel at Columbia.  The one professor cited to
back up the claims of these well-funded and well-organized
right-wingers, Dan Miron, is a heavy proponent of Zionist ideology.

*The swastikas that were carved into the bathroom at Butler Library
had nothing to do with the David Project movie.  In fact the
swastikas (there were two of them, not "6 or 7") were found before
the movie was shown on campus.  I work at the Library and was there
when they were found.  Not only that but the furor around the
campaign against MEALAC has overshadowed this ACTUAL incident of
anti-semitism, which has been largely ignored by Zionist groups on
campus.  Also, no one called anyone else "Zionist fascist scum"
after the movie showing.  Not that I would especially object to
that characterization for some of these people, but it never
happened.

*Zionist voices aren't marginalized at Columbia.  Zionist groups are
far and away the best funded groups on campus and receive the most
administration support.  Hillel, which at Columbia is an explicitly
Zionist organization not a Jewish cultural group, has it's own $3
million building on 115th st.

peace-Jonah, Columbia University

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/254925p-218295c.html<http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/254925p-218295c.html>

"Hate 101

Climate of hate rocks Columbia University

By DOUGLAS FEIDEN
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Many students say Columbia Prof. Hamid Dabashi, a department
chairman, has bullied and threatened them for defending Israel.

Students Ariel Beery (speaking) and Noah Liben (r.) at press
conference after showing of the film 'Columbia Unbecoming.'

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."


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.


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."


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."


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.


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.


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."

Originally published on November 21, 2004"




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