David Project Founder David Bernstein and his WOKE Protege Bari Weiss: A Toxic Legacy of Racist Hatred in the Context of HASBARAH Cancel Culture
David Shasha
A Double Disservice: the David Project Fails in its Mission
By: Zac Frank
After months of controversy, I finally saw the David Project's film "Columbia Unbecoming" a little over a week ago. The film offers a stinging critique of certain members of Columbia's Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department for intimidating dissenting students. Unfortunately, however, it goes beyond that to become of piece of agitprop, blurring charges of intimidation with criticism of the Israeli government and charges of anti-Semitism.
The film does a disservice to students who have valid complaints about the treatment they received from MEALAC professors. "Columbia Unbecoming" conflates professors' inappropriate behavior in class with their conduct outside of the classroom, their writing, and their political views. Amid several valid complaints about in-class conduct, for instance, there are anecdotes of interaction between professors and students who were never enrolled in any of their classes. In these instances, the film is dishonest in that it does not make clear which events happen in the context of a teacher-student relationship, in which a professor has an obvious power advantage over the student, and which happen off-campus and outside of a classroom relationship.
In addition, the movie draws upon the writing of certain MEALAC professors who have criticized the state of Israel and the policies of its government. While their behavior may at times not be productive in creating an academic dialogue about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it has nothing to do with how students are treated in the classroom. Additionally, toward the end, the film cites the appearance of swastikas in bathrooms of Butler and Lerner as instances of anti-Semitism on campus. What that has to do with students being intimidated by professors, I don't know.
The swastika example reveals the greatest failing of "Columbia Unbecoming." Rather than simply documenting instances of student intimidation and inappropriate classroom behavior, the film confuses intimidation with political views of professors and unrelated acts of vandalism to point to what it claims is pervasive anti-Semitism at Columbia. It artfully transforms a political criticism of Israel's security fence into an anti-Semitic remark.
Valid complaints of intimidation have been voiced at Columbia, both with respect to and independently of the film. I have spoken to some students who want nothing to do with the David Project, but who have described very detailed instances of what can only be described as inappropriate classroom behavior by a professor. Unfortunately, "Columbia Unbecoming" makes it very difficult for the administration to redress valid complaints because of the film's approach. Whether or not any professor is guilty of intimidation, he or she can point to the film as an attempt at censorship and seize the mantle of academic freedom in defense.
But the disservice done to the students and to the University was not just propagated by the David Project. The administration also has a significant burden to bear in its response to the situation. Before seeing the film I was angry at the students involved. I thought they had not even attempted to utilize grievance procedures already in place at Columbia. Watching the film, however, changed that. I heard one woman speak of how she went to one office which told her to go to another, that office to a different one, and so on until she had come full circle. That, if anything, rings true of the Columbia experience. This is a problem of bureaucracy and a lack of communication between the various appendages of the University that needs to be addressed on a large scale. President Bollinger, however, has done nothing to even begin to cut through Columbia's red tape.
Furthermore, though the response by Bollinger, on its surface, seemed balanced, it revealed a total lack of action and initiative on the part of his administration to address the problem. The accusations against the department had surfaced long before the film came out. The investigation of those complaints, however, seems to have been cursory at best. Only until this became (unfairly) a public relations nightmare did the administration take any more steps to address it.
The appointment of the ad-hoc committee investigating intimidation, however, was incredibly misguided. While I do have confidence in the ability of the committee to be impartial and fair, it is not surprising that students making accusations would have a problem with its composition of Columbia faculty and administrators, some with ties to the professors involved. When there was a controversy surrounding the English department, a committee was convened with members from outside the University. If Bollinger were serious about this investigation and had any sense, he would have done the same in this situation, if for nothing else than to avoid even the appearance of conflict.
The David Project and the administration have failed both Columbia and its students.
Zac Frank is a Columbia College senior majoring in history. The Lowdown runs on alternate Mondays.
From The Columbia Spectator, February 14, 2005
The Mess at Columbia University: The Zionist McCarthyites and an Orgy of Hate
Conference Review: The Middle East and Academic Integrity on the American Campus, Columbia University, March 6, 2005
The legacy of Edward Said, a Palestinian academic who was perhaps the first Anglophone intellectual of any public standing who sought to articulate the hitherto silent voice of the Palestinian Arabs, has become more than a trifling matter among latter-day Zionists. The recent flap over Jewish student accusations of intimidation by MEALAC professors, MEALAC being the Middle Eastern Studies department at Columbia University, perhaps the most prestigious college in New York City, has caused an outbreak of hate and derision the likes of which we rarely see in the seemingly benign world of the modern academy. Columbia was host to the March 6th conference which was meant to address the issues arising from the MEALAC controversy.
The conference was sponsored by Jewish and pro-Israel groups on the Columbia Campus and largely by The David Project, a recently-formed advocacy project that has made a number of media splashes – most prominently through the work of Rachel Fish, a former Harvard Divinity School student, who created a furor over the donation of $2.5 million to the school by an Arab potentate from the United Arab Emirates – a check that was returned by Harvard in August 2004, a year and a half after Fish’s initial campaign.
Edward Said’s sadly truncated life was contested while he was still living. In 1999, Commentary magazine printed an article which attempted to prove that Said was not a Palestinian. The writer of the article, a hitherto unknown figure named Justus Weiner, had worked for quite a while seeking to expose Said as a hypocrite and fake. In the style of such exposes, Weiner cut and paste a good deal of sketchy material that was almost immediately discredited by most legitimate sources and nothing was heard from Weiner again – a promised book on Said never materialized.
But what is most important to note in the Weiner episode was the pressing need to find a way to discredit Said. Such an expose spoke to the power that, by 1999, Said had accrued in both the academic world and in the general media. With his seminal work Orientalism first published in 1978 by Random House, Said articulated a bold and controversial understanding of the Arab world at a time when that world had been subjected to a persistent demonization of its morality and character. It should be remembered that the Iranian Revolution was causing all sorts of paroxysms in the American mind and the recent 1973 War in Israel was fresh in the minds of Jews who saw a new vulnerability exposed. The trip by Anwar Sadat, the late Egyptian dictator, to Jerusalem was a startling moment in the history of the Middle East conflict.
Orientalism was a massive scholarly work that marked the ideology behind Western Imperialism. While the history of Western Imperialism had been examined in many popular and academic works, Said, a professor of Comparative Literature, went back to the flotsam and jetsam of the Western literary tradition and found a pattern that emerged: From the paintings of Eugene Delacroix to the political pronouncements of Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Cromer, Said traced a line of racism and stereotyping that permeated the Imperial project.
This ideological prejudice provided a rational footing to the conquest of what were then thought of as inferior peoples. The rationalization allowed the “civilized” Europeans to make sense of their enterprise. In hyper-Darwinian fashion, the 19th century Imperialists thought that they carried with them an entitlement to subjugate their inferiors. And this was one of the most startling developments in Said’s study: The mass of material that he presented showed that the creation of Modern civilization was predicated on the backs of the exploited and the dispossessed. While the Americans had begun to look inward at the role of slavery in their own culture, the Europeans – and the Americans – continued to practice a malignant form of racism when it came to Third World nations.
In Orientalism Said fixated on the relationship between Europe and the Middle East in the wake of the destruction of the Ottoman Empire. He showed a pattern of abuse that was not merely physical in nature. The Western powers, especially Britain and France, loaded up their intellectual baggage with representations of the Orientals that showed them as indolent, lazy, morally suspect and intellectually deficient. (We should note that such representations were applied to Arab Jews as well.)
Said was hailed within the academic community for his breakthroughs. In a time of post-modern ferment, his ability to make use of literary matter normally considered marginal to political and historical study was a huge advance. The conservative forces were utterly startled by this work as they were by the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan a decade earlier. In fact, Said made extensive use of the ideas of Foucault and applied them to what was at the time one of the most pressing political issues of the day.
A year after the publication of Orientalism Said used his literary and academic capital to begin a series of works on Palestine and the perception of Arabs in the media. If Orientalism had scared the pants off the more timid, The Question of Palestine created a huge uproar among the Zionists and their supporters. For the first time in recent memory a capable intellectual wrote in the style and manner of a Western-trained academic. It must be remembered that from Chaim Weizmann to Abba Eban to Henry Kissinger, the Zionists had many able spokesmen for their cause; spokesmen who could articulate their ideas in proper English that was sensitive to the nuanced understanding of the Western intellectuals and political establishment. Since the publication of George Antonius’ The Arab Awakening in 1946, a book that got lost in the sands of time, and was wisely resurrected by Said himself, there was no voice to present the case of those dispossessed by Zionism and by the Imperialism of the West.
The Question of Palestine marked Edward Said as Public Enemy Number One of the Jewish people. Threats were made by the JDL against his life, his office at Columbia University was firebombed and his home was guarded by NYPD officers for years after.
It was clear that a movement was being formed to ensure that Arabs were not to open their mouths in the face of Western superiority. It must be remembered that Zionist HASBARAH had been a prominent feature in American life for decades. Leon Uris’ 1958 novel Exodus was turned into a major Hollywood film in 1960 thus cementing the standard Zionist version of the conflict and etching that version into the American and Western psyche with great force. It could be shown from the work of Edward Said that Uris and Otto Preminger, the director of the film of the book, were tapping into the hoary myths of Orientalism to construct a demonized portrait of the Arabs.
But the free market
of ideas in the 1950s and 60s did not provide for any articulation of Arab
voices. It must also be recalled that
the work of the British-born Jewish Orientalist Bernard Lewis was being used by
the political insiders in both Great Britain and the US. Lewis played
a major role in the Cold War and the emerging analysis
of the Arab Question in the wake of Zionism and the suppression of freedom and
democracy in the Arab world by a West that now saw its energy reserves linked
to the promotion of autocratic regimes in the region; regimes that would ensure
a free flow of the oil reserves to a West increasingly dependent on that form
of energy to fuel its economic engine.
In essence, Leon Uris’ Exodus provided the standard template by which all understanding of the Jewish cause in Zion would be formed: The straggling refugees of Hitler’s barbarity limped their way to Palestine only to find themselves attacked by red-faced Arabs and suppressed by the British. The story of the American ship the St. Louis being sent back from its Palestinian destination back to Nazi Europe was seen as emblematic of the Zionist cause. Little known were the insights that Tom Segev, an Israeli historian, would provide decades later in his book The Seventh Million: Israel and the Holocaust and Idith Zertal’s book From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel, books that would have been impossible to imagine without the prior work of Edward Said.
In point of fact, the work of Edward Said spurred on a new cadre of professional Israeli historians who sought to rethink the ways in which Zionist history was written. With the publication of Simha Flapan’s The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities in 1987, followed by Benny Morris’ The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem in the same year and Avi Shlaim’s Collusion Across the Jordan in 1988, a new interpretation of Zionist history was offered to the interested reader. While Palestinian authors such as Walid Khalidi had been doing studies for some years on the subject, it was not until these Israeli historians published their books that the situation changed – a situation that was brought about because of the work of Edward Said – a body of work that was deeply influential for a whole generation of students in Europe and America.
Said’s reach even extended into the realm of Sephardic studies. With the publication of Maria Rosa Menocal’s The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History in 1987, the field of medieval study of Arabic culture was transformed in profound ways that highlighted the role of Sepharad/Andalus in the construction of Western modernity. The emergence of Sephardic Jewish scholars like Ella Shohat and Ammiel Alcalay with their incisive critiques of the way in which Sephardic Jews had too been affected by Orientalism, completely redrew the map of Sephardic self-perception. Shohat published an article called “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims” that adapted a title of one of the chapters from Said’s A Question of Palestine. Shohat’s 1989 book Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation and Alcalay’s 1993 After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture were also works unimaginable without Edward Said’s insights.
Said’s influence both transformed and transcended the field of Middle Eastern studies. Hitherto a deeply conservative and even reactionary field of study that was linked to issues of national security and governmental policy, Middle Eastern studies was in the firm control of the Cold Warriors like Bernard Lewis who were welcome in the corridors of power. The view of scholars like Lewis and his acolytes was seen as determinative for foreign policy assessments of the executive branch of the US government. With the emergence of Said into the field – and it must be recalled that Said was not a Middle East scholar – he was a scholar of Western literature – there was a tremendous uproar.
The field went on the attack and tried to excise the Said factor. But many of the individual practitioners in the field were native Middle Easterners who found themselves freed from the old Imperialist paradigms and foci; free to look to native ways of understanding their own histories.
In a book like Timothy Mitchell’s masterpiece Colonising Egypt a new paradigm was brilliantly formulated: Texts by Arabs would be given as much weight as those by those colonialists who sought to enframe the Arabs within foreign paradigms and ways of seeing. The Arabs would retroactively be given voice to critique and reassess what was being done to them. Rather than remaining objectified, the Arabs in Mitchell’s study were given agency to tell us what they were actually thinking and how they were affected by what was happening to them. Focus was taken off of the standard racist ways of appropriating Arab history in the modern period and placed on the ways in which the East and West dealt with one another. In the penultimate portions of Colonising Egypt Mitchell presents a dazzling analysis on Husayn al-Marsafi’s book Eight Words which reflects the classical mode of Arabic literary interpretation that was common to the civilized culture that was shared by Jews, Muslims and Christians in the East.
When I first read Colonising Egypt I could not help thinking of the Jewish scholars Susan Handelman and Jose Faur and their attempts to reassert the classical Jewish glossolalia of the rabbinic traditions. And here I found a deep commonality in the Jewish and Islamic traditions that brought together the work of Said, Faur and Mitchell into a synthesis that had been articulated in Ammiel Alcalay’s After Jews and Arabs.
Further, Edward Said’s influence reached into the study of the very volatile issues that were retarding the growth and progress of Arab modernity. A number of vitally important books on the status of women in the Arab world were published in the wake of Said: Fedwa Malti-Douglas’ Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word: Gender and Discourse in Arab-Islamic Writing (1991), Leila Ahmed’s brilliant Women and Gender in Islam (1992), Beth Baron’s The Women’s Awakening in Egypt (1994) and Cynthia Nelson’s Doria Shafik, Egyptian Feminist (1996) were all works that followed the model of Orientalism and affirmed the value and power of the humanist critique of religious and nationalist fundamentalisms that Said had pioneered.
I realize that I have spent a good deal of time to provide background on Edward Said and the school of scholarship that he developed, but I think it vital for the reader to understand completely what is at stake in what is going on at Columbia University. The recent flap over MEALAC is part of the ongoing attempt to attack Edward Said and the Saidian legacy. This attack has been fought by students and followers of Bernard Lewis, that old Said nemesis, and by groups such as Campus Watch which has focused on the Middle East scholars who are of the Said mold.
At the outset it must be clearly stated that the events at Columbia University have at their core the charges of a number of Jewish students that must be taken seriously. Whatever the particular ideology of the student or professor might be, the freedom to articulate ideas and opinions is a sacrosanct one that must never be violated by any person. This having been said, it is common knowledge that professors at universities present their scholarly work and their teachings in a very forceful manner. But we must accept that the acrimony over an interpretation of Beowulf or The Federalist Papers does not have the same volatility as does views of current political and military conflicts.
I can recall that as an NYU undergrad I was advised against taking any courses in Jewish Studies. One of the prominent teachers in the department, Baruch Levine, was (in)famous for ripping apart believing Jews in his Bible classes. A student articulating religious views of Biblical authorship, I was told on good authority, would be chastised and humiliated in front of the class.
Such tales are legion in the university.
I myself got into a great deal of trouble as a Cornell grad student for not paying obeisance to the aforementioned Bernard Lewis who was, I thought and continue to think, a sworn enemy of the Sephardim.
The idea that the university is a place where freedom reigns is something of a myth. Professors use bullying tactics on a regular basis in their teaching and in their use of grades and recommendation letters. In many ways the whole thing is a game of cat and mouse; the ability of a professor to abuse his or her position is in proportion to their own power and the power of their department.
In the case of MEALAC, the department has been buoyed by the legacy of the late Edward Said whose name now adorns a chair in the department. The link between Edward Said and MEALAC is determinative in what has been going on. A number of Jewish students, frustrated at the treatment they were receiving from professors in the department, found an avenue to vent their grievances – not through the university which they claim would not listen to them, even though not one filed a formal grievance with the university – but through the avenue of the aforementioned Rachel Fish and The David Project.
The David Project is a Zionist-oriented organization that presents itself as a human rights watchdog. One of their campaigns is called “The Forgotten Refugees”; a project to acknowledge “the ethnic cleansing of one million Jews from Arab civilization and Iran.” We have in our newsletter addressed this problem of nomenclature previously in the case of Iraq and have asserted categorically that there is not one single shred of evidence that formal expulsions of Jews took place in the Arab world. The matter has become an issue to match the Zionist treatment of the Palestinians against a similar treatment of Jews by the Arabs. The evidence of Zionist interference with the Jews of the Arab world – as in the case of The Lavon Affair in Egypt or the Mas’uda Shemtob Synagogue bombing in Iraq – is thus elided and ignored. In the spirit of Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, we as Sephardim find it completely unacceptable that non-Sephardim should be allowed to speak for us. I think of the famous scene in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” – the “bring out yer dead” scene – where one of the ostensible dead on the cart shouts out “I’m not quite dead yet!”
Sephardim do not wish to have The David Project speaking in their names.
The David Project produced a filmed record of the accusations of the students against various MEALAC professors. Professors are accused of various forms of verbal abuse and psychological intimidation. As I have said previously, such intimidation is a regular feature of campus life. This does not make it acceptable or correct and I make no apologies for the professors named in the film. But problems arise in the course of the film: Only one of the students appears to have attended the classes of the professor under attack, Joseph Massad. The film carefully interweaves decontextualized accusations without any evidentiary procedures. “Columbia Unbecoming” is a classic work of political propaganda: There is no footage of the professors to confront their accusers according to the procedures of due process; there is a fixation on MEALAC with no mention of possible issues in other departments; and the predominant voice in the film is Hillel Director Emeritus Rabbi Charles Sheer who has never attended any of the classes or lectures in question. Rabbi Sheer seems to be a nice man, but he is presented as an expert witness in the “trial” constructed by the film, and yet his presence is rhetorically measured rather than providing real evidence that might “convict” these professors.
The accusations are very serious and the means to adjudicate them are also in dispute. The university has standard procedures for the filing of grievances which the students did not follow. The argument of the students was that the procedures were thought ineffective and useless so no one filled out a form. Instead, the students hooked-up with a partisan group that is fixated on Jewish and Israeli issues. This is fine for the group as an advocacy institution, but it serves to undermine the authority and the recognized procedures of the university which has a professional and public responsibility to deal with this matter with integrity. The David Project in this case, unlike the matter of Rachel Fish’s advocacy at Harvard, did not respect the boundaries of the university and provide the university with the opportunity to adjudicate the matter in the normal manner. Rather than attempting to determine whether these abuses were limited to MEALAC, the entry of The David Project and now a seemingly endless number of Jewish and non-Jewish advocacy groups from the ADL to the Zionist Organization of America to Nat Hentoff and Natan Sharansky, the New York City Council, the Israeli Knesset and US Congress have all served to turn this into a media circus.
It seems clear that there are a number of things going on here: There is the matter of the Said-ization of Middle Eastern studies and the takeover by Said disciples of the Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA), the professional organization of the field that was once in the hands of Bernard Lewis and his followers. Two professors at the March 6th event, Martin Kramer and Ephraim Karsh, from the Lewis school, bemoaned the nefarious influence of Edward Said and his students and followers, stating in very clear terms that MEALAC has been hijacked by the Saidians. Kramer’s essay on MEALAC “Bir Zeit on the Hudson” (distributed in the conference packet) typifies the arrogance and the prejudice that characterizes this school.
With the help of Daniel Pipes’ Campus Watch and David Horowitz’s Front Page Magazine, the views of these pro-Israel partisans have become a big deal. The Campus Watch website archives a dossier on each and every US academic (a sister website has just been created in Israel, where Said’s legacy in the country’s universities is perhaps even more pronounced than it is in the US) measuring them according to the strict standards of Pipes’ own Right Wing Zionism. Campus Watch has fed into the so-called S.H.I.T. list promulgated on the masada2000 website which targets Jewish figures critical of Israel. Campus Watch attempts not merely to “identify” Jewish “traitors” like Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, A.B. Yehoshua and Avraham Burg as masada2000’s list does, but to burrow into every nook and cranny of the US academic system and use reports from students that it solicits on its website to identify anti-Israel comments by professors.
If all this smacks of McCarthyism, perhaps we need to be reminded of what academic freedom actually means today.
While the sort of bullying that Massad and the others at Columbia are accused of goes on at every university in the world every day, the issue of targeting professors who Campus Watch judges to be “anti-Israel” is a manifestation, on more than ample display at the March 6th program, of the subterfuge known as HASBARAH.
While nearly every single speaker at the conference whined on and on about truth and academic integrity, there was little doubt that by truth the speakers – including civil libertarian hypocrites like Alan Dershowitz and Nat Hentoff – meant the truth as they Zionists understand it.
A quote from the handout provided by the organizers from the Zionist Organization of America, a reactionary fringe group that is at this point closer to the ideals of Meir Kahane than it is to the ideals of Stephen Wise (who was lambasted in this orgy of hate for his silence on the Holocaust) who was its founder, says it clearly: “That curricula, textbooks, and other educational materials be free of distortion and prejudice from one side, just as students may be required to read and study Mein Kampf and Edward Said as part of their class, they should be required to read Bernard Lewis and Bat Ye’or.”
This last statement sets the entire stage for the bloodfest that I felt obliged to sit through: Edward Said equated with Adolf Hitler. Such is the stuff of Bill O’Reilly and his equation of Mein Kampf and the Qur’an.
The program was an Arab bloodletting with Edward Said as its poster boy. Rather than debating the issues of what Joseph Massad and George Saliba actually did or did not do, each speaker presented a worldwide conspiracy designed to attack Jews at each and every turn.
From ex-liberals and progressives like Charles Jacobs of The David Project, the feminist pioneer Phyllis Chesler, Laurie Zoloth of Northwestern University and Mort Klein of the ZOA and the aforementioned Dershowitz and Hentoff who expressed their own internal angst over their radical past(s) and their current sense of alienation from the manner in which Anti-Semitism has come from the Radical Left, to true reactionary Conservatives like Martin Kramer, Ephraim Karsh and the crusading lawyer Debbie Schlussel who has specialized in her activism against Arabs and Muslims, the various speakers painted an ominously frightening picture of a world of new Nazis coming after the Jews – as if we were not sitting on Morningside Heights but were in the Warsaw Ghetto. And we were never too far from some mention of the Holocaust in many of the speeches.
The program fixated on the legal mechanisms that are in place to get at these Arab barbarians. There was no mention of the sort of intimidation that regularly takes place in and from the Jewish community against Arabs and those who seek justice for all people. In other words, academic integrity and fairness when it comes to the Middle East conflict is only seen as fairness for Zionists and their supporters. We were regaled with tale after tale of the horrors of Arabs and their civilization. This all came to a head in three speeches, one from Phyllis Chesler on the treatment of women in the Arab world; another from Brigitte Gabriel, a former Lebanese TV anchorwoman who moved to Israel and now lives in the US and has determined that she will tell the truth about Arab racism and hate; and finally the presentation of four African victims of Arab cruelty by Charles Jacobs of The David Project in a shameless display of exploitation – much in the manner that The David Project has sought to “use” the Arab Jewish issue to its advantage.
In each of these cases, the speakers began from a completely fair and unobjectionable premise: Ms. Chesler correctly identified the brutality towards women in the Arab world; Ms. Gabriel presented the hate that is taught in Arab schools; and Mr. Jacobs permitted the African men – all victims of Arab racist persecution – to tell their important stories. I would not even question the importance of raising these issues. What I do question however is the one-sided approach to the issue. A legal case was being made in a partisan manner against Arab civilization. There were no analogues presented from any other context – as if such abuses were unique to Arab culture and Arab culture alone.
I have previously mentioned the seminal studies of Leila Ahmed, Beth Baron, Fedwa Malti-Douglas and Cynthia Nelson on the issue of feminism in the Arab world. Such scholars depended on the critique of Orientalism that was formulated by Edward Said – the bete noire of the conference – and which has been continued in the work of MEALAC and the other entities being demonized by the Jewish partisans.
There is no question that since the redress of the imbalance of power in Middle Eastern studies that the scholars in the field like Joseph Massad and George Saliba and the many Arab and Palestinian advocacy groups that have sprung up in the wake of the 2000 Intifada which has led to so much misery for all concerned in the region, have committed excesses that have been correctly and properly identified by the many speakers at the Columbia conference. The problem is that the presentations were so filled with hate and bile any salient impact they might have had was blunted by the sheer violence that was inherent in the way in which the unashamed and completely unrestrained Zionist partisanship took place.
The day was replete with many thinly veiled and some not so thinly veiled threats against Arabs in and out of the academy. The speakers all made it manifestly clear to my ears that they were all filled with the sort of hatred and racism that they have identified on the other side and that they are ostensibly seeking to outlaw and punish. We were regaled to the Zionist myths, intimidations and hammers that led Edward Said to break out of his shell as a professor of literature and passionately articulate the voice of the silent. The sort of rhetorical violence from the various speakers often took on ominous tones; the edge of the speeches had a shrillness that served to reinforce the idea that these people were not much better than those they had come to criticize.
This became clear when three of the students from the “Columbia Unbecoming” film stepped forward to make some comments on the film and take a few questions. Ariel Beery stepped forward to say that he was unhappy with the tone of many of the speakers at the event and that he and the other students were fighting simply to be heard in a fair manner and not to suppress the right of Arab professors to their speech. Audience members were visibly upset that the very protagonists of the drama were not on board with the orgy of bloodletting that had been taking place in the auditorium that morning. One even rudely and with great intimidation demanded Beery to provide evidence of bias on the part of the speakers. When Beery provided that evidence you could see the visible anger on the part of the audience members. Beery was not following the script: His presentation of the themes of fairness and equity were not really what this conference was all about: The point of the event was to bash MEALAC and the Columbia administration into submission.
The underlying theme of nearly all of the speakers was that the Arabs were evil and that Jews would have to fight with bare knuckles to do what was needed to “protect” Jews from this virulent and primal Anti-Semitism.
Endless examples were given about how the Arabs have rained terror on the world and how that terror is deeply connected to the Arabs who teach in universities such as Columbia. The Title VI program – a program that funds academic programs that teach foreign cultures and histories – and various sources of funding were mentioned repeatedly among the not so thinly veiled threats that were marked by the presentation of Rachel Fish which laid out the manner in which lawyers, activists, journalists and politicians should deal with the transfer of money from the Arab world into the American university. We did not hear of any other attempt to look at sources of funding – other than the Arab. The basic idea is that if certain types of funding can be strangled that Arab studies can be reconfigured to a more Zionist-friendly variant. Again, the idea is not to hold all funding up to scrutiny, but to strangle Arab studies in its current variant which is perceived to be anti-Israel.
The straw man of fairness in academia that was the veneer at the conference is a mere bugaboo. What is behind all this is a massive dose of HASBARAH that means to advocate on behalf of the state of Israel. This, of course, is the same point that is being made to attack the Arab advocates. And I fully agree that any advocacy or suppression of free debate – on any side – is wrong and must be eliminated, swiftly and without prejudice. It is the height of hypocrisy to examine one side and not another. We should be able to freely discuss the issue of violence and injustice in the Arab world.
The following is a fair articulation of the point:
Where is the vision, where are the values guiding the investment of this great national treasure of ours, which will not last forever? How many castles in England, how many Cadillacs, how many Lockheed jets need to be bought before we can turn to other things? For this Right Wing I have been describing is not finally interested in its own preservation so much as it is interested in having a good time; no ruling class in history is so unintelligent as this one. If it does not have faith in its people, it has no faith in any other values either. The universities languish. The student population increases – which is good – yet the curriculum is as antiquated as anything can be. We must face the fact that there are no achievements to speak of in modern Arab science or most intellectual effort, at least none that have come out of our universities… We are living through a period in the Arab world of unparalleled economic prosperity on the one hand, and of unparalleled political and social and intellectual poverty on the other hand. In what Arab capital is it possible to write and publish what one wishes, to say the truth, to stem the tide repressive state authority, intolerant of everything except its own fantasies and appetites? Most of our best writers and intellects have either been co-opted or jailed into silence.
Bernard Lewis?
Daniel Pipes?
Martin Kramer?
No.
Edward Said from his 1979 essay “The Arab Right Wing.”
One can scour Said’s writings and find the same strident militancy against the forces of Arab anti-Semitism and anti-feminism and racism that we heard from many of the speakers at the Columbia anti-Said festa. And here is the value and the beauty of free speech – we can be political enemies and continue to discuss and dialogue with one another by finding common ground.
The idea that there is only one version of the truth is as spurious a concept on the Zionist side as it is on the Arab side. So when we hear from Mort Klein of the ZOA, a group that never met a peace it did not like, that we need to have truth – perhaps he needs to look within and find out the lies that he is telling. Perhaps The David Project should contact members of the Sephardic community who are active in preserving and protecting the rights of that community and not simply trying to adapt to the Ashkenazi model that has led to the tragedy of our people.
I am in complete agreement that the Arab world is corrupt and must be reformed so it will stop being a danger to itself and to others.
Edward Said was one of the lone voices in the American academy unafraid to speak of such things.
But he would not stop with a critique of the corrupt Arab regimes – he was defiant in the face of Zionist intimidation and HASBARAH which saw a need to eliminate his voice from the debate. If it is completely clear that professors at Columbia University’s MEALAC department committed violations of the academic code, they all need to be disciplined according to the rules of the university. We must also call for a full and complete investigation of all such threats of intimidation and presentations of spurious scholarship – like calling the end of Arab Jewish life in their host countries “ethnic cleansing” while turning a blind eye to Meron Benvenisiti’s presenting a dossier of evidence on what happened to the Palestinians at Jewish hands by the same name. If there are orders to expel Jews from the Arab world please let us have them or do not use such a charged phrase.
History is a contested thing. There are arguments among historians over nearly everything. This does not mean that we should simply sit here and languish while injustice takes place. In the 1960s Columbia University was the site of many rallies and sit-ins – and even a university shut-down by a Jewish-dominated group called The Weathermen – that protested against US intervention in Vietnam and on behalf of minorities. Today we see many of those same radical activists taking the side of the establishment against those who, like them when they were students, are taking to the campus with their banners and placards protesting oppression and racism. As in the 60s’ protests there is some excess and unacceptable behavior that needs to be addressed. But such excess must not be permitted to turn into a McCarthyite witch-hunt of administrators and professors who are doing what they can to balance the need for free academic expression with the need for scholarly accuracy and rigor.
We need to have a greater tolerance for complexity and diversity of opinion. Imbalances are frequently redressed by certain extreme measures to bring the minority up to speed with the majority. The current attempt to turn back the clock on Middle Eastern studies to a pre-Edward Said era – a time when Arabs had no voice in the discourse and no way to redress the matter of their own suppressed existence – in the name of academic freedom is a chilling statement of the intent of Jewish and Zionist groups in this country.
Neither Jews nor Arabs should have a monopoly on anything; all groups must have their right to speech.
The fears that were raised at the Columbia conference were whether one monolithic “truth” would be able to force out any other forms of advocacy. It is unacceptable that Jewish advocates of Israel are made to feel unsafe and at risk by Arab students and professors just as it is wrong for Jewish groups to target professors for their beliefs and opinions. So much of scholarship is interpretive that there is no single way to see anything and it is often not possible to present all the various viewpoints on a number of matters in a single forum. As uncomfortable as I felt sitting at the conference, it was necessary to have the conference take place. What was maddening and unacceptable to me were the repeated threats – veiled or not – to decimate a school of thought and its practitioners.
Two wrongs, as they say, do not make a right.
I will give the last words to Edward Said himself, from his final book Humanism and Democratic Practice which lends to this discussion a precise formulation and may serve as a proper credo for the real job of the university:
There can be no true humanism whose scope is limited to extolling patriotically the virtues of our culture, our language, our monuments. Humanism is the exertion of one’s faculties in language in order to understand, reinterpret, and grapple with the products of language in history, other languages, and other histories. In my understanding of its relevance today, humanism is not a way of consolidating and affirming what “we” have always known and felt, but rather a means of questioning, upsetting, and reformulating so much of what is presented to us as commodified, packaged, uncontroversial, and uncritically codified certainties, including those contained in the masterpieces herded under the rubric of “the classics.” Our intellectual and cultural world is now scarcely a simple, self-evident collection of expert discourses: it is rather a seething discordance of unresolved notations, to use Raymond Williams’ fine word for the endlessly ramifying and elaborated articulations of culture.
David Shasha
From SHU 149, March 23, 2005
Bari Weiss: It Was The David Project Before It Was The Tikvah Fund
I was not really intending to get into all the Linda Sarsour Women’s March mess, but it has been a pretty big Bari Weiss week, so I could not resist the following article from The Algemiener:
To repeat, I do not want to get into the toxic food fight; I will leave that to the fanatics on both sides of the HASBARAH divide.
None of them has any concern for Sephardim anyway.
But I happened to skim Bari Weiss’ new book on Anti-Semitism while at the Strand and thought I should comment:
She appeared on last week’s Bill Maher program, confirming the host’s vicious Neo-Con Zionism, an outgrowth of his vicious New Atheism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d27LLmm720
It is a problem for the Democratic Party, as I have written:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/maher/davidshasha/OAiKDUEMRUQ/uf6bnWH0DQAJ
Looking at the many people she thanks in the acknowledgements section at the end of the book, it was a veritable who’s who of Tikvah Fund Right Wing White Jewish Supremacists, led by notables like Bret Stephens and Alana Newhouse.
It got me thinking about her past, before Tikvah made her a big White Jewish star.
We should recall that her HASBARAH career began when she was just an undergraduate at Columbia University with The David Project, a far Right Wing Zionist group devoted to campus advocacy – and intimidation:
http://www.browndailyherald.com/2005/04/07/columbia-report-addresses-antisemitism-charges/
I discussed the degenerate group and its nefarious methods in a 2005 article on a McCarthyite conference at Columbia University, organized around the group’s rottweiler attack documentary “Columbia Unbecoming”; one of the great HASBARAH freakouts of recent memory.
That article follows this note.
We should note that The David Project also produced a documentary on the Arab Jewish Refugee issue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_David_Project#Documentaries
It is naturally a Lyn Julius favorite!
https://jewishrefugees.blogspot.com/2008/12/forgotten-refugees-film-to-be-shown-in.html
I recalled the 2005 “Columbia Unbecoming” event as I was writing the first draft of this note and soon made the connection with the list of friends that Ms. Weiss presents at the conclusion of her new book. She continues to cherish her relationships with many of the people who are named in my article.
It should give us moment to pause as we consider how far up the media food chain Weiss has climbed.
So, in spite of the fact that there are Neo-Con Never-Trumpers, we should not forget their vicious racism and their unalloyed, murderous Zionism and the PILPUL lengths they will go to pass it off on the public.
We must not be fooled by the current Trump realignment and how Neo-Con extremists like Weiss have been elevated by institutions like The New York Times.
David Project alumni should still be seen as a danger to society.
The Neo-Con Never Trumpers might not really be your friend.
I am not sure that politics should always make strange bedfellows.
In the case of Bari Weiss and her David Project Tikvah Fund pals the price is simply too high.
David Shasha
From SHU 920, November 13. 2019
What California tells us about the New Wave of Antisemitism on the Left
By: David Bernstein
What happens in California never stays in California. If you want to see what large swaths of the country, for better or worse, might look like in a year or two, look at what’s happening in California today. On the positive side of the ledger California was one of the first states that legalized same sex marriage, thereby legitimizing it for the rest of the nation. On the negative, it is among the first states to be drastically impacted by climate change with raging wildfires making large parts of the state unlivable. It is also one of the first states to fully embrace a far leftwing ideological curriculum for its K-12 public school system.
A version of this radical educational curriculum may be coming to your state too. And if and when it does, expect an increase in antisemitic attitudes and incidents.
The California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) was unanimously adopted in March of this year by the California Board of Education. The underlying ideology of the curriculum presents the world in binary terms of oppressed versus oppressor––largely along racial lines.
Now, with the ESMC ideological underpinnings in place, the very people who authored and promoted earlier versions of the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that held Israel and Jewish Americans in contempt are now pushing a “Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum” that’s even more extreme than the original. The goal, they explain on their website, is for teachers “to be part of a larger movement.” Fourteen California school districts have already passed resolutions indicating their receptivity.
Similar Ethnic Studies curricula with a decided ideological bent are being introduced in state legislatures across the country. No doubt some local Jewish groups will embrace these bills with open arms, hoping to influence the content and ensure that they don’t turn antisemitic. And while I understand this line of thinking–I held it myself not too long ago–it will only enable more antisemitism and anti-Israelism.
The reason why Jewish groups cannot ultimately control the antisemitic outputs of such a curriculum is that they are not discrete cases that emerge out of nowhere. They are products of a highly illiberal ideology pushed by ideologically-driven activists that characterizes America as systemically racist and oppressive. This ideology’s more extreme tenets virtually guarantee the generation of further anti-Jewish sentiment.
My organization, the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values (JILV), cited seven ways that the imposition of this ideology–which is often referred to as Critical Social Justice (CSJ)–fuels antisemitism in a recently released White Paper.
First, CSJ fuels the canard of Jewish privilege. Antisemites have always promoted the canard that Jews secretly control the levers of power. CSJ invites such antisemitic imagery by positing a fixed hierarchy of privilege, which legitimizes notions of “Jewish privilege.” This portrayal of Jews represents Jews as a self-contained cabal or lobby and doesn’t take into account the innumerable differences within the Jewish community.
Second, CSJ promotes the erasure of Jewish identity. Daphna Kaufman of Reut popularized the term erasive antisemitism for the designation of Ashkenazi Jews from Europe as “white.” This racialization of Jewish identity erases Jewish identity in favor of the CSJ binary of oppressed “person of color” versus “white” oppressor. In this ideological framework, Jews are not afforded the status of a distinct people worthy of self-determination. The erasure of Jewish identity also denies antisemitism its unique quality and historicity by falsely equating it with other forms of bigotry.
Third, CSJ, in the concept of intersectionality, can multiple antisemitic ideas. Intersectionality is the theory that various forms of discrimination interact in ways that create specific and compound problems, constituting an intersecting system of oppression. In other words, groups with “critical consciousness” have a strong incentive to agree with each other on whom to designate oppressor and oppressed in every system. This ideological framework serves to multiply a false view of “Jewish power” in the US and popularizes a perverse, binary perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Fourth, CSJ propagates an anti-Israel binary. The binary nature of CSJ ideology seeks to neatly divide human beings into either the oppressor or the oppressed while permitting and even encouraging violence against perceived oppressors. This binary extends to Israel, treating Palestinians as the perennial victims and Israel the perennial victimizer. It props up the most simplistic and crude notions of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
Fifth, CSJ may marginalize Jews in politics. While not explicitly antisemitic, CSJ has rendered and may further render many Jews politically homeless. Large majorities of Jews have historically voted for Democrats, yet the growing number of party officials, platforms, and policies supporting critical race ideologies stands to alienate a significant segment of American Jewry, especially as the connections between the ideology and antisemitism become more apparent.
Sixth, CSJ’s revamped concept of “equity” marginalizes Jews. CSJ ideology insists that the only reason there is disparity among racial and ethnic groups is white supremacy. If white supremacy is responsible for some people being held down, then it is also responsible for others being propped up. In this framework, Jews and other economically successful minorities are deemed complicit in or adjacent to white supremacy.
Seventh, CSJ undermines enlightenment principles. Jews have long thrived in societies undergirded by Enlightenment principles of rationalism, reason, logic and debate. CSJ is inherently anti-Enlightenment. It serves to delegitimize these principles as manifestations of “white supremacy,” stifle debate, and curtail academic freedom. Unmoored from its enlightenment values, society will become more totalitarian and hostile to Jews.
The White Paper goes on to recommend a set of strategies for countering CSJ inspired antisemitism. Because countering antisemitism is difficult if not impossible in the current ideological environment, we believe we must change the environment itself.
David Bernstein is the founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values and is a former CEO of Jewish advocacy organizations.
From The Times of Israel, September 13, 2021
On Teaching ‘Opposing’ Views of the Holocaust and Systemic Racism
By: David Bernstein
This past week, a school administrator in Texas was heard on tape saying that a new law forces teachers to provide “opposing” views on the Holocaust. The Texas law mandates that controversial issues be taught from “diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective.”
I immediately received messages asking whether the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values’ (JILV) efforts to open up the conversation on sensitive topics encourages Holocaust denial:
Don’t arguments that there is more than one side on systemic racism in America facilitate arguments that there is more than one side to the Holocaust?
It should go without saying that it is absurd and outrageous to teach opposing opinions about whether the Holocaust, or slavery for that matter, happened. They are historical facts. There are, however, completely valid differences of opinion about how and why these monstrous evils were perpetrated, just as there are valid differences of opinion about the extent and impact of systemic racism in America today. “The dispute about the interpretation of events is completely legitimate, but the dispute about the existence of events is either dangerous or stupid or both,” stated Rabbi David Wolpe.
A JTA article on the Texas Holocaust education controversy quoted Russel Neiss, a St. Louis-based Jewish educator:
“The way that Holocaust education is taught in America is, it talks about systems of oppression, it talks about dehumanization….I don’t even know what it means to just teach facts. Facts don’t mean anything unless they’re contextualized in a way of understanding that particular era…when you begin to ban all these approaches to understanding history, you are banning the way we teach Holocaust education in America today.”
We should indeed “contextualize the facts” of the Holocaust or the facts surrounding any significant historical event for that matter. But we should contextualize them in ways that allow students to wrestle with alternative perspectives on why these events occurred. There are, in fact, major disagreements among both scholars and educators about Holocaust pedagogy as well as a wide range of teaching practices.
In the mid-1980s, I had the honor of studying with the Philosopher and Holocaust survivor Emil Fackenheim at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who argued until his death in 2003 that the Holocaust was a unique and unprecedented event in human history. That notion of uniqueness has always been hotly contested by other philosophers and historians. It’s a debate I had on numerous occasions during and after college. Having that discussion elevated, not demeaned, the importance of the Holocaust in our consciousness.
In 1996, Daniel Goldhagen wrote the explosive book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, wherein he argues that most ordinary Germans were “willing executioners.” He advanced the notion of “eliminationist antisemitism” in German political culture through the centuries leading up to NAZI Germany. A year later, the German historian Hans Mommsen argued that Goldhagen failed to appreciate the varied forms of German antisemitism and rejected Goldhagen’s “unilinear continuity of German antisemitism from the medieval period.”
It would be perfectly appropriate for a teacher in a high school Holocaust studies class to expose his or her students to both Goldhagen’s and Mommsen’s arguments about the role of ordinary Germans and allow students to discuss and reach their own conclusions. I would not want my kids’ teacher to impart the Goldhagen thesis as the only acceptable interpretation.
Similarly, in the historical discussion over slavery, there are numerous disagreements over, for instance, the primary reason Abraham Lincoln initiated the Civil War. Was it to end slavery, as some assert? Or was it to save the Union, as others argue? How do we weigh the evidence? A good history teacher would help students understand the debate, not provide them a single answer.
On the recent row over the Texas Holocaust education pronouncement, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, a prominent progressive voice, stated “Just like there is no historical debate about the historicity of the Holocaust, “there are also no ‘both sides’ to American chattel slavery, to systemic racism, to lynchings and land theft and Indigenous genocide.”
If Rabbi Ruttenberg is referring to systemic racism as manifested in Jim Crow laws, there’s no argument there. But if she’s speaking about systemic racism as a singular explanation for disparities among groups in contemporary America, that should be regarded as a completely legitimate topic for debate and disagreement.
Obviously, pre-civil rights America was replete with systemic racism. It was written into the laws of the land and brutally enforced. But in the wake of the passage of the civil rights laws, the role of systemic racism becomes murkier. I believe that there is systemic racism in specific institutions, but I do not agree it is embedded in every nook and cranny of contemporary American life. Those who assert the ubiquity of systemic racism often demonize any other explanation for why there are differences in group outcomes and generally seek to shut down the conversation. It’s as settled in their minds as the occurrence of slavery itself. But it’s not settled in the minds of many other people.
There can be and often is more than one cause for disparity among groups. Why should kids – and society – have to settle with one favored explanation? If we can’t diagnose a problem in all its complexity, we won’t be able to solve it.
Just as we debate whether ordinary Germans were willing executioners and why Lincoln initiated the Civil War, we can and must debate the prevalence and meaning of systemic racism in America today. In the meantime, the historicity of the Holocaust will withstand a few idiots in Texas who can’t tell the difference between fact and opinion.
From The Times of Israel, October 17, 2021
We Got Here Because of Cowardice. We Get Out With Courage
By: Bari Weiss
A lot of people want to convince you that you need a Ph.D. or a law degree or dozens of hours of free time to read dense texts about critical theory to understand the woke movement and its worldview. You do not. You simply need to believe your own eyes and ears.
Let me offer the briefest overview of the core beliefs of the Woke Revolution, which are abundantly clear to anyone willing to look past the hashtags and the jargon.
It begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. They are the master’s tools. And the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.
So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated. And in so doing, persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings.
Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion.
In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all. In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good. In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about reeducating them in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully.
In this ideology, if you do not tweet the right tweet or share the right slogan, your whole life can be ruined. Just ask Tiffany Riley, a Vermont school principal who was fired—fired—because she said she supports black lives but not the organization Black Lives Matter.
In this ideology, the past cannot be understood on its own terms, but must be judged through the morals and mores of the present. It is why statues of Grant and Washington are being torn down. And it is why William Peris, a UCLA lecturer and an Air Force veteran, was investigated for reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” out loud in class.
In this ideology, intentions don’t matter. That is why Emmanuel Cafferty, a Hispanic utility worker at San Diego Gas and Electric, was fired for making what someone said he thought was a white-supremacist hand gesture—when in fact he was cracking his knuckles out of his car window.
In this ideology, the equality of opportunity is replaced with equality of outcome as a measure of fairness. If everyone doesn’t finish the race at the same time, the course must have been defective. Thus, the argument to get rid of the SAT. Or the admissions tests for public schools like Stuyvesant in New York or Lowell in San Francisco.
In this ideology, you are guilty for the sins of your fathers. In other words: You are not you. You are only a mere avatar of your race or your religion or your class. That is why third-graders in Cupertino, California, were asked to rate themselves in terms of their power and privilege. In third grade.
In this system, we are all placed neatly on a spectrum of “privileged” to “oppressed.” We are ranked somewhere on this spectrum in different categories: race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Then we are given an overall score, based on the sum of these rankings. Having privilege means that your character and your ideas are tainted. This is why, one high-schooler in New York tells me, students in his school are told, “If you are white and male, you are second in line to speak.” This is considered a normal and necessary redistribution of power.
Racism has been redefined. It is no longer about discrimination based on the color of someone’s skin. Racism is any system that allows for disparate outcomes between racial groups. If disparity is present, as the high priest of this ideology, Ibram X. Kendi, has explained, racism is present. According to this totalizing new view, we are all either racist or anti-racist. To be a Good Person and not a Bad Person, you must be an “anti-racist.” There is no neutrality. There is no such thing as “not racist.”
Most important: In this revolution, skeptics of any part of this radical ideology are recast as heretics. Those who do not abide by every single aspect of its creed are tarnished as bigots, subjected to boycotts and their work to political litmus tests. The Enlightenment, as the critic Edward Rothstein has put it, has been replaced by the exorcism.
What we call “cancel culture” is really the justice system of this revolution. And the goal of the cancellations is not merely to punish the person being cancelled. The goal is to send a message to everyone else: Step out of line and you are next.
It has worked. A recent CATO study found that 62 percent of Americans are afraid to voice their true views. Nearly a quarter of American academics endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences. And nearly 70 percent of students favor reporting professors if the professor says something that students find offensive, according to a Challey Institute for Global Innovation survey.
Why are so many, especially so many young people, drawn to this ideology? It’s not because they are dumb. Or because they are snowflakes, or whatever Fox talking points would have you believe. All of this has taken place against the backdrop of major changes in American life—the tearing apart of our social fabric; the loss of religion and the decline of civic organizations; the opioid crisis; the collapse of American industries; the rise of big tech; successive financial crises; a toxic public discourse; crushing student debt. An epidemic of loneliness. A crisis of meaning. A pandemic of distrust. It has taken place against the backdrop of the American dream’s decline into what feels like a punchline, the inequalities of our supposedly fair, liberal meritocracy clearly rigged in favor of some people and against others. And so on.
“I became converted because I was ripe for it and lived in a disintegrating society thrusting for faith.” That was Arthur Koestler writing in 1949 about his love affair with Communism. The same might be said of this new revolutionary faith. And like other religions at their inception, this one has lit on fire the souls of true believers, eager to burn down anything or anyone that stands in its way.
If you have ever tried to build something, even something small, you know how hard it is. It takes time. It takes tremendous effort. But tearing things down? That’s quick work.
The Woke Revolution has been exceptionally effective. It has successfully captured the most important sense-making institutions of American life: our newspapers. Our magazines. Our Hollywood studios. Our publishing houses. Many of our tech companies. And, increasingly, corporate America.
Just as in China under Chairman Mao, the seeds of our own cultural revolution can be traced to the academy, the first of our institutions to be overtaken by it. And our schools—public, private, parochial—are increasingly the recruiting grounds for this ideological army.
A few stories are worth recounting:
David Peterson is an art professor at Skidmore College in upstate New York. He stood accused in the fevered summer of 2020 of “engaging in hateful conduct that threatens Black Skidmore students.”
What was that hateful conduct? David and his wife, Andrea, went to watch a rally for police officers. “Given the painful events that continue to unfold across this nation, I guess we just felt compelled to see first-hand how all of this was playing out in our own community,” he told the Skidmore student newspaper. David and his wife stayed for 20 minutes on the edge of the event. They held no signs, participated in no chants. They just watched. Then they left for dinner.
For the crime of listening, David Peterson’s class was boycotted. A sign appeared on his classroom door: “STOP. By entering this class you are crossing a campus-wide picket line and breaking the boycott against Professor David Peterson. This is not a safe environment for marginalized students.” Then the university opened an investigation into accusations of bias in the classroom.
Across the country from Skidmore, at the University of Southern California, a man named Greg Patton is a professor of business communication. In 2020, Patton was teaching a class on “filler words”—such as “um” and “like” and so forth for his master’s-level course on communication for management. It turns out that the Chinese word for “like” sounds like the n-word. Students wrote the school’s staff and administration accusing their professor of “negligence and disregard.” They added: “We are burdened to fight with our existence in society, in the workplace, and in America. We should not be made to fight for our sense of peace and mental well-being” at school.
In a normal, reality-based world, there is only one response to such a claim: You misheard. But that was not the response. This was: “It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students,” the dean, Geoffrey Garrett wrote. “Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students, and for that I am deeply sorry.”
This rot hasn’t been contained to higher education. At a mandatory training earlier this year in the San Diego Unified School District, Bettina Love, an education professor who believes that children learn better from teachers of the same race, accused white teachers of “spirit murdering black and brown children” and urged them to undergo “antiracist therapy for White educators.”
San Francisco’s public schools didn’t manage to open their schools during the pandemic, but the board decided to rename 44 schools—including those named for George Washington and John Muir—before suspending the plan. Meantime, one of the board members declared merit “racist” and “Trumpian.”
A recent educational program for sixth to eighth grade teachers called “a pathway to equitable math instruction”—funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—was recently sent to Oregon teachers by the state’s Department of Education. The program’s literature informs teachers that white supremacy shows up in math instruction when “rigor is expressed only in difficulty,” and “contrived word problems are valued over the math in students’ lived experiences.”
Serious education is the antidote to such ignorance. Frederick Douglass said, “Education means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light only by which men can be free.” Soaring words that feel as if they are a report from a distant galaxy. Education is increasingly where debate, dissent, and discovery go to die.
It’s also very bad for kids. For those deemed “privileged,” it creates a hostile environment where kids are too intimidated to participate. For those deemed “oppressed,” it inculcates an extraordinarily pessimistic view of the world, where students are trained to perceive malice and bigotry in everything they see. They are denied the dignity of equal standards and expectations. They are denied the belief in their own agency and ability to succeed. As Zaid Jilani had put it: “You cannot have power without responsibility. Denying minorities responsibility for their own actions, both good and bad, will only deny us the power we rightly deserve.”
How did we get here? There are a lot of factors that are relevant to the answer: institutional decay; the tech revolution and the monopolies it created; the arrogance of our elites; poverty; the death of trust. And all of these must be examined, because without them we would have neither the far right nor the cultural revolutionaries now clamoring at America’s gates.
But there is one word we should linger on, because every moment of radical victory turned on it. The word is cowardice.
The revolution has been met with almost no resistance by those who have the title CEO or leader or president or principal in front of their names. The refusal of the adults in the room to speak the truth, their refusal to say no to efforts to undermine the mission of their institutions, their fear of being called a bad name and that fear trumping their responsibility—that is how we got here.
Allan Bloom had the radicals of the 1960s in mind when he wrote that “a few students discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.” Now, a half-century later, those dancing bears hold named chairs at every important elite, sense-making institution in the country.
As Douglas Murray has put it: “The problem is not that the sacrificial victim is selected. The problem is that the people who destroy his reputation are permitted to do so by the complicity, silence and slinking away of everybody else.”
Each surely thought: These protestors have some merit! This institution, this university, this school, hasn’t lived up to all of its principles at all times! We have been racist! We have been sexist! We haven’t always been enlightened! I’ll give a bit and we’ll find a way to compromise. This turned out to be as naive as Robespierre thinking that he could avoid the guillotine.
Think about each of the anecdotes I’ve shared here and all the rest you already know. All that had to change for the entire story to turn out differently was for the person in charge, the person tasked with being a steward for the newspaper or the magazine or the college or the school district or the private high school or the kindergarten, to say: No.
If cowardice is the thing that has allowed for all of this, the force that stops this cultural revolution can also be summed up by one word: courage. And courage often comes from people you would not expect.
Consider Maud Maron. Maron is a lifelong liberal who has always walked the walk. She was an escort for Planned Parenthood; a law-school research assistant to Kathleen Cleaver, the former Black Panther; and a poll watcher for John Kerry in Pennsylvania during the 2004 presidential election. In 2016, she was a regular contributor to Bernie Sanders’s campaign.
Maron dedicated her career to Legal Aid: “For me, being a public defender is more than a job,” she told me. “It’s who I am.”
But things took a turn when, this past year, Maron spoke out passionately and publicly about the illiberalism that has gripped the New York City public schools attended by her four children.
“I am very open about what I stand for,” she told me. “I am pro-integration. I am pro-diversity. And also I reject the narrative that white parents are to blame for the failures of our school system. I object to the mayor’s proposal to get rid of specialized admissions tests to schools like Stuyvesant. And I believe that racial essentialism is racist and should not be taught in school.”
What followed this apparent thought crime was a 21st-century witch hunt. Maron was smeared publicly by her colleagues. They called her “racist, and openly so.” They said, “We’re ashamed that she works for the Legal Aid Society.”
Most people would have walked away and quietly found a new job. Not Maud Maron. This summer, she filed suit against the organization, claiming that she was forced out of Legal Aid because of her political views and her race, a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
“The reason they went after me is that I have a different point of view,” she said. “These ideologues have tried to ruin my name and my career, and they are going after other good people. Not enough people stand up and say: It is totally wrong to do this to a person. And this is not going to stop unless people stand up to it.”
That’s courage.
Courage also looks like Paul Rossi, the math teacher at Grace Church High School in New York who raised questions about this ideology at a mandatory, whites-only student and faculty Zoom meeting. A few days later, all the school’s advisers were required to read a public reprimand of his conduct out loud to every student in the school. Unwilling to disavow his beliefs, Rossi blew the whistle: “I know that by attaching my name to this I’m risking not only my current job but my career as an educator, since most schools, both public and private, are now captive to this backward ideology. But witnessing the harmful impact it has on children, I can’t stay silent.” That’s courage.
Courage is Xi Van Fleet, a Virginia mom who endured Mao’s Cultural Revolution as a child and spoke up to the Loudoun County School Board at a public meeting in June. “You are training our children to loathe our country and our history,” she said in front of the school board. “Growing up in Mao’s China, all of this feels very familiar…. The only difference is that they used class instead of race.”
Gordon Klein, a professor at UCLA, recently filed suit against his own university. Why? A student asked him to grade black students with “greater leniency.” He refused, given that such a racial preference would violate UCLA’s anti-discrimination policies (and maybe even the law). But the people in charge of UCLA’s Anderson School launched a racial-discrimination complaint into him. They denounced him, banned him from campus, appointed a monitor to look at his emails, and suspended him. He eventually was reinstated—because he had done absolutely nothing wrong—but not before his reputation and career were severely damaged. “I don’t want to see anyone else’s life destroyed as they attempted to do to me,” Klein told me. “Few have the intestinal fortitude to fight cancel culture. I do. This is about sending a message to every petty tyrant out there.”
Courage is Peter Boghossian. He recently resigned his post at Portland State University, writing in a letter to his provost: “The university transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a social justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender and victimhood and whose only output was grievance and division…. I feel morally obligated to make this choice. For ten years, I have taught my students the importance of living by your principles. One of mine is to defend our system of liberal education from those who seek to destroy it. Who would I be if I didn’t?”
Who would I be if I didn’t?
George Orwell said that “the further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.” In an age of lies, telling the truth is high risk. It comes with a cost. But it is our moral obligation.
It is our duty to resist the crowd in this age of mob thinking. It is our duty to think freely in an age of conformity. It is our duty to speak truth in an age of lies.
This bravery isn’t the last or only step in opposing this revolution—it’s just the first. After that must come honest assessments of why America was vulnerable to start with, and an aggressive commitment to rebuilding the economy and society in ways that once again offer life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to the greatest number of Americans.
But let’s start with a little courage.
Courage means, first off, the unqualified rejection of lies. Do not speak untruths, either about yourself or anyone else, no matter the comfort offered by the mob. And do not genially accept the lies told to you. If possible, be vocal in rejecting claims you know to be false. Courage can be contagious, and your example may serve as a means of transmission.
When you’re told that traits such as industriousness and punctuality are the legacy of white supremacy, don’t hesitate to reject it. When you’re told that statues of figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass are offensive, explain that they are national heroes. When you’re told that “nothing has changed” in this country for minorities, don’t dishonor the memory of civil-rights pioneers by agreeing. And when you’re told that America was founded in order to perpetuate slavery, don’t take part in rewriting the country’s history.
America is imperfect. I always knew it, as we all do—and the past few years have rocked my faith like no others in my lifetime. But America and we Americans are far from irredeemable.
The motto of Frederick Douglass’s anti-slavery paper, the North Star—“The Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and all we are brethren”—must remain all of ours.
We can still feel the pull of that electric cord Lincoln talked about 163 years ago—the one “in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”
Every day I hear from people who are living in fear in the freest society humankind has ever known. Dissidents in a democracy, practicing doublespeak. That is what is happening right now. What happens five, 10, 20 years from now if we don’t speak up and defend the ideas that have made all of our lives possible?
Liberty. Equality. Freedom. Dignity. These are ideas worth fighting for.
From Commentary magazine, November 2021
Watch Bari Weiss Embarrass Brian Stelter On His Own Show
By: Jordan Davidson
Former New York Times Opinion Editor Bari Weiss embarrassed CNN’s Brian Stelter on his show “Reliable Sources” on Sunday when she pointed out that it is corporate media networks such as CNN pushing false narratives that contribute to silencing viewpoints and cancel culture.
“When you have the chief reporter on the beat of COVID for The New York Times talking about how questioning or pursuing the question of the lab leak is racist, the world has gone mad. When you’re not able to say out loud and in public that there are differences between men and women, the world has gone mad. When we’re not allowed to acknowledge that rioting is rioting and it is bad and that silence is not violence, but violence is violence, the world has gone mad. When we’re not able to say that Hunter Biden’s laptop is a story worth pursuing, the world has gone mad. When, in the name of progress, young school children as young as kindergarten, are being separated in public schools because of their race and that is called progress rather than segregation, the world has gone mad. There are dozens of examples that I could share with you,” Weiss explained.
When Stelter asked exactly “who are the people stopping the conversation?” Weiss noted that CNN is a key media player when it comes to promoting a certain agenda and silencing certain stories if they don’t fit the narrative.
“People who work at networks, frankly, like the one I’m speaking on right now, who try and claim that it was racist to investigate the lab leak theory,” Weiss said.
Stelter was dissatisfied with her answer and, in a tone-deaf reply, claimed that Weiss’s assertion was merely a “provocative” statement that held no water.
“I’ve heard about every story you mentioned, so I’m just suggesting, of course, people are allowed to cover whatever they want to cover,” Stelter said.
“But you and I both know, and it would be delusional to claim otherwise, that touching your finger to an increasing number of subjects that have been deemed third-rail by the mainstream institutions and increasingly by some of the tech companies will lead to reputational damage,” Weiss retorted. “Perhaps you losing your job, your children sometimes being demonized as well, and so what happens is a kind of internal self-censorship. This is something that I saw over and over again when I was at The New York Times.”
Not only are people intimidated, Weiss said, but the institutional culprits dictating speech are getting bolder.
“What’s going on is the transformation of the sense-making institutions of American life. It’s the news media, it’s the publishing house, it is the Hollywood studios, it’s our universities, and they are narrowing in a radical way what’s acceptable to say and what isn’t,” Weiss said.
Weiss explained that there are plenty of examples of cancel culture such as when Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago, was stopped from giving a lecture at MIT after a “Twitter mob” brought up his comments supporting meritocracy.
“What are the downstream effects of an example like that? Every other scientist, every other academic who’s watching that is saying, ‘Wait, hold on, if he’s being canceled for that, what does that mean for me? I might as well shut up. I might as well practice doublethink in the freest society in the history of the world,'” Weiss said. “That is one of the great stories of our time. That is the story that’s been uncovered largely not because of disinformation or not because they’re lying about it, simply because they’re ignoring it, it’s disinformation by omission.”
Stelter, however, overlooked Weiss’s points that this misinformation and cancel culture are promoted by media networks and other powerful institutions, to absolve himself from any blame and shift the burden to Twitter mobs.
“When there is a crowd on Twitter or some other social media site, complaining, you know, saying ‘you’ve offended me, you’ve hurt me, you’ve been racist, you’ve been sexist, you’ve been whatever it is,’ and then that Twitter mob can sound really loud and really powerful, it’s actually still a small number of people,” Stelter said. “But we do see companies sometimes cave to what sounds like a huge crowd that’s actually pretty small. And that is a story that’s happened over and over again, and it sounds like you’re trying to push back against that.”
Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.
From The Federalist, October 18, 2021