Bari Weiss: It Was The David Project Before It Was The Tikvah Fund
David Shasha
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
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