DANEgerus Exposes Left/Mohammedan Leaning Academics in America - PT 2

Posted by johnhouk on May 08, 2007
John R. Houk
© May 8, 2007

Here is Part Two of Part One to "DANEgerus Exposes Left/Mohammedan Leaning Academics in America."

JRH
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DANEgerus Exposes Left/Mohammedan Leaning Academics in America Part Two

MhoreOn Columbia "University"

Nine Professors At Columbia Are 'Dangerous'

Mr. Horowitz also criticizes the dean of Columbia's School of International Public Affairs, Lisa Anderson, for her sponsorship of Mr. Massad and her fundraising from Arab sources for an Edward Said chair in Middle Eastern studies.


The Sun in January reported that Ms. Anderson had along with several other Columbia professors taken a junket to Saudi Arabia paid for by the kingdom-owned oil company, Saudi Aramco.


Saudis Funded Columbia Program (* DANEgerus link is dead so here is something similar – CampusWatch)

Saudi Arabia has funneled tens of thousands of dollars into the "outreach" programs of Columbia University's Middle East Institute, which until last week was training some of the city's public-school teachers in how to teach students about Middle East politics.


Crisis at Columbia

It is disturbing that Janaki Bakhle, the wife of a Columbia administrator, was part of the Committee chosen to investigate charges of intimidation and indoctrination at MEALAC. She had signed an anti-Israel petition; she is a close colleague of Massad, one of those under investigation, and her future at Columbia depends, in large part, on the goodwill of three senior professors – Khalidi, Saliba, and Dabashi, two of whom have been charged with violating standards of conduct. To make matters worse, Khalidi is a friend, colleague, and long-time supporter of Massad’s.


Columbia University’s Political Agendas

Columbia's School of Journalism has long been regarded as the leading institution for training in the field. But some of the courses offered are concerned less with acquainting students with the fundamentals of the journalistic craft than encouraging them to embrace the political convictions of the professors. Among these courses, “Human Rights Reporting” is the most obviously corrupted by politics. Indeed, a description of the course is far more evocative of a newspaper editorial than an academic instruction in the fundamentals of reporting.

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Obviously, the aim of this course is not to teach students how to report on issues of human rights, but rather what to think about them...

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The notion that United States is fundamentally an imperialist nation and Latinos its main victims is further stressed in Rodolfo Acuña's tellingly titled, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, as well as speeches by Ernesto "Che" Guevara, and the so-called “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” a manifesto of the radical Chicano separatist group MEChA, all of which students are required to read...

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By grading students on the basis of political criteria, the course, “Introduction to African American Studies”, establishes arbitrary standards that have no place in an academic setting. That the course promotes one-sided political views is objectionable enough. That students' grades depend on the extent to which they embrace its political line is a travesty of the educational enterprise.


De Genova

At an "anti-war" teach-in at Columbia last week, Anthropology professor Nicholas De Genova told 3,000 students and faculty,


"Peace is not patriotic. Peace is subversive, because peace anticipates a very different world than the one in which we live--a world where the U.S. would have no place."


"The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military. I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus."


When the Mogadishu remark was made, it was as if the devil had inadvertently exposed his horns, and someone needed to put a hat over them before others realized it. That someone was the demonstration organizer, Professor Eric Foner, the prestigious head of Columbia’s history department. Actually, when Foner spoke after De Genova at the teach-in, he failed to find the Mogadishu remark offensive. Instead Foner dissociated himself from another De Genova comment to the effect that all Americans who described themselves as "patriotic," were actually "white supremacists."


But the next day when a reporter from New York NewsDay called Foner, the professor realized that the Mogadishu remark had caused some trouble. When asked now about the statement he said it was "idiotic." He told the reporter, "I thought that was completely uncalled for. We do not desire the deaths of American soldiers." Foner did not say (and was not asked) how he thought organizing an anti-American demonstration to protest America’s war in Iraq and express the hope that we lose would not encourage the enemy and possibly lead to American deaths.


Eric Foner is the scion of a family of American Communists (and American Communist leaders) at that. In the Sixties he was an anti-American Stalinist. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he wrote a piece in the London Review of Books saying, "I’m not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House." After receiving much adverse reaction, he wrote a self-exculpatory piece for The New York Times explaining that his uncertainty was actually patriotic.


Columbia’s Anti-Israel Film Festival (* If link is dead, FrontPage has similar article)

From January 24 to 27, 2003, the Columbia University Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) hosted an anti-Israel / pro-Palestinian film festival entitled “Dreams of a Nation.” Open to students and the general public alike, the festival featured 35 films directed by Palestinians, shown in their original language with English subtitles.

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The organizers of this festival reject the notion that Israel has any legitimate right to exist, as evidenced by the event’s official poster, which depicts the entirety of Israel, including the officially recognized 1948 areas, as “Palestine.” Reflecting this rejectionist attitude, three of the festival films – “Haifa,” “Chronicle of a Disappearance,” and “Blanche’s Homeland” – openly oppose Israel’s right to exist, and advocate Arab migration to “Zionist-controlled territory.” The film “Milky Way” lauds the Arab “struggle” against the Israeli government. And the film “Jenin, Jenin” depicts as a real event the alleged Jenin massacre of April 2002, the accounts of which UN reports demonstrated were fabrications.


The festival’s keynote speech was delivered by Columbia professor Edward Said (who passed away eight months later). One of academia’s most influential radical theorists, Said was once a member of the Palestinian National Council, from which he broke away in 1991 – in protest to the Oslo accords, and to what he deemed Yasser Arafat’s unduly moderate stance. In July 2000, Said was photographed throwing rocks over the Lebanese border into Israel, trying to hit Israelis on the other side. In March 2002 he wrote, “Palestinian hospitals, schools, refugee camps and civilian residences have been at the receiving end of a merciless, criminal assault by Israeli troops . . . and still the poorly armed resistance fighters take on this preposterously more powerful force undaunted and unyielding.” He described the conflict as a case of “one state turning all its great power against a stateless, repeatedly refugeed, and dispossessed people, bereft of arms and real leadership.” “Israel,” he said, “is now waging a war against civilians, pure and simple, although you will never hear it put that way in the U.S. This is a racist war, and in its strategy and tactics, a colonial one as well. People are being killed and made to suffer disproportionately because they are not Jews. What an irony!”


The film festival also featured panel discussions, among whose participants was Professor Hamid Dabashi, chair of Columbia's MELEAC department. Dabashi likens U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to Attila the Hun as “a destroyer of civilization” for his role in the Iraq war. In October 2003, shortly after the death of Edward Said, Dabashi eulogized the late professor, writing, “We were all like birds flying around the generosity of his roof, tiny dandelions joyous in the shade of his backyard, minuscule creatures pasturing on the bounteous slopes of the mountain that he was. The prince of our cause, the mighty warrior, the Salah al-Din of our reasoning with mad adversaries, source of our sanity in despair, solace in our sorrow, hope in our own humanity, is now no more.”


Another panel member was the MELEAC department’s Joseph Massad. In his panel remarks, Massad, who who regularly analogizes Israel and Nazi Germany, likened Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. Two-and-a-half months later, in the April 10 edition of the Egyptian publication Al-Ahram Weekly, Massad suggested that Israel is “a racist state” whose policy of “indiscriminate violence and terror” includes the “kill[ing] and bomb[ing of] anyone who stands in its way of protecting its right to discriminate on racial grounds.”


PHILIP MATTAR

He holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, is associate editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, and has been a member of the advisory committee for Human Rights Watch...

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Since 1984 Mattar has been the Executive Director of the Washington, DC-based Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS), a quasi-academic organization that was founded in Beirut and has maintained longstanding, close (though unacknowledged) ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). According to a State Department official, IPS is "the unofficial academic wing of the PLO."

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In 1992 Columbia University Press released a revised edition of Mattar's book, The Mufti of Jerusalem: Al-Hajj Amin Al-Hussaini, Founder of the Palestinian National Movement. In this screed, Mattar does not mention that Al-Hussaini, the leader of the Palestinians from the 1930s until the 1950s, formed a close alliance with Adolph Hitler and the Nazis during World War II; that Al-Hussaini established a special Muslim Waffen SS Division, known as the Handschar Division, in Bosnia and Herzegovina; that this division committed war crimes and atrocities against Serb Christians; or that the postwar Yugoslavian government consequently indicted the Mufti as a war criminal.


I’ve read about the alliance between Adolf Hitler and Muslim Arab leaders in World War II, and seen still photographs, but this is the first time I’ve seen actual video of Hitler meeting with the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini—Yasser Arafat’s alleged uncle. From a German TV documentary, with English subtitles.


YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d51poygEXYU

LISA ANDERSON

In 2004 and 2005, Anderson raised some $4 million, almost entirely from Arab sources, for an “Edward Said Chair in Middle Eastern Studies.” Though Said was not a scholar of Islam or the Middle East, but a literary scholar and celebrated anti-Israel polemicist, Anderson nonetheless named the chair after him. She kept the sources of the chair’s funding secret for as long as possible, despite public criticism and even though New York State Law requires that such information be reported when it involves foreign funds.


To occupy the chair, Anderson selected Professor Rashid Khalidi, a longtime supporter of Yasser Arafat and onetime activist with the Palestine Liberation Organization, who depicts Israel as a “racist” nation that imposes “apartheid” on Palestinians. Professor Anderson reserved the chair for Khalidi until he could extricate himself from his position at the University of Chicago, explaining that she could not “honestly think of a better person to recruit to Columbia.”


Professor Anderson was also instrumental in helping Joseph Massad, who she had served as a Ph.D. advisor, to secure a teaching post at Columbia.


During Anderson’s tenure as Dean, the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs has held numerous events condemning the state of Israel. In September 2002, for instance, SIPA co-sponsored an African Studies Institute seminar called "South African Conversation on Israel and Palestine," which likened Israel’s current social structure to the system of racial apartheid -- even though the one million-plus Arab citizens of Israel enjoy more rights than the citizens of any Arab state.


Professor Anderson is a fierce critic not only of Israel, but also of the United States. She views the 9/11 attacks as the Muslim world’s response to “the fact of American political power in the world, and the fact of inequitable distribution of power within the United States.” When writing about the “war on terror,” Anderson places those words in sneer quotes to convey her belief that the term is nothing more than a pretext for American empire-building by means of serial invasions. Casting the U.S. as an unprovoked aggressor in this war, she characterizes the American military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq as an “assault on the entire region” and an attempt “to rewrite the map of the entire area.”

Gosh, I am going to have do a PART THREE.

DANEgerus