DANEgerus Exposes Left/Mohammedan Leaning Academics in America PART Three

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

Here is Part Three that follows Part Two to "DANEgerus Exposes Left/Mohammedan Leaning Academics in America."

JRH
*********************************

PETER AWN


Consider how he has talked about jihad:

"If you want to stigmatize some one today, you use the word jihad. The word has enormous emotional power, it really does."


And where did Peter Awn present this view of jihad as something benign? It was no mere classroom discussion. His presentation took place in the context of a real trial, that of the Virginia "Paintball Jihadis" who were tried, convicted, and sentenced for practicing to engage in violent combat.


According to Awn, the "defense attorney said the government had twisted the meaning of the word and that jihad is instead a peaceful term that can mean anything from studying Islam to caring for the sick." Awn found this not to be a comical argument, but one he could, and with a straight face did, characterize as "quite legitimate." He thus became an accomplice in attempting to convince a judge and jury, in a courtroom where a trial for terrorist-related acts was taking place.

Millions of times a day, all over the Muslim world, the word jihad is used - by demonstrators in Gaza, or in Kandahar, or in Karachi. It is used by the doctors of Al-Azhar, in making rulings about the rights and duties of Muslims, both those living in dar al-Islam, and those sojourning in dar al-Harb. It is heard in the crowds that chant, in the email messages of Osama Bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri, Al-Zarqawi, and many others. It can be found scrawled on walls outside churches and synagogues in France and England. None of those demonstrators, those angry mobs, those plotting e-mailers, those Arabic graffiti artists, is using the word jihad as the defense attorney in the Paintball Jihad trial, so warmly supported by the scholarly authority of Peter Awn.


HAMID DABASHI

Professor of Islamic Studies at Columbia University Calls Israel "a military base for the rising predatory empire of the United States"

Believes that the Patriot Act has created "political conditions worse than those found in the Islamic Republic [of Iran]."


Says that Israeli Jews have a “vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of [their] culture.”

...
Dabashi has denounced supporters of Israel’s right to exist as “warmongers” and “Gestapo apparatchiks,” calling the Jewish state a nest of “thuggery,” as well as a “ghastly state of racism and apartheid” which “must be dismantled.”

...
On more than one occasion, Dabashi has cancelled classes he was scheduled to teach at Columbia—in order to take part in anti-Israel political rallies.


GIL ANIDJAR

Identifies “good teaching” with pro-Palestinian activism and “dissent”...

...
More aggressively political is Anidjar’s class, “Semites: Race, Religion, Literature.” The course parses, among other issues, the use of the term “Semite” and how it has “affected various aspects of academic and individual academics.” For Anidjar, the term is chiefly a convenient rhetorical cudgel with which to batter the legitimacy of the state of Israel. For instance, he has claimed in interviews that “the last Semites and the only Semites” are Arabs—an argument intended to undermine the legitimacy of Israel’s character as a Jewish state. Stretching this argument further, Anidjar has contended that “the Arabs have become the race that is still attached to its religion, whereas the Jews have in fact become Western Christians, and therefore are no longer marked, neither by race nor by religion.” Implicit in the professor’s remark is that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state, a point reinforced by Anidjar’s frequent tirades against Zionism, which he assails for what he calls its “apocalyptic dimensions.”

...
Anidjar draws no distinction between the responsibilities of an academic and those of an activist.


/www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2230">JOSEPH MASSAD

Believes that Israel is a "racist" state and Zionism is the equivalent of "anti-Semitism"


Supports terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians

...
Joseph Massad is Assistant Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) at Columbia University. He is a self-described "Palestinian-Jordanian" who routinely condemns Israel as a "racist state" and has clamored for its destruction. In April 2002, for instance, he delivered a public lecture wherein he castigated Israel as "a Jewish supremacist and racist state," adding that "[e]very racist state should be destroyed." One month earlier, Massad had insisted that "the Jews are not a nation" and the "Jewish state is a racist state that does not have the right to exist." "It is only by making the costs of Jewish supremacy too high that Israeli Jews will give it up," Massad said on another occasion.

...
Massad repeatedly equates Israel and its leaders with Nazis. There are "stark" similarities, he claims, between the plight of Jews in Nazi concentration camps and Israeli prisons' treatment of Palestinian terrorists (or "the children and young men of the stones and Molotov cocktails," as Massad dubs them).


In the spring of 2005, Columbia University conducted an investigation into two incidents where Professor Massad was alleged to have screamed at pro-Israeli students. When questioned about the charges, Massad claimed to have no memory of any such occurrences. The investigatory committee concluded, however, that these incidents did indeed occur. Massad then dismissed his critics as being "pro-Israel."


EDWARD SAID

The Palestine Monitor Website's official biography of Edward Said declares that he "was born in 1935 in Jerusalem, Palestine. In the 1947 partition of Palestine, he and his family became refugees and moved to Cairo where they lived with relatives." In truth, however, Said was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt.


One of academia's most influential radical theorists, Said is best known for his extremely influential 1978 book Orientalism, which holds that it is impossible for Westerners to write valid accounts of Middle Eastern affairs because their ideas are tainted by cultural biases...


RASHID KHALIDI

...the Lebanese publication Daily Star interviewed Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi about his opinions regarding recent developments in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Regarding Hamas' victory in the January 2006 Palestinian elections, Rashidi stated,

"They [Hamas] have an interpretation of this [suicide bombings against Israelis] that is actually closer to the view of most Palestinians and most people in the Arab world than to the American or Israeli interpretation, which is that the overwhelming majority of the violence that goes on daily is the violence of the [Israeli] occupation, ...until that stops there's going to be resistance....Now, the Israelis want to be able to maintain their occupation and have the Palestinians abjure any form of violence. ... it means you can do anything you want as the most powerful party, and that what you do is not bad and that anything they do is unacceptable."

Khalidi had made similarly intemperate remarks in declaring his opposition to the first Gulf War in 1991. Following Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Khalidi called the widespread opposition to Saddam Hussein's act of aggression an "idiots' consensus" and urged his fellow academicians to resist it. At the time, Khalidi had also weighed in with several predictions about the war, none of which recommended him as an insightful analyst of modern-day Iraq. Among other erroneous claims, Khalidi wildly over-estimated the tenacity of the Iraqi army. Whereas the Iraqi troops quickly took flight before the superior onslaught of the U.S.-led forces, Khalidi had envisioned an altogether different scenario. "They're [the Iraqis] in concrete bunkers. And it won't be easy to force them out without resorting to bloody hand-to-hand combat. It's my guess they'll fight and fight hard, even if you bomb them with B-52s."


The question of whether Khalidi is a serious scholar, or merely a radical polemicist masquerading as a scholar, remains vigorously debated—not least at Columbia, where Khalidi is embroiled in an ongoing scandal surrounding the faculty members of the university's Middle East Studies program. Still, there is no doubting that, despite the charges of extremism frequently attached to his name, Khalidi continues to wield considerable influence in the field of Middle East Studies. At present, Khalidi, in his role as the director of Columbia's Middle East Studies Institute, presides over a $300,000 annual grant from the federal government. Khalidi's books, meanwhile, are among the most frequently assigned works on the Middle East in American college syllabi. Additionally, both Arab and American media outlets continue to seek out Khalidi as a leading American authority on the Middle East.


Columbia U. Prof. Cole's Analogies

We recently commented on Prof. Jonathan Cole's organizing of the Columbia University Cheerleaders for Bias in the Classroom. He was defending the "right" of assistant professor of modern Arab politics Joseph Massad to intimidate Jewish students in his classroom and promote one-sided bashing of Israel there. Massad is accused of threatening to expel a student from his classroom because she defended Israel's military actions. You can get a feel for Massad's academic objectivity from thisdiatribe of his in the anti-Semitic Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram. As reported in the NY Sun, Prof. Cole said:

"Mr. Cole on Tuesday night cast Mr. Massad as an exemplary teacher who is under no obligation to give equal weight to student opinions expressed during class. Just as a Jewish history professor doesn't have to take seriously a student who denies the Holocaust, Mr. Massad is not required to give equal time to an argument denying the 1982 Shatila refugee camp massacre in Lebanon, he said." In other news reports, apparently Cole also defended Massad's "right" to introduce anti-Israel indoctrination in his classroom by noting that Jagdish Bhagwati, a world-class professor of economics, does not give equal time in his class to people who think that international trade is something bad. "We are witnessing a rising tide of anti-intellectualism," the New York Sun quotes Cole as saying, calling the present situation at the university "another era of intolerance and repression."

Now let us parse those statements of Cole a liitle. What Cole is trying to say is that someone denying that Israel was responsible for the massacres in Sabra and Shatilla, Lebanon, in 1982 is equivalent to a professor denying that the Holocaust occurred (something that would be no problem at all, by the way, at Depaul University) or to someone defying the wall-to-wall consensus in economics that international trade is beneficial to all countries involved in it.


In other words, telling the truth about Sabra and Shatilla is, in the learned sociologist Cole's view, as intolerable as lying about the Holocaust or promoting a superstitious faith in trade protectionism as legitimate economic thinking.


Just to remind you, some 400 or so Palestinians were killed in Sabra and Shatilla in 1982. The number there who were killed by Jews or Israelis was exactly zero. In Sabra and Shatilla, Palestinian Arabs were killed by Lebanese Christian Arabs, members of the Falange militia, who went on a rampage right after their leader was murdered, probably by Palestinians allied to Syria. The killings at Sabra and Shatilla occured a week after Damour, where 500 plus Christian civilians were murdered, killings that have never interested the Jew-haters.


When Arabs murder Arabs, the Israel-bashers and Jew-baiters all decide that somehow it is all the Jews' fault.


JUAN COLE

Cole's proclamations reveal an all too characteristic mindset for a Middle East Studies specialist. He is blindly anti-Israel to the point of supporting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, an apologist for radical Islam, and someone who despises America and its citizens. MESA's anti-American and anti-Israel bias is well known, making Cole's selection as its president reflective of a profession in crisis.


COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

List of articles


Campus Support For Terrorism

In the 1930s, the universities were the first German institutions to capitulate to Adolf Hitler.

...
In England in the 1930s, while Germany rearmed and began annexing territory in the heart of Europe, the Oxford Union resolved "not to defend King and country" against the growing fascist threat.

...
The pacificism of the progressive left and the Tory right added up to an appeasement of Hitler that protected him when he was still weak and testing the limits of Western resolve. The consequence was World War II and 70 million deaths before he was stopped.

...
The seeds of the contemporary opposition to the War on Terror were sown in the 1960s in the movement to oppose the Communist aggression in Vietnam. Once again the universities and the intellectual culture provided the most dependable support in the West for the totalitarian agendas of the Communist bloc. The withdrawal of American aid to the anti-Communist forces in Cambodia and Vietnam in 1975 (long after American forces had been removed) resulted in the slaughter of two and a half million peasants in Indo-China at the hands of the Communist victors. The blood of these innocents would not have been shed without the aid the Communists received from their supporters and appeasers in the anti-Vietnam movement in the West.

...
September 11, 2001, is burned into the nation's memory as a day of infamy and terror. Yet within weeks of this horror, protests were organized on more than 150 American college campuses opposing, in advance, an American military response. Columbia University Marxist Eric Foner, a past president of both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, declared,

"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."

El-Haj will get tenure...

DANEgerus