by Jerry Gordon, Alyssa A. Lappen and Maria Sliwa
Dec 14, '03 / 19 Kislev 5764
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The “US Imperialism in the 21st Century” intellectual atrocity gathered in the Teatro at Columbia University’s Casa Italiana, sponsored by the controversial Middle East Arts Language and Culture (MEALC) program, an interdisciplinary Barnard/Columbia affair founded by Said. This glimmering Morningside Heights campus was designed in the late 19th century by the fabled architectural firm of McKim Mead & White (and completed by the university’s dynamic early 20th Century President, Nicholas Murray Butler) to host world-rank civil and intellectual discourse. Indeed, in the 1930s and 1940s, Columbia offered a refuge for many scholars driven from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
But 2003 capped the campus reversal of fortunes.
This year, Said succumbed to leukemia; 2003 also marked the quarter century anniversary of his 1978 deconstructionist work, Orientalism. Here, Said rants on supposed failures of modern Western thought and alleged colonialist excesses, while strangely trivializing the significance of oppression imposed by Islamic Arab culture and civilization upon the Middle East’s weak and powerless minorities. The book brims with the revenge that Said prescribes for Western imperialist powers (including Israel), autocratic Arab leaders, and another oddity Middle Eastern scholars, most prominently Princeton professor Bernard Lewis, whose work doesn’t fit Said’s new, supposedly progressive paradigm.
On December 5, the MEALC faculty set its targets on alleged U.S. global imperialism (via the Global War on Terrorism in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Philippines) and Israel’s Second Intifada engagement (what London University Middle East analyst Ephraim Karsh more aptly calls “Arafat’s War”) to defeat a three-year onslaught of over 20,000 Islamikaze and other terror attacks that, to date, have killed and maimed nearly 7,000 innocent Israeli, U.S. and other civilians in the so-called Settlements and inside the Green Line. In June 2000, a month after Israel’s fateful unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon, U.S.-citizen Said traveled there as a representative of the Palestinian National Council and threw rocks at Israel’s northern border. Israel, according to Said’s sometime co-author, the brilliant linguist and critic of American foreign policy, Noam Chomsky, is a US military base in the Middle East.
In April, Columbia marked the anniversary of Said’s corrupting book. Following his death this fall, Said groupies and acolytes revered his memory and musical avocation in The Nation. In the New York Review of Books, they lionized his supposed interpretative abilities and reinvigoration of a presumably long-dormant culture suppressed by dominant Western imperialism and Orientalist scholarship. On Columbia’s 250th anniversary, a documentary made for the Public Broadcasting Corporation by Ric Burns (brother of documentary-maker Ken Burns), praised Said as the supposed apotheosis of classical Western civilization and an exemplary humanities teacher: After all, his thinking was now embedded in Columbia’s undergraduate core curriculum.
Said’s exegesis, alas, lives on in his controversial literary criticism and the anonymously funded Edward Said chair, filled by newly tenured MEALC professor and former PNC-negotiator Rashid Khalidi, fresh from the University of Chicago. A New York native and Oxford Ph.D. who speaks wonderful colloquial American English, Khalidi returned home largely to advance Palestinian and Arab causes in frequent PBS and NPR appearances. What the taxpayer-funded TV and radio networks never mention are Khalidi’s reverence for the memory of mass murderers like Black September terrorist Abu Iyad[1] or his support for violence: “Palestinian society comes through during these uprisings,” he said in October 2000. It is civil society that carried the first uprising.[2]
This controversial MEALC seat was endowed at over $4.0 million. Funds poured in from more than 40 undisclosed sources, until multi-pronged pressure and sleuthing, lead by Columbia Hillel director Rabbi Charles Sheer, exposed the identities of a few leading contributors. Rita Hauser, a partner in New York’s prestigious Stroock, Stroock and Lavan law firm, and head of an eponymous foundation, wrote a check. Hauser’s legal clients included Palestinian Authority interests in the US. She was a prominent Jewish Republican and former Nixon appointee to the UN Commission on Human Rights.
In 2002 and 2003, several controversial panels and media events roiled Columbia’s campus, all of them orchestrated by the MEALC faculty and such allies as Dean Lisa Anderson and School of International and Public Affairs Professor Mahmood Mamdani. In September 2002, Mamdani led an African Studies Institute seminar, sponsored by the SIPA. The South African Conversation on Israel and Palestine program was a thinly veiled attempt to glue a false South African apartheid analogy to Israel’s second Intifada counterterror tactics. The Israeli security system consists of checkpoints, curfews and virtual cantons, among other strategies now adopted by US coalition forces to handle Baathist guerrillas in Iraq.
The panel included radical Left Israeli, Jeff Halper, whose Israel Committee Against Housing Destruction (ICAHD) alleged that Israeli destruction of Palestinian Islamikaze and terrorist homes in the disputed territories evidences a mendacious displacement of poor, afflicted Palestinians by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s occupying forces. The panel also included Barnard College anthropologist and MEALC professor Nadia Abu El-Haj and political science professor Andre du Toit, visiting from the University of Cape Town.
Asked whether Arab displacement of more than 900,000 Mizrahi and Mahgrebi Jews before and after the Israeli War for Independence was not analogous to the Palestinian refugee displacement, the panel disingenuously claimed the question was intellectually dishonest. They claimed the Arab pogroms targeting Jewish people and confiscating billions of dollars in Jewish assets and property was not equivalent to the Palestinian displacement. They falsely claimed that Zionist agents blew up Baghdad synagogues and Jewish centers to encourage more than 130,000 Iraqi Jews to flee to Israel and abroad. Later, an audience member further evidenced the level of civil discourse at MEALC and SIPA events when he approached the questioner, asked if he weren’t a Zionist and railed, “You are a Zionist racist pig.” Sic Gloria transit mundi, Columbia.
MEALC’s faculty also sponsored a Fall 2002 weekend of Palestinian films prominently featuring Jenin, Jenin.This blatant piece of Palestinian propaganda intercuts supposed eyewitness accounts with haunting imagery suggesting that the IDF committed a massacre in the refugee camp. The film ignores the United Nations conclusion, following a controversial investigation, that in fact no such massacre had occurred. Jenin, Jenin contrasts sharply with the fact that Jenin terrorists murdered 23 IDF soldiers as they methodically tried to dismantle and defuse bomb factories and arms without assaulting innocent Palestinian civilians.
The truth is lost in the comments of uncritical UN officials, like Terje Roed Larsen, who actively support Palestinian Authority manipulation of the global press corps and mass news media and whitewash endless PA supplies of fraudulent documentaries and video attacks, manufactured to libel Israel and the Jewish people as murderers.
Columbia’s latest MEALC assault on the truth was intentionally scheduled on a December Friday evening, when most observant Jews were celebrating the onset of Sabbath. Thus protected from potential opposition (April’s Said fete was similarly held on the day of the first Passover Seder) the MEALC faculty engaged in their habitual one-sided, uncivil bathos and anti-American and Anti-Israel screeds. Goebbels and Streicher would have been proud.
The “US Imperialism in the 21st Century” conference was full to capacity. On a table at the hall’s rear were International Socialist Organization books and fliers announcing upcoming Gay rights, anti-FTAA and other activist events. Participants were also invited to join future discussions on the truth about the Russian Revolution. Among the refreshments was another table featuring ahistorical, anti-American books by propagandists like Chomsky.
This was not a conference devoted to academic discussion. The meetings latter half focused on the means of implementing resistance against imperialism and building an anti-imperialist movement in the U.S. Participants were regaled with dogma on protesting power, and disrupting and taming U.S. hegemony. Each speaker rallied the audience to anti-American action. It was like a ‘60s meeting for the Black Panthers or the Weathermen. Not one panelist offered an opposing view; not one member of the sizable audience offered an opposing comment.
Recent Harvard Divinity School graduate Rachel Fish single-handedly shut down the United Arab Emirates’ Zayed Center, whose thin academic veneer advanced reams of anti-American, anti-Semitic research and hatred. Yet, at Columbia, terrorist sympathizer Professor Khalidi and the panelists at his conference spew material in the same vein from an anonymously funded Edward Said bully pulpit, and no one rebuts them.
The afternoon’s and evening’s two panel presentations were uniform and monochrome in their anti-imperialist, anti-American, anti-Israel script. One speaker lauded Democratic presidential hopeful Dr. Howard Dean for his fund-raising and successful use of the Internet. Like Goebbels, these propagandists all appreciate the benefits of modern media technology. They have used the Internet to spread their hatred. A second speaker expressly extolled the importance of spreading the word in this way. This would make it much harder for the imperialists (Bush, et al) to lie and hide things from us, he said. Akeel Bilgrami, of MEALC, urged moderate Muslims to turn (like him) to vocal criticism of the U.S., and feature speakers passionately resonated these sentiments.
Khalidi, who ran the daylong conference, featured speakers harboring these sentiments:
* The US, and particularly the Bush administration, are hegemonic, imperialist aggressors. The Bush "regime" does not bully other countries, but reshapes them to be totally dependent on the U.S.
* The US has been baiting the Islamic world to enrage Muslims and transform Western Europe.
* The Bush administration has successfully divided Western and Eastern Europe.
* The Bush administration espouses a grand hegemonic strategy, in which the Middle East is central.
* Yasser Arafat is one of the most legitimate leaders in Palestine. This is why the U.S. government targets him (says Sorbonne University of Paris professor Gilbert Achcar).
* The Bush administration aims to tighten its hegemony and seeks the vassalage of other countries and of the people in the U.S.
* Israel is an occupier and oppressor, working with the US.
* The U.S. and Israel viewed 9-11 as a good thing, which justified further oppression of Palestinians, a ramped up global war on terror and conquest of Iraq.
* The Palestinian Authority militants and Iraqi and Afghan guerrillas commit armed resistance and terrorism due to intense forces of oppression and occupation imposed by the U.S. and Israel.
* The Bush regime wields great influence over faith-based Christians, who want him involved in foreign affairs.
* “Straussians” - alias neo-conservatives - run right-wing U.S. think tanks and the pro-Israel U.S. Defense Department.
* Bush did not anticipate getting blowback from Iraq, local guerrillas and international freedom fighters.
* At the core of Bush administration policy is an overt embrace of armed preemption in Iraq, within the Arab Muslim heartland, according to Professor Khalidi.
* The Bush imperialist occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq exceeds the efforts of any prior U.S. administration to establish a new security paradigm, announced in September 2001 and promoted internally among Defense Department neo-conservatives.
* Iraq was not connected to the attack on the World Trade Center.
* The U.S. intentionally exaggerates the savagery of Saddam Hussein against Iraqi people and others in the region.
* The US obstructs democracy in the name of democracy and the Bush administration operates in Orwellian fashion.
* The depiction of Islamic beliefs by Muslim apostate, author and playwright Salman Rushdie (lionized at a spring Columbia festival that produced Midnight’s Children) is inaccurate and irreverent.
* Al-Jeezera the 24/7, Qatar-based Arabic language satellite TV propaganda network, portrays the truth concerning the Middle East and Gulf region to the Arab/Muslim street.
The last speaker was journalist Rahul Mahajan, founder of the Internet’s Empire Notes and apparently a go-go activist. Despite a raging snow storm, the hall remained full even toward the programs end. Mahajan passed around a clipboard soliciting e-mail subscriptions to his daily news updates.
From audience comments at Columbia’s Teatro, many seemingly intelligent people and obvious progressives subscribe completely to the lunatic nostrums advanced. MEALC faculty and panels willingly pander to and cheer the toxic anti-American mix of anti-imperialism, radical anti-globalism, and Middle East Arab and Muslim hatred of the modernizing West, the U.S. and the Bush administration, and of course its ally and regional colonial power, the Jewish state of Israel.
Fortunately, valiant and intrepid fools like us attend such events. Monitoring them is critical to Western civilization. All too often, opponents of reds/greens/ Palestinian/anti-Western hate-fests simply shrug and ignore such conferences: “What's the use?” they ask themselves. The panels offer no balance, fairness or civil discourse; only hateful screed eerily reminiscent of Third Reich or Stalinist era diatribes and postwar Eastern European, Maoist or North Vietnamese Communist indoctrination. Attending and asking probing questions invites hoots, verbal assaults, psychological intimidation and possibly even violence. The sponsors do not want intruders in their forums, so to speak.
But conferences like these reflect nothing more than the despicable dogmas of National Socialism, Stalinism and Islamofascism. Their common threads are hatred of human liberty, freedom and democracy and heinous unprovoked slaughters of innocents. All were also vanquished only through force of arms, internal rot and external liberating forces. All except, of course, Islamofascism, whose mass production of hate ideology to this day perpetrates the worst inhumanities under the banner of Jihad and, in conquered societies, attendant Dhimmitude, the institutional debasement of non-Muslim minorities.
Therefore, we urge others to join us in educating an incredulous and naive public about the intellectual war rapidly progressing on our nation’s campuses. Get it from us, or get fresh assaults and carnage, or both.
Only investigative reportage and good journalism (sadly lacking in most mainstream media) can provide U.S. society with the necessary disinfectant. It is the most important weapon we have.
Notes:
[1] Khalidi, Rashid, Under Siege: PLO Decisionmaking During the 1982 War (1985); pp. ix and 103; see also Middle East Report, March-Apr. 1991.
[2] Elgrably, Jordan, “The Crisis of Our Times: Nationalism, Identity and the Future of Israel/Palestine: An Interview with Rashid Khalidi”, OpenTent.org, Oct, 2000.