Posted on 12/01/2004 7:19:44 AM PST by stevejackson
Others may have sympathized on learning that Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Middle East studies at Columbia University, felt threatened by a graduate student at his own university, but not me.
The incident began late on Sept. 27, 2004, when Victor Luria, a Ph.D. candidate in genetics and a former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, wrote Dabashi an e-mail taking strong exception to what Dabashi had written about the IDF in an article, "For a Fistful of Dust: A Passage to Palestine," he published in the Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram. In response, Luria wrote to Dabashi:
Rather than answer Luria's critique, Dabashi early on Sept. 28 forwarded his note to several top Columbia officials, including the university's provost, Alan Brinkley. He also commented on what Luria had written:I have rarely seen such a revolting excerpt of anti-semitism as your article in Al-Ahram. Your article implies no right of Israel to exist. … As an Israeli citizen, I welcome the right of Palestinians to have an independent state and a capital in East Jerusalem. At the same time, you clearly deny (and you are not even a Palestinian) my right to have a country.
Dabashi concluded, "For the time being, and in the best interest of our university, I will refrain from contacting the New York Police Department directly."I consider this slanderous harassment a conduct unbecoming of a student of Columbia University towards a member of the faculty whom he has never met or known. I bring this defamatory attack against a Columbia faculty to the judicious attention of your respective offices. Given the military record of this person, I also feel physically threatened. I would be grateful if Columbia Security were also to be informed of this slanderous attack against my character and appropriate measures taken to protect my person from a potential attack by a militant slanderer.
Underwhelmed, Brinkley wrote him back the same day,.
Dear Hamid,
I see nothing threatening in this message, however unfair its conclusions might be. I also see no grounds for alerting security, although you are certainly free to contact them if you feel otherwise.
I very much doubt the New York City police would have any grounds for intervening in this matter.
I'm sorry this attack has occurred, but you are no stranger to controversy and have encountered such ad hominem criticism before. This is one of the unhappy prices of a public life, and I would recommend ignoring Mr. Luria (whom I do not know).
Yours,
Alan
Indeed, Dabashi is "no stranger to controversy" and some of it concerns me. I report his exchange with Luria (which was first reported in the New York Sun) because it helps explain Dabashi's behavior two year earlier, when he claimed to be threatened by an article Jonathan Schanzer and I co-authored on June 25, 2002.
We mentioned Dabashi as one of six professors in a catalogue of academic radicalism regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. The reference to Dabashi, replicated here in its entirety, merely noted two of his actions:
Dabashi contested neither of these facts but instead bellyached how publicizing them disrupted his life by making him and his students the victims of "racist and obscene" harassment, leading his computer to be hacked, and causing spams to be sent from his Columbia account. In reply, I condemned any such actions but also requested proof that they had actually occurred. Dabashi and I went back and forth on this point, most notably on MSNBC's "Donahue" program.Columbia University: Hamid Dabashi, a specialist on Iran, compared Israel's military maneuvers in Jenin (to prevent future suicide bombings) with the Nazi Holocaust. When one student protested his canceling class to attend a rabidly anti-Israel sit-in, he sneeringly replied, "I apologize if canceling our class in solidarity with [Palestinian] victims of a genocide . . . inconvenienced you."
HAMID DABASHI: The hacking of our computers, and the fact that our e-mails are flooded with e-mails following his attack on us, and putting us on his Web site, is now documented that Columbia University security, NYPD, intelligence division of the New York police department, so as in Chicago and Michigan.
PHIL DONAHUE: You mean documented with the police?
DABASHI: With the police. That is, we are being attacked by hackers and by those who, following his attack on me-his initial attack on me was in the New York Post on June 26 [sic]. Immediately after that, I received tons of death threats, racist, obscene and threatening voice mails. And immediately after that, the last week of August, tons of e-mails – hundreds, thousands of e-mails, to the point that Columbian security could not increase my quota enough.
DANIEL PIPES: You must send me this information. Would you prove it to me?
DABASHI: If I may just, the evidence of all this, Phil, is with Columbia University security.
PIPES: Will you send to it me? Will you have them send it to me?
DABASHI: Mr. Ken Finnegan of Columbia security, if I could please not be interrupted. Mr. Ken Finnegan of Columbia security is, so far as my university is concerned, is in charge of this.
PIPES: Prove it to me. Just prove it, OK?
Two years later, despite this request on national television, Dabashi has yet to provide any proof.
Comments: (1) Dabashi's neurotic response to Luria, which closely parallels the one to Schanzer and me, establishes that he habitually interprets criticism as intimidation.
(2) His quick indignation may also reflect his extensive power at Columbia University (where he bills himself as "Chair of the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures Department, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies, and the Director of Graduate Studies at the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University") and the deference he habitually receives. When exposed to something a bit rougher, he squeals about being threatened.
(3) This unacceptable pattern of behavior points to another failure of Middle East studies in general and at Columbia University in particular.
http://netwmd.com/articles/article808.html
When I attended the law school (1981-1984) I didn't see any evidence that it was unusually liberal, and I have seen none since. There were traditionally liberal professors and visiting professors, and lots of New Deal style Democrats, who revered the Franklin Roosevelt administration as the golden age of professionalized administration and quality government. Certainly, many people can disagree with that analysis. However, there was no radical element there that I ever encountered.
Most graduates get jobs at large NY law firms and in the various administrative agencies of the federal government in Washington, D.C. (the SEC, the DOJ, etc.), and I don't believe that Columbia's law school is any more or less liberal than those two pillars of the US establishment.
What evidence do you have that the law school has become "liberal indeed"?
If he felt "threatened" by his Luria's letter he's going to really get a kicked out of my email ;)
I graduated in '95. I could tell you LOTS of stories along the same lines.
I would suggest emails to him pointing out that while the people he champions have the guts to take on the IDF and throw rocks at tanks, he doesn't even have a skin thick enough to withstand an email. That should get under his skin a little.
As a collective group is there any one more cowardly and sniveling than the Muslims? If they are not brainwashing and strapping bombs to young men and women to do their dirty work or killing unsuspecting, unarmed civilians they are calling the police about emails.
The mandatory pro-bono program that all law students must complete in order to graduate.
The program requires that every law student complete 40 hours of approved pro-bono legal work as a condition of graduation. Law students are specifically prohibited from fulfilling their pro-bono requirement during their first year or their first summer (when many have difficulty finding summer internships). So, it is not just that it is designed to provide help to the needy, it is intended to be a burden on the students.
The key word is "approved" pro-bono.
For example: a fellow wanted to work for a gun rights group - not "approved". Working for gun control groups: approved. Another fellow had an offer from the archdiocese of New York to do pro-bono legal work specifically for the Catholic Church. At the time this was disapproved because it was explicitly "religious" in orientation, for the benefit of a specific religion. If it was generally religious, that might have been ok. (Of course, what sort of real charitable operations are GENERALLY religious? In the real world, they are all operated by specific churches or temples). But doing pro-bono work for the Archdiocese of New York? Not approved pro-bono, according to Columbia's policy at the time. Want to work on a pro-abortion pro-bono cause? Approved.
Of course the pro-bono administrators at Columbia have tended to be snaky when challenged on this issue. They will flat out state that such is not the policy, even though there are former students who will flat out respond that their pro-bono was refused on content grounds.
In short: there is a great deal of discretion on the part of the head of the program there, and that discretion has been exercised to force pro-bono into "approved" liberal causes, and to prevent it being used into anything not judged socially useful, using the liberal litmus test of the administrators of the Columbia program.
Now, forcing someone to perform a week of unpaid legal work in a liberal cause as a condition of gaining their diploma is pretty offensive, in my view. And in the view of most conservative students in the law school over there. But it's a private school: they can set whatever policies they want, and students who don't like it can go elsewhere. What they aren't going to get away with is claiming that mandatory pro-bono to an "approved" list of subjects, with subtle political content control that HAS BEEN EXERCISED to restrict service from conservative causes, is not liberal. It is aggressively liberal.
Same thing.
Post it, please, for the rest of us. I for one could use a laugh.
I wasn't aware of either the pro bono program or the content-based exclusion of conservative pro bono opportunities based on their content. I agree that this sounds inappropriate and, if it works as you say it does, should be fixed.
I don't have a problem with requiring students to do pro bono work. So long as a law license is required to practice law and people can be arrested for practicing law without a license, I think it is entirely appropriate for lawyers to do pro bono work, and many of the largest firms devote substantial hours to pro bono. I also see no problem with lawyers-in-training doing the same. While content-based approval may be appropriate, I don't think that a system that approves only liberal pro bono projects and disapproves conservative ones is acceptable, and I hope that this will be changed.
Still, at least while I was at the law school there was a very conservative sense that students would get their grades based upon the merit of their work and not because of their race, religion or other external factor. At that time, the Law Review offered one affirmative action position each year, and each year the Black Law Student Association rejected the offer (I do understand that the offer subsequently was accepted).
There was a black professor who held a review session for his contracts class under the aegis of the Black Law Student Association, and this review session became a minor scandal because it was exclusionary. I may be mistaken, but I remember that the meeting was opened to anyone who wanted to attend as a result of the outcry.
I also remember that the professors all seemed to make it clear that the specific answer that we gave on a law school exam was relatively unimportant, but that the process that we went through (in terms of the case law and statutes that we considered and the way that we analyzed them) was the important stuff in determining our grade.
Again, as I said, there were lots of Roosevelt Democrats on the faculty. I don't remember any professor whom I would consider a Great Society/War on Poverty Democrat, and nobody was holding up George McGovern or Jimmy Carter as an example for us. I also don't remember any comments -- positive or negative -- about Ronald Reagan, who was reelected to his second term when I got there.
You: "I don't have a problem with requiring students to do pro bono work. So long as a law license is required to practice law and people can be arrested for practicing law without a license, I think it is entirely appropriate for lawyers to do pro bono work, and many of the largest firms devote substantial hours to pro bono."
I see the opportunity for good in this sentence. Let me restate it two ways.
(1) "I don't have a problem with requiring all lawyers to do pro bono work. So long as a law license is required to practice law and people can be arrested for practicing law without a license, I think it is entirely appropriate for lawyers to be required to do pro bono work, and many of the largest firms should be required to devote substantial hours to pro bono work."
Indeed, mandatory free labor by lawyers, as a condition of practicing law, might completely eliminate the problem of the lack of legal help for the indigent.
Following the logic further,
(2) "I don't have a problem with requiring all doctors to do pro bono work. So long as a medical license is required to practice medicine and people can be arrested for practicing medicine without a license, I think it is entirely appropriate for doctors to be required to do pro bono work, and many of the largest private clinics should be required to devote substantial hours to pro bono work."
If all doctors were required by law to work one full week for free every year, we could provide more indigent care, and substantially reduce medical costs.
Come to think of it, this offers a lot of new possibilities. Every licensed profession should be compelled to work a week for free every year for the poor. Banks should be required to give away loans for a week, because they have to meet all sorts of regulatory requirements in order to be banks.
The principle that: "You have to be licensed, therefore we can command you to perform free labor for the good of society" is a good one. We can use it to cut the costs of everything by 1/52, almost 2%, if we just impose it on everyone. Garbagemen perform a vital service. They should be required, as a condition of employment, to work for free for one week a year. Same thing for teachers.
If we up that one week to two weeks, we could cut the deficit by 4%. Three weeks, 6%, but that's probably going to far.
Surely it is not too much to ask that every working person in America, and every company in America, should be required to work absolutely free for one full week every year, in order to give back to society. And ESPECIALLY anyone in public service, like teachers, garbage men, bankers, doctors and the like.
Or maybe we don't like this idea very much. Seems to me that if you can make lawyers work a week for free as a condition of being a lawyer, you can make absolutely anybody work a week for free as a condition of holding a job.
Yes, I think that, subject to minimum wage laws and fair labor practice laws, you can make absolutely anybody work a week for free as a condition of holding a job.
Of course the minimum wage and fair labor practice law exception completely guts the concept, since it would be illegal under both to force somebody to work for free for a week.
Of course students are not under such laws, they being students and all, so Columbia can legally force them to give 40 (or presumably 1000) hours of pro-bono service to "approved" (i.e. liberal) causes.
And of course people so forced resent it and don't forgive it or forget it.
The Columbia College class of 2004 commencement speaker spent probably 2/3 of his time trashing the Bush administration, in typical Jackass Party fashion. It was obviously assumed that the parents and students would be delighted. Not? The tuition is now up to about $31,000 per year, and total expenses about $40,000 per year for the college. Parents should start voting with their feet and send their kids to colleges where the faculty realize that the terrorists are the enemy, not President Bush.
What can one say?
Some smart folks who think one way go to places like Columbia and Yale.
Other smart folks who think the other way go to places like West Point and Annapolis.
The parents are usually the source of the kid being the one way or the other way, and the ones delight at the Senator bashing Bush at commencement, while the others delight at Bush giving the speech at their child's graduation.
You say To-may-to, and I say to-mah-to.
You say Po-tay-to, and I say po-tah-to.
Tomayto, tomahto, potayto, potato...
Let's call the whole thing off!
Columbia Ping
Thanks, the more this Islamofascist Professor exposes himself, the shakier his position becomes.
His past utterances like this one on the PD show need to be brought out again.
None of these slime balls do well when their remarks leave the campus and get out into the open air.
A letter from the Heritage Foundation signed by Steve Forbes quotes Columbia professor Eric Foner: "I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City (9/11/01) or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House." And this guy is teaching our children?
"Underwhelmed, Brinkley wrote him back the same day,.
Dear Hamid,
I see nothing threatening in this message, however unfair its conclusions might be. I also see no grounds for alerting security, although you are certainly free to contact them if you feel otherwise.
I very much doubt the New York City police would have any grounds for intervening in this matter.
I'm sorry this attack has occurred, but you are no stranger to controversy and have encountered such ad hominem criticism before. This is one of the unhappy prices of a public life, and I would recommend ignoring Mr. Luria (whom I do not know).
Yours,
Alan"
Underwhelmed and underbrained. Note the cowardly use of "ad hominem criticism" here, instead of the customary "ad hominem attack". What should have been done by the provost is suspend Hamid, and require him to undergo
"anger management" sessions with a shrink:)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.