On campus, off base

Jerusalem Post ^ | 6-25-02 | DANIEL PIPES AND JONATHAN SCHANZER

[SJackson]

For three decades, left-wing extremists have dominated American academics, spouting odd but seemingly harmless theories about "deconstruction," "post-modernism," "race, gender, and class," while venting against the United States, its government, and its allies.

Only these ideas are not so harmless. The radical notions espoused in the classrooms and in campus demonstrations have recently had dangerous consequences. These are especially visible with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Consider some of the steps American professors took during 2002:

Columbia University: Hamid Dabashi, a specialist on Iran, compares Israel's military maneuvers in Jenin (to prevent future suicide bombings) with the Nazi Holocaust. He cancels class to attend a rabidly anti-Israel sit-in and when a student protests his irresponsible behavior, Dabashi sneeringly replies, "I apologize if canceling our class in solidarity with [Palestinian] victims of a genocide ... inconvenienced you."

Also at Columbia, Joseph Massad, a Jordan specialist, speaks at that same anti-Israel rally and calls Israel "a Jewish supremacist and racist state" which he proclaims "should be threatened." This is in addition to a talk with the inflammatory title "On Zionism and Jewish Supremacy" and a course which (students report) served as a soapbox for anti-Israeli polemics.

State University of New York at Binghamton: Robert Ostergard of the political science department converts his course into an anti-Zionist platform. One guest speaker, Ali Mazrui, presents a lecture that a student called "a 45-minute diatribe against Israel" with offensive assertions equating Zionism with fascism, Israel with apartheid South Africa, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with Hitler.

Kent State University, Ohio: Julio C sar Pino of the history department publishes an ode addressed to a Palestinian woman suicide bomber, lauds her courage, and concludes by calling on Allah to "elevate your place in paradise."

University of Oregon: In a course entitled "Social Inequality," Douglas Card of the sociology department calls Israel "a terrorist state," deems Israelis "baby-killers," and insists that students agree with his view that Israel "stole land" on the final exam. One student finds that Card bashed Israel and Jews "at every opportunity."

University of California at Berkeley: Snehal Shingavi of the English department and a leader of "Students for Justice in Palestine," announces a class on "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance" that includes the now-infamous "warning" to conservatives "to seek other sections." In brief, instructors routinely tout wild-eyed politics and openly wield their authority to indoctrinate students. At times, they even admit this, as in the case of Andrew Ross, the then-Princeton English professor who boasted in 1990 that he was using his position to radicalize "the children of the ruling class."

NOT surprisingly, some anti-Israel groups interpret the faculty's actions as implicit permission to harass Jewish and pro-Israel students. The result has been a wave of verbal and physical attacks.

At San Francisco State University, anti-Israel students physically threatened students marching for Israel while shouting phrases such as "Die you racist pigs" and "Hitler should have finished the job," prompting the president of the university to admit that he was never "as deeply distressed and angered by something that happened on this campus" during his 14 years there. Even after this incident, pro-Palestinian students continued to use an SFSU-owned Webpage to engage in Holocaust denial and accuse Jews of ritual murder.

At Berkeley, anti-Israel students occupied a classroom building, leading to the arrest of 79 of them, including one charged with a felony for biting a police officer. At the University of Colorado at Boulder, students desecrated an Israeli flag and chalked anti-Semitic slogans on the main campus walkway. At the University of Illinois, they assaulted with rocks a home flying an Israeli flag, shattering the front window.

Although professors teaching Middle East-related courses are the most responsible for this degeneration on campus, others too are complicit. By indulging the Middle East specialists' radicalism and efforts at indoctrination, alumni, administrators, parents, state legislators, Department of Education officials, and other faculty effectively condone those activities.

The time has come for all these stakeholders to take back the universities as institutions of civilized discourse. This can be done only by ending the now-regnant atmosphere of extremism and intimidation. The place to start is by condemning and curbing the leftish activism that too often passes in the US today for Middle East scholarship.

Daniel Pipes is director and Jonathan Schanzer is a research fellow at the Middle East Forum

[SJackson]

Wasn't deconstructionism a result of the attempts by Nazi collaborators such as DeMan to obfuscate their collusion?

You could probably take it back farther than that. I think Clinton was one of it's finest practitioners, at least in popular culture.

[ohioman]

I too drove many professors crazy with my self-professed right-wing ideology. As one of the few in the Journalism School who was not a socialist, I was surprised at how well I was treated (to my face only). These folks followed the correct stereotype of the wimpy liberal and I enjoyed their thinly disguised fear of my 6'2" 230lb. frame. It's better to be feared than loved. :)

[Hacksaw]

Back when George the 1st lambasted Dukakis for being a "card carrying member of the ACLU" one of my history professors ran out and joined them. He then held his card up to show it to the class. (He was actually a pretty good teacher in spite of that)