My Message to Columbia Professor Nicholas De Genova regardin his death wish for our forces

FreeRepublic | March 29, 2003 | Jeff Head

[Jeff Head]

The following is my email to Professor Nicholas De Genova of Columbia University who was quoted in the New York Post as wishing a "million Mogadishus" on American servicement in Iraq at an anti-war rally.

This was reported on FreeRepublic on this thread, Columbia Prof wishes death to GIs.

Here's my email to him:

Nicholas De Genova,

Your call for the US Military to suffer a "million Mogadishus" has crossed a serious line on civility and duty and commitment to our nation.

You are wishing for the death of 18,000,000 of your fellow countrymen and women, individuals who are fighting for your ability to make your crass statements about their well being.

Are you familiar with the term "useful idiot"? If you are not, I suggest that your read your history regarding the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Note the ultimate outcome to the "useful idiots" employed by the Bolsheviks. If you get your way, and these tyrants are victorious, those very people you support with your comments would have no compunction about doing the same to you and your ilk, while the very people you deride are dedicated to your life and liberty. Perhaps you should think about that.

In addition, you are self defeating in your own comments. You clearly have no concept of history, even recent history. Something between 2,000 and 10,000 Somalis were killed in that Mogadishu battle. Your wish for 18,000,000 American dead would result in between 2,000,000,000 and 10,000,000,000 Iraqi dead ... in other words, a complete depopulation of that country. With such a statement, and such a wish, you reveal your true genocidical nature.

Individuals like you are what is wrong with the world today. You are so transparent and so ignorant of history that it would be laughable, if your policies were not so dangerous. All I can say to you are the words that Samuel Adams said to similar defeatists and traitorous thinkers to the original American cause:

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom...go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels nor arms. May your chains set lightly upon you and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."- Samuel Adams

Without and ounce of respect,

Jeff Head
Emmett, Idaho
http://www.jeffhead.com

[american1st]

April 7, 2003, 7:15 a.m.
Liberate the Universities
Fair and open faculty hiring would foster educational diversity.

By Candace de Russy



hat a Columbia University professor should publicly wish upon the U.S. military “a million Mogadishus” should come as no surprise. True, professor Nicholas De Genova’s malediction at an antiwar teach-in is exceptionally despicable. But his loathing of this country is shared, as Daniel Pipes of Campus Watch has shown, by many Columbia professors. It is also of a kind, ideologically, with the anti-Americanism rampant among radical leftist academics throughout the country.

Although radicals are not necessarily a majority on faculties, their politically biased voices speak the loudest. They now control entire academic fields and indoctrinate untold numbers of students. The radical animus against this country worms its way into the minds of millions of people at home and abroad. It erodes the national unity we need above all in this time of war, and it lends moral support to terrorists and terror states.

For these reasons it is significant that De Genova is not just a “prof of something or other,” as the New York Post dismissively described him. He teaches anthropology and Latino studies, which have produced distinguished scholarship but which are now largely co-opted by radicals. Professor Edward Said, also employed by Columbia, has greatly influenced these disciplines and others, such as English, history, and women’s studies. Said, a radical Arab-American literary critic and a long-time activist for the Palestinian cause, has made a life’s work of singling out and demonizing the West and America — in his words — “for imperialist attitudes from ancient Rome to Vietnam.” American foreign policy, Said instructs, is driven by the West’s “untrammeled rapacity, greed, and immorality.”

While vilifying and refusing to acknowledge the achievements of America and the West, professors of Said’s bent turn a blind eye toward the faults of non-Western cultures. Historian Keith Windschuttle observes that they exhibit a “kind of relativism not seen since the days of Lenin and Hitler when class-based and race-based hatreds were morally sanctioned by radical politics.” Thus many radical academics cannot bring themselves to condemn cultural practices repellent to most Westerners, such as human sacrifice, cannibalism and female genital mutilation — for fear of demeaning the culture that fostered them.

This pattern of denial applies particularly to the events of 9/11 and the war on terror. In the 1980s and 1990s, for example, prominent professors of Middle Eastern studies excused away the growing threat of militant Islamism and terrorist attacks on American soil. Almost all of these academics simply refused to study such militancy — or even Islam itself! Prior to the 9/11 attacks, for instance, a Sarah Lawrence College professor accused “the terror industry” of fomenting an “irrational fear of terrorism by focusing…on far-fetched horrible scenarios.”

Even what is still called “American” studies is riddled with anti-American prejudice. Cultural critic Alan Wolfe has surveyed these studies, and he ironically concludes that current academics in the field, such as those at Dartmouth and Duke, display “a hatred of America so visceral that it makes one wonder why they bother studying America at all.” Like Said and his acolytes, these professors condemn the United States as imperialistic. They attack even the concept of our national unity, pronouncing this country to be an “imagined national community” and defining their role as “fracturing the very idea of an American nation, culture, and subject.”

Another school of radicals does some imagining of its own. It envisages an international political monolith with which to replace America and indeed all of liberal democracy in the West. These yearnings are embodied in a doctrine called “transnational progressivism,” which is gaining prominence in law schools, for example, at Princeton and Rutgers. As John Fonte of the Hudson Institute points out, professors in this camp argue for the establishment of a new transnational regime, or world government, that is post-liberal democratic and, in the American context, post-Constitutional and post-American. Within such a regime the key political unit would not be the individual citizen who voluntarily associates with fellow citizens but the racial, ethnic, or gender group into which one is born.

What can be done to counter this widespread academic radicalism? How do we return to intellectual pluralism in our colleges and universities?

A first step lies in reforming the autocratic hiring and promotion practices that permit the likes of De Genova to replicate their ranks and to cement their control of ideas. In an essay titled “Academic Corruption” published in The Monist, John Kekes, a professor at the State University of New York-Albany, explains how this process has been tainted. The choice of new faculty members is now commonly driven by the prejudices of those academics making the selection — not by how qualified the applicants are to uphold the truth as teachers or researchers. Hiring is furthermore influenced by something called “collegiality,” which is a code word for whether the attitude of the applicant — that is, regarding Left-wing causes and social transformation — is to the liking of the committee.

The right of extremist and antiwar professors like De Genova to spew forth their anti-American venom must be protected. But students also have a right to hear the views of traditionalist scholars, and those who would defend our national identity and this country. Fair and open faculty hiring would foster educational diversity on campuses. It is urgent that faculties and higher education governing boards ensure such openness.

— Candace de Russy is a member of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York. She chairs the board’s Committee on Academic Standards. De Russy was appointed to the Board of Visitors of the U.S. Air Force Academy by President George W. Bush in 2002.

[Jeff Head]

The right of extremist and antiwar professors like De Genova to spew forth their anti-American venom must be protected.

But not their right tosedition ... and certainly not at the expense of our right to use free speech to energize the free market and get his butt fired over his atrociousness.

[american1st]

Secretary Dr. Rod Paige
U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Avenue, SW
Washington, DC 20202

April 2, 2003

Dear Secretary Paige,

I am writing to express my outrage at the recent comments of Professor Nicholas De Genova, at last Wednesday’s "teach-in" at Columbia University. Professor De Genova told a crowd of 3,000, "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." He continued his anti-American diatribe: "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."

It is unfortunate and disgusting that De Genova is actually representative of many professors and instructors in universities all across America who shares this same self-destructive sentiment. Contempt for America and a Marxist socialist view is taught directly or indirectly on a daily basis to America’s youth, and has been for decades. The organizer of the Columbia event, Professor Eric Foner, the head of Columbia’s prestigious history department, was an anti-American Stalinist in the 1960’s.

What are professors such as these doing at Columbia? They are teaching our children what to think. Not how to think…what to think. Instead of joy of achievement, they teach entitlement. Rather than instructing in the effectiveness of teams and unifying a campus, the emphasis is paid to separate groups encouraging divisiveness then labeling it diversity. It is no wonder many businesses today actually prefer hiring candidates without a college degree. For them, it is worth the cost of training an individual, versus hiring a person poisoned by ignorance and possessing an elitist attitude.

As you know Dr. Paige, these same universities are funded with taxpayer dollars in the form of grants, research, and other programs. This practice must stop, and must stop immediately. All government funding of any kind, should immediately be pulled from any institution or instructor that advocates these views. While they have a right to free speech, there is nothing in the US Constitution mandating the public must pay for it.

The actions and rhetoric coming from these professors and universities is at best destructive, at worst, akin to treason. I urge you to take immediate action on this. As the Secretary of Education, you have an opportunity to make a difference before it is too late. I implore you to seize this opportunity for America’s sake. Stop funding the very people who wish to bring this country down. We The People deserve better.

Sincerely,

Pamela A. Morgan

[Jeff Head]

GREAT letter!

You should CC it to your Federal congressioal rep and your Senator.

Keep after it ... continue to spread the word!

[albertp]

versus hiring a person poisoned by ignorance and possessing an elitist attitude

Definition of a university by Adam Smith, the first man to make a study of political economy: "A sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find shelter and protection after they have been hunted out of every corner of the world."

The following reminds me of Ayn Rand's collection of essays on the New Left, specifically the one titled "The Comprachicos ("child-buyers"). This quote is from Charles Dickens, from the Preface of Nicholas Nickleby:

"...ignorant, sordid, brutal men, to whom few considerate persons would have entrusted the board and lodging of a horse or a dog: they formed the worthy cornerstone of a structure, which, for absurdity and a magnificent high-minded laissez-aller neglect, has rarely been exceeded in the world.

We hear sometimes of an action for damages against the unqualified medical practicioner, who has deformed a broken limb pretending to heal it. But, what of the hundreds of thousands of minds that have been deformed for ever by the incapable pettifoggers who have pretended to form them!

[american1st]

Columbia's Mogadishu?

---

Posted: April 10, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern


© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com


It's a good thing that Gen. Tommy Franks and not the Republicans in Congress are running the war effort in Iraq. Left to the Republican leadership in Congress, Saddam Hussein would now be occupying the Oval Office, and "Chemical Ali" planning the 2004 Republican Party convention.

I'm glad the spirit in the Grand Old Party isn't entirely dead. I just wish the flesh was a bit more willing, and the mind more fully engaged in the battle. If so, perhaps we could mount a more effective charge and capture a hill or two in the cultural battles facing America here at home.

The particular skirmish I'm referring to is Columbia University's anti-American faculty, represented – if not led by – lowly graduate teaching student Nicholas DeGenova. In concert with two dozen other Columbia faculty, Mr. DeGenova told a group of younger undergraduate students during a six-hour "teach in" that "U.S. flags are the emblem of the invading war machine in Iraq today. They are the emblem of the occupying power. The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military."

Mr. DeGenova then encouraged U.S. soldiers to kill their own officers, and pleaded "for a million Mogadishus," where vastly outnumbered U.S. troops were dragged through the streets and butchered.

That Mr. DeGenova is guilty of historical ignorance, generic leftist hatred toward all things American, and exceedingly poor judgment which should disqualify him from a faculty appointment – anywhere, ever – is beyond dispute. A strong argument could be made for mounting a prosecution for sedition as well.

As Americans, we have the right to disagree with the war. We do not have the right use our position and influence to give aid and comfort to our enemies in conducting the war by encouraging others to engage in treason or murder. Does anyone think for a moment that Mr. DeGenova would still be a free man had he encouraged the murder of blacks, Hispanics, Jews or homosexuals?

The Republicans in Congress, bless their collective heart, rose to the challenge and wrote a letter to Columbia University president in which they demanded Mr. DeGenova be fired. Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, however, declined to take any disciplinary action against his American-hating faculty on the grounds it would violate the concept of academic freedom, which appears also to guard general historical ignorance and blind hatred of all things American, except, of course, paychecks.

What the Republicans have failed to grasp is that they chose the wrong target in their battle. Mr. DeGenova is an academic private in the culture wars, who made a bold raid into the press limelight, where similar sentiments exist. The focus of the battle needs to be the general or commanding officer – in this case, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger.

In any organization, even one as racially diverse as Columbia (for intellectual diversity no longer exists in academia), the organization and its employees reflect the views of the man or woman at the top. The political equivalent of Gen. Tommy Franks in the Republican Party would know this. He or she would not have been distracted and taken pot shots at a dawn raiding party led by a private. He would have recognized that the plan for the incursion came from the top. Then he would have drawn up a battle plan to take back the ground that the enemy had seized. That ground is the university itself.

The strike against Columbia needs to be directed not at Mr. DeGenova, but at Dr. Lee Bollinger – and the university hierarchy. There is no point in picking off a private or two when the command center remains intact, the funding and supply lines open, and the assault against America and its values continues, all with taxpayer assistance.

A viable strategy to regain the ground lost in the academy would center around financial battles. Columbia, like nearly every other university public and private, has enthusiastically embraced federal grants and loans for students, and research grants from the Centers for Disease Control and the Defense Department.

This federalization of the university has been used by American leftists to promote racial quotas, discriminate against qualified white and Asian students based on their race, and create nonsensical departments such as gender studies, where tenured anti-American wackos use the classroom as a forum for their own confused ramblings on history, society and gender – all under the guise of "academic freedom."

A competent general would immediately realize that there is no reason the university cannot be purged of its vile leftist hatred for America and seditious tendencies by applying the same measures in reverse. Congressional Republicans should start by demanding the firing not of Mr. DeGenova, but of Dr. Bollinger, if the university is to retain its federally funded research grants and student-loan status. Since leftists have a severe aversion to working for a living and contributing to the private sector, this would get their immediate attention.

The Republican Congress can use the university's rapt attention to explain that restoring intellectual diversity to the university is now a top priority, that military recruiters will from this moment forward be welcomed on campus, and that leadership from the university president on down to the DeGenova shock troops need to re-implement intellectual diversity so they can once again serve America.

Universities have grown fat, leftist and lazy on a diet of taxpayer dollars. A bit of military discipline seems like just the thing to restore vigor and intellectual prowess. Let's start with Columbia.

---

Craige McMillan is a commentator for WorldNetDaily. He is the founder of CC&M, an exciting new initiative to reshape the way America looks at and interacts with people of faith.

[american1st]

Dissent WIthout Dignity

by Colin Probert
April 08, 2003

I ought to be able to feel proud of my school. The most basic justification for this entitlement is that I pay tuition to attend, and that by accepting these funds the University agrees to hold itself to a standard by which it continues to earn them. However, perhaps more significantly, I believe that Columbia has a duty to maintain my confidence in the scholarship it offers, since the academic background it provides contributes to the future success of its students (from which the University benefits as well). Today I remark with some sadness that I do not feel proud of my school, for it has failed in both of these charges. Indeed, Columbia University has handed over its dignity to Nicholas De Genova.
Crucial to the idea of undergraduate scholarship is the role of the educator: an intellectual who encourages and respects independent thought. Before he was a demagogue, Nicholas De Genova was, in fact, an educator, but his plea for a "million Mogadishus" was neither intellectual nor respectful. Instead, it was filthy and abusive, a verbal mortar shell lobbed indiscriminately from a distance too remote to be challenged by any honest standard. When De Genova gagged up Husseinian propaganda all over the interior of Low he did so as a member of the faculty, polluting the peaceful message of the "teach-in" with a craving for the deaths of millions of Americans--some of whom are parents of Columbia University students. This is a profound betrayal of trust between student and teacher, and it is unacceptable at a place such as this.

One of the cruelest realities of war is what it does to independent thought, brutalizing minds with a storm of propaganda until every free-thinking individual has been beaten into one simplistic position or another. To be sure, this condition is troubling enough without having one of our own faculty members perpetrating the beating; times like these demand that we not abandon our reason and conscience, yet that is exactly what De Genova did. His tirade was far from logical and far from conscientious, instructing us all that murder was not only necessary, but heroic. Words like "outrage" are meant for times like these.

Indeed, De Genova has proven himself more vicious than intellectual, and he has failed his students on a multitude of levels--from personal to professional. The administration is wrong to keep him on the payroll when it has a choice. Money talks--and what it's saying is undignified.

No doubt, however, many would prefer to let De Genova off the hook for his failures, and retreat into the mercurial ideal of academic free speech. While I admire President Bollinger's dedication to this principle, it does not miraculously transform the language of hate into intelligent dialogue; those who thrive on the former have no place on a campus built for the latter. Of course it is true that the professor has first amendment rights--no one is suggesting that he should suffer any legal penalty--but that does not exempt the administration from its obligation to enforce standards of employee integrity. The fact that the event at which he spoke was labeled a "teach-in" does not somehow render De Genova's appeal to violence academic. One can dissent without being filthy and, in failing to do so, he abandoned every pretense of candid rationality that the "teach-in" label was designed to connote. If he had called for the butchery of Russians because they were Russian or Australians because they were Australian, he would have found himself out on Broadway so fast the traffic wouldn't have had time to stop; it should be no different with Americans.

Similarly, if he had stood in front of those hundreds of attentive faces and unveiled some sick brand of Constitutionally-permitted pornography--undoubtedly a lesser evil than the carnage of Somalia--he might not have made CNN, but he surely would have been fired. Such an act would not meet the guardian standard of academic free speech, so why is his call for "fragging"--the assassination of a higher ranking soldier by a lower ranking one--so protected? The answer is: it's not, it shouldn't be, and any attempt at such a categorization is merely a plug for an agenda that the president is very concerned with, regardless of the relevant facts.

Like any other sort of smut, De Genova's comments deserve the protection of the Bill of Rights but not that of academic free speech; he overshot political opinion and spouted off perversion. Praise of a massacre is below the dignity of the students here and should be below the dignity of the University itself--his were not the words of an educator. Whatever your feelings on the war, you cannot call his remarks responsible, you cannot call them intellectual, and you cannot call them academic. As such, you shouldn't have to call him "professor."

I think that we all deserve better than that.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.

[MamaLucci]

Excellent letters, am1st.
When she's up to it, I hope to see Jessica Lynch confront
Columbia University Professor DeGenerate, regarding what
he had hoped would befall her as well as her deceased compatriots,
at the hands of Saddam's regime.

[Jeff Head]

Keep the fire burning. The man has to go.

But, one point. What the professor did does, IMHO, breach legality. To advocate the fragging of officers by their subordinates in a time of war and to do so to students on campus and call the same "patriotic" is purely seditious ... and sedition is illegal.

[rocky88]

Help Needed!

Yesterday I read somewhere that DeGenova had returned to the university with two personal security guards after being in hiding since March.

Does anyone remember where this story was from and how I can access it? I tried an FR search but no luck. I know I read it and I'm not going crazy!!! Any help? Thanks.

[Jeff Head]

I saw it too ... but did not book mark it. Will search.

[KineticKitty]

useful just plain 'ol Idiot BUMP for later reading.

[Jeff Head]

Here it is:

MOGADISHU PROF BACK AT COLUMBIA

[american1st]

'MOGADISHU' PROF BACK AT COLUMBIA


By JENNIFER FERMINO

---

April 9, 2003 -- The Columbia University professor notorious for his anti-American rants returned to class yesterday under extraordinary security, vowing he would "not be silenced."
Two campus guards were assigned to Nicholas De Genova as he taught his first class since March 27, when a storm erupted over his call for "a million Mogadishus," a reference to the 1993 "Black Hawk Down" battle in Somalia that left 18 GIs dead.

De Genova, who teaches anthropology and Latino studies, told a class he'd been lying low because he got death threats, one student told The Post.

"He made the point adamantly: 'I will not be silenced,' " said the student, who requested anonymity. She added that he did not apologize for his comments.

[albertp]

He made the point adamantly: 'I will not be silenced,' " said the student, who requested anonymity. She added that he did not apologize for his comments.

Well, all righty, then! But neither will WE be silenced, nor intimidated. But now we know just how "peaceful" these so-called "pacifists" and "anti-war" activists really are!

When we seek to engage these "activists" in some lively debate, they fall apart at the seams and become openly hostile, verbally and physically. Sad to say, some "Freepers" have behaved in similar fashion. Let us openly admit it and expose THEM, TOO, for who they really are.

Some of these public activists simply will not tolerate a healthy confrontation. They plot and plan to destroy your reputation and career. Character defamation is their strong point. Fabricating hate crimes or civil unrest, then posing as "victims," is another. They consider you to be a mortal enemy - of them, personally, or an enemy of their proposed "newstates of America." They call the land in which we live "AMERIKKKA" or the "United SNAKES of America," or by some other name that their demented socialistic imaginations have concocted.

We will NEVER give up our OWN free speech, and, more than that, we will NEVER give up our own right to govern ourselves according to the principles laid out in our Constitution. Professor DeGenova and the countless hordes of like-minded "pacifists" are simply going to have to get used to it. IF - and that is a big IF - they ever have something CONSTRUCTIVE to offer on how we can improve our lives as citizens of a free REPUBLIC, then MAYBE we ought to listen to them. Until then, for every statement they utter in the name of "free speech," we will make our own statements with SUPERIOR elegance and vigor. Too bad if they don't like it!

Illegitimis non carborundum - mock Latin for DON'T LET THE BASTARDS GRIND YOU DOWN.

[american1st]

See April 10th news at:


www.columbiaspectator.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/04/10/3e954d1f6b863

[Lady Eileen]

bump

[mel]

Haven't heard anything lately, did the little weasel finally get enough nerve to go back to teaching?

[Jeff Head]

He did ... and the Columbia President has indicated there will be no consequences.

But the email and funding impact campaign continues. The Alumni has gotten involved and on later threads, lists of the trustees and their contqacts were posted.

[jimt]

On the day after the anniversary, I wish Professor deGenerate "a million San Jacintos".