In case this has not been noted, take a look at what David Horowitz tells us about De Genova's boss, the chairman of the HISTORY DEPARTMENT at Columbia University.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/davidhorowitz/dh20030331.shtml Moment of truth: For the Anti-American Left
David Horowitz (archive)
March 31, 2003 |
Every movement has its moment of truth. At an “anti-war” teach-in at Columbia last week, Anthropology professor Nicholas De Genova told 3,000 students and faculty, “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.”
De Genova continued: “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.” This was a reference to the ambush of U.S. forces by an al-Qaeda warlord in Somalia in 1993. The Americans were there on a humanitarian mission to feed starving Somali Muslims. The al-Qaeda warlord was stealing the food and selling it on the black market. His forces killed 18 American soldiers and dragged their bodies through the streets in an act designed to humiliate their country. In short, America can do no good, and nothing that is done to America can be worse than it deserves.
The best that could be said of the crowd of Columbia faculty and students is that they did not react to Mogadishu remark (perhaps they did not know what “Mogadishu” referred to). But they “applauded loudly,” when the same professor said, “If we really [believe] that this war is criminal ... then we have to believe in the victory of the Iraqi people and the defeat of the U.S. war machine.”
In other words, the American left as represented by faculty and students at one of the nation’s most elite universities wants America to lose the war with the terrorist and fascist regime in Baghdad. In shorts, the crowd might just have well applauded the professor’s first statement as well.
The phrase “a million Mogadishus,” has a resonance for those of us who participated in an earlier leftist “peace” movement, during the war in Indochina. In 1967, at the height of the conflict, the Cuban Communist leader, Che Guevara (still an icon among radicals today) called on revolutionaries all over the world “to create…two, three, many Vietnams,” to defeat the American enemy. It was the Sixties version of a call for jihad.
In the late Sixties, I was the editor of Ramparts, the largest magazine of the New Left and I edited a book of anti-American essays with the same title, Two, Three, Many Vietnams. Tom Hayden a leader of the New Left (later a Democratic State Senator and activist against the war in Iraq) used the same slogan as he called for armed uprisings inside the United States. In 1962, as a Marxist radical, I myself had helped to organize the first protest against the war in Vietnam at the University of California, Berkeley. At the time, America had only 300 “advisers” in Vietnam, who were seeking to prevent the Communist gulag that was to come. John F. Kennedy was President and had been invited to speak on the campus. We picketed his appearance. Our slogan was, “Kennedy’s Three R’s: Radiation, Reaction and Repression.” We didn’t want peace in Vietnam. We wanted a revolution in America.
But we were clever. Or rather, we got smarter. We realized we couldn’t attract large numbers of people by revealing our deranged fantasies about America (although that of course is not how we would have looked at them). We realized that we needed the support of a lot of Americans who would never agree with our real agendas if we were going to influence the course of the war. So we changed our slogan to “Bring the Troops Home.” That seemed to express care for Americans while accomplishing the same goal. If America brought her troops home in the middle of the war, the Communists would win. Which is exactly what happened.
The nature of the movement that revealed itself at Columbia is the same. When the Mogadishu remark was made, it was as if the devil had inadvertently exposed his horns, and someone needed to put a hat over them before others realized it. That someone was the demonstration organizer, Professor Eric Foner, the prestigious head of Columbia’s history department. Actually, when Foner spoke after De Genova at the teach-in, he failed to find the Mogadishu remark offensive. Instead Foner dissociated himself from another De Genova comment to the effect that all Americans who described themselves as “patriotic,” were actually “white supremacists.”
But the next day when a reporter from New York NewsDay called Foner, the professor realized that the Mogadishu remark had caused some trouble. When asked now about the statement he said it was “idiotic.” He told the reporter, “I thought that was completely uncalled for. We do not desire the deaths of American soldiers.” Foner did not say (and was not asked) how he thought organizing an anti-American demonstration to protest America’s war in Iraq and express the hope that we lose would not encourage the enemy and possibly lead to American deaths.
Eric Foner is the scion of a family of American Communists (and American Communist leaders) at that. In the Sixties he was an anti-American Stalinist.
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WHAT AN OUTRAGE!! These anti-American commies control our once-great universities and ought to be torn out by the roots. Tenure or no tenure, they must go!!!
I saw that the other day. I try to drop by the good ole DN every once in awhile. What a liberal piece of crap that paper is (and has been for some time).
Just think how long De Genova would have lasted if he had wished for AIDS to kill all gays, or a million Rwandas to cleanse Africa?
Academic freedom and free speech my a$$.
Academic freedom is usually understood to relate primarily to the classroom and research aspects of the subject a professor teaches. If this nitwit anthropologist postulated that the first inhabitants of America were marxist transvestites, academic freedom would protect his right to do so. However, IMHO academic freedom does not protect him if he chooses to make a political diatribe at a rally. Suppose that a coach, who is also a faculty member in the physical education department, says at a rally before a basketball game that he expects the team to deliver a million mogadishus, and other grotesqueries. Would the university tolerate that? Of course not. President Bollinger needs to find other work. A man who probably squats to pee is not up to leadership in this day and age.
Destroy this man. When he's done, he shouldn't be able to get a job teaching a bum to roll off a bench.
All of the bullshit coming out of the halls of higher education, take away the thoughts I have of myself having only a high school edu. These people really do lack something besides a high IQ...