Free Republic

Environments of Hate: Indoctrination in the Arab World and Propaganda Advocacy in America’s University Classrooms I'm honored to bring Columbia a unique perspective concerning the academic freedom issue. I see similarities between the issue and my personal experiences growing up. I was raised in an Arabic society in Lebanon that took impressionable young minds and filled them with propaganda. Minds that were young and didn't know any better. I am an eyewitness and a victim of the indoctrination of hate education, racism, intolerance, intimidation and fabricated lies by my government and religious influences. This indoctrination was for one purpose: To...

In Professor Joseph Massad's mid-March statement to the ad hoc committee investigating faculty intimidation of students at Columbia University, he listed the support he'd received from various quarters, including petitions and letters. He then added this: The Middle East Studies Association's Academic Freedom Committee also issued a letter defending my academic freedom, as did the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP, the New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. I'd seen all of these missives, with a major exception: the letter from the American Association of University Professors. The AAUP...

If you've ever wondered how American universities can continue to allow political advocacy and indoctrination to flourish in their classrooms, consider the recent controversy over Columbia University's department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC). In a documentary called Columbia Unbecoming, 14 Columbia students describe what they considered expressions of anti-Israel bias and intimidation in some MEALAC department courses. In response, Columbia's President Lee Bollinger last winter appointed a faculty committee to investigate the matter. This was the second committee the president appointed, the students and others having rejected the first committee's obvious attempt to brush aside the...

ABIGAIL THERNSTROM once described the American college campus as an island of repression in a sea of freedom. The report of Columbia University's ad hoc grievance committee suggests that Columbia is such an island. On its face, the report presents findings and recommendations concerning allegations by Columbia students that they were subjected to intimidation and abuse by members of the university's department of Middle East and Asian Language and Cultures (MEALAC). However, the report is better understood as a directive to Columbia students to take without protest the poisonous medicine being administered by the anti-Israel, anti-American radicals who dominate MEALAC....

Columbia Unbecoming is on the whole just a series of complaints having to do mainly with manner or etiquette in the classroom, but the real issue has to do with the meager and politicized content that professors choose to teach. As Efraim Karsh, head of the Mediterranean Studies department at King’s College, University of London, implied on March 6 in Uris Hall, Massad’s classroom hysterics are not the real problem. The real problem is a polite and affable man like Professor Khalidi, who nevertheless peddles political propaganda in class, propaganda masquerading as real scholarship.Two articles in the March 23, 2005...

On April first, many bewildered Americans woke to find headlines including “Columbia Cleared of Anti-Semitism” and “Columbia Panel Clears Professors Of Anti-Semitism”. Many must have thought this an April Fools joke. How could there even be a question of anti-Semitism at Columbia, long known as “the Jewish Ivy?” Sadly, these news stories were little more that a tool for a cover up the problem at Columbia. For the last three years, Columbia has been a battleground between supporters of aggrieved students and professors throwing around allegations of Anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, intimidation, outside influence, “McCarthyism”, and “a pattern of discrimination”. The campus...

In the past year there have been press reports of a problem at Columbia University. The New York Sun has been the leader in exposing the details but the New York Post has also gotten involved. The New York Times has mostly stayed away, its coverage, when there’s been any, marked by superficiality and its famously skewed “balance.” The basic details are that courses covering the Middle East are obsessed with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and are wildly biased against Israel; and that Israeli and other Jewish students have encountered a very hostile reception, even in Arabic language classes, when they...

Columbia University, after a months-long investigation, has determined that only a small fraction of complaints from Jewish students against anti-Israel professors constituted intimidation. The faculty committee appointed by Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, to investigate a series of student allegations against professors in the Middle Eastern studies department issued a report yesterday largely clearing the accused scholars of blame. At the same time, committee members described a polarized classroom environment in which pro-Israel students disturbed lectures and seminars with inappropriate interruptions. Columbia's top administrators released statements applauding the report and saying that within the next two weeks they would announce specific...

In a strong indictment of Columbia’s grievance procedures and advising channels, the ad hoc faculty committee investigating students’ claims that they were intimidated by some Middle East studies professors described a pattern of mishandled complaints and widespread confusion over how to address students’ concerns about what goes on in the classroom. The committee’s report, obtained by Spectator last night and expected to be made public today, also identified one instance in which assistant professor Joseph Massad “exceeded commonly accepted bounds” when he made an angry outburst to a student defending Israel’s military conduct. The report addressed two other specific claims...

Saudi Arabia has funneled tens of thousands of dollars into the "outreach" programs of Columbia University's Middle East Institute, which until last week was training some of the city's public-school teachers in how to teach students about Middle East politics. Since 2002, the government-owned Saudi Aramco has given the institute annual grants of $15,000 for unspecified outreach activities. The institute's outreach activities have included a 15-week teacher-training course on Middle East politics led by Columbia faculty members and graduate students. In a letter dated April 27, 2004, a scholar of Arab nationalism who took over the Middle East Institute in...

The Middle East & Academic Integrity on the American Campus Sunday, March 6th, 2005 , 10 AM – 5 PM 301 Uris Hall, Columbia University , New York (Broadway at 117 th Street ) click here to registerHighlights: 11 am - Natan Sharansky, Human Rights Activist, Minister for Diaspora Affairs of the State of Israel (via interactive web cast)12 pm - Martin Kramer, Wexler-Fromer Fellow, Washington Institute for Near East Policy; Author: Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, Columbia 's Crisis: A Turning Point for Middle Eastern Studies?1 pm - Documentary film: Columbia Unbecoming,...

"Here's a quiz. Israel is: a) a Jewish supremacist state, b) the worst human-rights abuser in the Middle East, c) a major factor preventing the democratization of the Arab region, or d) all of the above. If you answered "d," you would fit right in at a core-curriculum course at Columbia University taught by an assistant professor of modern Arab politics, Joseph Massad, who is a rising star of the university's Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures..."

As students resume classes at Columbia University today after their winter break, they will face the telltale summonses of college life: Go to class, surf the Internet, sleep, pursue romance, sleep. And a new one: Testify about the alleged misconduct of their professors. Every Monday and Friday until its work is done, a novel faculty panel will make itself available to hear narratives from students and faculty members in the hope of sorting out a virulent dispute that has rattled the university for months. If anything is clear in this very unclear quarrel, ostensibly over supposed intimidation of Jewish students...

You won't read much about the crisis at Columbia University in The New York Times. But the crisis is real, as the assiduous reporting of The New York Sun and the New York Daily News makes clear. Over two decades, Columbia has become America's chief outpost of anti-Israel polemics disguised as serious scholarship and teaching. As some Columbia luminaries themselves admit, the university's program in Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures is a scandal. Columbia's most eminent Arabist, Rashid Khalidi, has cannily steered clear of his colleagues' antics. He is the Edward Said professor of Arab studies, faithful to...

The ever-clueless New York Civil Liberties Union has leaped head-first into the ongoing controversy sur rounding alleged anti-Israel bias and intimidation of students at Columbia University by siding — surprise, surprise — with the accused professors. Indeed, the NYCLU - proving that it doesn't need Norman Siegel in charge to look through the wrong end of the telescope - charges that an investigation into the students' charges is "likely to descend into an inquisition." Actually, there's little chance of that: As The New York Sun reported, Columbia President Lee Bollinger has stacked the deck of his fact-finding committee, choosing...

To: Columbia University To: Columbia University President Lee Bollinger Board of Trustees Chair David Stern The Columbia University Board of Trustees --- Columbia University is an outstanding academic institution, yet some students who express dissenting views in class are being intimidated and silenced by certain professors who have promoted a biased and politicized agenda in their classroom. We, members of the Columbia University community - including students, faculty, staff, alumni, and the general community - call on Columbia University to renew its commitment to the principles of academic freedom, high standards of intellectual inquiry, and freedom of expression in the...

Columbia's conference on U.S. imperialism in the 21st century this Friday, so soon after the deadly suicide bombings in Turkey, shows how willful ignorance is rotting the core of this University's intellectual life. The now almost-daily terrorist attacks around the world raise a number of questions. Were there cultural reasons for the terrorist bombings that spilled the blood of innocent Turks in Istanbul? Are there other cultural processes at work when the Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq declares that only direct democracy is acceptable in setting up a new Iraqi government? One would hope that the Middle East and Asian...