Tag: Columbia

Lost Israelis wander onto Columbia campus

On By Martin Kramer

I can understand why the besieged chiefs at Columbia University would want a photo op with the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Danny Ayalon, and the former Israeli consul-general in New York, Alon Pinkas. President Lee Bollinger, Dean Lisa Anderson, and Middle East Institute director Rashid Khalidi want to put out the fire around Middle Eastern studies at Columbia, but it keeps getting bigger. The flames singed their gowns last week, after the New York Times joined New York magazine in making this a big story.

Bir Zeit-on-Hudson desperately needs a makeover. So they’ve concocted a conference on the Middle East peace process, to be convened on Thursday at the symbolic heart of the campus, the Low Library Rotunda, and in the presence of Bollinger. You know this is a hasty job, because the two keynote speakers haven’t been announced as of this writing. But the published program already includes Ayalon and Pinkas, and you can bet that the university photographer will be clicking away as Bollinger, Anderson, and Khalidi sidle up to them during the lunch and the reception, all smiles.

The decision by Ayalon and Pinkas to attend this event is misguided, and is more evidence of the famous ineptitude of Israeli diplomacy when it comes to campus matters. The day will come when it makes sense to engage Columbia, but it’s way down the pike, and Bollinger should have to jump through a hundred more hoops before an Israeli ambassador crosses 116th Street. He hasn’t even started. His much-touted ad hoc committee is a bitter joke (Nat Hentoff will be taking it apart shortly in the Village Voice), and Khalidi is saying truculent and offensive things to the media. Ayalon and Pinkas, by wandering onto campus, will undermine those courageous students who’ve finally put the university on the spot.

Pinkas is a free agent now, he answers only to himself, so there’s nothing to be done about him. But Ayalon represents the State of Israel. I urge him to reconsider his appearance. I and many others will support him if he skips the event because there’s too much slippery ice on College Walk.

Bulliet on target at Columbia

On By Martin Kramer

This week’s New York Magazine runs a big feature story on the mess in Columbia’s Middle East department (MEALAC), and it’s well worth reading. I’m quoted there, but I said predictable things. Not so Professor Richard Bulliet, who teaches Islamic and Middle Eastern history in the History department:

The university should have looked at MEALAC five or ten years ago. It’s become locked into a postmodernist, postcolonialist point of view, one that wasn’t necessarily well adapted to giving students instruction about the Middle East…. We’ve had advocacy in the classroom for a long time. But in the areas where it’s most visible, like black studies and women’s studies, the point of view tends to coincide with the outlook of the Columbia community… But here we have an area where no consensus exists. And that’s the problem.

Bulliet and I have crossed swords a few times (he’s had the last word for now, in his recent book), but we’re on speaking terms, and I’d heard this from him in person. That someone of his standing at Columbia should have come forward now to criticize MEALAC in the media is testament to the damage the rogue department is doing to the university. And it’s another sign that the spell of intimidation cast by the radicals has been broken. Professor Bulliet: Bravo aleik.

Columbia Prof Plumbs the Shiite Mind

On By Martin Kramer

A lot is being written these days about Iraq’s Shiites, and the media avidly pursue anyone who seems like an expert. When demand exceeds supply, expect tendentious analysis.

Consider, for example, Professor Hamid Dabashi, head of the department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) at Columbia. The other day, a correspondent from the Boston Globe asked him about the mood among the Shiites. “The Shiites are horrified,” announced Dabashi.

Not only are their fellow Shiites and, in fact, their fellow Muslims maimed and murdered right in front of their eyes by the Americans, but the most sacrosanct sites in their collective faith are now invaded by foreign armies. The next time the British and Americans ask themselves, “Why do they hate us?,” they better remember the horrid scenes of their armies trampling on the sacred sites.

What in the world is Dabashi talking about? Coalition forces have been absolutely scrupulous about avoiding the sacred Shiite shrines in Najaf, Karbala, Kazimayn, and elsewhere. There have been no “horrid scenes” of coalition forces “trampling” on these sites. As for “murder,” the really horrid scene so far has been the brutal murder of two Shiite clerics—by their “fellow Shiites”—inside the shrine-tomb of the Imam Ali in Najaf. “They cut his body to pieces!” another Shiite leader said about one of the victims. “To pieces!” And if the Shiites are so “horrified” by this war, why did so many of them turn out in Najaf to greet the 101st Airborne as liberators? And how is it that even Robert Fisk reports that, “for the moment,” the massive Shiite slum in Baghdad “smiles at the West”?

Dabashi, of course, doesn’t have a clue as to what “the Shiites” think. He simply knows what he thinks. Dabashi has been a militant opponent of the war from day one. Most recently, he participated in that infamous “teach-in” at Columbia, in which one professor-participant called for “a million Mogadishus.” Dabashi’s contribution to the festival:

Because there are no answers to our questions about this war, we just get angrier and angrier. But this is where the blessed thing called “teach-in” comes in handy. Tonight, we think for ourselves. Revenge of the nerdy “A” students against the stupid “C” students with their stupid fingers on the trigger.

Again, one is left wondering just what Dabashi is talking about. And just what are Columbia students to conclude from such a quote in their campus newspaper? That a pro-war position might drop them to a “C”? Professors (especially departmental chairs) have no business suggesting even the most tenuous correlation between grades and politics. It’s just one more example of Dabashi’s egregiously flawed judgment.

Dabashi finds the war horrid, therefore when asked what “the Shiites” think about it, he says they are “horrified.” It’s pure projection, which is what passes for “expertise” on the Middle East when people don’t know what they are talking about. So we are told that “the Arabs” think this, or “the Muslims” believe that, when in fact they’re just racks on which to hang the prejudices and preferences of the “expert.” Here’s another fresh example. Last week, UCLA’s Gabriel Piterberg, a habitual anti-war demonstrator, told a “teach-in” that the Iraqis who defaced Saddam’s images and welcomed U.S. troops were not representative of typical Iraqi sentiment. How could Piterberg possibly know that? Answer: he doesn’t. He just wants to believe it.

And so the “experts” dwell on events that never happened (the “trampling” of Shiite holy sites), and dismiss events that did (the defacing of Saddam’s icons by Iraqis). Maybe the next time around, U.S. forces should “embed” academics. No group is more desperately in need of a dose of Middle Eastern reality.

UPDATE: Readers of Sandstorm will recall that last month, the renowned composer John Corigliano criticized the politicization of MEALAC during an acceptance speech at a Columbia University award dinner in New York. Department chair Dabashi dashed off an intemperate rejoinder. Since then, Corigliano has weighed in once more. After reviewing Dabashi’s hodge-podge of assertions, Corigliano composes this coda:

Students deserve real self-discipline from their professors. I miss evidence of this quality in the illiberalism, sloppy research, and near-hysterical tone of these statements Dabashi has written for publication. It’s deeply disturbing to me that—at this time, of all times—such a person chairs the department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia.

I do hope the administration has the courage—for it will take a lot of courage—to stand up to demagoguery of this nature. Columbia has done so in the past, and, if it is still the institution I remember, I expect it will do so in the future.

The logic for regime change at MEALAC gains momentum.