Horsefeathers - MADRASSA ON MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS (CONT.)

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January 26, 2005

MADRASSA ON MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS (CONT.)

So far, the story of Columbia's administration and its nest of anti-Western, anti-Semitic professors is one of Dhimmitude*. The administration appears intent on a whitewash, while claiming the high moral ground of defender of academic freedom. A common and current technique of intellectual cowards is to launch a highly personal attack and then claim victim status while assuming a tone of aggrieved moral superiority. We've come to expect this from political leftists like Barbara Boxer, but it is also a common practice by members of the Israel hating academic left. Here's one student's response to an anti-semitic professor. Let us hope Lee Bollinger can screw up his courage and learn from Victor Luria.

Student Intimidation Here and Now

By Victor Luria
January 26, 2005

The New York Times recently reported that there is little evidence of student intimidation at Columbia. Really?
On Sept. 27, 2004, I wrote a letter to faculty member Hamid Dabashi protesting his article in Al-Ahram (an extremist Egyptian governmental publication) that he signed as a member of the Columbia faculty.

Dabashi de-legitimizes Israel, never calling it by name and instead, only referring to Palestine. It is constantly described as an occupied country (the Ben-Gurion airport is a “checkpoint” or a “garrison” where travelers are “inmates”). Dabashi describes Israelis in truly frightening terms, saying that “a subsumed militarism, a systemic mendacity with an ingrained violence constitutional to the very fusion of its fabric, has penetrated the deepest corners of what these people have to call their ‘soul.’”

The presence of soldiers is emphasized, although he makes no mention of the fact that soldiers are on the streets to prevent Palestinian terror attacks. Israeli soldiers, when not described as “teenage ninjas with German shepherds,” loot a bank (Dabashi fiction). In one egregious paragraph, he describes a “white” Israeli officer and two “black” Israeli soldiers. The “white” is described as a “mighty cobra”, while the two “black” soldiers and himself are “pigeons.” These analogies are shocking and dehumanizing, and so are Dabashi’s racial categories. His accusation that the Israeli soldiers are racist is false. I served in the Israeli army under the command of a black officer. These categories are a product of Dabashi’s mind—in Israel, we never refer to people as whites and blacks.

The general accusations in Dabashi’s article are pure, unadulterated anti-Semitism, which is what I wrote to Hamid Dabashi and, in a separate letter, to the Columbia administration..."
See the rest here.

Also, see Martin Kramer on Columbia, here.

For a definition of dhimmitude see Dhimmi Watch.