January 27, 2005

POST MODERN APOLOGY FROM PROF. DABASHI

        For all those Columbia parents forking out $40,000+/yr. tuition, check out this "apology"* by Prof. Hamid Dabashi. Note the apology is for causing hurt, "inadvertently" to someone who tendentiously misread Dabashi's article. It is not a genuine apology, but is in fact a defense by the Columbia professor of his vile outpouring of hatred towards the Jewish state and its inhabitants. It's generic quality is underscored by Prof. Dabashi's failure to mention the actual name of the student. It draws from the reservoir of standard POMO cliches: the text is unstable, has a life of its own, escapes its author, etc. How sad that the author's benign original intentions should have been misread! This is an 'apology' meant for anyone who might have been upset by Dabashi's anti-semitic rant in Al Ahram, which he undoubtedly thought would not be read back in America. Here's the key sentence in Dabashi's "apology": "That passage could have easily been written about North Korea, Cuba, or about Pinochet’s Chile, the Shah’s or Khomeini’s Iran, Apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany, the French in Algeria, the Belgians in Congo, the British in India, the Americans in Iraq, or the Janjaweed in Darfur—indeed about any state apparatus that is predicated on systematic use and abuse of power..."
        How reassuring, how fair-minded to learn he could just as easily have written the same words about Nazi Germany as about Israel! What a wonderful moral equivalence, designed to show us Prof. Dabashi's broadmindedness. No reason to suspect anti-semitism there. Nothing to feel personally offended about; besides, he's also included other examples of states like Israel, for example, North Korea and Cuba, and, naturally, the "Americans in Iraq". No agenda there, just a straightforward apology. We know, of course, that to Pomo Profs, a text takes on a life of its own, freed from its author, and subject to infinite ways of being misread, so apologizing for its effects is essentially the same as saying: how regrettable that you imposed your subjective malevolent misreading on my text. It's a little like expressing regret that, having slandered the members of your family, you took it personally. Worst of all though, such a strategically duplicitous apology is then used by Prof. Dabashi to extend and compound his hateful ideas. This is pretty sick stuff for a Columbia professor; anti-semitism dressed up in the glib contemporary language of Post-Modernism. President Bollinger, hurry up please, it's time.

The full letter is here*.