[News] New York Times Supports McCarthyite Witch Hunt

Fri Apr 8 13:05:27 EDT 2005

posted by Juan @ 
<http://www.juancole.com/2005/04/cairo-blast-at-khan-al-khalili.html>4/8/2005 
10:21:00 AM 
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<http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3463907&postID=111297121211520720&quickEdit=true> 

New York Times Supports McCarthyite Witch Hunt

I am cancelling my subscription to the New York Times, and I urge others to 
do the same.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/07/opinion/07thu1.html?oref=login>The New 
York Times editorial board went over to the Dark Side on Thursday, with an 
editorial that blasted the end results of a panel at Columbia University 
that investigated whether students had been intimidated by professors at 
Columbia University. The panel found that there was no evidence of any such 
thing, that no students had been punished for their views by lowered 
grades, that there was no evidence of racial bigotry.

The NYT nevertheless praised the neo-McCarthyite "film" (actually it is 
large numbers of films that are constantly re-edited and have never been 
publicly shown) produced by the shadowy anti-Palestinian "David Project." 
But the "film" is not an objective document. I could interview on film lots 
of people who ascribed all sorts of bad behavior to the editors of the New 
York Times and call it a "damning documentary." Students, including 
Israelis, who have actually taken classes in Middle East studies at 
Columbia dispute the films' allegations.

The real question here is whether it is all right to dispute the Zionist 
version of history. The David Project, AIPAC, the American Jewish Congress, 
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Middle East Forum, 
Campus Watch, MEMRI, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, 
the Zionist Organization of America, etc., etc., maintain that it is not 
all right. Some of them have even been known to maintain that disputing 
Zionist historiography is a form of hate speech.

Historians are unkind to nationalism of any sort. Nineteenth century 
romantic nationalism of the Zionist sort posits eternal "peoples" through 
history, who have a blood relationship (i.e. are a "race") and who have a 
mystical relationship with some particular territory. The Germans, who were 
very good at this game, called it "blood and soil." Nationalism casts about 
for some ancient exemplar of the "nation" to glorify as a predecessor to 
the modern nation. (Since nations actually did not exist in the modern 
sense before the late 1700s, the relationship is fictive. To explain what 
happened between ancient glory and modern nationalism, nationalists often 
say that the "nation" "fell asleep" or "went into centuries of decline. My 
colleague Ron Suny calls this the "sleeping beauty" theory of nationalism.)

But there are no eternal nations through history. People get all mixed up 
genetically over time, except for tiny parts of the genome like the 
mitochondria or the Y chromosome, on which too much emphasis is now put. 
Since there are no eternal nations based in "blood," they cannot have a 
mystical connection to the "land." People get moved around. The Turks now 
in Anatolia once lived in Mongolia (and most Turks anyway are just Greeks 
who converted to Islam and began speaking Turkish).

The David Project wants Middle East historians to reproduce faithfully in 
the classroom the Zionist master narrative as the "true" version of 
history. We aren't going to do that, and nobody can make us do it, and if 
anyone did make us do it, it would be destructive of academic, analytical 
understandings of history. Next the Serbs will be demanding that we explain 
why the Bosnians had to be suppressed, and the Russians will object to any 
attempt to understand the roots of Chechen terrorism, and the Chinese will 
object to our teaching about Taiwan. The American Nazi Party will maintain 
that the Third Reich is presented unsympathetically in university history 
classes, etc. etc. Ethnic nationalisms if allowed to dictate the teaching 
of history would destroy the entire discipline.

The NYT editorial concludes:

"But in the end, the report is deeply unsatisfactory because the panel's 
mandate was so limited. Most student complaints were not really about 
intimidation, but about allegations of stridently pro-Palestinian, 
anti-Israeli bias on the part of several professors. The panel had no 
mandate to examine the quality and fairness of teaching. That leaves the 
university to follow up on complaints about politicized courses and a lack 
of scholarly rigor as part of its effort to upgrade the department. One can 
only hope that Columbia will proceed with more determination and care than 
it has heretofore."

What the editors mean by "anti-Israeli" is not spelled out. But generally 
the term means any criticism of Israel. (You can criticize Argentina all 
day every day till the cows come home and nobody cares in the US, but make 
a mild objection to Ariel Sharon putting another 3500 settlers onto 
Palestinian territory in contravention of all international law and of the 
road map to which the Bush administration says it is committed, and boom!, 
you are branded a racist bigot. And if you dare point out that Sharon's 
brutality and expansionism end up harming America and Americans by 
unnecessarily making enemies for us (because we are Sharon's sycophants), 
then you are really in trouble.

Personally, I think that the master narrative of Zionist historiography is 
dominant in the American academy. Mostly this sort of thing is taught by 
International Relations specialists in political science departments, and a 
lot of them are Zionists, whether Christian or Jewish. Usually the 
narrative blames the Palestinians for their having been kicked off their 
own land, and then blames them again for not going quietly. It is not a 
balanced point of view, and if we take the NYT seriously (which we could 
stop doing after they let Judith Miller channel Ahmad Chalabi on the front 
page every day before the war), then the IR professors should be made to 
teach a module on the Palestinian point of view, as well. That is seldom done.

Academic teaching is not about balance or "fairness" or presenting "both 
sides" of an issue. It is about teaching people to reason analytically and 
synthetically about problems. The NYT approach would ruin our ability to do 
this and would impose a particular version of history on us all by fiat. It 
even implies that some committee should sanction anyone critical of Israel.

Universities are about skewering sacred cows. Anyone who doesn't want their 
views challenged or their feelings hurt should stay away from them. If you 
can't handle an intellectual challenge, you shouldn't be on campus. And you 
certainly shouldn't be editing a major newspaper.

Links:

<http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/06/1421213>Rashid Khalidi 
on Democracy Now..

<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3742.shtml>Links to the report and 
to Joseph Massad's response.

<http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Mar05/Kimmerling0329.htm>Baruch Kimmerling, 
the eminent Israeli sociologist, denounces the witch hunt at Columbia. The 
Chronicle of Higher Education, which hasn't done squat for professors faced 
with the New McCarthyism, rejected Kimmerling's piece, and they are another 
good candidate for cancelled subscriptions.

<http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20050404&s=sherman>Scott Sherman in 
the Nation, "The Mideast Comes to Columbia."

Note: The links aren't "balanced." You'll have to find the McCarthyites on 
your own.

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