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<i>posted by Juan @
<a href="http://www.juancole.com/2005/04/cairo-blast-at-khan-al-khalili.html">
4/8/2005 10:21:00 AM</a></i>
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<b>New York Times Supports McCarthyite Witch Hunt</b> <br><br>
I am cancelling my subscription to the New York Times, and I urge others
to do the same.<br><br>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/07/opinion/07thu1.html?oref=login">
The New York Times editorial board</a> 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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.) <br><br>
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).<br><br>
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.<br><br>
The NYT editorial concludes:<br><br>
<br>
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<dd>"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."<br><br>
<br><br>
</dl>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!</b>, 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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Links:<br><br>
<a href="http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/06/1421213">
Rashid Khalidi on Democracy Now.</a>.<br><br>
<a href="http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3742.shtml">Links to the
report and to Joseph Massad's response</a>.<br><br>
<a href="http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Mar05/Kimmerling0329.htm">Baruch
Kimmerling, the eminent Israeli sociologist, denounces the witch hunt at
Columbia</a>. 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.<br><br>
<a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20050404&s=sherman">
Scott Sherman in the Nation</a>, "The Mideast Comes to
Columbia."<br><br>
Note: The links aren't "balanced." You'll have to find the
McCarthyites on your own. <br><br>
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