Columbia vows action v. "anti-Israeli" profs

[Moses]

Columbia vows swift action on anti-Israel professors

By Shlomo Shamir

Haaretz
26 November 2004

www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/506594.html

NEW YORK - Columbia University president Lee Bollinger plans
"specific steps" soon in response to allegations that professors and lecturers at the Ivy League university made vitriolic and malicious comments against Israel in classes.

Bollinger made the pledge in a Wednesday phone call to
Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman. Bollinger didn't detail the character of the steps, but emphasized "the matter will be handled immediately."

New York's Columbia University was recently embarrassed by reports that Middle Eastern professors are exploiting their academic standing to express extreme political views on Israel, using slanderous and defamatory statements.

The allegations against the professors, including their names and
photographs, were published at the beginning of the week in an
investigative report by mass-circulation newspaper the New York
Daily News.

Jewish sources in New York reported Thursday that major Jewish
donors to the university were considering severing ties with the
prestigious institution in response to the "corrupt behavior" by academic staff. In particular, the sources mentioned Jewish
graduates of the university active in alumni organizations.

They said that Bollinger had recently received irate requests from
alumni protesting the behavior and explaining they expected an
appropriate response from the university to what they called
"malicious comments" against Israel.

The university president recently proposed the establishment of a
special chair for Israeli Studies, with the view of separating it
from Middle East Studies. The proposal was interpreted by the Jewish community as an appeasement gesture after the wave of protest against the professors' behavior.

Foxman told Haaretz on Thursday that he his meeting with Bollinger had left him with the impression that "he is aware of the problem and understands its seriousness."

Foxman called the Columbia events "particularly grave as the
institution is located in New York, which has a large Jewish
population, and Jewish students are exposed to insults from
professors." [We wouldn't want to expose students to "insults" in college!]

Foxman emphasized that "if Columbia handles the problem decisively, it will be a strong message to other U.S. campuses where similar phenomena occur."

[Moses]

This is a running commentary, containing three items:

www.nyunews.com/printcontent.html?fid=8368
Issue date: 11.18.2004
A ‘documentary’ plays dirty

by Jason Rowe
Columnist
Columbia University is the locus of a growing controversy over accusations that three professors in the university's Middle East and Asian language and culture department used their classes to brashly intimidate students that supported Israeli policy. These charges are presented in a short documentary by the pro-Israel group the David Project, titled "Columbia Unbecoming," and in a series of articles and editorials in the conservative New York Sun.

These are grave charges, but they should be viewed with skepticism. The recent spate of right-wing smear campaigns against academics who support opposing positions on foreign affairs, especially related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, should give us pause in evaluating the accusations at Columbia. In fact, the available evidence lends itself to the supposition that it is the professors - and by extension other academics with similar political perspectives - who are the ones being subjected to intimidation.

The documentary - which aside from a few screenings to selective audiences has not been released to the public - is based on the anecdotal accounts of only six current and former Columbia students. According to people who have viewed the film, it references three professors, but the brunt of the condemnation falls on Joseph Massad, who teaches an elective course, "Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies," that is "critical of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism." In the wake of the film, the Sun and U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-Brooklyn, have demanded that Massad be fired.

Of the handful of students who attack Massad in the film, only one has ever taken his class. Despite divergent opinions on Israeli state policy, Massad remembers having a "friendly rapport" with the student, including office-hour discussions and e-mail correspondence well after the class was over. These are hardly the signs of a student intimidated by his professor.

Another student in the film decribes an exchange he had with Massad after he approached the professor following an off-campus lecture to take issue with some of Massad's points. This is a poor way to initiate discussion without provocation, presuming that was even the student's motive. Even if the discussion was heated, an encounter outside of both the university and the particular event's forum can hardly be construed as a professor using his classroom authority to intimidate dissident students.

Before the film's emergence, Columbia officials had not received a single formal complaint about the alleged intimidation. Even the local Jewish periodical, Jewish Week, is highly skeptical of the claims, noting, "Most of the complaints on campus appear to be from pro-Israel activist students not in the [Middle Eastern studies] program," and concluding that, after independent interviews with four of the students in the film and other Israeli and American Jewish students in the department, "a much different picture emerges than the one seemingly portrayed on screen."

"This movie films half a dozen students who are interested in creating a paranoia of anti-Semitism on campus," said Eric Posner, a Columbia student and former Israeli soldier who, unlike all but one of the six students in the film, has actually taken class with Massad.

Posner said he found Massad "approachable, stimulating and challenging," despite their differing political views. "He is articulate, he is very challenging, he is very critical of the Israeli government and he's very critical of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority," Posner said, adding, "If a professor doesn't challenge me, if he doesn't make me re-evaluate my positions or come up with better arguments, what's the point of going to the classroom?"

Thus it seems that the real problem these six students have with Massad is that he crticizes Israel. It also seems that the David Project was only too willing to help them in this attack by financing a misrepresentative movie heavy on shock value. On a national scale, ideological groups like Daniel Pipes' Campus Watch have hoped to intimidate scholars critical of aspects of U.S. foreign policy by creating McCarthy-esque blacklists.

Professors draw conclusions in their work and often times those conclusions are "political." Professors are paid to teach what they know, political implications and all. Their job is not to oversee a political balancing act in the classroom, or to make sure that every view is presented equally.

It's interesting how only certain academic disciplines are attacked for being "unbalanced" - you wouldn't require a U.S. historian to present the "alternative view" on the good points of Southern slavery or a Stern professor to extol the benefits of worker-controlled factory collectives.

We realize this at NYU, and don't get worked up trying to fire every professor we don't agree with. We know that sometimes classes with professors we don't agree with can challenge us to think more critically. And if we really have a problem with a professor's view, we know the simple solution is to just not to take his or her class.

I'd expect that students at a place with a reputation like Columbia's would realize that too. But I'm not surprised. I always knew deep down that NYU students were smarter. •

Jason Rowe is a columnist for Washington Square News. E-mail him at [e-mail]

[Moses]

www.nyunews.com/printcontent.html?fid=8416
Issue date: 11.22.2004
Mideast views hard to discern

by Shuan McElhenny
Columnist
A recent WSN article reporting an anti-Israel bias investigation at Columbia University ("NYU reflects on Columbia bias probe," Nov. 11) promptly dismissed any suspicion that similar sentiment could be present at NYU.

As a whole it is true that our university's faculty has no anti-Israel animus. Yet both at NYU and in general, gauging feelings toward Israel is not as simple as taking a straw poll. In the United States, at least, only an extreme fringe will ever come out and roundly denounce Israel. Instead, anti-Israel opinions tend to be expressed through a seemingly benign terminology that can hide deeper antagonistic sentiments.

The Middle East struggle always conjures militant images, but the conflict has a public relations dimension that is just as important. World opinion strongly affects the strength or weakness of each side, and as a result, phrases are strategically inserted into the global dialogue to color the conflict in one way or another. Often, this terminology hosts great distortions that are manipulative and prevent an honest discussion.

For example, in a WSN interview ("Take Five: After Arafat, what will change?" Nov. 11), NYU professor Timothy Mitchell repeatedly referred to Israel's presence in the West Bank as an "occupation." The term has become so common that Mitchell likely did not mean anything by it, but the characterization of Israel as an occupier is nothing short of slanderous.

Jews' roots in the Middle East trace to Biblical times, and the 1917 Balfour Declaration included what would later become the West Bank in the territory outlined for a prospective Jewish state. The West Bank was only made free of Jews in the years between the 1948 and 1967 wars, when it was under the administration of Jordan, which captured it from Israel in the 1948 war.
Israel recaptured the territory in retaliation to a 1967 invasion by several Arab states. Calling Israelis "occupiers" of the West Bank is like calling the Czech people occupiers of the Sudetenland or the French people occupiers of Alsace-Lorraine.

The Israeli "occupation" is only the beginning. One could write a dictionary of terms that have been mangled to delegitimize Israel's existence and actions, but I'll mention only a few. The Israeli security fence is commonly referred to as a "wall" or even "the apartheid wall," although it is, in actuality, a fence, except for about five miles of concrete wall to prevent snipers from firing on Israeli highways.

The onslaught of terrorist attacks following the collapsed 2000 Camp David peace accords, wherein Israel's offer to cede the West Bank was rebuffed, has become known as an "intifada," an Arabic word that implies an unarmed rebellion, though a wave of suicide bombers indiscriminately attack Israeli civilians.

The "Right of Return," the claim that descendants of Israeli Arabs who were displaced in the 1948 war for independence may return to the country, bears no legitimate classification as a "right." The 600,000 displaced Israeli Arabs were offered return, and 200,000 have been accepted. Now, 5 million descendants of those who did not return are claiming that same right, even though no other refugee descendants, in all of the numerous post-World War II displacements, have been offered such status.

Furthermore, anti-Israel sentiments can be betrayed not so much through one's statements but through what goes unmentioned. It is unfair to critique Israel's military actions without citing the constant terrorist threats that make military action necessary. It is absurd, yet also common, for critics to characterize Israel's actions as arbitrary by simply not acknowledging those who would kill Israeli citizens and erase all of Israel if given the opportunity.

I am not attempting to reveal any sort of deep-seated anti-Semitism at NYU, because none exists. But the university community does itself no favors by placing a veneer of academic neutrality on a faculty and student body that is bound to contain partisans. It may be comfortable to simply state we are all seeing both sides clearly, but there is no doubt that there are people at NYU who bear ill will toward Israel.

While all are entitled to their opinions, we must stay focused on facts and history in order to stop the distortion of words and concepts, and instead speak clearly on the issues. •

Shaun McElhenny is a columnist for Washington Square News. E-mail him at [e-mail]


www.nyunews.com/printcontent.html?fid=8493
Issue date: 12.02.2004
McElhenny wrong on several facts, betrays own view

by Michael Devlin
CAS, Class of ’07
To the Editor:

Shaun McElhenny's column ("Mideast views hard to discern," Nov. 22) betrays dangerous attitudes toward academic discourse. In distinguishing words that "have been mangled to delegitimize Israel's existence and actions," McElhenny undermines the well-justified view that Zionists have, at many points in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, been the aggressors.

His column bears a paternalistic tone, guiding the reader to beware the dangers of "anti-Israel" speech. Unfortunately, the author disregards fundamental aspects of the conflict's history and skews others. His statement that the Balfour Declaration included the West Bank as Jewish territory is wholly erroneous; the only geographical reference in the letter refers to a Jewish national home in Palestine, rather than of Palestine.

The true history of the modern State of Israel is undeniably one of occupation, no matter which side of the security fence one stands on. Theodor Herzl, father of modern Zionism, recognized it as such in his correspondence with British imperialist and South African colonialist Cecil Rhodes. •