The event was chaired by newly tenured MEALC professor and former Palestine National Committee negotiator Rashid Khalidi. Fresh from the University of Chicago, Khalidi, a frequent guest on PBS and NPR, filled the $4 million, anonymously endowed Edward Said chair to advance Palestinian and Arab causes at Columbia.
Neither Columbia nor the taxpayer-funded public television and radio networks publicize Khalidi’s reverence for the memory of mass murderers like Black September terrorist Abu Iyad or his support for violence: Palestinian society “comes through during these uprisings,” he said in October 2000. “It is civil society that carried the first uprising.”
On December 5, MEALC’s targets were U.S. global imperialism and the second Intifada – what Middle East analyst Ephraim Karsh more aptly calls “Arafat’s War.” The U.S. global war on terror seeks to defeat the state and Islamic terror sponsors that perpetrated and facilitated the September 11 attacks. Israel seeks to defeat a terrorist infrastructure that over the past three years has been responsible for more than 20,000 suicide and other terror attacks that have maimed or killed nearly 7,000 Israeli civilians.
Two afternoon and evening panels presented uniform, monochrome anti-imperialist, anti-American and anti-Israel scripts. MEALC’s Akeel Bilgrami, for example, urged moderate Muslims to turn (like him) to vocal criticism of the U.S. Other speakers praised the potential of the Internet to “spread the word” and make it “much harder for the imperialists (Bush et al) to lie and hide things from us.”
What do they consider the “truth?” Speakers claimed that:
* The U.S., and particularly the Bush administration, are imperialist aggressors. The Bush “regime” does not bully other countries, but reshapes them to be totally dependent on the U.S.
* The U.S. has been baiting the Islamic world to enrage Muslims and transform Western Europe.
* The Bush administration has successfully divided Western and Eastern Europe.
* The Bush administration espouses a grand hegemonic strategy in which the Middle East is central.
* Yasir Arafat is “one of the most legitimate leaders in Palestine.” This is why the U.S. government targets him (says Sorbonne professor Gilbert Achcar).
* The Bush administration aims to tighten its hegemony and seeks the vassalage of other countries and of the people in the U.S.
* Israel is an occupier and oppressor, working with the U.S.
* The U.S. and Israel “viewed 9/11 as a good thing” that justified further oppression of Palestinians, a ramped up global war on terror and conquest of Iraq.
* The Palestinian Authority “militants” and Iraqi and Afghan “guerrillas” commit armed “resistance” and terrorism due to intense forces of oppression and occupation imposed by the U.S. and Israel.
* The Bush regime wields great influence over faith-based Christians, who want him involved in foreign affairs.
* Straussians, aka neo-conservatives, run right-wing U.S. think tanks and the pro-Israel U.S. Defense Department.
* Bush did not anticipate “getting blowback” in Iraq from local guerrillas and international “freedom fighters.”
* At the core of the Bush administration?s policy is an overt embrace of armed preemption in Iraq, within the Arab Muslim heartland, according to Professor Khalidi.
* The Bush “imperialist occupation” of Afghanistan and Iraq exceed the efforts of any prior U.S. administration to establish a “new security paradigm,” announced in September 2001 and promoted internally among Defense Department neo-conservatives.