* The U.S. intentionally exaggerates the savagery of Saddam Hussein against Iraqi people and others in the region.
* The U.S. “obstructs democracy” in the name of democracy and the Bush administration operates in Orwellian fashion.
* Al-Jeezera, the Qatar-based Arabic language satellite TV propaganda network, portrays the truth concerning the Middle East and Gulf region to the Arab/Muslim “street.”
From comments heard at the Teatro, many seemingly intelligent people subscribe completely to potentially toxic anti-American, anti-“imperialist,” anti-global notions, all of which are infused with Muslim hatred of the West, the U.S., and of course “its ally and regional colonial power,” Israel.
Last year and this, several MEALC events have roiled the Columbia campus – events all supported by Dean Lisa Anderson. In September 2002, the School of International and Public Affairs co-sponsored an African Studies Institute seminar billed as a “South African Conversation on Israel and Palestine.” Its chair, Professor Mahmood Mamdani, attempted to glue a false apartheid analogy to Israel’s counter-terror tactics. Aiding him was radical leftist Jeff Halper, whose Israel Committee Against Housing Destruction (ICAHD) claimed that destroying the homes of Palestinian terrorists in the disputed territories was a mendacious “displacement” of Palestinians. MEALC anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj and political science professor Andre du Toit, visiting from the University of Cape Town, concurred.
Only one participant objected to that kind of talk. “What of the displacement of more than 900,000 Mizrahi and Mahgrebi Jews before and after Israel’s War of Independence” the dissenter asked. Mamdani’s panel declared the question intellectually dishonest, and Jewish and Palestinian displacements incomparable. When the program ended, a participant approached the questioner. “You are a Zionist racist pig,” he said. Sic gloria transit mundi, Columbia.
Also in 2002, MEALC sponsored a Palestinian film weekend featuring “Jenin, Jenin.” This blatant propaganda vehicle intercuts supposed “eyewitness” accounts with haunting imagery suggesting that the IDF committed a massacre in the refugee camp. The film ignores the conclusion of the United Nations that in fact no such massacre occurred.
Recent Harvard Divinity School graduate Rachel Fish single-handedly shut down the United Arab Emirates’ Zayed Center, whose academic program advanced Holocaust denial, anti-American conspiracy theories, and anti-Semitic hatred in its “research” and lectures. Yet at Columbia, terrorist sympathizer Khalidi and his conference panelists issue incendiary material under the aegis of an anonymously funded Edward Said bully pulpit and no one rebuts their calls to implement “resistance against imperialism,” build a U.S. “anti-imperialist movement,” “protest power” and “disrupt and tame U.S. hegemony.”
Monitoring such events can prove extremely uncomfortable. Those who ask probing questions invite hoots, verbal assaults, psychological intimidation and possibly even violence.
Yet exposure is the most important weapon we have.
Americans should take heed. Overseas, the purveyors of radical Islam mass-produce hate ideology and feed the people a diet of revulsion for Western ideas, thereby enabling tyrants to squelch democracy, equality, liberty and economic progress. Now proponents of radical Islam are importing the same ideologies into the U.S. and onto American campuses.
Columbia trustees should demand that academics return to the honest and free exchange of competing ideas. Their failure creates a vacuum that invites other Columbia stakeholders – press, public, parents, alumni, and government funding officials — to supply the necessary disinfectant.