Anyone else know anything about this?
By Zeynab Ali
A strange paradox beleaguers the field of Middle Eastern studies in the US these days. As the Middle East continues to be at the centre-stage of the US foreign policy, Washington is facing its most grueling challenges in the region. Whether these challenges lie in coping with the consequences of an ill-conceived war in Iraq or helping the Palestinians and Israelis achieve a sustainable peace, there is a widespread recognition of the need for knowledgeable expertise and deeper understanding of the region. Yet at this critical time, Middle Eastern studies and academics in the US are confronted with a fierce ‘campaign of silencing’ amidst forceful accusations of ideological bias and anti-Semitism.
Intellectual freedom in America has always been threatened by a culture of intolerance toward anti-Zionist outlooks. But Middle Eastern academics in the US are currently faced with what could be called a forceful nationwide crusade by pro-Israel and neo-conservative groups to silence any kind of discourse that interrupts American foreign policy or reproaches Israel. It would suffice to say that the mainstream US media, for inherent reasons, make it impossible for the average US citizen to understand the reality of Palestinian victimisation. Thus relatively little effort has to be made by Jewish Zionist organisations to shape the views of Americans in general about Israel and Palestine. It is only on college campuses that Palestinian rights advocates can be claimed to have posed an imagined threat to the hegemony of Zionist propaganda in mainstream American political culture. In this context the campuses have become the primary venue of candid but disruptive debates about this conflict. The colleges and universities, therefore, are the central focus of efforts by Zionist organisations to curtail the freedoms that are essential for a just debate.
A case in point is the prestigious Columbia University in New York where professors of Middle Eastern studies recently became the target of a concerted campaign of intimidation because of their criticism of American and Israeli policies. Rashid Khalidi, director of the Middle East Studies Institute and the Edward Said Professor at Columbia University, was recently publicly targeted for his views because he believes that “American Likudniks control American foreign policy” and calls the killing of Israeli soldiers by Palestinians “resistance”. The charge that he forced anti-Semitic and anti-American views in the classroom seems to be based wholly on the fact that Khalidi is a prominent Palestinian-American scholar who has been known to express criticism of Israeli politics in public. The New York State Education Department recently dismissed him from a position, in which he would prepare educators to discuss the Middle East conflict.
Among others facing similar problems is Joseph Massad, a professor of history at Columbia’s school for Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Culture. He recently faced an investigation for alleged anti-Semitism charges made by pro-Israel students and was accused of calling Israel “a racist state”. Massad compares these allegations to a “witch-hunt” which aims to stifle pluralism and the freedom of expression on university campuses in order to ensure that “only one opinion is permitted: that of uncritical support for the State of Israel”. “My characterization of Israel as racist is not some ideological insult but rather a description of a country that has myriad laws that grant Jewish citizens rights and privileges that it denies to non-Jewish citizens,” he says. The major strategy that the pro-Israel groups use equates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. But Massad believes otherwise: “It is those who want to claim that Jews, Israelis and Zionists are one group who are the anti-Semites. Israel in fact has no legal, moral, or political basis to represent (people) who never elected it to that position and who refuse to move to that country”.
Many critics have also pointed out that while Khalidi and Massad have been critical of Israel’s policies, they have not spared many of the Arab regimes from their criticism either, a factor that has been largely ignored. “How can we analyze what real obstacles to peace exist in the Middle East when we are liable to be labeled anti-Semitic for every opinion?” said Khalidi.
Such censure clearly reflects politically-motivated double standards in the US academia. When a professor criticises the policies of the Israeli state (such as its failure to provide the three million Palestinians under occupation with full rights and freedoms or to abolish the laws that discriminate against its one million Palestinian citizens living in Israel) this is labeled propaganda, but criticising the Arab regimes is considered sound scholarship. It seems all too facile to claim that the professors are politicising the classroom if one disagrees with their ideas. Instead of presenting alternative arguments, the only response that such disagreements have elicited is a somewhat immature rant that “all criticism of Israel is propaganda”.
The controversy at Columbia was ‘officially’ initiated by a short documentary called ‘Columbia Unbecoming’, in which 10 Columbia students contended that they felt threatened academically for expressing a pro-Israel point of view in classrooms. The film was produced by a pro-Israel student group called the ‘David Project’ which has ties to the ‘Israel on Campus Coalition’, an organisation whose members include the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the American Jewish Committee, and which openly encourages academic vigilantism on campuses to watch, report, and if necessary to intimidate scholars who present ‘biased’, ‘pro-Islamic’, or ‘pro-Palestinian’ views in their class lectures, in public statements outside their institutions or in their writings. Over the past year the David Project and its supporters have continued to orchestrate a media offensive of sustained intensity against various Middle Eastern scholars.
Given the sensitive nature of the subject, not surprisingly the issue instantly became located within the confines of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the US led war on terror. Local politicians rushed into the fray too, New York’s Governor George Pataki criticised the Colombia University for its ‘biases’ while a Democratic New York State Representative publicly demanded that Columbia fire Massad for “his displays of anti-Semitism”. In early 2005, Israeli ambassador to the United States announced that he would not attend an international conference scheduled to take place at Columbia due to the anti-Israel outlook of its faculty. Later Israel’s former minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs, Natan Sharansky, claimed that Jewish students were being silenced on American campuses which have become “hot-houses of anti-Israel opinion”.
Amidst allegations of dominance of pro-Palestine scholars in the Middle East studies programmes, there have been vituperative critiques from neo-conservatives calling for a radical rethinking of US legislation regarding academic freedom. Earlier in 2003, a confluence of neo-conservative and pro-Israeli groups helped push a bill through the US House of Representatives which called for government monitoring of international studies programmes that receive federal funding to ensure that they “better reflect the national needs related to homeland security”. The bill was drafted as a response to the claim that the federal government was funding programmes that criticise American foreign policy. The assault on Middle East programmes is, however, based on simplistic fallacies, most notably the ones that says 'any critique of US foreign policy constitutes an attack on US national interests", the “Middle East scholars are largely anti-American” and that these programmes “turn young minds toward unpatriotic opinions”. Consequently several legislative initiatives have been introduced at the state and federal levels in the US to establish monitoring mechanisms to ensure “balance and fairness” at publicly funded programmes of Middle Eastern studies and to protect students from “an epidemic of indoctrination”.
However scholars such as John Esposito, who have also been ostracised by the pro-Israel groups, continue to defend their so-called “un-American” views. “Freedom of thought and speech are not only embodied in notions of academic freedom but also most importantly in the role of assuring people that their policymakers have a multiplicity of viewpoints that inform their decision-making,” says Esposito.
If the legislation being proposed nowadays does get approved, what gets taught in American Universities will be decided not according to academic and intellectual criteria but by pressure groups, many of whose members are driven by crass political motivations. The real purpose of these bills it seems is not to provide students with ‘rights’ but to institute state monitoring of universities, to impose specific points of view and ultimately to silence dissenting voices by punishing universities that protect them. “If implemented as its proponents intend,” Khalidi asserts, “(this legislation) would impose the pseudo-sciences of terrorology and the demonization of Islam and Muslims as integral parts of teaching and research about the Middle East, which will have far-reaching effects way beyond the American academic world.”