Columbia VS. America by
Daniel Pipes and Jonathan Calt Harris New York Post April 1,
2003
"U.S. flags are the emblem of the invading war machine in Iraq today.
They are the emblem of the occupying power. The only true heroes are those
who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military."
Those words were spoken last week by Nicholas De Genova, a professor of
anthropology and Latin American studies at Columbia University. De Genova
went on, in words that will long shame his university, to call on U.S.
soldiers to "frag" (i.e., murder) their officers and to wish "for a
million Mogadishus," referring to the 1993 ambush in Somalia that left 18
U.S. soldiers dead and 84 wounded.
He wants 18 million dead Americans?
Columbia's administration distanced itself from De Genova (he "does not
in any way represent" the university's views) and other professors
criticized him - but his remarks are hardly the rude exception to the
usual discourse of the faculty at that university. For one: Tom Paulin, a
visiting professor at Columbia this academic year, has stated that
Brooklyn-born Jews "should be shot dead" if they live on the West Bank.
More broadly, plenty of other Columbia professors share De Genova's
venomous feelings for the United States, though they stop short of calling
for the deaths of Americans.
* Eric Foner, Dewitt Clinton professor of American history, sees the
U.S. government as a habitual aggressor: "Our notion of ourselves as a
peace-loving republic is flawed. We've used military force against many,
many nations, and in very few of those cases were we attacked or
threatened with attack."
* Edward Said, university professor, calls the U.S. policy in Iraq a
"grotesque show" perpetrated by a "small cabal" of unelected individuals
who hijacked U.S. policy. He accuses "George Bush and his minions" of
hiding their imperialist grab for "oil and hegemony" under a false intent
to build democracy and human rights.
Said deems Operation Iraqi Freedom "an abuse of human tolerance and
human values" waged by an "avenging Judeo-Christian god of war." This war,
he says, fits into a larger pattern of America "reducing whole peoples,
countries and even continents to ruin by nothing short of holocaust."
* Rashid Khalidi, who will hold the Edward Said chair of Middle East
Studies starting in the fall, used the term "idiots' consensus" to
describe the wide support for reversing Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of
Kuwait and called on his colleagues to combat it. After 9/11, he
admonished the media to drop its "hysteria about suicide bombers."
* Gary Sick, acting director of the Middle East Institute, alleges that
Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980 by conspiring with the Ayatollah
Khomeini to keep the U.S. hostages in Iran. He apologizes for the Iranian
government (it "has been meticulous in complying with the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty") and blames Washington for having "encouraged
Iran to proceed" with building nuclear weapons.
Sick opposes letting U.S. victims of Iranian-sponsored terrorism
collect large damages against Tehran. More generally, he sees the Bush
administration as "belligerent" and his fellow Americans as
"insufferable."
* George Saliba, professor of Arabic and Islamic Science, routinely
interrupts his class with political rants, leading one student to observe
that it is "continuously insulting" to attend his lectures and another to
complain about his course (on the subject of an "Introduction to Islamic
Civilization," of all things) degenerating into a forum for railing
against "evil America."
* Joseph Massad, assistant professor of Modern Arab Politics and
Intellectual History, seems to blame every ill in the Arab world on the
United States. Poverty results from "the racist and barbaric policies" of
the American-dominated International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The
absence of democracy is the fault of "ruling autocratic elites and their
patron, the United States." Militant Islamic violence results from "U.S.
imperialist aggression."
Such sentiments coming from leading lights of the Columbia professorate
suggest that De Genova fits very well into his institution. He just made
the mistake of blurting out the logical conclusion of the anti-Americanism
forwarded by some of his colleagues.
This self-hatred points to an intellectual crisis at a school long
considered one of the country's best. Alumni, parents of students and
other friends of the university should first acknowledge this reality,
then take steps to fix it.
Printer-friendly version
Email this article
to a friend