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ManintheMiddle
Joined: 20 Oct 2008
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 Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 12:04 am Post subject: ANTI-SEMITIC FACULTY WELCOME AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY |
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C'mon, all you Jew-hating academics, apply to Columbia University, once a bastion of Jewish intellectualism, for it has now caved in to the PC craze which tolerates any dissent from Islamists. Tenure guaranteed or your money back!
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COLUMBIA TENURES AN ISRAEL-BASHER
By JACOB GERSHMAN THE NEW YORK POST, June 29, 2009
JOSEPH Massad's scholarly contribution during his decade as a faculty member of Columbia University's Middle East Studies Department may be summed up as follows: Israel is racist, and homosexuality is an insidious Western invention.
Yet that was enough for Columbia, which officially -- if quietly -- awarded Massad tenure earlier this month.
Columbia's process for reviewing tenure candidates is as rigorous as any Ivy League school's. Ordinarily, an academic of Massad's caliber would be bounced from Morningside Heights. And in fact, the system did work -- it denied Massad tenure two years ago.
But now the school's academic standards have succumbed to ideological tensions and campus politics -- in what appears to be a remarkable manipulation of the tenure process and a breach of fiduciary trust.
First, a little background on Massad. A Christian secularist of Palestinian-Arab descent, Massad has dedicated his academic career primarily to encouraging the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. Criticism of Israel is far from unusual in his field, but Massad goes much further, taking arguments to bizarre ends. "The ultimate achievement of Israel," he writes, is "the transformation of the Jew into the anti-Semite, and the Palestinian into the Jew." In a book, he rails against the "Zionist theft of Palestinian Arab food (e.g., hummus, falafel)."
In a recent work, "Desiring Arabs," Massad claimed to expose yet another plot against the Muslim world -- the "Gay International." He describes how a vast conspiracy of gay activists descended on Arab countries and endangered the lives of "practitioners of same-sex contact" by transforming them into "subjects who identify as 'homosexual' and 'gay.' "
Nor is Massad fond of the women's rights movement, or "colonial feminism," as he calls it. He bristles at the attention paid to the Muslim practice of honor killings, which he likens to "crimes of passion," accusing women's groups of ignoring "rampant Western misogyny."
He specializes in reductio ad hitlerum. "If Germans spent the day on the beach when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, and Americans cheered in bars and at home the fireworks light show the US military put up over Baghdad while slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in 1991 and in 2003, Israeli Jews insisted on having front row seats on hills overlooking Gaza for a live show, cracking open champagne bottles and cheering the murder and maiming of thousands of civilians, more than half of whom were women and children," he wrote in a February essay, referring to the Gaza War.
Four years ago, it seemed as if Massad would be on his way out of the Broadway gates. A university probe backed up students' complaints that he disparaged Jewish students who disagreed with him. In one instance, while lecturing near campus, he responded to an Israeli student who asked a question by demanding to know how many Palestinians he had killed.
But faculty members opted instead to lionize Massad as a supposed martyr of academic freedom. A crucial ally for him was Dean of Arts and Sciences Nicholas Dirks, whose wife taught a class with Massad.
In 2007, months after Massad completed his latest book, a committee rejected his tenure application. Tenure candidates rarely get a second shot at Columbia, but Dirks intervened and pushed for a second committee, sources say.
Oddly, the professor who led the first review of Massad refused to serve again. Even odder, the administration justified the do-over by claiming that Massad had switched his field of specialty from political science to cultural studies.
After the second committee approved Massad, President Lee Bollinger and Provost Alan Brinkley took extraordinary measures to protect the secrecy of Massad's tenure case and guard against an outcry from Jewish alumni and donors.
The last step in the process was the trustees. The administration refused to share with the trustees any list of who was on the two tenure committees. The board was also kept in the dark as to why Massad failed the first review. Bollinger and Brinkley also refused to discuss in detail why Massad was permitted another shot.
Instead, the administration -- apparently more interested in managing public relations than dealing with the substance of the underlying problem -- simply provided the trustees with a set of talking points with "helpful facts" about the university's Jewish student center.
When I tried contacting trustee Esta Stecher, a senior administration official alerted the board about my inquiries and reminded the trustees that the university doesn't comment on tenure cases.
In the end, Columbia's board of trustees approved Massad's tenure appointment before ever getting answers.
Which raises the question: Just what does a trustee do? Are they merely fund-raisers? Do they view the title as a ceremonial honor? What's the point?
As for Bollinger, one wonders how he allowed his faculty to undermine his authority and the university's reputation.
The promotion of Massad isn't a victory for academic freedom but a cheapening of it. The freedom extended to a Columbia faculty member isn't the same as the rights of a soapbox crank. Protecting free inquiry and valuing scholarship are not mutually exclusive goals, but together define the university ideal.
If the trustees and Bollinger haven't figured that out, Massad's enduring presence at Columbia will help remind them. |
Tolerance at all costs, but only of Leftist faculty committed to the celebrity cause of the day--that would be rehabilitating the image of Islamo-fascism in the Western media and academia. Of course, the same would NEVER be reciprocated in any Islamic institution of higher learning. An academic critical of Arabs wouldn't be hired in the first place much less taken up for tenure consideration. It's one of the wonderful paradoxes of our times and laden with irony and hypocrisy.
What's next? An endowed chair for Ward Churchill? Or perhaps one in Social NonViolence for Bill Ayers? But why stop there? I'm sure Louis Farakhan has a few good books in him. Give him an honorary title as a visiting lecturer, that will do the trick.
The late great Edward Said, himself a Palestinian scholar famous for his treatise on Orientalism (though not without its flaws in logic) cannot be compared in the same breath to this guy.
Really, it's shameful what's become of Ivy League humanities programs in recent decades. |
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visitorq
Joined: 11 Jan 2008
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| Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 12:18 am Post subject: |
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| Your foaming at the mouth hatred of Islam is anti-Semitic... And Israel is the most anti-Semitic state on earth, period. |
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ManintheMiddle
Joined: 20 Oct 2008
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| Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 12:27 am Post subject: |
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visitorq spewed:
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| Your foaming at the mouth hatred of Islam is anti-Semitic... And Israel is the most anti-Semitic state on earth, period. |
Oh, really? Where exactly did I reveal open hostility to all Muslims? Put up or s _ _ _ up. |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 12:27 am Post subject: |
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| visitorq wrote: |
| Your foaming at the mouth hatred of Islam is anti-Semitic... And Israel is the most anti-Semitic state on earth, period. |
someone needs to look up the definition of anti-semetic. How is hatred of islam anti-semetic? Pakistanis, Afghans, Indians, Indonesians, etc etc, are not semetic in any shape or form.
And Man In the Middle, I'd just say a couple parts of Columbia University are a little nuts (most notably the Near Eastern Studies dept). Let's keep things in perspective. |
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Sergio Stefanuto
Joined: 14 May 2009
Location: UK
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| Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 12:31 am Post subject: |
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| visitorq wrote: |
| Your foaming at the mouth hatred of Islam is anti-Semitic.. |
Even if that accusation were true, the logical conclusion of this ingenious thinking is that hatred of communism was anti-Russian (and anti-Vietnamese, anti-Hungarian, etc) and hatred of fascism was anti-German, anti-Italian and anti-Spanish.
Somebody's tools of thought need a sharpen. |
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ManintheMiddle
Joined: 20 Oct 2008
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| Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 12:34 am Post subject: |
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buncheon bum replied:
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| someone needs to look up the definition of anti-semetic. How is hatred of islam anti-semetic? Pakistanis, Afghans, Indians, Indonesians, etc etc, are not semetic in any shape or form. |
Let's try to stay away from semantics; yes, I realize that Jews are not the only Semites and that much of the Muslim world doesn't fall into that category anyhow but all this is beside the point.
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| And Man In the Middle, I'd just say a couple parts of Columbia University are a little nuts (most notably the Near Eastern Studies dept). Let's keep things in perspective. |
It wasn't meant as an indictment of all faculty or administration, but more the trustees and those in certain departments which have become increasingly politicized in recent decades. It is at the very least deeply ironic and sadly revealing that of all the Ivy League institutions this particular one would make such exceptions for tenure review. |
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djsmnc
Joined: 20 Jan 2003
Location: Dave's ESL Cafe
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| Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 6:54 am Post subject: |
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| I delight in the fact that they are willing to allow room for unorthodox opinions! |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 4:51 pm Post subject: |
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| ManintheMiddle wrote: |
buncheon bum replied:
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| someone needs to look up the definition of anti-semetic. How is hatred of islam anti-semetic? Pakistanis, Afghans, Indians, Indonesians, etc etc, are not semetic in any shape or form. |
Let's try to stay away from semantics; yes, I realize that Jews are not the only Semites and that much of the Muslim world doesn't fall into that category anyhow but all this is beside the point. |
Sorry, that part was directed to visitorq, and not you. |
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visitorq
Joined: 11 Jan 2008
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| Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 9:50 pm Post subject: |
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| bucheon bum wrote: |
| visitorq wrote: |
| Your foaming at the mouth hatred of Islam is anti-Semitic... And Israel is the most anti-Semitic state on earth, period. |
someone needs to look up the definition of anti-semetic. How is hatred of islam anti-semetic? Pakistanis, Afghans, Indians, Indonesians, etc etc, are not semetic in any shape or form. |
The vast majority of "semitic" people are Muslim (whereas many zionist types are not), that was my only point (as I'm sure you all realise, sorry if I was too vague)... yet Israel always plays that card, despite it being the most militant and "anti-semitic" state since Nazi Germany... |
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ManintheMiddle
Joined: 20 Oct 2008
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| Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 11:56 pm Post subject: |
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buncheon bum replied:
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| Sorry, that part was directed to visitorq, and not you. |
No biggee, brah. I was the one who jumped the gun.
djsmnc rejoiced:
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| I delight in the fact that they are willing to allow room for unorthodox opinions! |
Ah, yes, but would your brethren who revel in diversity have been so open-minded were his views that of an archconservative? Methinks not.
Gee, Big Bird hasn't opined yet.... |
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