Salon.com | The new McCarthyism: "The new McCarthyism | By Juan Cole" | April 22, 2005

A witch hunt against a Columbia professor, and the New York Times' disgraceful support for it, represent the gravest threat to academic freedom in decades.
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A member of the U.S. Congress calls for an assistant professor at a major university to be summarily fired. The right-wing tabloid press runs a series of vicious attacks on him, often misquoting him and perpetuating previous misquotes. Opinion pieces attacking "tenured radicals" and questioning professors' patriotism use him as their centerpiece. All of these attacks are spurred by a propaganda film made by an advocacy group, in which anonymous accusations are made and the professor is not given an opportunity to respond to the allegations.

It is not 1953, the Congress member is not Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and the professor is not being accused of being a communist. No, it is 2005, the Congress member is Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., and the professor is being accused of being anti-Israel.

The lesson for academics, and American society as a whole: McCarthyism is unacceptable except when criticism of Israel is involved. ..
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The Christian Right's fundamental problem - Opinion - www.theage.com.au: "Perspective | By Terry Lane | April 10, 2005

There are two consequences of having so many Christian fundamentalists near the levers of power in imperial America.

First, it is a precondition of the return of Jesus that all Jews return to Israel and that the territory of that country should coincide with that promised to Abraham by God. Until Israel retakes its promised land, expels all the Arabs and welcomes back all the Jews of the diaspora, Jesus can't come.

The so-called Christian Zionists are influential. According to The Christian Science Monitor they "have access to the White House and strong support within Congress, including the backing of the two most recent majority leaders in the House of Representatives". In Genesis, God promises Abraham all the land "from the river of Egypt to the great river Euphrates", an area which includes a part of Egypt, a large slice of Iraq and Syria, not to mention all the land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. There is no room for Arabs in this promised land.
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Village Voice reporter Rick Perlstein came into possession of "an email we weren't meant to see" describing a meeting between the extremist Apostolic Congress and the National Security Council director for Near East and North African Affairs, Elliott Abrams. ....

Calling itself the Christian voice of the nation's capital, the Apostolic Congress opposes the withdrawal of Israeli settlements from Gaza because it opposes the surrender of any of the territory God promised to the Jews. Three weeks after the meeting President George Bush changed US policy and approved expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Apostolic Congress leader Pastor Robert Upton boasts: "We're in constant contact with the White House. I am briefed at least once a week." ...
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RollingStone.com: The Crusaders : Politics: "The Crusaders | Christian evangelicals are plotting to remake America in their own image | By BOB MOSER

It's February, and 900 of America's staunchest Christian fundamentalists have gathered in Fort Lauderdale to look back on what they accomplished in last year's election -- and to plan what's next. As they assemble in the vast sanctuary of Coral Ridge Presbyterian, with all fifty state flags dangling from the rafters, three stadium-size video screens flash the name of the conference: reclaiming america for christ. These are the evangelical activists behind the nation's most effective political machine -- one that brought more than 4 million new Christian voters to the polls last November, sending George W. Bush back to the White House and thirty-two new pro-lifers to Congress. But despite their unprecedented power, fundamentalists still see themselves as a persecuted minority, waging a holy war against the godless forces of secularism. To rouse themselves, they kick off the festivities with "Soldiers of the Cross, Arise," the bloodthirstiest tune in all of Christendom: "Seize your armor, gird it on/Now the battle will be won/Soon, your enemies all slain/Crowns of glory you shall gain."

Meet the Dominionists -- biblical literalists who believe God has called them to take over the U.S. government. As the far-right wing of the evangelical movement, Dominionists are pressing an agenda that makes Newt Gingrich's Contract With America look like the Communist Manifesto. They want to rewrite schoolbooks to reflect a Christian version of American history, pack the nation's courts with judges who follow Old Testament law, post the Ten Commandments in every courthouse and make it a felony for gay men to have sex and women to have abortions. In Florida, when the courts ordered Terri Schiavo's feeding tube removed, it was the Dominionists who organized round-the-clock protests and issued a fiery call for Gov. Jeb Bush to defy the law and take Schiavo into state custody. Their ultimate goal is to plant the seeds of a "faith-based" government that will endure far longer than Bush's presidency -- all the way until Jesus comes back.
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"Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost," Kennedy says. "As the vice regents of God, we are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our literature and arts, our sports arenas, our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors -- in short, over every aspect and institution of human society." ...
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The most vivid proof of the Christianizing of Capitol Hill comes at the final session of Reclaiming America. Rep. Walter Jones, a lanky congressman from North Carolina, gives a fire-and-brimstone speech that would have gotten him laughed out of Washington thirty years ago. In today's climate, however, he's got a chance of passing his pet project, the Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act, which would permit ministers to endorse political candidates from their pulpits, effectively converting their tax-exempt churches into Republican campaign headquarters. ....
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kimmerlingCan a “Patriotic” Mob Take Over the Universities? | by Baruch Kimmerling* | www.dissidentvoice.org | March 29, 2005

In the American academy, there is currently an organized campaign by some public figures to vilify prominent researchers and departments that are regarded as “anti-American” or even as “anti-Semitic” because their research and teaching are not in accordance with the views of the recent American administration. Universities are especially at risk if their faculty members are of Arab or -- even “worse” -- of Palestinian origin. The recent scandalous decision of the New York City Department of Education to bar Rashid Khalidi, one of Columbia University’s finest scholars, from instructing public school teachers is an example of this effort. Indeed Khalidi, a first-rate academic and a genuine intellectual, has often spoken of both the discriminatory laws within Israel that favor Jews and of the oppression of Palestinians in the occupied territories, facts that no honest and informed person would contest. One the other hand, he has consistently condemned suicide bombings as "war crimes," while asserting the right of Palestinians to resist the occupation without harming Israeli civilians. Many Jewish intellectuals in Israel and around the world share these completely legitimate opinions.
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This assault on academic freedom by a coalition of necons and zealous Jewish students supported by some Jewish “mainstream” organizations (like the ZOA) may have effects on American higher education that are similar to the purges conducted by the Rapp-Coudert Committee of the 1940s and later by officials during the McCarthy era. Another instructive example is the dramatic fall in the quality of teaching and research that occurred when rebellious students took over some excellent European universities in the sixties. ....
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For several years, a pseudo-academic neo-conservative think tank operating the pompously-named website “Campus Watch,” denounced academics who are deemed to have shown "hatred of Israel," or “anti-Americanism.” Many of the prominent professors dealing with Middle Eastern issues are listed there and are accused of the unpardonable sin of of supporting the “Palestinian cause,” or, even worse, of encouraging terrorism. The site wants students -- in an act reminiscent of Nazi and Communist regimes -- to inform on professors who are guilty of "campus anti-Semitism." The main initiators of this campaign are Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes who was, in a bit of unintentional irony, appointed in 2003 by President Bush to the board of governors the US Peace Institute. Moreover, this think tank has encouraged students to “monitor” lecturers in some of the nation’s most prestigious universities—such as Princeton, Yale, and Stanford. Reports of their “unpatriotic bias” are published on the website which aims —in the best of Orwellian language—to “debunk” the abuse of academic freedom. Students are also encouraged to write complaints to their institution’s newspaper. ...
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... In fact every faculty member who appears in the public sphere and doesn’t adopt an ultra-nationalist stance has an excellent chance of having his or her words taken out of context or reinterpreted and of being labeled a “self-hating Jew” or a “traitor.” There is an even more vulgar American Jewish list that includes about 7,000 names (in addition to email addresses and even photos) of many Jewish-American and Israeli academics and Reform Rabbis who are described as “traitors” and “non-Jewish”. The list’s preferred technique is to tar dissenters with labels like Communist, leftist or to equate them with Jewish collaborators of the Nazis (like Judenrats or kapos). ...
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Genuine academic freedom can continue only if universities refuse to let the mobs overrun them. No single institution or professional organization (even not The American Association of University Professors) can fight this intellectual totalitarianism alone and the university leadership carries a special responsibility to stand up to those who would let ideology trump scholarship. As such, I wonder for instance why that Khalidi’s colleagues at Columbia and at New York City’s other fine universities, failed, regardless of their own political orientations, to declare non-cooperation with the Department of Education in solidarity with their discriminated colleague.

* This article was submitted to “Chronicle for Higher Education” and rejected.

Baruch Kimmerling is a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Among his recent books are Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War Against the Palestinians
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massadstatementtocommittee: "Statement to the Ad Hoc Committee1 | March 14, 2005 | Joseph Massad

I have prepared a statement to read to you. I would be happy to answer your questions
afterwards. Before I begin, however, I want to ascertain that as professor Katzneslson has
informed me, the only complaints that your committee has heard about me are the two
complaints that the press reported from my students, namely the complaint by Noah Liben
and the complaint by Deena Shanker. ...

I appear before you today because of a campaign of intimidation to which I have been
subjected for over three years. While this campaign was started by certain members of the
Columbia faculty, and by outside forces using some of my students as conduits, it soon
expanded to include members of the Columbia administration, the rightwing tabloid press,
the Israeli press, and more locally the Columbia Spectator. Much of this preceded the David
Project film “Columbia Unbecoming,” and the ensuing controversy. In the following
statement, I will provide you with the history of this coordinated campaign, including the facts
pertaining to the intimidation to which I am being subjected by the Columbia University
administration, most manifestly through the convening of your own committee before which I
appear today out of a combined sense of intimidation and obligation and not because I
recognize its legitimacy. You need to bear with the details of the following narrative, as the
campaign of intimidation against me is most insidious in its details.
...
During the same semester, in April 2002, I was attacked and misquoted by the Spectator
after attending an on-campus rally in support of Palestinians under Israeli military attack in
the West Bank and Gaza, ...and an op-ed piece and letters were published in the Spectator
accusing me of “anti-Semitism” for a lecture I had given at the Middle East Institute in
February 2002.7 The op-ed piece by a junior at Barnard named Daphna Berman, who was
not my student, drew parallels between a swastika found in a law school bathroom and my
lecture and rebuked the university for allowing me to speak out:
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On June 25 2002, Daniel Pipes and one Jonathan Schanzer published an article in the
New York Post titled “Extremists on Campus,” in which they listed me as one such extremist
and complained that I use my class as a “soapbox for anti-Israeli polemics.” ...
...
n late January 2003, I began to write a column to the Egyptian Weekly Al-Ahram which
deals mostly with Palestinian-Israeli affairs and with the Arab World more generally. Every
time I published an article, Kramer and Pipes would write about it, as would new student
recruits that they had on campuses. ...
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We will see how the false claim attributed to me by Rabbi Sheer that I said that “the Zionists
are the new Nazis,” a claim I never made, would find its way to Ariel Beery who would make
the same claim in the video “Columbia Unbecoming,”19 as would Noah Liben in his
description of my course --a false claim that would be repeated ad absurdum in the media. ...
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The Columbia Spectator ran an editorial asking me to respond to the allegations. They
wrote me and called me asking that I issue a statement. I agreed with their editorial page
editor, Rachael Scarborough King, on the number of words and sent it to them. They
refused to publish it unless I cut it to 1600 words, 400 words below what they had agreed to.
I cut down my statement and resent it. They still refused to publish it. The editorial page
editor, Ms. King sent me an apology about her sense of shame that the editor in chief
“overruled” her and refused to run it. I have kept our E-mail correspondence. I opted to post
my response to the allegations on my Columbia Webpage on November 3, 2005, against the
advice of the Provost, who counseled that my silence was of more benefit to me. The
Spectator would later publish Charles Jacobs, the director of the David Project’s response to
my statement.25
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As for the claim made by Ariel Beery, whom I have never met and who has never been my
student, that my “favorite description is the Palestinian as the new Jew and the Jew as the
new Nazi.” Such a statement is an outright lie. Beery gets this quote not from anything I said
or wrote, but from the fabrication made up by Rabbi Sheer on his Hillel web posting of
January 4th 2004. ....
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Deena Shanker is lying in all three versions of her story. I have never asked her or any
student to leave my class no matter what question they asked. In fact, I never asked any of
my students to leave class for any reason. I have no visual memory of Deena Shanker who
never came to office hours or spoke with me after class. The incident she describes has
never taken place. ...
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In the aftermath of the film, I have received, and still receive, a barrage of hate mail and racist E-Emails and voicemail messages. The first such E-mail message was from a medical school professor called Moshe Rubin. Professor Rubin wrote me on October 20th, the same day as the first report was published in the Sun. Under the subject heading “Anti-Semite” he
wrote:

“Go back to Arab land where Jew hating is condoned - get the hell out of America - you are a disgrace - and a pathetic typical arab liar - Moshe Rubin” ...
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President Bollinger’s Failure to Defend the Faculty

The response of the Columbia University administration to the David Project was swift. As I will show below, in statement and action, Columbia’s President Bollinger has prejudged the accused faculty, and failed to defend us or the MEALAC department, and he refused to defend Columbia’s own record of pluralism and tolerance, the variety of courses the university offers on the Middle East, or Columbia’s established commitment to promote Jewish and Israel Studies. Instead President Bollinger and his administration, as the evidence I will present will show, gave legitimacy to the film “Columbia Unbecoming,” referred to its claims as facts, and promised an “investigation.” His subsequent statements and actions have emboldened those engaged in the campaign to intimidate me and would confirm to the public that the allegations against me are in fact true, at least, as far as he was concerned. Let me illustrate how this transpired.
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Bollinger never contacted me to check whether this is true and has not seen copies of my syllabi. While he claimed that he was answering a hypothetical question to New York Magazine, he would soon be so emboldened by the very repetition of the claims against me that he would abandon the necessity he initially saw for the hypothetical caveat. This is how the reporter of the Jewish Week put it: ...
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The matter of the committee charge is of grave importance. I requested and had a meeting with Vice President Dirks in his office on December 9 to discuss this particular matter. I told him then that I would not consider the ad-hoc committee a legitimate body unless it included in its charge the investigation of claims of intimidation of faculty by students, by administrators, and by off campus pressure groups. He responded positively to my concerns ...
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I am very concerned about the choice of Floyd Abrams as your advisor, a position whose mandate has not been made public. Mr. Abrams is publicly identified with pro-Israeli politics and activism. He has spoken at fund raisers for causes in Israel,38 has worked and consulted with the Anti-Defamation League, one of the parties campaigning against me, and received a major award from it in 2003, the Hubert H. Humphrey Award, and has endorsed the book The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz who has been speaking publicly in lectures and to the media against me, in the context of the ongoing witch-hunt, alleging that I support terrorism. In his blurb endorsing Dershowitz’s book, Abrams states:
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Given these statements by Abrams, the decision to appoint him as advisor to this committee conveys at the least the appearance of partiality.
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An attack on my scholarship therefore is not only an attack on me and on MEALAC but on Columbia’s political science department, on prestigious academic presses, including Columbia University Press, and on the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), an opinion expressed by Martin Kramer who also condemns Middle East Studies at Columbia and MESA itself. I should affirm here that President Bollinger is under the impression that he can set the research agenda for Middle East scholarship at Columbia much better than Columbia’s Middle East faculty. He told the Jewish Week that “we need to integrate better than we have other fields that have knowledge relevant to the work being done in MEALAC. What is the relationship, for example, between the environmental facts of life in the Middle East and Asia, or its diseases, and the culture there?” 45 This retreat to 19th century climatology and medical anthropology is disturbing. Would President Bollinger also think that there is a relationship between “environmental facts, its diseases and the culture” of African Americans or of American Jews?
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I am further chilled in this regard by reports that at the recent general meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Bollinger sought to change the fifty-year tradition regarding how tenure cases are decided at Columbia when he stated that he and the trustees, in accordance with the statutes but in contravention of a fifty-year tradition, would want to have the final say in tenure cases in the future.48
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In conclusion, the foregoing has given you the minimum of details and historical narrative regarding this coordinated campaign from inside and outside the university targeting me, my job, and my chances for tenure, based on my political views, my political writings, and my nationality. That the Columbia University administration acted as a collaborator with the witch-hunters instead of defending me and offering itself as a refuge from rightwing McCarthyism has been a cause of grave personal and professional disappointment to me. I am utterly disillusioned with a university administration that treats its faculty with such contempt and am hoping against hope that the faculty will rise to the task before them and force President Bollinger to reverse this perilous course on which he has taken Columbia’s faculty and students. The major goal of the witch-hunters is to destroy the institution of the university in general. I am merely the entry point for their political project. As the university is the last bastion of free-thinking that has not yet fallen under the authority of extreme rightwing forces, it has become their main target. The challenge before us is therefore to be steadfast in fighting for academic freedom.
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