Author: Jonathan Calt Harris
Publication: New York Post
Date: August 25, 2003
URL: http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/4015.htm
This week, Rashid Khalidi starts
his new job as the first Edward Said Chair of Middle East Studies at Columbia
University, as well as director of the school's Middle East Institute.
His arrival augments the school's already acute problems of extremism and
intolerance on the Middle East.
Examples of Columbia's problems:
* Outspoken Palestinian advocates
- openly antagonistic to Israel and Zionism - teach every course offered
on the politics or history of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the department
of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC).
* 78 percent of MEALAC faculty members
signed a petition that compares Israel to apartheid-era South Africa (a
comparison Columbia's President Lee Bollinger called "grotesque and offensive")
and calls for Columbia to divest from companies with interests in Israel.
* Hamid Dabashi, chair of MEALAC
and professor of Iranian studies, declared at an April conference that
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was equal to Attila the Hun as "a
destroyer of civilization" for his role in the liberation of Iraq.
Enter Rashid Khalidi and the Edward
Said chair.
Anonymously endowed, the chair canonizes
the Columbia prof who more than anyone else politicized scholarship in
Middle East studies. In "Ivory Towers on Sand," Martin Kramer writes that
Said "enshrined an acceptable hierarchy of political commitments, with
Palestine at the top, followed by the Arab nation and the Islamic world."
Yet Said is a professor of comparative
literature, not a Middle East specialist, and teaches no courses on the
topic. His sole connection to the Middle East is one of advocacy and polemics,
including defending Palestinian violence. For example, he calls suicide
bombing "a consciously programmed result" of Israel's actions, and insists
that "Sharon wants terrorism, not peace."
Khalidi's views aren't much different.
An unabashed advocate for the Palestinians and an obsessive detractor of
Israel, he claims that Israel (a modern, Western nation) is an "apartheid
system in creation," a "racist" state that "brainwashed" Americans simply
don't understand. He calls Israel's capital, Jerusalem, "an Arab city"
whose control by Israeli "foreigners" is "unacceptable."
In a June 2002 speech to the conference
of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Khalidi reportedly
condemned violence against innocent civilians but then added: "The ones
who are armed, the ones who are soldiers, the ones who are in occupation,
that's different. That's resistance."
Khalidi also lashes out at his own
country - repeatedly. During the Gulf War of 1991, he (wrongly) forecast
that U.S. intervention on Kuwait's side would cause a "backlash" of Arab
unity against America and a power imbalance in the Middle East. And he
characterized popular support for the recent war against the brutal tyrant
Saddam Hussein as an "idiots' consensus," while labeling Deputy Secretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz "a fanatical, extreme right-wing Zionist."
Given this background, two aspects
of the funding around Khalidi are worth noting:
* As director of Columbia's Middle
East Institute, Khalidi will oversee a new influx of federal funds worth
$900,000 over the next three years.
* While other donors to the endowment
of the Edward Said chair are unknown, two of them are 1.) a foundation
headed by Rita Hauser, whose former law firm, Stroock & Stroock &
Lavan, was registered with the Justice Department as an agent for the Palestinian
Authority, and 2.) the Olayan Charitable Trust, a charity affiliated with
the America arm of the Saudi-based Olayan Group.
Columbia's other Middle East faculty
are celebrating Khalidi's imminent arrival. Lisa Anderson, dean of the
School of International and Public Affairs and president of Middle East
Studies Association, said she "can't honestly think of a better person
to recruit to Columbia."
In short, a biased professor is
taking over a biased department, paid for by funds endowed at least in
part by Saudi and Palestinian interest groups - and administering a taxpayer-subsidized
program. (Ironically, those subsidies are justified as improving our national
security.)
It is highly unusual for a university
to make a secret of the donors of a chair; that Columbia's administration
has done so for the Said chair suggests it has something to hide. Faculty,
staff, students, alumni and other Columbia stakeholders should demand the
full story, to be sure that this highly suspect chair isn't funded with
tainted money.
Jonathan Calt Harris is managing
editor of Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum that reviews
and critiques Middle Eastern studies in America.
