Is Everything About Palestine?

The French Revolution Returns to Columbia: Heads Will Roll for the Greater Glory of Palestine and Ahmadinejad, Phyllis Chesler

Shades of Harvard’s Larry Summers! Columbia’s President, Lee Bollinger, has just come under faculty-fire for having mistreated Iran’s President Ahmadinejad, and in so doing, having “sullied the reputation of the University with (his) strident tone.” Bollinger has also been castigated by seventy faculty members for having “allied the University with the Bush administration’s war in Iraq” and for taking “partisan political positions concerning the politics of the Middle East.”

This is no parody. This is a seventy-gun opening salvo and the unmistakable sound of a bloody drumroll; the French Revolution has returned to Columbia’s campus.

I did not think that Columbia should have invited President Ahmadinejad to speak or that President Bollinger was honor-bound to either introduce—or insult him. I wrote about this HERE and HERE.

I am not familiar with the work of all seventy faculty signatories but seven names jumped out at me: Professors Nadia Abu El Haj (an American-born anthropologist of Muslim and Palestinian origin who just received tenure after much controversy); Lila Abu-Lughod (an American-born Muslim-Jewish Palestinian anthropologist); Hamid Dabashi (a Muslim Iranian, who founded the Palestinian Film Project which is dedicated to preserving and safeguarding Palestinian Cinema); Mahmood Mamdani (a South Asian Ugandan anthropologist and political scientist); Rashid Khalidi (an American-born academic of Palestinian origin, the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies, the head of Columbia’s Middle East Institute, former President of the Task Force on Palestine and current editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies); Alice Kessler-Harris (an American-born historian who specializes in gender and labor issues); and Bengali-born Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak.

Is absolutely everything about Palestine? Just asking, a merely rhetorical quibble. And yet, this is not a minor quibble. About six or seven years ago, nearly every feminist and left academic listserv group from whom I received email, began systematically dumping propaganda about Palestine and against America and Israel into the ongoing conversation about psychotherapy, the nature of trauma, contemporary struggles for women’s rights. Anyone who did not salute this particular flag was no longer welcome online or was reduced to silence.

Now, these kinds of academics are staking a more public claim to their campus. For now, let me briefly focus on the work of two of these Columbia signatories.

Bengali feminist and postcolonial academic Chakravarti Spivak writes in a way that renders whatever she is saying fairly incomprehensible. Such aggressive, postmodern obtuseness is often confused with both brilliance and courage. Spivak has nevertheless been lionized for her attack upon the (potential) western feminist critique of non-western cultures as just another kind of imperialism. Spivak has been widely acclaimed for viewing (such imaginary) western feminists as similar to white men who are saving brown women from brown men. She views doing so as both racist and sexist. (continue reading)

Comments

[Skunkfeathers]

So-called "higher education" at it's lowest common dumbnominator: The Columbia Seventy. 'Nuff said.