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Democrats on the Brink: Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair; Innocent Lads, Depraved Killers and Predatory Priests by JoAnn Wypijewski; Torture Air, Inc.: the Road to Rendition: by Jeffrey St. Clair. Remember these stories are available exclusively in the print edition of CounterPunch. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 |
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Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY  Today's Stories March 26 / 27, 2005 Gary Leupp March 25, 2005 Scott Richard
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Weekend Edition Columbia "Unbecoming"A European Student's Experience at ColumbiaBy MARC ROBERT Before studying at Columbia University I hadn't thought much about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Coming from Europe I had no specific links to the area. Then, after finishing my undergraduate degree in Europe and enrolling at Columbia as a graduate student, what struck me most was just the opposite of what some are complaining of nowadays: that is, how fanatically pro-Israel Columbia was. After being at Columbia for a while it occurred to me that international organisations and the UN, on the one hand and Columbia and New York, on the other hand, functioned in parallel universes. At international fora and assemblies, which I followed for my studies, Israeli repression was condemned, and countless resolutions requesting Israel to abide by international law were blocked by the US. At Columbia arguments were concocted to defend Israel. I have been to many universities in many different countries and I have to say that, by far, I have never attended a more closed-minded campus than Columbia. And I am not saying this merely on account of the density of Israeli army T-shirts that can be regularly observed there. By fall 2000 at the beginning of the second intifada, fanatical supporters of Israel sought violently to repress anybody defending the Palestinians. Students belonging to the Middle Eastern group at the Law School were practically spat upon, their tables overturned, etc. - occurrences that in Europe would be inconceivable. On the other hand, maybe due to international condemnation of Israeli policies, a debate was finally opening up on campus. Because they no longer dominate one hundred percent of public discussion, fanatical supporters of Israel on campus claim that their voices are "stifled" and that they are "unwelcome" and "silenced." Consider these recent incidents, which I personally witnessed. When Palestinian students on the main campus distributed flyers by spring 2002 to commemorate the 1948 "nekhba" (disaster), a crowd of Hillel fanatics approached them shouting "terrorists." Had they said that to me or to any other person and had I been in the Palestinian students' shoes, it would have ended up in a fistfight. But it was the Palestinian students and not the Hillel provocateurs who showed extreme restraint. When Dr Mustafa Barghouti (who just finished second in the recent Palestinian elections) came to Columbia to give a talk in November 2003, two Hillel fanatics began to harass him during the Q&A session, heaping ridicule on his presentation as "this wonderful display of propaganda" and charging that "you Palestinians feel like victims, but how about all the weapons you get from Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah?" They then demonized Arabs in the rudest form that I have ever seen. "Thank you for the compliment about my propaganda," Barghouti replied, "but actually we are still learning about this - from you know who." When Barghouti mentioned the 4,000 Palestinians killed one of the Hillel fanatics laughed. A lady stood up and very angrily told them at least not to show their scorn for the victims publicly. When they continued to laugh, a professor told them to shut up. I wonder if that is what is meant by "silencing students who offer opposing views" - that is, rightly telling them to show a little bit of respect towards the keynote speaker and victims of the conflict, just as Israelis expect respect to be shown for their 1,000 dead since 2000. No such vulgarity was on display every time Benjamin Netanyahu came to the Business School to give a talk during the previous years. It also bears comparing the "silencing" to which the late Professor Said was subjected at Columbia. His life was constantly threatened, so much so that he was put under police surveillance. But this silencing wasn't meant to stifle discussion, didn't lead to any public investigation and wasn't a cause of concern by New York politicians. Then there's the stifling of dissenting voices by fanatical Zionist professors at the Law School. Some of them seem to spend all of their waking hours concocting legal alibis in defense of Mother Israel, much like Communist Party hacks did for Mother Russia in the 1930s. For example, at the height of the Israeli incursions of 2002, Professor George Fletcher put forth the long discredited notion that UN Resolution 242 "did not compel Israel to leave all territories." This masterful piece was published in the New York Times as some kind of intellectual breakthrough. Never mind that 242 emphasizes "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war." Other law school professors are avid proponents of Israel exceptionalism - that is, human rights protections like the prohibition on torture must be afforded to everyone except victims of Israeli policy. And, while it is perfectly legitimate to write a paper on the injustices committed against the Palestinian population for a specific class on Human Rights (at the student's risk with respect to the grade), those wishing to conduct more thorough research on the topic after the J.D. degree, for which the assistance of a professor is necessary, have been told that "while the subject may be worth-while, there is no current interest among the faculty." The truth is that Columbia is the last refuge of self-delusional Zealots for Zion. It is precisely when the ideological walls protecting this haven began to crumble that they started shouting about "silenced" and "stifled" voices and anti-Semitism. One doesn't hear this nonsense on European campuses because the zealots know the battle has been lost there: the truth is out about what Israel has done to the Palestinians. But in the U.S. the hope is that by whipping up enough hysteria they can still win here. If they do, it won't be because what they're saying is true but because the rest of us were, yet again, "silenced" and "stifled." In what there has been mounting interest indeed especially after the events of September the 11th has been classes dealing not only about the Middle East, but about Islam. And in substantial cases pro-Israel students have enrolled in these classes not so much out of curiosity or interest, but as a means to confirm their prejudices and as a way of finding valuable "new" arguments to prove their pro-Israeli stand against "pro-Palestinians". You could hear pro-Israel defenders vigorously arguing "but the Qu'ran says this or that" to prove their point that Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims are less civilised or that the Qu'ran justifies atrocities or that Islam is a malignant religion, all as a result of having attended one class on the issue. The point also needs to be make that these classes have been attended by "students" having "worked" for the CIA or other federal agencies. Classes dealing with Iran have also been a favourite selection of pro-Israel students. And many have used those classes to try to garner sympathy for Israel or to offer a partisan political expose or to simply show scorn for that country. I remember very vividly attending one of these classes where the presentation by a pro-Israel student shifted from Iran to the defense of anything Israel does and the criticism and outright scorn for the Palestinian Authority, Arafat, Arabs, Muslims and the like. In fact I do not recall the name of Iran being mentioned even once in the presentation. In Europe such an incident would not have happened. The Professor would have nicely told the student that the defense of Israel did not constitute the topic for the class. At Columbia, Professors, afraid that pro-Israeli students would claim to be "silenced" do not offer resistance and succumb like doves. In the very same class in a different session pro-Israel students vigorously disputed the universally accepted assertion made by the foreign-born Professor that "Palestinians are oppressed". The Professor, for fear of reprisals, did not dwell on the issue and barely defended himself while the "silenced" students angrily and vociferously protested. That European students came to the rescue of the Professor and initiated a debate after the class was over defending what the professor mentioned in passing suggests that it is not the pro-Israel students but the Professors and anyone voicing any sort of criticism of Israel who are silenced. The European students were accused by their pro-Israeli counterparts of "being anti-Semites." Of course I forgot that Palestinians are not oppressed because it is Palestinian tanks that populate Israeli roads, Palestinian helicopters that bomb Jerusalem and Haifa, Palestinian bulldozers that destroy houses in Tel Aviv and American made Palestinian F-16 that target Israeli militants. Columbia unbecoming? Of course the United States and Israel constitute the "axis of good" and Muslim countries find themselves more often than not in the axis of evil, but does that offer a valid explanation for the fact that the student body specially at the Law School is composed from very few students from Muslim countries and practically none from the Arab world ? Or that more than half of the accepted candidates into the S.J.D program every single year are Israelis, a country of 6 million people in a world with 6 billion inhabitants? Of course Israeli students are generally very focused and capable but should they monopolize each year more than half of the candidatures for the doctoral degree in law? Are there no law students in the Arab or Muslim world or Africa or other places? Maybe Columbia is truly unbecoming but not for the ones who claim so. Some of the few students coming from Muslim countries, not necessarily Arabs and not Arab Americans who obviously are used to the prevalent pro-Zionist ambiance, have privately confided to me that the undisguised pro-Zionist mood at the university and specifically at the Law School is something "unbearable" and "without parallel anywhere [they] have been". Even in some cases some confessed to me that they were considering transferring to "other less pro-Zionist schools". An American girl of Middle Eastern origin enrolled in a dual program (meaning that she would share the time for her degree between a school in Europe and Columbia, thereby considerably reducing the time spent at Columbia) told me very frankly that "I am very happy that this is my last year here, I could not stand another year in this place". So maybe Columbia is truly unbecoming. But for reasons quite opposite of those alleged. It is a fact that this constant denial of justice and justification of anything that Israel does turned Columbia and NY in general into the last self-delusional haven for zealots. It is precisely when this area of "safety" was beginning to be eroded by more students coming to terms with reality that these pro-Israeli students (and those who were behind them) started running out of arguments, felt increasingly cornered and had to turn to the ultimate argument, "stifling of voices", and eventually, sooner or later it had to be pronounced, "anti-Semitism". The ADL has decisively contributed to the debate. That the ADL intervened in the matter and solicited "punishment" against professors offering different views not in accord with Zionist myths to President Bollinger suggests that these students were not that "silenced" or "discriminated". The production of a video by a Boston-based pro-Israel group implies that these students have decided to take recourse to outside sources to vent their frustrations. And also that they possess considerable resources and outside backing in their campaign to smear Columbia University. These measures denouncing Professors that criticise Israel and its policies comes at a time also when even the Israeli government has realized that the public relations battle has been lost. The Israeli government has thus repeateadly denounced the "inability of pro-Israel students to respond to the challenges on American campuses" as a reason behind the current failure. That they do not refer to campuses in Europe stems form the belief that the situation is irreversible in other locations. And it is with this purpose that several Israeli Ministries have been involved in an active campaign to "promote pro-Israel activism on American campuses". The Israeli Ministry for Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs under the guidance of Natan Sharansky has been an instrumental piece. Mr. Sharansky offered a tough critique of the "dismal state of Jewish campus activism in the United States" in the Forward magazine and decided to take the matter into his own hands. That Ministry celebrated "back to campus advocacy weekends" for foreign students enrolled in summer courses at Israeli universities where participants, coming from institutions all over Israel, were happily recruited for a financially sponsored weekend near the beach. The students were welcome with the following statements: "lately pro-Palestinian students at U.S campuses have been very successful and some of you have not been active enough and could not confront them probably because you did have the right arguments. This weekend is designed to give you the tools to fight". And then students had to sign up for conferences where those tools were provided and discussed, and CD, CD-Roms and DVDs were distributed with statements like "settlements are not illegal under international law" or "Jerusalem is the undivided capital of the state of Israel" or "why do we have a claim to the whole land" as just some illustrative examples. Students were also told to confront "anti-Israeli" professors by all means. That Mr Sharansky, the erstwhile defender of Human Rights in the Soviet Union now turned into Bush's guru, has become "an uncompromising activist against the human (and any other) rights of the Palestinians in the occupied territories" as Uri Avnery points out should not be a matter of concern, I guess . Mr Sharansky, from human rights defender to the extreme right, "systemat |
