ZNet, MA
April 16 2005
Realities and Roots of Pro-Israeli Harassment at Columbia University
by Mark Roberts April 16, 2005
and M. Junaid Alam
Introduction by M. Junaid Alam
Readers who have been following the attacks on Arab professors at
Columbia University may have read my recent investigative article on
the subject. The piece elicited many positive responses, including
from Columbia staff and students. One such respondent was a recent
European graduate who shared some startling revelations about the
university’s real atmosphere. Relating his experience below, and
using the pseudonym “Mark Roberts” to avoid the kind of vicious
attacks Zionist groups are notorious for, he describes how Zionist
students have attacked Muslims inside and outside the classroom, and
exposes the heavily pro-Israel nature of Columbia Law School. He then
explains in detail how this comprises merely one part of a broader
campaign of attacks on intellectual freedom and Palestinian rights on
campuses across the country. In fact, the broad outlines of his
account have been confirmed by Columbia’s Ad Hoc Grievenace
Committee. Tasked with investigating the claims of anti-Semitism in
the department, the panel found the claims untrue – but noted several
instances of harassment in the University mounted by Zionist students
themselves.
———–
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. But after finishing my undergraduate
degree in Europe and enrolling at Columbia as a graduate student, I
was struck by 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, 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 to violently repress anybody defending
the Palestinians. Students belonging to the Middle Eastern group at
the Law School were practically spat upon, their tables overturned –
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 now 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 what the late Professor
Said had to deal with 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.”
After September 11, fanatical Zionists began enrolling in Middle East
classes at Columbia. Those dealing with Iran have been a favourite. I
vividly remember one of these classes where the presentation of a
pro-Israel student supposedly on Iran turned into a defense of Israel
and an attack on Palestinians. In fact, Iran was not even mentioned
once in the presentation. In Europe this could not have happened. The
professor would have politely told the student that Israel was not
the topic of the class. But not at Columbia, where terrified
professors allow these poor “silenced” and “stifled” students go on
interminably (and boringly) about Mother Israel.
In this same class during another session the (foreign-born)
professor’s uncontroversial, at any rate in the real world, assertion
that “Palestinians are oppressed” was met by the fanatics’ outrage.
The professor, no doubt fearing reprisals, did not dwell on the issue
and barely defended himself while the “silenced” students angrily
protested. That European students came to the professor’s rescue and
initiated a debate after class would seem to suggest that it is not
Israel’s supporters students but its critics who are “silenced” and
“stifled..” The European students were then accused by their
pro-Israeli counterparts of being – surprise, surprise –
“anti-Semites.”
Indeed, one wonders why these fanatics feel it necessary to defend
Israel in class. Isn’t such defense redundant when these same
“silenced” students offer their partisan views in the school’s
newspaper on a weekly basis? And, truly the anti-Semitic oppression
weighs heavily at the Law School, where only a handful of Arab and
Muslim students gain admission while more than half of the accepted
candidates in the S.J.D program every single year are Israelis, a
country of 6 million people in a world with 6 billion inhabitants. It
might also be mentioned that the few Arab and Muslim students often
contemplate leaving or long for the last term there because of the
fanaticism of those “silenced” and stifled” apologists for Israel.
The truth is that Columbia has been a refuge for 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
here 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.”
It is precisely when their area of ideological “safety” was being
eroded by more students coming to terms with reality that these
pro-Israeli students (and those outside front groups behind them)
started running out of arguments, felt increasingly cornered and had
to turn to the ultimate argument: “stifling of voices”, and
invariably, “anti-Semitism”.
The ADL has contributed decisively to this travesty. That the ADL
intervened in the matter and solicited “punishment” against
professors offering different views not in accordance Zionist
mythology suggests that these students were not that “silenced” or
“discriminated”. The production of a video by the Boston-based
pro-Israel group, the David Project, shows that these students have
decided to take recourse to outside sources to vent their
frustrations. These outside sources possess considerable resources in
their campaign to smear Columbia University.
The attack on professors who criticise Israel and its policies also
comes at a time when even the Israeli government has realized that
the public relations battle has been lost. The Israeli government has
thus repeatedly 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 from the belief that the situation is irreversible in other
locations. And it is with this understanding 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 player. Mr.
Sharansky offered a tough critique of the “dismal state of Jewish
campus activism in the United States” in the Forward magazine1 and
decided to take the matter into his own hands. The Ministry
celebrated “back to campus advocacy weekends” for foreign students
enrolled in summer courses at Israeli universities, where
participants 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, in Uri Avnery’s
words, “an uncompromising activist against the human (and any other)
rights of the Palestinians in the occupied territories” is most
intriguing.2 Mr Sharansky, from human rights defender to extreme
right figure, “systematically enlarged the settlements on
expropriated Arab land in the West Bank”3 as Israeli Housing Minister
and now belongs to the group of Likud rebels that opposes the
disengagement plan in Gaza, meaning that he is a partisan of the
Greater Israel idea against any consideration for a negotiated
settlement of the problem – or international law for that matter. Mr
Sharansky himself abandoned the coalition his party of former
immigrants of the Soviet Union formed with Barak’s Labor Party for
offering “too many concessions” to the Palestinians on the issue of
Jerusalem.
Countless organizations and internet sites have been created to
support Israel’s cause on U.S campuses and media, and still, Israel’s
image does not improve. That must be the real cause of concern for
those who claim to have been “silenced” and that is why they are
resorting to outside guidance.4 Mitchell Bard, executive director of
the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, and author of “Myths and
Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict” maintained as early as
June 2003 that “the prevalence of outspoken anti-Israeli professors
remains the most insidious danger to Israel’s standing on the
campus.”5
Ronald S. Lauder, president of the Jewish National Fund, and Jay
Schottenstein, a board member of Media Watch International, have
argued that they found “Jewish students to be demoralized,
intimidated and, worst of all, apathetic about their homeland (sic)”,
and decided to create the “Caravan for Democracy program” in 2002.
That not all Jewish students identify with Israel’s policies is
unimportant, apparently. The existence of groups like “Jews Against
the Occupation”, “Jews for Peace and Palestine and Israel” presumably
does not matter for these ideologues.
Mr Lauder and Mr Schottenstein pointed out in an article that
appeared in the November 2003 edition of Forward magazine that
“Jewish students are confronting unprecedented anti-Israeli and
anti-Semitic aggression (sic) at their schools.”6 Affirming that “in
this age of information, when our enemies (sic) have remarkably
managed to loose their misleading slanders upon every university
(sic)”, they conclude that the solutions are twofold. The first
response to the “current college crisis” should be to “bring top
pro-Israel speakers to campuses from coast to coast”. That would not
constitute propaganda, I assume. But secondly, and more important,
“effective dialogue (sic) with the Middle East studies faculties
which are known for their anti-Israel orientations” must be promoted.
By “effective dialogue” it is understood to “confront professors and
departments…by those with the proper ability to respond”, to “reshape
the rhetorical landscape in these faculties…and biases and unbalanced
curriculums (sic)” and to protest and apply “pressure…to change them
(referring to curriculums and hostile professors)”.
Mr Lauder and Mr Schottenstein also complain that “one university
which would have never been perceived as anti-Israel held a
university authorized seminar on ‘Why anti-Zionism is not
antisemitism´”. So apparently, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are
exact equivalents. All those attacking any measure carried out by
Israel and defending the legitimate rights of the Palestinians
emboldened in countless international resolutions are not driven by
any concern for justice, they are all “anti-semites” – and that
includes the Jewish groups mentioned previously among many others. It
is further suggested that “Jewish students and their professors must
be taught to effectively utilize their campus and local media to
explain Israel’s counter-arguments”.
As we can see, the smear campaign against Columbia professors who
dare to criticize Mother Israel in the midst of a pro-Zionism campus
is nothing new and is part of a well-orchestrated campaign stemming
from a feeling of impotence. And since the students are not going to
change, the target of pro-Israel students and all those considerable
outside organizations providing support to them should be the
professors who offer dissenting views.
But intimidating measures will not work. Dean Bollinger should be
criticised for succumbing to the pressure of a group well-known for
carrying out a witch hunt against anybody daring to criticise Mother
Israel in all circles and walks of life. Cancelling a class – as one
professor has done or has been forced to do after the pressure of
events – suggests that academic freedom and freedom of thought are at
danger. Furthermore it constitutes a dangerous precedent. What if any
other group did not like the contents of a class in which they were
criticised ? Should that class be cancelled ? What if Turkish groups
engaged in a campaign to protest against classes that mention the
Armenian genocide ? Or what if Armenian groups pressured Mr Bollinger
to protest lectures where the existence of an Armenian holocaust is
put into question? Would he also cancel that class and punish the
professors that teach it?
What if a professor claims that the US sanctions on Iraq that killed
nearly a million people were genocidal, should he or she be
reprimanded? What if Palestinian students demanded that all classes
where they are criticised and vilified (and there are many) be
cancelled? Of course they do not possess similar backing and
financial means from obscure outside sources so they could not
produce a video.
Muslims and Islam, especially after September 11th, have been
vilified, insulted and defamed in the press and also in academic
circles, including Columbia. For example at the Law School right
after the attacks of September the 11th pro-Israel Law Students tried
to present a movie by Steve Emerson, who has been notorious for
waging jihad on the religion of Islam. Emerson, for example, was
quick to blame Islamists for the Oklahoma bombings of 1995 and his
thesis and opinions have been widely discredited. Had it not been for
the protests of a few Muslim students at the Law School the video
would have been projected in the failed attempt to identify
Palestinian resistance to occupation with radical Islamic Al-Qaida
terrorism which has been a long desired goal of the right-wing
Israeli government and its defenders (including those at Columbia).
September the 11th offered a great opportunity to discredit and
delegitimize the Palestinian discontent against the occupation and
pro-Israeli groups tried to take advantage, even if they failed
miserably.
That Columbia succumbed to outside pressure from a well-organized
financially powerful pro-Israel group indicates that the freedom of
academic institutions in the US is subordinated to financial and
economic interests. The resources groups like the ADL possess in
order to carry out their witch hunts are enormous. The ADL should
serve to protect the memory of the Holocaust and real anti-Semitism.
Instead, the ADL is one of the organisations that actively promotes
the conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-semitism, which are
completely different issues.
The professors being criticized are, in fact, just the closest thing
Columbia has to fostering a reasonable debate about the Middle East
on campus and in New York as a whole. That is why they are being
penalized. They are also reprimanded for expressing what the majority
of the world already thinks. At a time when the gap between what the
rest of the world thinks and what the U.S thinks has never been
wider, especially on the Middle East, debate should be encouraged,
not threatened.
Is the ADL going to persecute Jews and non-Jews alike who criticise
the fact that the creation of the state of Israel was achieved
through impure methods? Why would 3.5 million Palestinians be rotting
in refugee camps in other countries, not being allowed to return to
the places where they had some land, a house, an apartment, keys on
hand? Many Israeli historians have taken the time to document the
facts of Zionist ethnic cleansing. The hysterical response is that
this represents questioning the “existence” of Israel and its right
of exist, as if Israel is some kind of moribund patient in bed and
not a powerful country. We should remember this is a country awash in
billions of dollars form financial and military aid from the US, a
sophisticated army, and methods of attack so powerful it led
independent forces at the UN (not acting under US pressure as the
rest of their peers) to suggest imposing an arms embargo on that
country in May 2004.
The witch hunt has also recently extended to Hebrew University, so
Jews who dare to criticize Israel policies or history should be aware
that they are not “immune” either as the ADL themselves have
explicitly stated with that very same language.7
Will the ADL succeed in eliminating intellectual discourse and
research on those topics everywhere? What will it do with European
universities which decided to eliminate or drastically reduce
academic cooperation with Israeli institutions in 2002 because of
that country’s continuous violations of human rights? Is smearing
them what the ADL was created for? Part of what characterizes
totalitarianism and fascism is the elimination of dissent and the
suppression of independent thought. In that respect what the ADL is
doing falls clearly within the parameters of fascism. It could also
be called intellectual terrorism. Taking a few quotes out of context
in order to smear a particular professor or a group of professors
that do not agree with your policies constitutes a method that only
inquisition-type tribunals would apply.
It could also very easily be used the other way around. We could take
a few quotes from pro-Israeli or Zionist professors which as
mentioned in some institutions comprise the majority of the faculty,
and I am convinced that the results would be more “spectacular”.
Would these groups apply any pressure when professors on campus
completely disregard or even show scorn for the Palestinians’ right
to existence ? Or for their right of safety? What will they do when
pro-Israel students demonstrate rudeness and contempt, as they do
quite often?
Facts have to be shown precisely in class and taking recourse to
outside forces is cowardly. But it is here when the pro-Israeli lobby
and its students have failed. Because the reality is that the world
and especially educated people at universities have started to come
to terms with the Palestinians’ suffering. Most Europeans, maybe
because of the geographic proximity, or maybe because of the lesser
influence of pro-Israeli groups on campus, or because of a far more
balanced media8 , understood this long ago. I guess that I forgot
that we Europeans are all anti-Semites and that includes also even
those with Jewish roots.
What has happened, quite simply, is that Israeli supporters have run
out of arguments to justify the military occupation and all it
entails. They are pushed into a corner out of which there is no exit.
It remains extremely difficult to justify dispossession and injustice
in the inter-connected world we live in nowadays. What is especially
troubling for pro-Israeli supporters is that not only Arab or Middle
Eastern students but also European students and increasingly American
students have started to complain against Israeli violations on
campus.
Caught off-guard ABD left without arguments, Zionist students have
resorted to powerful outside groups and lobbies to come to the rescue
with cries of “bias.” But this ploy is merely a desperate reaction
aimed at justifying the unjustifiable, and it will not succeed.
——————————————————————————–
“Mark Roberts” is the pseudonym for a recent European graduate of
Columbia University.
Notes:
1.”Tour of U.S. Schools Reveals Why Zionism is Flunking on Campus”,
article appeared on Forward magazine ( ), October 24th
2003.
2.”Natan Sharansky: Minister of Ignorance, Bush’s Guru”, by Uri
Avnery, article appeared on , March 10th 2005.
3.Id.
4.Let us just name a few. The Israel on Campus Coalition, a
“partnership of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation
and Hillel” is committed to “promoting Israel education and advocacy
on campus (sic) in cooperation with a network of national
organizations”. The “Israel on Campus Coalition” and “Israel Campus
Beat” members include groups like the “American-Israel Cooperative
Enterprise (AICE)”, the notorious AIPAC, the ADL, the Committee for
Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), Hillel, the
Israel Program Center, the Israel University Consortium, MediaWatch
International, or the USD/Hagshama of the
World Zionist Organization.
5.On Israel Campus Beat’s website. Reference:
6.”Back to School for Israel Advocacy”, by Ronald S. Lauder and Jay
Schottenstein, article appeared on Forward magazine (forward.com),
November 14th 2003
7.”When anti-Israeli sentiment comes from within”, by Yair Sheleg,
Haaretz newspaper, online edition, March 10th, 2005.
8.Besides the ADL let us not forget the Inquisition represented by
groups and websites like , ,
or countless others.
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