[wvns] America’s New McCarthyism in Academia
In Academic Circles, Criticism Of Israel Is Increasingly Off-Limits
America's New McCarthyism
By Larry Cohler-Esses
Oct. 28, 2007
The Nation
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/26/opinion/main3415521.shtml
Conservative activist David Horowitz, founder of Students for Academic
Freedom, addresses a public hearing Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2006, at Temple
University. His FrontPage magazine was one of the first to criticize
Barnard College professor Nadia Abu El-Haj's book, "Facts On The
Ground." (AP)
Meet Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj, a notorious Barnard College professor
now up for tenure who:
claims the ancient Israelite kingdoms are a "pure political fabrication,"
denies the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE and instead blames its
destruction on the Jews,
does not speak or read Hebrew yet had the temerity to publish a book
on Israeli archaeology that demanded such expertise,
is so ignorant of her topic that she quotes one archaeologist on how a
dig might have damaged the ancient palaces of Solomon - oblivious to
the fact that those palaces, if they existed, were far from the site
in question.
None of these charges are true. You could look it up. I did, in
El-Haj's book "Facts on the Ground," about which these charges are
made. The statements for which a network of right-wing critics assail
her book are not there.
I asked Paula Stern, the Barnard alum who has organized an online
petition demanding that El-Haj be denied tenure, how she squared her
petition's charges with El-Haj's book. "The petition takes pieces of
criticisms from experts. It may not be quoted 100 percent accurate,"
she admitted. Still, more than 2,500 people, including many Barnard
and Columbia alumni, have signed on to its claims. Tellingly, Stern,
who now lives in the West Bank, voiced astonishment at being asked to
justify her charges in terms of what El-Haj's book actually says.
"I've spoken to many newspapers," she said. "No one has done what
you've done."
I looked that up, too. In the key media venues, at least, Stern was
right; and not just with regard to her target. In case after case, a
network of right-wing activists has started an online furor based on a
mélange of distorted or provably false charges against someone
involved in Middle East studies. They supported these charges with
quotes yanked out of context or entirely made up and wielded a broad
brush of guilt by association. Right-wing media megaphoned the
charges, stoking the furor. And mainstream media ultimately noticed
and responded, often focusing their stories on the furor rather than
the facts.
Under pressure from these assaults, some academic institutions buckle
and a professor's career is derailed; in other cases it is permanently
stained. More insidious, even when tenure puts an academic beyond the
reach of his or her assailants, more vulnerable junior faculty and
grad students take note. "There certainly is a sense among faculty and
grad students that they're being watched, monitored," said Zachary
Lockman, president of the Middle East Studies Association. "People are
always looking over their shoulder, feeling that whatever they say -
in accurate or, more likely, distorted form - can end up on a website.
It definitely has a chilling effect."
This is the modus operandi of the New McCarthyism. It targets a new
enemy for our era: Muslims, Arabs and others in the Middle East field
who are identified as stepping over an unstated line in criticizing
Israel, as radical Islamists, as just plain radical or as in some way
sympathetic to terrorists. Its purveyors include Campus Watch, run by
Arab studies scholar Daniel Pipes; the David Project, supported by the
Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation; and David Horowitz's
FrontPage Magazine (in October Horowitz organized an "Islamo-Fascism
Awareness Week" on campuses across the nation).
Their efforts often appear to be linked. As first noted by blogger
Richard Silverstein, the earliest web attack on El-Haj's book was
posted simultaneously by Campus Watch and FrontPage, in October 2005.
Alexander Joffe, identified as a professor at SUNY, Purchase,
published a harshly negative review of the book in The Journal of Near
Eastern Studies that same month. The prestigious journal did not note
- and was not informed - that he was then-director of Campus Watch.
Soon after, he became research director for the David Project. Less
prominent researchers like Stern, the online PipeLine News and writers
such as Beila Rabinowitz and William Mayer provide raw material to the
more well-known portals, such as Pipes and Horowitz. Pipes's and
Horowitz's material is, in turn, picked up by key conservative papers
like the New York Post and New York Sun.
There is an undeniable security threat, but as in the 1950s the New
McCarthyites use it as a base for demagogy. Their distinguishing
feature is not concern about this threat but cynical indifference to
the truth or decency of their charges. Take the case of Debbie
Almontaser, the New York City public high school principal forced to
resign in August as head of a new Arabic/English secondary school. The
furor revolved around her attempt in an interview with the Post to
explain the meaning of, rather than simply condemn, T-shirts bearing
the words Intifada NYC. This provoked a firestorm. United Federation
of Teachers chief Randi Weingarten, a key supporter of Almontaser's
school, condemned her in a letter to the Post. The next day Almontaser
resigned - a move publicly welcomed by Schools Chancellor Joel Klein
and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Almontaser has since stated she was told
to resign or the school, which she founded, would be closed.
In its obscuring, anodyne postmortem on the affair, the New York Times
vaguely described Almontaser as a victim of the city's "treacherous
ethnic and ideological political currents" rather than of specific
charges that were demonstrably false - like Pipes's widely publicized
claim, based on a truncated quotation, that she denied Muslims or
Arabs were involved in the 9/11 attacks. The Times report on El-Haj
adopted a similar hands-off stance, simply quoting supporters and
attackers. It did not once compare the activists' charges with what
El-Haj actually said in her book.
As it happens, Almontaser's forced resignation was the city Education
Department's second dive in the face of pressure from the New
McCarthyites. Three years ago it dismissed Professor Rashid Khalidi,
the esteemed director of Columbia's Middle East Institute, from
lecturing teachers enrolled in professional development courses. The
dismissal came in response to a Sun article claiming Khalidi had
denounced Israel as "a 'racist' state with an 'apartheid system.'"
Khalidi denied the quote fragments as they were used in the story. "I
do not think Zionism is racist," he told the Forward. "When we talk
about some of the contemporary laws, there are policies that I
consider racist and discriminatory." Asked if the department had
verified Khalidi's purported remarks before dismissing him, a
department spokesman avoided answering Times columnist Joyce Purnick.
Khalidi still has his day job, as does - so far - a nontenured
Columbia colleague, Joseph Massad, who according to a special school
investigative committee was falsely accused several years ago of
discriminating against Jewish and Israeli students. The same cannot be
said for Norman Finkelstein, who was terminated at Chicago's DePaul
University in September after the school's president - in a rare
departure from standard procedure - rejected the overwhelming tenure
approval Finkelstein had received at both the departmental and college
levels. Finkelstein's scholarly work has accused Jewish groups of
exploiting the Holocaust and Israel of egregious human rights
violations. He had incurred the special wrath of Harvard law professor
Alan Dershowitz, whose book defending Israel Finkelstein had devoted
an entire book to savaging. Dershowitz, in turn, tried unsuccessfully
to prevent the University of California Press from publishing
Finkelstein's book, and sent Finkelstein's tenure committees a dossier
that he said documented his "most egregious academic sins, and
especially his outright lies, misquotations, and distortions."
Clearly, the tenure committees were not impressed by Dershowitz's
claims. DePaul president Dennis Holtschneider, for his part, denied
that Dershowitz's intervention affected his decision.
Beshara Doumani, a University of California history professor, has
mapped the systemic strategy of the New McCarthyism, highlighting that
more than just its targets are new. First and foremost, private
advocacy groups, not Congressional committees, are by and large
today's means of pressuring academic administrations - at least, so
far. These groups often retain important ties to government figures.
But they are most focused on organizing alumni and students, with an
eye toward generating public outrage and eventually government and
donor pressure.
"I'm worried about untenured professors trying to get tenure," said
Doumani, co-chair of the Middle East Studies Association's Committee
on Academic Freedom. "I'm worried about entire departments saying, 'We
need people in Middle East positions, but we're not going to hire
certain kinds of people. It involves too much headache, too much
risk.' How do you quantify that? You can't. But it's going around. I
can tell you, it's a real issue."
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