Unfortunately, youre right in one sense, Anna. <br><br> Im intellectually lazy. If I wasnt, then I would take time to catalogue exactly how this game is played, since you appear to have difficulty acknowledging the facts, as have been played , not just on myself, but an exbuddy of yours.<br><br> Its a very sinister form of chinese whispers, by the end of which the entire character of someone has been deformed way beyond the mark.<br><br> Congratulations. You joined in right at the end to complete the chain with the "Jewish Bankers" stuff.<br><br> Let me repeat the quote for posterity before I move on.....<br><br> <!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Ive lost count of the number of times, theyve been caught out half quoting, or completely misquoting people, or putting words into their mouths. Ive catalogued it on here for all to see, and yet you sit there smugly suggesting that "Ive got a message".<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><br> Well never mind, you obviously missed that part.<br><br> But hey, lets press on.......If I might be allowed to quote you, before I make my point ;<br><br> <!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>You wanna know what makes ME puke, slim? The fact that in order to claim my birthright…which is a life of maximized happiness and safety through knowledge and justice…in order to create a safer and saner world for my children and for all of humanity through proper education and united action,<br><br>I have to go around a multitude of people like you with their own heads in the fucking sand, encouraging others to keep THEIR heads in the fucking sand…people like you who are doing the work of the fascists FOR them…running interference for THEM… by relentlessly spreading the “jewish bankers done it” bullshit…thereby guaranteeing the real perps go free, and guaranteeing THE STATUS QUO.<br><br> <hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br> Well, thank heavens for that. Youre going no doubt to educate your children about the "sneaky ways" of how fascism operates, with its gentle deformity of facts, character assassinations and all the rest of it.<br><br> Well good for you. You obviously feel that Im an unworthy example of someone who should benefit from your "Clueless you wish" intellectual understanding.<br><br> Id like to leave you with a story about someone who might just be worthy of that cause.<br><br> I post this, principally out of that very intellectual laziness that you accuse me of; Because like I said youre right - I truly cant be bothered to catalogue it all again for you, so better to lump together a perfect example of how it might actually end up looking.<br><br> Are you sitting comfortably ?.........( bold emphasis mine. ) - <br><br> <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>March 14, 2005<br>Joseph Massad<br><br>I have prepared a statement to read to you. I would be happy to answer your questions afterwards. Before I begin, however, I want to ascertain that as professor Katzneslson has informed me, the only complaints that your committee has heard about me are the two <br>complaints that the press reported from my students, namely the complaint by Noah Liben and the complaint by Deena Shanker. As for the complaint by Tomy Schoenfeld, who was not my student, I presume, <br>his case is irrelevant to this body, as your mandate states that “as a result of the expression of concern by a number of students that they were being intimidated by faculty members and being excluded from participating fully in classroom discussions because of their views,” you are expected “to identify cases where there appear to be violations of the obligation to create a civil and tolerant teaching environment.”<br><br>2 If there are any other complaints against me, unless I am told what they are and who made them, and the date and place where they allegedly took place, I shall not respond to them.<br><br>I appear before you today because of a campaign of intimidation to which I have been subjected for over three years. While this campaign was started by certain members of the Columbia faculty, and by outside forces using some of my students as conduits, it soon expanded to include members of the Columbia administration, the rightwing tabloid press, the Israeli press, and more locally the Columbia Spectator. Much <br>of this preceded the David Project film “Columbia Unbecoming,” and the ensuing controversy. <br><br> In the following statement, I will provide you with <br>the history of this coordinated campaign, including the facts pertaining to the intimidation to which I am being subjected by the Columbia University administration, most manifestly through the convening of your own committee before which I appear today out of a combined sense of intimidation and obligation and not because I recognize its legitimacy. You need to bear with the details of the following narrative, as the campaign of intimidation against me is most insidious in its details.<br><br>I started teaching at Columbia in the Fall of 1999. At the conclusion of my first academic year, during which I taught my class on Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies, I received a Certificate of Appreciation <br>for teaching presented by "The Students of Columbia College, Class of 2000," and was nominated and was one of the two finalists for the Van Doren teaching award which went that year to Professor Michael <br>Stanislawski. <br><br> In my second year, I began to be told of whispers about my class on Palestinian and Israeli politics and Societies. Jewish Students in my class in the Spring 2001 would tell me that I was the main topic of discussion at the Jewish Theological Seminary and at Hillel and that my class is making the Zionists on campus angry. I took such reports lightly, as the class had doubled in size from the first year. I did <br>notice however that the class included some cantankerous students who insisted on scoring political points during the lectures. I would always <br>defuse the situation by allowing all questions to be asked and by attempting to answer them informatively. <br><br> I would do so in class and <br>during office hours. I had strong positive evaluations from most of my <br>students with some complaining that the class was biased. Although my <br>course description explained that “The purpose of the course is to <br>provide a thorough yet critical historical overview of the Zionist-<br>Palestinian conflict to familiarize undergraduates with the background to <br>the current situation,”3 I decided in the following year (Spring 2002) to <br>emphasize that point more clearly. The course description read as <br>follows:<br>The course examines critically the impact of Zionism on European Jews <br>and on Asian and African Jews on the one hand, and on Palestinian <br>Arabs on the other --in Israel, in the Occupied Territories, and in the <br>Diaspora. The course also examines critically the internal dynamics in <br>Palestinian and Israeli societies, looking at the roles class, gender, and <br>religion play in the politics of Israel and the Palestinian national <br>movement. The purpose of the course is not to provide a “balanced” <br>coverage of the views of both sides, but rather to provide a thorough yet <br>critical historical overview of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict to familiarize <br>undergraduates with the background to the current situation from a <br>critical perspective.4<br><br>The point of the class description is to make sure the students <br>understood that no side was being presented, neither the Palestinian <br>nor the Zionist side, but rather that this was a course that was critical of <br>both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism. When I taught the class in <br>2004, after returning from my sabbatical, I decided to remove the <br>sentence on “balance,” especially after CampusWatch began to attack <br>me for including it, to which I will return below. I removed it.5<br><br> It was with this as background that I started my Spring 2002 semester. <br>My Palestinian and Israeli course seemed to have a more cantankerous <br>crowd that year than before. Even though this year, the class had two <br>discussion sections to accommodate the number of students, a number <br>of students insisted on having discussions during the lecture. Some <br>would bring with them a pro-Israel lobby propaganda book from which <br>they would insist on reading in class. I would let them.<br><br>One student in particular stood out. A smart older student in General <br>Studies, who identified herself as having a South African Jewish <br>background, would insist on asking many questions every lecture, most <br>of which were about scoring political points. The class had over 80 <br>students and therefore it was difficult to accommodate such a large <br>number of questions from students. No matter, I decided to let her ask <br>all her questions in every lecture in order to make her feel comfortable <br>and that she feel that the class is a space where she could express <br>herself freely. She would E-mail me asking for exact sources for <br>information that I would give in class. I would E-mail her back what she <br>needed. For a while, it seemed that I was her research assistant, which I <br>was happy to do, in order to teach her that there are indeed scholarly <br>sources and scholarly answers to her political queries. I later found out <br>from other students that she was circulating a petition in the class to <br>have me fired from Columbia. I asked her after class one day if that was <br>the case, and told her that if it were so, that she would be free to <br>circulate it outside of class, not inside. She smiled back without comment.<br><br>I saw her on college walk one day after Spring break. She came up to <br>me and told me that she had just been to Israel and the Occupied <br>Territories and expressed how bad she felt about the situation there. <br>She apologized about the petition and told me that she had been <br>approached “from the outside” to do it but she had dropped the matter. <br>She spoke of people at the medical school and others from outside the <br>university who were behind the idea, but did not provide details. I did not <br>inquire.<br><br> Another student of mine (now at the School of International and Public <br>Affairs), who self-identified as a “Likudnik,” also approached me on <br>campus one day during the Spring 2002 semester, telling me that he <br>and a few other students had been invited to see a female professor at <br>the medical school. He described that the meeting was so <br>“surreptitious” and “conspiratorial,” that it felt that they were planning on <br>having me “murdered.” In fact, the plan was to strategize how to get me <br>fired. The student told me that they discussed the option of meeting with <br>a female administraror who worked at the time at the Middle East <br>Institute, to coordinate the plan with her. He told me that he had <br>informed the students and the medical school professor that even <br>though he disagreed with me, that he thought I had the right to express <br>my views.<br><br> The female student who initiated the petition against me was not alone <br>in class who consistently posed hostile questions. Three or four other <br>students would do so intermittently. One of them insisted on reading out <br>loud in class paragraphs from a propaganda book issued by a pro-Israel <br>lobbying organization. The book is “Myths and Facts: A Guide to the <br>Arab-Israeli Conflict” written by one Mitchell Bard and published by the <br>American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, which states on its website that <br>“We are committed to arming students with the information they need to <br>respond to the very difficult issues raised on the campus” through the <br>publication of Bard’s book.6 Many students complained that these few <br>students were disruptive of class, especially as there are discussion <br>sections for them to raise their concerns. I allayed their anxiety by <br>explaining that there is something to learn from some of the students’ <br>politically-motivated questions, namely that all students would learn the <br>political arguments of proponents and opponents of certain scholarly <br>analyses of the conflict, and that students who had political queries <br>would also learn that there are indeed persuasive answers to the <br>queries they raise from a critical and scholarly angle. For me, allowing <br>these students to disrupt my lecture was of pedagogical benefit to them <br>and to the rest of the class.<br><br>During the same semester, in April 2002, <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>I was attacked and misquoted </strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br>by the Spectator after attending an on-campus rally in support of <br>Palestinians under Israeli military attack in the West Bank and Gaza, and <br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>an op-ed piece and letters were published in the Spectator accusing me <br>of “anti-Semitism” for a lecture I had given at the Middle East Institute in <br>February 2002.7 The op-ed piece by a junior at Barnard named <br>Daphna Berman, who was not my student, drew parallels between a <br>swastika found in a law school bathroom and my lecture and rebuked <br>the university for allowing me to speak out:</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>“I was struck by the University's willingness to publicly condemn blatant <br>expressions of anti-Semitism [such as the swastika incident] while <br>simultaneously condoning, and even sponsoring, more tacit and subtle <br>forms of that same evil. Massad's talk is lent a certain legitimacy by mere <br>virtue of the fact that his views exist within an academic framework. The <br>rhetoric is polished, the multisyllabic words characteristic of academia <br>are pleasing to the ear, and so Massad's message somehow becomes <br>more acceptable, more palatable. Yet fundamentally, the difference <br>between Massad's message and its more blatant and visually tangible <br>manifestation are only subtle.”8</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>As for the political rally, which took place on Wednesday April 17, 2002, I <br>was one of countless speakers. I spoke out and asserted the following: <br>“"Like white South Africans who felt threatened under apartheid and who <br>only felt safe when they gave up their commitment to white supremacy, <br>Israeli Jews will continue to feel threatened if they persist in supporting <br>Jewish supremacy. Israeli Jews will only feel safe in a democratic Israeli <br>state where all Jews and Arabs are treated equally. No state has the <br>right to be a racist state.” <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>The Spectator misquoted me as saying that <br>Israel is “a Jewish supremacist and racist state,” and that “every racist <br>state should be threatened.”9 When I protested the misquotation, the <br>Spectator journalist who wrote the story, Xan Nowakowski, apologized <br>and informed me via E-mail that she did not even attend the rally and <br>got the quotes from another reporter.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> She assured me that the <br>newspaper would run a correction. After a back and forth for almost a <br>week on E-mail, the Spectator ran the correction on April 24, 2002.<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>However, two major pro-Israeli propagandists, namely Martin Kramer <br>and Daniel Pipes, would insist on reproducing the misquote in articles <br>that they wrote to newspapers and that they posted on their websites. </strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br>On June 20, 2002, Martin Kramer, an Israeli academic who teaches at <br>Tel Aviv university, posted an article on the Middle East Forum website <br>titled “Arab Panic,” in which he attacked a number of Columbia <br>professors, myself included. He argued that “Massad's views are not all <br>that unusual in Middle Eastern studies, and he has every right to <br>express them on Columbia's Low Plaza, in public lectures, and in print. <br>But should someone who is busy propagandizing against the existence <br>of Israel be employed by Columbia to teach the introductory course on <br>the Arab-Israeli conflict?… <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Suffice it to say that this column has received <br>a surfeit of student complaints about the course, suggesting that there is <br>no difference between what Massad teaches and what he preaches.” </strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> In <br>his article,<!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong> Kramer reproduced the misquote from the Spectator. Prior to <br>Kramer’s column, a website for an organization called “The Columbia <br>Conservative Alumni Association” listed me among the six "worst faculty" <br>at Columbia, a list that also included Edward Said who was identified as <br>a “homosexual” who supports Hamas. Martin Kramer was only too <br>happy to quote from that website in his article, as would other columnists <br>writing for the New York Sun. </strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>On June 25 2002, Daniel Pipes and one Jonathan Schanzer published <br>an article in the New York Post titled “Extremists on Campus,” in which <br>they listed me as one such extremist and complained that I use my class <br>as a “soapbox for anti-Israeli polemics.”</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> The Wall Street Journal <br>published on September 18, 2002 an article about a pro-Israel website <br>calling itself CampusWatch being launched by Daniel Pipes, stating that <br>the website listed 8 professors (including me) with our own public <br>dossiers as enemies of America and Israel and called on our students to <br>monitor us in class. Following the launch of CampusWatch, my E-mail <br>was spammed for months with over 4000 E-mails daily, which I had to sift <br>through until finally Columbia was able to install an anti-spamming <br>program. Moreover, I was subjected to identity theft when thousands of <br>racist E-mails would be sent in my name to individuals and listservs, <br>including a few to the White House and Congressmen threatening them <br>with terrorist action. Moreover, thousands of other E-mails would be sent <br>to people with requests of notes of receipt being sent back to my E-mail <br>account which clogged it further with thousands of such E-mail receipts. <br>I also received tens of racist E-mails and phone messages including <br>death threats directed at me. In the meantime, Pipes’s website called on <br>our own students to spy on us in the classroom and report to him, and <br>Kramer called for my dismissal from Columbia University.10 In interviews <br>that I gave to the press, I spoke about the misquotation which Pipes and <br>Kramer continued to propagate, and about my experience in my Spring <br>2002 class, with regards to the petition to get me fired and the secret <br>meeting at the Medical school which my student had told me about.11<br><br>As I was on sabbatical in London that year, I was relatively shielded <br>from the campaign, even though my E-mail account continued to be <br>disrupted. I did come to Columbia to deliver a lecture on Palestinian <br>cinema in January 2003. My lecture, titled “The Weapon of Culture,” <br>discussed how Palestinian cinema was a weapon of resistance and an <br>act of culture in reference to Amilcar Cabral’s famous essay “the <br>Weapon of Theory.” Kramer immediately attacked my paper based on <br>reports in the press.12<br><br>In late January 2003, I began to write a column to the Egyptian Weekly <br>Al-Ahram which deals mostly with Palestinian-Israeli affairs and with the <br>Arab World more generally. Every time I published an article, Kramer <br>and Pipes would write about it, as would new student recruits that they <br>had on campuses. One such ideological recruit was a first year student <br>in General Studies whom I had never met called Ariel Beery. Beery <br>would become one of the main people defending the claims of the David <br>Project in whose film he appeared and called me “one of the most <br>dangerous intellectuals… on campus.” Beery has never taken a class <br>with me and never met me. Beery, who claims to have served in the <br>Israeli army in Lebanon, had his own Spectator column and a personal <br>blog. Beery arrived on the Columbia campus when I was on sabbatical, <br>yet, surprisingly, he chose to write about me in his column. After <br>criticizing my Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies course, which <br>he never took, Beery asserted:<br>One would think that we need a teacher in the classroom, not a <br>critic…The problem lies not in what Massad believes, but in his openly <br>biased presentation in the classroom. The statements he issues are <br>anywhere from questionable to fundamentally wrong.<br><br>Basing his arguments on of one my newspaper columns, Beery added <br>the following:<br><br>“If anything, Massad's claim [in his column] that there is no anti-Semitism <br>in the Arab world should disqualify him from setting foot in a Columbia <br>University classroom as a professor of Modern Arab Politics. Just as you <br>would not trust a surgeon with shaky knowledge of the human anatomy, <br>Columbia should not trust the minds of its charges to a professor with a <br>limited knowledge of the body politic of the region he supposedly is an <br>expert in. [Massad also] says that the claim that Israel is democratic is <br>no more than a ‘propagandistic image.’… th[is]…charge on Israel should <br>again disqualify Massad from teaching at Columbia.”13<br><br>In a second column, Beery again railed against me and lamented that<br><br><br>“Our educations are bound in intellectual Egypt, enslaved by the post-<br>colonialist slant that has permeated our social sciences, while our <br>institution is trapped by its old-fashioned bylaws into protecting the <br>employment of those who espouse hateful and violent rhetoric… Will <br>President Bollinger and future Provost Alan Brinkley be our gate and our <br>key to a new and better University? Only time will tell. Let's just hope that <br>our time in the wilderness will be short and that next year we will enjoy a <br>rebuilt Columbia.”14<br><br>This is in addition to myriad log entries on me on his website.<br><br> In April 2003, I decided to respond to Kramer and Pipes in an article <br>titled “Policing the Academy,” in which I fleshed out their agenda and <br>their plans. I concluded by stating that<br><br>“Kramer, Pipes, and co. are angry that the academy still allows <br>democratic procedure in the expression of political views and has an <br>institutionalised meritocratic system of judgment…to evaluate its <br>members. Their goal is to destroy any semblance of either in favour of <br>subjecting democracy and academic life to an incendiary jingoism and to <br>the exigencies of the national security state with the express aim of <br>imploding freedom. Their larger success, however, has been in <br>discrediting themselves and in reminding all of us that we should never <br>take the freedoms that we have for granted, as the likes of Kramer and <br>Pipes are working to take them away.”15<br><br>I attach the text of my article at the end of this statement.<br><br> Upon returning to Columbia in the Fall of 2003, I was scheduled to <br>give a lecture on the 2nd of October at the Society of Fellows at the <br>Heyman Center. The lecture was attended by a large number of people <br>including many faculty members, Professor Nicholas Dirks, who had not <br>yet become vice-president, was among them. After the lecture I was <br>asked a number of hostile questions from young students and from one <br>Rabbi Charles Sheer, about whom I had heard the previous year when <br>he railed against MEALAC professors in the context of the pro-<br>Palestinian rally that took place on campus in April 2002. I had never <br>met him before. I answered all the questions put before me. Several <br>professors came to me afterwards, including Brinkley Messick of the <br>Department of Anthropology and my departmental colleague Janaki <br>Bakhle, among others, wondering how I managed to remain calm in the <br>face of rude and hostile questions of the caliber I had been asked. <br>Rabbi Sheer’s secretary called me and left a message asking for the text <br>of the lecture. I never responded. The lecture has been published in the <br>scholarly journal Cultural Critique and has recently been the topic of a <br>newspaper article in the New York Sun, and I believe also in the Daily <br>News.16 On 6 January 2004, Rabbi Sheer posted a letter on the Hillel <br>website addressed to Columbia and Barnard students, in which he <br>discussed my lecture and made a startling announcement. In his letter, <br>Sheer shared an article he had written called “The Treatment of the <br>Middle East Studies at Columbia University.”17 Sheer declared that “the <br>principal anti-Israel voices [on Columbia’s campus] are not pro-<br>Palestinian student leaders and groups, but Columbia faculty and <br>academic departments.” He added that “On the one hand, there are <br>many fine courses taught by CU faculty on Hebrew language and <br>literature, the history of Israel and Zionism, Arab culture, languages and <br>nationalism, etc. These courses, offered in various departments, are <br>taught with the usual CU standard of careful scholarship and <br>balance…On the other hand, some faculty members whose teaching <br>style is called ‘advocacy education’ espouse a consistent anti-Israel and <br>pro-Palestinian bias. Their personal politics pervade the classroom and <br>academic forums. The record is public: search under ‘Columbia <br>University’ at websites such as
www.campus-watch.org and
www. Be prepared; it is not a pleasant read.”18<br><br> Sheer proceeded to mention that he had attended my lecture at the <br>Heyman Center and then summarized it by making outrageous claims <br>that were never made in the lecture:<br><br>“Professor Massad has reversed the roles of all the players and <br>redefined many of the historic events: the Zionists are the new Nazis; the <br>Palestinians are oppressed victims and therefore the new Jews... From a <br>distance, this diatribe may sound ludicrous. However, its impact on <br>campus is serious. MEALAC should enable our students to explore <br>issues vital to their understanding of the modern Middle East in a <br>balanced way…”<br><br>We will see how the false claim attributed to me by Rabbi Sheer that I <br>said that “the Zionists are the new Nazis,” a claim I never made, would <br>find its way to Ariel Beery who would make the same claim in the video <br>“Columbia Unbecoming,”19 as would Noah Liben in his description of my <br>course --a false claim that would be repeated ad absurdum in the media. <br>Sheer concluded with two interesting claims, one which effectively called <br>on students not to take my class, and another announcing the filming of <br>Columbia Unbecoming:<br><br>“Of course, academic freedom is a cornerstone of our University. <br>However, students are understandably reluctant to take courses from <br>faculty who impose their biases in their teaching. A student group is <br>currently working on a video that records how intimidated students feel <br>by advocacy teaching, and how some are discouraged from taking <br>MEALAC courses or majoring in Middle East studies.”<br><br>Sheer further called on Columbia University to “share my passion for <br>unbiased scholarship and the establishment of a proper learning <br>environment so our students – Jews and non-Jews - can learn about <br>complex issues with honesty and integrity.” 20<br><br> Suffice it to say that my class had over fifty students for the Spring <br>2004 and students did not heed the call made by Sheer. The class did <br>however include a number of auditors (I found out they were <br>unregistered during the last week of class) who would consistently <br>harass me with hostile ideological questions that ignored all the <br>readings. Students complained about the disruption this caused the <br>class. I tried to emphasize to the auditors that their questions must be <br>relevant to the subject at hand and that they must do the readings. They <br>never did and I continued to answer their questions until the end of the <br>semester to avoid creating a tense atmosphere in the classroom.<br><br> During this period, the New York Sun and Kramer and Pipes continued <br>to attack me in their columns and on their websites. In an article on <br>December 30, 2003, the Sun had again attacked one of my newspaper <br>columns misquoting me. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>In my column, I stated that "While Israel has no <br>legitimacy and is not recognized by any international body as a <br>‘representative’ of the Jewish people worldwide but rather as the state of <br>the Israeli people who are citizens of it...," the Sun quoted me as saying <br>that “Israel has no legitimacy.”</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> I asked for a correction from the reporter <br>Jacob Gershman. He agreed and the newspaper ran it the next day.21 <br>This however was just a brief lull. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>On May 4, 2004, the Sun ran another <br>article about me by one Jonathan Calt Harris, identified as an associate <br>of Daniel Pipes at Campus Watch, titled “Tenured Extremism.” After a <br>litany of misquotes, half quotes, and outright fabrications, Calt Harris, <br>who referred to my views as akin to those of “Nazis,” concluded by <br>stating: “Mr. Massad is soon up for tenure review. Should this once <br>distinguished university stoop to provide a permanent forum for his <br>views, it would signify a truly stunning oversight…He knows no <br>distinction between a classroom lecture and advocacy at a public <br>demonstration.”22</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br> Based on this repeated call to deny me tenure at Columbia, which had <br>already been expressed by Martin Kramer, I set up an appointment with <br>Provost Brinkley and met with him. I sought his help and the help of the <br>university’s legal services to fight this defamation of character. The <br>latest article in the New York Sun included such blatant and insidious <br>misrepresentations that I seriously considered suing them for <br>defamation. I provided copies of my written work for the Provost and told <br>him of the campaigns to which I had been subjected in the previous <br>years. While the provost seemed mildly supportive, he did not think that <br>suing would be practical. I asked him if he could arrange for me to meet <br>with legal services to which he reluctantly agreed. I had to remind him by <br>E-mail to set up a meeting for me. After he put me in touch with legal <br>services, my E-mails to them went unanswered. I asked the provost to <br>intervene which he did. His intervention produced a response from their <br>office asking me about my available times to set up an appointment. I <br>sent it to them and never heard back. I dropped the matter after I left in <br>mid summer for vacation abroad.<br><br> <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>In the meantime however, I received a letter from Joel J. Levy, director <br>of the<br>New York chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, copies of which had <br>been sent to President Bollinger and Provost Brinkley. The letter was <br>significantly dated on May 6, 2004, two days after Calt Harris published <br>his article in the Sun. The letter complained to me that, according to one <br>report it received from one student who attended a lecture that I had <br>given at the University of Pennsylvania on March 24, 2004 (which <br>incidentally was the same lecture I gave at Columbia’s Society of Fellows <br>the previous October), ideas expressed in my lecture are “anti-Semitic.” <br>The letter made false claims about what my lecture said and asked that I <br>retract them and issue an apology for my allegedly anti-Semitic remarks. </strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br>I wrote Mr. Levy back and copied President Bollinger and Provost <br>Brinkley. I stated in my letter that:<br><br>“My principled stance against anti-Semitism and all kinds of racism is a <br>matter of public record and cannot be assailed by defamatory ‘reports’ <br>or by letters from the ADL that consider them credible sources. Indeed I <br>have condemned anti-Semitism in my Arabic and English writings, <br>regardless of whether the person expressing it was pro-Israel or anti-<br>Israel, an Arab, an American Christian, or an Israeli Jew… I therefore <br>expect a prompt correction of the errors contained in your letter and <br>demand an immediate apology, a copy of which should be sent to <br>President Bollinger.”23<br><br>I never heard back from the ADL, or from the provost.<br><br> It was with this as background that news about the David Project film <br>“Columbia Unbecoming,” surfaced on October 20, 2004 in a New York <br>Sun article.24<br><br>The Aftermath of Columbia Unbecoming<br><br> I was horrified by the media campaign against me and the calls for my <br>dismissal from Columbia that were issued by Congressman Weiner and <br>by the editors of the Daily News and the New York Sun, as well as calls <br>by Jewish members of the New York City Council to investigate the <br>matter. These calls were issued as declarations about the controversy <br>by the national head of the ADL and Mayor Bloomberg were also made <br>to the press and the film was suddenly being shown in Israel before a <br>government minister at an anti-Semitism conference. I had requested a <br>meeting with Provost Brinkley who did not contact me once during the <br>early days of the controversy during which President Bollinger was <br>making all kinds of statements to the press. My request to meet with the <br>Provost was made through the chair of my department, Marc van de <br>Mieroop, who attended our meeting in the Provost’s office on the 27th of <br>October. I inquired of the provost as to why he would sit down secretly to <br>watch a propaganda film produced by a lobbying group and why he <br>would remain silent about it after he had seen it. The provost apologized <br>and admitted that these were mistakes but that now we needed to <br>contain the problem. He assured me that he had received countless <br>letters in my support and few against me. When I spoke with Vice-<br>President Dirks later, he also informed me that he had received <br>“hundreds” of letters in my support and “three or four” against me. I trust <br>that the President, the Provost, and the Vice-President, have shared <br>with you these letters. While the provost and I corresponded briefly on E-<br>mail, mainly about my concerns regarding statements made by <br>President Bollinger, which the Provost would challenge and represent as <br>the media’s inaccurate rendering, soon there would be no further <br>communication with him. President Bollinger to this day has not <br>contacted me.<br><br>The Columbia Spectator ran an editorial asking me to respond to the <br>allegations. They wrote me and called me asking that I issue a <br>statement. I agreed with their editorial page editor, Rachael <br>Scarborough King, on the number of words and sent it to them. They <br>refused to publish it unless I cut it to 1600 words, 400 words below what <br>they had agreed to. I cut down my statement and resent it. They still <br>refused to publish it. The editorial page editor, Ms. King sent me an <br>apology about her sense of shame that the editor in chief “overruled” <br>her and refused to run it. I have kept our E-mail correspondence. I opted <br>to post my response to the allegations on my Columbia Webpage on <br>November 3, 2005, against the advice of the Provost, who counseled <br>that my silence was of more benefit to me. The Spectator would later <br>publish Charles Jacobs, the director of the David Project’s response to <br>my statement.25<br><br> Let me begin by responding to the claims put forward in “Columbia <br>Unbecoming,” both based on press reports and on the recent transcript <br>of the film made available on the web. I still have not seen the film. Let <br>me reiterate what I said in my statement regarding the claims put by the <br>students in the film:<br><br>I am now being targeted because of my public writings and statements <br>through the charge that I am allegedly intolerant in the classroom, a <br>charge based on statements made by people who were never my <br>students, except in one case, which I will address momentarily. Let me <br>first state that I have intimidated no one. In fact, Tomy Schoenfeld, the <br>Israeli soldier who appears in the film and is cited by the New York Sun, <br>has never been my student and has never taken a class with me, as he <br>himself informed The Jewish Week. I have never met him. As for Noah <br>Liben, who appears in the film according to newspaper accounts (I have <br>not seen the film), he was indeed a student in my Palestinian and Israeli <br>Politics and Societies course in the spring of 2001. Noah seems to have <br>forgotten the incident he cites. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>During a lecture about Israeli state <br>racism against Asian and African Jews, Noah defended these practices <br>on the basis that Asian and African Jews were underdeveloped and <br>lacked Jewish culture, which the Ashkenazi State operatives were <br>teaching them. When I explained to him that, as the assigned readings <br>clarified, these were racist policies, he insisted that these Jews needed <br>to be modernized and the Ashkenazim were helping them by civilizing <br>them.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->[/b] Many students gasped. He asked me if I understood his point. I <br>informed him that I did not. Noah seems not to have done his reading <br>during the week on gender and Zionism. One of the assigned readings <br>by Israeli scholar and feminist Simona Sharoni spoke of how in Hebrew <br>the word “zayin” means both penis and weapon in a discussion of Israeli <br>militarized masculinity. Noah, seemingly not having read the assigned <br>material, mistook the pronunciation of “zayin” as “Zion,” pronounced in <br>Hebrew “tziyon.” As for his spurious claim that I said that “Jews in Nazi <br>Germany were not physically abused or harassed until Kristallnacht in <br>November 1938,” Noah must not have been listening carefully. During <br>the discussion of Nazi Germany, we addressed the racist ideology of <br>Nazism, the Nuremberg Laws enacted in 1934, and the institutionalized <br>racism and violence against all facets of Jewish life, all of which <br>preceded the extermination of European Jews. This information was also <br>available to Noah in his readings, had he chosen to consult them. <br>Moreover, the lie that the film propagates claiming that I would equate <br>Israel with Nazi Germany is abhorrent. I have never made such a <br>reprehensible equation.<br><br> </em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br> Hey Anna, theres plenty more there. <br><br> Do YOU recognise what IM trying to say ? <br><br> Or am I being fucking obtuse ?<br><br> "misquote", followed by " half quote".<br><br> Deform, followed by "defame" ( how Ironic). <br><br> Would YOU like to look over my posts, and then try and tell me from an independent viewpoint what "My message is" ?<br><br> Didnt you get on well with Anti once over ? Tell me Anna. Was it "Ruth", or was it the lies and bullshit you fell for ?<br><br> Im still giving you the benefit of the doubt. Hence only posting this typical Modus Operandi on the firepit.<br> <br> Also, as you can clearly see, Perhaps Im being a tad melodramatic, in the sense that the smearing of myself and others on this board is nothing quite so intense as the above was subjected too........But im hoping that even you cant miss the point.<br><br> Or do you prefer to join the "Triumverate"<br><br><br> ? <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=slimmouse@rigorousintuition>slimmouse</A> at: 12/10/05 8:57 pm<br></i>
by Rigorous Intuition » Fri Dec 09, 2005 4:24 pm 
