Good to hear Columbia University hasn't changed too much since I've left (via Roger Simon)!
In the world of Hamid Dabashi, supporters of Israel are "warmongers" and "Gestapo apparatchiks."
The Jewish homeland is "nothing more than a military base for the rising predatory empire of the United States."
It's a capital of "thuggery" - a "ghastly state of racism and apartheid" - and it "must be dismantled."
A voice from America's crackpot fringe? Actually, Dabashi is a tenured professor and department chairman at Columbia University. And his views have resonated and been echoed in other areas of the university...
In classrooms, teach-ins, interviews and published works, dozens of academics are said to be promoting an I-hate-Israel agenda, embracing the ugliest of Arab propaganda, and teaching that Zionism is the root of all evil in the Mideast.
In three weeks of interviews, numerous students told the Daily News they face harassment, threats and ridicule merely for defending the right of Israel to survive.
The article is lengthy and worth a read if you care. I never took any classes in the Middle Eastern studies department, though I took more than my fair share of courses in the cultural anthropology department, one of the other major redoubts of tenured radicalism on campus. I'm not particularly shocked by anything in the article, a lot of it is pretty familiar. I will say that singling out Lila Abu-Lughod seems a bit unfair - I'm a bit biased, I loved Veiled Sentiments. And I sat in on a few Bruce Robbins classes and thought he was a great teacher, though I don't really know much about his scholarship or his politics.
That said, the atmosphere on campus was pretty poisonous at times, especially during the runup to the war in Iraq (and here I will conflate anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism a bit, which isn't entirely fair, but isn't entirely unfair either, in context). As I think I've said before, the campus anti-war movement - which had a substantial professorial presence, culminating in the ridiculous and infamous 'teach-in' (infamous for Nicholas DeGenova's wish for 'a million Mogadishus') - really helped to catalyze my own eventual, if somewhat reluctant, support for the war. Some of these people are totally fucking nuts, and it's scary to see how contagious this kind of shit (anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism) can be inside a prestigious echo chamber.