[Peace-discuss] What happens on other campuses can happen here.

[Morton K.Brussel]

One can draw similarities. --mkb

Begin forwarded message:

> From: ZNet Commentaries <sysop at zmag.org>
> Date: April 15, 2005 7:13:15 PM CDT
> To: brussel at uiuc.edu
> Subject: Herman / The New York Times Supports Thought Control: The 
> Massad Case / Apr 16
>
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> Today's commentary:
> http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-04/16herman.cfm
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> ==================================
>
> ZNet Commentary
> The New York Times Supports Thought Control: The Massad Case April 16, 
> 2005
> By Edward Herman
>
> The New York Times has never been a very courageous newspaper in times 
> of political hysteria and threats to civil liberties. When Bertrand 
> Russell was denied the right to fill his appointment at CCNY in 1940, 
> following an ugly campaign by a rightwing Catholic faction opposed to 
> his positions on divorce and marriage, the paper not only failed to 
> defend him, its belated editorial called the appointment "impolitic 
> and unwise" and criticized him for not withdrawing when the going got 
> hot ("The Russell Case," April 20, 1940).
>
> Russell pointed out in a published reply something the editors had 
> missed: that there was a serious matter of principle at stake; that a 
> withdrawal would have been "cowardly and selfish" and would have 
> "tacitly assented to the proposition...that substantial groups should 
> be allowed to drive out of public office individuals whose opinions, 
> race or nationality they find repugnant" (April 26, 1940).
>
> During the McCarthy era also the Times failed to stand by its 
> ex-Communist employees who were willing to tell all to the Times 
> officials, but not turn informers. They were fired, and in its news 
> and editorials the paper failed to oppose the witchhunt with vigor and 
> on the basis of principle. Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger himself 
> wrote an editorial assailing the use of the Fifth Amendment in 
> appearances before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities 
> (August 6, 1948).
>
> We are in another period of escalating attacks on civil liberties, 
> with the Patriot Act, a lawless rightwing administration, open threats 
> to retaliate against judicial failures to follow rightwing dictates, 
> and perpetual aggression to create the justification for repressive 
> policies at home. An important additional factor is the steadily 
> increasing aggressiveness of pro-Zionist forces, both in the United 
> States and elsewhere, who have fought to contain criticism of Israeli 
> policies by any means, including harassment, intimidation, threats, 
> boycotts, claims of "anti-semitism," occasional resort to violence, 
> and other forms of pressure.
>
> While sometimes allegedly based on the need for fairness, balance and 
> truthfulness, these campaigns are completely one-sided and are 
> invariably aimed at suppressing alternative views and inconvenient 
> facts. 
>
> Attacks on critics of Israel are of long standing--individuals like 
> Edward Said and Noam Chomsky have been vilified and threatened for 
> years, and both frequently needed police protection at speech venues, 
> at work or at home. The situation has worsened in the Bush-2 era, in 
> good part because of the cultivated hysteria of the "war on terror" 
> and congenial environment provided by Bush, the strengthening of the 
> rightwing media, and the demands imposed by Israeli policies.
>
> On the latter point, it has long been noted that increased Israeli 
> violence and land seizure, which causes greater international 
> hostility to Israel, induces a new protective response by "defenders 
> of Israel." In recent years nobody who criticizes Israeli policies has 
> escaped attack--not attack by intellectual argument, but by ad hominem 
> assault, spam invasions, the use of stolen addresses to embarrass, 
> threats, and campaigns to discredit and silence.
>
> For these attackers the end justifies any means, including, of course, 
> lies (for one episode in the extensive lying career of Harvard law 
> professor Alan Dershowitz, see the letter exchange between him and 
> Noam Chomsky, Boston Globe, May 17, May 25 and June 5, 1973).
>
> The Bush-Sharon era has witnessed the emergence of McCarthyite 
> institutions like Campus Watch and the David Project, designed to 
> police academic Middle East studies for un-Israeli-patriotic thoughts, 
> putting pressure on academics and administrators to intellectually 
> cleanse, and providing targets for vigilantism.
>
> There are even current proposals to legislate for "balance" and 
> "fairness" in Middle East studies both at the state and federal level. 
> These vigilante efforts and attempts to politicize the university pose 
> serious threats to free speech, academic freedom, and the independence 
> of the university. They are also threats to integrity and truth, with 
> the main target criticism of Israeli policy and with the aim of making 
> the official Israeli version of history the sole legitimate narrative.
>
> It is in this context that we must evaluate the Joseph Massad case, 
> Columbia University's handling of that case, and the New York Times' 
> editorial on "Intimidation at Columbia" (April 7, 2005). Massad, who 
> teaches courses in Middle Eastern studies at Columbia, and is critical 
> of Israeli policies in Palestine, has been under assault from 
> pro-Zionist forces, in class and outside, for years, although running 
> an open class, tolerating hostile and often irrelevant questions, many 
> times by outsiders and "auditors," and with a record of having never 
> thrown anybody out of class for harassment (for documents by Massad 
> and others bearing on this record, see the links provided at the end 
> of this article).
>
> In a decent and honest environment, concern about "intimidation" would 
> focus on the intimidation of Joseph Massad, whose life has been been 
> made very stressful and whose freedom to teach and effectiveness as a 
> teacher has been threatened by this campaign of harassment--and Massad 
> and his students are not alone in victimization by this campaign for 
> the hegemony of an official truth.
>
> But in the indecent and post-Orwellian world in which we live, Massad 
> is the intimidator, several students he allegedly treated harshly are 
> the true victims, and justice demands an inquiry on this alleged 
> intimidation and a possible disciplining or firing of this 
> intimidator. Thus, Columbia University's administration, responding to 
> the hegemony campaign in the Daily News, New York Post, Wall Street 
> Journal, and by other organized groups and individuals, appointed a 
> grievance committee to look into the allegations of intimidation 
> of students by Massad and a colleague who have failed to follow the 
> official narrative.
>
> But this committee had no instruction to consider the intimidation of 
> Massad et al., although both the committee and New York Times 
> acknowledge that he and others have had their classes "infiltrated by 
> hecklers and surreptitious monitors, and they received hate mail and 
> death threats" ("Intimidation at Columbia"). Put otherwise, the 
> admitted systematic intimidation of the faculty, clearly a threat to 
> academic freedom and the possibility of honest teaching and research, 
> is off the agenda for an inquiry into intimidation; claims by several 
> students that are disputed and clearly part of a larger campaign 
> of intimidation involving Campus Watch, David Horowitz and other 
> nationally-based intimidators, must be taken seriously.
>
> The Columbia grievance committee displayed bias by its willingness to 
> accept a one-sided assignment in which only student intimidation was 
> at issue. Their bias was also evident in their handling of the student 
> complaints. The two complaints about Massad were declared "credible" 
> although made belatedly and contested by Massad.
>
> The committee does not state explicitly that Massad's denial in the 
> classroom case was "incredible" and that Massad (and his three student 
> witnesses) lied, so "credible," undefined, appears to mean not 
> disproved and theoretically possible, and the committee's finding is 
> therefore not only asinine and damaging to Massad, it opens a 
> Pandora's box to future accusations of intimidation.
>
> The "most serious" student accusation, which dates back to the Spring 
> of 2002, was that Massad said to a student "If you are going to deny 
> the atrocities being committed against Palestinians, then you can get 
> out of my classroom." This statement was confirmed by one student and 
> an outsider allegedly present but unnoticed by others. Massad denied 
> the accusation and was supported by three students.
>
> The committee noted that the accusing student didn't leave the 
> classroom, and expulsion was contrary to Massad's policy (with no such 
> case ever reported). The student failed to complain in 2002 and did 
> not mention the incident in her evaluation sheet for the course. The 
> other student accusation was not in a classroom, the time and place 
> were vague, and the alleged statement by Massad, while harsh was 
> conceivable in the heat of a private argument; but the student and 
> incident were not recollected by Massad.
>
> These incidents might have happened, but they might not, and actual 
> incidents might have been rewritten to serve a political agenda. The 
> grievance committee doesn't even mention these possibilities, nor does 
> it place them in the context of continuous harassment and intimidation 
> from the side of the purported victims that might be considered to 
> reduce their "credibility."
>
> A third demonstration of the grievance committee's bias is its 
> suggestion that the failure of the student victims to complain earlier 
> resulted from a deficient grievance procedure at Columbia. The 
> committee said that it was only a "result of these failures that 
> outside advocacy groups devoted to purposes tangential to those of the 
> University were able to intervene to take up complaints expressed by 
> some students."
>
> But not only is this a fallacy in that there were several routes to 
> complaint at the time these incidents occurred, which the students 
> failed to tap, the committee fails to note the possibility that the 
> absence of earlier complaints might be because the incident or 
> incidents didn't happen or were later inflated in seriousness, 
> constructed or made serious only as part of the escalating attacks on 
> Massad and other dissidents from the official line.
>
> The committee premises the truthfulness of the complainants and 
> ignores their possible role in a larger campaign of suppression---that 
> is, they fail to recognize that the belated complaints may be part of 
> the process by which "advocacy groups devoted to purposes tangential 
> to those of the university" have been able to accomplish their ends.
>
> Turning to the New York Times editorial, although noting in the 
> penultimate paragraph that the accused faculty members had had their 
> classes infiltrated, disrupted, and monitored by outsiders, and had 
> been recipients of hate mail and death threats, the editors do not 
> criticize Columbia for failing to act to prevent these numerous abuses 
> threatening academic freedom, nor do they even hint that any remedy 
> was called for.
>
> This was apparently acceptable intimidation, coincidentally carried 
> out against individuals challenging the official narrative that the 
> New York Times itself has adhered to closely (see my article on the 
> media's treatment of Israel's approved ethnic cleansing: 
> http://www.zmag.org/meastwatch/israeleth3.htm). The editors focus on 
> Massad, allegedly "clearly guilty" of ill temper on two occasions, 
> although under continuous provocation over several years. The editors 
> misrepresent the facts even here--the grievance committee called the 
> charges "credible," but didn't explicitly deny the credibility of 
> Massad and his witnesses.
>
> Neither the committee nor editors had the integrity to note that the 
> student charges were old and that they might have been constructed as 
> part of an organized campaign of derogation; or that the methods 
> employed in this campaign have not been scrupulous, and that the 
> incidents might have been edited or entirely fabricated.
>
> In its last paragraph the Times editors contend that the grievance 
> committee's mandate should have extended to the question of 
> "anti-Israel bias" and that Columbia should hire and fire "with more 
> determination and care." In short, the Newspaper of Record tells its 
> readers that universities should police thought to keep out 
> unwarranted bias, which seems to pose a threat in only one 
> direction--the editors have never mentioned the possibility of 
> unwarranted pro-Israeli bias, which for the editors may be 
> inconceivable.
>
> Joseph Massad is in good company. The editors of the New York Times 
> found Bertrand Russell unworthy of an appointment to CCNY based on his 
> politics and a bandwagon of hostile attacks. Sixty four years later 
> they implicitly call for the removal of Joseph Massad based on his 
> politics and an organized campaign of derogation. As Russell pointed 
> out to the editors back in 1940, it is contrary to the fundamental 
> principles of a free society to drive out of their position 
> "individuals whose opinions, race or nationality they find repugnant."
>
> This point remains valid even where done under the cover of alleged 
> "intimidation" by the victim being driven out.
>
>
> USEFUL LINKS:
>
> --" New York Times Supports McCarthyite Witch Hunt," Juan Cole, 
> Informed Comment, April 8, 2005
>
> --Ad Hoc Grievance Committee Report, Ira Katznelson, Chair; Lisa 
> Anderson; Farah Griffin; Jean E. Howard; and Mark Mazower, Columbia 
> University (28 March 2005)
>
> --EI EXCLUSIVE: Joseph Massad's statement to Columbia University's Ad 
> Hoc Grievance Committee (5 April 2005)
>
> --"Columbia Unbecoming" in the clear light of day, Monique Dols (5 
> November 2004)
>
> -- Joseph Massad responds to the intimidation of Columbia University, 
> Joseph Massad (3 November 2004)
>
> --Columbia Considers Limits on Political Expression at University, 
> Jacob Gershman, The New York Sun (19 April 2004)
>
> --Curriculum reform should start in the U.S. and Israel, Joseph Massad 
> (18 August 2003)
>
> --Policing the academy, Joseph Massad (14 April 2003)
>
>
>
>

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