Columbia University has officially invited Tom Paulin, the bard of Jew-hatred, to speak.

ACTION
-

Please contact Columbia, questioning the university's judgment in giving a podium to a man who has said that Jewish settlers deserve to be "shot dead." [If you do so, remember to always be unimpeachably polite. -Sol]

CONTACT INFO
-

Lee C. Bollinger, President
Columbia University
2960 Broadway
New York, NY 10027-6902
Phone: 212-854-9970
Fax: 212-854-9973
Email: bollinger@columbia.edu

Columbia alumni should contact:

Derek Wittner
Columbia University
Dean of Alumni Affairs and Development
Interchurch Center
Room 917, Mail Code 7732
Columbia College
New York, NY 10027
Phone: 212-870-2741
Email: daw8@columbia.edu

BACKGROUND
-

The Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia will host a talk on February 10 by Tom Paulin, the Irish poet notorious for telling the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram that what Paulin described as "Brooklyn-born" Jewish settlers should be "shot dead." He said: "They should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists. I feel nothing but hatred for them." He added: "I can understand how suicide bombers feel. ... I think attacks on civilians in fact boost morale."

Paulin, who has regularly declared that Israel has no right to exist and recently resigned from Britain's ruling Labour party on the grounds that Tony Blair was heading a "Zionist government," is no doubt entitled to his opinion; what is in question is not Paulin's right to spout hatred, support for suicide bombers, and anti-Semitism, but the judgment of the Columbia faculty that invites such a man to campus...

...The harsher, ideologically accented part of the evening began with Dr. Rashid Khalidi's presentation. He spent a few tortured minutes stating that the talk he was giving was not the talk he wished to present because of time limitations, implying that he had heavier artillery in store. He declared that he was not speaking in favor of any one solution and that he came with no concrete proposals for peace in hand. However, he quickly underscored that Israel's national sovereignity was won at the expense of another people's and that its continued appropriation of Palestinian land boded ill for the future. He said he was far more interested in structural rather than discursive features of the Middle East, in the actual reality on the ground—walls, watchtowers and roads—rather than declarations and demarches issued by the powers-that-be. Largely pessimistic about the future, he appeared dismissive of the recent warming in Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Dr. Khalidi proved to be mere preamble to Dr.Joseph Massad's philippic against the Jewish state, which he declared in no uncertain terms had not only expelled the Palestinian Arab majority and confiscated its property, but continued to prevent its rightful return. He almost always prefixed or suffixed the phrase "the Jewish state" with such adjectives as "racist" or "apartheid." Gaza and the West Bank were invariably termed "bantustans." Any state defining itself as specially Jewish was, in Massud's lexicon, ipso facto labeled racist and beyond the pale. The two-state solution, he argued, "was asking diaspora Palestinians to commit suicide." Only within the confines of a bi-national state, he explained, "can Palestinians be repatriated… and Jews become equal citizens." In order to bring this "equitable" solution about, Israel must be sufficiently weakened by boycott and divestment for starters. Only a change in the balance of power in the Middle East, Massad averred, could bring to fruition his longed-for solution. (Some might even be forgiven the unholy thought that Massad's arguments necessitate Mossad's existence).

Not to be undone, Dr. Ilan Pappe of Haifa University, who some have named "the Noam Chomsky of Israel," gave his own gloss on history, promising to add further polish and refinement to Dr. Khalidi's position. He quickly reminded his audience that Israel controls 80 percent of mandatory Palestine, while the Palestinians are stuck with a mere 20 percent. He selectively ignored the historically recognized fact that 80 percent of the Palestine promised to the Jews as their national home by Lord Balfour was lopped off by Winston Churchill in 1922 and given to the Arabs as the kingdom of Trans-Jordan.

Dr. Pappe's heavily sardonic tone served to portray Israel in the worst possible light as a blunt force riding roughshod over liberty-loving Palestinians. He privileged the Palestinian right of return, while contradictorily insisting that nationalism was even a more baleful force in the world than religion itself. He too invoked apartheid imagery whenever and wherever possible, daubing South Africa and Israel with the same thick brush.

Dripping sarcasm, Pappe described an Israel desperate to "whiten" its population, searching high and low for light-skinned immigrants. To appreciative laughter, nods and titters from parts of the audience, he recounted Israel looking for possible "Hebraic" tribesmen in the mountain fastnesses of Peru, the alluvial plains of India and the equatorial heart of Africa to bring to the Jewish state, while obstinately refusing entry to Palestinian Arabs. "The preoccupation with Israeli demography is the basis of discrimination," he further explained...

Here's a quiz.

Israel is: a) a Jewish supremacist state, b) the worst human-rights abuser in the Middle East, c) a major factor preventing the democratization of the Arab region, or d) all of the above.

If you answered "d," you would fit right in at a core-curriculum course at Columbia University taught by an assistant professor of modern Arab politics, Joseph Massad, who is a rising star of the university's Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures.

Mr. Massad, author of the forthcoming book "The Persistence of the Palestinian Question," is best known as one of the Columbia scholars whose alleged mistreatment of Jewish students is at the center of a campus controversy that has attracted national attention from Jewish and academic leaders.

Though the dispute has focused on allegations of intimidation and harassment of students, the more common criticism brought up by students of Mr. Massad has to do not with the appropriateness of his conduct, but with the quality and content of his teaching.

Students of his say he is relentless in his condemnations of Israel and America, even in a course he taught in the fall called Topics in Asian Civilization, in which Israel, at least according to the syllabus, plays only a minor role...