Thursday, September 21, 2006
We last saw James Russell when he hosted Andrew Bostom's talk at Harvard. Here he is talking about being a Jew in Columbia's Middle East Department and beyond: Professor Talks of Jihad -- on the Battlefields and in the Classroom
But Russell, an expert in Armenian studies, soon learned that other factors besides the quality of his scholarship were under consideration.
"Two senior professors in my department explained that I could not expect, as a Jew, to be kept as a tenured professor in the Middle East department," he said.
Now, three years later, Russell, a tenured professor at Harvard University, speaks brazenly against anti-Semitism in academia.
Addressing more than 100 people at the Gershman Y on a recent Sunday morning, he pointed to numerous examples of what some have referred to an "academic jihad."
He called Edward Said, the late Columbia University professor who espoused the Arab cause, the "academic apostle" of radical Islam. Russell blamed Said's "pseudo-scholarship" for painting Israel as a colonial tyrant and Arabs as hapless victims.
"It created an innocent and passive Arab population, raped by imperialists and colonized by Zionists," explained Russell. The scholar also said that Said's work engendered "a general sympathy for the Arabs as postcolonial revolutionaries, together with an easy antipathy towards Israel."
He added that such "scholarship" misrepresents the Middle East, and its history...
[h/t: Adam Holland]
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Leave a comment to: Columbia Watch: Untenured Jew
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President@columbia.edu
Tell the President of columbia how you feel.
President Lee Bollinger
It's Bolinger@columbia.edu
sorry, my bad.
Then, of course, in the university at large, there's the academic jihad against tenure for scholars of the right . . . As I always ask rhetorically, how can these people live with themselves? And as I always answer, denial and projection.
"Pseudo-scholarship" is the best term I've heard to describe the works of Edward Said. His attempts to deny the existence of Jewish ancient history in Israel and especially in Jerusalem are seemingly lauded in the academic world.
His books are fantasies and have no basis on archaelogical or historic fact.
Columbia's Middle East program seems to be based more on wishful thinking than on actual history. The blatant anti-Semitism shown to Professor Russell speaks volumes.