Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

It’s not often one gets mentioned in The New Yorker as my blog did today, so I’m wearing a small intellectual glow. I used to read the magazine religiously back when I was a literature major in college and grad school. I read it from cover to cover. I can still remember vividly profiles by John McPhee and Pauline Kael’s remarkable film reviews. I’m trippin’.

Jane Kramer writes a long article, The Petition: Israel, Palestine, and a Tenure Battle at Barnard, about Nadia Abu El Haj’s ultimately successful battle for tenure at Barnard College. It profiles her anthropological research and the pro-Israel detractors who made her tenure process a cause celebre for the Israel-First crowd. Many of you know that I devoted considerable time, energy and words to this subject before she earned tenure. I thought a gross injustice was being perpetrated by the Campus Watch-Frontpagemagazine crowd and that the Barnard anthropologist deserved someone monitoring the campaign against her, which was what I did.

Kramer notes that this blog was one of the first to take up the cause, something of which I’m very proud:

Stern’s facts were wrong. Within a few months, she was exposed in the progressive Zionist blog Tikun Olam and in the Jewish press–most notably in the Jewish Week…

She goes on to credit Larry Cohler-Esses’ work there in unmasking Stern’s vilification and falsehoods. I’m also proud of the teamwork between myself and Cohler-Esses which advanced this story, though I want to make clear that Larry did all his own research and drew his own conclusions. Hell, he even spent 10 days wading through Facts on the Ground for which he deserves a medal since it is a VERY DENSE text. Even I didn’t do that.

Kramer doesn’t note the critical role played by Jesse Walker of Reason Magazine. While I was already interested in Abu El Haj’s battle, Jesse first brought to my attention the deliberate misquotations of the academic’s work by her opponents. This in turn opened up the subject in a way it might not have otherwise done. Jesse published his research in his publication.

The New Yorker story is interesting not just for its recap of the tenure battle, but because the author puts that battle in the context of a furious tug of war taking place in higher education over academic freedom and the right of third party advocacy groups to intervene in the tenure process and inject political considerations into scholarly discourse.

I never thought of this analogy until just now, but it appears to me that what Campus Watch and Paula Stern did was akin to the Terry Schiavo circus. In the latter case, a group of religious fanatics with a vested interest attempted to intervene in both a personal family tragedy and a medical process out of which they should’ve kept their noses. Their effort demeaned the family involved and dragged the field of medicine into a political arena in which it had no business being. I’d argue that the Schiavo fiasco contributed significantly to the Republican defeat in the 2006 elections.

The Abu El Haj detractors have paid no such price. In fact, they’ve gone on to new targets of opportunity in their propaganda battle on behalf of Israel. But articles like Kramer’s and efforts like mine help shine a light on such smearmongering so that it may be discredited even more firmly the next time it rears its ugly head.

I thought one particular section of Kramer’s essay was particularly evocative and helpful in understanding the political motivations of Abu El Haj’s opponents. Here she quotes Jonathan Boyarin, an Orthodox Jewish academic and friend of the Barnard professor:

Sometimes, I think the Jews who attack Nadia are really grasping at the idea that Israel is THE standard of Jewish life and faith–so, for them, defending Israel, even against scholarly debate, becomes the way to express Jewishness. I haven’t advanced much in my understanding of this kind of anxiety. But I know that if you’re looking for a reasoned, progressive scholar who’s on the same side as those guys, you’re not going to find him.

This is an important epiphany. The mission of Campus Watch and Paula Stern has everything to do with Jewish identity (and a narrowly defined identity at that) and little or nothing to do with academics. That is why their efforts should be derided and disqualified by the academy.

Pipes reinforces the intolerance and extremism of his approach in this passage:

…I very much dispute the notion that academics cannot function freely and be accountable at the same time. It doesn’t come free, this very special set of privileges they have, and there’s nothing to be said for the abstracted position that they can disdain the public, the students, and only engage with each other. They are financed by the public and are thus accountable in some way to the public. They say, No, only we can judge and evaluate each other’s work. Well, that’s not how things work in this country.

This is a profoundly important distillation of Pipes’ anti-intellectual philosophy. The academy is not to be trusted with decisions affecting itself. The public and its representatives like Pipes are the best judges of what is best for the academy since they take into account not just academic needs, but society at large’s needs. I can’t think of a much more pernicious approach, one that is more inimical to the very foundations of scholarly inquiry and academic freedom, than this.

While I tend to think that Kramer bent over backwards to portray Abu El Haj in the most favorable light possible, in this passage she finds a weakness in the latter’s work which bothered me during my entire time writing about this. Kramer notes:

…a tendency to reduce the complexities of Zionism to colonial terms…

I think this idea deserved amplification because it does deeply inform Facts on the Ground and renders it a less persuasive critique than it might otherwise have been. There is too much dismissive ideological grandstanding and speech that trumpets an academic anti-colonial approach that detracts rather than amplifies.

There were a few moments in reading the New Yorker piece when I thought the author stretched too far in portraying Abu El Haj as a mainstream academic figure:

[Virginia] Dominguez [Abu El Haj's dissertation advisor] says that Facts on the Ground was received by Israeli social scientists “not as a scathing critique but as right in line with what they were doing there.”

In fact, I have read no Israeli social scientists who defended Abu El Haj’s work. I’m not saying there aren’t any since I don’t read Israeli academic publications. I AM saying that there were many Israeli academics, especially archaeologists, who reacted with high moral dudgeon to her attacks on them. Again, I’m not saying their views were correct or justified. But I believe we should call a spade a spade and not ignore the academic uproar her work caused in certain Israeli circles, as both Kramer and Dominguez seem to do. [NOTE: Ms. Kramer informs me that the Columbia Spectator does feature comments by Israeli academics who support Abu El Haj's work, so I stand corrected on that score.]

A tidbit: those of you who follow the Jewish right will enjoy Charles Jacob’s (founder of the David Project) description of himself as a “classic liberal.”

I wish there had been a little more in Kramer’s article about the mysterious “Hugh Fitzgerald” who wrote the Frontpagemagzine-Campus Watch article which helped fuel the tenure battle.  Personally, I don’t believe that Fitzgerald is a real person. I would love for Kramer to have gone back to that original story and researched its origins further, including Fitzgerald’s real identity.  [NOTE: Ms. Kramer informs me that she made a considerable effort to do just that and was ultimately unsuccessful.]

A note about the New Yorker cartoon above: I thought it was an interesting and powerful evocation of the conflict. It portrays the lone academic standing on the steps of Columbia’s Low Library (precisely where the Alma Mater statue normally sits), battling against political forces outside herself and the campus. In that sense it conveys well some of the issues involved. But it also misses something important. While Abu El Haj may see herself as purely an academic and scholar, in her work she does take a political position. She is engaged in the debate though perhaps in a more nuanced way than Pipes or Stern. If she was not engaged, then she would have used a different set of rhetorical tropes to describe Israeli archaeological practice than she did. Again, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with her being engaged in this way. But I think that everyone needs to put all their cards on the table and in this battle none of the parties have fully done so, though Abu El Haj has done so much more transparently than her enemies.

Thanks to Seth Flaxman and Dan Sieradski for almost simulateneously notifying me about my 20 seconds of New Yorker fame.

Don’t get me wrong. He NYT IS the newspaper of record so it’s great that they’ve outed Giuliani’s neocon pro-Israel stack of Mideast policy advisers including Daniel Pipes and Norman “WWIV” Podhoretz. It’s a great story. But why didn’t they note that Ken Silverstein at Harper’s has been reporting the story for months (as have I, but Ken was there first)? In fact, Ken’s first story came out on August 27th in which he reported that Giuliani’s team of advisers included Podhoretz, Martin Kramer and Charles Hill. He also published a subsequent story about Pipes joining the team and another about Pipes’ support for the war crimes notion of razing entire Palestinian villages in retaliation for attacks on Israel. In other words, he was all over this story before it was a gleam in the NYT’s eye.

I’m a former academic and I was trained if you didn’t credit your sources you were just plain no good. Maybe journalism is different. I’m not sure why it should be but maybe it is. But I do believe in setting the record straight and Ken should get the credit even if Marc Santora and Michael Cooper aren’t willing to give it to him. [UPDATE: Michael Cooper has written saying that Marc Santora began researching this story in the summer and did not know about Ken's work. That's an honest reply. However, if I could find Ken's work by doing a Google search on Daniel Pipes it seems to me that a crack NYT journalist should've been able to do so as well. I'm not saying this to be snarky. I just think that given the importance that attaches to NYT reportage that other journalists who are the first to report a story deserve credit or acknowledgement for that when the NYT follows with a later story.]

Another great quotation from Ken’s reporting is this characterization of the overall Mideast policy group:

I asked Augustus Richard Norton of Boston University, an expert adviser to the Iraq Study Group, for his take on Giuliani’s crew. He dubbed the group “AIPAC’s Dream Team.”

We shouldn’t let that phrase die. It should attach to Giuliani like Elmer’s glue every time any of us mention him.

By the way, one thing the Times story missed out on completely, which is very important, is that Giuliani’s rejection of the notion of creating an independent Palestinian state flies in the face of bipartisan consensus U.S. policy going back decades. In other words, Giuliani is a radical troglodyte when it comes to his views on Israel. I guess you can’t quite say that in the august NYT–but I just did.

The NY Times’ Samuel Freedman weighs in on the smear campaign against Debbie Almontaser and the Khalil Gibran Academy by the Jewish neocon world. It’s a fine article which I wish could’ve been written a little earlier in the campaign so that it could’ve made more of a difference in defending Almontaser and her reputation. But no matter, it’s important that Freedman has documented for the world to see the overt racism of the school’s and Almontaser’s accusers. After quoting some especially pungent anti-Arab vitriol from right-wing blogs, Freedman notes:

Thus commenced the smear campaign against the Khalil Gibran International Academy and, specifically, Debbie Almontaser. For the next six months, from blogs to talk shows to cable networks to the right-wing press, the hysteria and hatred never ceased. Regrettably, it worked.

Ms. Almontaser resigned as principal earlier this month. Nominally, she quit to quell the controversy about her remarks to The New York Post insufficiently denouncing the term “intifada” on a T-shirt made by a local Arab-American organization. That episode, however, merely provided the pretext for her ouster, for the triumph of a concerted exercise in character assassination.

The Times columnist has come forward to draw a line in the sand and say: “This should not be acceptable discourse in our city.” I only wish more prominent figures like Joel Klein, Michael Bloomberg, Randi Weingarten (who sealed Almontaser’s fate by her betrayal), and even Abe Foxman would’ve done what Freedman did. Where are the leaders when you need them? Covering their asses and ducking down in their foxholes.

Who ever cared about Debbie Almontaser and what she went through in this ordeal?? Listen to a friend speak about it:

“She feels that she’s been violated, personally and professionally,” said Louis Cristillo, a research professor at Teachers College at Columbia University who has studied the experiences of Muslim children in the New York public schools. “To be painted as somebody who’s un-American, questioning her patriotism, is extremely hurtful for her. She’s really shocked at how devastatingly effective the defamation was.”

And here Freedman names names of those responsible for blackening Almontaser’s reputation:

In syndicated columns by Daniel Pipes, in articles and editorials in The New York Post and The New York Sun, on such Web sites as PipeLineNews and Militant Islam Monitor, both concerned with radical Islam, the Gibran school was repeatedly characterized as a “madrassa,” an Arabic term plainly meant to evoke images of indoctrination into terrorism and holy war.

Bella Rabinowitz, writing on March 9 in PipeLineNews, called Gibran “an Islamist public school whose curriculum shares the same ideology as the Sept. 11 terrorists.” Alicia Colon wrote in The Sun on May 1, “How delighted Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda must have been to hear the news” that New York “is bowing down in homage to accommodate and perhaps groom future radicals.”

Also important to me are the inclusion of two statements of support from local rabbis with whom the ex-Gibran principal worked in laying the groundwork for the school:

“There’s zero correspondence between the caricature and the actual person,” said Rabbi Andy Bachman of Beth Elohim, a Reform Jewish congregation in Park Slope, who was on the Gibran school’s advisory board. “The words that were used to describe her, the fears that were evoked, are absolutely unrelated to her and her life’s work. Not in any way, shape or form.”

Another rabbi who has worked with Ms. Almontaser on interfaith efforts, Michael Feinberg of the Greater New York Labor-Religion Coalition, said: “It’s all about insinuation and innuendo and this formula of Arab equals Muslim equals terrorist. The viciousness and the vileness of this case surpass anything I’ve seen before.”

This entire episode brings to mind a quotation from Pirkey Avot:

“Whoever destroys one life is as if he has destroyed an entire world.”

Similarly, whoever destroys one reputation is as if he has destroyed the good name of us all.

Well, it appears that Brandeis, after Yehuda Reinharz rolled out the red carpet for pro-Israel ideologue, Daniel Pipes, has thought better of the idea of preventing Normal Finkelstein, the harsh critic of Israeli policy and Alan Dershowitz, from speaking. After announcing it would welcome Pipes to campus, it pointedly said it had not decided on whether Finkelstein was welcome.

The odd thing about the turnabout regarding Finkelstein is that at first the University announced he’d speak in the Library. Then the Library announced there was a conflict which essentially put the speaking engagement in limbo once again. Only after Jewish Week reporter Larry Cohler-Esses began inquiring about the room cancellation was another venue approved. Thank God for intrepid reporters.

So if you’re in Boston you might want to get yourself to Brandeis on March 6th for yet another episode in what has become a national debate about Israel. The following installment in the Brandeis-Israel melodrama will be Pipes on April 26th.

I just came across an excellent column in Ynetnews by Ben Gurion University lecturer, Dror Zeevi, which provides a more comprehensive history of hardline pro-Israel attacks on Brandeis.

I was delighted to read M.J. Rosenberg’s column today about IPF’s high-level lobbying effort on Capitol Hill this week:

We met with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Presidential Candidate Barack Obama, and Senators Kennedy, Kerry, Sununu, Murray, Cantwell and Hagel and newly elected Senators Webb, Brown, and McCaskill. The next day, we focused on House Members from the Pacific Northwest and Nita Lowey, the new Chair of the House Appropriations Committee on Foreign Operations, and the first Muslim to serve in Congress, Keith Ellison.

These meetings (with the legislators and usually a top aide) left our delegation feeling that this is a new day on Capitol Hill. Each of these legislators understands that progress toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is central to securing US interests throughout the Arab and larger Muslim world. Each recognizes that ending the conflict is critical to the security of the State of Israel. Each knows that resistance to vigorous US diplomatic activity is just about the worst approach for those of us worried about America’s standing in the world and Israel’s security as a nation.

We have had these conversations with legislators many times but this week’s conversations were different. This time there was a clear sense of urgency that America needs to play its historic role as honest broker between Israelis and Palestinians and offer the leadership that will advance both America’s and Israel’s security while simultaneously relieving Palestinian suffering and moving toward the establishment of a viable Palestinian state…

[A] Senator said that he would guess that 90 of his colleagues agree with him [that the final settlement will follow the lines of the Taba plan negotiated by Bill Clinton] although many feel constrained about saying that aloud because of the “pressure groups.”

The “pressure groups” the senator and Rosenberg are obliquely referring to of course are AIPAC, and to a lesser extent ADL and the AJCommittee.

But what’s critically important here is that AIPAC’s staff and volunteers are no longer the only force prowling the halls of Congress for votes to stymie progress in settling the conflict. There’s a new kid on the block. Hopefully, even though the new kid is smaller than the old one, congressional representatives will realize that IPF and other American Jewish peace groups are the real deal; that they know something the other guy doesn’t. Namely, that only negotiation and compromises on both sides will resolve this conflict.

Rosenberg also highlights a throwback to the bad old days of AIPAC dominance: a Congressional hearing sponsored by Gary Ackerman, Next Steps in the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process, which featured three speakers representing an Israeli center-right perspective and NO ONE representing either the Israeli peace camp OR the Palestinians. One of the speakers was the nattering ideologue, Daniel Pipes, who said this gem:

“Victory consists of imposing one’s will on the enemy by compelling him to give up his war goals. Wars usually end when one side gives up its hope of winning, when its will to fight has been crushed.”

In other words, Israelis should fight Palestinians until the end of time.

Rosenberg correctly notes the damage such a hearing does to the U.S.’ standing abroad, but particularly in Arab/Muslim nations:

although the Middle East Subcommittee hearing got no play in this country, it was widely covered in the Middle East (by Al Jazeera in particular) and will damage America’s ability to play a productive role.

Although few Americans outside the Congressional hearing room heard Daniel Pipes spew out his hatred for Arabs and describe the need to crush the Palestinian people, millions of Arabs and other Muslims heard him throughout the Middle East and Muslim Asia.

Every one who did, every one who saw an official Congressional hearing that banned the Arab point of view was either hurt by the spectacle or angered by it. And that damages the interests of America, and of Israel.

Rep. Ackerman, it’s a new day. We don’t hold Congressional hearings anymore which are patently one-sided. The goal should be for the U.S. to be more of an honest broker than a partisan favoring Israel. I guess Ackerman hasn’t gotten the memo, he’s still reading from the old AIPAC version.