By Alyssa A. Lappen and Jonathan Calt Harris
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 18, 2003

A Pulitzer Prize and Academy Award-winning composer might seem an unlikely critic of Columbia Univeristy’s Middle East studies department. But last week, when John Corigliano was honored as a distinguished Columbia College alumnus, the composer took it upon himself to criticize the bias in that Columbia department.

“There has been an enormous, enormous amount of publicity about the various departments of Middle Eastern Studies,” he said in his acceptance speech. “And about the fact that the anti-Israeli policy in these [departments] is enormous. And one can say that of the department of Middle Eastern languages and cultures at Columbia, that that’s true here.”

Corigliano’s critique of Columbia’s department of Middle Eastern languages and cultures (MEALAC), is should put the university on notice that it has a problem. Unfortunately, that problem is about to get worse, with the arrival of Rashid Khalidi next fall as MEALAC’s inaugural (anonymously funded) “Edward Said Professor of Middle East Studies” and head of the university’s Middle East Institute.

A glance at Khalidi’s work shows why this is a step in the wrong direction for Columbia University. His writings and statements routinely cross the line from education into a political advocacy that is not just extremist but often factually wrong. Four examples:

On American foreign policy. Following Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Khalidi called the widespread resistance to this act of aggression an “idiots’ consensus” and called on his colleagues to combat it.^[i] After 9/11, he admonished Washington to drop what he called its “hysteria about suicide bombers.”^{[ii] Continue reading “Columbia U’s Radical Middle East Faculty” →}

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