by Jerry Gordon and Alyssa A. Lappen
Jewish Internet Association
December 14, 2003

An anti-American geyser erupted December 5 at a daylong Columbia University conference, entitled “US Imperialism in the 21st Century.” The university’s Center for Comparative Literature and Society co-sponsored the event with its controversial Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures program to honor MEALC founder, the late polemicist Edward Said. It filled the Teatro at Casa Italiana to capacity, apparently through email notices sent “entre nous” to like-minded students and faculty.The event—chaired by newly tenured MEALC professor and former Palestine National Committee negotiator Rashid Khalidi—capped a period specially marking the university’s intellectual decline. Fresh from the University of Chicago, Khalidi filled the $4 million, anonymously endowed Edward Said chair to advance Palestinian and Arab causes at Columbia, and appear frequently on PBS and NPR.Neither Columbia nor the taxpayer-funded TV and radio networks publicize Khalidi’s reverence for the memory of mass murderers like Black September terrorist Abu Iyad [1] or his support for violence: Palestinian society “comes through during these uprisings,” he said in October 2000. “It is civil society that carried the first uprising.” [2]

On December 5, MEALC’s targets were U.S. global imperialism and Israel’s Second Intifada–what London University Middle East analyst Ephraim Karsh more aptly calls “Arafat’s War.” The U.S. global war on terror seeks to defeat the state and Islamic terror sponsors that perpetrated and facilitated the September 11th attacks. Israel seeks to defeat a terrorist infrastructure that over the last three years is responsible for more than 20,000 suicide and other attacks that maimed or killed nearly 7,000 Israeli civilians. Continue reading “Peeling Columbia’s Middle East Mask” →

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