While perusing Drunkablogs latest post on the C.U. campus madness staring Ward Churchill, and co-staring Churchill groupie/racist Ben Whitmer I was directed to the Ward Churchill Solidarity Network Website, were I came across a screed from Rina Abdelkader reprinted from the Anti-American Anti-Israel Pro-Terrorist “News and commentary” website Arabisto.
Arabisto is written by a collection of Islamic Imperialist, Neo-Marxists and “Anti-Zionists” (People who want to destroy Israel including the Jews and Arabs living within. In the old days we called them Nazis) so the site is virtually overflowing with the usual drivel. Mock indignation for how a brutal Fascist was treated? Check. Condemning America for being smutty, racist and “making” the Islamic world hate us? Check. Justification of suicide bombings? Check and mate. The point being that despite their attempts to claim moderation, they’re a group you’d not want as your neighbor. Especially if your a Jew.
But the most interesting part of Rina’s rant is this gem of a quote which sums up what everyone who makes a living in Academia believes the world should look like:
“…academic freedom stipulates that scholars, not elected officials, private interests, or media pundits, are the ones authorized and entitled to make collective decisions about academic knowledge, and about what may or may not be published and professed.”
Sorry Rina, but that isn’t what “academic freedom” means at all. What your describing is academic Stalinism, a system of knowledge control where certain people, professional students and college faculty, would be given absolute authority over deciding for the rest of the society what would be “true”. This to yourself and no doubt the Ward Churchill’s of the world, who make their living selling their “truth” to those too lazy to seek it out for themselves, seems an appealing prospect. To my thinking, it’s a horrible perversion of what the university system is supposed to teach.
Under Rina’s theory of “academic freedom”, college professors could write volumes of books alleging that the “colonial Zionist power” commit all sorts of atrocities and would be immune to being questioned as to the veracity of their claims. If academics make the “collective decision” that Israel’s very existence is illegitimate, they shouldn’t have to be bothered with those pesky “outside interests” whose view differs from theirs. By outside interest we mean people born in Israel for example. If Rina and Ward and a bunch other academics decided it was absolutely true that Jews make Matzos out of Palistinaian blood, those darn outside interests shouldn’t be able to keep them from spreading their “truth”, just because the outside interests are, you know, right.
It isn’t hard to figure out why Churchill supporters, desperate to save their hero from his own shoddy scholarship and penchant for the Marxification of facts to propagandize for his fever dreams of revolution, should love Rina Abdelkader’s intellectual hand job of academia. Her piece is so drenched in academy worship, so wet with lusty infatuation with the “truth keepers”, that the vanity and arrogance of a man like Ward Churchill would practically force him to disseminate the essay, if only to prove to himself there are still people out there willing to worship him and his titanic sense of self importance.
And like Churchill itself, the piece is boiling over with Anti-American/Anti-Jewish sentiment. That Jewish groups would speak out against the vilification of of Jews through the medium of Anti-Zionism becomes an attempt by “them” to stifle fee inquiry, with the aid of the evil government of course. That a debate by two sides is free inquiry never enters the mind of these supposed seekers of truth. That the obviously politically motivated attacks on a country or a policy be questioned becomes an exercise in Fascism, and to point out an outright fraud perpetrated on others is to be labeled an agent of the shadowy forces that until recently were only perceived by the most unstable of conspiracy theorists.
Academic freedom is a code for the sense of entitlement people like Churchill, and Rina Abdelkader, have that makes them feel as if they should be immune to not just criticism, but to being questioned at all. The freedom they want is to lie, to spread the old blood libels that went out of fashion with lynchings and Klan meetings, to dictate what the rest of the country, and the world, think and believe. Academic freedom for them is a code for the new intellectual theocracy that would reward their pettiness, bigotry and ugliness with unquestioning fealty and belief from the masses of people they feel so superior to.
The freedom they want is to sit in their hallowed hallsand plan out a final solution for Israel. And us.
