He was the great Edward Said. He was the man who relentlessly accused Israel of victimizing him by not victimizing him, i.e., by consenting to his success instead of somehow sending a Mossad hit-squad after him. By not letting him share the fate of his people, Israel was out to prove that it was not the sinister Zionist entity that in actuality is, so it could use the ensuing goodwill as a cover for continuing its outrages against the Palestinians. Said also famously declared on September 10, 2001, that terrorism was a fabrication by Zionist-imperialist forces to justify the perpetuation of oppression. He taught in Columbia University and was – is – a legend of its Middle East Department.

 

Where others still teach, keeping his legacy alive and well. Some teachers and students wrote recently to Columbia President, Lee Bollinger. They complained of thorough abolition of dissent from the received wisdom that Israel and America are murderous states and suicide bombing a justified avenue to redress such awful grievances as Palestinians must carry with them. They called upon Bollinger to investigate allegations that students were shut up from voicing alternative viewpoints. They urged him to investigate charges of anti-semitism in campus and in the classroom. And what did Bollinger did? He appointed a panel to look into those allegations with those most prominently accused as panel members.

 

Columbia is also the University where Nicholas de Genova teaches whatever his thing is. De Genova wished that American troops in Iraq “met a Thousand Mogadishios” there which - doing the quick number-crunching I learned at Columbia University - means the vicious murder, dismemberment and dragging through the dirt of 19.000 corpses of American servicemen. But Professor de Genova was fairly conservative in his just wrath. At least, by the standards of Professor Ward Churchill. Churchill (no kin of Sir Winston, most assuredly) faked an identity as a Native-American to earn tenure in the Department of Native-American studies at the University of Colorado. He then proceeded to teach that the victims of 9/11 were “Little Eichmanns”, who deserved to die by the divine justice ever so swiftly and appropriately meted out by “courageous” militants on that day - “courageous” was the very adjective applied by pompous, inane, self-regarding intellectual Susan Sontag to said militants.

 

There is words and then there is deeds. Good deeds of course. Like Sami al-Arian´s. The former professor at the University of South Florida also had a night job as chief fund-raiser for Islamic Jihad but was quickly elevated to martyrdom on the altar of freedom of expression by the egomaniac Academic Community. Ah, those pesky right-wingers, always trying to make things hard on the proponents of ever lasting peace! South Florida kept Sami teaching and cashing for years after it was disclosed that the professor was going the whole nine yards for the cause.

 

Frankly, what are Larry Sommers´s travails next to this? Being pilloried and hauled out of Harvard for just positing that gender may configure cognitive structures differently from men to women is a mild occurrence. Or what is being discriminated against, on grounds of being white, in every University Department of Admissions across the land next to all of the above?

 

David Horowitz, in his book Unholy Alliance, is wistful enough to recollect the candle vigils in many campuses in America following September 11. The heart-rending remembrances were… er...wait a minute... They were not remembering anything or anybody. They were demanding George W. Bush not to defend the country, heaping the H... word on any official in the Administration that might even hint at so much as touching a hair of Usama´s. Give peace a chance! At the tragic hour when 3.000 thousand Americans had been slain, these useful idiots would still have America as the doleful and craven attacker.

 

And naturally, they kept their faith to Edward Said and Susan Sontag. They were doing as they had been taught. And we, all of us, are going to lose the War for Civilization not because high-schoolers in America cannot locate Hungary in a map. But because all-of-the-above is America´s higher education today. A bunch of narcissistic, chicken-brained little lefties fawning out to produce serialised  Noam Chomskys to the delight of the Democratic Party and the mainstream media.