Can we accidentally lose their passport info once they get to Iran? Maybe even lose all their info?

Posted by: Kevin at January 8, 2008 12:07 PM

....as soon as they leave the US...revoke their citizenship and tell Iran to keep them....

Posted by: exsgtbrown at January 8, 2008 12:09 PM

WOW

I agree revoke their citizenship

Posted by: Elric66 at January 8, 2008 12:12 PM

Who is paying for this nonsense?

Posted by: Mr. Arbroath at January 8, 2008 12:14 PM

Cheer up, Sir. We're in a brand new year. They'll be in the running for the 2008 award.

Posted by: MP at January 8, 2008 12:21 PM

It'll be interesting to see a list of names of those who go before the pocket-Hitler to debase themselves. I'm reminded of the trophy cake that Reagan sent to the ayatollahs. It's refreshing to see that form of olde tyme diplomacy resurrected.

Posted by: MP at January 8, 2008 12:27 PM

"....the deans and professors from the faculties of history, anthropology, Middle Eastern studies, philosophy, and Islamic studies have criticized Bollinger’s behavior toward Ahmadinejad.,,,"

...what about Ahmadinejads behavior towards Christians, Jews, NOn Muslims, women,gays,and cartoonists?.....

Posted by: exsgtbrown at January 8, 2008 12:30 PM

So many in such a hurry to 'apologize' ourselves away to inferiority. Then comes demise.

Posted by: Sounder at January 8, 2008 12:34 PM

Robert

Leave the Anti-dhimmi awards annual, but make the Dhimmi awards the 'Dhimmi of the month' award, so that we can richly recognize all the deserving candidates. As you know, there are so many more than a mere 12.

Posted by: Infidel Pride at January 8, 2008 12:35 PM

The professors are overpaid and traitorous pigs, vile butt boys. Of course they are anonymous, for now; but they should be utterly humiliated.

Aside from that, I think these people are worthy of our respect.

Posted by: StillBreathing at January 8, 2008 12:35 PM

It won't change a thing, will convince more Muslims that we are all total wimps, and encourage them to continue on the path that they have chosen. Fruitless and pathetic if not totally aggravating.

What has happened to the North American spine? Don't these people realize that if Sharia law is ever instituted here, the intellectuals will be the first to be sacrificed? Despotism does not want debate.

Posted by: OolongChung at January 8, 2008 12:37 PM

I am going to do the Columbia U. folks a favor...a public donation to the group "On the Wings of Eagles" which brings Russian Jews to Israel. Then I will send this info to Ahmidinejad's blog, so he can question the entire entourage at length, and maybe introduce them to Evin Prison.

When you fool with rattle snakes, expect to get bit.

Posted by: AmericanTiger at January 8, 2008 12:45 PM

OolongChung,
Ahhh, there's the rub....these "professors" do not believe in debate (so maybe they'll escape death by sharia on technicality), just a shout-down of differing opinions that don't tow the leftwing mantras or it's banishment to those pesky "free speech" zones popping up on campuses. Can't have free speech happening just anywhere, ya know.

Posted by: No_Mooselimbs at January 8, 2008 12:45 PM

Sounds like an excuse for a junket. I'm guessing the Univ. is going to foot the bill so they can be "All international, and such".

Posted by: Max Darkside at January 8, 2008 12:51 PM

I used to think that Columbia couldn't get any worse than the Ahmadinejad visit...I was wrong.

Posted by: irish_infidel at January 8, 2008 12:51 PM

I hope these Dhimmis do not forget to take their mothers, wives, and daughters to serve their muslim masters.

Posted by: Crusader at January 8, 2008 12:53 PM

I fear for my child when she is old enough to go to college. Gotta do my research and keep her away from these crazy dhimmi professors.

Posted by: Swinehound at January 8, 2008 1:03 PM

What has happened to the North American spine? Don't these people realize that if Sharia law is ever instituted here, the intellectuals will be the first to be sacrificed? Despotism does not want debate.
Posted by: OolongChung

won't be these Columbia buffoons who will be sacrificed first. Just because they hold tenured positions does not make them *intellectuals*.

And yes, despotism does not want debates. Columbia fits right into that equation. May I remind you of the Minutemen debate and how that ended at Columbia?

Islamism has infested the educational environment..

Posted by: Allah Schmallah at January 8, 2008 1:09 PM

I'm okay with the apology, I just ask that they only apologize for falsehoods, and clearly indicate which of the president's statements WERE falsehoods.

Don't apologize for the truth!

Posted by: Archimedes2 at January 8, 2008 1:12 PM

Maybe they can meet with Adam "Basement-dwelling, World of Islamic Warcraft-playing, Extreme Makeover-needing Fatboy Loser" Gadahn while they're over there, and he can rip up their passports in protest against America The Great Satan.

Posted by: Lori B. at January 8, 2008 1:17 PM

I do hope the good professors don't try to bring home any hotel towels or ash-trays as souvenirs. If they do, they may end up missing a few pieces, as described in the DW article following this one.

Posted by: ebonystone at January 8, 2008 1:23 PM

This isn't surprising or even remarkable. The left ALWAYS sides with our enemies. It was true in 1938 and 1968, and it is true in 2008. The only thing that has changed as of late is their willingness to be blatant about it, which will hopefully be their undoing.

The harder they work to destroy our republic, the more hated they become. How long will it be before Columbia and other such institutions begin losing enough money and public goodwill that they begin reconsidering the policy of hiring Soviet era 5th columnists and their ideological progeny?

Posted by: Lee Reynolds at January 8, 2008 1:30 PM

I’m curious why it took more than three months before this trip. Were they hoping all the turmoil from the initial visit would die down? Did they think we’d forget what this traitorous group has done?

With people like this in control of our children’s education, we are in a very sad state. We have to wake-up before it’s too late!

Posted by: snowman162000 at January 8, 2008 1:33 PM

I didnt think Americans COULD travel to Tehran (as in illegal to do so).

Oh wait a minute, this is Columbia University. They aren't Americans.

Never mind

Posted by: Mr Ape Pig at January 8, 2008 1:42 PM

Here's a chance to not slip in agent, but allow the 'Arab Street' and Bazaars to sugest we have.
Orchestrating and choreographing linkage between a couple or more of them would be ideal.
Of course, they'd have reasonable deniability which would foster even greater outrage.

Posted by: Shawmut at January 8, 2008 1:51 PM

Here's a chance to not slip in agents, but allow the 'Arab Street' and Bazaars to suggest we have.
Orchestrating and choreographing linkage between a couple or more of them would be ideal.
Of course, they'd have reasonable deniability which would foster even greater outrage.
Often done with East-West border crossers in Germany. Sending an exposed Stasi or KGB operative back into the East with bogus intelligence targets usually made him a guest of the DDR penal system as a opposed to the Bonn government's.

Posted by: Shawmut at January 8, 2008 1:56 PM

"With people like this in control of our children’s education, we are in a very sad state. We have to wake-up before it’s too late!"

Last time I checked, the students at Columbia (with rare exception) were all over the age of majority.

These are not "children." These are men and women.

This is illustrative of one of the problems that we face as a nation, the progressive artificial extension of childhood. We coddle our offspring when they are children, and seek to shield them from reality, and especially from the possibility that they might make bad choices. The result is a nation of young adults ill prepared for the challenges of being an adult, still clinging to their parents at a time in life when they should be fully independent.

The end result is a nation of people who never quite grow up, just older. And a definition of "childhood" that reaches well into the 3rd decade of life.

The next time you look at an 18 year old and feel tempted to define them as a child, just remember that the men who fought and died in WW-I, WW-II, Korea, and Vietnam were that age as well, and often younger still.

It is like Robert Heinlein said: Don't cripple your children by making their lives easy for them.

Posted by: Lee Reynolds at January 8, 2008 2:10 PM

Crusader wrote:
"I hope these Dhimmis do not forget to take their mothers, wives, and daughters to serve their muslim masters."

Are the professors allowed to bring along their "significant others", of the same or opposite sex? Do the same Sharia laws apply, as with Sarkozy visit to the Saudis?

Let's all recommend them to positions at Tehran University!

Posted by: CTYankee at January 8, 2008 2:13 PM

Ok so after rummaging around the Columbia University website I found the following e-mail addresses of the relevant department chiefs. I could not find anyone to take ownership of the Islamic Studies division. If you are really outraged as I am, send them e-mails, lots of them:

bmm23@columbia.edu
ajkosto@columbia.edu
ajkosto@columbia.edu
cr260@columbia.edu

Here is my note (please make up your own, though):

Dear Sirs,

It is my understanding that members of your departments will be visiting the fascist, genocidal dictator of Iran, Achmed Ahmadinijad in order to apologize for Dr. Bollinger's introduction of him when he spoke last September. While I agree that Dr. Bollinger was incorrect in his introduction, the fascist of Iran needs no apologies. He really needs a bullet in his head. Unless, of course you support his hanging of gay people, development of nuclear weapons to bomb cities, amputating limbs of criminals, and his overall repression of the Iranian people. This is really appalling behavior by people who really should know better. I would urge you in the strongest possible terms to cancel this visit, as it only serves to further the cause of religious fascism. And since when does Columbia University support fascism?

Needless to say, my children will not be applying to Columbia.

Posted by: dp at January 8, 2008 2:16 PM

I almost fell out of my chair on reading the subject line of this article.

This is why left wingers all are usually found in one area - clumped together. If they get caught doing their own thinking they would feel naked. They need each other to make sure they find the latest sheep talk of the day. If they are indeed found outside of their pens - they cannot handle hearing, nor speaking, anything that disagrees with them.

In this case we see a guy who spoke 'outside of the box' among the lefties and he just couldn't stand up to it and instead had to fly off to apologize to a murdering thug in charge instead of standing up to principles and to what is right.

Posted by: R_not at January 8, 2008 2:19 PM

Terrific. Perhaps they'll find time to go watch a public execution of a homosexual.

Posted by: Celsius at January 8, 2008 2:20 PM

As the apologists for Islam go to apologize to Iran for Columbia's terrible mistreatment of the mental primitive Ahmadinejad, they may need, along the way, a little amusement.

Assuming that one of their number will be the inimitable Hamid Dabashi (smiter of Ms. Nafisi and of assorted cruel campus-watchers), perhaps he could be persuaded to recite, to his fellow apologizers, his celebrated Ode On The Death of Edward Said.

And non-apologizers will derive profit and pleasure from it as well. I never tire of it. It has become one of my favorite party-tricks. Print it out, recite it, with feeling, at gatherings. You'll be the life of the party. Of every party.

And so, without further ado, The Piece That Needs No:

The Moment of Myth

Edward Said (1935-2003)
By HAMID DABASHI

Close proximity to a majestic mountain is a mixed blessing -- one is at once graced by the magnanimity of its pastures and the bounty of its slopes, and yet one can never see where one is sitting, under the shadow of what greatness, the embracing comfort of what assurance. The splendor of mountains -- Himalayas, Rockies, Alborz -- can only be seen from afar, from the safe distance of only a visual, perceptive, appreciative, awe-inspiring grasp of their whereabouts.

A very happy few -- now desolate and broken -- have had the rare privilege of calling Edward Said a friend, fewer a colleague, even fewer a comrade, only a handful a neighbor -- the closer you came to Edward Said the more his intimate humanity, ordinary simplicity, the sweet, endearing, disarmingly embracing character -- his being a husband, a father, a father-in-law, an uncle, a cousin -- clouded and colored the majesty that he was. Our emails and voicemails are still full of his precious words, his timely consolations, anecdotal humor, trivial questions, priceless advice -- all too dear to delete, too intimate to share. We were all like birds flying around the generosity of his roof, tiny dandelions joyous in the shade of his backyard, minuscule creatures pasturing on the bounteous slopes of the mountain that he was.

The prince of our cause, the mighty warrior, the Salah al-Din of our reasoning with mad adversaries, source of our sanity in despair, solace in our sorrow, hope in our own humanity, is now no more.

In his absence now it is possible to remember the time when you were and he was not part of your critical consciousness, your creative disposition, your presence in the world -- when he did not look over your shoulder watching every single word you wrote.

If remembering the time that you were but he was not integral to you is not to be an exercise in archeological futility, then it has to account for the distance, the discrepancy, between the bashful scholasticism of the learning that my generation of immigrant intellectuals received and the confidence and courage with which we can stand up today in face of outrageous fortune -- hand in hand with our brothers and sisters across races and nations, creeds and chaos -- and say, "NO!"

Today, there is a solidarity of purpose among a band of rebels and mutineers -- gentiles are among us and Jews, Christians and pagans, Hindus and Muslims, atheists we are and agnostics, natives and immigrants -- who speak truth to power with the voice of Edward Said the echo of our chorus. How we came here -- where we are, hearing with his ears, seeing with his eyes, talking with his tongue -- is a question not for making an historical record but for taking moral courage.

Now in the moment of his myth, when Edward Said has left us to our own devices and joined the pantheon of mythic monuments, is precisely the time to have, as he once said, a Gramscian inventory of our whereabouts -- once with, and now without him. Today the world is at once poorer in his absence and yet richer through his memory -- and precisely in that paradox dwell the seeds of our dissent, the promise of our future, the solemnity of our oath at the sacred site of his casket.

I come from a generation of immigrant intellectuals who mark the origin and disposition of their critical intelligence from the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). The shape of our critical character, the voice of our dissent, the texture of our politics, and the very disposition of our courage, are all rooted in every nook and cranny of that revelatory text. It was in the year of the Iranian Revolution, 1979, less than a season after the publication of Orientalism, that Samuel Klausner, who taught us theory and method, first introduced me to Edward Said's spectacular achievement in an utterly prosaic manner. I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, finishing a dual degree in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies. By the time I read Orientalism (inhaled it rather, in one deep, satisfying swoop -- drank it like a glass of freshly squeezed lemonade on a hot summer day), I had already read Karl Marx, Max Scheller, Max Weber, and George Herbert Mead on the sociology of knowledge. What Said had argued in Orientalism was straight out of a sociology of knowledge angle -- and yet with a globality of vision, a daring, defiant imagination, and with such an assured audacity that I remember I could not believe my eyes -- that I was reading these words in that particular succession of reason and rhetoric.

By the mid-1970s, my generation of sociologists at Penn had already started reading Michel Foucault in a systematic and rather unusual curriculum given that the discipline of sociology was then being rapidly sold out to federally funded policy research and demography -- a downward spiral from which a once groundbreaking discipline never recovered. But at that time at Penn, Phillip Rieff, Digby Baltzell, Samuel Klausner, Harold Bershady, Victor Lidz, and Fred Block were serious theorists with a relatively universal approach to their sociological concerns. I wrote my doctoral dissertation with Phillip Rieff advising me on the sociological aspect of my work and with the late George Makdisi on the Islamic aspect. But the seed that Orientalism had planted in my critical consciousness never left my thoughts after that fateful Fall semester of 1979 when we read it with Samuel Klausner in that dimly lit, tiny room on the fifth floor of McNeal Building off Locust walk on the Penn campus -- smack in the middle of the hostage crisis in Iran, when I could hear a chorus of Penn undergraduates shouting in unison, "Nuke Iran, Maim Iranians!"

Take Orientalism out of that curriculum, Edward Said out of our consciousness, and my generation of immigrant intellectuals would all be a bunch of dispirited souls susceptible to chronic melancholy, or else, horribile dictu, who would pathetically mutate into native informers of one sort or another -- selling their souls to soulless sultans in DC or else to senile patriarchs in Princeton.

I had no clue as to Edward Said's work in literary criticism prior to Orientalism, and for years after my graduation I remained entirely oblivious to it. It was Orientalism that would not let go of the way I thought and wrote about modern or medieval Islamic or Iranian intellectual history. From then on, I began a journey, at once professional and personal, moral and intellectual, that brought me literally to his doorstep on the campus of Columbia University -- where I now teach. To my dying day, I will cherish the precise spot next to Miller Theater on the corner of 116th and Broadway where I met Edward for the first time and went up to him and introduced myself -- the gratitude of a liberated voice in my greetings.

I discovered Edward Said first from Orientalism then his writings on Palestine, from there to his liberating reflections on the Iranian Revolution, and then from there I began an almost Jesuit training in every single book he ever wrote and the majority of his essays and articles, reading and re-reading them like a dutiful student preparing for a doctoral exam, long after I was giving doctoral examinations.

Today, of the myriad of things I have learned from Edward Said, nothing matters to me more than the rhapsodic eloquence of his voice -- the majesty, confidence, courage, audacity, and poise of his diction, without which my generation of immigrant intellectuals would have been at the mercy of mercenary academics and embedded journalists who have now flooded the gutters of the mass media -- uttering their pathologies with thick Arabic, Persian, or South Asian accents and yet speaking with a nauseating "We" that sides with the bankrupt architects of this predatory empire. In Edward Said's voice, in his princely posture and magisterial air of confidence, the fragile tone of our almost silent objections and the frailty of our say in the matter suddenly rose to the occasion.

Through Edward Said we suddenly found comrades we never knew we had, friends and families we never suspected in our own neighborhood -- Asia, Africa, and Latin America suddenly became the extension of our home away from home. Jose Marti I discovered through Edward Said, as I did Kojin Karatani, Chinua Achebe, Eqbal Ahmad, Tariq Ali, Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Spivak, Seamus Deane, Masao Miyoshi, Ngugi wa Thiongo. Everyone else we thought we knew he made new sense of for us -- Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahmoud Darwish, Nazim Hikmat, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Faiz Ahmad Faiz.

As the color of our skin began to confuse the color line drawn tyrannically between blacks and whites in the United States -- segregated in the respective corners of their misplaced confidence about their races -- we Asians and Latinos, Arabs, Turks, Africans, Iranians, Armenians, Kurds, Afghans and South Asians were instantly brought together beyond the uncommon denominator of our origin and towards the solidarity of our emerging purpose, the nobility of our handshake with Edward Said.

For years after I had come to Columbia, I could not quite reconcile the public, mythic, iconic Edward Said, and the immediate Edward of my increasing acquaintance and friendship, camaraderie and solidarity. It was as if there was an Edward Said the Magnificent for the rest of the world and then another Edward for a happy few. The two were not exactly irreconcilable; they posited a question, a distance in need of traversing -- how could a mortal so fragile, frail, and accessible cut a global figure so monumental, metaphoric, parabolic?

When two years ago an infamous charlatan slandered me in a New York tabloid and created a scandalous website to malign my public stand against the criminal atrocities he supports, my voicemail was flooded with racist, obscene and threatening messages by the lunatic fringe he had let loose. Smack in the middle of these obscenities, as if miraculously, there was a message from Edward -- a breath of fresh air, refreshing, joyous, re-assuring, life-affirming: "Hamid, my dear, this is Edward . . ." Life was so amazingly beautiful. I kept listening to those obscenities just for the joy of coming to Edward's message. There was something providential in his voice -- it restored hope in humanity. Today at Edward's funeral, the heartbroken few who could look over the shoulder of the pallbearers of Edward's coffin were witness to yet another sublime restoration of hope when Daniel Barenboim played Bach's Prelude in E-Flat from Part I of the Well-Tempered Clavier as a musical tribute to his deceased friend. Those in the vicinity of this miracle saw and heard that the Maestro's loving farewell was no longer just a virtuoso pianist playing a beautiful piece of music-- but that they were privy to Daniel Barenboim speaking with Edward Said for the very last time, in the common language of their choice, privilege and transcendence.

Edward Said was the walking embodiment of hope -- one extraordinary incident that sought and detected an extraordinary sparkle in otherwise very ordinary people who happened on his watch. Years before, when I had open heart surgery and my dear, now departed, friend and colleague, Magda al-Nowaihi was just diagnosed with ovarian cancer, Edward was extraordinary in his support: calling on us regularly, sending us his new books and articles, reading our manuscripts, making fun of what he called our postmodernisms -- he was the sound of our laughter, the color of our joy, the shape of our hope. Magda fought her malignant cancer for years until her young children became teenagers; I defied my congenital fate and lived -- Edward, the model of our endurance, the measures of our truth, the meaning of our daring to walk into a classroom.

The closer I became to Edward the more impossible it seemed to tell what exactly it was that went into the making of his heroic character in such mythic measures -- by now I was too close to the mountain, embraced by its grace, oblivious to its majesty. But even in public, the account of his life that Edward Said published is no different. One reads his Out of Place (1999) in vain looking for a clue, a succession of historical or psychological causes and traits, as to what great or consequential events make for a monumentally moral life. Everything about Edward Said was rather ordinary, and yet an extraordinary adventure was made of the prosaic occurrences of this very life.

Born in Palestine in 1935, named Edward after the Prince of Wales, he lived a life of exile like millions of other Palestinians in the Arab world. Sent to Mount Hermon High School in New England, and subsequently to Princeton and Harvard for his higher education, Edward Said reports of no extraordinary event that one can identify, analyze, theorize as the defining moment of the mythic figure that he cut at the time of his untimely death. Edward was an ordinary man. Edward Said was a giant. The distance was covered by nothing other than the glory of his daring imagination.

Knowing Edward Said personally was a study in how heroes are made from the flesh and blood of the most ordinary and perishable realities. A Palestinian, an exile, an academic intellectual, a teacher, a scholar, a husband, a father, a friend: none of this common and abundant evidence of a disjointed world can account for the sum total of Edward Said as a towering figure measuring the very definition of a moral life.

"Did you know Professor Said," I asked Chaplin Davis here at Columbia when looking for a place for Miriam Said to receive the flood of visitors who wanted to pay their respects last Friday. "I never met him," she said, "but I know he was a warrior," and then she looked at me with a bright set of shining eyes and added ". . . for justice." "It was just like a light going off on campus," another colleague said of Edward's death.

If one is to begin anywhere to place the particulars of Edward Said's moral and intellectual life together it is not in the prosaics of his exilic life that he shares with millions of others, Palestinian or otherwise, but in the poetics of his creative defiance of his fate -- where he was able repeatedly to give birth to himself. At his death, Edward Said was the moral mandate, the volcanic outburst of a life otherwise wasted in and by accidents that accumulate to nothing. Exile was his fate and he triumphantly turned it into the fruit of his life -- the gift he gave to a world now permanently cast into an exilic departure from itself.
We can find few places in Out of Place that reveal the creative concatenation of such moments better than the concluding paragraph of the book. Like his life, Said's autobiography has to be read from its endings and not from its beginnings. "Sleeplessness for me," he says, "is a cherished state to be desired at almost any cost" (295). He stayed awake when the world went to sleep -- the insomniac conscience of the world, conversant with Minerva, observant with his eyes wide awake, like a wise owl, all-seeing, all-hearing, vigilant. "There is nothing for me as invigorating as immediately shedding the shadowy half-consciousness of a night's loss, than the early morning, reacquainting myself with or resuming what I might have lost completely a few hours earlier."

It is here, in the twilight borderline of repeated promises of a dawning light against the assured persistence of darkness, when it appears that the darker moments of our despair must yield to brighter hopes, that we always find Edward Said waiting for the rest of us to awake, to arrive. "With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place." Right here, I believe, Edward Said has rested his case and left his indelible mark on the rest of us, trying, as we are, to learn from him how to complement fatefully while remaining humanly incomplete. That, in my judgment, is the principal reason why such a multitude of people ordinarily at political and ideological odds with each other deeply loved Edward without contradicting themselves or him. His was a spontaneous soul -- he generated and sustained good will and moral purpose on the impulses of the premise he was given, not on the projected idealism of some metaphysical certainty.

What was paramount about Edward Said is that in his utter solitude he was never alone. He always spoke for an otherwise muted possibility of living a moral life against all odds, a graceful David swinging his sling and launching his stones against the Goliath of a world so mercilessly cast in the logic of its own madness -- to be the moral voice of a people, and to turn the tragic fate of that people into the tragedy of a global predicament in which we have all become homeless Palestinians. His virtue was to turn the vices of his time into momentous occasions for a more universal good that went beyond the specificity of one wrong or another. There was a catholicity to his liberating knowledge, a generosity to his moral rectitude, that easily transgressed boundaries and put to shame all territorial claims to authenticity. He was, as he rightly said, always slightly out of place, but that only brought out what was wrong with that place that could not completely accommodate him in the entirety of his character and culture.

In his legacy, Said has made a universal virtue out of the particular predicament that the world handed him at birth. Born in Palestine but denied his ancestral claims on that land, raised in Egypt but schooled with a British colonial education, dispatched to the United States by way of his father's claiming a more permanent part of his American dream but constantly driven to speak the truth of that lie to the powers that hold it, Said turned the inevitability of his fate into the defining moment of his stature as the iconic figure of an entire generation of hope -- against a whole culture of despair.

Edward Said's life has its most immediate bearing as an eloquent testimonial of a people much maligned and brutalized in history. His life and legacy cannot and must not be robbed of that immediacy. It is first and foremost as a Palestinian -- a disenfranchised, dispossessed, disinherited Palestinian -- that Edward Said spoke. The ordinariness of his story -- particularly in those moments when he spoke openly, frankly, innocently of his early youth, adolescence, sibling rivalries, sexual maturity, etc. -- is precisely what restores dignity to a people demonized by a succession of purposeful propaganda, dehumanized to be robbed of their homeland in the broad daylight of history. No assessment of his multifaceted achievements as a teacher, a critic, and a scholar, no laudatory endorsement of his universal humanism, no perfectly deserving appreciation of him as a musician, an essayist, a subaltern theorist, a political activist, etc. -- nothing should ever detract from his paramount significance as a Palestinian deeply wounded by the fate of what he repeatedly and wholeheartedly called "my people."
But Edward Said was not just a Palestinian, though a Palestinian he proudly was. Edward Said also became an icon, a moral paragon in a time when taking desperate measures have cast doubt on the very possibility of a moral voice, and here the ordinariness of his life makes the extraordinary voice that he was even more enduring. Said was not just a Palestinian. But he made every one else look like a Palestinian: made homeless by the mad logic of a brutal game of power that has robbed the whole world of any semblance of permanence.

How to remain an incessantly moral voice in a morally impermanent world, how to transfigure the disfigured mutations of the world into a well-mannered measure of truth, how to dismantle the power that false knowledge projects and yet insist that the just is right and the truth is beautiful -- that is the legacy of Edward Said, right from the mountain top of his majestic peak visible from afar, down to the slopes of his bountiful pastures which few fortunate souls were blessed to call home.

Posted by: Hugh at January 8, 2008 2:30 PM

Columbia Alternate Universe. Have you thought how SINISTER and weird it is to go around the world to apologize for something someone else said and did?

What is so pathetic is that these academic cretins think their words and gestures etc. are so important to anyone least of Al-Monkey.

Posted by: poetcomic1 at January 8, 2008 2:34 PM

The trustees of Columbia should declare all of these professors in violation of the moral turpitude clause of their tenure contracts and fire the whole lot of them.

chsw

Posted by: chsw at January 8, 2008 2:36 PM

Someone should phone ahead to Ahmadinejad and say this guy is a gay Jew.

Posted by: R_not at January 8, 2008 2:38 PM

...trophy cake that Reagan sent to the ayatollahs.?
Posted by: MP at January 8, 2008 12:27 PM

Hey MP, what was this about?

Posted by: Kevin at January 8, 2008 2:47 PM

You couldn't make up better stuff than this!

Posted by: Dumbo at January 8, 2008 3:10 PM

I think the best way to handle these kinds of dhimwits is to simply publish their names, pictures, and stupidity, far and wide, such as:

* on billboards along prominent highways

* run ads on TV and radio exposing these nuts right after any ad for a university

* Candidates running for public office can mention these nuts prominently in their campaign speeches.

In Spanish, there is a word for these people "IDIOTA!"

Posted by: PersonOfTheBook at January 8, 2008 3:12 PM

This insane fifth column of traitors who poison the minds of young Americans for a living, should be made to understand by the State Department that embarking upon such a trip will automatically result in revocation of their citizenship, and they will be barred from entry back into the U.S.

They want to go to Iran and collaborate with America's enemies? Fine. But let them know it will be a one-way ticket.

Posted by: US_infidel at January 8, 2008 3:19 PM

C'mon, this is not the 1st of April.

Posted by: Mimi at January 8, 2008 3:21 PM

C'mon, this is not the 1st of April.

Posted by: Mimi at January 8, 2008 3:21 PM

I'm sure these fine fellows won't have any time to attend a hanging; they're probably only flying over to find out what's taking so long to get the Jew extermination thing going.

Posted by: Lt. Presley O'Bannon at January 8, 2008 3:49 PM

I should have known better..

What goes up...must come down.

Live and learn.

Posted by: greatcometof1577 at January 8, 2008 3:49 PM

ok, who put the ipecac in the punch bowl, Hugh?

Posted by: QuickHenryTheFlit at January 8, 2008 3:50 PM

Hey Kevin - The cake story while true seems stupid beyond belief. Rather than go into in detail here google "cake reagan ayatollah" and see what you get. Supposedly the cake was in the shape of a key.

Posted by: MP at January 8, 2008 3:58 PM

Hugh, who is the "infamous charlatan" mentioned above by Dabashi? I'd like to shake his hand.

Posted by: USBeast at January 8, 2008 4:17 PM

Definately deserves a special Dhimmi award. Maybe the Dhimmi Dickhead award for extreme stupidity?

Just amazing how many people their are who are prepared to suck up to this 21st century version of Adolf Hitler.

Posted by: DaveMate at January 8, 2008 4:29 PM

MP. Thanks.

Posted by: Kevin at January 8, 2008 4:34 PM

"An academic delegation of Columbia University professors and deans of faculties plans to visit Tehran to officially apologize to Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad."

Only one word does justice to this news: REVOLTING!

Posted by: alexon at January 8, 2008 4:55 PM

Damn, they have to play the dhimmi till the very end, don't they? Disgusting.

Posted by: mrockroll1969 at January 8, 2008 5:06 PM

No problem, Kevin.

Posted by: MP at January 8, 2008 5:16 PM

Dabashi's "infamous charlatan" is his way of referring to Daniel Pipes, who wrote something about him in a New York paper -- something unduly mild, insufficiently mocking.

More interesting is the phrase about people "selling their souls to soulless sultans in DC or else to senile patriarchs in Princeton."
There are plenty of people "selling their souls to soulless sultans in DC" -- all of those on the Saudi or other Arab take, including former ambassadors, ex-intelligence agents, ex-presidents -- but those who fit the bill the best are such people in "DC" as John Esposito, whose Prince Talal Somethingorother Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding is named after precisely such a "soulless sultan."

As for "senile patriachs in Princeton" -- an obvious reference to Bernard Lewis -- that "senile patriarch" has, since October 2003, when Dabashi wrote his astonishing and comical and telling Ode to Edward Said, published several books, a single page of any one of them superior to the collected works of Hamid Dabashi -- I know this because I have read too much of his turgid nearly-impossible prose, especially that where he goes on at tedious length (for primitives like Dabashi, quantity is a substitute for quality) about every aspect of the dismal vilayat-e-fiqh. And has written article after article, delivered lecture after utterly coherent lecture, at the age of 88, 89, 90, 91. Dabashi, as we have seen, cannot write English and cannot think.

Yes, Dabashi's dementia, I'm afraid, is definitely praecox.

Posted by: Hugh at January 8, 2008 5:33 PM

Considering the college environment today, what are the odds that at least some of these dimwits are gay.
This could turn into a dangerous trip.
What if they get caught en flagrant?

Posted by: Aunt Bea at January 8, 2008 5:38 PM

Lets give them the 2008 Dhimmi of the Year award - Now.

Surely nobody can top that this year - can they?

Gives a new meaning to the nutty professor, and surely all the world's squirrels can't hoard as many nuts as our universities.

Posted by: Spirit Of 1683 at January 8, 2008 5:41 PM

Aunt Bea,
Talk about the irony. Ouch.lol

Posted by: Kevin at January 8, 2008 5:42 PM

So let me see if I get this straight:

Some professors of the academic echo chamber (must toe the party line to be a member), one could say a representative sample of the rot in these institutions, are going to a totalitarian state to apologize for the hurt feelings of dictator filled with hate caused by Americans practising their 1st ammendment rights?

So instead of defending our constitution, which guarantees equal rights, or attempting to explain the importance of basic human rights, they go on bended need?

I agree with all the posters who said to revoke their passports. But seeing that this is unlikely, we should hope that Homeland Security would put these profs on the "no-fly-list with extra cavity searches"

Posted by: npabga at January 8, 2008 5:53 PM

Would they actually enjoy a good cavity search?

Posted by: MP at January 8, 2008 5:57 PM

I've just been looking at the bloated, altogether ludicrous entry at Wikipedia for Hamid Dabashi. I don't what part is funniest. Almost all of it is, no doubt, written by Dabashi himself.

But here's one sentence I particularly like:

"Dabashi’s major theoretical contribution is the collapsing of the binary opposition between the creative and the critical, the true and the beautiful, the poetics and the politics etc."

He's just gone and done it, see. He's collapsed that old "binary opposition" between "the creative and the critical" and "the true and the beautiful" and "the poetics and the politics" and let's not forget the vast vistas opened up by that promising multum-in-parvo word "etc."

Posted by: Hugh at January 8, 2008 5:58 PM

This is what happens when you take a boy, not to the manner born, out of what must have been a primitive backwater (that "working-class" origin he claims) and bring him to the big city, that city being not a real place, but the mental city of Western culture, and give him not the real thing, but a simulacrum of the real thing, so that while he is lacking in the education that would enable him to understand and appreciate that West, he never gets that education, but is dropped right into Fanon-and-Derrida land, and thrashes about from then on.

Like so many former teachers of literature today, bored with mere words, and with students who are semi-literate, he's discovered "the cinema" as the new domain of his "discourse," but his impossibly-politicized "cinema" is one that would be greeted with gales of knowing and contemputous laughter from Kierostami and other, civilized Persians who actually make those Iranian movies that will transcend their time, and to which, as "Iranian cinema," Dabashi has affixed himself like the post-colonial parasite, within the permanent primitive, he is. Yes, his every word, but above all that Ode To Said, shows that he remains that primitive, whether he happens to live on the Upper West Side, or happens somehow to have attained the well-upholstered chair of the Hagap Kevorkian Professorship. Those titles, that station, change nothing, for the usurpers in the American academy. He's not the only one. But he's a most comical one.

Don't you wonder if Jacques Barzun keeps up with this example of a quite new kind of faculty member at Columbia, and if he does, what he must be thinking?

Posted by: Hugh at January 8, 2008 6:09 PM

I hope the airplane they travel runs out of gas over the Atlantic. They do not represent me nor any American.. These people ought to be flown to Guantanamo

Posted by: lonewolf at January 8, 2008 6:41 PM

Would they actually enjoy a good cavity search?

Posted by: MP at January 8, 2008 5:57 PM

Laughing,

Maybe, though more seriously, I am wondering how similar Iranian prisons are to Turkish ones.

Plant some hashish on them, though maybe this is unnecessary since I am sure many of them partake regularly anyways, and have them experience firsthand the film 'Midnight Express'

Hugh at January 8, 2008 5:58 PM

He is truly legend, the messiah, on that day we gainded higher plain of conscience, the old rules were broken and everything made sense.

Thanks for the link, etc.

Posted by: npabga at January 8, 2008 7:00 PM

Apropos the piece on amputations, perhaps these professors can participate first hand in Iranian justice and do some of the amputations themselves. Maybe, just maybe, they can do amputations on each other, you know, just to get in the spirit of Iran and then make their useless limbs gifts to the Iranian president.

Posted by: Seymour Paine at January 8, 2008 7:10 PM

from above

"Born in Palestine in 1935, named Edward after the Prince of Wales....."

If documents such as birth certificates were used at the time of his birth, and one is therefore available, what are the chances that in the box where Country of Birth is to be filled in, it lists "Palestine" in 1935?

Posted by: USorThem at January 8, 2008 7:10 PM

This turns my stomach. Of all the causes these privileged individuals could be contributing their time, intellectual vigour, and money to, they choose to take time off their teaching (assuming these so-called "professors" are still expected to do any teaching?) to travel to Iran to apologize to a psychotic dictator. I hope they feel pleased with themselves. I agree; they don't deserve to return to the U.S., much less to their cushy jobs and fat paychecks. Maybe poetic justice will be served somehow. We live in hope.

Posted by: angloirishslav at January 8, 2008 7:48 PM

I'm shocked that I still get shocked at things like this, and of the necessity of it being a face to face apology, Man. They better bring protection, especially if they bow to their master.

Posted by: Bosch Fawstin at January 8, 2008 8:14 PM

What must they make of us?

Posted by: devorgilla at January 8, 2008 8:48 PM

Maybe, if we are lucky, the Iranians will find them permanently useful as male escorts at Qom.

Posted by: FredIsinglass at January 8, 2008 11:31 PM

...Mr Bollinger said to Ahmadinejad:

".. Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator, and so I ask you, why have women, members of the Bahá'í Faith, homosexuals and so many of our academic colleagues become targets of persecution in your country?"
"Why do you support well-documented terrorist organizations that continue to strike at peace and democracy in the Middle East, destroying lives and the civil society of the region? Frankly, and in all candor Mr. President, I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions, but your avoiding them will in itself be meaningful to us. I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mind-set that characterizes what you say and do."

......do the college professors have a problem with the truth...?......

Posted by: exsgtbrown at January 9, 2008 6:41 AM

Maybe the Allied Forces should set up an official apology to Hitler. **snerk**

Dhimmitude will be the undoing of the West!

Posted by: Always On Watch at January 9, 2008 8:48 AM

I used to think that Columbia couldn't get any worse than the Ahmadinejad visit...I was wrong.

Posted by: irish_infidel at January 8, 2008 12:51 PM

It is truly unbelievable.

Posted by: darcy at January 9, 2008 9:16 AM

I have become more and more appalled by Columbia University over the months, but this nonsense takes the cake. I have a Master's Degree from Columbia, and I am going to tear it up and send it back to those loons.

Posted by: Drjeff at January 9, 2008 10:08 AM

D-

Posted by: special_guest at January 9, 2008 10:16 AM

Questions arise:

Who are these professors?

How did they get their jobs?

What organizations do they belong to?

What are they teaching in their classes?

Why are American universities hiring these people?

Posted by: Rahman bin Rahman at January 9, 2008 10:50 AM

The Academic Intelligentsia is at it again...

If you take a 'morale building' trip to a country that's an avowed enemy of the United States, your citizenship should be automatically revoked.

Notice how they haven't yet revealed their names. What are they afraid of? A backlash of criticism for their treachery? Anonymity always provides a cover from responsibility. And to think parents pay good money for these wackjobs to indoctinate their children.

My contibution to the apology:
Mahmoud, I am very sorry that you enjoyed the auspices of undeserved free speech and protection in the U.S. Please accept my best wishes for a slow, painful death.

Posted by: SFCMAC at January 9, 2008 11:44 AM

The sad truth is these pathetic brown-nosers will be treated like visiting diplomats in Iran, and Iran will milk this pr coup for every drop.

These Useful Idiots will come back and be feted by their stall mates (jackasses DO have stall mates don't they?).
Hope for any better outcome is wishful thinking, unfortunately.

Posted by: DaninVan at January 9, 2008 12:39 PM

Perhaps they can have first-hand experience of what is done to people that dress unislamic in Terhan. We could only hope.

Posted by: never_submit at January 9, 2008 1:55 PM

I assume none of these Columbia folks are gay/lesbian.

Posted by: TheOmegaMan at January 9, 2008 2:31 PM

A commenter at my site said the following about this story:

The news report is a fabrication by a so-called news agency in Iran, which is undoubtedly a government front.

No one at Columbia knows anything about this trip. Iran is just trying to stir up more trouble.
Ungvar | 01.09.08 - 11:04 am

Now, I'm not a doubter of Dhimmi Watch, but I wanted to alert all those here as to the above comment. Perhaps some here could post an answer to the commenter?

Posted by: Always On Watch at January 9, 2008 5:15 PM

Since Dr. Bollinger is mentioned as having been queried, and having advised the faculty members involved, it would seem that he'd be the go-to guy for confirmation(?). Anyone out there have him on speed-dial? :)

Posted by: DaninVan at January 9, 2008 5:29 PM

Interesting; no easy access e-mail addy at Columbia's website(?)...
Although I found these:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/president/communications%20files/tc.html
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/president/

(I tried mousing and clicking on the lions privates...no joy)

Posted by: DaninVan at January 9, 2008 5:51 PM

Well, is it true, or not?

Posted by: darcy at January 9, 2008 7:24 PM

Anybody here live in Ny, Ny?
President's Office, Columbia Univ.
535 West 116th Street, 202 Low Library, Mail Code 4309, New York, NY 10027
phone: 212.854.9970, fax: 212.854.9973
Office hours: Weekdays, 8am-6pm

Posted by: DaninVan at January 9, 2008 7:43 PM

How can they "officially" apologise if they have not been sent by the University itself?

Posted by: payingattention at January 10, 2008 5:39 AM