Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald writes in FrontPage about Columbia prof Gil Anidjar, teacher of “Hate”:
Gil Anidjar is an Assistant Professor at Columbia, with his primary responsibility the teaching of Comparative Literature — but there is a lot of comparison, and very little literature, in his writing. He offers two Comparative Literature courses. One is on Freud and Derrida. The second, a course that is listed as part of Columbia’s Middle East offerings, is called, dramatically, “Hate.”
The course on “Hate” is not really about the history or literature of the Middle East at all. It is an extended rumination upon two matters. The first is the evil of Europe, which has for its own purposes not merely created “the Other” (or rather, being especially awful, as Europe will be, creating two “the Others” — “Arab” and “Jew”), and subjecting both of them to identical diabolical persecution.
The second is that in creating, and persecuting, these inoffensive Arabs throughout Europe (and those inoffensive Jews) Europe is largely responsible for the otherwise harmonious relations between Arab and Jew, and which were disrupted only by Europe’s colonial project, and attempts to separate, and “create difference,” as with, for example, the loi Crémieux (1870), which gave French citizenship to Sephardic Jews in Algeria.
Read it all.