> As regards Dabashi's courage, that turns partly on
> whether he has tenure or not. Does anybody know?
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Nasty innuendo. Dabashi's tenure at Columbia is hardly secure.
He and two other members of Columbia's Middle East studies department, Joseph Massad and George Sabila, have been under siege for the past several years from the campus witchhunt arm of the Israel lobby in the US. All are strongly pro-Palestinian and vocal critics of the US and Israeli policy in the Middle East.
The university's undistinguished university president Lee Bollinger responded to the furious attacks on the trio by ordering an internal inquiry to investigate whether the familiar Zionist slanders of "anti-semitism" levelled against them were based in fact. Of course, they weren't, and the investigation quickly dismissed the charges. Meantime, Bollinger was widely condemned within the academic community for capitulating to outside pressure rather than defending free speech.
Dabashi's web site can be found here: http://www.hamiddabashi.com/index.html. A quick skim of the selected newspaper essays and other published writings on it might persuade Michael of the pitfalls of rushing to judgement.