Ahmadinejad's Academics
by Cinnamon
Stillwell
FrontPageMagazine.com
July 10, 2009
http://www.meforum.org/2402/ahmadinejad-academics
What a difference a popular uprising
makes.
It seems like just yesterday that
the Middle East studies establishment was busy
defending Iran's theocratic regime and its president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad from the alleged predations of U.S. and Israeli foreign
policy. Yet in the wake of the unrest in response to the stolen election,
suddenly American academics have succumbed to intellectual honesty and
moral clarity. Despite the best efforts of the Iranian regime to drum up conspiracy theories blaming the West for
the uprising, the Iranians themselves have taken center stage.
This signals quite a shift. When
Ahmadinejad, the supposedly elected leader at the heart of the current
crisis in Iran, spoke at Columbia University in September 2007,
his appearance was applauded by many academic apologists as a means of
"reaching out." Columbia University Islamic studies professor Richard
Bulliet went so far as to act as
an intermediary between the university and the Iranian regime in
arranging the appearance. As
reported by the New York Sun in September 2007:
In a meeting of the Columbia
faculty senate on December 8, 2006, before the university extended and
then rescinded an invitation to the Iranian president to speak on
campus, Mr. Bulliet argued in favor of providing him a platform. Mr.
Bulliet said he attended a breakfast meeting with the Iranian and found
him to be a "very reasonable speaker, a very effective debater."
One would be hard pressed to
describe Ahmadinejad's typically inflammatory and conspiratorial tirade at Columbia as reasonable. Yet it was
university president Lee Bollinger's harsh introductory remarks that caused
outrage. Over 100 faculty members, including a number from
Columbia's Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures Department
(MEALAC), signed an open letter to Bollinger condemning his
"disrespectful language." The standard accusations of racism, threats to free speech,
and warmongering ensued.
Bulliet painted Ahmadinejad as the
victim, describing him as "the slight, relaxed,
well-mannered Iranian who sat stolidly through President Bollinger's
blistering attack." He complained to the New York Sun that "in a
culture where hospitality is venerated, audiences in the Middle East were
shocked by Mr. Bollinger's rebuke." But what was truly shocking was
Bulliet's blindness towards Ahmadinejad's true nature.
Today, Bulliet seems to have
experienced an epiphany. In a recent New York Times op-ed, he likened the young Iranian protesters to
America's Baby Boomer generation and used very different terms for
Ahmadinejad. As he put it:
The boomers themselves, and
particularly the women among them, chafe under the behavioral
restrictions enforced by Ahmadinejad's regime. They long to connect with
the world and hate seeing their country humiliated by Ahmadinejad's
outrageous public pronouncements.
If only Bulliet had applied such
insight when he helped broker Ahmadinejad's talk at Columbia.
Hamid Dabashi, Columbia's Hagop
Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature and
MEALAC Chair, took a similar route. Dabashi was one Bollinger's most
strident critics, penning a lengthy screed in Al-Ahram Weekly in
October 2007 in which he accused him of inhabiting "the self-righteous
domain of a white man and his civilizing mission" and of acting like "the
president of diehard Zionists at Columbia." He was particularly incensed
that Bollinger called Ahmadinejad a "cruel and petty dictator," asserting
that:
I am against Ahmadinejad and the
system over which he presides, but he is an elected official, not a
"dictator" in the technical sense of the term. The republic that he
represents is a theocracy, but that theocracy works through a very
complicated division of power in various official and unofficial,
elected and unelected, democratic and despotic, centers of gravity, of
which Bollinger seems to know next to nothing.
This was not Dabashi's first defense
of Iran's allegedly democratic system. In a 2003 AsiaSource interview, he stated that "within the Islamic
Republic, there is a democratically elected government." He also claimed
that the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 counterterrorism measures had
created "political conditions [in the U.S.] worse than those found in the
Islamic Republic [of Iran]."
Yet Dabashi has since changed his
tune. As he told CNN last month:
I am absolutely convinced that
what we are witnessing is a turning point in the history of the Islamic
Republic. We are seeing a rise of a new generation of Iranians who are
not taking it anymore. This is no longer just about this election, this
is full-fledged civil disobedience.
Now that the emperor is wearing no
clothes and crowds in Tehran chanting "Death to the Dictator" have Ahmadinejad in mind,
Dabashi isn't so eager to rally to his side.
University of Michigan history
professor Juan Cole, who once implied that the Iranian-initiated confrontation between Iranian boats and U.S.
Naval ships in the Straits of Hormuz in January 2007 was a GOP-fabricated conspiracy, has finally turned on
Tehran. Writing at his blog last month, Cole offered up a compelling list
of the "Top Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential
Election Was Stolen." Summing it up, he noted: "The post-election
situation looks to me like a crime scene."
In a rare reference to the Iranian
regime's propensity for anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism, Cole,
writing last month at Salon.com, pointed out that opposition
candidate "Mir-Hossein Moussavi complained that Ahmadinejad's bizarre
downplaying of the Holocaust had made Iran a laughingstock." This is the
same Juan Cole who steadfastly insisted that Ahmadinejad was
mistranslated when he said that Israel should be "wiped off the map" at
the World without Zionism conference in October 2005. Perhaps now that
masses of Iranians are rejecting him, Ahmadinejad doesn't appear quite so
credible.
While these examples provide a ray
of hope, it's unlikely they foretell a new era of dispassionate analysis
in the field of Middle East studies. In spite of the Iranian regime's
blatant corruption and brutality, many of these same professors are urging
President Obama to continue his administration's futile plans for
negotiation with Ahmadinejad.
Juan Cole has contended that "the outcome of the
election…changes little for the Obama administration," while Richard
Bulliet told Bloomberg News that "the U.S. and
foreign governments will have to resign themselves to dealing with the
Ahmadinejad regime." Meanwhile, Columbia University international affairs
professor Gary Sick, writing at his blog, fretted that "this election
is an extraordinary gift to those who have been most skeptical about
President Obama's plan to conduct negotiations with Iran."
In other words, it's back to
business as usual.
Cinnamon Stillwell is the
Northern California Representative for Campus Watch, a
project of the Middle East Forum. She can be reached at stillwell@meforum.org.
Related Topics: Academia, Iran, Middle East studies
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