(New York Magazine) Jennifer Senior - Columbia Unbecoming is a 40-minute reel of testimony from fourteen students and recent graduates who describe, among other things, moments of feeling cowed by professors for expressing pro-Israel sentiment in the classroom. The startling thing about the video, made by a group called the David Project, isn't just that these students showed their faces. It's that they dared to name names, and that all of the professors are in the university's Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures, known around campus as MEALAC. One student, an Israeli and a former soldier, says a professor named Joseph Massad demanded to know how many Palestinians he'd killed; another woman recounts how George Saliba, one of the country's foremost scholars on Islamic sciences, told her she had no claim to the land of Israel because - unlike him - she had green eyes, and therefore was "not a Semite."
2005-01-14 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive