Why does every single Jewish or Palestinian event spiral down into bitch-fest nonsense? Why does bitch-fest nonsense in that part of the Middle East continue to spread its contagious notions of xenophobia and unbridled hate to us?

My analysis is horribly reductionist, but the issue often comes off this way. Let’s face it: the Israeli and Palestinian populations will not agree on certain monumental things. And excuse me for sounding trite, but neither violence in physical, in symbolic, or in verbal (or even here) form will ever constitute a step forward. Of course, one can hope that history’s famous deployment of the “one step back, two steps forward mechanism” will eventually do something (don’t hold your breath it’s been going on for over 60 years). No productive dialectic can emerge without utilizing proper methods of consultation.

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I’m too swamped by an English paper to give a detailed analysis, but I don’t really think one is necessary. Just read this, and gape at the fact that its author actually teaches here.

Some favorite excerpts from our Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies’ latest pathological screed:

With that one phrase she puts on the record that behind her clean-cut hairdo and makeup lurks the criminal mind of a mass murderer….

She does not wish to inconvenience her major supporters — ranging from her Israeli constituency in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, to her Zionist financers in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, all the way down to Gloria Steinem, Edward Rendell, Geraldine Ferraro and Jack Nicholson…

The good Senator from the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey, and Israel wants this varied constituency to know immediately what she means when she says she is going to obliterate the entirety of a nation, a people, the whole 70,000,000 plus of them….

…she serves as the senator of the Empire State of Israel…

…the Israeli Senator from New York…

The latter is fully supported and sustained by the American Christian Empire, and will be after Senator Golda Clinton Meir possibly becomes its Commander-in-Chief…

To his credit, the good professor does sneak a valid observation into his hyperbolic and publicly humiliating display of crypto anti-Semitic paranoia:

She is the worst face of American political culture — a vicious, vulgar and degenerate power mongering, willing to do absolutely anything and everything to destroy a rival, no matter how many more states have voted for him, how much more of the popular vote he has received, and how many more pledged and super delegates are on his side.

this excerpt from Joe Raggo’s sendup of Dartmouth, French literary theory and the state of academia in general:

I once wrote a term paper for a lit-crit course where I “deconstructed” the MTV program “Pimp My Ride.” A typical passage: “Each episode is a text of inescapable complexity . . . Our received notions of what constitutes a ride are constantly subverted and undermined.” It received an A.

And check back later this week for a full Commentariat Year in Review.

In the year of Ahamdinejad, hunger strikes, faculty uprisings (don’t remember that one, huh? Well, check out the Comm.’s Year in Review this Wednesday and Thursday!), noose-hangings, plagiarists, hate crimes, tenure battles and irritating websites, it was encouraging to see that the lede of the Spectator’s last top story of the ‘07-08 school year reads as follows:

As neighborhood criticism of the West Harlem Local Development Corporation subsides, members of the corporation say they are four months into developing a full community-benefits agreement.

It was equally encouraging to see that the writer of these lines was Daniel Amzallag, who was involuntarily catapulted into Spectator lore by the front fender of an oncoming car. But his leg has healed, and the recipient of one of the truly horrific on-the-job injuries in Spec history is now healthy enough to write a comfortingly innocuous news story about the University’s relationship with the Harlem community. It turns out this year wasn’t fated to end in massive student and communal retaliation against the University, for better or for worse. So for Dan, for the University, and for fans of moderation and compromise, everything turned out all right.

Could that turn out to be the last word on one of the most tumultuous years in Fair Alma’s history? It’s easy for a self-important journalist like myself to get stuck on the notion that everything he’s covering is the most significant thing ever to happen, ever. But the hunger strikers were only with us for ten days, Ahmadinejad for a couple of hours, David Horowitz for even less time than that. I submit that these events were thrilling at the time, but perhaps ephemeral in retrospect; footnotes dotting an otherwise-undistinguished era of footnotes. I’m not sure this year has changed Columbia in any fundamental ways, but I’m not sure it hasn’t–for now, I’m content with leaving Amzallag’s lede as an optimistic coda to an often-infuriating year.

I just got back from the Varsity Show. It was the first time I’ve been to the Varsity Show, and I really enjoyed it. Unfortunately, I have a splitting headache from sitting in the front row, but that’s a small price to pay for good entertainment.

Speaking of things that addle the pate, I read this curious column in the Spec.

Let Dante and Austen and Woolf know all the “facts” they will, they still wouldn’t be anything without knowing equally as much about how their own minds function—their success comes from their desire and ability to not let the mind work itself out without consciously understanding what it’s doing.

Wahuh???

[One of the most vile acts of vandalism in this city’s history will occur some time next autumn, when the Kotel of American sports will physically cease to exist, replaced by a Disney-like simulacrum of the most hallowed place in baseball. When that happens, we can all relive the magic by reading Christopher Morris-Lent’s hour-by-hour breakdown of last night’s Yankees-Mariner’s game.]

5:10 PM, May 2, 2008

It’s a sacrament of sports fans everywhere, expat and otherwise, to root for their hometown teams in hostile stadiums, to rain insults down upon the hated home team while enduring the scornful opprobrium of their supporters. And what better opportunity to do this than a Yankees vs. Mariners game, pitting the most odious franchise in all of sports against the only team that the dilettante Seattle sports fan – i.e., me – cares about on a regular basis? Bearing this in mind, I ordered a pair of tickets up in the bleachers for each game in the series back in April and awaited the arrival of March with masochistic joy.

At around 5:10 my friend from Yale, much more of a hardcore fan than a detached, over-intellectualized humanities douchebag like me can ever be, came to campus, and with a Don Diego cigar in my mouth we walked to the 125th and Lexington subway station. Regrettably I got a little lost around 125^th and St. Nick’s, so I used that as a flimsy pretext for leading my charge on a stroll down Harlem’s main street, puffing my cigar along the way.

We swapped obscure NBA references – Manute Bol, Robert Horry’s clutch shots – and I reflected with pleasure that it was good to talk about sports again after three months at Columbia, and that no outside observer could discern how little I really knew about the subject. To appear smarter than one actually is – this is the key to life.

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Karen Arenson, higher ed reporter extraordinaire for the Gray Lady, has accepted a buyout package, the Chronicle of Higher Ed reports.

Arenson may be familiar to readers as the byline that always appears in the Times above whatever crazy shit is going on at Columbia.

Hers is one of 100 buyouts reportedly going down in the troubled Times newsroom these days. A spokeswoman told the Chronicle, ominously, that “more changes were pending.” Ring any bells?

(Here’s a long interview with Arenson, in case anyone is weirdly obsessed.)

To counter today’s op/ed (linked below), a quick rundown of what Nakba Week gave us:

-Joseph Massad explaining that “the Nakba began in 1881,” as if Jews fleeing the Russian and Polish pogroms of that year did so in order to dis-posses Palestinian Arabs–a slander not-so-vaguely reminiscent of the old anti-Semitic canard that the Jews encouraged the Holocaust in order to obtain some pretext for laying Palestine to waste.

-Gil Anidjar going on off on a barely-coherent tangent about Zionism being “the internalization of Jewish self-hatred.” Yes, and Palestinian nationalism is internalized self-hatred as well, right?

-Saif Ammous callously referring to the celebration of Israeli independence as “phony,” and condemning a pro-Israel group’s attempt at outreach and dialogue (however superficial) as “racist.”

Anti-Zionism is just about the only intellectual position I can think of that holds the destruction of a single political entity as its organizing principle. As this past week reveals, it marries the worst of antiquated, right-wing pan-Arabism (for instance, Massad’s rehash of the old Nassarite conspiracy theories) with the worst of post-identitarian utopianism (for instance, Anidjar’s rather condescending replacement of 100 years of Zionist thought with a cute half-sentence of crude psychoanalysis. Keeping in mind that he teaches a class called “Freud and Derrida”…), then insists on applying the toxic mix to a country whose legitimate political sovereignty is recognized by a vast majority of the countries on earth.

Nakba week was characterized by this ideological incoherency on the one hand, and the kind of cheap intellectual thuggery practiced by Massad, Anidjar and Ammous on the other. It was a week of shallow anti-Israel hysteria–successful for those who are already hysterically anti-Israel, a non-event for everyone else.

Then again, this probably had more to do with shaming the campus’s Zioinsts than with winning ideological converts. Let this post serve as proof that they failed.

The NY Sun hates on the Coatsworth appointment (though curiously, not on the SoA’s thesis show).

Massachusetts state legislators mull hating on colossal endowments. I wonder who they have in mind…

Columbia professor et al. hate on unoriginal music.

Uma Thurman reads aloud stalker’s emails to her Columbia professor father in court. Understandably, she hates that kind of attention.

TNR’s Marty Peretz just indiscriminately hates.

An alternative view on things, given that the theme of this week’s Op/Ed page could very well be summarized as “discourse is not bullshit.” From Chris Kulawik’s (tad bit self-congratulatory) validictory a couple of days ago:

We are ordinary students, well over 10 percent of the community, who, like everyone else, want only a quality education and the chance to be heard. And I am equally proud of our methods. Unlike our various progressive peers, we respect your right to skip our columns and ignore our events. We have never forced our will on the Columbia community.

Chris Kulawlik is, to be sure, an proponent of enlightened political debate–of toleration, of talking things out, of intellectual pluralism. But the aforementioned Hillel president puts him to shame:

“Al Nakba” is a term that makes many Jewish students feel uncomfortable, so an event with “Al Nakba” in the title is not something Hillel will co-sponsor. In using the inflammatory term in its title, the week-long program eliminates the possibility of dialogue and understanding…

However, events labeled with “Al Nakba” are not models that will successfully engage in dialogue if a discussion of the Arab-Israeli conflict has to be based on the premise that Israel’s creation was a catastrophe…

The five-letter word Nakba, like some other inflammatory four-and-five-letter words, is not the beginning of dialogue.

Yet even she is a veritable Philistine (no pun intended) compared to my next-door neighbor (who, by the way, won’t be happy about this post I reckon. Just knock on my door, Jake…), LionPac president Jacob Shapiro:

The dialogue we propose requires diligent thought and planning, down to the smallest details. We do not offer this as a ploy or a political trick. We fully intend for this to take place, if you are willing to join us. As a first step, we propose a private meeting among representatives of our organizations to initiate discussions and talk about moving forward. While we fully understand the potential for failure, we believe that the time has come to challenge ourselves and search for solutions. Next semester we look forward to working together.

Our hand is extended. Will you meet us?

Let’s hope they don’t. My reasons why after the jump.

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