To the Editor:
It is with distress that we read the Spectator’s defamatory campaign against Columbia University’s most celebrated professor, Edward Said [“Said’s Affinity for Fiction,” Sep. 7, 2000]. The Spectator should not allow itself to be used as a forum holding inquisitions against professors deemed by some Columbians as “errant.”
Edward Said is world-renowned for his scholarly and academic integrity, a reputation he had initially acquired here at Columbia. For the editors to call him “hypocritical” and to call for his dismissal from University service due to his throwing a rock across the Lebanese-Israeli border smacks of demagoguery.
The Spectator’s editors would do well condemning Israel’s 30-year reign of terror against Lebanon’s civilian population of Palestinians and Lebanese during which it killed tens of thousands and made half a million people refugees. The triumph of the Lebanese resistance against the illegal foreign occupier of its land should be hailed as an example of the triumph of justice against injustice.
It is not Said’s symbolic gesture against the occupation forces which needs condemnation, but the Israeli soldiers’ shooting of three Jordanian civilians across the border one week before Said threw his stone. It would have been better had The Spectator taken note of such violence instead.
Magda Al-Nowaihi, Associate Professor, MEALAC
Gil Anidjar, Assistant Professor, MEALAC
Hamid Dabashi, Associate Professor, MEALAC
Joseph Massad, Assistant Professor, MEALAC
George Saliba, Professor, MEALAC,
Marc Van de Mieroop, Chair, MEALAC
Gauri Viswanathan, Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature
http://www.columbiaspectator.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2000/09/11/3c7408db445d4?in_archive=1