Anees of Jerusalem writes to me:
Another North American college professor, Margo Ramlal-Nankoe of Ithaca College, alleges pro-Zionist prejudice was the reason behind her career block. Norman Finkelstein is quoted saying that it's a case of "tenure tragedy": "It simply cannot be disputed that she is the victim of a political witch-hunt."
Two such stories in the same month! (Last being the U of Ottawa
one.) Those peeps should start a club! Ok, bad joke; they need moral
and financial support, especially if they truly were discriminated
against.
I liked the joke. I asked Anees whether Palestinians derive any measure of solidarity from the experience of American intellectuals who have sacrificed career or advancement because of the Palestinian issue. He responded:
I live more in the Internet Cloud than I do in Palestine, so I am kind
of not so representative of 'what people here think or know'. My
news-crawling habits and tastes are Western influenced because I lived
in the US close to 9 years.
So to answer the question, stories of this scale and nature don't
make it to the newspapers and tv reports here. At best al-Jazeera
(English or Arabic), which I follow, might have someone like
Finkelstein on one of its talk shows and he might bring to light cases
like these.
So speaking for me, from my MondoAnees perspective, I sympathize
with and admire people like Finkelstein immensely, though in his
particular case I disagree with his occasional backlash-induced vitriol
like calling Israel a Nazi state—it's unhelpful and wrong. That reminds me of Salman Rushdie,
who went rightwardly ballistic against Islam because of the fatwa, and
become a darling of the right. I do wish Finkelstein would find it in
his heart to tone down some of the polemic and not succumb to anger, to
put it simply.
So, yeah… the non-Arab people who get fired because they speak
out on I/P: I myself feel bad for them as a Palestinian. They're real
people with nothing to gain, who have lives to live and maybe children
to worry about, and they get thrown in the dumpster for having
integrity. It's especially infuriating when it's happening in the Land
of the Free (and the country north of it), where the discourse on I/P
can be so Orwellian. Palestinians owe them thanks, but most don't know
it.
