Of banality and burden
Hamid Dabashi*
comments on a meeting of minds
Al-Ahram Weekly
11 - 17 October 2007
Issue No. 866
Let's, then, be clear at the beginning, Mr.
President you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel
dictator . . . . I am only a professor, who is also a university
president, and today I feel all the weight of the modern
civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you
stand for. I only wish I could do better.
-- President Lee C. Bollinger of Columbia University addressing
his guest Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of the Islamic
Republic of Iran (24 September 2007)
Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
-- Rudyard Kipling, "White Man's
Burden" (1899)
The only reason that the world at large should
care about the contankerous exchange between an irresponsible
and sensationalist president of a beleaguered and increasingly
illegitimate Islamic Republic and the racist president of an Ivy
League university in the United States is that in the brief
encounter between the two dwells the symptoms of a much more
frightful malignancy now afflicting our globe--the fact and
phenomenon of an Empire least equipped to rule the world and yet
flaunting a vulgar audacity to issue pronouncements about its
ills and afflictions--at once creating, promoting, and
supporting undemocratic regimes in its domain of influence (from
the Saudis to the Taliban) and yet unable to deal with their
criminal consequences, while at the same time having the
audacity to give itself the moral authority to be the arbiter of
truth in the world, carrying the white man's burden to set the
course of history aright.
The forum to which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the
president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, was invited for a
talk at Columbia University in New York, where I teach, is one
of the inanest ideas of President Lee Bollinger--something
called "World Leaders Forum," to which he invites the most
notorious warmongers around the globe (among the most innocuous
and irrelevant leaders), so they will have yet another forum to
reiterate their nonsense. The world suffers the terrorizing
predicament that it does precisely because these so-called
leaders have altogether too many forums on which to talk, and
some of them the inordinate power and the necessary wherewithal
to put to action the nonsense they thus speak. They should never
be invited to any university, and if they are they are to be sat
down and talked to and not to listen to--they have scarce
anything important, new, or significant to say.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited to come to
Columbia University and address our community on 24 September
2007. Neither I nor any one of my colleagues in the Department
of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC), the
principle home of Iranian Studies, knew, was consulted, or
approved of this visit. In his opening statement, President
Bollinger said, "This [Ahmadinejad's visit] is just one of many
events on Iran that will run throughout this academic year, all
to help us better understand this critical and complex nation in
today's geopolitics." So far as my colleagues and I in MEALAC
know, we are party to no such "project" in understanding Iran,
outside our regular teaching and scholarly projects reading and
writing on diverse aspects of Iranian history, politics,
culture, arts, cinema, literature, and geopolitics none of which
is of any immediate use to the US military or the neocon
chicaneries trying "to understand" Iran. In fact, ever since Lee
Bollinger has become our president, our department has been
systematically sidestepped and undermined precisely because we
do not cater to such self-promoting and megalomaniac projects.
Ahmadinejad's September 2007 visit to Columbia
was overwhelmingly dominated not by the inanities that he
repeated in his talk, nor indeed by the horrors the Islamic
Republic has perpetrated against its own citizens over the last
three decades, but in fact by the rude and racist remarks that
Lee Bollinger made when introducing him. In his own remarks,
Ahmadinejad said nothing outside his regular nonsense--yet again
effectively denying the suffering of millions of human beings
and their descendents during and in the aftermath of the Jewish
Holocaust, denying that there are even homosexuals in Iran,
denying Iranian women are the second rate citizens in their own
country. No amount of footnotes or linguistic, political, or
cultural fine- tuning can excuse these inexcusable obscenities.
No degree of solidarity with the Palestinian cause can ever
translate into denying or belittling the monumental suffering of
other human beings viciously murdered in their millions by the
German Nazis in European concentration camps in the course of
the Jewish Holocaust. No cultural explication of the difference
between the varieties of homoeroticism in Iran and outside Iran
can explain the fact that non-heterosexual practices in the
Islamic Republic are severely repressed, denigrated, or even
punished. No amount of cultural finagling can change the fact
that Iranian women live in a legally sanctioned gender apartheid
system. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the representative of a brutal
theocracy that has systematically and consistently repressed,
imprisoned, and even cold-bloodedly murdered those opposed to
its very theocratic foundations. Having said all of this, I must
immediately add that only Lee Bollinger's mind-numbing racism
when introducing Ahmadinejad could have made the demagogue look
like the innocent bystander in a self- promotional circus.
A close reading of Bollinger's statement when
introducing Ahmadinejad is today the closest text analogue of
what exactly happens when the legitimate criticism of the
atrocities of the Islamic Republic quite imperceptively
degenerates into the propaganda warfare against a soverign
nation state, to be waged by the self-proclaimed moral authority
of the United States, and from there further mutating into the
oldest racist assumptions of the white man's burden to civilize
the world. Reading Bollinger's statement is to witness a
closely-knit packing of assertions of fact about the horrors of
the Islamic Republic, combined with the most ridiculous clichés
of the neocon propaganda machinery, wrapped in the missionary
position of a white racist supremacist carrying the heavy burden
of civilizing the world.
From the very first sentences of his speech,
Bollinger went on a rampage against his guest: "It should never
be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way
implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our
resolve to resist those ideas or our naiveté about the very real
dangers inherent in such ideas. It is a critical premise of
freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we
open the public forum to their voices. To hold otherwise would
make vigorous debate impossible." The man sitting in front of
Lee Bollinger, the elected president of a soverign nation state,
had not yet open his mouth and he was already branded deplorable
and dishonorable. It makes no difference how abominable some of
Ahmadinejad's utterances may have been or how massively
documented the human rights abuses of the Islamic Republic are.
Ahmadinejad was sitting there as the elected official of a
soverign nation state. Bollinger would not dare call any of the
monarchs of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or Morocco (all allies of the
United States and all medieval potentates ruling
undemocratically), or above them all call George W. Bush
anything resembling what he did Ahmadinejad--and yet Bush is now
chiefly responsible for the unconscionable poverty of millions
of Americans, most of them children, as well as for an illegal
invasion of a soverign nation- state that has caused the death
of almost one million Iraqis, maiming of millions more, and
turning four other million Iraqis into refugees. Bollinger would
never dare calling Ehud Olmert anything remotely resembling what
he did Ahmadinejad, and Olmert is chiefly responsible for
destroying the entire infrastructure of a sovereign nation state
(Lebanon), killing thousands of innocent civilians, and adding
even more refugees to the already deplorable condition of
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. This is to say nothing about
the apartheid state of Israel continuing to maim and murder even
more Palestinians and stealing even more of their homeland on a
daily basis. If Ahmadinejad has uttered a nonsense about "wiping
Israel off the face of the map," Bush and Olmert have actually
wiped the economic, moral, and political infrastructures of
three nations (Iraqis, Lebanese, and Palestinians) off the face
of the map--and yet Bollinger will roll the red carpet for them
if they ever deigned to grace our campus.
Further prejudicing his audience, Bollinger
solemnly declared, "to those among us who experience hurt and
pain as a result of this day, I say on behalf of all of us we
are sorry and wish to do what we can to alleviate it." But even
this was not enough: "To be clear on another matter," Bollinger
added, "this event has nothing whatsoever to do with any
"rights" of the speaker but only with our rights to listen and
speak. We do it for ourselves." "Unfortunately," Michael
Ignatieff once famously said, "terrorists even have human rights
too." But not according to Lee Bollinger. The President of the
Islamic Republic sitting in front of him had no such rights.
This makes Bollinger indistinguishable from Ahmadinejad who
presides over an Islamic Republic that denies its citizens such
rights, if not on practical then certainly at theoretical level.
The key question that someone should have asked Bollinger (but
no one did) is that do we have those rights on our own campus at
Columbia--can we criticize whomever we want (Israel for example)
as we deem necessary, without immediate and enduring
repercussions? Nothing short of the devil incarnate, the
Christian Fundamentalist in Bollinger thought, was sitting in
front of him: "It is consistent with the idea that one should
know thine enemies, to have the intellectual and emotional
courage to confront the mind of evil and to prepare ourselves to
act with the right temperament." What is the difference between
that sentiment and the idea of an "Axis of Evil," as promoted by
George W. Bush? What is the point of inviting a head of state,
no matter how much his ideas and practices are deplorable, to
heap racist insult upon him and by extension the people that he
may even misrepresent?
When Bollinger finished with his preamble and
turned his attention directly to Ahmadinejad, we begin to
witness the precise manner in which the legitimate criticism of
the Islamic Republic invariably and ever so imperceptively
degenerates into an illegitimate propaganda manifesto for the
missionary position of the United States to save the world and
for its client Jewish state of Israel to do its share in this
civilizing mission. Bollinger began his jeremiad against
Ahmadinejad with the senseless and unconscionable arrest of
scholars like Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh, referred to
reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch of the
persecution and even execution of political activists, pointed
out the wider range of the persecution of students and scholars
opposing various policies of the Islamic Republic, identified
Iranian women in particular, the Baha'is, as well as
homosexuals, as the victims of Ahmadinejad's policies, and then
specifically pinpointed the letter that Akbar Ganji, a leading
Iranian dissident, has written to the UN Secretary General, and
had it signed by over 300 non-Iranian public intellectuals,
writers and Nobel Laureates, expressing concern about civil
liberties in Iran. To top it all then, Bollinger added, "Let's,
then, be clear at the beginning, Mr. President you exhibit all
the signs of a petty and cruel dictator."
Now, where did that come from? Almost
everything that Bollinger has said is true, in fact truisms.
Even worse is true about the Islamic Republic, and nothing that
Bollinger said is hidden to anyone in or out of Iran. For over a
decade, a massive, grassroots, Reform Movement inside Iran has
shaken the degenerate and corrupt foundation of the clerical
rule to its foundations. Thousands have been killed, more have
been imprisoned, many more forced into exile. Iranians in and
out of their homeland, as well as anyone else slightly
interested in their fate, have known these and some have fought
valiantly to bring them to world attention. So what is the point
of repeating them here by Bollinger--that Ahmadinejad is a
"petty and cruel dictator"? It is a sign of sheer illiteracy in
basic politics to confuse an elected President (no matter how
outrageous his politics or how retrograde the republic he
represents) with a "dictator," who is an unelected monarch or
potentate who rules whimsically and as he pleases. 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.
Just a few years after the CIA sponsored a
vicious, malicious, and criminal coup to topple the
democratically elected premiership of Mohammad Mussadiq in 1953,
Columbia University, to its everlasting shame, gave the real
Iranian dictator, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, an honorary
degree. Ahmadinejad is a weak demagogue, today the elected
president of a republic, tomorrow forgotten by the history of
his own homeland. But as a signpost in the continued saga of
millions of Iranians fighting over decades and centuries for the
cause of democracy in their country he is infinitely
(infinitely) superior to that degenerate Shah whose cruel
monarchy was the predicate of this even more degenerate band of
mullahs who have stolen the hopes and aspiration of an entire
people. Did this people in their entirety have to wait for this
upstart career opportunist to come and tell them that centuries
of their struggles for freedom and democracy has been futile and
useless? Not really. Bollinger may have secured an infamous
place for himself today, but he has brought my university
unsurpassed shame with his "either brazenly provocative or
astonishingly uneducated" remarks about the history and
political struggles of a people I proudly call mine, and of
which, judging by his pestiferous and illiterate statement he
knows absolutely nothing.
The real point of Bollinger in presiding over
this charade, however, gradually emerges after these futile and
entirely useless references to all sorts of human rights abuses
in Iran--abuses that Iranians themselves are both its immediate
victims and at the forefront of fighting against them. Bollinger
though raises them for an entirely different objective. He soon
turns to Ahmadinejad's inexcusable, scandalous, and simply
outrageous remarks about the Holocaust. Bollinger's scolding
Ahmadinejad's outrageous statements about the Jewish Holocaust,
however, points to something entirety different. He wants to use
it to drum up unconditional support for his beloved Israel.
Referring to an inane conference that
Ahmadinejad's government had organized on the Holocaust,
Bollinger declared, "For the illiterate and ignorant, this is
dangerous propaganda. When you come to a place like this, this
makes you, quite simply, ridiculous. You are either brazenly
provocative or astonishingly uneducated." Now who exactly is
this "illiterate and ignorant" refers to? Iranians, right? All
of them, the entire nation? This is by far the most shamelessly
racist comment of Bollinger in a statement replete with racism,
for here "the illiterate and ignorant" categorically refers to
some 75 million Iranians in whose country this conference was
organized (entirely against their will)--an attribution made to
differ markedly from Ahmadinejad's having "come here" to the
United States, to Columbia University, where not just
Ahmadinejad but in fact those 75 million people that he (whether
we like it or not) represents are told to be "illiterate and
ignorant." "They do not exist," the Israeli Prime Minister Golda
Meir used to say about Palestinians. She denied the very
existence of an entire nation. Would Bollinger ever dare to call
Israelis in their entirety "illiterate and ignorant"?
Bollinger's easy targeting of Ahmadinejad's
inanity about Holocaust soon moves into his comment about Israel
and its right to exist. Here Bollinger is in his home territory
defending the cause of the Jewish state not just against the
stupidity of Ahmadinejad's statements but against all other
legitimate criticisms of the colonial settlement as well.
"Columbia," Bollinger solemnly declared, "has over 800 alumni
currently living in Israel. As an institution we have deep ties
with our colleagues there. I personally have spoken out in the
most forceful terms against proposals to boycott Israeli
scholars and universities, saying that such boycotts might as
well include Columbia. More than 400 college and university
presidents in this country have joined in that statement. My
question, then, is: Do you plan on wiping us off the map, too?"
Really? Now this is all fine and dandy for New York Zionist
diehards to hear and applaud. But what about the rest of us?
Where is the representation of the fact that scores of us at
Columbia, faculty and students, are also signatories to
statements boycotting the academic institution of the Jewish
apartheid state? Where is the acknowledgment of the fact that
even more of us have signed a petition calling on Columbia to
divest from companies selling arms to the Jewish state? Where is
the acknowledgement of the fact that Lee Bollinger killed our
petition before we even had a chance to articulate it? He is of
course entitled to be the born again Zionist that he is. But
where is his responsibility in representing all of us at
Columbia with views radically different from his? Is he only the
president of diehard Zionists at Columbia, or the president of
the rest of us as well?
By this point, Bollinger has moved completely
into the neocon chicanery of the Bush administration and staged
his nauseating show as if he could care less about human rights
of Iranians at large, whom he considers categorically to be
"ignorant and illiterate." "According to reports by the Council
on Foreign Relations," he says, "it's well documented that Iran
is a state sponsor of terror that funds such violent group as
the Lebanese Hezbollah, which Iran helped organize in the 1980s,
the Palestinian Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad." Really?
Hezbollah and Hamas are the legitimate grassroots organizations
of two nations, Lebanon and Palestine, and no matter for what
abusive reasons the Islamic Republic is pretending to side with
them to further its own loss of legitimacy at home, they remain
legitimate political organizations defending the sovereignty of
their respective nations. Is this president of a university or
the propaganda officer of American neocons? What exactly is the
role of a university president--simply to reiterate the most
worn out clichés of a belligerent and pestiferous culture of
militarism and global domination?
"Your government," Bollinger further added,
"is now undermining American troops in Iraq by funding, arming,
and providing safe transit to insurgent leaders like Muqtada al-Sadr
and his forces." Really? What are the Americans doing in Iraq in
the first place, having caused the maiming and murdering of
hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and making millions more
homeless, and then these Iraqis need to hear from Bollinger that
the Islamic Republic is undermining the US presence in their
homeland? If the Islamic Republic has no business doing anything
in Iraq, and it does not, then what in sanity's name is the US
doing illegally and immorally occupying that soverign nation
state--and where exactly is General Bollinger's condemnation of
that atrocious act of criminal imperialism?
"Why," Bollinger asked forcefully from
Ahmadinejad, "do you support well-documented terrorist
organizations that continue to strike at peace and democracy in
the Middle East, destroying lives and civil society in the
region?" Evidence? "In a briefing before the National Press Club
earlier this month," President Bollinger stated, "General David
Petraeus reported that arms supplies from Iran, including 240mm
rockets and explosively formed projectiles, are contributing to
'a sophistication of attacks that would by no means be possible
without Iranian support.'" Is this the president of a university
talking or a spokesman for the Bush administration's shameless
refusal to accept responsibility for the mayhem it has caused in
Iraq? If the Islamic Republic is to be reprimanded for smuggling
arms to Iraq to give to its allies, and it must, then what
should be said and done about the United States and it amassing
of the army of Attila the Hun in Iraq, or about the gargantuan
military aid the US gives to Israel on an annual and regular
basis (while millions of Americans live under the poverty line,
and their homes, their schools, their medical care and
livelihood and sheer dignity are in ruins)? Are we allowed to
ask this question from Bollinger, and does he have the
"intellectual courage" to answer them?
Finally, Bollinger took Ahmadinejad to task
about the Iranian nuclear program. "You continue to defy this
world body by claiming a right to develop peaceful nuclear
power, but this hardly withstands scrutiny when you continue to
issue military threats to neighbors." And where is the reference
to the massive Israeli nuclear stockpile in this splendid
analysis of the geopolitics of the region? Does Bollinger
himself have "the intellectual courage" that he thought
Ahmadinejad lacked in answering these questions?
And the finale: "I am only a professor, who is
also a university president, and today I feel all the weight of
the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at
what you stand for. I only wish I could do better." I have no
doubt that Lee Bollinger's speech in front of Ahmadinejad and
thousands of our students on Columbia campus in September 2007,
particularly this last line, will go down in history as one of
the most racist documents at the height of American renewed
claim to world hegemony, a document that we will have to go all
the way back to the time of Rudyard Kipling and his infamous
poem, "The White Man's Burden" (1899), originally composed on
the occasion of the US conquest of the Philippines and other
adjacent areas. The fact that this speech was delivered at the
same university where Edward Said used to teach, where Gayatri
Spivak is now a University Professor, and where its current Vice
President, Nicholas Dirks, has assembled by far the most
distinguished array of postcolonial and subaltern theorists and
scholars all go to show that the political import of these
bureaucratic functionaries called "university presidents" is
entirely severed from any organic link to the actual content of
these institutions and has assumed a political reality sui
generis, geared entirely to the apparatus of power in the United
States. Is that also the reason that Bollinger can utter the
most racist statements about an entire people and get away with
it, without a single voice of dissent from my colleagues?
Criticizing President George W. Bush on our campus is quite
rampant and easy. Because on our campus criticizing Bush is a
mere exercise in futility, for there the US president is an easy
target and a mere abstraction. It does not cost anyone anything
to criticize him. You even cash a certain amount of liberal
credentials for doing so. But criticizing President Bollinger,
who is no abstraction on our campus, is a whole different kettle
of fish. It costs you things, particularly in these renewed days
of academic and civil McCarthyism in the United States.
But by far the most atrocious aspect of
Bollinger's statement is that because of the slanted relation of
power it flaunts it ipso facto shifts the center of gravity of
contemporary Iranian political predicament away from Iran and
Iranians themselves and places it in the self-righteous domain
of a white man and his civilizing mission. It is precisely the
same colonial attitude that is perpetrated in the statement
written by Akbar Ganji and circulated for signatures among
exclusively non-Iranian signatories. Not a single Iranian was
allowed, even if he or she insisted, to sign that statement.
Akbar Ganji's deeply colonized mind, denying Iranians themselves
the right and responsibility to have a say in their national
destiny, tallies perfectly well with Bollinger's deeply racist
mind to presume that he is telling Iranians something they do
not know. Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of Lee Bollinger's
statement is the appearance of the name of Akbar Ganji in it,
for in that single reference Lee Bollinger and Akbar Ganji
appear as the two-sides of the same colonial coin that denies
nations agency and assigns to white men the authority and
audacity to civilize the world. Is it even conceivable for
Gandhi to launch his movement to liberate India and
systematically deny Indians a say in the affairs of their
homeland, or for Mandela to write a statement on behalf of civil
liberties in South Africa and disallow South Africans to sign
it? This is precisely what Akbar Ganji has done, and that is
precisely the reason why he is so easily incorporated into
Bollinger's racist assumption that he has to bear the heavy
burden of liberating Iran and civilizing the world. To avoid
that trap, it is long overdue that people like Akbar Ganji look
at movements led by Gandhi and Mandela as example of their
struggle, rather than come to the United States, go on a Shi'i
pilgrimage of collecting white talismans of names he considers
worthy of defending the cause of liberty in his homeland. The
circus around Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia in
September 2007 has now been packed and removed. Both Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad and even more so Lee Bollinger are irrelevant
footnotes in the long and noble struggle of people around the
world for a pride of place. What remains are the measures of
truth and agency we hold inviolable and sacred when it comes to
nations and their prolonged struggle for dignity and freedom.
* The writer is a professor of Iranian
studies and comparative literature at Columbia University in New
York.
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