With military tensions escalating between the US and Iran, it would be good to know that if we have to go to war with the number one state sponsor of terrorism in the world, the country that held US diplomatic hostage for 444 days, whether we had everybody here in this country rooting for the good guys. (That’s us.)
However, that seems not to be the case. We have a professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature teaching at Columbia University, who seems to be on the side of the mullahs. His name is Hamid Dabashi, and we have featured him before on these pages, usually for his incendiary anti-Semitic statements. Now he is running an article in Al Jazeera, which clearly takes the position that President Trump is the bad guy.
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/iran-attack-war-190626171305032.html
If you think Dabashi is the only academic in the US writing for the despicable news outlet based in the despicable country of Qatar, you would be mistaken. There are plenty of US-based academics ready to carry water for Iran and other hostile interests in the Middle East while blasting our own country (and Israel) with regularity.
Dabashi’s article during such a delicate point makes me think back to the US-based German-American Bund, which carried water for the Hitlerian regime prior to our entry into World War II. We say that politics stops at the water’s edge, but for academics, the show must go on.
By the way, Dabashi’s article is also being re-posted, re-tweeted, etc. by others-with less critical comment. Local Islamist activist in Southern California, Shakeel Syed, has re-tweeted it (with no comment whatsoever).
https://twitter.com/ShakSpeak/status/1144837222564282368
Syed is past CEO of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California. He has a history of calling America and Israel “racist nations”. But I digress. This article is about Dabashi, not one of his fans.
President Trump, despite his critics who think he is a warmonger, has acted responsibly in the Iran issue. After one of our drones was shot down, he declined to respond militarily because it was estimated there would be innocent casualties. Yet, here we have Dabashi calling Trump a bully and a liar. In fact, reading this smear piece, it is hard to tell whether Dabashi is applying those words to Trump. the United States, or both. One would expect to hear those words coming out of some university in Iran, not Columbia. Or would one?
