This week our subject has been Hamid Dabashi, a Professor of Iranian Studies at Columbia University who is notorious for his anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, and readiness to defend Islamic terrorism. We’ll wind up today with just a few representative items from recent years.
In 2011, Dabashi condemned high-profile fellow Muslims and ex-Muslims who, living in the West, “inform…on their brothers and sisters…as a way of ingratiating themselves with their white masters.” He was referring to people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq who “have undertaken their activities in the honorable name of defending human rights, women’s rights, and civil rights of Muslims themselves” but who in fact, he claimed, “have demonized their own cultures and societies” in order “to advance their careers” and thereby help “rationalize and justify US carnage in the Muslim world.”
In 2013, Dabashi was one of many members of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement who signed an open letter to exiled Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf criticizing his participation in the Jerusalem International Film Festival, where he was to be awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award for Peace and Freedom. Three years earlier, Dabashi had published a book praising Makhmalbaf’s films. “We ask not only that Mr. Makhmalbaf stand with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement,” read the open letter, “but that he be a messenger of liberation for everyone, including both Palestinians and Iranians.”
As Cinnamon Stillwell noted, this wasn’t the only open letter written in response to Makhmalbaf’s action: in fact, eighty Iranian academics and activists wrote in the Times of Israel praising Makhmalbaf’s “bravery for breaking the taboo of visiting the state of Israel and conveying the message of friendship between [the] Iranian people and [the] people of Israel.” As Stillwell noted, Dabashi is a film critic and self-described advocate of “art without border,” but for him apparently, “anti-Zionism trumps any alleged belief in the transcendance of art.”
In 2015, Clemens Heni reported that Dabashi, after “a flurry of speaking engagements at German universities and organizations,” had “become the darling of German academe.” Explaining that “Germany is a hotbed of academic antisemitism, particularly in the fields of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies,” Heni observed that “Germans are particularly pleased with non-European scholars, such as Dabashi, who will defame Israel and downplay the crimes of the Holocaust.”’
In his 2015 book Can Non-Europeans Think? Dabashi promoted the idea “that Israel is committing an ‘incremental genocide’ of the Palestinians.” In fact the populations of Gaza and the West Bank are steadily climbing.
After the jihadist Omar Mateen gunned down 49 people last year at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Dabashi responded by serving up a bunch of meaningless academic gibberish about “two people, Americans and Muslims, converging on the edges of their common destiny,” by equating “Islamophobia and homophobia,” and by trying to shift responsibility to the U.S. government for its invasing of Iraq. Dabashi argued that while there are “homophobic Muslims,” he added that there were also “homophobic Jews, homophobic Christians, homophobic Hindus, [and] homophobic atheists.” True, but what makes Islam different in this regard is that its scriptures contain passages calling explicitly for the murder of gay people and a great majority of its adherents refuse to distance themselves from those passages.
So it goes. And after all this, Dabashi is still poised comfortably on his perch at Columbia, shaping the minds of yet another generation of Ivy League students.