Ms. Almontaser, a teacher by training and an activist who had carefully built ties with Christians and Jews, said she was forced to resign by the mayor’s office following a campaign that pitted her against a chorus of critics who claimed she had a militant Islamic agenda. In newspaper articles and Internet postings, on television and talk radio, Ms. Almontaser was branded a “radical,” a “jihadist” and a “9/11 denier.” She stood accused of harboring unpatriotic leanings and of secretly planning to proselytize her students. Despite Ms. Almontaser’s longstanding reputation as a Muslim moderate, her critics quickly succeeded in recasting her image.
The conflict tapped into a well of post-9/11 anxieties. But Ms. Almontaser’s downfall was not merely the result of a spontaneous outcry by concerned parents and neighborhood activists. It was also the work of a growing and organized movement to stop Muslim citizens who are seeking an expanded role in American public life. The fight against the school, participants in the effort say, was only an early skirmish in a broader, national struggle. “It’s a battle that’s really just begun,” said Daniel Pipes, who directs a conservative research group, the Middle East Forum, and helped lead the charge against Ms. Almontaser and the school.
I’m temporarily coming out of hiatus to point to this “New York Times article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/nyregion/28school.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin which should, I hope, give some pause to people who claim that concerns over whether to fire people like John Yoo reduce down to academics trying to defend their privilege of tenure. And yes – I completely agree that there is a vast gaping difference between trying to fire someone for actions that were directly intended to facilitate torture,1 and firing someone because vicious paranoid hatemongers like Daniel Pipes and his cronies say that she deserves firing. The question is whether that distinction can be maintained politically in an employment system where very few people indeed have the kind of job protections that academics (or, to a lesser extent, teachers in an unionized system) have, and where people like Daniel Pipes have considerable political sway. I think it’s perfectly legitimate for people to maintain either (a) that firing people like Yoo in the absence of external proceedings is still worthwhile, even if it has substantial knock-on effects, or (b) that firing Yoo is unlikely to have the kinds of repercussions that I fear. But I also think that my position is legitimate (and I also think that it’s right or I wouldn’t have put it forward), and whatever you believe, it’s clear that the battles that are about to begin are only indirectly about academic freedom. They’re better considered as battles over whether people who hold minority views (‘middle ground’ Muslim views, certain political beliefs), whether they be professors, teachers, or whatever are going to be persecuted (either sporadically or systematically, depending on how successful Pipes is), sacked or forced to resign, and forced out of public life in its myriad forms. That’s the agenda that Pipes is proposing. Now back to my cave …
1 I should say, by the way, that I think that “Brian Leiter’s claim”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/american-freedo.html that
Anyone calling for him to be fired is calling for him to be punished for his ideas, and nothing else. Attempts to claim it is more “complicated” are just attempts to rehabilitate the idea that having bad ideas, even bad ideas others act on, is a crime.
is misleading and very badly wrong. “Ideas” that are floated in an academic paper are very different from _legal analyses_ that are offered by someone working within a bureaucratic apparatus, which are directly intended to help others in that apparatus to carry out war crimes. The latter are better considered as actions than ideas – they are directly connected to the activities that are carried out on their basis in a way that free floating ideas are not.
UPDATE: I should perhaps have made clearer that I am not diving into the comments section of this post for reason of time commitments. I recognize that this isn’t very satisfactory for people who might want to push me on this or that aspect of my argument, and promise that I’ll post again on this when I return …