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Showing posts with label edward said. Show all posts
Showing posts with label edward said. Show all posts

Monday, October 15, 2007

it's absolutely

frightening there are 'professors' like this ANYWHERE, much less columbia

The Columbia Professor Who Also Doesn't Think Gay People Exist in the Middle East
Queer Theory

by James Kirchick
.........................Yet while the audience in the Roone Arledge Auditorium and millions of television viewers laughed and booed at the Islamist rube, there was one man--ensconced at Columbia University, no less--who was likely nodding along in agreement. His name is Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History, and he legitimizes, with a complex academic posture, the deservedly reviled views on homosexuality espoused by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
According to Massad, a Palestinian Christian and disciple of the late Columbia professor Edward Said, the case for gay rights in the Middle East is an elaborate scheme hatched by activists in the West. Massad posited this thesis in a 2002 article, "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World," for the academic journal Public Culture, and he has expanded it into a book, Desiring Arabs, published this year by the University of Chicago Press. In it, he writes that such activists constitute the "Gay International" whose "discourse ... produces homosexuals as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist." The "missionary tasks" of this worldwide conspiracy are part of a broader attempt to legitimize American and Israeli global conquest by undermining the very moral basis of Muslim societies, as the "Orientalist impulse ... continues to guide all branches of the human rights community." Massad's intellectual project is a not-so-tacit apology for the oppression of people who identify openly as homosexual. In so doing, he sides with Islamist regimes over Islamic liberals. .....................