- Hamid Dabashi
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] , most recently the Locarno International Festival in Switzerland. In the context of his commitment to advancing trans-national art and independent world cinema, he is the founder of Dreams of a Nation, a
Palestinian Film Project, dedicated to preserving and safeguardingPalestinian Cinema . As a theorist of trans-aesthetics (“art without border”), his articles and essays on the relationship between art and politics have been featured, translated to many languages, and published by museums and cultural institutes in Europe [ [http://www.fundaciotapies.org/site/article.php3?id_article=5519 Fundació Antoni Tàpies] ] . For his contributions to Iranian cinema,Mohsen Makhmalbaf , the Iranian film-maker called Dabashi "a rare cultural critic".Columbia University controversy
In 2004, Professor Dabashi was involved in a dispute at
Columbia University between Jewish students and pro-Palestinian professors, which included accusations of antisemitism against the professors. [ [http://nymag.com/nymetro/urban/education/features/10868/ Columbia University's Own Middle East War] ] According to theNew York Times , Dabashi was mentioned principally because of his published political viewpoints, and that he canceled a class to attend a Palestinian rally.cite web|url=http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/education/18columbia.html?pagewanted=2|title=Mideast Tensions Are Getting Personal on Campus at Columbia|publisher=The New York Times |accessdate=2008-02-27|last=|first=] The New York chapter of theAmerican Civil Liberties Union sided with the professors. [cite web|url=http://www.nysun.com/article/6826|title=Civil Liberties Official Defends Columbia Professors - December 28, 2004 |publisher=The New York Sun |accessdate=2008-02-27|last=|first=] An ad hoc committee formed byLee C. Bollinger , Columbia University's president, reported in March 2005 that they could not find any credible allegations of antisemitism, but did criticize the university's grievance procedures, and recommended changes. [cite web|url=http://www.nysun.com/article/11414|title=Faculty Committee Largely Clears Scholars - March 31, 2005 - |publisher=The New York Sun |accessdate=2008-02-27|last=|first=]Controversy
Comments on the Israel-Palestine Conflict
Dabashi has made a number of controversial comments regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict.
In an interview with AsiaSource in June of 2003, Dabashi stated that supporters of Israel "cannot see that Israel over the past 50 years as a colonial state - first with white European colonial settlers, then white American colonial settlers, now white Russian colonial settlers - amounts to nothing more than a military base for the rising predatory empire of the United States. Israel has no privilege greater or less than Pakistan or Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. These are all military bases but some of them, like Israel, are like the hardware of the American imperial imagination." [cite news|url=http://www.asiasoc.org/news/special_reports/dabashi.cfm|title=AsiaSource Special Report - Interview with Hamid Dabashi|date=June 12, 2003|author=Nermeen Shaikh|publisher=Asia Source]
In September of 2004, Dabashi wrote in an Egyptian in the Egyptian Newspaper Al-Ahram that:
"What they call "Israel" is no mere military state. A subsumed militarism, a systemic mendacity with an ingrained violence constitutional to the very fusion of its fabric, has penetrated the deepest corners of what these people have to call their "soul." What the Israelis are doing to Palestinians has a mirror reflection on their own soul -- sullied, vacated, exiled, now occupied by a military machinery no longer plugged to any electrical outlet. It is not just the Palestinian land that they have occupied; their own soul is an occupied territory, occupied by a mechanical force geared on self-destruction. They are on automatic piloting. This is they. No one is controlling anything. Half a century of systematic maiming and murdering of another people has left its deep marks on the faces of these people, the way they talk, the way they walk, the way they handle objects, the way they greet each other, the way they look at the world. There is an endemic prevarication to this machinery, a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture. No people can perpetrate what these people and their parents and grandparents have perpetrated on Palestinians and remain immune to the cruelty of their own deeds." [cite news|url=http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/709/cu12.htm|title=For a Fistful of Dust: A Passage to Palestine|date=September 23-29, 2004|publisher=
Al-Ahram Weekly |author=Hamid Dabashi]In August of 2008, Dabashi similarly wrote in a scholarly journal, the Middle East Journal of Communication, commenting on artist
Mona Hatoum 's piece, "The Keffieh":What is that silent sign of resistance, those quiet designs woven intothe fabric of a global cause against colonialism doing here, under a glass box,staring out at bewildered, indiff erent, bemused, people, looking at it? Lookingat it for what, to see what? Do they see the stolen land of a people behind andthrough its curves, their demolished homes, uprooted olive trees, dispossessedand scattered families, murdered sons and daughters—the transformation oftheir Gaza and their West Bank into concentration camps?
Criticism of the Movie "300"
Dabashi criticized the film
300 (film) , the 2007 movie which depicts the battle of 300 Spartans against thePersian Empire . Dabashi stated that the director Zack Snyder is fearful of all the racialised minorities in and out of the United States -- Jews, Muslims, Asians, Africans, Latinos -- gathering storm around his white-washed racism, Snyder has quite unbeknownst to himself given a perfect picture of the way the world sees Bush's army." Dabashi also stated "That monstrosity that Snyder pictures marching towards Thermopylae is the American empire -- and that band of brothers that stood up to that monstrosity are those resisting this empire: they are the Iraqi resistance, the Palestinians, Hizbullah." [cite news|url=http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/856/cu1.htm|title=The '300' stroke|date=August 2-8, 2007|publisher=Al-Ahram Weekly |author=Hamid Dabashi]Criticism of Columbia University President
Lee Bollinger Following Columbia University President's statements on Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia in September of 2007 (in which Bollinger stated that the Iranian President was a "petty and cruel dictator" who lacked the "intellectual courage" to offer real answers on denying theHolocaust ) Dabashi wrote that Bollinger's statements were "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." Dabashi further stated that Bollinger's comments were "propaganda warfare … waged by the self-proclaimed moral authority of the United States" and 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."cite news|url=http://www2.nysun.com/new-york/columbia-professor-calls-bollinger-white/|title=Columbia Professor Calls Bollinger White Supremacist|date=October 15, 2007|publisher=New York Sun|author=Annie Karni]
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