NYC=free speech? Fagetaboutit! with 3 updates

Head of City’s Arabic School Steps Down Under Pressure - New York Times

"Ms. Almontaser’s remarks, made last weekend, were in response to questions from The Post over the phrase “Intifada NYC,” which was printed on T-shirts sold by Arab Women Active in the Arts and Media, a Brooklyn-based organization. The shirts have no relation to her school.

“The word basically means ‘shaking off,’ ” Ms. Almontaser told the paper. “That is the root word if you look it up in Arabic.”

Fear of Arabic as discussed in Democracy Now.

Former Mayor Ed Koch:

“I believe there is nothing wrong with having a school related in Islamic culture,” said former Mayor Edward I. Koch. “ I don’t think there is anything wrong with the idea at all.” He added, referring to Ms. Almontaser: “They were too quick to fire her though. I thought she apologized and gave what she thought was an adequate response and is believable.”

The former principal of NYC's new Arabic-focused school has been replaced by a veteran teacher who speaks no Arabic at all. Koch hits it on the head:

“To put a principal totally unimmersed in the culture seems like spitting in their eye,” he said.

"The next step is to get the academy itself canceled," Pipes wrote in the Aug. 15 New York Sun.

Balanced NYT article about the controversy.

"“There’s zero correspondence between the caricature and the actual person,” said Rabbi Andy Bachman of Beth Elohim, a Reform Jewish congregation in Park Slope, who was on the Gibran school’s advisory board. “The words that were used to describe her, the fears that were evoked, are absolutely unrelated to her and her life’s work. Not in any way, shape or form.”

"Another rabbi who has worked with Ms. Almontaser on interfaith efforts, Michael Feinberg of the Greater New York Labor-Religion Coalition, said: “It’s all about insinuation and innuendo and this formula of Arab equals Muslim equals terrorist. The viciousness and the vileness of this case surpass anything I’ve seen before.”

"That vileness also did no favors to the responsible critics of the Gibran school, whether they were parents worried about school overcrowding or scholars like Diane Ravitch and Richard Kahlenberg, who believe that public schools should reinforce a common American culture rather than promote ethnic identity. Their worthy voices got lost in all the bile.

"For now at least, Ms. Almontaser remains employed by the Department of Education. What she requires, though, is something harder to obtain than another job. As another victim of a different smear campaign put it once: “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?”"

R.I.P. Zeev Schiff

Zeev Schiff, 74, Author and Dean of Israel Military Correspondents, Dies - New York Times

I knew Zeev for 23 years. I first met him at a meeting in Norway, when the late Marianne Heiberg and her colleagues at NUPI gathered a number of well-placed or well-informed players and observers of the Multinational Force in Lebanon for a retrospective assessment. NUPI convened the meeting while memories were still reasonably fresh, so the conference was quite memorable, as was Zeev specifically. The result was a very solid edited book, which is still in print.
I met Zeev sometimes at conferences, or at various intellectual cross-roads around the world. He was a gentlemen, with a admirable capacity for self-deprecation and a keen respect for the truth. He and I did not always agree, particularly when we discussed Israeli policy options in Lebanon, but I respected him and his work. He was a good man, a very decent person and an interlocutor with whom you might find lively disagreement but then go to dinner together and share a joke over good wine.
He was very connected to the Israeli military and intelligence, which gave his reportage special value, but he was also susceptible to the same misjudgments as his informants. He co-wrote several important books, including the seminal Israel's Lebanon War, which I reviewed many years ago in the Middle East Journal. I will find a copy of the review and post it. His book on the first Intifadah, which he co-authored with Ehud Yaari, was quite good and I also reviewed it. I learned about Israeli support for Islamists in 1986, during a recent visit to the West Bank and Jerusalem, but the first book to confirm that funding was the Intifadah volume, published in 1988.