Dr. Dossa and our dumbing down

Some things you wish would just go away. How often must we return to discuss the delusional resentment of Israel among many on the Western left who are never able to digest or admit the plain fact that no significant segment of Arab society has ever recognized the state of Israel as having a right to exist and never will as long survives the present orthodox Islamic understanding in which the lands of Israel are deemed Dar-al-Islam - Muslim lands that, having once been conquered for the true faith, can never again be ruled by infidels without being the focus of a Jihadi struggle to win back the lands for Allah. No Palestinian leader will ever have the right, in the minds of his fellows, to sign a peace treaty with Israel that recognizes any kind of state in which Jews, Infidels, will have some role in ruling Muslims in Dar-al-Islam. No matter what Israel offers, short of packing Jewish bags and going somewhere else, will the Jews of Israel be allowed to live in peace, until this orthodoxy is defeated by some overwhelming reality.

With this in mind, how can one not admire the great patience with which the Israelis treat the Arabs of Palestine, those who have refused and been refused assimilation into the surrounding Arab states, that they may remain in the vanguard of the maddening struggle against the Infidel, sacrificing their own children to the cause. Countless wackos would portray the Israelis as Nazis for acting violently to keep the armed Arabs at bay, all the time ignoring the fact that if this portrayal were true, there would be no Palestinians about. But there are, and Israel continues in the faith that one day Moslems may choose to free themselves from the more devastating aspects of their political faith and get serious about building peace with the Jews.

In the meantime, we have all become familiar with the arguments that proclaim anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, that holding the former antipathy need not entail the latter. In abstract terms, this seems logically sound. And yet, when we examine the nature of anti-Zionist arguments, we usually find that the implied problem with Israel is that it is too Western and technologically and militarily successful (an embarrassment for its often oil rich Arab neighbors whose cultural or political/ethical shortcomings are revealed in comparison), too pushy, too aggressive, too sure of itself, too keen to proclaim a special relationship with God as a model of a covenant for others to follow in creating their own nationhood. In short, once we move beyond abstract logic, we generally find that Israel is resented for being just what the (stereotypical or real) Jew has long been resented for being. Hence the protestations that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism are rarely convincing. What is a Zionist for most anti-Zionists? A dirty Jew.

At least, if you are going to try to convince fair-minded people that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, you have to put some energy into explaining how this is possible when one leaves the world of abstract logic and enters the real world in which millions of Jewish lives depend on the security of the state of Israel.

What's more, this is especially true if, say, you are someone who takes travel money from the Iranian government, and helps its propaganda efforts by attending Iranian state-sponsored conferences, a state that has repeatedly expressed extreme hostility to the state of Israel. In such a case, it is only fair that you should have to do a lot to convince intellectually competent people that you are not Judeophobic.

Alas, in today's Canada you can put up a rather intellectually shabby defense of your anti-Zionism and find people in high positions in the national media to report that your arguments deserve a fair hearing in an open "multicultural" society. At this blog I have often argued that invocations of multiculturalism are often not the sign of a free and open society, but rather of a nation turning towards some form of imperial or oligarchical rule by self-accrediting experts who are less interested in the world's diverse cultures as they are in keeping the peace among a migratory hodge-podge of peoples who increasingly find themselves without shared understandings about national and constitutional values and norms, as would be necessary to any form of democratic self-rule in which the experts serve the people's will, and not vice versa.

All this is by way of introduction to a question that has been slowing down the writing of this post. Must we rehash all these arguments yet again in order to voice our protest at the support voiced in some quarters for the shabby defense just published by Canadian Professor Shiraz Dossa of his attendance, last December, at an Iranian government-sponsored conference that was held to cast doubt, in some way, on the established memory of the Holocaust as it is generally understood among the world's academic elite?

We first talked about the trip of the St. Francis Xavier University professor to the Teheran Holocaust deniers' conference (a characterization of the conference that Dossa now contests) here.
In my view, there is little of substance to add to that discussion, since I find Dossa has said little new of substance to explain his trip. Yet he has come up with an "explanation" that some apparently find convincing and so we must try to support our initial doubts about the need for more discussion.

Let's start by considering the first news of Dossa's return to the national stage, the story in the Globe and Mail by Michael Valpy who calls Dossa's essay "compelling":

A Canadian political scientist excoriated for attending what was widely labelled a Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran has retaliated with a blistering published attack on his university president and his colleagues for being illiterate Islamophobes.

Writing in the influential Literary Review of Canada, Shiraz Dossa, a tenured professor at Nova Scotia's St. Francis Xavier University, said that his academic integrity and academic freedom were grossly impugned by the university administration, an assault on his reputation that he said has yet to be remedied.

He accused the president and chancellor of authorizing a "small Spanish Inquisition" to denounce him - a campaign he said was initiated by two Jewish professors and the Christian chair of the political science department.
[...]
James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, likened the treatment of Prof. Dossa to the 1950s McCarthy period in the United States when academics and others were subjected to intense pressure not to attend events that were unpopular.

This is the first time Prof. Dossa has spoken out since the storm erupted over his attendance at the Tehran conference in mid-December.

His two-page essay appears in the issue of the LRC that will be posted today on its website, http://www.reviewcanada.ca. Although the monthly publication's circulation is small, it is widely read in the academic, journalistic, political and public-service communities.

In an interview, Prof. Dossa said he wrote the essay because he wanted to set the record straight and because he still hasn't received an apology from either St. FX president Sean Riley or chancellor Raymond Lahey, the Roman Catholic bishop of Antigonish where the university is located. He also said he has refused to speak to his department chair, Prof. Yvon Grenier, since December.

He wrote that the university administration uncritically accepted the Holocaust-denial label "concocted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center [a Jewish human-rights organization] and the [U.S.] Jewish Defence League and peddled by media outlets such as The Globe and Mail."

Prof. Dossa, a Muslim, teaches political theory and comparative politics at St. FX. His focus as a scholar has been on the Holocaust and its aftermath. He abruptly dismisses any suggestion that he is a Holocaust denier. Rather, he said, his interest has been in what use of the Holocaust has been made to promote Zionism - the right of Jews to a national homeland - and to support the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

In both his essay and in a telephone conversation, he makes a compelling case for why he attended the two-day Tehran conference, titled "The Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision."

We might pause at this point to query what Valpy considers compelling about Dossa's claims since Valpy concludes his article with an apparent contradiction that weighs mightily on how one should read Dossa's justification for his attendance at an event that was well publicized in advance by the international media, such that any minimally informed person knew, before it happened, that the point of the conference was to cast doubt on the memory of the Holocaust as an iconic event of postmodern times. Rightly or not, it was suggested by the media that Holocaust deniers were to attend alongside those questioning Israel's right to exist.

Valpy first writes:

Prof. Dossa said the presenters, himself included, were invited, but he said he had no idea in advance that Holocaust deniers were on the list. He said that, until his arrival in Tehran, he did not see an agenda, something he said is not uncommon for global South conferences.

And then we are told:

He said he would not have attended a conference entirely of Holocaust deniers because it would have held no scholarly or intellectual interest for him. But a conference with five Holocaust deniers was of academic interest for him to see what kind of reception they'd be given.

Well, that sounds like Dossa did know what the event was about in advance, at least as much as anyone reading the papers. But perhaps Valpy and Dossa were at this point discussing hypotheticals in some intellectual search for best justifications for attending an Israel hate fest held by a totalitarian regime that uses hate of Israel to help preserve its own power which entails much violence towards its own people. Draw your own conclusions.

Let's now turn to the justification of the editor of the pretentious but (in my experience) intellectually boring publication, the Literary Review of Canada:

When Shiraz Dossa, a professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, got in touch with us back in April, we felt some shock, followed by acute curiosity. This gentleman had been the brief centre of feverish media attention last December, when he surfaced in Tehran as the only Canadian attending what was being called a "Holocaust-denial conference", supposedly organized at the behest of Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself and including among its attendees a number of notorious Holocaust deniers or sceptics, such as David Duke.

Four months later, Professor Dossa wanted to tell his version of the story, including the real purpose of the conference (not Holocaust denial), who organized it (not Dr. Ahmadinejad), who attended, and what he thought and felt about the all-out attack on him back home in Canada, particularly from The Globe and Mail and from his own university, St. FX. At the LRC we read his manuscript, which seemed to us a serious exploration of the right of academic freedom in Canada and who gets to exercise that right. After rigorous fact-checking that went on for a number of weeks, we agreed that the essay was ready for publication.

Academic freedom, like all freedom of speech issues, calls on thoughtful citizens to broaden their horizons. It's never individuals who are voicing mainstream or non-controversial thoughts - ideas we can all agree with - who find themselves on the wrong side of academic freedom debates. It is always individuals who are raising uncomfortable ideas that the majority would rather not hear who end up excoriated or denigrated in the media and who are left twisting in the wind by the institutions within which they work. Reading Shiraz Dossa’s essay gives us all the opportunity to confront some important and controversial ideas that go to the heart of our identity as a multicultural nation.

We hope you agree.

Bronwyn Drainie
Editor

Before turning to Dossa's "essay", I will ask you to keep in mind those words "rigorous fact checking", and also to ask yourself what academic freedom is for. You see, part of the problem with the cult of multiculturalism is that no one in authority can any longer know, or at least pretend to know, what culture or intellectual freedom is for. To know what culture is for would be to assert a norm, which would in turn be deemed oppressive of those somehow thought to be victimized by hegemonic norms. For today's authorities, it is as if academic "freedom" were a utopian end in itself, as if the end of freedom (which is something that really only exists when it is shared within a society) were not the building of some particular form of social order in which claims of freedom can be weighed against those of order and of sharing responsibly in common projects to expand human freedom. Drainie seems to imply that a happy and balanced social order naturally emerges from everyone being allowed to do their own thing, as if we don't have to defer to any common and particular purpose that inevitably values some histories more than others.

The idea that we, as a duly constituted society, or academy, might make collective decisions about academic values, scares those without a clear sense of Canadian values, or those who fear shared values. For such people, academic freedom somehow came into existence to defend the idea that anything remotely academic that a tenured prof. wants to do with his freedom should be allowed (because who are we to know what may or may not come of it). But what of those who would use our shared freedoms in causes (like those of the Iranian apocalyptic and totalitarian regime) antithetical to our shared freedom? Must our respect for academic freedom always preclude our judging the arguments of a tenured professor as absolutely beyond the ken of serious academic discussion, and a sign that one may not be worthy of keeping his job?

Again, beyond denying us a right to feel intellectually comfortable, does Bronwyn Drainie provide us any real hint of what academic freedom is for? Does it exist primarily to preserve the peace by deferring judgment on contentious issues, or does it exist to allow any and every utopian intellectual to think that his or her resentful critique of the status quo, along with vague promises of an emerging knowledge or ideology that can save us from our fallen humanity, fall within the bounds that a serious regard for serious thinking should defend?

Let's turn now to Dossa's "essay", which should not require too serious a refutation since it in large part relies on the logical fallacy of ad hominem attack, and parts of it have already been ably critiqued by Angry Steve Janke, who makes quick work of the claim that Dossa has been rigorously fact (or logic) checked by the LRC. I won't retread all of Janke's ground, so read him first and then see here what else might be said about the matter at hand. The essay begins with ad hominem:

It would be a shocking event in any university. It was doubly so in a university that takes pride in its “Catholic character.” Last December, St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, authorized a small Spanish Inquisition of its own to denounce a St. FX Muslim professor. It was launched by two Jewish professors and the Christian chair of the political science department (Michael Steinitz, Samuel Kalman and Yvon Grenier). My sin: I attended a conference in a Muslim nation on the Holocaust entitled The Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision. It took place in Tehran, Iran, in December 2006, and it was widely—and erroneously—described in the western media as a “Holocaust-denial conference.” I have never denied the Holocaust, only noted its propaganda power. Yet my university tolerated this assault on me.

But, in my reading, Dossa wasn't widely attacked for denying the Holocaust but for keeping company with the Iranian regime which is evil on so many levels (not least against the Iranian people) and with those who similarly took up the travel-paid invitation from the Iranian government to partake in what was obviously, for the government, a major propaganda event. When I first wrote about Dossa, I noted he was a fan of Chomsky, who is among other things famous for questioning all sorts of "facts" about the Holocaust, including the number of Jews murdered, in such a way as to throw into doubt the general validity of established accounts of the event. Of course he does not admit to "denying" the Holocaust, he just throws doubts on its highly symbolic status or on the uses of the Holocaust symbol in world history. That, we might assume, is Dossa's game too. As Dossa told the Globe and Mail last year

My essential point is that the Jewish loss - which is, of course, a reality, and anyone who denies it is a lunatic - the focus here is on how the Holocaust is a political construct, distinct from the Jewish loss at the hands of the Nazis. And that political construct has been used to justify certain policies by people, some of whom are Zionists. And now that whole issue plays into the war on terrorism, which is essentially a war on Islam

Here, we return to the original point of this blog post. Dossa may be able to make a distinction with some coherence in abstract logic. But the relevant question is how, not if, he questions the role of the Holocaust in historical memory. While the company he kept in Tehran is inevitably part of a fair answer, to answer this "how" question properly might require a lengthy study of his work which we cannot do unless someone pays us for time and boredom.

But it seems inevitable that we anticipate that Dossa's reasons for resenting the present historical status of the Holocaust are relevant to our defense against the resentment and delusion that all manner of Jewish historical precedence, from Moses to Auschwitz, causes in people. It seems clear enough that Dossa resents a memory of the Holocaust that makes the "Jewish loss" somehow more (or unduly) significant in world history than are other losses, even those which compete (and not without some success) with the memory of the Holocaust when their supporters call the Israelis Nazis. But resenting the "uses and abuses of the Holocaust" is, it seems inevitably, to resent the Jews for being the kind of people that led to the kind of historical resentment that led the Nazis to a profoundly revealing form of racism and genocide and modernity that is, somehow, more historically significant in this day and age than other losses (rightly or wrongly, if we can even pose the question). In other words, at a certain point of understanding, it is likely not possible really to keep separate, in one's mind, resentment of the "uses and abuses of the Holocaust in historical memory" from a general resentment of the Jews' role and existence in history. To keep the two separate, one must remain in the realm of abstract logic, and not in the real historical world.

I believe it is a rhetorical sleight of hand to deny that anyone who questions major aspects of the mainstream historical memory of the Holocaust, labeling it a "political construct", anyone whose questioning is evidently motivated by an aim to deny sympathy to the state of Israel, is not in some sense denying the Holocaust. But it is a very deft sleight of hand and to argue this point properly is not an easy proposition, as Dossa no doubt intuits. It is a tough point to make because it is not widely appreciated that a widespread historical memory of an event can emerge that is in no way either a conspiracy or a rationally refutable "political construct". A certain form and content of historical memory is an inherent part of an event as it unfolds for the first time. But to argue this fully would require an anthropological essay on the nature of human historicity - a discussion of how facts about an event and its historical memory emerge in tandem, how and why participants in an event consciously act in ways that irreversibly shape the memory of the event - and now is not the time or the place.

Suffice it to say that in an age when Israelis are repeatedly framed as the new Nazis by the left, I doubt Dossa's concern is really to get at the heart of the widespread desire for victim status in the postmodern age. He just wants to limit the victim status he implies (with no evidence) is supposedly widely accorded the Jews of Israel. While I would agree that limiting victimary status is generally a fine thing, Dossa wants to dole out victim status to the Palestinians and the martyred professor victims of McCarthyism (but he still has his job and can still get published!), which is not so fine.

Moving on, Dossa writes:

The anti-intellectual storm at St. FX was driven by two fallacies pushed by the media and the literati. The first is that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has dismissed the Holocaust as a “myth” and threatened to “wipe Israel off the map.” In fact, Ahmadinejad has not denied the Holocaust or proposed Israel’s liquidation; he has never done so in any of his speeches on the subject (all delivered in Farsi/Persian). As an Iran specialist, I can attest that both accusations are false. U.S. Iran experts such as Juan Cole and UK journalists such as Jonathan Steele have come to the same conclusion.1

As Cole correctly notes, Ahmadinejad was quoting the Ayatollah Khomeini in the specific speech under discussion: what he said was that “the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time.”2 No state action is envisaged in this lament; it denotes a spiritual wish, whereas the erroneous translation—“wipe Israel off the map”—suggests a military threat. There is a huge chasm between the correct and the incorrect translations. The notion that Iran can “wipe out” U.S.-backed, nuclear-armed Israel is ludicrous.

Israel is a small country, it could be largely destroyed with one bomb. As an aside, the fact that this nonsense got past the LRC "fact checkers" should be enough to end the debate on whether fact/value distinctions can be made by an "objective" political science (they cannot be), (a debate which Dossa, as a one-time reader of Eric Voegelin, could be more open about).

Dossa is referring to this blog post by Juan Cole, which is a response to this article by Christopher Hitchens. One leftist blogger aptly describes Cole's tone here as hysterical, and out of touch with reality. I think most readers would concur that Cole is hardly strong support for anyone on this point, a curious authority for Dossa to invoke. The leftist blogger then goes on to show that there is surely no doubt that Ahmadinejad and the Iranian regime have repeatedly called for Israel's destruction. Any sane fact checker would surely read this debate and come down on Hitchens' side. After all, given the array of domestic media outlets and international attention that the Iranian regime controls, if they wanted to correct a widespread misinterpretation or mistranslation of their intentions, they could very well do so. Instead, the calls of "Death to Israel" remain a standard and uncontroversial part of Fridays in Tehran. But I don't think Dossa's heart is really in denying Iran's eliminationist attitude to the state of Israel, a position which is merely orthodox in Islamic circles and nothing new. Rather, he seems furiously stuck on insisting that hatred of Israel is not Holocaust Denial or antisemitism, as if all the contempt he has received were caused by some outrageous logical error.

Dossa then writes:

The second western fallacy is that the event was a Holocaust-denial conference because of the presence of a few notorious western Christian deniers/skeptics, a couple of a neo-Nazi stripe. It was nothing of the sort. It was a Global South conference convened to devise an intellectual/political response to western-Israeli intervention in Muslim affairs. Holocaust deniers/skeptics were a fringe, a marginal few at the conference. The majority of the papers focused on the use and abuse of the Holocaust in Arab, Muslim, Israeli and western politics, a serious and worthy subject for international academic discussion.

Again, what Dossa fails to grasp is that the resentment of the self-styled representatives of the "Global South" for the West, in a conference devoted to "the use and abuse of the Holocaust" can only be distinguished from a more general resentment of the symbols of Western firstness (which include the Jews and Israel, the discoverers of monotheism, the first nation) by rhetorical sleight of hand. Those in attendance may not have been conscious of hating Jews (though some clearly were), but you can be sure they talked of Israel and the West's "use and abuse of the Holocaust" as if Israel were some kind of domineering Western hegemon controlling historical memory and conspiring to keep down the masses of the developing world. In short, they were figuring Israel, consciously or not, in terms of the stereotypically pushy, conniving, domineering Jew-American.

But the really offensive part in all of this is the great delusion that "Global South" or Muslim intellectuals who make a living condemning the West, often while living in the West or while in service to totalitarian regimes like the one in Tehran, are in any way serving the cause of the poor and marginalized in this world. What, pray tell, would a withdrawal of Western involvement in the Muslim world entail for those so isolated? Keeping in mind that one cannot have trade, development, medical, and technological ties without political involvements of many kinds, it would surely mean mass death in those large populations whose numbers would not be sustainable if cut off from much if not all of the modern world. Again, this is another topic best left to another time. But I'll just drop a link to one of my favorite essays, if anyone is interested in dropping this and doing some real thinking.

After another slough of ad hominem attacks buttressing weak arguments, while showing an apparent desire to label those who condemn Islam and the Palestinians as "racists" (as if Islam were a race) and while trying to claim Islamophobia as a form of "antisemitism" (see Angry Steve Janke's post) and the ethical equivalent of Judeophobia (another point for another day), Dossa moves on to a defense of academic freedom saying nothing more than that academics have a right to speak the truth as they see it. He says nothing about when an academy has a right to sanction its staff (keeping in mind that Dossa has only been criticized - he still has his job) or judge them for ethical stupidity or an overabundance of resentment and delusion.

Then, in Dossa's conclusion, there is one more outrageous statement that must be addressed, since it snuck by the LRC fact checkers:

Iran’s elites have protected Jews since Cyrus ruled West Asia. Anti-Semitism is a Euro-American problem, not an Islamic one. Iranian opposition to Israel and its wars on Muslims/Palestinians is ethical and political; it has absolutely nothing to do with hating Jews qua Jews.

I have little idea where to start with this. Public opinion surveys shows that antisemitism is pervasive in the Arab world, as any study of Arab media shows. I can't recall at hand a survey of Iranian opinion but does Dossa really want us to believe that antisemitism doesn't exist there too, that the regular chants of "death to Israel" are simply political and not racial? But what, in any case is a "Jew qua Jew"? Someone with a funny nose? Surely, there is no meaningful understanding of "Jew" that is not essentially ethical and political in nature; so how does one really distinguish a war against Jewish ethics from a war against Jews? Only in abstract logic, not in reality. One could be for the ethics and ideas of some Jews as opposed to those of other Jews. But to be this, one would have to recognize the legitimacy of Jewish politics, perhaps even of the state of Israel.

The few Jews in Iran - who serve in a commercial function that the present regime (as in the past) is wise to protect for it could not readily replace their knowledge and international connections - would surely not agree that having the status of privileged Dhimmis is the same as being free and equal members of the Islamic Republic. It is possible to protect Jews and to resent them at the same time. Indeed I rather imagine this is the norm in much of the world.

It is no doubt true that a lot of the antisemitism in the Muslim world today is, in form and content, an import from Europe. Yet there is also no doubt that some form of Judeophobia (as opposed to the nineteenth-century European construction of "anti-Semitism") is a part of the Islamic self-understanding, since the political religion of Mohammed clearly evolved in opposition to the historically pre-existing monotheistic faiths. Just read the Koran and Sunna and see how many times the Infidels, unbelievers, and even "Jews" are cursed.

Anyway, to say that "anti-Semitism" is not an Islamic problem today is simply the baldest of lies, or the most dishonest of word games. The evidence is everywhere for anyone who looks. I will only note, as a first thought, the standing ovation given to the hateful speech of the former President of Malaysia, Mahatir Mohamad, at the 2003 Islamic Summit Conference (for a discussion see here).

I actually have some empathy, not sympathy, for Dossa. I sense that he is an angry man, living in a mental turmoil that is only partly of his own making. However, the fact that we are all resentful and deluded, to some degree, is no excuse for our nation having leading journalists who call Dossa's rhetorical games "compelling" and invoking our need to read them as part of a great struggle for freedom. There is nothing liberating for the poor masses of the world in this sort of performance, nor for Canadian students, nor for Jews and Israelis. A growth in freedom does not come from wanting it or demanding it, in some abstract conception of "human rights" divorced from shared social responsibilities; it comes from sharing in real revelations of human self-understanding and in shared ethical covenants that expand the possibilities for all in a shared human society.

We must take seriously, however, the possibility that much of the Canadian establishment has lost any sense of what it stands for, beyond the idiotic name calling of victimary politics, and its attendant cultural relativism and false moral equivalencies. A nation is only free, the people can only hope to rule themselves, when there is some shared understanding about right and wrong, when one doesn't have to spend endless time to pretend to debate, e.g., the most ludicrous propositions about Israel. To deny this need for a shared reality, for a national Covenant, while making noises about "academic freedom" and invoking the trauma of "McCarthyism" is not only to forget that the academic left has yet to redeem its supporting role in the tyranny and mass murder that was real world Communism in the 1950s, but that it continues to play the victim game in a way that corrodes the possibility of serious thinking in our public and academic life. If this goes on, sooner or later we will fall apart into real sectarian conflict.

When we see the degrading oppositional culture of academe bring another mind into the mimetic madness of endless trials of accusation and rivalry, we really must think twice about our paeans to academic freedom and multiculturalism, especially when they don't actually prove conducive to free and open discussion about truth. And when a "rigorously fact checked" essay in a national publication allows the claim that anti-Semitism is not also a Muslim problem today, we should know that we no longer have a sufficient regard for truth or freedom.

True freedom requires some kind of shared discipline, based on a concern for shared human truths. In a truly free academy, people would grapple openly with the big theological questions, and openly weigh the pros and cons of, say, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic belief. But to do this, they would have to share a faith that they were collectively pursuing some fundamental human truth and not just letting every sect and camp have their turn at the front of the room, or letting every lonely and angry intellectual do his own thing.

I am not a Christian, but I have no problem in ending on a Christian note because I see the anthropological value in many of Christianity's truth claims. In a truly free academy, a guy like Dossa would not be reduced to puerile smear campaigns against "Christian boys". He would be taking on ideas that today we can only find at humble web logs, such as Gil Bailie's:

During his 40 days in the desert, Jesus was tempted to do things that would make the truth of his claims and the meaning of his existence irrefutable. He declined. His followers down through the centuries have sometimes tried to do what Jesus refused to do.

But irrefutability is overrated. Christian faith appeals to freedom and to love, both of which require the absence of irrefutability, what Hans Urs von Balthasar calls "the purely worldly power of persuasion." The truth of Christianity is simply Christ -- the Way, the Truth, and the Life -- the Truth that will set you free.

Balthasar:

The kind of evidential power with which God manifests himself must be of the highest kind, precisely in virtue of the fact that it allows freedom because it makes men free. And it wants to overpower a lover that answers in freedom only in its own way -- by the evidential power of love ...

Balthasar cites Blaise Pascal as the thinker who best understood this, quoting this from Pascal's Pensées: "Perfect clarity would please reason but harm the will. The proud man must be humbled."

Balthasar goes so far as to say that "only that person can truly recognize the Messiah who knows how to keep his secret."