Right-wing professor goes postal on diversity

J Hashim Brown

• Last Updated: November 14. 2009 12:01AM UAE / November 13. 2009 8:01PM GMT

The NYU Stern School’s professor of business, Tunku Varadarajan, is trying to be clever. But watching the Hoover Institution’s own version of Michael Steele falling flat on his face would be entertaining if it wasn’t so potentially dangerous to the well-being of both visible minorities and American principles.

Writing in his regular column in Forbes on Monday, in reference to the Fort Hood shooting spree last week, he invented a new reference for the old phrase “going postal”. He suggested we should now refer to employees who snap, bring weapons to work, and fire them on their colleagues as “going Muslim”. Not only does it not have the same resonance as the old standard, but the reasoning is so awkward that it leaves everyone at the party standing in utter silence looking at the uncomfortable professor who has just put his foot in it. Bad form.

Interestingly, an Orlando man opened fire on co-workers at an architectural firm on that Friday. In the hours that followed, two other US soldiers turned their weapons on fellow soldiers at military bases elsewhere in the country. Given what we know from the past seven years, the pattern of soldier-on-soldier crime, as well as workplace violence in the US seems to be broader than the individuals involved.

His logic starts to break down as he proceeds to undermine his own argument. “The difference between ‘going postal’ and ‘going Muslim’ in the sense that I suggest,” is not a psychological snap but a “calculated discarding of the camouflage of integration.” So what he really wants, is to resuscitate the old neocon-cum-Fox News insinuation that all Muslims are potential sleeper cells awaiting activation. His xenophobic premises don’t add up to his “postal” conclusions.

“We are a civilised society,” he says. When Varadarajan uses the word “we” here, things start to get real weird for me. Our society is also premised, at least on paper, on giving all minorities a chance. We are all – except for the small minority that our forebears “went postal on” – a nation of immigrants. But Varadarajan warns us not to allow the bugbear of “political correctness” to prevent us from singling out the “hundreds of thousands of Muslims in our midst” for special treatment. Will the next step be to suspect all Latinos as being potential Mara Salvatrucha?

The sad thing here Professor, is that your students, “in the hundreds of thousands,” need to be able to look up to you as a mentor and a leader. They need to be able to rely on your belief in fairness and unbiased reasoning.

In a flourish of anthropological reductionism he sums up 1,400 years of Islamic civilisation as “a religion founded on bellicose conquest”. For analysis to be relevant, even valid, it has to start out with dispassionate observation. Varadarajan fails on all points.

He goes on to advise the US Army – the most successfully integrated institution in America – on how they should run their policies, without looking at the institution’s history and experience with race and minorities. These men have a great deal of experience in best practice on this issue, let’s leave it to them.

Furthermore, indigenous American Muslims are not going to take lightly the insinuation of Islam as “an immigrant religion”, foreign to American culture. Mr Varadarajan, stick around with us a bit longer and you’ll learn just how robust and vibrant the American fabric of diversity can be.

At the same time, I think we’re safe in our assumption that we should be able to expect a little better from Forbes, and a little more responsibility from NYU.



Jihad Hashim Brown is director of research at the Tabah Foundation. He delivers the Friday sermon at the Maryam bint Sultan Mosque in Abu Dhabi