Bucking the cliché, Joel Beinin has decided to judge a book by its cover. And not only does he not like it — he’s suing.
Beinin, an outspoken Middle Eastern history professor at Stanford and a prominent critic of Israel, filed a complaint last month against David Horowitz after the conservative firebrand published a booklet titled “Campus Support for Terrorism” with a photo of Beinin featured on the cover.
And while Beinin claims Horowitz has deliberately misrepresented his views to portray him as a terror supporter, that’s not what this suit is about. Beinin owns the rights to the photograph in question, and his complaint is for copyright infringement.
“I want him to stop using my photograph illegally, and I want whatever damages I’m entitled to since he has used it illegally,” said Beinin, who filed his complaint in the U.S. District Court’s Northern District of California in San Jose.
“It’s a pretty straight-up legal question.”
But Horowitz, a onetime 1960s radical turned neoconservative, disagreed with that statement, just as he and Beinin, both of whom are Jewish, disagree about virtually everything else. He belittled the professor for filing what he referred to as a “harassment suit” and dared him to refute the claim that he is a terror supporter and apologist.
“He’s not suing for libel. This suit is not about our description of him. If what we said about him in our pamphlet is false, let him sue us for libel. This is designed to chill our First Amendment speech,” said Horowitz, the Los Angeles-based head of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and editor in chief of the right-wing Web site FrontPage Magazine.
Horowitz claimed he never received Beinin’s letters demanding he cease use of the photograph (“He sent them to my office. I never go to my office”) and has recently altered the cover.
Gone are the photos of Beinin, Rachel Corrie, Lynne Stewart (a civil rights lawyer convicted of providing material support for terrorism) and Sami Al-Arian (a Palestinian American professor at the University of South Florida convicted of raising funds for Palestinian Islamic Jihad): The new cover features what appear to be clip art images of poison and radioactivity symbols, danger signs and a mortarboard cap.
Horowitz conceded that this is not the only legal action currently being filed against him — in fact, he’s fighting a suit demanding $50 million. But he claimed to be reasonable and open to compromise: As long as a lawsuit isn’t filed by “some Islamofascist idiot … I try to make people happy,” he explained.
Beinin isn’t happy, however. Like Horowitz, he claims he is being intimidated out of his First Amendment rights. He fingers Horowitz as one of the leading right-wing critics of academia and the field of Middle Eastern Studies, who is specifically leading a “McCarthyite” attack against anyone who espouses views contrary to the neocon line.
“He is most definitely part of a concerted effort to defame, delegitimize and discredit [professors] who disagree with the Bush administration and Bush administration policy. And I do disagree with Bush administration policy,” said Beinin.
Horwitz, not surprisingly, disagreed with that perspective. He’s already named Beinin in his earlier book “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America,” and said that he is preparing a long article documenting “Joel Beinin’s support for terrorism.”
Beinin countered, however, that Horowitz’s past salvoes have relied upon pulling quotes out of context.
“I have both written and spoken many times on the record that I believe that attacks on unarmed civilians are morally unacceptable and politically unproductive. That sounds like someone who supports terrorism?” he asked.
And while Horowitz continually mocked Beinin during an interview or not filing suit over the content of Horowitz’s writings, the professor said that option is not off the table yet.
“I might. It’s still an open question,” said the professor.
Regarding the copyright complaint, a case management conference is scheduled for December of this year.