Sadiq Al-Azm and AUB

In the 1960s, AUB hated Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm, when he was a Marxist who supported the Palestinian resistance movement (although he had a well-known distasteful political polemical habit of calling every person who disagreed with him at the time a CIA-Mossad agent: there isn't one Palestinian intellectual who was not labeled by Al-Azm of CIA and Mossad services, including the late Hisham Sharabi and Walid Khalidi).  But Al-Azm changed in the 1990s, especially when Bernard Lewis and Emmanual Sivan invited Al-Azm to Princeton back in the early 1990s.  The fact that Edward Said hated him and had severed all ties with him, made Al-Azm more popular in Zionist circles than ever, and Al-Azm didn't mind the role. But in the 1960s, AUB fought Al-Azm and even unfairly fired him from the faculty under pressure from the American management and their local propagandists (like Charles Malik and Samir Khalaf among others).  But AUB (management) is now in love with the new and improved and revised Sadiq Al-Azm. So the orders came from above to award Al-Azm the Kamal Salibi prize for intellectual freedom or something like that.  But many among the faculty (who are consistently progressive and are not, like Al-Azm, progressive only when it is intellectually fashionable) protested and the plan was foiled. Al-Azm won't be getting the award after all.