Tag: academia

Iraqi Intellectuals Seek Exile

Iraqi academics are in peril:

Since the war ended 18 months ago, at least 28 university teachers and administrators have been killed, while 13 professors were kidnapped and released on payments of ransom, according to the Association of University Lecturers. Many others have received death threats.

The result: an exodus of academics and other intellectuals, who are urgently needed by a shattered society, from their schools and often the country, joining an earlier generation of exiles who fled the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Kramer’s chutzpah

Martin Kramer writes in his blog, Sandbox:

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt, held a conference on the fate of the ancient library of Alexandria. To the organizers’ credit, they invited Bernard Lewis, who couldn’t attend, but who sent a paper, read in his absence. The correspondent of the Ahram Weekly, Amina Elbendary, tied herself in knots about it. The invite to Lewis was “bewildering,” since Lewis’s name is “controversial, to say the least, and often associated with the negative connotations of Orientalism.” Well, quite obviously the organizers accomplished Egyptian historians — haven’t been corrupted by post-Orientalist orthodoxy and its blacklisting militancy. There’s hope.

This is pretty laughable from the guy who, along with fellow traveler Likudnik Daniel Pipes, founded an institution whose blacklisting militancy against Middle Eastern studies professors is reminiscent of anti-communist witch-hunts. Not to mention that the likes of Pipes and Kramer, who style themselves as Middle East experts, are really policy advocates, not real scholars like the professors they like to criticize.

Just a reminder

It’s seems that now it’s official: Iraq had no WMD.

Actually, it’s about the third time someone reports this — I think the last time was the Kay report presented to Congress. It may not be that important in the face of the fait accompli that is the occupation of Iraq, but it’s worth remembering that this war was brought about by either mind-numbing incompetence or dishonesty. It’s also worth remembering that many “apolitical” Middle Eastern experts were flogging this in the run-up to the war. The neo-cons and their allies may have been doing it for their own ends (i.e. they were dishonest) but how about the “liberal hawks,” people like Ken Pollack (remember this?) Should we ignore these people next time they say something? That the Iraq war was fought on false pretexts may not be a big deal to politicians or even voters in the upcoming US election, but it should be a big deal to those people whose job it is to know about the Arab world and countries like Iraq — the academics, the intelligence officers and the others who should have known better.

Congress to consider “National Security Language Act”

Rush Holt, a Democratic congressman from New Jersey, and 34 others (mostly Democrats) have cosponsored a bill that would provide increased federal funding for languages considered to be critical to national security.

Al Qaeda operates in over 75 countries, where hundreds of languages and dialects are spoken. However, 99 percent of American high school, college and university programs concentrate on a dozen (mostly European) languages. In fact, more college students currently study Ancient Greek (20,858) than Arabic (10,596), Korean (5,211), Persian (1,117), and Pashto (14) put together. We need to do more to make sure that America has the language professionals necessary to defend our national security. This cannot be done overnight. We are already years overdue.

As reported by the 911 Joint Inquiry in July, our intelligence community is at 30 percent readiness in languages critical to national security. Despite this alarming statistic, we do not appear to be taking aggressive action to address this problem. When I asked a panel of intelligence experts at a recent Intelligence hearing what the federal government is doing to increase the pool of critical need
language professionals, they answered with silence. Two years after the events of September 11, we are still failing to address one the most fundamental security problems facing this nation.

This National Security Language Act would:

* Provide loan forgiveness of up to $10,000 for university students who major in a critical need foreign language and then take a job either in the federal workforce or as a language teacher. 

* Provide new grants to American universities to establish intensive in-country language study programs and to develop programs that encourage students to pursue advanced science and technology studies in a foreign language. 

* Establish grants for foreign language partnerships between local school districts and foreign language departments at institutions of higher education.

* Commission a national study to identify heritage communities here in the United States with native speakers of critical foreign languages and make them targets of a federal marketing campaign encouraging students to pursue degrees in those languages. 

Here are the languages covered in the text of the bill (pdf) as submitted to Congress:

The term less-commonly taught foreign languages includes the languages of Arabic, Korean, Chinese, Pashto, Persian-Farsi, Serbian-Croatian, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, and any other language identified by the Secretary of Education, in consultation with the Defense Language Institute, the Foreign Service Institute, and the National Security Education Program, as a foreign language critical to the national security of the United States.

This can only be a good thing. Since 9/11 intelligence officials and others have noted that there is a dearth of Arabic and other Middle Eastern language speakers in the intelligence community. The targeting of “heritage communities” is a particularly good thing, especially considering that these have often been historically under-represented compared to other groups in certain parts of the federal government for political reasons — see for instance the State Dept. Near Eastern Affairs bureau, which for a good part of the 1990s was dominated by pro-Israeli appointees at the senior level.

Protocols of Zion in Alexandria Library

This AP story is making the rounds:

The United Nations’ culture agency plans to issue a public denunciation of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” dismissed by historians as a forgery to discredit Jews, amid criticism that the book had gone on display in Egypt and that an official there had made anti-Semitic remarks about it, The Associated Press has learned.

UNESCO has inquired with Egypt’s Alexandria Library about allegations of possible anti-Semitism in its display of the book and has asked the library to assure UNESCO that it hasn’t left itself open to possible racism charges.

“Protocols” tells of a Jewish plot to take over the world. Historians have long dismissed the work as a forgery concocted by Czar Nicholas II’s secret police to blame Russia’s troubles on Jews.

UNESCO’s director-general, Koichiro Matsuura planned to issue a public denunciation of the book this weekend at a seminar in Venice pegged to “Protocols”‘ 100th anniversary. The seminar was organized in part by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which combats anti-Semitism around the world.

This would be surprising considering that the museum’s director, Ismail Serageldin, is a very worldly for Vice-President of the World Bank and the entire project is under the aegis of Egypt’s First Lady, Suzanne Mubarak, but considering the high-profile of the Protocols in Egypt after last year’s Ramadan TV serial scandal, anything is possible. It would be a great shame if it’s true, as the Alexandria Library is a worthy project that doesn’t need the bad publicity. It’s rather odd however that the story does not interview anyone in Egypt or confirm that the book is indeed on display at the Library.

Update: The Alexandria Library today said the book has been displayed “as a curiosity” and that it was removing it from the display. Al Jazeera has the complete story.

Likudniks target campuses

Salon.com is running an interesting article on how Likudnik activists are targeting Middle Eastern Studies departments that receive federal aid to impose their own views, and ultimately, academics who share their extremist views.

The article shows that the usual anti-Arab suspects — Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, David Horowitz, Stanley Kurtz — are supporting or leading advocates of this campaign. Their main boogeyman — when it isn’t simply academics who are foreign or have Middle Eastern roots — is as always Edward Said, who they claim is representative of the field as a whole.

While there is no denying that Said was an influential figure, anyone studying Middle Eastern Studies today will focus more on criticizing Said (from a post-modern or traditionalist perspective) than actually endorsing him. And it is never mentioned anywhere that Said was a professor of English literature, and that Orientalism was in great part devoted to literature rather than political studies. I’m pretty confident that the leading academics working on Middle East politics in the US today would differ with at least some of Said’s thesis even as they recognize that it was an important milestone.

I will post more on this later, with more details on the new law and its potential impact.