Franck Salameh, who teaches Arabic studies at Boston College, writes about the marginalization of non-Muslim Arabic-speaking people, as well as of non-Arab Muslims, and the erasure of Israel, at Middlebury College's highly politicized Arabic Summer School. From RealClearPolitics:
At Middlebury College's Arabic Summer School, where I recently taught Arabic, students were exposed to more than intensive language instruction. Inside the classroom and across campus, administrators and language teachers adhered to a restrictive Arab-nationalist view of what is generically referred to as the "Arab world." In practice, this meant that the Middle East was presented as a mono-cultural, exclusively Arab region. The time-honored presence and deep-rooted histories of tens of millions of Kurds, Assyrians, Copts, Jews, Maronites, and Armenians--all of whom are indigenous Middle Easterners who object to an imputed "supra-Arab" identity--were dismissed in favor of a reductionist, ahistorical Arabist narrative. Those who didn't share this closed view of the Middle East were made to feel like dhimmi--the non-Muslim citizens of some Muslim-ruled lands whose rights are restricted because of their religious beliefs.In maps, textbooks, lectures, and other teaching materials used in the instruction of Arabic, Israel didn't exist, and the overarching watan 'Arabi (Arab fatherland) was substituted for the otherwise diverse and multi-faceted "Middle East." Curious and misleading geographical appellations, such as the "Arabian Gulf" in lieu of the time-honored "Persian Gulf," abounded. Syria's borders with its neighbors were marked "provisional," and Lebanon was referred to as a qutr (or "province") of an imagined Arab supra-state.
Nor was the Arabic school's narrow definition of Middle Eastern culture restricted to the classroom. Alcohol was prohibited during school events and student parties, and although a school official claimed the ban reflected Middlebury's campus policy, beer and wine flowed freely during cookouts and gatherings organized by the German, French, and Spanish schools. Banning alcohol is a matter of Islamic practice and personal interpretation--not accepted behavior throughout the Middle East--and reflected the Arabic school's conflation of Arabic with Islamic.
Similarly, the Arabic school's dining services conformed to the halal dietary restrictions of Islam, an act implying that all Arabic speakers are Muslims, and that all Muslims are observant; yet less that 20 percent of the Arabic school community was Muslim. No such accommodations were made for Jewish students who kept kosher, even though they outnumbered the Muslims.
Read it all.
This article has many, many disturbing aspects to it. Were any of these summer school students also employees of the US State Dept? Does Condi Rice, who is on record saying that she is a strong supporter of the Cedar Revolution, know that her employees, or possible future employees are studying in a school that teaches that Lebanon is a "province" and not a legitmate country in its own right? What about these students, the influence of their professors had on them, and their jobs with US government agencies? Or, were most students there in order to work at an Arabic version of the Home Shopping Network?
I thought that the US had threatened/cajoled/sweet-talked the Palestinian Authority to change school textbooks to show that Israel does exist? Why both if the college curriculum in the US does the same thing as the PA?
Outrageous!
If there is a program that teaches 'arabic' (lower case 'a' intentional) taught by Kurds, Assyrians, Copts, Jews, Maronites, &/or Armenians, -sans mohammedan arabic instructors - I would like to know about it.
If one doesn't exist, why not? There is ample reason to open a non-mohammedan inspired arabic class and teach the competing politics, i.e. return:
Iran to the Zoroastrians,
Egypt to the Copts,
Lebanon to the Maronites,
western Turkey to the Greeks,
Iraq to the Assyrians,
and
eastern Turkey to the Armenians.
Just imagine.
I remember being on a subway on a friend and seeing people with Arabic textbooks in their hands, he remarked the seemingly rising number of people studying Arabic.
Though I was ignorant of the real Islam at the time, I casually replied that “maybe it’s because of the War on Terror”. My friend was doubtful, but I was already reading in the news that the U.S. intelligence and diplomacy was hampered by the lack of Arabic-speaking personnel.
My question is: why would anyone want to study Arabic? For example, Japanese is not my native
language, but I study it, because Japan is a major country, and I find Japanese culture and works interesting (not everything is perfect of course). Similarly I can see why a non-native speaker would want to study French, German, or Chinese because one is attracted to their cultures, or famous philosophers, etc. What has Arabic got to offer besides Islam, and military/political work in the Arabic world?
So yes, we judge it to be bad that Arab and the Middle East and Islam are all equated together in the Middlebury school, but not all that surprising.
Even if one is deluded in that Islam is peaceful and a “great religion” — damn, I hate that canned phrase — why would a non-believer be so inclined on this religion and its culture?
As a (Chinese) immigrant in my country, I am grateful that multiculturalism is allowed and practiced in my country, but Chinese — or any other ethnic group, whether Korean, or Indian — is just a culture, a set of norms and rituals from our ancestors, which some deem artful and amusing, but most do not have to be rigidly followed. Even those rituals that are rigidly followed are not immoral actions in any sense. For example, Confucianism, whose principles permeate Chinese culture to this day, is a very patriarchal philosophy, yet in the decline of China in early 20th century, it was not very hard to find educated Chinese furiously criticizing this philosophy as backward and contributing to China’s economic and political decline then.
And I would not lose any sleep, would not threaten to kill anyone, if I were to encounter a Westerner here who does not enjoy Chinese cooking or appreciate any other Chinese ritual.
I think we can see that Islam is not comparable to any of the great cultures that we know in the world today, even as it claims more than one billion believers.
I want to bring out the above points, because I see that it is popular to rail against multiculturalism in the comments here, but really, I think it would be stretch to call Islam a culture. For people who actually have a culture to be proud of — and it is puzzling that apparently some Westerners are not, even as most scientific, economic, and human rights achievements in our world were due to the West —
I think most of them would not want blind Submission of others to their own culture, cloaked as “multiculturalism”.
This is an important article. All those insistent cries in Congress and the press about "the need to learn languages" and the "need to learn other cultures" mean nothing at all, all those brave new programs that the most sinister members of MESA Nostra are rubbing their hands in glee about, hoping to get in on the government money and to use it, not only, not even mainly, to introduce students to nouns and verbs and glottal stops and the sisters of Inna, but also to impart, every step along the way, the Muslim or islamochristian view of things, beginning from those liquid-brown-eyes and smiles of human warmth, encouragement, intimacy (and how the silly young students fall for it all, fall for Mr. X or Mrs. Y who was "so kind" and "so caring" and "made learning Arabic fun" and "even invited us to his/her house for a real Middle Eastern dinner." The drill, the usual drill.)
Just look at the textbooks of Arabic. Just look at the experiences of those who attended such courses, but remained stonily unbrainwashed. If American Infidels are to pay, through government-supplied scholarsihps for such students, then they have a right to ask for vigilance in hiring and the monitoring of classes. Better yet, the government should set up its own critical-languages institutes, and not only that at Monterey, and make sure that someone -- well, someone just like Franck Salameh -- runs the place, and that Maronites, Copts, Armenians from Beirut or Haleb, and of course Arabic-speaking Jews, all of whom are quite capable of teaching Arabic without the Muslim agenda or propaganda, are the teachers.
In Tikrit, for example, an Arabic-language class was given to soldiers taught by a woman from Jordan, but a Christian -- she was scathing on the subject of Islam, not that the soldiers by that point needed any help. But innocent students, the just a few years away from those smile-filed innocence of high-school yearbooks, and whose experience of political malignity or ideological malevolence is merely a matter of book-learning), need to be protected.
Far more important than spending years learning Arabic, or learning Urdu, is to learn about Islam, to read, with understanding (for which a guide may be required, given that so much of it is an incondite mess, and in English or French the full force and venom of the Arabic is diluted) the Qur'an, the Hadith, the biographies of Muhammad (not the hagiographies of the Montgomery Watt or Karen Armstrong or Barnaby Rogerson sort), as written either by Muslims (Ibn Ishaq, or what remains of Ibn Ishaq, and Ibn Sa'd, and others), or by non-Muslims such as Albert Guillaume, Arthur Jeffery, Tor Andrae, Sir William Muir, and, coming soon to bookstores near you, the biography by Robert Spencer which relies completely on Muslim sources.
And the time spent squiring around those sisters of Inna, in the company of your caring and sharing instructor, who will spare no effort to make you see the greatness of Arab culture, the kindness of Arabs, the natural affinity between Arabs and Americans if only those pesky Israelis and crazed Christian fundamentalists and mad-dog right-wingers could all be ignored or even silenced, taking them, those sisters, out for some practice at a meal -- the instructor insists on paying, he really does, please don't even try to pay, we Arabs know what hospitality is -- and then, who knows what will happen at the end of the course, with the even kinder promise to write you "any reference any time you need it" and then the little gift (a book of pictures, perhaps, of mosques or Qur'anic calligraphy, or a little history of "Palestine" or perhaps Karen Armstrong's book on Islam or something by Sayeed Hossein Nasr if the instructor is Shi'a, something by Yahiya Emerick if Sunni.
And the American taxpayers, through their government which has yet again been conned into thinking it is preparing a cadre of "experts," will not be happy if they realize what is happening. For if these students are put into courses run by apologists for Islam and especially for Arab Islam, whatever linguistic proficiency they acquire, so that they may now read Al-Ahram or listen to Al-Jazeera, will be outweighed by the slow, sweet, under-the-radar brainwashing they will have been receiving throughout the whole experience of their language classes, in the classroom itself, in the kind of homework assignments given, even in the Arabic-language lunches and suppers they attend as part of their Total Immersion.
Total Immersion, all right, but in much more, alas, than Arabic.
I wonder if any public funds are being used by Middlebury College. If so, the dean of the school and its whole administration ought to be FIRED! The Federal and State Authorities ought to investigate this growing Arab influence and monies flowing into our educational systems. Why are they being allowed to carve out a special liebensraum for themselves in our educational institutions? Do we get to do that in their schools? DEMAND RECIPROCITY!!!!!!!
It is time we took back the educational institutions from the leftist, feel-good know nothings. These teachers of fads and leftwing crap agendas, who dumb down the education system are damaging the kids and endangering the country's future.
Damn liberals and their multicultural bias. When will they wake up and realize there are many postive values in our culture that are worth defending and even dying for? I saw some of them starting to come to grips with this on other commentary pages here, but the vast majority remain asleep in their beds of ignorance.
By the way, the American gentlemen from China has some great points. Arab kultur has not advanced since moh and his sheep-loving girlie men pedophiles came out of the desert with swords hacking off the heads of people in then existing cultures. Is the Arab culture a great culture? Though they believe the were great progenitors of knowledge, in fact they have been great destroyers of diversity and promote a uniformity based on Arab first thinking and strict conformity to a primitive paranoid schizophrenic. Religion of Peace what a joke. It is a culture of war codifed into a brainwashing belief system.
In America, legal immigrant families from cultures can maintain their traditions based on the strengths of our culture. E pluribus unum means even in our differences we are one. Americans are different, but underneath the thin veneer of appearance, the values that drive us are derived from the latin phrase above. It is a mistake to understand us as all just to be hyphenated Americans. Some people want to designate themselves as this heritage or that race, many with an agenda. It is time these useful idiots joined the rest of us and just started calling themselves Americans without any hyphenations. After all, they are not immune from the threat that these people represent. These hyphenated Americans have been indulged long enough!
I speak, read and write both Chinese and Japanese, though I come from a completely European background and have lived in the Far East for decades. While I understand what it means to be a foreigner in a another country, neither did I experience outright racism, with the exception of being a non-Japanese in the Japanese social security system. (I believe they will have to update that law in the future.)
I can't, however, imagine living in sharia dominated arab culture. The treatment of dhimmis makes that impossible by definition. For example, I can't imagine an arab saying "the word dhimmi itself is bad" as I have heard Japanese tell me a number of times that the word "gaijin" is just such.
Getting back to Middlebury, I once also took a course on International Politics taught by an Arab ambassador. Turns out it was just another front to wage the war through taqyiya and misinformation. Everybody got an A of course since the man was an absolute dunce and didn't even bother to read the term papers. The fact that this occurred at a Jesuit school made it even more ironic.
In any event I am sure the Middlebury school administration is turning a blind eye to these practices, happy to receive a few extra sawbucks in their pockets. Two to one, our friends, the saudis, our friends, or the gulf states, are funding this. We ought to hoist the school administrations by their petards.
"What has Arabic got to offer besides Islam, and military/political work in the Arabic world? "
you are underestimating the fact that a good arabic speaking translator is tremedously needed nowadays and if he's a westerner, he can do a good service to his country.
To the chinese man above. I always underline that multiculturalism is never a problem. People who lump chinese, south americans and eastern europeans in the same league as muslim commit a terrible mistake.
I wouldn't be surprised if State was up to its eyeballs in this program and knows, quite well, what is going on. State has its own foreign policy and such Arab/Muslim-friendly indoctrination would suit a lot at State, I'm sure.
In contrast, several decades ago I learned Chinese as part of one of those National Defense Foreign Language Act funded college programs.
In talking to my teacher in off-campus social settings, I found out that she was from an old Chinese family that was part of the last Imperial government, then became Nationalist--my teacher's father started one of the first nationalist newpapers and was firebombed for his troubles. Once, at a party for students at her house, I noticed a large original scroll painting on the wall which my teacher said Mme. Chiang Kai-shek had painted and presented to her. Yet, I can recall perhaps only one passing remark by my teacher, in the three years I studied with her, that concerned the PRC, Communism, Taiwan or the Nationalists. The texts and language tapes we used, produced by pre-postmodern Harvard, had no discernable bias that I can recall. Even the textbooks Harvard's Far Eastern Institute created for the study of the particular Chinese language style used for Communist propaganda, as I recall, merely concentrated on teaching how to read the Chinese but did not editorialize at all, leaving each student free to evaluate what was being said for himself.
Middlebury is about indoctrination, the teaching I received was about learning.
It is not Middlebury that indoctrinates, but those who control the Arabic-language programat Middlebury. One hopes that administrators of Arabic language programs, at the president-of-college level, will take an intelligent interest in the problem that this memoir-cum-indictment reveals, and work to correct it, rather than to rally around the teachers or administrators invovled, and to become defensive.
I don't think there is any such problem, or ever was, with other critical languages. Chinese was always taught not by agents of Communist China, but by those Chinese who, whether from Taiwan or citizens of this country, were not about to spread Communist propaganda (that would be left to Orville Schell, or in a much milder way, to Jonathan Mirsky and even J. K. Fairbank, the latter two changing their spots considerably, almost ending up where Simon Leys began, and the former turning himself into a respectable dean of journalism who, alas, has permitted at least one apologist for Islam to rise in the School-of-Journalism bureaucracy).
As for Russian-language programs at MIddlebury, they were always staffed by those who had a keen sense of what Soviet Communism was all about, and for that matter, and even more so, was the celebrated Russian School held in summers at Norwich University, in Northfield, Vermont (Norwich, a military academy, began life in Norwich, Vermont but after a disastrous fire, removed to Northfield, perhaps to be nearer the body of water in Brookfield with its floating bridge).
But the teaching of Arabic, almost everywhere, is a scandal -- a scandal that those in Congress prepared to throw money at it apparently are insufficiently aware of. Not all the students have been fooled; some are ready, willing, and able to testify to the sly and not-so-sly indoctrination they are subject to, and heads may yet roll, in places that least expect it.
"One hopes that administrators of Arabic language programs, at the president-of-college level, will take an intelligent interest in the problem"
This assumes that such tendencies as documented by Franck Salameh operate in a vacuum, beyond which is the blue sky of the untainted West. I'd say that most administrators and presidents of colleges are earnest white-haired Anglo-Saxons who wouldn't dream that Islam itself could ever be at fault, and who would regard with reflexive suspicion anyone who would suggest otherwise.
I have no objection to people learning Arabic for the same reason the US promoted the study of Russian during the Cold War.
There is however something very wrong when the Blair Administration allows a Muslim Girls School funded by the taxpayer in England to focus as a "languages" school with an emphasis on Arabic. Now it may be that Muslim girls only need to recite the Koran during household chores to feel wholly satisfied in life, but since 60% Bngladeshi households in Britain live on welfare, it might not be a good idea for taxpayers to fund this lifestyle.
Arabic has a very high tolerance level among opinion-formers who recognise baksheesh when it is offered, and those civil service pensions and home extensions look so desirable when the recycled petrodollars land in an account near you.
The longer this approach goes on the bloodier will be the eventual outcome.
the eccelibano blog [link on the margin of JW] has a rather similar account of life at the Middlebury Arabic program, written, I believe, by Dr Louis Harfouche. This post by Harfouche appeared about 10 months ago, I think.