Lee Kaplan at FrontPage on the entrenched dhimmitude of the Saidists of MESA, as exhibited at their Conference in late November in San Francisco:
When I arrived at the conference, I looked over the information tables. One table offered what can only be described as anti-Israel, anti-U.S. propaganda in the guise of scholarly and professional research society materials. On the bulletin board was a business card for Alison Weir’s IfAmericansKnew.org, an anti-Israel Web site claiming that America’s support of Israel should be terminated, and that a Palestinian state should replace Israel. The site uses misleading statistics to push its hateful message. For instance, the chart depicting American aid to Israel and the Arab world ignores the fact that, while Palestinians receive less U.S. aid than Israel does, the Arab world as a whole gets much more; in addition, aid to Israel is reciprocated through new technology. Also, the Web site’s statistics on Palestinian casualties include suicide bombers and armed combatants as “civilian casualties.”Weir has also distorted history in the past. She once called a massacre of 60 yeshiva students in Hebron in 1929 by Arabs an “Arab uprising” against Jewish oppression – even before Israel existed. Manipulation of statistics to advance political goals for foreign dictatorships should not be welcome at an academic conference.
At the same table, free copies of a glossy newsmagazine called the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs were being distributed to the academics in attendance. Most people, upon seeing the publication, might assume it was similar to Newsweek or Time; the inside cover claims the report has been “telling the Truth for more than 20 years. … Interpreting the Middle East for North Americans.” What most people don’t know is that the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs magazine and Web site – indeed, the entire organization behind it – are funded by Saudi Arabia, a despotic regime that has been quietly buying its way onto every campus in America, particularly through Middle East Studies centers in the U.S.
Articles in the magazine included anti-U.S. and anti-Israel diatribes by the likes of the 83-year-old dyed-in-the-wool leftist radical Rachelle Marshall from Stanford, who condemns as evil both Israelis fighting Palestinian terrorists and U.S. forces in Iraq dealing with similar terror attacks. An article by Alison Weir claimed that Israelis beat American activists for walking Arab children to school in Gaza (with no proof that the thugs were Israelis, since the assailants were hooded and robbed the victims). The message throughout was that Israel and the United States are “colonialist” warmongers, and titles such as “Israel’s Day of Penitence: Drown Gaza in a Sea of Blood” were typical.
That was just some of the free reading material being distributed. I could find nothing presenting an opposing point of view....
I decided to interview some faculty attendees and gravitated to the upstairs bar, where I met Nabil Al-Tikriti, a professor from the University of Chicago; Albrecht Fuess, a Middle East Studies professor from the University of Erfurt in the former East Germany; and a Ph.D. candidate named John Curry, attending from Ohio State. All three condemned the U.S. presence in Iraq and blamed the U.S. invasion for the “collapse” of the Iraqi government. When I asked if the majority of the Iraqi people weren’t better off since the removal of Saddam Hussein, they all said no. Curry cited an Arab proverb that “a bad government is better than no government at all.” They complained that Iraq wasn’t a democracy under U.S. presence there.
I asked, “But the U.S. government is now setting up elections. Hussein was murdering 5,000 Iraqis a month. How can you say they were better off?” Al-Tikriti stated: “That’s a myth that Hussein killed more than 5,000 a month. It was more like 20 per month and that was only during the last seven years of his rule.” Fuess interjected, “If you do the math, you can see it is impossible.” Fuess put Iraq’s population at 22 million and declared that at the rate of 5,000 per month over 35 years of Saddam’s rule over Iraq, he would have to have killed 2.1 million people. (Actually, the number is more than plausible, because compared to Hussein’s idols, Hitler and Stalin, both of whom he modeled his regime after intentionally, Hussein was a piker. The Kurdish village of Halabja alone netted over 5,000 dead when it was gassed by Hussein.)
Basically, the idea was that the U.S. is doing wrong in Iraq and no good will come of it, not even the liberation of the Iraqi people from a Hitler wannabe. They claimed there was absolutely no connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, yet anyone who reads a newspaper knows that Ansar Al-Islam was founded in Northern Iraq with Hussein’s permission and is now leading the insurgency against U.S. soldiers. They still insisted it wasn’t true.
These are the same people who our government is funding as “experts” on the Middle East.
I finally asked about indoctrination in the classroom and expressed that I’d seen how it occurs, based on what scholars attending the MESA Conference were discussing. Al-Tikriti commented that he felt professors had a right to teach their personal opinions in the classroom and asked what I had against it. I answered that opinions backed up by verifiable academic research should be taught, but that I’d seen blatant propaganda throughout that evening’s conference. He asked me what I would change.
I replied, “I’d invite those academic Middle East scholars who actually support America’s war effort overseas and security needs here at home. People like Daniel Pipes or Martin Kramer.” I continued, “Why aren’t they here at the MESA Conference?”
“They’d be shouted down,” replied Al-Tikriti.
Read it all.
Many a student will leave these professors' classes, work in the Middle East, and draw his own conclusions upon seeing the seamy side of Islam. Ultimately, these tenured troublemakers will be digging their own graves.
Congress should consider creating a parallel universe of real scholars of the MIddle East. Scholarships and other programs could be provided for those who, for example, having served in the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan, have seen the workings of Muslim societies and peoples in a way that the Laurie Brands, Rashid Khalidis, Juan Coles, and Joel Beinins of this world would not wish them to see.
Recently a certain Peter Bechthold who has been put in charge, at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute, of the "training" of people involved in the MIddle East, addressed the MESA meeting. He assured his audience that there was nothing to worry about; there were only, he said, about 30 "neo-cons" in all of Washington, adn besides, 97% of MESA's membership deplored the current administration's activities and attitudes in the Middle East. 97%. That should give everyone pause.
Again: how is a cadre of people, schooled not so much in languages, but in the tenets of Islam, in what is contained in Qur'an and hadith and sira, which after all affects day and night, year after year, what Muslims think, what they are told, what they see, how they interpret the universe -- or at least, most of them do. Until we have created a world where easy allusion can be made to "Khaybar" or the "Bani Qurayza" or the "Verse of the Cow" or "9.29" or "the Treaty of al-Hudaibiyya" or "what al-Ghazali and Ibn Khaldun said about the Jihad" or "why Akbar was despised by Muslims" or "1258" or "1517" or --- well, you get the idea. We know these things. The people making policy should also know them.
That leaves out the likes, I'm afraid, of Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk and all the other tiresome and tired believers in a "peace process" -- as well, of course, as the small army of apologists who make up much of the population of MESA.
Money can and should be diverted; we would not between 1945 and 1985 have supported a Soviet studies program run by agents, rather than defectors, from the K.G.B. Defenders of Japanee Kodo (militarism and Emperor-worship) would not have been put in charge of Japanese-language studies from 1941-1945; Nazi sympathizers did not find that their university positions remained available to them, between 1941 and 1945 -- or, indeed, at any time since.
And there is a lesson there, as the moralist Pushkin wrote, dobrym molodtsam urok.
During the Q&A I decided to run a little two-part experiment. I stood up and asked if he would mind if I related a short quote from the "President of the United States" that I believed to be germane to the discussion, to which he graciously agreed. There were about 100 folks in attendance, with about half being academics like myself and the other half being mostly retired high ranking military officers and many of those were generals.
So I read a short passage from an essay written in 1826 by John Q. Adams in which he stresses the need to deal forcefully with Muslim states as they can never be trusted to abide by the terms of any treaties that they sign. Presidents Jefferson, Adams and Madison all understood the full history and implications of the precedent set by Muhammad in the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah.
When Richard asked me which president was quoted, I revealed that it was JQA. The whole audience erupted in laughter and the entire passage was dismissed as anachronistically irrelevant.
After the laughter died down, in part two of my experiment, I suggested that the reason the regimes in the Muslim countries cannot effectively combat the "extremist" ideology is because that ideology is not extreme, but is rather a matter of mainstream orthodox canon. Shouts of "hogwash" and the like were hurled at the suggestion.
When we broke for lunch a few souls mustered the courage to approach me to confess that they too secretly shared the view of JQA and agreed with my assessment of the "extremist" problem. There are many more like minded scholars out there but they are so intimidated that they dare not speak up. The oil of tenure annointment is almost exclusively held by the hands of the multiculturalist de facto dhimmis. As an outsider, yet in possession of their same credentials, folks like me don't give a hoot about their tenure system so there is a certain degree of impunity available to us when we speak to the academic community as peers. Aside from claiming that admitting misfits like me into the company of scholars in the first place is a mistake, all they really can do is try to shout us down.
So it appears that not only have the academics deluded themselves, they have managed to draq the leaders of the military establishment along with them.
For the time being I remain in private practice which currently pays much better than academia anyway. Folks like us may have to wait for some more people with means who understand the nature of the challenge of jihad that confronts the present generation, to endow some chairs around the country in political science, history, sociology and philosophy that we can fill with counter-jihad minded scholars.
In the meantime, we'll do what we can by pumping out tomes like my new book, "Saracens at the Gates" which we hope to launch this spring and by following in the footsteps of visionaries like Robert Spencer in making the rounds on the talk radio, bookstore and Rotary Club circuit.
Dr. Mack,
looking forward to reading your book.
To Dr. Mack: I admire your courage to confront the narcissistic sophistry of the contemporary academy. Indeed, I agree with you that intellectual freedom can only truly be found by standing on one's own feet and not engaging the magnetic mechanisms that keep one in a superficial groupthink posing as a house of cards.