Was in the spring
Given the current, too often juvenile level of political discourse on this medium – with loudmouthed lunkheads magically transformed overnight into experts on issues and parts of the world they know nothing about (except maybe a postcard from Aunt Rita last fall and a fondness for spicy foods) – I’ve chosen to avoid being part of the brawl.
But this little piece by Sara Roy in the latest LRB is right chilling, and so ruled worth sharing.
[…] The relationship between Israel’s hardline supporters and the ‘Arab professoriat’, as we have been called, has been tense for a long time. After 11 September, the right accused Middle East academics in particular of extremist scholarship and intellectual treason. Defending Civilisation: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done about It, a report published in November 2001 by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a non-profit organisation founded by Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice-president, and Senator Joseph Lieberman, effectively accused the academy of being unpatriotic and anti-American, a fifth column providing intellectual support for global terrorism.
In evidence it cited over a hundred statements by academics (and others) calling for a more critical examination of the causes of the events of 11 September and the role US foreign policy may have played.
Another indictment of Middle East studies appeared in Martin Kramer’s Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, published in October 2001 by the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Kramer, who teaches Arab history and politics at Tel Aviv University, claims that Middle East studies in the US are dominated – indeed, crippled – by pro-Arab and anti-American sentiment. The academy, he believes, failed to anticipate and may even have concealed the growing Islamist threat that resulted in the attack on the World Trade Center.
Middle East studies, he claims, have devoted too much attention to historical and cultural subjects that are of no use to the state and its national security imperatives, and may even harm them. What is needed, he says, is a new approach to the study of the Middle East that has at its core ‘the idea that the United States plays an essentially beneficent role in the world’. […]
And that’s the good news.
My only other contribution to the subject is a song to the tune of Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline, with the refrain that starts: ‘Sweet Palestine, détente never seemed so good…’ goes downhill into this:
And now I
Look at the Right
(gaza gaza)
And it don’t seem so holy
(gaza gaza)…
Then gets much too silly.
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Comment
- never in all my days did I think I would see a neil diamond quote dragged into this particular fray. that’s some darkly hillarious shit. word. thankyou.
-fish
— fish Apr 2, 11:14am # - It’s chilling to see how neo-republicans are succeeding in curbing free speech and are trying to subvert any possibility for intellectual discussion in universities and wider public opinon.
Twenty years ago we were riling at the idea that Orwell’s 1984 could have any relevance in a “post modern” world. Times have changed and it seems that big brother & co. have plundered what few civil liberties we had.
— pete s Apr 6, 5:22pm # - Chillier and sillier, that’s my advice.
Let’s take this thing all the way while we still have a shot.
— msg Apr 8, 2:42am #
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