Author: Martin Kramer

Bush-whacked by Hamas

On By Martin Kramer

My long-time readers know that for years, I’ve consistently warned that indiscriminate democracy promotion courts Islamist disaster. Here’s one example from The Washington Institute’s fall conference in 2002, and here’s another, my remarks last winter on a panel with Natan Sharansky. I watched with dismay and alarm as John Esposito’s agenda became George Bush’s agenda, driven by blind adherence to simplistic nostrums.

Now the American democracy fetish has brought a certified terrorist movement to power in the Palestinian territories. I’d say that puts George Bush in the category of Jimmy Carter, whose human rights fetish helped to propel Islamists to power in Iran. (How appropriate that Carter monitored the latest Palestinian elections. I first pointed to the Carter-Bush parallel when Bush announced his “forward strategy of freedom” in a 2003 speech at the National Endowment for Democracy–a silly institution that’s busily paving the road to hell with good intentions.)

So what does the Hamas victory mean? Back in November, I debated the chief British apologist for Islamist extremism, Alastair Crooke. I said this about Hamas: “The more power they share, the more the conflict will be returned to a standoff reminiscent of the period between 1949 and 1967: an unsteady armistice, non-recognition, and non-negotiation. Islamism is now what Arab nationalism was then: a preference for long-term attrition over diplomacy.”

Of course, it’s only the Palestinians who are headed back to 1949. Israel today is squarely aligned with the United States, it has peace with Egypt and Jordan, and its economy is completely globalized. Only the Palestinians, stuck behind the wall, have entered the time machine. The right strategy for Israel is to draw in Egypt and Jordan, to complete the 1949 scenario. Israel and the United States should compel Hamas to go through Cairo and Amman if they want air to breath. King Abdullah and Husni Mubarak have plenty of levers over Hamas, and should be pressed to use them. In return, the United States should exempt Egypt and Jordan from its democracy edicts.

The rest of us can put away our roadmaps, and the last of the peace envoys can retire to write their books. As for my neocon friends, when they find themselves out of jobs, I suggest they apply to John Esposito’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. He’s just taken $20 million from Saudi Prince Alwaleed to boost think tank operations. It’ll be a perfect marriage: they can all reassure us that power will moderate Islamists, that we shouldn’t fear pursuing democracy come what may, etc. Here’s the perfect title for the new hires: the Bush-Carter Fellows.

The Colephate

On By Martin Kramer

Juan Cole’s penchant for specious analogies misleads his readers once again, this time in regard to the caliphate. Here is Cole:

There are different conceptions of the caliphate, sort of a Sunni papacy. At some points in history the caliph was both a temporal and a spiritual leader. But over time there was a separation of religion and state of sorts in medieval Islam, and civil rulers such as the Buyids or Seljuks exercised material rule, reducing the caliphs of the tenth through thirteenth centuries to largely a spiritual function.

Note that the link for this authoritative analysis is to the Wikipedia entry for “Caliph,” written by… well, God only knows.

So let’s quote instead from the entry “Caliph” in a genuine encyclopedia, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World an entry expertly written by Glenn E. Perry. It seems to contradict Cole head-on:

The caliph is not the Muslim equivalent of the pope, that is, the head of a Muslim Church, for Islam has no such institution that may be differentiated from the state. It is misleading to think of the caliphate as a spiritual office; it is a religious office mainly in the sense that the purpose of the state itself is religious in Islam.

Of course, Cole manages not only to mislead his readers, but to contradict another specious analogy he made a year and a half ago: “Sunni Islam most resembles, it seems to me, Protestant Christianity in its authority structures…. As in Protestantism, there is no over-arching authority.” Now wait a minute: if Sunni Islam resembles Protestant Christianity in its authority structures, what’s it doing with “sort of a papacy”? (And what does the Shiite authority structure look like? Elsewhere Cole has explained that “you can choose, in Shiite Islam, which ayatollah to follow.” That sounds sort of Protestant, too.)

Or maybe the whole business of analogies with Christian denominations is pointless? Here’s a real expert, Bernard Lewis:

Some, in trying to explain the difference between Sunnis and Shi’a to Western audiences, have described them as the equivalents of Protestants and Catholics…. The absurdity of the comparison is shown by a very simple test. If the Shi’a and Sunnis are Protestants and Catholics, then which are the Protestants and which are the Catholics? The impossibility of answering this question will at once demonstrate the falsity of the comparison.

Juan Cole is a virtual storehouse of misleading, absurd, and false “juanalogies,” which cut against more than a century of scholarly efforts to explain Islam in its own terms. It’s thanks to those efforts that no one calls Islam Mohammedanism anymore. When Cole draws analogies between Saudi Arabia and Amish country (“Saudi Arabia is an extremely conservative society; going to Saudi Arabia is kind of like going to Amish country in the United States”), or between Al-Qaeda and David Koresh, he functions as an anti-expert, obscuring the very complexities whose elucidation we expect from someone who’s spent years studying Islam. Cole’s only possible excuse is that he’s talking down to his fans, because they’re not smart enough to grasp the intricacies. Well, maybe they aren’t: after all, they’re his fans.

Suffering in silence at Columbia

On By Martin Kramer

An Israeli newspaper over New Year’s weekend ran a profile of Anat Malkin-Almani, a violinist and child prodigy who had performed at Carnegie Hall at the age of 16. Malkin-Almani was born in Israel, but moved to California at the age of five, and then to New York, where she enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music and Julliard. Between her junior and senior years at Julliard, her left hand was badly mauled in an automobile accident. Now 29, and twelve surgeries later, she has made her way back to full-time performing. The profile is a moving story of dogged devotion to music in the face of adversity.

After Malkin-Almani’s accident, she considered a career in politics and foreign affairs. So she decided to study for a degree in Middle Eastern studies at Columbia University. Big mistake:

Malkin-Almani: Every week I would get e-mails about anti-Israel demonstrations, lectures that were virtually a form of incitement. The whole atmosphere in the department was hostile, and it was orchestrated by Edward Said. In one class the lecturer cited an article about how the Israelis were raping Palestinian women in the prisons and then sending them back to the territories. I raised my hand and said that no friend of mine had raped a Palestinian, and he started to shout at me.

Haaretz: Was that the only case?

Malkin-Almani: There were cases like that all the time. In one class I asked the lecturer where the border between East and West Jerusalem ran. He started to shout that you Israelis are so stupid, you don’t know anything. All the students in the class joined him and started shouting at me. That was the routine. Once I met with Said, who was a good friend of Daniel Barenboim, and I told him I wanted to join the Arab-Jewish orchestra they had established. He asked me where I was born and I told him Israel. Straight off he told me that Israel had not permitted the entry of a few musicians from Syria who wanted to play with the orchestra in Bethlehem. Suddenly he started to shout at me as though I were the one who stamps the permits. After two years of studies I said enough is enough and I left the university.

Haaretz: Did you share your experiences with anyone on the faculty?

Malkin-Almani: I had an Israeli lecturer whom I told what happened in the classes and I gave her all the articles we were given. She said that we must not meet in the university. A month later she told me, “We checked it out, it is dangerous to act and the best thing is to be silent.”

Malkin-Almani didn’t appear in the film Columbia Unbecoming, and her name didn’t surface in the subsequent controversy. She was a silent victim of faculty intimidation in a department run wild. Columbia isn’t in the news these days, but now is the time to pose this question to the university’s president, Lee Bollinger: how are you using this hiatus to clean up the mess? We’re waiting. And we’re watching.

Update: The New York Sun has spoken to Malkin-Almani, and she confirms that the offending professor was Joseph Massad. She also testified before the ad hoc grievance committee. Columbia’s legal laundryman, Floyd Abrams, says he doesn’t recall the testimony.