Author: Martin Kramer

My Virtual Lecture Series, 2004-2005

On By Martin Kramer

Many years ago, I developed the habit of writing out lectures before delivering them. There are some scholars, like my mentor Bernard Lewis, who can lecture from one-word cues scribbled on a scrap of paper. More power to them. But I learned through experience that you don’t always know the shape you’ll be in when you step off a long flight and get behind the lectern. Better to have done all the thinking and formulating in the comfort of your office, than in front of the multitudes after a less-than-agreeable trip.

The advantage of my way is that I have the texts of my lectures for later deployment. So here are links to seven lectures I delivered over the past academic year. Take them together as kind of virtual lecture series.

The first four lectures deal with crucial issues related to policy and politics in the Middle East. I gave three of them at events organized by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

  • When Minorities Rule is a presentation I delivered on a Washington Institute panel I shared with Syrian dissident Ammar Abdulhamid. I point to the long legacy of minority rule in the Middle East, and the fear in the region that democracy promotion could overturn long-established ethnic and religious hierarchies.
  • Shiites and U.S. Policy: Between Allies and Adversaries is a talk delivered at the annual fall conference of The Washington Institute. I consider the U.S. tilt toward the Shiites in Iraq and beyond, and the Shiite suspicion that the United States is destined to betray them.
  • Mr. Sharansky, Ease My Doubts is a presentation I gave on a Tel Aviv University panel featuring Natan Sharansky and devoted to his influential book, The Case for Democracy. I draw distinctions between different concepts of “freedom,” and suggest that the Middle East may be different after all.
  • Islam, Islamism, and U.S. Foreign Policy is a talk I delivered at The Washington Institute, on a panel I shared with Gilles Kepel. (The occasion: publication of his book, The War for Muslim Minds.) I argue that it would be a mistake to parley with the the so-called “moderate” Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood school, and that it is impossible to turn the Muslim Brothers against the jihadists. And I add this on Islamism in Europe: “What Europeans are discovering is that deals with Islamists, once cut, don’t always last. The U.S.-Islamist deal over Afghanistan did not last, and the European-Islamist deal is coming apart now. Europe’s unique dilemma is that Islamism is so thoroughly implanted in vast emigre communities (17 million), that it may be necessary for Europe to cut still another deal, even less favorable than the previous one.”

The next three lectures deal with the predicament of Middle Eastern studies in America.

  • Arab Studies: My Critical Review is a lecture I delivered at the annual symposium of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, on a panel with Michael Hudson and As’ad AbuKhalil. I look at the many ways the field has prospered thanks to 9/11, and I paraphrase Secretary Rumsfeld: you go to war with the Middle Eastern studies you have, not the ones you might want or wish to have. But I suggest that the time has come for scholars to step back and look critically at their endeavor, without demonizing their critics or fearing for their subsidies. (If you prefer, you can listen to this lecture.)
  • Middle Eastern Studies: What is the Debate About? is a presentation I made at the inauguration of the new Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, where I shared the podium with Steven Caton and Malik Mufti. There I emphasize that the new center will have to take a stand on two issues: Who is an expert? And what is the proper relationship between academe and the national interest?
  • Columbia University: The Future of Middle Eastern Studies at Stake is a talk I gave by videocast to a conference on academic integrity held at Columbia University. I seek to place the crisis of Middle Eastern studies at Columbia in a larger context, showing that it exemplifies the dysfunctional nature of the field as a whole. “Up close,” I note, “this looks like a story about Columbia and Israel. In proper perspective, it is a test case for Middle Eastern studies and American preparation for its enhanced role in the Middle East.”

There’s no charge for admission to this year’s virtual lecture series. Just sit back, click, and enjoy. The great thing about a virtual series is that audience members can come and go as they please, and the lecturer doesn’t have to answer pesky questions. It’s the best of all possible worlds.

Tentacles in Sinai

On By Martin Kramer

The bombings in Sharm el-Sheikh again raise disturbing questions about the nexus of smuggling, Islamism, and terrorism in the Sinai. In summer 2004, when I was still editor of the Middle East Quarterly, I published an article by Maj. Gen. Doron Almog, who headed Israel’s Southern Command from 2000 to 2003. Almog focused on the smuggling and inflitration network from Egypt into Gaza and Israel a network that’s flourished under the noses of Egyptian authorities. Almog explained the dynamic: “Tolerance for smuggling and infiltration, like anti-Israel demonstrations in Cairo and incitement in the media, appears to be designed to relieve some of the pressure exerted by anti-Israeli public opinion in Egypt.”

But Almog warned that this could backfire, in a passage that seems prophetic in light of the subsequent attacks in Taba and Sharm el-Sheikh:

There is growing evidence that the smuggling-infiltration network operating from Egyptian territory against Israel is linked at some level to Egyptian Islamist groups. There are Egyptian Islamists who see the border area, and Gaza in particular, as a mini-Afghanistan a point of entry and vector for opening another Islamist front against infidel occupiers. Right now, this cannot take the form of armed volunteers, as in Afghanistan in the 1990s and Iraq today. But there is no impediment to smuggling and infiltration, which could be expanded into more substantial involvement in post-Mubarak circumstances. In the meantime, the smuggling itself is eroding the Israeli-Egyptian peace accord, which has always been a prime Islamist objective.

Informally, the Egyptians have signaled that the moment the Israeli-Palestinian issue is resolved, smuggling and infiltration will be dramatically reduced. The problem, they claim, is driven by the conflict itself and the occupation. But this notion is wholly mistaken. Not only does the smuggling have a strong economic incentive, but it is also linked to ideological groups that have far-reaching objectives, that reject the authority of the Egyptian government and the Palestinian Authority, and that would regard any progress toward peace as a trigger for even more intensive efforts against it. From the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in October 1981, to horrific acts of terror such as the 1997 murder of fifty-eight tourists in Luxor, the regime has demonstrated its inability to eradicate this Islamist threat. That the regime would succeed, precisely on Egypt’s border with Israel, seems very unlikely.

Almog then added this conclusion:

The smuggling and infiltration network should be regarded as part and parcel of the global terrorism network, and the battle against it as part of the global war on terror. Smuggling constitutes a strategic convergence between the Palestinian terror apparatus in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and global militant Islam. It is a reflection of the strengthening of militant Islam in post-9/11 Egypt and in the post-Saddam Middle East.

Ah, some readers probably said to themselves: another Israeli trying to hitch a ride on the global war on terror. But Almog was right, and the Sharm el-Sheikh attack is proof of it. For the Sinai is also a stage set on which Husni Mubarak receives foreign leaders in sumptuous surroundings. As long as that same Sinai remains an Islamist “vector” toward Israel, some of the terror network’s resources are bound to be spent on the peninsula’s underbelly. I say “bound to” because one kind of Islamist terrorism breeds another. Look the other way when it’s directed against your neighbor, and soon enough it’ll turn around and get you.

It starts with the Jews

On By Martin Kramer

This past week, eleven years after the event, Argentina has accepted formal responsibility for failing to solve the 1994 bombing of the Jewish communal headquarters (AMIA) in Buenos Aires. In that attack, an explosives-laden vehicle (now known to have been driven by a Lebanese Shiite suicide bomber) brought down the entire building, killing 85 people. The investigation was a travesty of cover-up and corruption, and Argentina remains the only Western country not to have solved a major terrorist attack.

I wrote an article on the context of that attack in the October 1994 issue of Commentary, where I made this point:

There is now a great backwash of extreme fundamentalists into the West, the result of crackdowns in the Middle East and North Africa. They are gaining shelter, visas, and even political asylum. While some respect the laws of their host countries, some do not. There are fundamentalists who look upon the West as one more arena for the conduct of their jihad against Western governments, their own governments, Israel, and the Jews.

If they are to be stopped, Western governments will have to show an absolute determination to keep their ground free of the violence that characterizes conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa. This can best be done by preventing the entry of more fundamentalist standard bearers; by regarding those already in the West as potentially violent; and by employing every legal means of surveillance against them.

This was before Al-Qaeda, before the spread of Islamist suicide attacks, before the collapse of the Oslo process. But a handful of analysts saw the omen in Argentina, and saw worse things coming. Alas, each government in the West has required an individual wake-up call in the form of an attack, and it’s taken a decade for all of North America and Europe to get it. At the time of the AMIA bombing, people thought it was the kind of thing fanatics did only to Jews. That’s what people thought in 1933, too.