Author: Martin Kramer

Hail the terrorologists

On By Martin Kramer

On Monday, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge paid a visit to the University of Maryland, to announce the award of a three-year, $12-million grant from DHS for the creation of a Center of Excellence for Behavioral and Social Research on Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism. The center’s team is composed of psychologists, criminologists, sociologists, and political scientists. Maryland’s VP for research made great claims for this practical application of the social sciences: “The expertise of social scientists can help disrupt terror operations and reduce the after-effects of attacks. But so far the nation hasn’t taken full advantage of their knowledge. With this new team, we hope to change that.” The head of the new center struck an even more ambitious note: “This may be the social science equivalent of the Manhattan Project.”

Okay, I’m smiling at that one. But I take my hat off to these guys. While the Middle East academics are busy applauding a radical speech by MESA’s president, who would have them burn the bridges over the Potomac, other academics are busy filling out grant forms and bagging millions of dollars. At the end of the day, they’ll have made respectable what the snots in MESA call “terrorology.” After all, how hard can it be to match the choppy record of the social sciences as applied to the Middle East? It’s intellectual poaching in the best tradition, and if leaders of the field don’t wake up, the best chance in fifty years to expand their domain will be stolen from under their noses.

Bulliet on target at Columbia

On By Martin Kramer

This week’s New York Magazine runs a big feature story on the mess in Columbia’s Middle East department (MEALAC), and it’s well worth reading. I’m quoted there, but I said predictable things. Not so Professor Richard Bulliet, who teaches Islamic and Middle Eastern history in the History department:

The university should have looked at MEALAC five or ten years ago. It’s become locked into a postmodernist, postcolonialist point of view, one that wasn’t necessarily well adapted to giving students instruction about the Middle East…. We’ve had advocacy in the classroom for a long time. But in the areas where it’s most visible, like black studies and women’s studies, the point of view tends to coincide with the outlook of the Columbia community… But here we have an area where no consensus exists. And that’s the problem.

Bulliet and I have crossed swords a few times (he’s had the last word for now, in his recent book), but we’re on speaking terms, and I’d heard this from him in person. That someone of his standing at Columbia should have come forward now to criticize MEALAC in the media is testament to the damage the rogue department is doing to the university. And it’s another sign that the spell of intimidation cast by the radicals has been broken. Professor Bulliet: Bravo aleik.

Noah Feldman: no more Baghdad

On By Martin Kramer

Noah Feldman is the young NYU law professor who was tapped by the Coalition Provisional Authority back in 2003 to help Iraqis write their constitution. He later fell out with the CPA and returned to New York in a huff. Feldman has recently lamented that he’s infamous in the Arab world, because Edward Said wrote an article noting he was raised as an Orthodox Jew. “The article morphed and spread [in Arabic translation], until I became known as a Zionist agent. I became nervous, and I believe it would be dangerous for me to go back.”

The irony is that Feldman set himself up. It was he who, in spring 2003, pumped the New York Times and the Israeli press with the self-promotional saga of his Orthodox background. This is what I wrote in those glory days, before there was any Iraqi resistance or beheading of foreigners: “I question the wisdom of all the to-do about Feldman’s Jewish upbringing. In America, it’s part of the novelty—so much so that Feldman seems to think that there’s no reason not to dwell on it…. [But] there are undoubtedly people in Iraq who would be delighted to bag an American Jew. I urge Feldman to watch his back.” Feldman didn’t understand enough about the temperament of the region to know that he was making a mistake, and Said made sure it caught up with him. Feldman once told an interviewer that being in Baghdad was “invigorating—there is nothing like putting your money where your mouth is.” Well, up to a point. And since Professor Feldman has written an entire book enumerating the mistakes of his lessers in Iraq, he might acknowledge just one of his own.