Author: Martin Kramer

USA Today, Duped by Michigan Profs!

On By Martin Kramer

USA Today runs an editorial this morning against the advisory board provision of H.R. 3077, the International Studies in Higher Education Act. The editorial opens by presenting the University of Michigan’s faculty as scholars with their shoulders to the wheel:

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the University of Michigan has tried to help the U.S. government understand anti-U.S. terrorism in the Arab world and deal with the threat. It has increased the enrollment of students studying Arabic tenfold, helped military leaders learn about the culture of Islamic countries and led seminars for State Department officials on waging public diplomacy.

Michigan and dozens of other universities have expanded their Middle Eastern studies using a $90 million-a-year federal grant program designed to increase the number of Arabic translators and analysts the government can hire. But some squeamish members of Congress who don’t trust what university professors teach about Middle East politics jeopardize the efforts.

Now who are those distrustful Congressmen to get in the way of the good Arabic professors at the University of Michigan, who are helping us beat back the terrorists by teaching Arabic to future government officials?

Dear readers, USA Today has been completely and utterly duped. The University of Michigan is famous for its Arabic instruction. It’s also infamous for its consistent refusal, before 9/11 and since, to cooperate with the federal government in training Arabists for government service.

The Title VI program—that $90 million-a-year-program—isn’t designed to increase the number of Arabic translators. It’s a subsidy that largely goes to minting new Ph.D.’s., who want jobs in universities. That’s why Washington, a few years back, came up with the idea of government-funded language academies on American campuses. The government would fund some teaching positions and student fellowships. The grads would incur a service obligation. It’s now called the National Flagship Language Initiative (NFLI)—a part of the National Security Education Program—and Washington wanted to implement it for Arabic at the University of Michigan.

In October 2001, The Michigan Daily reported that the university’s Arabic department had been offered funds by the NFLI pilot program, and was considering accepting them. But the department was “currently debating the pros and cons.” In particular, some of the faculty were “worried about whether the program goals, for students to learn Arabic and then use the language for work in the Federal Bureau of Investigation or other governmental agencies, clashes with the mission of the department.”

In the end, Michigan turned Washington down. “We didn’t want our students to be known as spies in training,” puffed Carol Bardenstein, an assistant professor of Arabic literature and culture. “By intertwining intelligence and academics, we’d essentially be recruiting Arabs to later inform on members of their own community.” Time ran the story under the headline: “No Spooks, Please. We’re Academics.”

Michigan wasn’t alone. When the board of the Middle East Studies Association ( MESA) met the following spring, it issued a resolution calling on MESA members and institutions not to accept NFLI funding. MESA expressed itself “uneasy” about “the direct link that [the NFLI] envisions between academic programs and government employment.” It was “apprehensive” that the program would link all language students “by association” with the Defense Department. And MESA feared that the program “may foster the already widespread impression that academic researchers from the United States are directly involved in government activities.” The board has yet to rescind that decision. (But the University of Washington took the funds for Arabic anyway.)

And the University of Michigan? Oh, they came out just fine. They turned down the NFLI, but they came up winners in the next Title VI cycle. So they’re swimming in fellowship money to produce more academics. And their Arabic professors won’t have to soil their reputations by teaching those “spies in training.” You see, Title VI is a wonderful no-strings-attached subsidy, an entitlement, the great fellowship slush fund by which academics clone themselves. Remember Professor Bardenstein, quoted above? She spent three years on a Title VI fellowship, doing a thesis on an obscure nineteenth-century Egyptian translator of French literature. Why did the United States pay for such extravagance? On the assumption that somehow, some way, her knowing Arabic might serve the national interest. Now do you believe that?

In response to H.R. 3077, the academics are mounting a massive campaign of deception and disinformation. I’m impressed: some prof or public relations official at Michigan duped the editors at USA Today into presenting the professors at Ann Arbor as team-players in the war on terror, when in fact they’ve refused to play ball. These profs aren’t part of the solution to the shortage of Arabic-competent people in government service. They’re part of the problem, and they’re why, after forty-five years of Title VI, we still don’t have enough of the right people in the right places.

Title VI will cost you and me half a billion dollars over the next five years. It’s received a massive increase in funding since 9/11. It’s time for Congress to cut through all the half-truths and falsehoods churned out by professors and education lobbyists. We need to know if Title VI meets some national need, and if not, how it should be improved. That’s why Title VI needs an advisory board.

Stanley Kurtz, also in USA Today, makes the case for just such a board.

Clarification. MESA’s board has never rescinded its anti-NFLI resolution. A full year after its passage, and in response to continued criticism, the board deleted the paragraph urging MESA member institutions not to take NFLI funds. However, another resolution against accepting funding from the National Security Education Program, the NFLI’s parent program, still stands, and figures prominently on MESA’s website.

How Not to Promote Israel Studies

On By Martin Kramer

For a very long time now, supporters of Israel have been unhappy with its treatment in American academe, and understandably so. The sympathies of those academics who actually teach the Middle East run in the opposite direction. The solution, according to some, is in the promotion of Israel studies. In a recent issue of the Forward, my old friend, Michael Kotzin, has made a plea for philanthropic support of these studies. His conclusion:

It is increasingly clear that serious steps must be taken to provide funding for courses in Israel studies. University officials—who should care about their institutions’ academic credibility as well as their image in the community—need to know that when they solicit Jewish donors for large gifts, this is an area that should be offered as waiting for support. Members of the Jewish community who are already prepared to make substantial gifts to colleges and universities need to be urged to support Israel studies on campus. And all community members with an abiding concern about the fate of the Jewish people need to be encouraged to add this area of giving to their philanthropic portfolios.

Indeed. But when donors come to add Israel studies to their philathropic porfolios, they should know that academic administrators can be pretty sharp dealers on their own turf. Indeed, some programs on offer are as close as academe gets to a scam.

This thought is prompted by the inauguration, this spring semester, of a visiting Israeli professorship at Berkeley. It was established with the support of Helen Diller, a Berkeley alumna whose fortune (and that of her husband, Sanford) was made in real estate (Prometheus Real Estate Group). The two of them have given generously to a wide range of enlightened causes. (Parallel to the Berkeley gift, she gave Ben-Gurion University an equal sum to construct a new humanities building.)

In an interview, Helen Diller said she had been motivated by the pro-Palestinian activism on campus: “You know what’s going on over there. With the protesting and this and that, we need to get a real strong Jewish studies program in there….Hopefully, it will be enlightening to have a visiting professor and it’ll calm down over there more.” An official of the local Jewish federation echoed the sentiment: “Israel has become, somehow, the politically correct whipping boy of academia on this campus….Having an Israeli professor as a permanent fixture on the U.C. [Berkeley] campus provides Jewish students and faculty with a sense of validation.” The local Jewish paper ran a celebratory editorial: “What makes [the Diller] family’s $5 million grant to establish a permanent visiting professor from Israel even more significant is that the professor will not only be a presence on campus. The professor will also be a resource to the entire community.” Diller again: “I feel, through education, both sides will come out with a more positive approach to the situation. I’m hoping to even get the (pro-Palestinian) students to take the courses.”

Well, that’s not likely to be a problem, because Berkeley’s academic committee chose Professor Oren Yiftachel as the first Diller Visiting Professor. Yiftachel is a professor of geography at Ben-Gurion University. He’s also a shining light in the post-Zionist pantheon, a “critical scholar” whose criticism runs overwhelmingly in one direction: against Israel.

I’ll let you judge for yourself. Start with his article “‘Ethnocracy’: The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine,” where he makes the argument that Israel, far from being a democracy, is an ethnocracy—a state predicated on an ethnic preference that cannot be reconciled with democracy. (This is also the title of his next book.) Continue to his article “From Fragile ‘Peace’ to Creeping Apartheid,” where he argues that Ehud Barak’s peace offers were humiliating to the Palestinians, and that Israel is heading down the road of apartheid South Africa. This quote pretty much summarizes Yiftachel’s position:

The failed Oslo process, the violent intifada and—most acutely—Israel’s renewed aggression and brutality toward the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, have cast a dark shadow over the joint future of the state’s Palestinian and Jewish citizens….The actual existence of an Israeli state (and hence citizenship) can be viewed as an illusion. Israel has ruptured, by its own actions, the geography of statehood, and maintained a caste-like system of ethnic-religious-class stratification. Without an inclusive geography and universal citizenship, Israel has created a colonial setting, held through violent control….Occupation and settlement, which necessitate ever intensifying oppression of Palestinians with or without Israeli citizenship, have clear potential to make Israel gradually cave from within.

Yiftachel has called for “a conceptual shift, from Jewishness to Israeliness as the core of the country’s national identity.” To that end, he advocates the cancellation of Israel’s Law of Return, and the effective abolition of the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund. In a presentation at Stanford, he said that while he now supports a two-state solution, he thought that Israelis and Palestinians would eventually form one state.

In the overheated year of 2002, Yiftachel spent several weeks speaking on U.S. campuses with a Palestinian professor from Bir Zeit University. One witness to Yiftachel’s campus roadshow (at U.C. Irvine) described him and his Palestinian cohort as “a far greater threat to the image of Israel in this country then their more rowdy compatriots, because they understand the art of propaganda. They scrupulously avoid the code words that tend to turn off all but the most committed Israel-haters…[Yet] they proceed to lay out the ‘facts’, for those who are unfamiliar with the facts, in a such way that any reasonable person would conclude that Israel is a monstrous obstacle to peace in the Middle East.” Yiftachel would disagree that he’s a threat, believing that Jewish organizations are the real problem. After his lecture tour, he reached this conclusion: “A well-organized system of Jewish and right-wing Christian organizations (actively supported by right-wing Israeli elements) is working on American campuses, exerting heavy pressure on media outlets, and operating dozens of Internet sites.” They had “hijacked the agenda.”

This is the person summoned to Berkeley, supposedly to validate Israel for its Jewish students and faculty. (His course title: “Nationalism, Territory and Identity: Ethnic Relations in Israel/Palestine.”) Now I don’t question Yiftachel’s qualifications to be a visiting professor at Berkeley. In fact, there are enough qualified Israeli post-Zionists and “critical scholars” to fill the Diller Visiting Professorship for the next fifty years, if not longer. But is that what the Dillers had in mind when they made their gift? Bringing to Berkeley a caravan of critics of Israel, who just happen to be Israeli professors?

Yet what is to prevent Berkeley from doing just that? Nothing. Indeed, the visitorship was planned so haphazardly that it emboldened Berkeley to defy the donor’s intent from the very first appointment. It did that, in part, by admitting the head of Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies into the three-person selection committee for the visitorship. Anyone with experience in academic administration will tell you that most battles are won or lost by the selection of committee members. The director of Berkeley’s Middle East center is bound to be someone hostile or indifferent to the aims of a Zionist donor, and this is certainly so in the case of the present director. It’s a novice’s mistake to situate an academic program or project in such a way that your adversaries can influence or hijack it.

The committee’s composition gave the Middle East center the inside track. Yiftachel had spoken at a conference at the center in 2001, and he brought his Israeli-Palestinian roadshow to the center in 2002. (An account appears as a cover story in the center’s newsletter.) Yiftachel was the kind of Israeli that an Edward Said-boosting, Saudi-connected Middle East center could not only tolerate, but embrace.

Now I don’t fault the director of the center, Professor Nezar AlSayyad. I was an academic administrator, and I know the drill. You take the money, you cut the donor’s strings by invoking academic freedom, and you turn the resources to what you think is worthy. The fault here lies with the ineptitude or inexperience of the donor’s negotiator. Foundations have lawyers and advisers to make sure their gifts do what they’re supposed to do. And they’ve got to stay sharp even on a disarmingly peaceful, leafy campus, because it’s very hard to beat an academic player at his own game, and on his own court.

Which is why, all things being equal, it’s better to work with institutions you trust, and that already have a record of doing your thing with their own resources. Outside money is wasted in an attempt to cut across the political grain of a department, program, or center. It works best at reinforcing a priority that the professors have already set for themselves. By these standards, Berkeley’s Middle East center wasn’t a candidate for Israel studies or a visiting Israeli professorship, and it still isn’t.

Someone might say that I’ve judged the Diller Visiting Professorship too hastily, on the basis of only one appointment. I don’t doubt that there will be future appointments more in tune with the donor’s intent and the community’s expectations. But I think the structure of the thing assures that the vast majority of appointments will fall between the far left and the not-quite-as-far left. Whether, on balance, these Israeli professors will validate or invalidate Israel for Berkeley’s students is an open question. But until the question can be answered, the lesson of the Berkeley case for Jewish philanthropists is self-evident. In academe, as in real estate, buyer beware.

Sheikh Obeid, Now Free, on Women Suicide Bombers

On By Martin Kramer

Yesterday, Sheikh Abdul Karim Obeid led the parade of freed Lebanese prisoners. Israel seized him in 1989 from the southern Lebanese village of Jibshit, where he was the local prayer leader. Israel hoped it might trade him for a missing airman. I wrote this about him in the New York Times, shortly after his abduction: “Sheikh Obeid was not among Hizbullah’s leading strategists, or one of its smooth and dissimulating ideologues. He personified the zealous local cleric, passionately preaching war and sharing his meals, his home and his guidance with the young militiamen of Hizbullah.” Now he’s being hailed as a returning hero, and the ideas of this once-obscure man will command attention.

In an article I published in 1991, I had occasion to quote Sheikh Obeid. The subject: women suicide bombers. In the 1980s, pro-Syrian nationalist organizations worked to emulate Hizbullah’s suicide attacks against Israelis. It became a kind of competition, just like the present-day Palestinian competition among Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, and so on. But the pro-Syrian nationalists, unlike Hizbullah, didn’t hesitate to use women. The Lebanese daily newspaper Al-Safir decided to ask Sheikh Obeid what he thought about that. His answer (issue of July 28, 1986):

One of the nationalist women asked me, does Islam permit a woman to join in military operations of the resistance to the occupation, and would she go to paradise if she were martyred? The jihad in Islam is forbidden to women except in self-defense and in the absence of men. In the presence of men, the jihad is not permissible for women. My answer to this woman was that her jihad was impermissible regardless of motive or reason. She could not be considered a martyr were she killed, because the view of the law is clear. There can be no martyrdom except in the path of God. That means that every martyr will rise to paradise. I do not deny the value of the nationalist struggle (nidal) against Israel, but the jihad of women is impermissible in the presence of men. I do not deny women of the right to confront the enemy, but we must ask whether all of the nationalist men are gone so that only the women are left, or whether their men have become women and their women have become men.

Sheikh Obeid expressed the classic position of Islamic law, and he didn’t hesitate to discourage the woman from taking up arms. Unfortunately, during the years he’s spent in prison, a parade of Islamist “authorities” have chipped away at the limitation on women, simply because any method that kills more Jews is deemed to justify itself. Here, for example, is a man hailed by some in the West as a great Islamist force for moderation, the noxious Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. He was asked by the Hamas monthly magazine about whether women could commit martyrdom (suicide) operations:

When jihad is obligatory, as when an enemy invades a country, the woman is summoned to jihad with the man, side by side. As the jurists have said: if an enemy invades the country, its people are obliged to rally to arms. A woman must act even without the permission of her husband…I believe the woman can fulfill her role in this jihad, to the extent she is able. The organizers of these jihad actions have already assigned some believing women to this matter, as they are able to reach places that a man could not reach….I believe that women have a right to a role in the way of jihad, and to share in the way of martyrdom.

And here is Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, the very clever Beirut cleric who is a spiritual guide for many Shiites in Lebanon and beyond:

It is true that jihad is not a duty for women, but Islam has permitted women to fight, if the requirements of a defensive war necessitate a conventional military operation or a martyrdom [suicide] operation to be carried out by women. Thus, we believe those martyr women are making a new and glorious history for Arab women. We also express our denial of any reservations concerning the martyrdom operations which have been carried out by women.

Neither of these Islamo-celebrities, who whisk about in limos while preaching jihad against this and that, really addresses Sheikh Obeid’s main point: the jihad of women is impermissible in the presence of men. Obeid, who made his ruling when he was down there on the front lin in south Lebanon, thought that “no motive or reason” could justify an exception, and that “the law is clear.”

One of the charges frequently leveled by Islamist clerics against state-employed clerics is that that latter are too pliable, and that they twist the law to suit circumstances. In fact, the Islamist clerics do just the same thing, as this case perfectly illustrates. If Hizbullah gives Sheikh Obeid a limo, he too might begin to sound like the rest of them. But when it counted, at a time when he guided the local “resistance” to Israeli occupation, he saw the issue with perfect clarity. What we have heard of late, from the leading lights of contemporary Islamism, is deviation.