Author: Martin Kramer

Nonsense on Title VI in the L.A. Times

On By Martin Kramer

The International Studies in Higher Education Act (H.R. 3077) would create an advisory board for Title VI, the federal subsidy program for area (and Middle Eastern) studies in universities. As I’ve argued before, such a board is the very least Congress can do to assure some return on the taxpayers’ investment in these programs. I spoke in defense of the bill on a panel in Washington on November 20, and I post my remarks here. In my address, I dispel some of the way-out notions about the legislation now being propagated on campuses.

Now the issue has cropped up in the national press, in the form of an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times by one Paula R. Newberg, identified as an “independent consultant.” The piece is a slick and evasive advertisement for Title VI, the sort that is regularly churned out by the higher education lobby and Saudi ARAMCO. Its bottom line: a board would “seriously diminish” the “capacity of the U.S. to be a responsible world actor.” To make that argument, you have to misrepresent Title VI and H.R. 3077. Our “independent consultant” does this with a lobbyist’s panache for half-truths, falsehoods, and omissions.

So after you’ve read the op-ed, here are the four grievous sins committed by its author.

1. Newberg opens by noting that “for two years, Congress has rightly insisted that the United States needs better foreign intelligence.” True. “One way to obtain it is to train more experts in foreign languages.” True. H.R. 3077, she writes, is “an assault on the very programs that produce these professionals.”

False, because these programs do not produce those professionals. The great bulk of the money goes to fellowships for doctoral students. When The Chronicle of Higher Education spoke to a dozen job-hunting Ph.D.s in Middle Eastern studies in the spring of 2002, not one expressed any interest in government employment. “Academics just aren’t biting,” said one job candidate, as quoted by the Chronicle. “I don’t think running around chasing terrorists is the solution to this problem. Academics have a belief in the power of education to effect change.” The real intelligence professionals—the few men and women who solve problems when the “power of education” fails—are produced elsewhere.

Title VI programs have also shifted their emphasis away from languages. A government-contracted report on Title VI, published in 2000, admitted as much: “Over the years, the original focus on language has been replaced with a much broader mandate for area, international, and international business studies. … functional linguistic competence in the graduates of the nation’s colleges and universities has tended to diminish.” Title VI is failing at precisely the mission Newberg thinks it should fulfill, a fact concealed from the public precisely because there is no board to measure the program against the intent of Congress.

2. Newberg writes that Title VI has produced international knowledge, although “these centers have endured funding cuts.”

False again. As far as I can recall, funding for Title VI over the past decade has never been cut even once. The appropriation has grown every year. More to the point, Title VI received a massive post-9/11 windfall on January 10, 2002, when President George W. Bush approved Congress’s authorization of a 26 percent increase (over $20 million a year) for the program, to meet an “urgent need.” Since 2000, federal funding for area studies centers at universities has ballooned by fifty percent, and funding for fellowships has doubled. The universities are now flush with taxpayers’ money, appropriated on a renewed promise that this will enhance national security. There are more federally-subsidized Middle East centers right now that at any time in America’s history. Is it too much money? Too little? Just the right amount? Maybe that money should go to another higher education program? We’ll never know, unless we have a board with appointees well-positioned to define U.S. needs, and determine whether the program is meeting them.

3. Newberg then casts H.R. 3077 as an attempt by interested parties to foist their Middle East views on academics. For this reason, a board “is utterly impractical, given the polarization of Middle East politics…[N]o politically appointed advisory board is likely to bridge these differences any more than the U.S. has reconciled competing visions of Middle East peace.”

Once more, false. Far from being “utterly impractical,” boards supervise every other comparable federal program. The sister program of Title VI, the Fulbright program, is the mainstay of foreign research for U.S. academics. It has a 12-member board, all of them presidential appointees. The U.S. Institute of Peace has a board of presidential appointees, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars has one too. These boards are supervisory, not advisory—they have more powers than the proposed Title VI board. All three support advanced research in international affairs, including the Middle East. Yet they somehow manage to “bridge differences.” The real question is why Title VI, of all these programs, should be exempt from having a board. Of course, you would never know that from Newberg, who forgets to tell you just what an administrative anomaly Title VI has become.

4. Newberg praises Title VI for having introduced thousands of Americans to foreign societies and cultures. If she has a reservation, it is that “some scholars have used this platform to underscore distinctively, occasionally parochial, American views.”

Is this a misprint? It seems to me this should read: “Some scholars have used this platform to underscore distinctively, occasionally parochial, anti-American views.” There is no more systematic abuse of Title VI than the exploitation of taxpayers’ money by professorial activists to fund propagandistic “outreach” activities. All of the instances known to me involve totally one-sided teachers’ seminars and study kits that rail against U.S. policy. Do you think your tax dollars should fund a “critical reader” on 9/11 for K-12 teachers, in which every single reading bashes the United States? Do you think federal subsidies should fund a seminar on the Iraq war for K-12 teachers, addressed by five “anti-war” activists, and not a single supporter of U.S. policy? Professors are sovereign in the classroom, but “outreach” is a federally-mandated activity to reach non-students. As part of the contract, universities undertake to spread knowledge, not propaganda. What is absolutely clear, given that these abuses have continued even as Title VI has come under fire, is that only a board can stop “outreach” outrages.

In sum, the Los Angeles Times has run an op-ed completely detached from reality on campus, which is not surprising, since its author-consultant has no connection to campus. You would think that with 120 subsidized area centers across the country, each one with a director and faculty, a Title VI beneficiary could be found to argue the case against H.R. 3077. But I suppose any one of them would be embarrassed to make the arguments Newberg makes, in the way she makes them—because they are false. But that’s what consultants are for, isn’t it?

L.A. Times Follow-up. Robert Satloff, who was quoted out of context in Newberg’s piece, wrote a letter to the paper, and it has been published. Satloff, after taking the op-ed to task for distorting the bill, adds this:

As a recipient of generous Title VI grants for my own graduate education, I know the value of such funding. I also know how many universities and area-study programs have abused it for purposes far from the noble one for which it was intended, i.e., to advance language proficiency, academic expertise and community awareness of foreign policy issues in the service of U.S. national security interests. The sole purpose of this proposed board is to advise the Department of Education, whose legal responsibility to perform oversight of Title VI recipients remains unchanged by this bill. Since no one compels universities to ask for taxpayer dollars to fund their area-study programs, a little scrutiny over how that money is spent is not too much to ask. That’s not a liberal or conservative idea; it’s a reflection of traditional American fair play.

Well put.

Can Congress Fix Middle Eastern Studies?

On By Martin Kramer

An address delivered by Martin Kramer on a panel entitled “Can Congress Fix Middle Eastern Studies?” at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, November 20, 2003. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

A meeting on Middle Eastern studies is becoming an annual event here at The Washington Institute. I spoke alone on this podium two years ago, when I launched my book, Ivory Towers on Sand. I was joined last year by Professor Lisa Anderson, then-president of the Middle East Studies Association, for a very interesting session. And I’m pleased to be joined this afternoon by Dr. Stanley Kurtz, who’s had such a profound impact on the public debate. I am grateful for the podium, because in the grand scheme of things, the state of Middle Eastern studies isn’t exactly at the top of the priority list at The Washington Institute. And on legislative questions, the Institute has no position and cannot have one by its mandate. So the Institute is basically indulging me as its guest, and I am grateful for that indulgence.

When I launched my book, and later when I stood here with Professor Anderson, I gave my analysis of the state of the field, and my sense of where it was headed. I could say still more today. But over the past six months, the debate about Middle Eastern studies has taken an interesting turn. It has moved from faculty lounges into legislative chambers. By a process that I don’t pretend to fully understand, I saw the call for Title VI reform I made in my book blossom into a full-fledged piece of legislation, the International Studies in Higher Education Act, or H.R. 3077.

We now have before us a detailed piece of legislation, which has already gone rather far, and which is part of the overall reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, of which Title VI is a part. The bill passed in the House of Representatives unanimously last month. Now it’s crossed over to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. All along the way, adjustments were made in the language of the bill, so as to assure bipartisan support.

Title VI: Semi-Entitlement

I’ll come to my take on the bill in a moment. But let me first briefly recap what Title VI does. Title VI is a program of federal subsidies for area studies in higher education. Its vintage is Cold War: back in 1958, the United States embarked on a crash program to beef up foreign area studies in the universities, to meet the Soviet threat.

Since that time, the government has subsidized area studies in universities, with two emphases: First, the maintenance of National Resource Centers for the study of various world areas. These centers funnel their subsidies into public outreach, libraries, conferences, language teaching, and other projects. The second purpose has been graduate fellowships, now called FLAS fellowships, an acronym for Foreign Language and Area Studies. It’s important to remember that most programs in area studies aren’t Title VI stipendiaries. But most of the serious graduate education takes place in Title VI centers. In Middle Eastern studies, probably about 70 percent of Ph.D.s are earned in institutions with Middle East centers.

The program has seen ups and downs over the decades. In the 1980s, it pretty much stabilized as a semi-entitlement, administered with a light hand by the Department of Education. There was no great desire to put more money into it, but no taste for noisy battles with professors to cut it back. The program has been run pretty much by and for those professors: grantees are selected by peer review, and are chosen on the basis of whatever criteria have been defined as excellence by academic fad and fashion. In recent years, when government wanted to meet manpower needs out of academe, it tended to create alternative programs rather than add to Title VI. The prime examples are the National Security Education Program, and its offshoot, the National Flagship Language Initiative.

So it was until 9/11. When the Twin Towers came down and the Pentagon burned, the higher education lobby sensed an opportunity. In the appropriations panic that followed 9/11, the lobby promised that more money for Title VI would pay off in more security for the United States. That persuaded Congress to increase Title VI funding by 26 percent, or $20 million, the largest single-year increase in the program’s history. As a result, the number of National Resource Centers has increased, and the number of graduate students on FLAS fellowships for the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia, is being doubled, from 200 to 400.

Peer Purge

Now 9/11, as I haven’t tired of repeating, should have been the occasion for some very deep soul-searching in Middle Eastern studies. On a whole range of subjects, from Islamism to civil society, the academic consensus had gotten it all wrong, or mostly wrong. It was wrong about Islamism moving in an ever-more-benign trajectory, and it was wrong about civil society advancing at the expense of the state.

But it wasn’t just that the academics were wrong. They had also managed to silence people who dissented from the consensus, by a process that can only be described as peer purge. Guidance was provided by Edward Said’s book Orientalism, which set a new standard for scholarship: not proficiency but sympathy. His ideas rode the tide of radical third worldists who came through Ph.D. programs in the 1970s. Once esconced in the field, they proceeded to shut it off—from dissent, from the public, and from Washington. It was a great shake-out, and it left Middle Eastern studies narrow, intolerant, and shuttered.

9/11 rocked this establishment to its core, because sympathy and apology for Islamist rage were its orthodoxies. Islamists should be heeded, they announced, because they really only want what we want: better schools, cleaner streets, more accountability. After 9/11, it became painfully apparent that this underestimated, by a very great margin, the scope of Islamist aspirations. It was a tremendous failing, and one that should have prompted a wrenching debate.

But that debate was nipped in the bud by the 9/11 windfall. Who dared to rethink out loud when the public purse was finally being opened wide? And when that purse did disgorge millions of more dollars, the radical mandarins could say: “You see, we bite their hand, and yet they feed us.”

Reading the Bill

Apparently, they spoke too soon. Our elected representatives do want to put more resources into area studies. But they want to change the terms of the contract, in the hope of getting a better return on investment. That’s the purpose of the International Studies in Higher Education Act, on whose principle features I’d like to dwell.

The bill begins by citing 9/11, and establishing this premise: “Homeland security and effective U.S. engagement abroad depend upon an increased number of Americans who have received [academic] training and are willing to serve their nation.” This and other language in the bill suggests that it isn’t enough for Title VI to mint Ph.D.s for the academic job market. There are other manpower needs, and the bill implies that grantees must help to meet them, if their subsidies are to be justified.

The bill would also establish an independent International Higher Education Advisory Board, to advise the Secretary of Education and Congress on how Title VI might best meet national needs. The board has seven members; two appointed by the speaker of the House, two by the president pro tem of the Senate, and three by the Secretary of Education. Two of the Secretary’s appointees must represent government agencies with national security responsibilities. The board will meet once a year; it’s authorized to monitor those activities supported by Title VI; it can commission research on the program’s impact; and it must hold a public hearing before making a recommendation.

When you think about it, it’s an anomaly that Title VI doesn’t have a board. Every federal program for higher education has one. The sister program of Title VI is the Fulbright program, which sends American academics overseas for teaching and research, and brings foreign academics over here. In budgetary terms, it’s about the same size as Title VI—upwards of $100 million. Fulbright has a 12-member board, all presidential appointees, who meet four times a year. If you were establishing Title VI today, you wouldn’t think to do it without a board.

One of the recurring phrases in the legislation is that programs supported by Title VI should “reflect diverse perspectives and the full range of views” on world affairs. This is invoked specifically in regards to outreach (which I’ll mention in a moment), but also other supported programs. This is new language, and it is meant to signal that taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be used for activities that reflect limited perspectives and a narrow range of views.

Finally, note the language about offering all agencies of government an equal shot with other employers at on-campus recruitment.

Campus Myth, Washington Reality

So much for the bill’s language. Now a word about what it won’t do and what it will do.

First, what it won’t do. It won’t monitor curriculum, because day-to-day teaching isn’t a Title VI-supported activity. And it won’t have any authority to pronounce about curriculum. I turn your attention to this provision: “Nothing in this title shall be construed to authorize the International Advisory Board to mandate, direct, or control an institution of higher education’s specific instructional content, curriculum, or program of instruction.”

Now most of the campus critics of the bill have had an extremely difficult time reading and understanding this passage, which is remarkable considering the fact that they are all Ph.D.s and make their livings interpreting texts. Despite this, they’ve done exactly what the bill tells the board it can’t do: they’ve construed its provisions as a license to interfere with curriculum. Here is a quote from a political science professor in the Yale Daily News: “People from outside the academic world—people from the intelligence community—telling what can go on in a classroom, that’s where it gets scary.” Here’s a UCLA professor of Arabic literature, quoted in the Daily Bruin: “It’s censorship. We will be subject to review from a committee of nonacademics. They will be judging curriculum on the basis of political expediency.” Here is a professor of Arabic literature at the University of Chicago, in an article in the Chicago Maroon: “Universities will never accept supervision of the content of their courses. If they do so, they will stop being universities.” (Perhaps these professors would have better understood the language of the bill if it had been in Arabic.)

I strongly suspect that this misreading isn’t just an inability to understand a text in plain English. (Although, as you may know, to the post-modern interpreter, any text is open to infinite interpretations. If all our laws were read like some academics read literature, we would live in a state of nature.) I think the misreading is wilful and deliberate, and has to do with their desire to turn Title VI into an unencumbered entitlement. For that purpose, they claim that the board will intrude on their classroom teaching and their syllabi, and infringe on their academic freedom. So let me read that passage one more time: “Nothing in this title shall be construed to authorize the International Advisory Board to mandate, direct, or control an institution of higher education’s specific instructional content, curriculum, or program of instruction.” No safeguard could be more decisively worded than this one. It trumps every other provision of the bill. The only way to improve upon it in the legislation, would simply be to repeat it twice.

The board also won’t encroach on a university’s internal procedures in hiring and promoting faculty. Remember that Title VI doesn’t pay any faculty salaries, so faculty matters are completely outside the board’s purview.

In a bizarre twist, some critics have said that the provision for “diversity of perspectives and full range of views” will somehow silence critics of U.S. policy, or the Iraq war. I say bizarre, because academics are supposed to be champions of diversity, and a “full range of views” perforce includes every view and excludes none. In fact, no one knows how the board will interpret this in practice, and it may end up just being one of those pious admonitions that crop up in legislative language. But at least it reminds academe of its obligation to keep the marketplace of ideas open.

So what will the bill do?

It will establish a forum in which to renegotiate the contract between elected government and academe in international affairs. The bill envisions a board composed of people with a range of expertise. It’s not hard to imagine one composed of distinguished university administrators, former diplomats, publicly-acclaimed scholars and writers on international affairs, along with representatives of those agencies of government that need foreign expertise to function. The board’s composition has balances inside balances; no interest would go unrepresented, no stakeholder need fear exclusion.

There are three areas of Title VI activity that are definitely in the purview of the board. The first is outreach. All National Resource Centers are required to engage in outreach activities to the general public, which may mean seminars for K-12 teachers, the preparation of K-12 teaching kits, lending of video films, lectures to chuch and civic groups, and so on. The sad fact is that the record of federally-funded, Title VI outreach programs is marred by egregious examples of propagandizing. In some centers, federal funds have become slush to mount heavily one-sided events for the K-12 community, often with the help of off-campus political activists. I exposed some instances of this, most recently at Georgetown—an event for Washington-area K-12 teachers on the day Baghdad fell, addressed by five anti-war speakers. “Outreach” is not university curriculum, it’s an activity done at the behest of government, and it must to be monitored to assure that it provides “diverse perspectives and a full range of views.”

The second area in need of attention is criteria for fellowships. At present, too many government fellowships go to students doing arcane research that conforms to trendy academic fashions. But there is in government a massive shortfall of people competent in the languages of the region, and it’s been much-commented upon. When Congress doubled the number of grad students on its tab, its intention was to bring them into the nation’s service. These fellowships have to be prioritized to areas that link more directly to national needs. Let me quote Mike Castle, chair of the House Subcommittee on Education Reform, from his endorsement of H.R. 3077:

Our lack of highly-trained linguistics experts seriously hampers our ability to fight the war on terrorism, and this legislation provides incentive to focus these programs on the reality of the situation our men and women in uniform face overseas.

Third, there is the matter of the selection criteria of the National Resource Centers. Even the existing Title VI language calls for the creation of a “diverse network” of centers. But is the network really diverse? Or does the selection process as now constituted actually produce a uniform network? In one of my more cynical moments, I called Middle East centers the McDonald’s of academe. They flip the same intellectual hamburgers in 17 different markets. Is the nation really served by this system? Wouldn’t it be more in our national interest to have very different centers, with different emphases? For example, one center might marry Middle Eastern studies with public policy, another might offer special programs for mid-career officials, yet another might specialize in issues like Islamism and terrorism. Certainly we still want centers specializing in cinema and gender, but we already have them in spades. Only an advisory board can look at the system as a whole, measure national needs against human resources, and propose a solution.

The Very Least

Thanks to the careful crafting of this legislation, and compromises made at an early stage, the bill has so far enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support in the House. There’s no reason it shouldn’t enjoy identical support in the Senate. There is opposition among some academics to the International Studies in Higher Education. But I think it’s very shallow, and most evident in the know-nothing corners of political extremism. I can’t resist quoting a University of Michigan professor, who said that “one of the subtexts is they [referring to Dr. Kurtz and myself] don’t like criticism of Ariel Sharon and want to shut it down.” According to this professor, our objective is to force universities into “hiring pro-Likud scholars.” There are plenty of conspiracy buffs even in the ranks of full professors—people who ignore texts but make up subtexts—and they make lots of noise.

But it’s very telling that the Middle East Studies Association, or MESA, which met in annual conference two weeks ago, did not adopt a resolution against the bill, although it was discussed. If you know the history of MESA, you know its propensity for passing resolutions. But they apparently thought it wiser not to get on the wrong side of H.R. 3077, at least publicly.

The American Council on Education also doesn’t oppose the board, although it’s obliged to echo, if faintly, the concerns of the radical fringe. They, too, know that boards are how things are done in such programs. I am not so naive as to believe that there is no behind-the-scenes lobbying on the bill’s language. But whoever is doing it has yet to make a public case of the kind Dr. Kurtz and I have made, and I suspect that is because there is no case that would click with the public.

I conclude. In my book on Middle Eastern studies, I ended my discussion of Title VI reform with this observation: “No amount of tweaking Title VI can cure the more fundamental ailments that afflict the field… it is generational change that will renew and reinvigorate the field. The task will probably be accomplished by people who are under forty.” So I was struck by this fact, provided by Lisa Anderson two weeks ago in her MESA presidential address. “The field of Middle Eastern studies is not reproducing itself…in 1990, a little more than 40 percent of the full members of MESA were over fifty years old; in 2002, it was 60 percent.”

When any human group fails to reproduce itself intellectually, it means that its worldview no longer speaks to young people. I think that’s been happening for some years in Middle Eastern studies. I seriously doubt that the graying radicals will be able to lead or inspire the legions of young people who have been drawn towards the field since 9/11. These young people know that the United States is in the Middle East for the long haul, and many of them want to be a part of it.

The young will push out the old, that’s inevitable. But as it stands now, the U.S. government is complicit in delaying change, having put so many new resources in the hands of a failing old guard. Let’s keep those resources there; let’s add still more; but let’s establish a board of wise men and women, to give this program some much-needed advice. It is, quite literally, the least Congress can do.

The idea of violent resistance

On By Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer delivered this address on a panel on “The Idea of Violent Resistance,” at the University of Chicago’s International House on November 17, 2003. Co-panelists: Martha Nussbaum, Nathan Tarcov, and Paul Breslin. A report on the panel from the Chicago Maroon follows the text of the address. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

This past Saturday morning, suicide bombers attacked the two major synagogues in Istanbul as Jews were assembled for prayer. You have seen the details in the media: over twenty dead, several hundred wounded—a third of them Turkish Jews, two-thirds of them Turkish Muslims, although the Jews were obviously the prime target. We don’t yet know exactly who committed this act, but we can know one thing for certain: those who planned it and carried it out regarded it as a legitimate act of resistance, presumably against the U.S. and Israel.

How so? If you believe that the Jews of the world are loyal only to world Jewry; that their leaders plan the world policy of the Jews, as implemented by Israel and the United States; and that this Jewish-driven policy is directly responsible for the oppression of Palestinians, Iraqis, Arabs, or Muslims—if you believe these things, what happened in Istanbul could well seem to you a form of legitimate resistance.

The assumptions I just cited are not at all rare. In fact, last spring, some professors on American campuses were insinuating these very things. The war to remove Saddam, they said, was being driven by a Likudnik cabal in Washington, acting on behalf of Israel. (Likudnik is a transparent codeword for Zionist American Jew.) It’s easy to see how some people in the Arab or Muslim world, overhearing this claim, might conclude that attacking synagoguges full of Jews—outposts of the cabal—could constitute legitimate resistance to Israeli or U.S. policies.

Now I imagine and assume that all of you would find the notion preposterous. But in some parts of the world, all of you would be in a clear minority. For example, even statesmen in these parts have been equivocal about what happened on Saturday. The Arab League secretary-general, Amr Musa, was quoted yesterday, to the effect that the Istanbul bombing was “unacceptable”—not reprehensible, or despicable, or barbaric, but “unacceptable”—and then he went on to add this: “Responsibility for all this comes back to Israeli policy.” If this is what the head of the League of Arab States is saying, imagine what is being said in coffee shops and mosques.

Now the word “resistance” is ubiquitous in the Middle East. The region, and particularly the Arab lands and Iran, constitute a zone that professes itself to be in continuous resistance. It resists Western hegemony; American power; consumer culture; Israel and Zionism; regime oppression; religious skepticism; the scientific spirit—I could go on and on. It’s a region that actively defines itself in terms of resistance. There is resistance in Lebanon, and there is resistance in Palestine, and now there is resistance in Iraq. In these places, it’s actually called resistance, or muqawama in Arabic, which usually refers to armed or violent resistance—to military occupation; elsewhere it’s called jihad, which can be parsed as resistance to the “enemies of God.” How are we to approach these many forms of resistance? Is all of it legitimate? Is none of it legitimate? Is some of it legitimate? Is some of it so illegitimate as to constitute terrorism, against which we are waging a war? And what are our criteria for making our determination?

There are three ways to approach the dilemma. The first is to assume a completely relativist position, and effectively endorse whatever is done in the name of a cause perceived as legitimate to be ipso facto legitimate. The pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement (ISM) has taken the position that “we recognize the Palestinian right to resist Israeli violence and occupation via legitimate armed struggle.” Since the movement has never defined legitimate armed struggle, or never condemned any Palestinian armed act as illegitimate, and since its numerous spokespersons have said that the Palestinians have the right to resist in any way they deem appropriate, the ISM has effectively absolved any Palestinian for any act against any Israeli Jew. The International Solidarity Movement refuses to draw any lines for the Palestinians—this is its definition of solidarity, which is unquestioning. Having made just one moral choice against occupation, the ISM is on automatic pilot; it accepts whatever moral and strategic choices are made by any Palestinian decisionmaker, down to the Hamas cell leader preparing a suicide belt. After all, who are we to judge them? Who are we to impose our categories on them?

The second approach is to contextualize the violence in such a way as to legitimize it, or diminish its illegitimacy. This is what I would call the “yes, but” approach—yes, those who committed this particularly unsavory or indiscriminate act of violence crossed a line, but they were pushed or pulled across it. It’s not legitimate resistance, but it’s not terrorism either. There is a rule, but for one reason or another, it doesn’t apply to this special case, which is exceptional. There are many ways to contextualize violence or cast it as a legitimate exception; the usual one is to underline the violence or humiliation inflicted by the other side.

Academics can give this approach a very interesting twist. For example, there is a professor of cultural anthropology who has written an article for a scholarly journal on how suicide bombings in cafes are reported in the Israeli press. The article is sanitized of any mention of the blood and glass; it’s all post-modern analysis of the discourse of the Israeli daily press on the “emptiness” of public places created by fear, relating this to the “emptiness” of Palestine assumed by Zionism, etc. The ultimate point is to suggest that Israelis, by these bombings, have been denied their pursuit of leisure, whereas the Palestinians have been denied their very freedom. The whole purpose of this exegetical exercise is to diminish or mitigate the illegitimacy of suicide bombings of cafes and restaurants. And in case the point is missed, the author studiously avoids the word terrorism, instead calling the blowing up of cafes acts of Palestinian “militarism.” The author seems to be unconcerned that the semantic space of the word “militarism” is already occupied—the dictionaries already define it. But why submit to the hegemonic authority of Merriam-Webster, when you can make it all up to suit yourself?

The third approach is to try to formulate something which I would dare to call a standard—that is, a set of general principles, against which to measure and judge specific cases. This is the most rigorous of the three approaches. It doesn’t simply accept the other’s choices, like the relativist “solidarity” approach. It doesn’t treat its favorite case as unique, like the “yet, but” approach. It requires the full integration of moral, analytical, and political factors. It is a calculus. It shouldn’t be value-free, it can’t be culture-free, and it’s rarely interest-free. The extent to which such a standard becomes universal reflects the extent to which it appears to be one standard, as opposed to two or ten or a hundred.

The essence of this approach is that it distinguishes, in situations of conflict, between legitimate resistance and terrorism, and does so down the line, according to a set of coherent principles. That is, it acknowledges that while there is legitimate resistance, there is also illegitimate resistance, which is tantamount to terrorism. The core of that standard is self-evident to us. The experience of total war in this century has created a strong disposition in the West to affirm that it’s never legitimate to deliberately target non-combattants.

Now we’re painfully aware of the imperfection of this effort at consistency, and we understand that its achievement is ever a work-in-progress. But at least we attempt it. And now I come to the most controversial part of my presentation. The very discussion we’re conducting here, the striving for a universal standard, is a defining characteristic of the West and the parts of the world that have incorporated its values. In most of the Middle East, the discussion we’re having would be impossible to conduct on a public podium, and it wouldn’t matter. Because in this part of the world, there is only one approach to violence against the “other”: the “solidarity” approach. And because of that, because the Arab and Muslim world is retreating from its past moral, ethical, and legal engagement with the West, because it is even retreating from its own moral, ethical, and legal legacy, the scope of violence is expanding almost faster than we can document it. It’s not just that every form of resistance is evolving inexorably toward terrorism; it’s that this evolution can always find some justification from public figures, intellectuals, and spiritual leaders. People of this caliber, who act in our societies as brakes on the exercise of the almost limitless power we command, in those societies advocate the erasing of one red line after another.

Let me show how this works in the case of the suicide bombings. The first ones took place in Lebanon in the early 1980s, the most important were conducted by Hizbullah. Back then, I published an article called “The Moral Logic of Hizbullah,” in which I discussed the way Shiite jurists debated the permissibility of this tactic. Twenty years ago, there was a lot of debate over whether such acts constituted suicide, which is expressly forbidden in Islam. After considerable back and forth, it was deemed permissible, but only if it inflicted massive casualties on the enemy. When this couldn’t be guaranteed, the act was not permitted. And the operations were conducted only against occupying military forces in Lebanon.

After the successes registered by Hizbullah’s resistance against Israel, the Palestinians imitated the technique, but gave it a new dimension. Whereas Hizbullah was highly discriminating in going for “quality operations,” in their phrase, the Palestinians have essentially released a suicide human wave some 700 persons in three years. Almost all of them have bypassed Israeli military personnel in order to target non-combattants. In other words, the Palestinians took forward the precedents of Hizbullah, but crossed many of the red lines set by Hizbullah.

But the Palestinians, from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, did have their own red lines. They didn’t operate outside of Israel and the territories; and they made an effort, in their targeting, to kill primarily Jews.

Al-Qaeda and its affiliates have gone even further than the Palestinians. They’ve built on the Palestinian precedent of deliberately targeting non-combattants with suicide bombers. But they’ve erased two more red lines: they operate internationally, they’ve expanded the targeting to anyone anywhere, from office workers in Manhattan to tourists in Bali, and they are entirely indifferent to how many Africans they killed when they bomb two U.S. embassies in 1998, or how many Turks died when they bombed two synagogues, as happened this weekend. Indeed, to undermine a regime, as in Saudi Arabia, they are perfectly willing to bomb a residential compound full of Arabs, as they did two weeks ago. The debate I chronicled, less than twenty years ago, about whether a bomber detonating himself was a suicide or martyr, now looks quaint. Once there were qualms about the death of one Muslim in such bombings, the bomber himself. Now there are no qualms even about killing dozens more Muslims. It’s just “collateral damage.”

What is tragically obvious is that the Arab and Muslim world—its intellectuals, its philosophers, its poets, its politicians—don’t have the authority or the courage to stop this downward spiral into nihilism—a nihilism that accepts or contextualizes or legitimizes every form of violence that bombers produce. There are no brakes; this has become the heart of darkness, comparable in its despair to Europe in the 1930s, a part of the world that has progressively abandoned its own philosophical, historical, and religious concepts of the permissible and the forbidden.

Surely, you say, there is a great debate raging. I think you would be surprised to find how little debate there really has been, and how denial has come to replace it. 9/11 is a case in point. Instead of a debate, opinion rallied to this position: America certainly deserved it, though the innocents in the Twin Towers did not, but in any case none of us did it; it was a plot by the Mossad to discredit the Muslims. They do not debate or denounce the acts; they deny them.

Why is this happening? The slide towards nihilism, the prevalence of denial, are inseparable from post-colonial decay. Because masses of the disaffected have failed to find an avenue to modernity, they’re in a rage against its representatives. And there’s no one point from which to lever a change in this situation. It isn’t in a solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or the removal of Saddam, or regime change elsewhere. It’s a condition that’s endemic and profound.

Does that mean that there is nothing to be done, except to fight, as Yeats wrote in 1919, like “weasels in a hole”? Certainly there is a fight here: the war against Al-Qaeda and its affiliates won’t end in a peace agreement. Al-Qaeda has never made a demand, it’s following a path of jihad to erode and destroy the power of the West. There are some in Palestinian ranks, in Hamas and Islamic Jihad, whose declared goal is the erosion and destruction of Israel. Theirs isn’t resistance to occupation, it’s resistance to Israel’s existence. In these cases, there must be a fight.

But parallel with that battle, there’s a struggle for hearts and minds. We’re losing that battle in part because there are those among us who have accepted the redefinition of legitimate resistance made by the planners of suicide bombings. There are those among us who, rather than adhere to a definition of terror that emerges from our own terrible history, are willing to accept one that accommodates theirs. There are those who, in the name of the right to resistance, are prepared to accept a double standard, or to say that they have cultural norms that diverge from ours, and that must be respected.

Now there is nothing static about cultures, and certainly not in the way they conceive force. American society, nearly sixty years ago, embraced the use of nuclear weapons against civilians as a shortcut to ending a war it was winning. That would be unthinkable today. Now we face societies that are abandoning their own traditional constraints, that are building intellectual constructs that will allow even more killing. Does anyone here doubt that the 9/11 hijackers, and the Palestinian suicide bombers, would use weapons of mass destruction if they had them? We have entered a very dangerous moment. But there is nothing inevitable about the slide toward an Armageddon in the name of resistance; and that slide needs to be resisted—yes, resisted especially by those of you who share the political aspirations of these peoples.

Let me give an example of how that could be done. In July 2002, Amnesty International issued a report entitled “Without Distinction: Attacks on Civilians by Palestinian Armed Groups.” The report noted that Amnesty had made many criticisms of Israeli policy over the years, and it noted the right of peoples to struggle against foreign occupation. But it then emphasized: “The attacks against civilians by Palestinian armed groups are widespread, systematic, and in pursuit of an explicit policy to attack civilians. They therefore constitute crimes against humanity under international law. They may also constitute war crimes, depending on the legal characterisation of the hostilities and the Palestinian armed groups under international humanitarian law.”

This is the message that has to go forth from those who see themselves as friends of these causes. Israel and the West do not lack outspoken domestic critics of the way they use force. This is not so on the other side of the divide. Those critics, who now lay low, have to be emboldened. That is best done by holding this part of the world to the minimal standard we would wish to see diffused through all humankind. Anything less will enshrine two different kinds of warfare as legitimate, establish two radically different codes of conduct. There have always been descrepancies of power among states, but that doesn’t mean that there should not be one code. Indeed, without one, we will soon find ourselves on an irrevocable course to a war of civilizations.

Here follows a news item entitled “Panel considers violent resistance,” by Isaac Wolf, Chicago Maroon, November 18, 2003.

In the last three years, international relations have been dominated by news of violent attacks related to the Muslim and Arab world: the continuous bloodshed between Israel and the Palestinians; the explosive terror of 9/11; and the recent intensification of attacks on Western targets in Iraq.

On Monday, the moral implications of these acts were evaluated through the lens of academics, who drew on varied fields of expertise to explore recent developments in a panel discussion entitled, “The Idea of Violent Resistance.”

With special attention given to addressing the ethical question of suicide attacks on civilians in Israel, three of the four panel speakers elaborated on specific topics of theory and then teased out insights into the arena of current events.

The event drew a crowd of 300 students, professors and community members, with attendees spilling into the upper deck of the International House auditorium. Presented by the Student Committee on the Middle East, the lecture was co-sponsored by a broad base of student groups.

The first speaker was Martha Nussbaum, a professor in the Law School. She attempted to frame the current conception of international law in terms of the Western philosophical tradition. She drew first on Cicero, the Roman philosopher who espoused the view that acts of violence should exist solely in the framework of a long-term plan for peace.

“To assault someone aggressively is to treat them as a tool,” Nussbaum said with reference to Cicero.

Relating these ideas to the world’s present situation, Nussbaum said that few clear conclusions regarding the moral guidelines for violent resistance could be drawn from the canon of Western philosophy. One thing that can be said with clarity, Nussbaum said, is that civilians are being abused “in ways that threaten life.”

Nussbaum’s comments contrasted with those of Nathan Tarcov, a professor in the Committee on Social Thought, who used the Declaration of Independence, a landmark document of resistance, as a baseline for discussion.

In his analysis of the Declaration, Tarcov balanced the idea that the document called for immediate action as a “fundamental statement of resistance” with its invocation of “prudent judgment.” He said that the Declaration embodies the notion that all people have the right to resistance, but it doesn’t demand that they actually act on that right.

Martin Kramer, the third speaker, repudiated the idea that violent attacks on civilians are legitimate. He rejected the relativism and contextualization that, he believes, often occur in the adjudication of violent attacks. To believe that the American or Israeli targets deserve to be bombed, he said, is to sincerely believe that the two nations are run by an “American Jewish cabal” of Likudniks that specifically dictate a policy of repression and hatred against Muslims and Arabs.

“All of you would find this notion preposterous,” he said. “But in some parts of the world, you would be the minority.”

Kramer then attempted to link the lack of public debate in the Middle East to the proliferation of violence, showing that a decrease of public discussion has created an environment ripe for attacks. He mentioned a case 20 years ago when Lebanese clerics debated the permissibility of suicide bombings, and said that this is a “debate the Palestinian resistance has not had.”

Kramer’s viewpoints were originally supposed to be refuted by Mark Wegner, a professor in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. But Wegner, citing personal reasons, did not speak on the panel, and was replaced by Northwestern University English professor Paul Breslin.

Breslin drew on his background in post-colonial theory to describe the work of Franz Fanon, the 20th-century writer who championed violence as a means of repelling colonialism and developing a new societal identity.

Rejecting the importance Fanon ascribed to violence, Breslin conceded that he could make little connection between the post-colonial theorists and the morality of violent resistance.

“Speaking as a human being to a group of human beings, there are different kinds of violence and these distinctions and circumstances matter,” he said.