Author: Martin Kramer

Profs Duped by Sami Al-Arian

On By Martin Kramer

In recent years, Sami Al-Arian has been a celebrity among Arab-Americans and American apologists for Islamism. Yes, Al-Arian, a Palestinian professor of computer engineering at the University of South Florida (USF), was suspected of close ties to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group specializing in suicide attacks against civilians in Israel. But the smooth-talking, professiorial family man countered that he was merely exercising his first amendment rights, and he covered himself in the banner of academic freedom. When USF sought his dismissal, the American Association of University Professors rallied to his cause. So did the United Faculty of Florida. All of them cast Arian as a pitiable victim of a smear campaign, and rained sympathy on him.

Well, the FBI arrested Al-Arian yesterday, charging him (and seven co-conspirators) with material support for a terrorist organization. Racketeering, conspiracy, extortion, perjury, obstruction, immigration fraud—it’s all there. The 50-count indictment makes riveting reading. That’s because it’s based on wiretaps of Al-Arian’s telephone and fax communications—the sort of material which, before 9/11, didn’t get into indictments. And those wiretaps show Al-Arian to have been involved up to his neck in Islamic Jihad’s finances, recruiting, and internal intrigues. The wiretaps, as summarized in the indictment one by one, offer a compelling portrait of a highly secretive conspirator, casually exploiting America’s protection to evade the law and fund terror. The actual transcripts will be even more damaging. Arian’s various defenders should be cringing in embarrassment, if they have even a shred of conscience.

Some of these boosters deserve particular scrutiny, because of their claim to clairvoyance in separating Islamist “moderates” from “extremists.” I refer to the Middle East “experts,” who purport to guide us through the labyrinth of Islamic movements, telling us who to fear and who to trust.

John Esposito, director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, has been Al-Arian’s most distinguished academic champion. Early last year, he wrote a letter to the president of USF, professing to be “stunned, astonished, and saddened” by moves to dismiss Al-Arian, whom he described as a “consummate professional.” The university had to resist the “pressures” of “biased, inflammatory” media. (Esposito specifically mentioned the journalist Steven Emerson, who was the first to establish Al-Arian’s links to Islamic Jihad.) USF’s actions would not only “reflect on the University’s reputation but also send a clear message to your students about what American democracy and academic freedom mean.” Last September, after another move to dismiss Al-Arian, Esposito cancelled a lecture appearance at USF, which he denounced as “a university that so clearly violates the academic freedom of one of its professors.” (Esposito has also employed Al-Arian’s daughter, a Georgetown undergraduate, as a research assistant.) It’s all confirmation of the obvious: Esposito never met a Muslim extremist he didn’t like.

Esposito has another, more remote connection to the case. He still sits on the board of a London institute run by his Hamas friend, Azzam Tamimi. Another board member, Basheer Nafi, was indicted yesterday along with Al-Arian. I urged Esposito to resign from this board back in September. How many more indictments will it take for Esposito to realize that he’s been running with funders and apologists for the worst suicide terrorism?

Other Middle East profs supported Al-Arian. The University of Maryland political scientist Louis Cantori complained to USF’s president that Al-Arian was being “pursued as a political radical. This he is not. Period.” Antony Sullivan, of the University of Michigan, wrote that Al-Arian “is a quintessential political moderate” and “a good man.” The list of these duped or duplicitous academics is long.

But the most embarrassing endorsement came from the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). Last year, its board wrote to the president of USF, dismissing accusations of Al-Arian’s terrorist involvement as “old and never-proven.” MESA announced that “the Al-Arian case is about academic freedom. It is also about the basic first amendment right to freedom of speech.” Odd: Al-Arian, a computer engineer, has never been a member of MESA, nor has he ever taught a course in Middle Eastern studies. So the statement was just another instance of gratuitous politicization by MESA’s radical busybodies, who would rather dabble in politics than attend to the degraded state of their field.

Al-Arian’s case is no longer about free speech, it’s about overt acts. It’s no longer between professors and administrators, it’s between prosecutors and attorneys. Al-Arian will have his day in court. But whatever the outcome, there’s no doubt that he isn’t the “consummate professional” and the “quintessential political moderate” of the “expert” testimonials. Bottom line: the Middle East scholars have failed—again.

The Saddam Papers

On By Martin Kramer

Saddam soon will be history. It’s important that the United States collect and preserve as much of it as possible. I refer to the vast archives of the various arms of the Iraqi regime: the presidency of the republic, the Baath Party, the Republican Guard, the intelligence and security organizations, the ministries of foreign affairs and information, and more. If the United States establishes a military authority to run the country, it should do what the Western allies did in occupied Germany: collect and collate the archives of the enemy. That’s necessary not only to locate any weapons of mass destruction, and to de-Baathize and de-Saddamize the state. It’s the only way to provide researchers with the evidence they will need to reconstruct precisely what went wrong in Saddam’s Iraq.

The process is already underway. In 1992 and 1993, two Kurdish groups turned over to the United States eighteen tons (four million pages) of Iraqi documents seized from abandoned government offices in the north. This massive collection has been digitized and used to great effect by the Defense Department and Human Rights Watch. The Iraq Research and Documentation Project at Harvard has a significant portion of these documents in digital form, as well as other documents left behind by the Iraqis in Kuwait. (Kanan Makiya directs the project.) The documents themselves are stored by the National Archives.

But this is a pittance compared to the massive archives in Iraq itself. Documents from every military unit, government office, scientific lab, overseas embassy, secret prison, and interrogation cell, make their way in a steady stream to Baghdad. There they are passed up the bureacratic chain of command, in multiple copies, to the most trusted inner circles. In the protocols of the meetings held around Saddam’s long table, decisions of war, repression, and evasion are carefully recorded for further action. These are the real “smoking guns.” As Human Rights Watch put it in 1994 (in regard to the Kurds), “it is not unlikely that the strongest evidence of genocide will only be found in the event of a change of government in Baghdad and the opening up of security archives there.” That’s probably true for a whole range of highly sensitive subjects, from elimination of dissidents to support for terrorism.

When an army moves, its priorities are operational. That’s why it’s so important to emphasize, in advance, the need to avoid the destruction of enemy documents, and to secure them as rapidly as possible. Not only do the documents have immense long-term value. They are certain to back up the rationales for the war itself. Captured enemy documents can have a dramatic political impact. To this day, the Osama bin Laden video recovered in Afghanistan, in which he boasts of bringing down the World Trade Center, is the strongest public piece of evidence against him. Last spring, the Israeli Defense Forces seized a trove of documents from Arafat’s compound, Palestinian political offices, and police stations. The documents linked Arafat and the Palestinian Authority to terrorism, and their publication put Arafat beyond the pale in Washington. If the United States goes to war on only half a tank of international legitimacy, expeditious publication of Iraqi documents will be even more important.

It’s not just the Iraqis and Americans who have an interest in these archives. Kuwaitis might like to know more about Saddam’s decision to invade their country in 1990, and the fate of Kuwaitis who “disappeared” during the Iraqi occupation. Iranians might like to know about Saddam’s still earlier decision to invade their country in 1980, and Iraq’s strategic rationale during the war. And Israelis would wish to learn what Saddam was thinking when he sent missiles into Tel Aviv in 1991. His connections with Arafat and Palestinian groups will also be of prime interest. An international commission of historians could supervise that aspect of the work.

Personally, I’d like to see the documents from the foreign and information ministries. I want to read the evidence of the Baghdad regime’s cynical use of the soft-headed scholars and the gullible journalists, the do-gooders and the fellow travellers, the Ramsey Clarks and the John Pilgers. Send in the xerox machines.

Saidiana

On By Martin Kramer

Here is interesting news about Edward Said, Columbia University’s celebrity professor of English literature, Palestine, Islam, and what-have-you. Said has a long-standing connection to King’s College, Cambridge. He has the status of a member, and has been an occasional visitor there, most recently this past fall. The College is a redoubt of the left. Its provost, Patrick Bateson, signed a letter to The Guardian last April, calling for an academic moratorium on contacts with Israel. That unleashed a tidal wave of publicity and criticism that shook the Provost’s Lodge and the College.

So it was particularly unwise for Edward Said’s friends to choose this moment to nominate their hero for an honorary fellowship of the College. The inner deliberations of the College congregation are not public, but The Guardian picked up enough gossip to make a story. Details are murky, but the bottom line is that two fellows who had criticized Bateson also spoke persuasively against Said’s nomination, and apparently succeeded in nixing it.

It’s not often that Edward Said gets turned down for honors these days, and I find it refreshing. No one has done more than Said to confuse scholarship and advocacy, and it frankly looks pathetic when his partisans rush to his defense by declaiming his scholarly virtues. Edward Said is a package deal. At King’s College there are people who rightly understood that honoring Said would be interpreted as honoring his politics. I don’t know exactly how it happened, or what the arguments were, but King’s College has kept its honor.

Of course, in America it’s another story. Berkeley is about to enjoy a visit by Said, hosted by its (federally-funded) Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and paid for in part by the Chancellor’s fund. The Daily Californian carries a strange quote from the vice-chair of the Center: “We’re inviting him in his capacity as a university professor. Edward Said is an important advocate of Palestinians but also a professor of English.” You would think that Said had been invited to lecture on Austen or Conrad. But I doubt there will be much literature in a lecture with this title: “The U.S., the Islamic World and the Question of Palestine.” My prediction: the lecture’s only relationship to English will be that it is delivered in English. You can judge for yourself from the webcast, which is supposed to become available on February 20.

By the way, note this sentence in the report of The Daily Californian: “Born in Jerusalem in 1948, Said’s family was forced to settle in Cairo, Egypt after the establishment of Israel.” First, there is the grammar. Perhaps if Berkeley’s English department actually taught English, instead of The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance, this wouldn’t happen. Second, Said was born in 1935. Third and last, his parents were already settled in Cairo even before his birth, and Said has written a whole memoir of his Cairo childhood. The news item is more evidence of how people continue to assume that Said is a 1948 refugee. No amount of counter-evidence, or even Said’s own account, has made any difference. People believe what they need to believe, and I imagine that if Edward Said did not exist, the denizens of Columbia and Berkeley would have invented him. Perhaps they did.

ADDENDUM: I’ve been informed by a reader that The Daily Californian ran a correction. It admitted that its original article “erroneously stated that Said was born in 1948. Actually, he was exiled from Jerusalem in 1948.” Wrong again. Said went on an extended family visit to Jerusalem in 1947, and left it near the end of that year, returning home to Cairo. The crucial point of Said’s memoir is that as a boy, he didn’t feel the loss of Palestine, and that at home, the subject was “repressed, undiscussed, or even unremarked on.” The refugees, he wrote, were regarded as “those Others.” (Read the first part of Chapter VI.) His Palestinian awareness and activism flowered only later, in the 1960s. Said has given an accurate representation of himself. He’s acknowledged that his personal sense of exile (from more than one place) is a matter of sensibility, not a fact with a date. It’s others who keep stretching his biographic envelope, because they need him to be a perfect icon of dispossession. That need apparently extends to The Daily Californian, which cannot get it right in two tries.

ADDENDUM+: The administrators at Aston University, in Birmingham, England, have intervened to cancel a live video-link with Edward Said, organized by a student anti-war group. The reason: it might disturb public order. This is all too reminiscent of the mindset that almost kept Daniel Pipes off the York University campus in Toronto. Aston has an absolute obligation to rescind the ban and let the show go on.