Author: Martin Kramer

Life imitates art at UCLA

On By Martin Kramer

Back in October, I put together a little parody: a letter from an indignant professor to Campus Watch. In it, the prof rails against the “McCarthyite” website, but winds up begging to be listed on it, so as to boost his tenure prospects.

Now there’s a real-life case of this, with only minor deviations. It takes the form of a memo from Gabriel Piterberg, a professor of Middle Eastern history, to his colleagues in the UCLA history department. After a perfunctionary opening, Piterberg warns of the “intensifying activity of Campus Watch at UCLA and other major campuses.”

Campus Watch is a web site directed by Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer, Middle East scholars and activists for the cause of the pro-Israeli lobby in America….The web site itself is a black list of professors whose views are unpalatable to the pro-Israeli lobby and to the current administration. The academic community is advised to be wary of these professors, and students are encouraged to spy and report on what they—and other potential suspects—do in class and publish. As a major academic center with an illustrious tradition in Middle East studies, UCLA is one of the main targets of Campus Watch. [UCLA history professor] Jim Gelvin and I are on its black list.

End of memo. (Incidentally, Piterberg is an Argentine-born Israeli who left the country some years back.)

Now I am not a director of Campus Watch (ten points off right there), and it’s not my place to defend it. I happen not to think the website is a blacklist. Nor do I think the classroom is a clandestine cell or a security agency, whose members are bound by an oath of secrecy. (Professors who treat the classroom as a place of indoctrination and initiation might think differently.) And the notion that there is something wrong when students report what their professors publish—well, it’s been rumored that if you publish something, anyone can read it. Perhaps it’s to keep those “spies” from “reporting” his ideas that Professor Piterberg has been careful to keep his own list of publications short.

But the really comic part comes at the end. Piterberg claims to be on the “blacklist” of Campus Watch. Now for the life of me, I haven’t been able to find his name anywhere on the site. He wasn’t the subject of one of the “dossiers” of the original “egregious eight.” He doesn’t appear on the list of persons who sent in their own names, in “solidarity” with the eight. In fact, Campus Watch hasn’t put out anything about him at all. Same thing with James Gelvin. (I myself have written about Gelvin—not a “listing” but 1,000 reasoned words— and I wrote them not for Campus Watch, but for the journal I edit.)

Finally, as far as UCLA being one of the “major targets” of Campus Watch: until the website posted Piterberg’s memo, it didn’t even have an entry for UCLA under its “Survey of Institutions.”

So what’s going on here? Life is imitating art. Piterberg desperately wants to be “blacklisted” by Campus Watch, because being “blacklisted” by Daniel Pipes is a credential. He wants all his colleagues on the hallway to slap him on the back, to tell him “We’re with you!” He wants the sympathy regularly accorded to a victim. And so he’s completely fabricated his own “blacklisting.” It’s a self-serving fiction, which marvelously brings my little parody to life.

Poor fellow, he really is too small a fry to warrant his own mention at Campus Watch. Yes, he did appear on a plenary panel honoring Edward Said back in 1998. (His bio reports that he looks back on his participation as “one of the proudest and most emotional moments of his career.”) Yes, this winter he teaches a course entitled “Myths, Politics, and Scholarship in Israel,” which promises to reveal the “construction of Israel’s Zionist foundational myths, their impact on politics, and attendant scholarship, collusive as well as critical.” (In case you miss the coding here, “critical” is anti-Zionist and good; “collusive,” defined by the Oxford Concise as based on “a secret understanding, especially for a fraudulent purpose,” is pro-Zionist and bad.) Yes, he parrots Palestinian “foundational myths” made popular by better-known propagandists and “new historians.” Yes, he’s signed the University of California divestment petition. Even the door of his office is reportedly festooned with an “End the Occupation” poster showing Israelis hauling away a Palestinian. (In academe, you don’t wear your politics on your sleeve, you post them on your office door.)

Yes, yes, yes. Still, I don’t think he deserves the full Campus Watch treatment, because he’s not good enough to be bad enough. He doesn’t write much, his students give him a mediocre rating, and he has no presence in the media. Sorry, Gabi, Campus Watch isn’t looking for profs with bad taste, it’s looking for profs who taste bad—real bad.

I’m not Campus Watch, and it’s not really my business, but if they want my opinion, here it is: ignore the guy. It’ll kill him.

ADDENDUM: Piterberg now insists to The Daily Bruin that he was listed at Campus Watch. Gabi, get over it: you never were. Search the Campus Watch site for your name. There ain’t nothin’ here but your own memo and your name at the bottom of a couple of petitions that you signed yourself.

Ignatieff’s Empire

On By Martin Kramer

Michael Ignatieff has a meandering piece in today’s New York Times Magazine on American empire. In it, he tells us that “leaving the Palestinians to face Israeli tanks and helicopter gunships is a virtual guarantee of unending Islamic wrath against the United States.” The exit from the present situation is a “United Nations transitional administration [for the Palestinians], with U.N.-mandated peacekeepers to provide security for Israelis and Palestinians.” Without this, victory in Iraq won’t staunch the hemorrhaging of U.S. prestige in the Middle East. These ideas have been bouncing around for some time. Now they get the endorsement of a noted journalist and Harvard professor, in the most prominent spot in the print media.

I admit I have a hard time taking Ignatieff seriously on the Middle East, in part because of an article he published back in April in the London Guardian entitled “Why Bush Must Send in His Troops.” Before you decide that Ignatieff is a sure guide to things Middle Eastern, read it.

You’ll find that it includes, in one form or another, every trendy calumny against Israel. There is the infamous South African analogy: Palestinian self-rule was really “a Bantustan, one of those pseudo-states created in the dying years of apartheid to keep the African population under control.” The Palestinian Authority had “failed because Israel never allowed it to become a state.” Reading through this piece, you would never know that there were Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Camp David because they’re never mentioned. Perhaps Ignatieff didn’t want to get into the debate over what happened or didn’t happen in those talks, in which an Israeli leader proposed the creation of a Palestinian state on virtually all the lands occupied in 1967. But that would only have complicated things for Ignatieff’s inevitably Solomonic verdict: “Both sides have an equal share of blame.”

As for the Palestinian half of the blame, Ignatieff quickly shifts some of that to Israel’s shoulders, too. Israel kept the Palestinian Authority too weak. “Had Israel realized that its own security depended on assisting in the establishment of a viable and, if necessary, ruthless Palestinian Authority it might now be secure.” In particular, Israel did not allow the PA “enough military and police capability.”

Not enough? Did Ignatieff have a clue about what was going on in the PA? The PA (even according to David Hirst in the Guardian) had forty to fifty thousand persons in its security services—ten to twenty thousand more than the number agreed upon in Oslo II. As one observer put it, “the PA has become the most heavily policed territory in the world, with an officer-to-resident ratio of 1:50; the U.S. ratio for police officers and sheriff’s deputies, in contrast, is 1:400.” So what, in Ignatieff’s view, would have been “enough military and police capability”? (And why military?)

In fact, the problem was never one of capability. It was one of will. The PA decided to wage war with the weapons it had been given to keep peace. Some think that had there been fewer “security services” and guns, there might not have been an intifada at all.

But the absolute low point of this article is Ignatieff’s invocation of the “sacrifice of the young people on both sides in a mutually reinforcing death cult.” It’s an insufferable case of false symmetry, especially coming as it did in the midst of the worst suicide bombings. Even if you believe Israelis and Palestinians are locked in a “cycle of violence,” you’re showing yourself ignorant if you compare the suicidal “death cult” rampant among Palestinians to the stoic resolve of Israelis.

“The Americans now face a historic choice,” pronounced Ignatieff back in April. “For 50 years, they have played the double game of both guaranteeing Israel’s security and serving as honest broker in the region. This game can’t go on.” This is the greatest of all the calumnies—not just against Israel, but against generations of U.S. policymakers. A “double game”? It’s been an immensely successful strategy, which won the Cold War in the Middle East and produced the Israeli-Egyptian peace. This “double game” has prevented a general conflagration for thirty years. And it must go on, because the moment America’s commitment to Israel seems diminished in Arab eyes, the region is destined to spiral into war, just as it did in 1967 and 1973.

None of the nonsense Ignatieff published in the Guardian would have gotten past an editor at the Times, but all of it is implicit in today’s new piece. 9/11 has turned everyone into a Middle East expert for fifteen minutes. That’s about as long as it will take you to get through the lead article of today’s Magazine. Time’s up.

Modernizing Islam

On By Martin Kramer

This letter by Martin Kramer, in response to the article by Francis Fukuyama and Nadav Samin, “Can Any Good Come of Radical Islam?” published in Commentary, September 2002, appeared in Commentary, December 2002, pp. 17-18. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

What happens when a really big reality (like 9/11) collides head-on with a really big idea (like Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history”)? Inevitably, the idea crumples to absorb the shock. Let us survey the wreckage.

In “Can Any Good Come of Radical Islam?” [September], Mr. Fukuyama and his co-author Nadav Samin concur that Islamism is a destructive force that warrants comparison with Communism and fascism. But, they write, it might also be a modernizing one—it might, despite itself, strip away the traditional constraints that have prevented Muslims from modernizing. And if Islamism, in turn, can be stripped of its ideology, then perhaps it might turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

If. And if only. In Francis Fukuyama, Hegel springs eternal, and it was Hegel who passed this judgment early in the 19th century: “Islam has long vanished from the stage of history, and has retreated into oriental ease and repose.” The persistent refusal of Islam to do just that remains one of the principal flaws of “endism,” from Hegel to this day—that is, for as long as the modern West has rubbed shoulders with Islam.

After some two centuries, the evidence is compelling. Islam has been an inexhaustible power cell for scores of movements that have defied the values of modern liberalism. From Mahdism to bin Ladenism, from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Taliban, Islam continues to generate new and potent antidotes to the infection of the West. All of which suggests that the power of radical Islam (like Islam itself) is its ability to mutate—to adapt itself to ever-changing circumstances. Today it ingeniously exploits the very modernism that it seeks to thwart. Just when you think it is outmoded—as many analysts thought 30 years ago—it suddenly reappears in some completely new (and often more virulent) form.

Radical Islam, Messrs. Fukuyama and Samin speculate, “may yet help pave the way for long-overdue reform. If so, this would certainly not be the first time that the cunning of history has produced so astounding a result.” In theory, of course, Islam might be reformed into irrelevance. The late Ernest Gellner even opined that while Islam “did not engender the modern world, it may yet, of all the faiths, turn out to be the one best adapted to it.”

The problem is that in actual practice, real Muslims have treated their would-be reformers very shabbily; the space between Islamism and the authoritarian state remains a leaderless void, which neither side has an interest in filling. The reformers, who have always been a small minority, are today even worse off than they were a half-century ago: today, terrorists threaten to kill them. By all means, let us pray five times daily for an Islamic Reformation. But let us admit that there is no Luther in sight who could inspire one.

The danger of the Fukuyama-Samin argument is that it could encourage complacency. They really do not come down very far from the starry-eyed Middle East experts. One recalls in particular the Georgetown political scientist Michael Hudson, who once told a congressional committee that “whatever the ultimate intent of Islamist movements, their current function is a liberalizing one.” Messrs. Fukuyama and Samin would just switch the adjectives around: whatever the current intent of Islamist movements, their ultimate function is a liberalizing one. It is a short distance from this point to the argument that we should welcome Islamist seizures of power, so as to speed up the inevitable process of regeneration.

As for the authors’ idea that Islamist “independent action” might “lay the groundwork of a true civil society,” this sounds precisely like the argument of John Esposito and a raft of “experts” who tell us that we should weigh the good social deeds of groups like Hamas. Only in the absence of any other mediating institutions can this illusion be maintained. Islamism is a poor man’s civil society, and a poor substitute for it, since it lacks a concept of tolerance. There is no evidence it can develop further, and ample evidence suggesting that it cannot.

In any case, the Fukuyama-Samin thesis cannot be proved or disproved in any near term, and it is pointless to debate it. Its policy implications are vague at best. And it does not change the fact that at this moment in time, it is not Islamism but “endism” that (to quote Hegel) has “vanished from the stage of history”—even if it has cropped up in the pages of Commentary.

Middle East Quarterly
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania