Author: Martin Kramer

U.S. Ambassador in London Hosts Hamas

On By Martin Kramer

Saturday’s London Guardian reports that Azzam Tamimi, a Palestinian Hamas ideologue, attended the Ramadan reception of the U.S. ambassador in London. It was the first time the embassy had hosted an iftar dinner, and it’s already made a big mistake.

An earlier entry in this weblog was devoted to Tamimi. To Islamists on both sides of the Atlantic, Tamimi is effectively an emissary of Hamas. As he put it to the Guardian: “There is a personal relationship with some of them. Because of that I am sometimes asked to advise them. I have been asked, ‘what do you think of how we present ourselves to the world?’ I can be of use both to Hamas and people in the West who know nothing of what Hamas is about.” Actually, the benighted West does have a pretty good sense of what Hamas is about: suicide bombings and the elimination of Israel. As my previous entry shows, Tamimi has had no difficulty making the case for both.

Deep within the bowels of the State Department, there are people who still harbor the wacky idea that they can tell the good extremists from the bad ones, and who play games with Islamists that confuse the message coming from Washington. Hamas is a listed terrorist organization. Tamimi is its self-avowed adviser. He’s been deliberately admitted to the American inner sanctum of Winfield House, residence of the American ambassador. E-mail Ambassador William S. Farish and let him know what you think.

Profs Condemn Israel in Advance

On By Martin Kramer

The latest absurdity to emanate from Middle Eastern studies is an open letter suggesting that Israel might exploit a war against Saddam to engage in “ethnic cleansing” against Palestinians. (The letter, released last Wednesday, is ostensibly in support of a small group of extreme-left Israelis who issued a letter with the same message back in September.) After quoting the shrill and partisan rant of “our courageous Israeli colleagues,” the American profs go on to make a recommendation: “Americans cannot remain silent while crimes as abhorrent as ethnic cleansing are being openly advocated. We urge our government to communicate clearly to the government of Israel that the expulsion of people according to race, religion or nationality would constitute crimes against humanity and will not be tolerated.”

Are these people serious? The claim that Israel is plotting the mass explusion of Palestinians is one more lunatic-fringe conspiracy theory, hatched by Palestinian propagandists who want “international protection” as the wage for their two disastrous years of insurrection. Unfortunately for them, Israel has done nothing that constitutes a “crime against humanity,” and so Palestinians have had to fabricate one that never happened (Jenin) and cry wolf over another one that won’t happen (forced “transfer”). Let me not put too fine a point on it: anyone signing this letter, effectively condemning Israel in advance for something it has no intention of doing, is either an ignoramus or a propagandist.

It’s not surprising, then, that a majority of the original signatories of the American letter (eight of fifteen) are academic Middle East “experts.” Here are their names:

Joel Beinin, Stanford
Beshara Doumani, UC Berkeley
Zachary Lockman, New York University
Timothy Mitchell, New York University
Gabi Piterberg, UC Los Angeles
Glenn E. Robinson, Naval Postgraduate School
Ted Swedenburg, University of Arkansas
Judith Tucker, Georgetown University

Some of them are leaders of their field. Beinin is the immediate past president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). Mitchell directs the Middle East center at NYU. Tucker directs Arab studies at Georgetown. At the end of this entry, you’ll find the names of more MESA types who appear as “additional signatories.” One of them, Laurie Brand of the University of Southern California, is president-elect of MESA.

I’m not surprised to see the names of Noam Chomsky and Edward Said on this letter. Joel Beinin is no surprise either. But I’m disappointed that so many purported Middle East “experts,” whose very profession is the first-hand examination of textual evidence, would mindlessly repeat the shrill claims of Israeli political activists. For example, did the Israeli chief of staff suggest the possibility of “transfer” in a recent interview, as both letters claim? Read the interview yourself. I see nothing in it that could even remotely be considered a proposal of “transfer.” Quite the opposite: “We do not have intentions to annihilate them,” said Israel’s top soldier, “and we have also expressed readiness to grant them a state, whereas they are unwilling to recognize our right to exist here as a Jewish state.” Did any of the American signatories bother to check the text of this interview? Obviously not—and these are tenured “specialists,” several of whom teach the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The academics who now warn the U.S. government against the possibility of Israeli “transfer” of Palestinians are the same ones who failed to warn that very government, before 9/11, of the possibility that radical Islamists might commit a “crime against humanity”—specifically, against Americans. After 9/11, they warned that the greatest threat to peace had become—you guessed it—the American response at home and abroad. The real Middle East, with its real threats to peace and security, is so boringly predictable. Leave it to the “experts” to invent a Middle East and fill it with imaginary threats—it’s much more interesting.

So the professors have posed as saviors of the Palestinians from imaginary “transfer.” How ennobling. And there’s no downside, right? Well, you also get your credibility questioned (see above), and your name listed (see below). Never trust the judgment of anyone whose name appears here. I don’t.

Rabab Abdulhadi, New York University
Rula Abisaab, University of Akron, Ohio
Khaled Abou El Fadl, UC Los Angeles School of Law
Ervand Abrahamian, CUNY, Baruch College
Janet Lippman Abu-Lughod, New School University
Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University
Mahdi Alosh, Ohio State University
Camron Michael Amin, University of Michigan, Dearborn
Naseer Aruri, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
Talal Asad, CUNY, Graduate Center
Raymond William Baker, Trinity College
Khalil Barhoum, Stanford
Hatem Bazian, UC Berkeley
Michael Beard, University of North Dakota
Laleh Behbehanian, UC Berkeley
Marilyn Booth, Brown University
Donna Lee Bowen, Brigham Young University
Laurie A. Brand, University of Southern California
Edmund Burke, III, UC Santa Cruz
Juan Cole, University of Michigan
Elliott Colla, Brown University
M. Elaine Combs-Schilling, Columbia University
Miriam Cooke, Duke
Kenneth M. Cuno, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Ahmad Dallal, Stanford
Lawrence Davidson, West Chester University
Fred M. Donner, University of Chicago
Eleanor A. Doumato, Brown University
Nadia Abu El-Haj, Barnard College, Columbia
Mansour O. El-Kikhia, University of Texas, San Antonio
Khaled Fahmy, New York University
Samih Farsoun, American University
Mary Ann Fay, American University of Sharjah
Carter V. Findley, Ohio State University
Ellen Fleischmann, University of Dayton
Nancy Gallagher, UC Santa Barbara
Irene Gendzier, Boston University
Deborah J. Gerner, University of Kansas
Deborah A. Gordon, Wichita State University
Yerah Gover, Queen’s College, CUNY
Elaine C. Hagopian, Simmons College, Boston
Lisa Hajjar, UC Santa Barbara
Sondra Hale, UC Los Angeles
Eric Hanne, Florida Atlantic University
Frances S. Hasso, Oberlin College
Clement M. Henry, University of Texas, Austin
Charles Hirschkind, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Mahmood Ibrahim, Cal Poly Pomona
Suad Joseph, UC Davis
Jamil E. Jreisat, University of South Florida
Resat Kasaba, University of Washington
As’ad Abu Khalil, CSU, Stanislaus
Dina Rizk Khoury, George Washington University
Diane E. King, American University of Beirut
Margaret Larkin, UC Berkeley
Bruce B. Lawrence, Duke
Fred H. Lawson, Mills College
Mark LeVine, UC Irvine
Ian Lustick, University of Pennsylvania
Mary N. Layoun, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Richard C. Martin, Emory University
Ernest McCarus, University of Michigan
David Mednicoff, University of Massachusetts
John Meloy, American University of Beirut
Brinkley Messick, Columbia University
Farouk Mustafa, University of Chicago
Riad Nasser, Fairleigh Dickinson University
Ibrahim M. Oweiss, Georgetown University
Marcie J. Patton, Fairfield University
Kenneth J. Perkins, University of South Carolina
Lisa Pollard, University of North Carolina, Wilmington
Ismail Poonawala, UC Los Angeles
Nasser Rabbat, MIT
Alan Richards, UC Santa Cruz
Aleya Rouchdy, Wayne State
Cheryl Rubenberg, Florida International University
Edward Said, Columbia
Elise Salem, Fairleigh Dickinson University
George Saliba, Columbia University
Ariel Salzmann, New York University
Jonathan H. Shannon, Hunter College, CUNY
May Seikaly, Wayne State
Ella Shohat, New York University
Rebecca L. Stein, University of Minnesota
Michael W. Suleiman, Kansas State University
Mary Ann Tetreault, Trinity University
Elizabeth F. Thompson, University of Virginia
Dan Tschirgi, The American University in Cairo
Bill L. Turpen, University of Central Oklahoma
Sherry Vatter, California State University, Long Beach
Lisa Wedeen, University of Chicago
Donald Will, Chapman University
Mary Christina Wilson, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Farhat J. Ziadeh, University of Washington
Stephen Zunes, University of San Francisco

(There may be other signatories of the letter who teach the Middle East, and who I didn’t identify by a quick read. I invite additions and corrections, and I may make a few myself.)

ADDENDUM: If you want to know more about the Israelis who are complicit in this campaign of preemptive vilification, read the lecture delivered by Ilan Pappe, Haifa University’s celebrity “new historian,” to the “Right to Return Coalition” in London this past September. Pappe:

We must all take the danger of a recurrence of the 1948 ethnic cleansing very seriously. This is not just paranoia when I directly—not indirectly—link the war against Iraq with the possibility of another Nakba. Take it seriously, believe me. There is a serious Israeli conceptualization of the situation in which Israeli leaders say to themselves, “we have a carte blanche from the Americans. The Americans will not only allow us to cleanse Palestine once and for all, they even will help create the window of opportunity for implementing our scheme.”

His conclusion: “The government of Israel is preparing a very swift and bloody operation.” So Pappe’s analytical prescience is on the line. Sandstorm promises not to forget this dire prediction, and will revisit it after an Iraq war.

UPDATE: The well-informed West Bank correspondent of Ha’aretz, Danny Rubinstein, has a piece in the December 29 edition, under the headline: “Less Fear of Transfer, More Hatred of the U.S.” Rubinstein:

Until a few months ago, there was fear in the territories that the Sharon government would exploit the tumult of an American assault on Iraq to conduct a mass explusion of Palestinians. But that’s no longer the assumption—perhaps because the consensus in the territories now is that Israel understands there’s a limit to power.

So now even the putative transferees aren’t worried about it. That pretty much leaves the American profs who signed this petition (along with Professor Pappe) alone in the farmyard, clucking that the sky is going to fall. Do any of them have the intellectual honesty to rescind their signatures? And they call themselves experts.

An Answer to Al-Jazeera?

On By Martin Kramer

In an earlier entry, I asked: “Could the United States ever create its own alternative to Al-Jazeera? I somehow doubt it.” A couple of weekends ago, on a trip to California, I spent an hour with a man who put my skepticism to the test.

That man is Norman Pattiz, founder and chairman of Westwood One. It’s the country’s largest radio network, and it owns or distributes CBS Radio News, Fox News Radio, CNN Radio News, and the NBC Radio Network. Pattiz also serves on the Broadcasting Board of Governors that supervises the Voice of America. He was the moving spirit behind Radio Sawa, the youth-oriented radio network that plies Arab twenty-somethings with a mixture of pop music and news in an American format. To judge from the numbers (always to be taken with a grain of salt in the Middle East), Radio Sawa has been an overnight success. For example, a survey conducted last month in Amman, Jordan, asked listeners: “What station do you listen to most for news?” Forty-one percent answered Radio Sawa. That compares with 21 percent for the Jordanian Government’s Amman FM, and a mere 10 percent for BBC-FM.

Now Pattiz seeks to escalate the media war. He wants the United States to launch an Arabic-language satellite television station to rival Al-Jazeera, and he’s lobbying Congress to fund it. I visited Pattiz in his offices at Westwood One in Culver City, and he gave me a lite version of the sales pitch he makes in Washington.

His main prop is a short video, prepared in response to doubters in Washington who told him: “We know you can do radio, but what about television?” It’s a great piece of salesmanship. The segment opens with images of angry mobs of enraged Muslims burning American flags. “These are the images that bombard over 300 million Arabs on a daily basis,” says the voiceover (I’m paraphrasing here). “And these are the images sent out by America in response.” What you see, of course, is a completely blank screen. The video goes on to stress the urgency of filling that screen, and fast, with something Pattiz calls MTN, the Middle East Television Network. And to listen to Pattiz tell it, this is a piece of cake. The formula is tried and true, it works in America, and it will work in Araby too. Because when it comes to television, says Pattiz, there’s no rival to good old Yankee ingenuity. Just the “production values” (the slick formatting we take for granted in American television) will keep the Arab viewer riveted to MTN.

What about content? Original programming is an expensive proposition, and even if Congress coughs up $60 million a year, it won’t be enough to fill all those hours. Pattiz would take a lot of content right off the shelf. The American networks, he expects, would provide much of the entertainment for free, or at “patriotic rates.” And game shows could provide cheap and attractive filler. The original part will be news and public affairs.

It’s here, of course, that things begin to get vague. The news format is fairly straightforward, but the commentary is another matter. Pattiz believes he knows what doesn’t work: stressing the good life lived by Arabs in America. This is the staple of public diplomacy, State Department-style. But the millions of Arab television viewers aren’t going to immigrate to this country, says Pattiz, and they really don’t care how great it is to be an Arab-American. What they want to know is how they themselves might benefit from the American model, and how American policy works to their advantage. That’s a harder sell, and it’s not easy to find Arabic-speakers who are prepared to make it. The solution, Pattiz thinks, is to mix commentary and news the way it’s done on Fox, by chatty and opinionated anchors. Lip gloss doesn’t hurt either; after all, it works quite well on Al-Jazeera.

I won’t say more about the tricky question of where to locate such a station. Someone is out scouting sites, and Egypt, Jordan, and Qatar are all in the race, as are off-shore locations such as Cyprus and Rhodes. (Definitely out of play: London.) Pattiz can run down the pros and cons of every alternative, and in so doing, shows himself to have already mastered the intricacies of inter-Arab politics. But at the end of the day, he doesn’t seem to think that it matters. In a digital world, you prepare content wherever it’s convenient, and you can bounce it off a satellite from anywhere. Making sure that the headquarters are cheap and safe is the main consideration. As for politics—well, no host would dare to interfere in America’s message.

So am I persuaded? Pattiz is a persuasive guy—he reminds you that he’s a salesman—and if Congress is ever to put millions into such a project, someone will have to sell it, and hard. The old VOA and State Department types wince at Pattiz’s approach, because it’s not particularly focused on persuading elites. But these critics are the same people who are always warning us about the dangers of the Arab street. It really makes no sense to invest massive efforts to parry Arab “intellectuals” in a PBS-type format. Most of them are incorrigible anyway. It makes a lot more sense just to go over and around them, and there is no medium more suited to that purpose than television. Sure, there are lots of issues to be hammered out here. But if there is one thing that the United States does even better than wage war, it’s television.

So I’ve suspended my skepticism. Let’s bet a nickel on the Pattiz formula. It might do some real good, and I can’t see how it can do any harm. If the Arabs can’t bring themselves to admire our political values, then let’s get them started by admiring our production values. Let the rest follow.

ADDENDUM: There is also a private initiative to provide American-slanted content for MTN (or any other buyer). It’s called Al-Haqiqa Television Inc. Two former ambassadors, Richard Fairbanks and Mark Ginsberg, are chairman and president respectively.