Author: Martin Kramer

How have they changed?

On By Martin Kramer

The American media this week have focused on this theme: How have we changed since 9/11? Far less attention has been given to the issue of how they have changed “they” referring to the social and political nexus that produced the hijackers of 9/11.

This morning, The Washington Post ran a piece by Bernard Lewis, under the title Targeted by a History of Hatred. But the headline-writer missed the point of the essay: it was not hatred that produced 9/11, but contempt. The hatred, as Lewis points out, has been growing for some years, but “a more important question, less frequently asked, is the reason for the contempt with which they regard us.” The contempt arises from the fact that the United States has radiated irresolution and weakness in the face of challenges put up by Middle Eastern assailants.

In an address almost a year ago, I listed what had to be done to squelch that contempt:

You must smite your enemy in a decisive and demonstrative way. This requires two things. First, you must get rid of the Taliban regime. The United States has not deposed a regime in the Middle East in fifty years. It must do so now. Second, you must get Osama bin Laden and not in one, two, or sixteen years. Every day he lives is an affront to American credibility. Let me be clear: nothing you do will ever even the score for September 11. But do these two things, and you will rebuild the gaping hole left in your wall of deterrence. Do these two things, and you will create awe and fear among the multitudes. Fail, and you will engender derision and contempt and the fear will be yours.

So the crucial question, one year after, is not how we have changed, but how they have changed above all, have they learned to fear us? Lewis ends his essay on the hopeful note that the destruction of terrorist bases in Afghanistan will have “compelled some revision of their earlier assessment of American weakness and demoralization.” But with bin Laden (and Mullah Omar) still at large along with much of al-Qa’ida’s leadership, Afghanistan in a tenuous state, and America’s leadership under question even by its allies, the authors of 9/11 still have room for hope. And to judge from the new terror alert, the fear is still ours.

Mixing signals on Hizbullah

On By Martin Kramer

Last week was not a good one for carefully formulated U.S. statements on Hizbullah. Two senior diplomats said things that shouldn’t have been said, suggesting that the U.S. doesn’t quite know where the Iranian-backed movement fits in the “war on terror.”

The first gaffe belonged to U.S. ambassador to Lebanon Vincent Battle. According to the Beirut Daily Star (September 4), Battle was asked about Hizbullah’s attack the previous week on the Shebaa Farms (Har Dov), which killed one Israeli soldier and wounded two others. Was this terrorism? The ambassador said that it did “not fall within the rubric” of terrorism, since Hizbullah had gone after “combatant targets” and not civilians.

Now that may have been the U.S. position when Israel remained in occupation of Lebanon. But it’s the U.S. position, in accord with UN certification, that Israeli troops have withdrawn from Lebanon. Hizbullah’s attacks across the line are violations of it, done by an organization which the U.S. officially designates as terrorist. The U.S. does not regard Israel as intruding on Lebanese sovereignty at the Shebaa Farms, and it has every interest in delegitimizing Hizbullah attacks across the “Blue Line.” Unfortunately, Ambassador Battle has stumbled into according a measure of legitimacy precisely to these attacks. (And it’s an inconsistent position, too: the U.S. regularly categorizes assaults on its own uniformed personnel, from the Marines barracks in Beirut to the U.S.S. Cole and the Pentagon on 9/11, as terrorist acts.) Battle should have answered: “Terrorism is as terrorists do.”

The second mistatement belonged to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, in the Q&A following his speech to a U.S. Institute of Peace conference. Armitage, asked whether the U.S. intended to settle scores with Hizbullah over its past attacks on Americans, answered:

Hizbullah may be the A-team of terrorists and maybe al-Qaida is actually the B-team. They’re on the list and their time will come. There is no question about it. They have a blood debt to us, which you spoke to; and we’re not going to forget it and it’s all in good time. We’re going to go after these problems just like a high school wrestler goes after a match: We’re going to take them down one at a time.

Alas, the U.S. has never brought down anyone in Hizbullah, and there is no evidence that it has an operational plan for settling scores left over from the mid-1980s. There is a blood debt, but the bravado should come after action, not before it. A better answer would have been simpler: “We haven’t forgotten, and we haven’t forgiven.”

Perhaps it’s time to get everyone at State on the same page regarding Hizbullah. They are formidable adversaries, and it’s dangerous to make off-the-cuff concessions or threats. Recommended introductory reading: Eyal Zisser, The Return of Hizbullah, in the Fall Middle East Quarterly.

Who needs Arabic?

On By Martin Kramer

From Martin Kramer, “Arabic Panic,” Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2002, pp. 88-95. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

Berkeley’s administration, from the chancellor down, squirmed in May when The Wall Street Journal published the description of an upcoming English department course entitled “The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance.”13 Deconstruct this:

The brutal Israeli military occupation of Palestine, an occupation that has been ongoing since 1948 [sic], has systematically displaced, killed, and maimed millions of Palestinian people. And yet, from under the brutal weight of the occupation, Palestinians have produced their own culture and poetry of resistance. This class will examine the history of the Palestinian resistance and the way that it is narrated by Palestinians in order to produce an understanding of the intifada and to develop a coherent political analysis of the situation. This class takes as its starting point the right of Palestinians to fight for their own self-determination. Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections.

These last two sentences set off a firestorm, since they so obviously contradicted every norm of intellectual exchange. They also violated the university’s own Faculty Code of Conduct. Out they went, the very next day. If the criticism doesn’t die down, it’s possible that the rest of the description will be cleaned up. But that won’t be enough. This match of subject and instructor still raises serious questions about Berkeley’s standards.

Palestinian poetry is a legitimate subject for instruction, but not by anyone. This poetry is written in Arabic, which is rich in poetic expression. A student need not know Arabic to study it, at least on an undergraduate level. But it should never be taught by anyone who can’t read the originals with ease. If you can’t unravel the multi-layered Arabic of Mahmud Darwish, the foremost Palestinian poet, you have no business standing in front of a classroom and teaching his oeuvre. Such malpractice is particularly indefensible at those very institutions where Arabic language and literature are well represented on the faculty, as they are at Berkeley.

Who did Berkeley’s English department entrust with teaching this complex material? A 26-year-old Indo-American graduate student, one Snehal Shingavi, whose doctoral dissertation, if and when it is finished, will deal with pre-independence Indian fiction from 1917 to 1947. His qualifications? He is a militant activist in Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) (and also in the United Students against Sweatshops, the Stop the War Coalition, and the International Socialist Organization). He has been spotted wearing a kafiyyeh.14 To judge from his course syllabus, he has read a lot of Edward Said. And in April, he received a police citation for blocking entry during the SJP’s takeover of a campus building. End of résumé.

Mr. Shingavi is an authority—on agitprop. Do you need to defend yourself against pepper spray? “With pepper spray,” Shingavi advises, “you want to first rub the area with alcohol to bring the oil up, and then with water to flush the skin out.”15 That sounds authoritative. But he is utterly unqualified to teach anything to anybody about the poetry of the Palestinian resistance. “If you can’t accept that Palestinians have the right to self-determination, it is impossible to read resistance poetry,” stated Shingavi.16 Nonsense. What is true is that it is impossible to teach resistance poetry if you can’t really read it.

When The Wall Street Journal carried the offending course description, Berkeley took heat from conservatives and supporters of Israel—and rightly so. But it seems to me that the professional instructors of Arabic literature have equal grounds for complaint. If major universities can get away with employing campus agitators to teach Arabic literature, the future prospects for this field are grim. “There are usually just two positions in Arabic language and literature every year,” notes a Harvard professor of Arabic. “A very good year is three.”17 This column urges the American Association of Teachers of Arabic and the American Comparative Literature Association to register their displeasure with Berkeley’s employment of a scab. If the comp lit pros don’t speak up now, let them not lament when the only jobs left for their graduates are chasing terrorists.

13 Roger Kimball, “The Intifada Curriculum,” The Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2002.
14 Rory Miller, “UC Berkeley: A Safe Harbor for Hate,” FrontPageMagazine.com, May 13, 2002, at http://frontpagemag.com/guestcolumnists2002/miller05-13-02.htm.
15 Quote in “The Battle for What?,” ThinkCurrent.com, Oct. 2000, at http://www.thinkcurrent.com/mag-10-00/politics/students2.html.
16 The Daily Californian, May 10, 2002.
17 William Granara, quoted by Wilson, “Interest in the Islamic World.”