Author: Martin Kramer

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 But it’s the U.S. position, in accord with UN certification, that Israeli troops have withdrawn from Lebanon.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.”

Compared to whom?

On By Martin Kramer

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

One of the great debates launched after September 11 turns on the relationship between terrorism and poverty. True, Usama bin Ladin was born with a silver spoon; he has been eating with his fingers in Afghanistan by choice. But the possible relationship between terrorism and poverty is a worthy subject of debate.29 It often leads also to a more important debate over the reasons for the Arab world’s economic failure, as compared to much of the developing world. At least that’s where it should lead, unless you are the A.J. Meyer Professor of Middle Eastern History at Harvard.

Roger Owen, the economic historian who occupies the chair, doesn’t like it when outsiders highlight the economic underperformance of the Arab world. “Their ostensible purpose is to explain to a Western audience how it is that poverty contributes to violence,” he writes. “But it is difficult not to see them as also part of the age-old polemic against the religion of Islam itself.” In other words, pointing to Arab economic failure is orientalism, or even worse, the dreaded anti-Islamic bias.

Owen especially disapproves when analysts compare Arab economic performance to that of East Asia. “Economic league tables are produced to show that the recent economic performance of the Arab countries, or the Muslim countries, lags not only behind the West but also behind what Bernard Lewis described in a recent New Yorker article as the ‘more recent recruits to Western-style modernity such as Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore.'” Once Bernard Lewis has been invoked, we know what is coming.

And here it is: how dare he compare? “What, for example, does Egypt have in common with South Korea in terms of economic structure, institutions or resources that make them comparable in any way? And why is the Middle East never compared with regions than which it has performed much better in recent decades, like sub-Saharan Africa, or at least as well, like South Asia? They are its closest non-European neighbors after all.” And is it not unfair to compare the Arabs without even consulting them? Surely they should have a say in all this. “I imagine that few governments and peoples of the MENA [Middle East and North Africa] region would see much point in a comparison with Singapore or South Korea. But Syria could well find advantages in being compared with Egypt, which it aspires to emulate.”30

Of course, no one likes unflattering comparisons. What Owen’s exercise demonstrates is how difficult it has become to find comparisons that do flatter the Arab Middle East. It is not just the West that is out of the question; so is East Asia; so is Latin America; so is Eastern Europe. What is left are South Asia (which is bypassing the Middle East, perhaps because India does have democracy); and the AIDS-ridden, strife-torn continent of Africa, a comparison that the Arabs themselves would find demeaning. So the Harvard professor finally gives us the solution some Arabs (and he) would prefer: just compare them to themselves.

There may be some value in comparing Egypt and Syria. But Egypt and Syria haven’t looked to one another for models since Owen was a Nasser-struck student in Cairo forty long years ago – that is, since the days of their failed union in the United Arab Republic. In a world that is becoming globalized to the hilt, it is development relative to the rest of humankind that matters. Leading Arab development experts, who aren’t stuck in a “pro-Arab” groove, don’t flinch from comparing the Arab world to South Korea and Taiwan – and to Israel. It does the Arabs no great favor to spare them such comparisons, and it is patronizing to boot.

29 For example, Daniel Pipes, “God and Mammon: Does Poverty Cause Militant Islam?” National Interest, Winter 2002, pp. 14-21.
30 Roger Owen, “The Uses and Abuses of Comparison,” Al-Ahram Weekly, Dec. 27, 2001 – Jan. 2, 2002.