Author: Martin Kramer

No terrorists here

On By Martin Kramer

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

It’s ironic that Middle Eastern studies have reaped a windfall from September 11. The current project of the professors is to put as much distance as possible between that infamous day and their cherished subject. With one hand, they rattle a begging cup in Washington, promising they will use more subsidies to help us understand terrorism. With the other, they wave off suggestions that terrorism has anything to do with the peoples and places they study.

Consider, for example, an op-ed piece written by Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, and one of the most media-friendly academics. Telhami, it should be emphasized, is an accomplished political scientist, trained in rigorous methodology – at Berkeley. In his piece, entitled, “Put Middle East Terror in a Global Perspective,” he wrote: “It is a mistake to imagine that the global terrorism problem beyond al Qaeda is primarily Middle Eastern.”26

How so? Telhami read through the State Department’s annual Patterns of Global Terrorism for 2000.27 And this is what he discovered:

In the five years preceding the tragedy of September 11th, the Middle East was not the leading region in the number of terrorist incidents or in the number of casualties from terrorism. Moreover, while the terrorist trend in the Middle East moved downward every single year, it moved upward in other regions, including Africa, Asia, and Latin America. By the year 2000, the Middle East had the fewest incidents of terrorism of any region around the globe, except for North America.

Hence, concludes Telhami, there is justified anger in the Middle East that the “United States targets only that region” in its war on terror.28

If only it were so. But on close examination of the report, it turns out that Telhami’s discovery is bogus. Consider what he does not tell us about the State Department’s methodology.

First, State Department statistics do not include foiled terrorist plots. Because some agencies of government understood the threat of Middle Eastern terrorism even before September 11, some Middle Eastern terrorist plots were foiled – most famously, the millennium bombing conspiracy. It was uncovered in the nick of time; it produced no State Department statistic.

Second, the State Department has an odd way of determining what constitutes a “terrorist attack.” For example, the statistics tell us that Latin America led the world in the number of attacks in 2000. But that’s because every time two rival groups of leftist guerrillas set off a charge under an oil pipeline in Colombia, it’s a “terrorist attack.” In 2000, this happened 152 times. Number of casualties: zero. Obviously, Latin America is not the world’s terrorism epicenter, and it is not why you have to take off your shoes at airport departure gates.

Third, the State Department categorizes attacks by where they take place, not where they originate. Thus, the bombings of the two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 do not count against the Middle East in State Department methodology. They count against Africa. It is this that allows Telhami to write: “While the terrorist trend in the Middle East moved downward every single year, it moved upward in other regions, including Africa.”

Now the embassy bombings did happen in Africa. But they were not African in origin. This was Middle Eastern terrorism exported to Africa, which killed 224 and injured some five thousand. The 1998 embassy bombings also sit smack in the middle of Telhami’s supposed five-year trend of diminished terror in the Middle East.

In short, the “downward” trend detected by Telhami is an illusion. We now know for certain what was happening in the late 1990s: Arabs from the Middle East were moving their terror apparatus abroad. They were repositioning, in preparation for an operation that would dwarf all others. In this respect, the FBI’s list of “Most Wanted Terrorists” far more accurately pinpoints the sources of terrorism than the State Department’s graphs. All but four of the 22 listed terrorists are Arabs from the Middle East.

This truth is self-evident, but there are still people who would deny it. Telhami seems to be one of them. Given his own competence in method, how could he have failed to detect the flaws in the State Department’s methodology? How could his misrepresentation not be willful? Most alarmingly, his thesis has bounced back to the Arab world. Two months after his op-ed appeared, I heard a well-known Egyptian strategist make precisely the same argument: the State Department’s own statistics prove that the Arab Middle East is relatively free of terrorism, thus it cannot be the source of the global terrorism problem.

This is not as bad as the pervasive belief in Cairo cafés that Arabs had nothing to do with September 11. But it is less of a difference than it might appear. There is a word for the steadfast refusal to acknowledge the truth: that word is denial. Not only is it at work in the “Arab street.” It is in plain evidence on the American campus.

26 Shibley Telhami, “Put Middle East Terror in Global Perspective,” The Baltimore Sun, Feb. 17, 2002.
27 At http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/pgtrpt/2000/.
28 Telhami, “Put Middle East Terror in Global Perspective.”

Malpractice at Columbia

On By Martin Kramer

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

“I’ve never used my classes to talk about political activism of the kind that I’ve done. I’ve stuck pretty carefully to the notion that the classroom is sacrosanct to a certain degree.” The words belong to Edward Said, who taught for some forty years at Columbia.18 From what I have heard, his claim may even be true (to a certain degree). Sadly, the crude imitators of Said have failed to emulate him on precisely this point – and precisely at Columbia.

Joseph Massad is an assistant professor in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) at Columbia, where he also completed his doctorate. He holds views that are common enough among Palestinians: Zionism is racism, its offspring Israel is “a colonial settler racist state,” it has manipulated the Holocaust for its own ends, Palestinian refugees have an unfettered right of return, etc. On February 6, Massad gave a talk entitled “On Zionism and Jewish Supremacy,”19 sponsored by Columbia’s Middle East Institute, and it polarized student opinion. A MEALAC undergraduate wrote an op-ed in the campus newspaper, complaining that the title and content were “anti-Jewish.”20 An article by an international affairs graduate student called it “not the least bit academic,” and an exercise in “tacit incitement.”21 In April, Massad appeared at a pro-Palestinian sit-in on campus, where he decried Israel as “a Jewish supremacist and racist state,” and added: “Every racist state should be threatened.”22

Massad’s views are not all that unusual in Middle Eastern studies, and he has every right to express them on Columbia’s Low Plaza, in public lectures, and in print. But should someone who is busy propagandizing against the existence of Israel be employed by Columbia to teach the introductory course on the Arab-Israeli conflict?

This past spring, MEALAC offered a course entitled “Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Society.” The course description promised that its instructor would “provide a historical overview of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict to familiarize undergraduates with the background of the current situation.” This is neutral language and suggested that students could look forward to a disinterested introduction to a controversial subject. Wrong: the instructor was none other than Joseph Massad. Suffice it to say that this column has received a surfeit of student complaints about the course, suggesting that there is no difference between what Massad teaches and what he preaches.23

This violates no university regulation. The assignment of the course to Massad was just bad judgment by the departmental chair. If MEALAC had a chair with a sense of propriety – or plain common sense – someone like Massad would have been steered away from teaching his commitments.

The problem is that the chair, Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies, is as militant as Massad. After September 11, he expressed doubt about bin Ladin’s responsibility for the attack and announced that CNN should be held accountable for “war crimes.”24 In an op-ed in the campus newspaper, Dabashi denounced Zionism as “a ghastly racist ideology,” condemned “the Israeli slaughter of innocent Palestinians in Jenin,” and declared that he and his colleagues (including, presumably, Massad), had “received repeated and unequivocal assurances from our recognized administrators that we have done absolutely nothing wrong in defending the rights of voiceless victims of the massacres in Palestine.”25 He also cancelled his classes to attend the pro-Palestinian sit-in. (One irate student, in an Internet posting, pointed out that Columbia students do pay $90 per class session.) In short, the message conveyed from the very top of the department is that it’s virtuous to teach your opinion from a lectern in one hour, and to shout it from a soapbox in the next.

Perhaps Edward Said and I are old-fashioned. I happen to agree with him that the classroom is sacrosanct, and that professors shouldn’t teach the subjects of their political activism. The only way to avoid cross-contamination is to maintain some space between your personae, public and academic. Unfortunately for Columbia’s students, this tradition has died a thousand deaths on their campus, and in MEALAC they face a faculty body with no more pressing mission than their systematic indoctrination. These days, students often ask me where they should study the modern Middle East. I am also an alumnus of Columbia. I wish I could recommend it. Sorry, I can’t.

18 Gauri Viswanathan, ed., Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said (New York: Pantheon, 2001), pp. 280-81.
19 This was a verbatim presentation of his article by the same title, published in New Politics, Winter 2002.
20 Daphne Berman, “Masks of Tolerance,” Columbia Daily Spectator, Feb. 26, 2002.
21 Yaron Schwartz, “Exploding the Myth of Israeli Racism,” The SIPA Communiqué, Mar. 6, 2002.
22 Quoted by Xan Nowakowski, “Students Organize Sit-In to Support Palestinians,” Columbia Daily Spectator, Apr. 18, 2002.
23 The Columbia Conservative Alumni Association also lists Massad among the six “worst faculty,” for things he is alleged to have said in class. At http://www.columbiacons.net/worst.htm.
24 Quoted by Nat Jacks, “MEALAC Professors Criticize U.S. Policies,” Columbia Daily Spectator, Sept. 28, 2001.
25 Hamid Dabashi, “The Hallowed Ground of Our Secular Institution,” Columbia Daily Spectator, May 3, 2002. The article is an intemperate assault on Columbia’s Hillel rabbi.

Stocking stuffer

On By Martin Kramer

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

“During or after this crisis, [the academics] will find some pliant senator or congressman willing to propose additional budgets for Middle Eastern studies under the rubric of national security.” I made that prediction in The Wall Street Journal on November 15, 2001.1 I was right. On December 20, Congress rewarded the famously errant mandarins of academic Middle Eastern studies with an incredible windfall.

In a flurry of year-end legislation, both houses approved the House-Senate conference report on education appropriations for FY 2002. The bill, signed by President Bush on January 10, included a 26 percent increase for Title VI/Fulbright-Hays, the mainstay of federal support for Middle East centers and programs in the universities. The massive windfall added $20.5 million in new funding, the largest single-year increase in the program’s four-decade history. Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), a long-time patron of Title VI, led the charge for the additional appropriation.

The conferees left no doubt that this increase should go largely to Middle Eastern studies. In their report, they specifically found “an urgent need” to enhance the nation’s capabilities in language fluency “relevant to understanding societies where Islamic and/or Muslim culture, politics, religion, and economy are a significant factor.” The increase is supposed to double the number of government fellowships for students whose preparation includes Arabic, Azeri, Pashto, Persian, Tajik, Urdu, and Uzbek. It will also pump new funds into university-based Middle East centers.2

It isn’t difficult to fathom the sense of urgency that drove this decision. September 11 was a great trauma, and the sums of money added to Title VI are small by Washington standards. If the United States must gird itself for a protracted war in the Middle East, Central and South Asia, why not encourage more students to take up the study of their languages and cultures? Why not strengthen the centers already subsidized by the federal government? The conferees found that “our national security, stability, and economic vitality depend, in part, on American experts who have sophisticated language skills and cultural knowledge,” especially of the Muslim world.3 Why not subcontract the job to the universities?

Alas, this ignores a sad yet inescapable truth: the academic establishment is part of the problem.

Middle Eastern studies have been in deep crisis for years. The field has been decimated by the impact of Edward Said’s post-colonialism and cut off from the American mainstream by the influx into faculty ranks of ideological radicals and activist immigrants. The most outlandish theories have flourished in this hothouse. Shelves have filled with works exalting the democratic potential of Islamist movements, even those that use terrorism. An entire cottage industry of wishful thinking has grown up around “civil society,” even though the region remains in the thrall of authoritarian regimes. The professors, absorbed by their own faddish theories, were as surprised as anyone by September 11, and even more surprised than most officials, terrorism experts, and investigative journalists.

Mingled with this has been a patent distrust of American purpose and power in the Middle East. Edward Said himself has called the evolution of Middle Eastern studies in the United States “a story of cultural opposition to Western domination.”4 A report from the most recent annual conference of the Middle East Studies Association, last November, described it as a “refreshingly flag-free zone.”5 It would be hard to find a field more detached from the idea of national security, however defined.

Yes, you say, but what about those languages? Wouldn’t it be better for more Americans to know them? “The federal government’s current Middle Eastern studies funding priorities should be languages first, second, and third” – so writes a staunch defender of Title VI funding.6 But the dirty little secret of Title VI is that while Congress appropriates money in the hope of improving “language skills and cultural knowledge,” the recipients aren’t that interested in languages or culture. Students on Title VI fellowships don’t become language experts in any significant number. They pick up as much as they need, as a supplement to their training in history, politics, anthropology, and other disciplines. Lift the hard rock of languages, and you’ll find mostly soft scientists, writhing about in theoretical circles.7 As for the study of culture, it’s regularly sacrificed to the study of disciplinary theory. As one political scientist has admitted, “the mere recognition that cultural factors matter labels specialists as anti-scientific heretics by their more dogmatic colleagues.”8

It’s difficult to see how this new investment in Middle Eastern studies could produce a return that serves the national interest. Given what goes on in some Middle East centers, perhaps the government should pay them, like farmers, not to produce anything. David Ward, president of the American Council on Education, tried to pull a fast one in his testimony before Congress in April. “Most career security foreign language and area specialists in agencies such as the CIA and DIA were trained at institutions with Title VI centers,” he boasted.9 So what? There are National Resource Centers for area studies at every leading private and public university. The more important fact is that the people who actually get Title VI fellowships wouldn’t dream of working for the CIA or DIA. When The Chronicle of Higher Education spoke to a dozen job-hunting Ph.D.s in Middle Eastern studies this past spring, not one expressed any interest in government employment. “Academics just aren’t biting,” said one job candidate. “I don’t think running around chasing terrorists is the solution to this problem. Academics have a belief in the power of education to effect change.”10

Government has known for a long time that it has no choice but to teach languages to its own servants, in preparation for those instances when “the power of education” fails. This is the job of the Defense Language Institute and the Foreign Service Institute. It’s never enough, and a new GAO report underlines the language deficit in government.11 But it doesn’t list more funding for Title VI among its proposed solutions, because it isn’t a solution. Now that languages have become a public policy issue again, and additional millions are going to Title VI, perhaps Congress should order the GAO to see whether the program does what it purports to do. The GAO hasn’t inspected Title VI since 1978.12

In the meantime, the new levels of funding are here to stay. Whatever the long-term outcome of the new subsidy, its immediate effects are not in doubt. The Title VI bonanza will reinforce the authority of an otherwise failed establishment. Rather than ponder what has gone wrong, they will pat themselves on the back. They will spend their September 11 windfall to add new turrets to their ivory towers, which function more like minarets, and from which they will broadcast a muezzin’s call on behalf of Islam. Hey, what about the national interest and security of the United States? Didn’t you see the sign? This is a “flag-free zone.”

1 Martin Kramer, “Terrorism? What Terrorism?!” The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 15, 2001.
2 Conference Report on H.R. 3061 (House of Representatives), Dec. 18, 2001, at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?r107:6:./temp/~r107NWcKvm:e559653:.
3 Ibid.
4 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 314.
5 David Tuller, “Not Academic: The Middle East Studies Association Wards off Rebukes,” The American Prospect Online, Nov. 29, 2001, at http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2001/11/tuller-d-11-29.html.
6 F. Gregory Gause III, “Who Lost Middle Eastern Studies?” Foreign Affairs, Mar.-Apr. 2002.
7 A government-contracted report on Title VI admitted as much: “Over the years, the original focus on language has been replaced with a much broader mandate for area, international, and international business studies. … functional linguistic competence in the graduates of the nation’s colleges and universities has tended to diminish.” Richard D. Brecht and William P. Rivers, Language and National Security in the 21st Century (Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt, 2000), p. 132.
8 Jerrold D. Green, “The Politics of Middle East Politics,” PS: Political Science, Sept. 1994, p. 517.
9 David Ward testimony, at http://www.acenet.edu/washington/legalupdate/2002/04april/ward.titlevi.testimony.html.
10 Quoted by Robin Wilson, “Interest in the Islamic World Produces Academic Jobs in U.S.,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Mar. 1, 2002.
11 “Foreign Languages: Human Capital Approach Needed to Correct Staffing and Proficiency Shortfalls,” U.S. Government Accounting Office, GAO-02-375, Jan. 2002, at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d02375.pdf.
12 “Study of Foreign Languages and Related Areas: Federal Support, Administration, Need,” Comptroller General of the United States, ID-78-46, Sept. 13, 1978.