Category: Sandbox

Squeezing goobers in Congress

On By Martin Kramer

Yesterday, President Bush announced a new National Security Language Initiative, which has the potential to fix America’s debilitating deficit in foreign language proficiency in the military and government. I’ll say more about it later, but I’ve already been struck by a few of the reactions in Middle Eastern studies.

Consider this one. F. Gregory Gause III is a professor of Middle Eastern politics at the University of Vermont, and member of the academic freedom committee of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). When my book Ivory Towers on Sand appeared in 2001, he wrote a critical review essay in Foreign Affairs. To my suggestion that Congress reexamine its subsidies to Middle Eastern studies, he offered this rejoinder, piously couched in the language of the national interest:

Now more than ever the United States has a compelling national interest in encouraging its citizens to study the difficult languages of the Muslim world, and that costs money…. In fact, given the lack of official linguistic capacity evident during the post-[9/11] attack crisis, the federal government’s current Middle Eastern studies funding priorities should be languages first, second, and third…. Only increased federal support can sustain and expand the language instruction necessary to turn students into the careful and knowledgeable observers that everyone wants them to be.

Gee, readers must have thought, here is a Middle Eastern studies prof who defies Kramer’s generalization, and who has our security at heart–the kind of clean-cut guy MESA might want to send up to Capitol Hill to lobby for Title VI money.

So what are we to make of Gause’s response to Bush’s new initiative, made yesterday in the comments section of a weblog?

In this country, where we even had to use “national defense” as the justification to build our interstate highway system, you just can’t squeeze enough money out of the mountebanks, charlatans, ideologues and goobers who represent us in Congress to fund these programs unless they can be sold as “national defense” (or now, “homeland security”).

Bingo. I’ve argued all along that the mandarins of Middle Eastern studies are scamming Congress. In public, they announce that they’re eager to put their shoulders to the wheel in the nation’s defense, if Congress comes up with the budgets. In private, they have nothing but contempt for the Congress that subsidizes them, and for the Congressional obligation to assure that America is defended and secure. They look down on elected representatives as a bunch of “goobers,” who can be efficiently “squeezed” for money by mouthing patriotic platitudes about “national security” (in sneering scare quotes).

The sad thing is that Gause is probably the best of the bunch. Unlike most of his colleagues, he’s willing to hold his nose and take taxpayers’ money even when it comes in defense packaging. The diehards around him would strangle any federal program for students who want to study languages in order to serve.

Well, I’m glad Gause has told us how he feels. I’ll be happy to convey his latest message to the appropriate charlatans on the Hill.

My long road with Ariel Sharon

On By Martin Kramer

I heard Ariel Sharon speak on several occasions, but I only met him once.

In 1996, as director of the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, I set about scheduling a speaker for the annual address in Dayan’s memory. In practice, the Center’s Israeli board of governors, composed largely of Dayan’s old friends, selects the speaker. That year, we held the board meeting at the museum-home of David Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv. The subject of the address came up, and someone floated the name of Ariel Sharon.

At the time, Sharon was minister of national infrastructure in the Likud-led government of Benjamin Netanyahu, and he was still very much a bête noire. At the mention of his name, my eyes immediately turned to Yael Dayan, Moshe Dayan’s daughter and a Labor party politician active in Peace Now. To my surprise, she pronounced Sharon to be the perfect choice as her father’s memorial speaker. I realized then, as I’ve realized many times since, that the old Israeli elite is bound by ties that go much deeper than the party politics of the moment.

So Sharon got the invitation, and he accepted it. For my academic colleagues, it was as if I had summoned Satan from the depths. While I awaited Sharon’s arrival on the appointed evening, I scanned the audience and saw few if any of them in attendance. (Yael Dayan wasn’t there either.) I recall feeling relieved that the honor of introducing Sharon had been claimed in advance by Zalman Shoval, a board member. I would have been hard-pressed to come up with enough admiring words.

Sharon came, spoke, and went. The speech got some coverage on an inside page of a newspaper, but it wasn’t a headline event. Yet it stayed with me, as did another Sharon speech I attended in Washington during those same years. Listening to Sharon, I didn’t hear a radical ideologue bent on “politicide” of the Palestinians—his usual portrayal in Israeli academe. I heard a hard-nosed former soldier concerned first and foremost with Israel’s security and preservation as a Jewish state.

The second Palestinian intifada resurrected Sharon, thanks to people like me. I had supported the Labor-led peace process, knowing it would involve far-reaching compromises. I voted for Ehud Barak in 1999. But when Yasir Arafat tried to leverage Israel by promoting mass terrorism, he changed my mind. I thought it important to erase from the record those concessions that had been offered by Israel at Camp David and, more importantly, at Taba. I saw Sharon as personifying strength, determination, and a willingness to act boldly, not in pursuit of a utopian  “New Middle East,” but of Israel’s national survival. So I cast my ballot for him in 2001, as did a decisive majority of Israeli voters.

The situation was very different in my university setting, where I was a lone soul, both then and in 2003, when I voted for Likud. Since the disengagement and Sharon’s creation of Kadima, I’ve run into people on campus who’ve announced their intention to cast a ballot for the man they once reviled. Now they never will. No elected leader ever meets all expectations, and to believe that they might is to subscribe to a dangerous sort of secular messianism. But of all the votes I’ve cast, I least regret the two I cast for Ariel Sharon, and I would have cast another one.

As to the future, I claim no special insight.

Georgetown Yankees in Prince Alwaleed’s court

On By Martin Kramer

In December, Harvard and Georgetown universities announced that they’d each received $20 million from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud, for programs in Islamic studies. There’s been much commentary on this, and I’ll have more to say later. For now, I draw your attention to the photograph of the signing ceremony for the Georgetown deal.

Presumably, Alwaleed’s own photographer shot the event (it took place on November 7 at one of his properties in Paris), and it seems logical to assume that Alwaleed selected the photograph for release to the press. Anyone gazing upon it will sense immediately that this wasn’t just a signing ceremony. It was a deliberately choreographed court ritual, about power and control.

The most striking element in the mise en scène is the positioning of Prince Alwaleed. He is front and center. Immediately to his right is Georgetown president John J. DeGioia. Note that they aren’t positioned as equals—as joint partners in a shared enterprise. That’s because DeGioia is a mere a recipient of royal largesse, inferior to Prince Alwaleed. This is true not only in the formal sense that he is not of royal lineage. It’s also true in absolute terms of wealth. Georgetown’s endowment is a meager $680 million. Prince Alwaleed’s personal worth is estimated at $23.7 billion. In other words, Georgetown’s entire endowment can be tucked into the leftovers of Alwaleed’s worth, to the right of the decimal point.

It’s telling, too, that DeGioia is grinning in gratitude, while Prince Alwaleed remains expressionless. DeGioia has achieved a coup, having added greatly to the university’s endowment. It remains for Georgetown to do what it takes to put a smile on Prince Alwaleed’s face. “We are deeply honored by Prince Alwaleed’s generosity,” DeGioia said in a statement announcing the gift. It’s a telling formula. Prince Alwaleed, unlike most donors to universities, hasn’t exchanged his money for the trifling honors of academe. He has showered Georgetown with his money and his honor. Now it’s incumbent upon Georgetown to give him what he wants in return.

That’s where the figure seated at the far left comes in. He’s Georgetown professor John Esposito, founding director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, which has now been renamed for Prince Alwaleed. Esposito, more than any other academic, contributed to American complacency prior to 9/11. He peers out from this photograph as if to say: I’m back. Indeed he is, having proved that he’s still a magnet for Arab and Muslim money. Prince Alwaleed apparently decided that while Esposito’s reputation may be dented, the professor still has some value in him. (Remember, too, that the prince made his fortune buying up distressed stock.) So Esposito’s now a bought and paid-for subsidiary, and he’s signed himself over in his own hand, as this photograph attests. (But Esposito, to his credit, doesn’t undersell himself. A recent profile reported that he’d unloaded his trophy Hillandale home to the NFL commissioner, downsizing to a Bethesda, Maryland condo, while keeping his getaway on the Maryland shore and a “dream home” on the Florida coast. He collects up to $30,000 for speaking to groups that support his message. Advocating for foreign interests from within the academy can be a lucrative vocation.)

What’s also striking, too, is that DeGioia and Esposito have crossed the Atlantic to accept the gift in Paris—specifically, at the Hotel George V, owned by Prince Alwaleed. The great Arabian prince cannot be troubled to come to Georgetown, but rather summons his newly-acquired agents to his outlying campsite to collect their gift, hear his wishes, and take oaths to do his bidding.

Finally, note that the scene is flanked by two national flags, of the United States and Saudi Arabia. Georgetown is a private university (with its own flag), and Prince Alwaleed is a private businessman. The agreement between them isn’t a treaty between governments. But the national flags send the implied message that this deal is somehow in the interests of the two countries and deserves their blessing. Prince Alwaleed thus claims to serve a higher purpose, as a self-professed “friend” of the United States and its “special relationship” with the Saudi kingdom.

I find the whole scene both fascinating and repelling. It’s the most dramatic visual confirmation of the deep corruption that Prince Alwaleed’s buying spree is spreading through academe and Middle Eastern studies. Erik Smulson, assistant vice president for communications at Georgetown, made this assurance about the gift: “The funds are designated, but there are no strings attached.” Such boiler-plate statements are ritualistic incantations. Over two years ago, I predicted that Alwaleed would reduce Middle Eastern studies to a cargo cult, with university administrators vying to win the attention of the flying prince. And I wrote this passage: “In the near future, don’t be surprised to see grinning university presidents posing with Prince Alwaleed. They will say there are no strings attached. Puris omnia pura: To the pure all things are pure.”

My prediction has come true.