Category: Sandbox

MESA chooses, and you can too

On By Martin Kramer

Members of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) are electing their president, an annual ritual that has symbolic value. The outcome usually moves between radicalism and sobriety in alternate years. Consider the most recent choices, in reverse chronological order: incoming president Juan Cole (radical), Ali Banuazizi (sober), Laurie Brand (radical), Lisa Anderson (sober), Joel Beinin (radical), and so on. MESA this year will choose between Zachary Lockman of New York University, and Mark Tessler of the University of Michigan.

Lockman is the darling of the far left of the spectrum, particularly for his polemical defense of the field’s sorry record in his book Contending Visions of the Middle East. (A polemic it is, disguised beneath a university press veneer.) I called him last year on an academic boycott petition he signed, or signed but didn’t understand, or signed but understood differently from everyone else who signed it. Go here and watch him twist himself in pretzels.

Tessler is a cautious but shrewd manager who likes to play the center. He’s often trotted out as proof that Middle Eastern studies are balanced and reasonable, by people who don’t always know much about him. It was amusing to see Juan Cole, on two occasions, claim that Tessler holds his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University. Tessler did his Ph.D. at Northwestern; he just spent a junior year abroad in Jerusalem more than forty years ago. Cole should know better: he and Tessler are both at Michigan. But when MESA’s mandarins want to present themselves as Israel-friendly, all sorts of exaggerations flourish, and Tessler becomes the poster boy. As such, he pitched up in Washington last year to lobby against Title VI reform.

All of this is by way of encouraging you, dear reader, to cast your own vote in a straw poll on this website. You’ll find the MESA poll box on the sidebar of Sandbox and on the homepage. Choose between Lockman and Tessler, and leave a comment on the whole business, if the spirit moves you.

Israeli plot against Juan Cole!

On By Martin Kramer

Juan Cole, who doesn’t get the television time that he used to, has been reduced to appearing on webcasts from makeshift studios. It’s a completely apt setting for his nutty theories.

See, for example, the first segment of a homespun interview Cole gave to a Daily Kos blogger named Markinsanfran, a.k.a. Dio. (You’ll need Quicktime to view it.) Here Cole offers an account of Daniel Pipes’ Campus Watch that goes way beyond claims he’s made in the past. It turns out that Campus Watch, which began by putting up “dossiers” of links on Cole (and others), wasn’t acting alone! “If you followed Pipes around, I think you would probably find that he did have some kind of consultation with Israeli officials at some point about all this. I couldn’t prove that but I wouldn’t be surprised at it.” Of course! It’s the Mossad! Yes, it’s hard to imagine mild-mannered Pipes going after Cole without prodding from Tel Aviv. And those email spammers who hit Cole’s mailbox and sent out spoofs? Another revelation! “I’m quite convinced that the individuals behind this cyberspace harassment were right-wing Zionists and very possibly settlers on the West Bank.” Of course! Settlers! They’re the only ones mad enough at Cole to spam him, and they’ve got nothing better to do!

I don’t know whether Cole really imagines that Israeli agents and settlers targeted him, or whether he just puts out these accusations so that more bats will flock to his tree. But if a history professor in Ann Arbor believes that plots are being hatched against him in secret offices and hilltop redoubts thousands of miles away, he’s got a problem. Counseling might help.

Oh, and you have to chuckle at Cole’s answer to a question put to him on something called Evolvetv. The interviewer asked Cole how many languages the professor speaks. Cole: “Well, I think it’s more relevant how many languages I read. But, and it’s hard to to count because you know, knowing a language is always an imperfect thing and I know more of some languages than others and so forth. But I’ve studied eight or nine.” Studied? Is that a degree of proficiency? Would you ever list how many languages you’ve studied as a credential? Why Cole obscures his foreign language abilities is a mystery to me, since he has what he needs for what he does, and he’s been called on one exaggeration already. I’ll leave that one to the mind doctors too.

Professor Cole, I was there first

On By Martin Kramer

Juan Cole continues to have his unedifying tit-for-tat with Christopher Hitchens over his credentials. In the frenzy, Cole has resorted to listing his many travels to the Middle East (with dates), the Middle Eastern languages he says he knows or reads, and so on. It’s come to that.

But Cole claims one credential that I dispute: “I happen to have been the first American observer to explain [Ayatollah] Sistani’s significance, at this weblog in April-July of 2003; go to the archives and do a keyword search.” As a specialist on Shiism, it’s important to Cole that you believe he had Sistani’s number before anyone.

But in fact, nowhere in Cole’s weblog in April 2003 did he “explain the significance” of Sistani (which is why he gives no link, but sends you to search on your own). He just mentioned him in his summaries of press reports. I myself explained Sistani’s significance on April 4, 2003 in a Sandstorm entry entitled “The Ayatollah Who Saved Najaf.” It was linked that very day from the NRO Corner with the teaser: “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Ayatollah Sistani.” Thousands saw it. I even recall sending the link to Cole. All in a day’s work, and nothing to brag about–unless you can’t allow that anyone knew something significant about anything before you did. So since Cole is claiming this and that, let the record show that his Sistani claim is false. Compare my April 4 entry and the April entries Cole wrote before (and even after) that date, and decide which of us first explained Sistani’s significance. No contest.

Cole also makes this statement: “I was also one of the few American scholars publishing on the institution of the marja’-i taqlid or source for emulation among the Shiites, in the 1980s and 1990s. See my [book] Sacred Space and Holy War. I guarantee you Hitchens did not know Sistani existed in February, 2003.” Cole’s book did cover the marja’iyya, but Sistani isn’t mentioned in it at all, nor did Sistani appear in Cole’s weblog prior to April 2003. Hitchens may not have heard of Sistani before April, but Cole probably didn’t know a lot about him either.

Of course, since then Cole has learned and written a lot about Sistani–far more than Hitchens (or I). So why does he bother making all these claims of prior knowledge? It looks compulsive to me.