Category: Sandbox

Meet an anti-Israel agitator

On By Martin Kramer

Yesterday the Los Angeles Times ran an op-ed by Saree Makdisi, a professor of English lit at UCLA. The headline: “Neocons Lay Siege to the Ivory Towers.” The bottom line: there’s a neocon conspiracy against academe, the result of an unholy alliance between conservatives and Zionists.

Since Makdisi threw in my name too, combining an insult with an error, I sent off a response to the paper. I have no idea whether they’ll publish it, but having a website means you always get the last word, so here it is:

Dear Editor,

Saree Makdisi (“Neocons Lay Siege to the Ivory Towers,” May 4) purports to establish a linkage between the state-level “Academic Bill of Rights” (SB5 in California), and the federal-level International Studies in Higher Education Act (HR3077 in the last Congress). After falsely associating the two (and calling me a “pro-Israel agitator”), he claims that I am “among the active proponents of the ‘bill of rights’ legislation at the state level.”

This is false. I have never expressed any opinion on the “bill of rights” legislation, and I am not a proponent, active or otherwise, of such legislation.

I have actively supported the International Studies in Higher Education Act (reintroduced in the new Congress as HR509), which Makdisi misrepresents. He quotes the bill to the effect that it would make federally-funded academic programs in area studies “better reflect the national needs related to homeland security.” In fact, the bill speaks much more broadly of improving programs to “better reflect the national needs related to homeland security, international education, and international affairs.” All Americans recognize the need for improvement of our performance in security, education (including foreign languages), and diplomacy. The proposed legislation would encourage just that.

As a professor of English, Mr. Makdisi should be a model of precision and a bulwalk against selective quotation. Alas, as an anti-Israel agitator (in the manner of his uncle, the late Edward Said), he suppresses the truth, and blames the resulting falsehoods on Israel.

Martin Kramer

For evidence that Makdisi is an anti-Israel agitator, read his essay written in memory of Edward Said. It includes this mind-boggling claim: Israel has “actualized all the logics, apparatuses, discourses, and practices associated with the worst, the ugliest, the most violent and draconian forms of European racism.” Read that sentence again. It says that Israel is a Nazi state; it cannot be read any other way. In another essay, arguing for divestment, Makdisi says Palestinians are shot “for stone throwing, for writing, for thinking, and practically just for being Palestinian.”

Makdisi’s white-knuckle fanaticism is actually closer to the line of Joseph Massad than to Edward Said. The difference is that Columbia pays Massad to teach his grievance, whereas Makdisi holds down a day job teaching English romanticism and Blake. But take note: Makdisi is writing his Palestine book, so prepare yourself by reading both essays–war propaganda bordering on hate speech. They don’t leave any doubt just who’s an agitator.

By the way, Makdisi already has a reputation for playing fast and loose with the truth in op-eds. The LA Times had to publish a correction to an op-ed he did back in November, and which retailed falsehoods about Israel’s security barrier. Any other author might have been banned for that, but when you’re papabile in the Saidian church, people are prepared to look the other way. So they keep publishing him. Will the LA Times clean up the mistakes in Makdisi’s latest performance? Will it publish my letter? We’ll see.

Update, May 7: The LA Times has published my letter, in an abbreviated form. The record has been set straight on the matter of legislation.

Bad Mamdani

On By Martin Kramer

Saturday I caught the end of an Ann Arbor lecture by Mahmood Mamdani, Columbia’s Herbert Lehman Professor of Government. (It was carried by BookTV.) Mamdani is the author of a book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, which is a recitation of the usual shibboleths. He’s another extremist, a 1970s-vintage Marxist, who’d taught in Uganda and South Africa until he somehow managed to slip past the somnolent gatekeepers at Columbia. I suspect Edward Said had something to do with it, and he certainly helped to place Mamdani’s book with Pantheon, Said’s commercial publisher. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim has sold well probably, as Mamdani admits, because it has a stealth title. (People think it’s some sort of guide to who the terrorists are. John Esposito pulled the same marketing trick some years back with a book titled The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?)

Mamdani is an entirely derivative thinker, so his book and public lectures naturally begin with the ritual stoning of Bernard Lewis. There isn’t anything here that isn’t from the standard-issue kit. But in his Ann Arbor talk, he broke new ground, and my jaw dropped. Here is Mamdani, responding to a question: “Bernard Lewis is not really a historian. To the extent he is a historian, he is a historian of Turkey, but not of the Middle East.”

This is a statement of blazing ignorance, practically unparalleled in post-Orientalist annals and that’s saying a lot. Mamdani obviously hasn’t a clue about the place of Lewis in the historiography of the Middle East, which suggests to me that he’s flying on empty when it comes to Middle Eastern history generally. So for his edification, I link to an assessment of Lewis as a historian, by R. Stephen Humphreys, published fifteen years ago in Humanities.

Ah, the mediocrity of it all.

Searching for Israel in all the wrong places

On By Martin Kramer

Last month, Columbia University announced with much fanfare that it would establish a chair of Israel studies. Four generous trustees threw in $3 million to make it happen—and to help extricate the university from its crisis. Michael Stanislawski, a professor of Jewish history, will conduct the search. The New York Sun reported today that the search committee has been formed. When the reporter read me the names, I burst out laughing.

The committee includes Ira Katznelson, chair of the ad hoc (a.k.a. “whitewash”) committee that investigated student grievances; Dan Miron, a long-suffering Hebrew lit professor in the Middle East department; and Karen Barkey, an authority on the Ottoman empire. So far, reasonable. But then add this to the mix: Rashid Khalidi, the ubiquitous Edward Said Professor; and lesser-known Lila Abu-Lughod, a Palestinian American anthropologist and signer and supporter of Columbia’s divestment petition. Abu-Lughod, who’s writing a book on the Palestinian experience in 1948, has just published a longing letter to the departed Professor Said. “I sit here on the earthen terrace with the sunset warming the pharaonic temple across the field, wondering how to carry on your work. The first step, I know, is to keep talking about Palestine.”

The inclusion of Khalidi and Abu-Lughod on the search committee is perverse. Edward Said used to complain that the Palestinians needed “permission to narrate” their story. At Columbia, the situation is reversed: Israel can’t be narrated without the permission of the great Palestinian mandarins. They must be appeased, satisfied, propitiated.

And we know what price they will exact. The incumbent of the new chair must be someone who freely acknowledges Israel’s sins, perhaps even its original sin. It must be someone at home in the self-excoriating world of post-Zionism. It must be someone willing to consider, in all seriousness, whether the “one-state solution” is the only one left—what is called in the code “Israel/Palestine.” (Perhaps that should be the designation of the chair: Israel/Palestine studies.)

There will be plenty of willing and able candidates. Israeli universities are teeming with academics who fit the bill, and who’ve taken their oaths to Saint Edward. The search hasn’t formally begun, but some hopefuls have already floated their names to friends at Columbia. Did you really believe that the great mafia on Morningside Heights would cede any of its home turf without a fight? These people are militants, and they fight for every inch as though the world depended on it. I’m not going to guess how the battle for the Israel chair will end, but it will leave bloodstains on the upholstery, and it will perpetuate Columbia’s crisis right through the next academic year.

The affair also raises the larger question of whether Israel studies are the answer to the problems at Columbia or anywhere. Last month, the Forward did a piece on the drive for Israel studies on campuses, quoting its various boosters. I was the sole dissenter. “The answer to flawed Middle Eastern studies,” I was quoted as saying, “isn’t Israel studies, it’s better Middle Eastern studies.”

Without broader change, the malaise of Middle Eastern studies is bound to infect Israel studies. Last year I showed how Berkeley’s Said-set took funds given by pro-Israel donors for visiting Israeli professors, and hijacked them to serve post-Zionist purposes. They did it by rigging the selection committee. (“Anyone with experience in academic administration,” I wrote back then, “will tell you that most battles are won or lost by the selection of committee members.” Memorize that sentence.) Here and there, it may be possible to protect an Israel studies position, by burying it deep in an isolated Jewish studies program. But who wants to go down there? That really is “fortress Israel,” and it doesn’t do anything to improve the lot of students with broader interests, who are left with holy rollers like Joseph Massad and Hamid Dabashi.

So I don’t rejoice every time some heavily padded chair in Israel studies gets planted in the sand. I will rejoice when the entire public begins to understand that America (and not just Israel) deserves better. Low Library isn’t home to the kind of courage it takes to change the big context. The U.S. Capitol just might be.

Back at Columbia, I do look forward to the adventures of Professor Stanislawski, skipper of the search committee, as he tries to steer his boat while members of the crew row furiously in different directions. Of course, he’s busy giving assurances that only “academic qualities” will determine the outcome of the search. (He’s a precedent-setter.) Speaking to the Columbia Spectator on who might fit the chair, he promised an international search, and added: “It could be an American, Israeli, Australian, Austrian, Swede, a Palestinian.” I think he should be taken literally.

Then there are Bollinger’s trustees, whose money pads the chair. Let’s name them: David Stern, Mark Kingdon, Richard Witten, and Philip Milstein. However this ends up, the composition of the committee leaves them looking like cuckolds for the next year—and, possibly, forever. It’s an open question whether their current plight is tragic or comic. But whenever guys in master-tailored suits get taken for a ride by the tweed jacket gang, you’ve gotta chuckle. I do. It’s best to end where I ended my exposé of Berkeley last year: In academe, as in real estate, buyer beware.

• 2008 update: The chair has been filled. And guess what?