Tag: Middle East Studies Association

Profs Duped by Sami Al-Arian

On By Martin Kramer

In recent years, Sami Al-Arian has been a celebrity among Arab-Americans and American apologists for Islamism. Yes, Al-Arian, a Palestinian professor of computer engineering at the University of South Florida (USF), was suspected of close ties to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group specializing in suicide attacks against civilians in Israel. But the smooth-talking, professiorial family man countered that he was merely exercising his first amendment rights, and he covered himself in the banner of academic freedom. When USF sought his dismissal, the American Association of University Professors rallied to his cause. So did the United Faculty of Florida. All of them cast Arian as a pitiable victim of a smear campaign, and rained sympathy on him.

Well, the FBI arrested Al-Arian yesterday, charging him (and seven co-conspirators) with material support for a terrorist organization. Racketeering, conspiracy, extortion, perjury, obstruction, immigration fraud—it’s all there. The 50-count indictment makes riveting reading. That’s because it’s based on wiretaps of Al-Arian’s telephone and fax communications—the sort of material which, before 9/11, didn’t get into indictments. And those wiretaps show Al-Arian to have been involved up to his neck in Islamic Jihad’s finances, recruiting, and internal intrigues. The wiretaps, as summarized in the indictment one by one, offer a compelling portrait of a highly secretive conspirator, casually exploiting America’s protection to evade the law and fund terror. The actual transcripts will be even more damaging. Arian’s various defenders should be cringing in embarrassment, if they have even a shred of conscience.

Some of these boosters deserve particular scrutiny, because of their claim to clairvoyance in separating Islamist “moderates” from “extremists.” I refer to the Middle East “experts,” who purport to guide us through the labyrinth of Islamic movements, telling us who to fear and who to trust.

John Esposito, director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, has been Al-Arian’s most distinguished academic champion. Early last year, he wrote a letter to the president of USF, professing to be “stunned, astonished, and saddened” by moves to dismiss Al-Arian, whom he described as a “consummate professional.” The university had to resist the “pressures” of “biased, inflammatory” media. (Esposito specifically mentioned the journalist Steven Emerson, who was the first to establish Al-Arian’s links to Islamic Jihad.) USF’s actions would not only “reflect on the University’s reputation but also send a clear message to your students about what American democracy and academic freedom mean.” Last September, after another move to dismiss Al-Arian, Esposito cancelled a lecture appearance at USF, which he denounced as “a university that so clearly violates the academic freedom of one of its professors.” (Esposito has also employed Al-Arian’s daughter, a Georgetown undergraduate, as a research assistant.) It’s all confirmation of the obvious: Esposito never met a Muslim extremist he didn’t like.

Esposito has another, more remote connection to the case. He still sits on the board of a London institute run by his Hamas friend, Azzam Tamimi. Another board member, Basheer Nafi, was indicted yesterday along with Al-Arian. I urged Esposito to resign from this board back in September. How many more indictments will it take for Esposito to realize that he’s been running with funders and apologists for the worst suicide terrorism?

Other Middle East profs supported Al-Arian. The University of Maryland political scientist Louis Cantori complained to USF’s president that Al-Arian was being “pursued as a political radical. This he is not. Period.” Antony Sullivan, of the University of Michigan, wrote that Al-Arian “is a quintessential political moderate” and “a good man.” The list of these duped or duplicitous academics is long.

But the most embarrassing endorsement came from the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). Last year, its board wrote to the president of USF, dismissing accusations of Al-Arian’s terrorist involvement as “old and never-proven.” MESA announced that “the Al-Arian case is about academic freedom. It is also about the basic first amendment right to freedom of speech.” Odd: Al-Arian, a computer engineer, has never been a member of MESA, nor has he ever taught a course in Middle Eastern studies. So the statement was just another instance of gratuitous politicization by MESA’s radical busybodies, who would rather dabble in politics than attend to the degraded state of their field.

Al-Arian’s case is no longer about free speech, it’s about overt acts. It’s no longer between professors and administrators, it’s between prosecutors and attorneys. Al-Arian will have his day in court. But whatever the outcome, there’s no doubt that he isn’t the “consummate professional” and the “quintessential political moderate” of the “expert” testimonials. Bottom line: the Middle East scholars have failed—again.

The Incredible Shrinking MESA

On By Martin Kramer

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) will convene next weekend in Washington, for its annual conference. An article in the current issue of The Nation reports that “at its upcoming annual conference, MESA is expected to pass a resolution condemning Campus Watch, similar to the one it unanimously endorsed 18 years ago censuring the efforts of the ADL and AIPAC.” (The Anti-Defamation League and the pro-Israeli lobby AIPAC had issued campus guides that offended the guild.)

Without even asking my friends over at Campus Watch (a project I’ve endorsed), I can easily imagine their response: “Condemn us. Make our day.”

That wasn’t the attitude of the ADL and AIPAC, all those years ago. Their condemnation by MESA persuaded them to back off their name-naming of academics. So what has changed? Why has MESA’s opinion become worthless? Why will Campus Watch welcome a MESA condemnation as though it were an endorsement?

I’ve written a book about it, but the bottom line is this: Middle Eastern studies have become intellectually incestuous and thoroughly politicized. Eighteen years ago, MESA still had the aura of a professional association. Today its reputation lies somewhere between that of an ethnic lobby and a radical front. Eighteen years ago, MESA still counted respected founders of the field among its leaders. Today it is regarded as the plaything of a few masters of agitprop, exemplified by its current president. This is a MESA that made Edward Said one of its ten honorary fellows (“internationally recognized scholars who have made major contributions to Middle East studies”)—yet never got around to including Bernard Lewis. (For more MESA madness, see my MESA Culpa in the current issue of the Middle East Quarterly.)

I don’t intend to zap MESA in the Wall Street Journal on the eve of its conference (as I did last year). And I don’t go where I’m not welcomed. But I’m sure to get plenty of reports on the proceedings: the presidential address, the plenary, and the business meeting. If there is any good hearsay, you’ll hear it from me.

And since I’ve mentioned an article in The Nation (a piece that misrepresents my views), here’s a postscript. The previous time my name figured in its pages, in 1996, Edward Said blacklisted me. “What matters to ‘experts’ like [Judith] Miller, Samuel Huntington, Martin Kramer, Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Steven Emerson and Barry Rubin, plus a whole battery of Israeli academics, is to make sure that the [Islamic] ‘threat’ is kept before our eyes.” That’s seven at one blow. Since this is the most Professor Said has ever managed to say about my arguments, it seems to me that MESA ought to investigate. I’m waiting for their call.

MESA: Nothing Learned, Nothing Forgotten

On By Martin Kramer

A Washington friend has rushed ahead of me, reading through the program of the next annual conference of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). That conference will meet at the end of November in Washington. (Every third year, the meeting takes place in the nation’s capital, in order to demonstrate the health of Middle Eastern studies to government funders.) This is what my friend discovered:

I read through the MESA conference program. Amazingly, they still haven’t learned—not even enough to cover their tracks. The words “al-Qaeda” and “Osama bin Laden” are nowhere to be found. The word “terrorism” is either between quotation marks or in the context of “Arab Responses to America’s War on Terrorism.” Not a single panel on suicide bombings, the impact of Wahhabism, or the ideological roots of Osama. These people are still spending their time on “Sex, Gender and Family Structures in Modernizing Projects of the Early 20th Century” and “Perspectives on Today’s Middle East Textile Industry”—nail-biters all! You would think the smart people in this business would have led an in-house corrective movement, to forestall another attack. But evidently they either didn’t try or were rebuffed.

Now no one can object to lectures on clothes and sex. And reading through the program, I confess that many of the more obscure subjects appeal to my antiquarian tastes. But there is very little in this program to justify the notion that Middle Eastern studies serve the national interest, or that they deserve the massive increase in federal funding authorized by Congress last January. Given the fact that the conference is meeting in Washington, the omissions are even more striking.

Journalists should read the program as an invitation to find out whether anything has changed at MESA since Franklin Foer wrote his devastating New Republic piece on last year’s conclave in San Francisco. To the extent that the program reflects the research priorities approved by the mandarins of Middle Eastern studies, the answer would appear to be a resounding “no.”