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Middle Eastern Studies

The New Neo Posted on by

Actually, we know what’s going on. Since the early 90s at least, the field has been captured by pro-Arab pro-Palestinian thinking and propaganda. It’s deeply embedded now and has been for a long time, producing generations of “scholars” with the same point of view, and students as well.

I believe this was jump-started by the highly influential Edward Said, about whom I plan to write quite a bit in a future post or posts. I first learned about him around the time I started blogging, which was almost twenty years ago, but although I’ve mentioned him before I don’t think I’ve ever written anything in-depth.

Comments

Middle Eastern Studies — 43 Comments

  1. From Jeff Goldstein’s piece “How Dare Jew?”:

    This is who and what they are — and the leftists and university activists and waffling media outlets and “world leaders” who sympathize with this animal behavior are complicit in it, providing it cover thru the twin Cultural Marxists poisons of “power imbalance” and the Otherness trope of Edward Said’s Orientalism, which elevates the supposedly marginalized to positions of undeserved power by using “victimhood” as an excuse for every special dispensation and every vile act they lay claim to.

    There are no purely “intellectual” allies to the “Palestinian cause.” There are only evil people who are able to use sophistry and intersectional leftism to justify their deep-seeded hatred of Jews.

    https://jeffgoldstein.substack.com/p/how-dare-jew

  2. YES. I believe Jamie Glazov best surveyed this with “United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror.” But several other authors have focused on scholarly corruption like David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes

    And it typically involves Edward Said if not front and Center. Ibn Warraq wrote one book just to refute and repel Said.

    But back to Glazov: “United in Hate analyzes the Left’s contemporary romance with militant Islam as a continuation of the Left’s love affair with communist totalitarianism in the twentieth century. Just as the Left was drawn to the communist killing machines of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Castro, so too it is now attracted to radical Islam. Both the radical Left and radical Islam possess a profound hatred for Western culture, for a capitalist economic structure that recognizes individual achievement and for the Judeo-Christian heritage of the United States.” Yup, pretty much.

    Daniel Pipes web site: https://www.danielpipes.org/#!

  3. I remember when I was in grad school in the nineties. MESA was at best hostile towards Israel and Jewish Studies. (We had our own, the Association for Jewish Studies.) the State Department helped foment it — they provided fellowships for graduate studies in pretty much EVERY area BUT Hebrew and Israel. It also meant that MESA got federal money that AJS did not. And it helped in the crowding out of Hebrew and Islarei Studies form “Middle East Studies Departments.” Most Hebrew and Israel studies courses became part of the Jewish studies departments, leaving the Middle East Studies Department. this happened at my undergraduate school and where I got my master’s degree.

  4. News flash, Steven: I figured this out a long time ago, when I was college freshman. And I’m no genius. My cumulative score on the SAT was just a smidge under 1200. (It was the math that did me in.)

  5. Inter-disciplinary majors are bad business and should be discontinued.
    ==
    You might have an areal specialist in one or another department (history, political science, anthropology, sociology, art history, world literature), but it would be a rare department where you had sufficient manpower to delineate a concentration within a major (much less a full major) in the study of that areal aspect of the discipline in question.
    ==
    Martin Kramer among others was writing about problems in the study of the Near East, North Africa, and Central Asia twenty years ago. His description of the MELAC department at Columbia: “A train wreck of friend hires friend”.

  7. …Keeping in mind that Germany from 1914-1918, and also post-war, was claimed (by the usual suspects) to be a victim of da Jews—especially after 1933….
    ==
    You’re overthinking this. He’s another parody academic hired because Cornell’s faculty and administration (and the graduate programs from which they recruit) are mad for blacks as decorative pieces. They don’t much care if they’re cranks, dolts, or head cases. If we didn’t live in clown world, you’d have about 45,000 (FTE) black professors in the U.S., they’d be split evenly between the arts and sciences faculty and the occupational schools, they’d be lodged at institutions where their research prowess was similar to that of their colleagues, and the share of them who were screwballs and weirdos would be similar to that among the non-black faculty.

  9. As you research Said for your future posts you’ll no doubt come across his nemesis Bernard Lewis. I had the good fortune of attending a lecture he did here in Chicago. Now there was a brilliant man.

  11. Mike Plaiss:

    That’s how I came across Said in the first place, through Lewis. I found Lewis shortly after 9/11. Posts that mention him are here.

  12. Steve is a friend of mine. He’s plugged in. He’s also not a bomb thrower.

    There’s something to his request.

  13. how about Rashid khalidi, a frequent interlocutor with obama, as per Said, who I recall was born in Cairo, back in the time of the British mandate there, not Jerusalem, who went to Victoria College, the leading public school there, he thought he could disabuse islamists of their strongly held beliefs, no they weren’t interest,

  15. LATimes still hasn’t released that video. It’s buried as deeply as Barry’s college and university records.

  16. The entrenched Anti-Semitism in Western academia “was jump-started by the highly influential Edward Said”.

    Influence is gained when it feeds what people want to believe. Politicians rely upon it.

  17. “…buried…”
    “Influence is gained when it feeds what people what to believe…”

    Everything you didn’t want to know about Obama but were afraid to ask…
    (And I mean EVERYTHING….)
    Make of this neo-gonzo—but-everything-is-connected—interview what you will.
    (This magnum opus of political megalomania pulls up so much unknown history, goes through so many hoops and covers so many bases that one shudders to think what it all really means…that is, if it means anything at all—which is most ironic since it purports dig deep, and then some—to be an uber-profound, in-depth explication of the Obama “phenomenon”; meanwhile the “Great Man’s” atmospherics are as nauseating as they are bizarrely fascinating….)
    “The Obama Factor;
    “A Q&A with historian David Garrow
    “BY DAVID SAMUELS”—-
    https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/david-garrow-interview-obama

  18. Honestly, I’d take it a step further: let’s shutdown every single academic disciple with ‘Studies’ in the title. Defund them, fire all of the faculty (the tenured ones will get golden parachutes but whatever), label all their publications as ‘misinformation’ and attach a warning label to every diploma awarded in these fields.

    No, I’m not ‘anti-intellectual’. I’m anti-pseudointellectual’, and anti-academic BS propagandist-grifter. And I make no apologies for that.

  19. neo—You are right on target, and the leftist takeover of Middle Eastern Studies really took off with the allegations and reframing job done by supposed “Palestinian “ Edward Said and his book “Orientalism.”

    Once this leftist takeover got rolling it wasn’t long before all of the former experts on the Middle East and Islam—some rather eccentric, many self-taught, and with their expertise and language abilities gained through many years or decades working in and observing in various ME nations—were pushed out of Academia, and their books, ideas, and usually very uncomplimentary evaluations of
    Islam and Muslims discarded.

  20. @ Snow > “Once this leftist takeover got rolling it wasn’t long before all of the former experts on the Middle East and Islam…were pushed out of Academia, and their books, ideas, and usually very uncomplimentary evaluations of
    Islam and Muslims discarded.”

    And this sterile monoculture was then called “diversity.”

  22. Not getting it. Went to college in mid-late Sixties. There were the usual lefties, SDS and so forth. But they got their information from various places. Not necessarily lefty profs.

    But, as I recall, for the great, great majority of the rest of us, we didn’t take the prof’s word as gold. Okay. He said it. It will likely be on the test. So what?

    There were anti-war profs but their successes came because of the nature of their converts…didn’t know squat and wanted to be on the side of the ostentatiously just and righteous. Wasn’t a matter of a blank slate converted.

    Even the SDS didn’t claim that killing peasants was a Good Thing when the VC did it. Either it didn’t happen or the peasants started it. They may have thought the peasants got what they deserved, but they knew it would be a bad idea to say so out loud.

    Not getting it.

  23. @ Barry > calls “A ‘Low Dishonest’ Reference” thin gruel, but I think it rates higher.

    I found the post by Podhoretz to be interesting for the history of Auden’s poem (the “reference”) because the poet repented and effectively cancelled it in his own collections, as it had originally expressed support for Germany in 1939.
    To have people now using it to excuse Hamas is high irony.
    The Palestinian Allies are calling their own side Nazis.

    https://www.commentary.org/john-podhoretz/a-low-dishonest-reference/

    Walt has now done us a favor, inadvertently, with a tweet he wrote over the weekend because it provides a window into the true nature of the intellectual and spiritual rot of which he is a perfect exemplar.

    Here it is: “Re the shocking and depressing events of the weekend, I am reminded once again of W.H. Auden: ‘I and the public know/What all schoolchildren learn,/Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return.’”

    This is a quotation from a poem called “September 1, 1939?—and thereby hangs a tale of intellectual sophistry and intellectual growth.

    W.H. Auden wrote it in the days following Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
    …
    The Germans who had just invaded Poland were the ones to whom evil was done [via the Versailles Treaty], so they were now just going to give it back as good as they got it.

    From the perspective of 2023, this is obviously an indefensible, even despicable point of view.
    …
    Auden was very much a man of his intellectual moment, contemptuous of bourgeois democracy for its mediocrity and the social injustice of its economic policies. He and Keynes were friends. One way in which they differed was Auden’s deep Christian belief, which he sought to dovetail with his leftist politics.

    Thus, his poem’s answer to the problem raised by World War II: “We must love one another or die.”

    Well, no. In truth, what had to happen after 9/1/39 was that the West had to love life enough to kill off the twin evils of Fascism and Japanese imperialism so that the world could survive.

    And you know who also came to believe that? W.H. Auden.

    Not too soon after he wrote the poem, his brilliant biographer and literary executor Edward Mendelson tells us in his book Later Auden, he had a profound change of heart. Mendelson writes: “As early as 1944 he had abandoned the stanza…that ended, ‘We must love one another or die.’ This line was more widely quoted and admired than perhaps anything else in his work…and in 1957 he told a fellow poet, ‘Between you and me, I loathe that poem.’”

    He began to refuse to allow it to be anthologized, and when a friend of his complained he was making his most memorable poem invisible in this way, Auden responded, “if, by memorability, you mean a poem like September 1, 1939, I pray to God that I shall never be memorable again.”

    The moral relativism that suffused Auden’s poem and reaction to the invasion of Poland is perfectly and precisely mirrored today by people like Stephen Walt, who quote words Auden himself came to view with contempt and shame.
    …
    W.H. Auden was a great poet. More telling, he was a man who was able to deepen and grow in response to real-world events. Stephen Walt is an intellectual mediocrity whose name will be lost forever the second he passes this mortal coil, never to be remembered. Unless, that is, as an example of the kind of low, dishonest thought-worker who sees good and calls it evil— and sees evil and weeps over the supposed injustice being done to it.

  24. Well, yes, of course, you’re right….
    (But “thin” in the sense that it might have a chance in hell of persuading Walt or anyone of his ilk of their meretricious views.)

  26. And in a nutshell…:
    “Why won’t the Jews just let themselves be killed?
    “Nothing better captures the moral decay of our woke elites than their haughty disdain for the State of Israel.”—
    https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/10/16/why-wont-the-jews-just-let-themselves-be-killed/
    H/T Powerline blog.
    Nonetheless also, alas, “thin gruel” if the stalwart and crystal-clear-eyed Brendan O’Neill—no matter how brilliant—believes he will be able to persuade anyone of anything….
    …Since the forces of evil have been unleashed world-wide; and the ensuing global orgy of sheer hate is being feted, fostered, promoted, encouraged and savored throughout…as the usual suspects smell blood…and are filled not only with “passionate intensity” but with hopeful ecstacy…

  29. I’m here touting the WSJ again. Editorials by Eugene Kontorovich on war crimes, or the lack thereof, Walter Russell Mead on the diabolical Iran deal, Ruth Wisse on the history of anti-Zionism, and one by the WSJ editorial board are all fantastic, and in one newspaper on a single day. If you can pick up a copy, please do.

  32. Mike Plaiss, I continue to subscribe to the WSJ so I can read the editorial page. I don’t always agree with them, but it’s one place which publishes a variety of opinion by influential people, and one place which doesn’t hesitate to publish opinions contrary to the leftist religion, whether on climate, crime, Jew-hating, or radicals of all kinds.

    Their news coverage leans left, but not nearly as heavily as, say, the AP.

  34. It is totally clear that leftists do not care one iota about who or how people get exterminated / killed.
    What they care about is WHO does the killing.
    If it is leftists that do the killing, then the murders / killings are rarely mentioned and quickly swept under the carpet.
    Recall how Chomsky spent years jumping thru his ass trying to show how Pol Pot was really a nice guy. And how often is the Cambodian genocide mentioned?
    Not one complaint from lefties when East Germans, trying to escape into West Berlin were shot in the back and left to die upon the barbed wire.
    Rarely is it mentioned how Stalin’s policies led to the deaths of about 50 MILLION souls. Instead, we had here in the USA an extensive spy network, spying on behalf of Stalin.
    Mao’s polices led to the deaths of about 70 Million; yep, not one peep from the geniuses that populate the institutions of “higher” learning.
    Castro and his best murderous pal, Che, can murder thousands – and that is just fine for leftists, and yes, no trial needed – the victims deserved those bullets..

    Yet if the killers are not of the left, well, there is no condemnation nor punishment severe enough that can be meted out to the killers.

    Mass murder is mass murder; but not for leftists. For leftists, there is “good” mass murder, and “bad” mass murder; you have to break some eggs to make that omelette.

    Does anybody really believe that if Israel had been a loyal ally of the USSR, beginning in 1948, that leftists in the USA or anywhere, would be raising any objections at all to anything that Israel did to defend itself??

    One thing this recent conflict has brought to the fore is it has firmly established which individuals and institutions have a Nazi like, murderous mindsets. They have no compunction supporting and cheering for those terrorists that revel in murdering babies and children.
    If given the opportunity, they themselves would personally carry out killings if it suits their ideology. And the victims can easily be you or me; our mere existence is anathema to these execrable almost-human vipers..

    These individuals that are not yet citizens should be deported, and those that are citizens should be strongly encouraged to permanently leave (make them an offer they can’t refuse) the USA and force them to renounce their citizenship.

    Woodrow Wilson’s administration conducted the Palmer Raids in 1919 and 1920, in which trouble makers (e.g., leftists, communists, socialists, anarchists) were deported and sent back to their homeland (mostly Russia and Eastern Europe). So there is precedent to remove trouble makers and send them back to the shit holes they came from.
    We can start with members of “The Squad.”

    By the way, Gaza has over a 20 mile stretch of Mediterranean sea shore on their western border. The Gazans could have created a world class resort along that shoreline that would have brought in massive tourism (and $$$$$) that would have benefited all Gazans.
    But no siree !!! Better to spend money building tunnels, buying guns and spend money training terrorists.

  35. Sounds like zerohedge Tyler needs his nappies changed.

    Someone at The Telegraph likes a book critical of George Orwell, from a karen’s perspective, not exactly top of the fold significant news.

  36. Why they’re almost as funny as…”Biden”!!!
    ‘ China & Russia Criticize Israel As Putin Arrives In Beijing To Deepen Ties With “Dear Friend” Xi ‘—
    https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/china-russia-criticize-israel-putin-arrives-beijing-deepen-ties-dear-friend-xi
    Key punchlines:
    ‘…Over the weekend China’s foreign ministry blasted Israel’s actions as collective punishment against Palestinians.
    ‘ “Israel’s actions have gone beyond self-defense and it should heed the call of the international community and the Secretary-General of the United Nations to stop its collective punishment of the people in Gaza,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi told his Saudi Arabia counterpart Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud in a Sunday call.
    ‘ In a separate call he told Turkey’s FM: “The exercise of the right of self-defense should abide by international humanitarian law and should not be at the expense of innocent civilian casualties.”
    ‘ As for Putin, he’s expressed “his sincere condolences to the families and friends of the deceased Israelis,” while also warning against the potential for further “catastrophe” for civilians in the Gaza Strip. “What matters now is to stop the bloodshed”….’

  37. @ Barry > “Victor D. Hanson with a few, er, questions for the Talented Mr. “Biden”…”

    One of VDH’s best – his post covers the gamut of the Left’s open admissions of “This is who we really are.”
    I hope his prediction of devolution by way of disgust comes true, but suspect that most of the despicables have enough funding & support to disappear briefly until they can be rebranded.

    https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/16/our-post-hamas-wreckage/

    Note to new readers: at least half of ZeroHedge’s posts are just cut-and-paste copies with a link to the source. If the author purports to be “Tyler Durden,” then the content is original to ZH.

  38. How do you say crocodile tears in russian dubrovka where they gassed the theatre to kill the chechens

  39. In re Walt quoting Auden:
    “So much that passes for intellectualism today is simply built around remembering something you learned as a freshman in college, out of context.”
    Posted at 9:35 am by Glenn Reynolds

  41. The thing about Said’s theory is that people are still practicing orientalism and colonialism, quite vigorously, and it’s very deeply embedded in the modern political, media and academic systems, and many of the patronized objects of this orientalism and colonialism go along with it enthusiastically. Entire nations and “nations” of people. They project/deflect their sins onto everyone else, of course.

  42. “Their [WSJ] news coverage leans left, but not nearly as heavily as, say, the AP.”

    Kate, in my view they are nearly or even as bad. Their “news” coverage of Israel has been heavily slanted against Israel. One of their chief Middle East correspondents is the abominable Dion Nissenbaum. Nissenbaum once wrote a disgusting fawning article about his shmoozing with the terrorist Samir Kuntar who murdered a 4-year old Jewish girl by smashing her head with a rock.

  43. W.H. Auden was a great poet. More telling, he was a man who was able to deepen and grow in response to real-world events. Stephen Walt is an intellectual mediocrity whose name will be lost forever the second he passes this mortal coil, never to be remembered.

    You were right the first time.

    Thin gruel … given the weighty crisis of the moment.

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