Sandbox by Martin Kramer

Coming to Columbia

Martin Kramer — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:17:00 GMT

For those who have Columbia University ID's, I will be lecturing on Monday evening, November 16, on "How Not to Fix the Middle East" at the invitation of the Columbia University International Relations Forum (CUIRF). The lecture will take place at the Roone Arledge Lerner Cinema on the Columbia campus, 2920 Broadway, at 8pm. It's to be preceded by a reception at 7:15pm.

In the CUIRF web announcement, I was surprised to see it suggested that I and Prof. Jack Snyder, my moderator, "may also discuss his [Kramer's] critique of the MEALAC program at Columbia." At the Columbia Bwog, this grows larger in the telling: "Martin Kramer will also most likely be discussing the Joseph Massad tenure, and his critique of other MEALAC Professors at Columbia."

It is not likely. I intend to adhere to my lecture topic.

Shalem College takes off

Martin Kramer — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:34:00 GMT

I've been tapped to serve as the president-designate of Shalem College, Israel's first liberal arts college, which will go from plan to reality over the next three years. Elliot Jager, editorial page editor of the Jerusalem Post, interviewed me about the College for the Friday magazine. Here is that interview, which ran under the headline: "A progressive first from a conservative think tank."

Ask Martin Kramer if spearheading the country's first liberal arts college isn't a daunting - maybe unachievable - goal in these hard times, and he invokes the name of his old friend Prof. Zvi Yavetz.

The venerable historian, Kramer tells me, was part of a small group of scholars who helped to found Tel Aviv University, ex nihilo, in the 1950s. They gave their lectures in makeshift classrooms in Abu Kabir. As Kramer heard it, the vision of creating a world-class university, on a par with the already-existing Hebrew University of Jerusalem, that would teach everything from music to physics was hashed out by Yavetz and his contemporaries as they worked away "in miserable shacks." Kramer quotes Yavetz: "Students who were later to become great professors sat on first graders' chairs."

Relative to Yavetz, Kramer has certain advantages. All he is trying to do is bring to fruition a small liberal arts college that, if everything goes according to plan, will one day have an enrollment of 1,000 students. And he is doing it at the behest of Jerusalem's powerhouse Shalem Center.

EJ: Where did the idea of a college come from?

Kramer: The idea has been an aspiration of Shalem since the center's inception. In a way, the Shalem Center was the interim framework established until a kind of critical mass and reputation were achieved that would allow this step.

THE 55-year-old president-designate of Shalem College, who spent 25 years at Tel Aviv University as a scholar of Middle East Studies, has made a name for himself outside academia as well, with the publication of Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America - a book which argued that many Middle East departments on US campuses had abandoned serious scholarship to become trendy bastions of shoddy research and anti-Western bias.

When Edward Said, the late Columbia University English professor who became an indefatigable advocate of the Palestinian Arab cause, challenged the scholarship of Bernard Lewis, Kramer's dissertation adviser and the doyen of Western Middle East experts, Kramer went on the offensive. He initiated a campaign to depoliticize and re-professionalize university Middle East Studies departments wherever they had fallen under the ideological sway of Said's followers.

A native of Silver Spring, Maryland, Kramer first visited Israel on a summer program in 1970. He returned to study at Tel Aviv University between 1971 and 1973 where Itamar Rabinovich - who went on to become TAU president - took him under his wing. Kramer returned to the States to complete his BA at Princeton, an MA at Columbia and a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies back at Princeton.

The Shalem-Princeton connection runs deep. The center was founded 15 years ago by a group of Princetonians, among them Yoram Hazony and Daniel Polisar. Over the years other Princeton grads, including Michael Oren - and now Kramer - gravitated to Shalem. Original financial backing for Shalem came from philanthropists Ronald Lauder and the late Zalman Bernstein. The Tikvah Fund, Bernstein's creation, remains the center's leading supporter.

Separately, Sheldon Adelson provided initial support for Natan Sharansky's institute within Shalem.

By 1981, Kramer had made aliya and, with backing from Rabinovich, joined the TAU faculty. He spent 25 years at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, eventually becoming its director. Kramer has been a visiting scholar at Harvard, Brandeis, Cornell and other prestigious institutions abroad. He is also a former editor of the Middle East Quarterly and maintains a long-standing relationship with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Kramer lives in Ra'anana with his wife of 31 years, Sandra, a physical therapist whom he first met in high school - "though we didn't start dating until much later," he said. The couple has three children.

Kramer and I met over a lunch of bagels and tuna at the Shalem Center's posh offices in Jerusalem's trendy Emek Refaim neighborhood. Joining us was Cambridge-educated Suzanne Balaban, Shalem's vice president for communications.

WHEN HE first came to Tel Aviv University in the early '70s, Kramer reminisced, Middle East specialists were held in especially high esteem.

"In those days, you didn't have Israeli academics, journalists and diplomats traveling about the Arab world," he said. Scholars who were fluent in Arabic - he named Shimon Shamir, Rabinovich and Haim Shaked as examples - became iconic figures. Israeli newspapers featured their interpretations of events in the Arab world.

Paradoxically, Kramer lamented, the ability of Israeli Middle East experts to illuminate what was happening in Arab and Muslim civilization diminished even as more of them began to travel to neighboring countries - in part because the newer generation of experts was more narrowly educated. Remedying this now-endemic pedagogical deficiency is one of the motivations driving Shalem College.

"We are not talking about creating an alternative education system," Kramer explained, "but of providing an additional option."

He cited his personal experience: "In my first year at Tel Aviv University, with a dual major in Middle Eastern Studies and East Africa, I had no Jewish history, no Western philosophy; I studied Swahili and I studied Christianity in Egypt and Ethiopia - which were required courses. Later, when I arrived in Princeton, I discovered my cohorts had spent this time broadening their knowledge base."

SIMILARLY, an often myopic educational experience, Kramer argued, has created a generation of Israeli leaders who may know how to get things done, but have forgotten why they should bother.

In contrast, the country's founding generation had a more rounded intellectual experience and was thus well-versed in Jewish and world history, said Kramer. "Go visit David Ben-Gurion's personal library in Tel Aviv and you can get an idea of the range of his knowledge and reading. Israelis were being called upon to make sacrifices. And they needed leaders who could explain where they had been and where they were going."

Kramer paused and unfolded a handwritten quotation that he'd copied from an interview given by former prime minister Ehud Olmert to Haaretz and read it to me: "If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights [among Palestinians in Judea and Samaria], then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished."

Kramer appeared quietly incensed. He said, "I thought to myself, well, certainly the early Zionist leaders knew that there was a tremendous demographic disadvantage. They were very much tilting against reality on the ground, and yet they didn't despair. Because they knew something, I think, through their reading of history that perhaps this particular leader didn't know. That history is not a straight line."

He refolded the paper.

Israel's founders "would have rejected the idea that our fate is a function of whether the Palestinian Arabs organize a state - 'If they fail, we're finished.' Our founders had an understanding of the twists and turns of world and of Jewish history, and in the ways they intersected, and in the unexpected opportunities that history provides."

EJ: But is Olmert wrong?

Kramer: His more linear reading comes from a shallower understanding of the human condition. Maybe it makes sense to a lawyer, but I think leadership requires people who are prepared to see the opportunities and not to see only the dead ends.

EJ: And with the new liberal arts college, you are setting out to create a cadre of future leaders who see opportunities; a new elite that puts the collective good first?

Kramer: That is a fair characterization.

For the challenges ahead, said Kramer, Israel needs a skilled military, a strong economic base and highly trained technocrats. Leaders of Israel's hi-tech sector recognized the need to produce thousands of engineers a year, Kramer noted, "and the system geared up to do just that."

"But where are we going to produce that cadre of 100, 150, 250 people a year with a holistic view, who will be prepared for any eventuality and the sense of responsibility in going forward?" Kramer asked.

"I am a great admirer of Israel's universities," he allowed. But they are focused, he said, on competing to enter the rankings of the top 50 universities in the world. That leads them to bolster the hard sciences and emphasize faculty research while essentially demoting the humanities and teaching, which count for less in rankings.

With the energies of university administrations invested elsewhere, "there tends to be less attention paid to what goes on in the humanities and social sciences until someone in one of the departments writes an outrageous op-ed in some American newspaper that casts Israel in a bad light and attracts negative attention onto their university," said Kramer.

TO PREPARE its students for leadership, Kramer told me, Shalem College will take a holistic approach in its curriculum and admissions policies. The language of instruction will be Hebrew, though students will be expected to be articulate in English, too. Kramer is not certain whether applicants will need to take the dreaded psychometric exam, but he's adamant that it will not be the primary selection criterion: "We will look at the applicant's entire record." Following the US model, about two-thirds of the student body will receive some form of scholarship.

Whether they specialize in Middle East Studies or in a combined program in philosophy, political theory and religion - other majors will be added over time - all students will be expected to master the same core curriculum that Kramer considers essential for a "learned person" aspiring to leadership of this country. It will run the gamut from Plato to Keynes, from the Hebrew Bible to Hobbes.

Though Israeli universities are now also adopting the core-courses principle into their existing curriculum, Kramer insisted that Shalem's requirements would be the "most extensive and comprehensive" in the country. Their content "will also be unique, and reflect what Shalem values in Jewish and other traditions."

To accomplish its mission, the college will be demanding the devotion of its enrollees for four years, compared to the usual three-year commitment required of undergraduates at Israeli universities.

EJ: To get off the ground, Shalem College will need to be accredited by The Israel Council for Higher Education. You are proposing to create an unabashedly Zionist institution. Israel's intelligentsia is riddled with post-Zionists. Do you anticipate any problems?

Kramer: Ours is not a political project that is in some way different from the enterprise of the State of Israel itself. I was struck that the president of Ben-Gurion University recently felt it necessary to assert that her institution is "proudly Zionist." So I take it that it will not be counted as a strike against us that we see ourselves as a Zionist institution, too.

EJ: But might not the college be seen as too right-wing?

Kramer: There is no doubt that various departments in various Israeli universities are not in line with the country's mainstream. But I think we are where the mainstream is in Israel today. Zionism isn't Left or Right. It's a commitment to Israel as the national home of the Jewish people. We plan to bring together outstanding scholars who share that commitment.

KRAMER'S vision is of a college that puts teaching "first and foremost." Faculty will be top-notch, he promised, but the publish-or-perish obsession that dominates research universities will be banished from Shalem.

"The heart of any educational institution is its faculty. It's not the buildings. The students graduate. But what gives a university or college its flavor is the faculty. We have a core of people who will be making appointments, who have shared values and who know how to respect the best scholarship," said Kramer.

EJ: Shared values?

Kramer: We've seen that value-free scholarship has infiltrated from the sciences - where it makes some sense - into the humanities and social sciences, where it is corrosive. Shalem will be looking for faculty whose values commit them to the Jewish people and to the State of Israel - the vessel for Jewish survival.

Yet this will not be a school for the indoctrination of Zionism. When you look at our curriculum, you see that we don't actually come to the history of Israel until the second semester of the fourth year. Why? Because we think that the Zionist conclusion emerges only from the full reading of Jewish history and Western history and philosophy.

EJ: Will you be inviting scholars who disagree with the Shalem worldview to join the faculty?

Here Balaban interjected. "When I joined Shalem, I noticed that there was a glass door. On one side sat Natan Sharansky and Moshe Ya'alon, and on the other sat Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael Oren. They profoundly disagreed over the Gaza disengagement. But they were all welcome under our roof. A.B. Yehoshua has written for Shalem publications. Our culture is one of collegiality even when there is disagreement. There aren't many intellectual havens like that."

Kramer: I would note, too, that Yosef Gorny of Tel Aviv University, my former colleague, is chair of the appointments committee of our academic council. He's an iconic figure in Labor Zionism and its historiography.

Every institution molds its faculty. Not long ago, Columbia University established a chair in Israel studies. Two leading Palestinians were put on the search committee. Why? Because it was understood that while there could be a chair in Israel Studies at Columbia, it could not be held by someone who would negate the Palestinian narrative.

EJ: Would you say that's outrageous?

Kramer: I would say that is Columbia. Shalem College, I can assure you, will not become yet another home to scholars who have made their reputations by negating the Zionist and Israeli narrative.

KRAMER hopes Shalem's graduates will become leaders in journalism, politics, academia, the security establishment and the business world - "whatever their choice, they will be equipped well beyond their cohorts."

Balaban sees the college's role as a form of continued nation-building.

"The swamps have been drained," she said. "But in terms of the intellectual infrastructure of the country, there is still much to be done."

EJ: Where is the money for the college coming from?

Kramer: Well, the money will not come from the State of Israel. We will not ask for the usual per-student allocation. It will come from private sources in America, Europe and Israel.

EJ: Want to name names?

Kramer: We will name names when donors permit us to do so. We have a number of donors at a million dollars and above - including the Klarman family foundation of Boston and George and Pamela Rohr of New York.

EJ: But are you confident you'll have enough money?

Kramer: Yes, once we receive accreditation from Israel's Council For Higher Education. We expect to open our doors in 2012. We are just launching a campaign which will take us through our first four years of college operations and also help create an endowment. We are obviously closer to the beginning than the end. I have absolute and total confidence this will happen.

EJ: Who is the father of the liberal arts college idea?

Kramer and Balaban agreed that the concept should be credited to Hazony, Polisar, Ofir Haivry and Josh Weinstein.

SHALEM has always operated on the battleground of ideas, melding Diaspora creativity and money with an Israeli stubbornness that, said Kramer, does not accept failure as an option. It is this track record, Kramer told me, that persuaded him to take on an assignment that seeks a different path for Israeli higher education.

Photo of Martin Kramer by Ariel Jerozolimski

More from Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:17:00 GMT

If you're a subscriber to Sandbox, you may be interested to learn that I've taken to mini-blogging on my Facebook fan page. I won't distribute or alert you to these brief insights via email or syndication—they're too frequent—so you have two options for following them.

The first, for Facebook users, is to become a "fan," here. My posts will show up in your stream, and you can also post comments on them. (Sometimes I comment back.) The second, for those who don't use Facebook (or aren't my "fans"), is to visit my homepage whenever you want to catch up. There's a Facebook widget embedded at about the middle of the page, with all the latest posts.

Whenever I have something more substantial to say, I'll continue to say it at Sandbox, and you'll received it in the format you've chosen.

Below are three sample Facebook posts from the past week. Visit my Facebook page for many more.

Stephen Walt advises Obama on Israel: "To succeed, Obama must use his bully pulpit to explain to the American people that the two-state solution is by far the best outcome for Israel and that time is running out." Uh, why not explain that to the Israeli people? Walt doesn't get it: Obama forgot to reassure the Israeli public, who think he's just another Hussein. Israeli opinion is the key to peace, and Obama lost it.
I resent it when opponents of Israel's existence criticize Israeli policy in prime outlets, but aren't identified as deniers of Israel's right to exist. George Bisharat, a law professor, endorses the Goldstone report in the LAT. But we aren't told that Bisharat supports the dismantling of Israel. LAT readers should know that these are Goldstone's boosters: they want to erase Israel, not fix it.
Of course Tony Blair has backed up Yale's suppression of the Muhammad cartoons in a book about them, to be published by Yale U Press. The US operations of Blair's personal foundation are based at Yale, and he collects over $200k per annum to co-teach a Yale course. Blair is in bed with Yale, and if Yale says day is night, Tony will don pajamas. As usual, just follow the money.

Some day, Yale's prince will come

Martin Kramer — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 23:00:00 GMT

One of the most disturbing aspects of the Danish cartoons scandal at Yale University Press is the role of the university administration. When author Jytte Klausen was summoned by John Donatich, director of the press, to hear that it wouldn't publish the cartoons in her book about them, Donatich had company. Also present were the chair of Yale's Mideast center, Marcia Inhorn, and Linda Lorimer, Yale vice president and secretary of the Yale Corporation. Klausen now asserts that the university effectively forced the hand of press, by collecting almost "unanimous" opinions of "experts" warning that violence would erupt if the images were republished. Klausen: "Once the university had decided to collect these alarmist reports about the consequences [of including the pictures], there was very little the press could do. That is why I agreed to go ahead with it, [although] I disagree with it." The press has confirmed reaching its decision "after receiving the outside advice collected by the university." And that advice was collected from on high. Islamic art historian Sheila Blair, one of the outside experts (who recommended in favor of publication), says she was approached by an assistant in the office of Yale president Richard Levin.

What prompted the Yale administration to intervene? Roger Kimball and Diana West have already suggested that Yale University is foraging for funding from oil-soaked Arab sources. Yale's administration intervened not to prevent violence, but to prevent damage to its fundraising prospects in Araby. There's a strong prima facie case for this, and it revolves around Yale's courting of Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

Over the years, I've reported on Prince Alwaleed's efforts to buy up prime academic real estate in the United States. It was six years ago, in July 2003, that Alwaleed, then the world's fifth-richest man, announced his plan to go on what I called "an academic shopping spree." On a stop in Britain, Alwaleed revealed that "I am in the process of establishing centers of Arab and Islamic studies at select universities in the United States." I made a prediction:

If you want a fabulously wealthy Saudi royal to drop out of the sky in his private jet and leave a few million, you had better watch what you say.… Prince Alwaleed's buying binge is liable to reduce the entire field [of Middle Eastern studies] to a cargo cult, with profs and center directors dancing the ardha in the hope of attracting the flying prince.… 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.

Sure enough, in December 2005, Harvard and Georgetown universities announced that they'd each received $20 million endowments from Prince Alwaleed—Harvard for an Islamic studies program and Georgetown for John Esposito's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. Sure enough, a photographer captured Georgetown's President John J. DeGioia beaming alongside the Prince, and a Georgetown administrator made the inevitable assurance: "The funds are designated, but there are no strings attached."

The crucial thing to know about Prince Alwaleed is that he believes in "strategic philanthropy." He's not tied emotionally to particular universities, and he's not interested in honors. He seeks maximum return on investment. The two $20 million gifts he made in 2005 followed a semi-secret competition, in which half a dozen institutions put on their most Saudi-friendly face. Alwaleed later named some names in an interview with the New York Times: Harvard, Georgetown, Chicago, Michigan, "and several of the Ivy Leagues" were in the running. The interviewer pressed for more names. "Please. Keep the other universities out," said Alwaleed. "I'd rather not embarrass them."

Who was spared embarrassment? The Yale Daily News asked President Levin if Yale had been in the race; Levin "said two University proposals had been in the final running." Finalist, but not a winner.

But everyone assumes that Alwaleed will run another competition. He isn't worth as much as he was a few years back, but according to Forbes, he's still worth over $13 billion. (In March, he summoned a Forbes reporter to spend a week with him, just to prove he's still living the opulent life. "Observing wealth on this scale, even for a seasoned billionaires reporter, was staggering.") And he's still in the academic market—so says Muna AbuSulayman, executive director of the Alwaleed Bin Talal Foundation: "Because of what is happening (in the markets) people might think he is stopping his philanthropy; on the contrary he is fully committed to his charity goals no matter what happens." According to her, the Alwaleed Foundation has set aside $100 million for its Islam-West dialogue project, which endowed the centers at Harvard and Georgetown.

This same Muna AbuSulayman is also Alwaleed's point person for his academic programs. "I used to work with him at Kingdom Holding, I was head of strategic studies, and I was given the assignment of doing the first centers in the U.S. I guess I did such a good job that he actually offered me the foundation." You can see her in this photo of Alwaleed with Georgetown's president, and in this one of Alwaleed with Harvard's provost (she's the one with the hijab). AbuSulayman continues to monitor the Alwaleed centers; in March, she convened their directors in London for their first joint planning meeting. (In this photo, she's surrounded by the directors of the endowed centers, including Georgetown's John Esposito and Harvard's Roy Mottahedeh. Look carefully for strings attached.)

Now it gets interesting. In April, Yale named Muna AbuSulayman a "Yale World Fellow" for 2009. This isn't some honorific, and she'll reside from August through December in New Haven. (Her Facebook fan page, August 16: "I need help locating a Town House/condo for short term leasing near Yale University... Anyone familiar with that area?") Can you imagine a better way to set the stage for a major Alwaleed gift? Hosting for a semester the very person who structured the Harvard and Georgetown gifts, and who now directs Alwaleed's charitable foundation? A stroke of genius.

Imagine, then—and we're just imagining—that someone in the Yale administration, perhaps in President Levin's office, gets wind of the fact that Yale University Press is about to publish a book on the Danish cartoons—The Cartoons That Shook the World. The book is going to include the Danish cartoons, plus earlier depictions of the Prophet Muhammad tormented in Dante's Inferno, and who-knows-what-else. Whooah! Good luck explaining to people like Prince Alwaleed that Yale University and Yale University Press are two different shops. The university can't interfere in editorial matters, so what's to be done? Summon some "experts," who'll be smart enough to know just what to say. Yale will be accused of surrendering to an imagined threat by extremists. So be it: self-censorship to spare bloodshed in Nigeria or Indonesia still sounds a lot nobler than self-censorship to keep a Saudi prince on the line for $20 million.

Yale has seen its endowment suffer billions in losses, and its administration has the mission of making the bucks back. Yale's motto is lux et veritas, light and truth, but these days it might as well be pecunia non olet: money has no odor—whatever its source. Still, that isn't the mission of Yale University Press, which seeks to help authors of exceptional merit shed full light on the truth. More than three years ago, I warned against "the deep corruption that Prince Alwaleed's buying spree is spreading through academe and Middle Eastern studies." If this is what caused Yale University to trespass so rudely against the independence of its press, then the rot has spread even further than I imagined. I've been a reader for Yale University Press, which I think publishes a more interesting list in Middle Eastern studies than any university press. But if editorial decisions are to be subjected to vetting and possible abortion by Yale's money collectors, why bother?

Ignore all the denials, and watch for a hefty gift from Arabia, perhaps for another Alwaleed program in Islamic apologetics. Fat endowments speak louder than words—or cartoons.

Fear-mongering at Yale

Martin Kramer — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:22:00 GMT

Flash back to 2006. Professor Marcia Inhorn, a medical anthropologist and director of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Michigan, is invited to lecture in Tehran on her field of expertise, infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in Muslim countries. On her return, she seeks to dispel misconceptions about the Middle East. Because of the "American daily diet of fearsome media discourses about the Middle East, particularly Iran," she complains, "it was difficult to convince relatives, including my 80-year-old mother, that it was safe for me, a mother of two young children, to travel to that part of the world." Landing in Detroit, she finds the same bias:

When the customs official at the Detroit International Airport asked me why I had been "over there," I told him it was for an academic conference. Then he asked, "And they didn't behead you?," to which I replied, "No, they served me delicious food." He retorted, "But you never know what was in it (i.e., the food)," to which I responded, perhaps too flippantly, "Probably uranium." Fortunately, he returned my passport and let me proceed to baggage claim, where I retrieved my two gorgeous Persian carpets.

Inhorn's conclusion:

I would argue that such fear-mongering is very unwise. It is leading to closed minds, closed embassies, restricted visas, travel bans and demeaning airport luggage searches for those of us who overcome these travel restrictions.

They're not going to cut off our heads or irradiate us—that's her message. They just want to serve us their delicious food and sell us their gorgeous carpets. Nothing to fear but fear itself.

Flash forward to July 2009. Professor Inhorn has recently made a big move: she's now at Yale, where she chairs its Middle East center (known as the Council on Middle East Studies). She's seated in a cafe in Boston with Jytte Klausen, author of a forthcoming book on the Danish cartoons affair—those dozen cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that Muslim extremists seized upon in 2005. (Also around the table: the director of Yale University Press—the book's publisher—and a vice president of Yale.) Professor Inhorn has been called in by the publisher to break some bad news to the author. Here's a summary of what transpired at that meeting (as told by Klausen to Roger Kimball):

Their two-hour cup of coffee on July 23rd was not a pleasant occasion.... Unfortunately, [Klausen's] book about the Danish cartoons could only be published without the cartoons. Moreover, Professor Inhorn told her, that depiction of Mohammed in hell by Doré would have to go. How about the less graphic image of Mohammed by Dalí? she suggested.

Nope. No-go on that either. In fact, Yale was embarking a new regime of iconoclasm: no representations of that 7th-century religious figure were allowed.

The reason? Yale University Press, relying on Professor Inhorn and other "expert" consultants, had determined that running the cartoons "ran a serious risk of instigating violence," and that "publishing other illustrations of the Prophet Muhammad in the context of this book about the Danish cartoon controversy raised similar risk." A statement by Yale University Press justifying its decision directly quoted Inhorn: "If Yale publishes this book with any of the proposed illustrations, it is likely to provoke a violent outcry."

Wait a minute.... The last time we encountered Professor Inhorn, she was telling us to ignore the fear-mongering, not to let the media dupe us into expecting the worst. Now, behind the scenes, she's telling an expert author, who knows a lot more about the topic than she does, that Yale's press absolutely must expect the worst. The author's book must be censored.

So let me try to reconcile Professor Inhorn's view of how it works "over there." Sure, they'll feed you delicious food and sell you gorgeous carpets, but they can suddenly be "instigated" to violence by the mere reproduction, in a scholarly book, not only of old cartoons that anyone can access in a flash on the internet, but canonical works of Western art that have been in the public domain for decades (and even representations of the Prophet Muhammad in Islamic art). How easily they come unhinged! Why, show them the wrong image, and they could... well, behead you, just like that. And Professor Inhorn fancies herself above the "fearsome media discourses about the Middle East"....

Now I don't know if publishing these images in an academic book at this time would run a "serious risk of instigating violence." Everything I do know tells me that it wouldn't. Extremists are always looking for something to exploit, but it has to be a new, unprecedented (perceived) offense against Islam. Dante's Inferno, Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, the Danish cartoons—these are all old perceived offenses, too familiar to fire up a sense of indignation. No doubt there will be another round at some point—and no doubt, its ostensible "cause" will surprise us all. (That's because it won't really be the cause, but a pretext—like the Danish cartoons.)

But that's neither here nor there. The reason we have "restricted visas, travel bans and demeaning airport luggage searches" (and other disdained measures) is so that in America, a university press can publish the Danish cartoons in a book about the Danish cartoons, and do so without fear. If we didn't have that line of defense, we would constantly have to censor ourselves and ban whole classes of free expression, lest we be tormented by fanatic extremists.

Given a choice between undergoing a baggage search and muzzling themselves, Americans prefer the former. More than that: if you threaten their freedoms, they may just cross an ocean to search for you. That's why America is free and a refuge for the world. What sort of American would prefer the muzzle? Now we know.

Update, August 19: Here are more details about that outrageous baggage inspection:

Changing planes in Paris on her way home [from Iran], Inhorn was pulled aside and required to provide proof that her business in Iran had been strictly academic. Security workers slapped a high-risk stamp on her carry-on bags, then donned latex gloves to manually inspect every item. "It was very demeaning, simply because I had been in Iran," Inhorn says. "So that's the particular political moment I was in."

It sounds entirely routine, and speaks less about the "political moment" than about Inhorn's sense of entitlement.

Pointers: Read Christopher Hitchens, "Yale Surrenders," and the statement by the American Association of University Professors, "Academic Freedom Abridged at Yale Press."

Kissed to death by America

Martin Kramer — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:42:00 GMT

People in and around the Obama administration are taking the position that his low key on Iran is carefully calculated. It's not that he doesn't sympathize with the protesters, he just doesn't want their cause to be identified with the United States. That would be a kiss of death. I'm not persuaded, and as I've suggested already, his real problem with Iran's turmoil is that it's just so inconvenient to a Palestine-first approach. Laura Rozen at her blog The Cable quoted an "Iran hand in touch with the administration" as saying that Obama "is dedicated to diplomacy in a manner that is almost ideological," that he's already decided what he wants to do in the Middle East "over the next eight years" (bit of presumption there), and that he doesn't want to be "distracted" from the "larger strategic objective" or "let himself get shaken by stuff like this"—"stuff" referring to the reality in the streets of Iran and the Middle East more generally. If this spectacular hubris isn't a formula for failure in the Middle East, what is?

Let's begin with the claim that an American embrace of Iran's struggle for freedom would harm rather than help the cause. Call it "1953 and all that," and color me skeptical. I think most young Iranians are fed up with creaky mullah double-talk about America destroying Iranian democracy in 1953 (as if Iran has had democracy since 1979), Perfidious Albion (as though Britannia still ruled the waves), and the Zionist conspiracy (as if the mullahs weren't conspiring daily with Hezbollah and Hamas). They've identified the threat to their freedom, and it's their own unelected class of clerical overlords, driven by a will to total power. Just because the "Supreme Leader" repeats one of these archaic themes ad nauseum doesn't mean Iranians believe it, and we shouldn't assume they do.

However, there is an American (and Israeli) "kiss of death" elsewhere in the Middle East. Why is there a correlation between U.S. and Israeli endorsements of a "two-state solution" and the Palestinian stampede away from it, both Islamist and secular? Every time an American president or an Israeli prime minister declares that a two-state solution is a vital U.S. or Israeli interest, more Palestinians conclude it can't possibly be in their interest.

"If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses," then-prime minister Ehud Olmert told an interviewer, "then, as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished." Could one devise a more diabolical way to delegitimize a two-state solution in Palestinian eyes than that? Obama claims that "it is not only in the Palestinians' interest to have a state. I believe it is in the Israelis', as well, and in the United States' interest, as well." For Palestinians, that's one reason to support it, and two reasons to oppose it. Are the Olmerts and Obamas of the world completely ignorant of history and psychology? And even if Obama believes this (personally, I think it's untrue—a Palestinian state isn't in everybody's interest), why say it? Each time he does, he undercuts his own "larger strategic objective."

A smarter president would deploy the word "intolerable" not for the situation of the Palestinians (whose "president" has described that same situation as "good" and "normal"), but for the repression in Iran, whose courageous young people genuinely crave support. A smarter president would tell the Palestinians that the United States can uphold its Middle East interests forever and a day without a "Palestine," but that it's willing to try if Palestinians show the grit and unity that statehood requires.

Unfortunately, everything young man Obama knew about the Middle East before coming to the White House came from tainted sources. Now that his eight-year plan has run aground—in month five—acknowledging and adjusting to the "stuff" of reality will be a test of his smarts. If he refuses to let reality "distract" him, he'll fail the test, and leave the Middle East worse than he found it.

Obama's Middle East map in shreds

Martin Kramer — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 22:27:00 GMT

There is nothing at all surprising about Barack Obama's reluctance to embrace the surge for freedom in Iran. As I've shown, he received his primer on the Middle East from Rashid Khalidi, who facilitated Obama's formation as a Palestine-centric Third Worldist. In this view of things, only the situation of the Palestinians deserves to be described as "intolerable" —the word Obama used in Cairo—and action is promised only to them. Iranians are defrauded and assaulted by the bizarre dictatorship of the "Supreme Leader" and his Basiji minions? America, Obama says, is "watching." Why? Obama's master plan for the Middle East is supposed to commence with his entry to Jerusalem as the messiah of peace, godfather of the Palestinian state. Everything is supposed to follow from that.

Well, the Middle East doesn't revolve around the Palestinians, and young Iranians don't intend to wait for Mahmoud Abbas (emir of Ramallah, where there is a "good reality") to get off his derrière before demanding their freedom. Iranians rightly think they're no less worthy of the world's sympathy than the Palestinians. (One of the chants of Iran's protesters: Mardom chera neshastin, Iran shode Felestin! "People, why are you sitting down? Iran has become Palestine!") Events in Iran have left Obama's simplistic mental map of the Middle East, first learned from a few Palestinian activists and an old Hyde Park rabbi, in shreds.

We're fortunate that this has happened now, and not a year down the line. The collapse of the Obama strategy has occurred early enough in his presidency to create an opening for alternative strategies. In October, I predicted that such alternatives "will become relevant in another two years, when reality sinks in and illusions are shed." But it's happened in only the five months since the inauguration. The reeducation of Barack H. Obama has to begin now.

Update: A friend of mine writes: "Comme on dit en français, tu vas un peu vite en besogne..." In other words, I've cut corners. Quite possibly. If I'd taken more time, I would have pointed out that Obama has also been taken in by the myth, to which he alluded in his Cairo speech, that all Iranians remain incensed by what the United States did to the "democratically-elected" Mossadegh government in 1953, as opposed to what has happened to them during the thirty years of democracy-deprivation since 1979.

Iranian turmoil

Martin Kramer — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:49:00 GMT

My short assessment of the turmoil in Iran appears (with nine other expert assessments) at Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH), and is reproduced here at Sandbox.

There are days when I'm supremely grateful that I'm not paid to make policy decisions. Those who must make them on Iran have much more information than I have, but it probably still won't be enough, so that in the end, analogies will play as large a role as analysis. Already much of the public in the West has embraced the analogy between Iran's protests and the "color revolutions" of Europe. The potential for error there is great: Iran's politics are sui generis even in the Middle East. But there's a bit of room for such an error, because the regime doesn't have nukes. If it had them, we'd be biting our nails instead of tweeting on Twitter.

Harvard's Stephen Walt, on his blog, made an assertion that exposes the fundamental weakness of the realist claim that the outcome doesn't matter, at least to us: "In the end, what really matters is the content of any subsequent U.S.-Iranian rapprochement, not the precise nature of the Iranian regime. If diplomatic engagement led to a good deal, then it wouldn't matter much who was running Iran." Walt is right when he goes on to say that Mousavi, specifically, may not be a vast improvement over the Khamenei-A'jad duo. But in keeping up Iran's end of any "good deal," does it really not much matter who runs the country? In our own lives, we prefer to do business with reputable dealers, as opposed to known scam artists, thieves, and forgers. The meaning of this past week is that the ruling mob has been exposed, and that alternatives aren't entirely unimaginable. No one should get their hopes up, but the moment Khamenei, A'jad, and even Mousavi aren't the entire universe of options, there's every reason to put engagement on hold.

And since it's always better to have options, perhaps the United States should act to promote them. "The Americans do not have the experience or the psychological insight to understand Persia." That was Ann (Nancy) Lambton, the great British Iranologist, back in 1951. (She thought Mossadegh could be readily overthrown; the Americans at first thought otherwise. She was right.) So it's a long shot. But there may be an opportunity here, and perhaps even awkward Americans—now with an additional sixty years of experience and a president with psychological insight—can find it.

Sweeping Khalidi under Obama's rug

Martin Kramer — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 23:22:00 GMT

The Washington Post runs an article today, exploring the origins of President Obama's heels-dug-in stance on Israeli settlements. White House officials described Obama's position to the Post as "years old and not the product of recent events or discussions." The Post then traces it way back to some of Obama's Jewish friends from Chicago days. The earliest influence named in the piece is the late Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf of Hyde Park, whose synagogue was across from Obama's home (and whom Marty Peretz memorably described as "one of those remaining nudnik Reform clergy who is always pained that, given the distress of the Palestinians, life is too good for the Israelis").

But how is it possible to mention Wolf and not Rashid Khalidi, Obama's University of Chicago colleague? Not only did Obama famously have his own "conversations" with Khalidi, but Wolf attested that his own conversations with Obama on Israel and the Palestinians were three-way, involving Khalidi. A journalist who interviewed Wolf last year wrote this:

Wolf has impressions about Obama's initial views on Israel more than specifics, and the impression was one of sympathy for the views that he and their mutual friend, Palestinian advocate Rashid Khalidi, expressed to him on Israel—views including the need to pressure Israel to give up the West Bank. In retrospect, he believes that Obama was carefully considering their perspective rather than endorsing it. "When he was listening, we had his ear, but he didn't come down on our side," he reflects. "I think he was listening and learning and thinking."

"Our side," no less. It makes no sense to invoke Wolf's influence without even mentioning Khalidi, because on the question of the West Bank, they were a tag-team.

That's why writing Khalidi out of the story of Obama's view of the settlements is absurd. Back in October, I delivered a lecture suggesting that Khalidi gave Obama his primer on the Middle East. I recently posted it here, for the record. There's nothing in it I would change, and the claim that Obama got his intransigent view of the settlements from exclusively Jewish sources is yet another attempt to sweep Khalidi under the rug.

Obama and the Muslims

Martin Kramer — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:54:00 GMT

My quick assessment of President Obama's Cairo speech of June 4 appears (with fifteen other expert assessments) at Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH), and is reproduced here at Sandbox.

"Peoples of Egypt, you will be told that I have come to destroy your religion; do not believe it! Reply that I have come to restore your rights, to punish the usurpers, and that I respect more than the Mamluks God, His Prophet, and the Quran." So spoke Bonaparte when he arrived in Egypt, in a proclamation of July 2, 1798. Substitute "Islam" for Egypt, "we Americans" for I, and "violent extremists" for the Mamluks, and you've got the core message of President Obama's speech.

It's a very old drill in the annals of "public diplomacy." Supplementary gestures help. Obama was careful to pronounce the word Quran with the guttural qaf of the Arabic. (Too bad, though, he botched the word hijab.) Unless you're converting, you can't say Ich bin ein Muslim, so you come as close as you can. (Barack Hussein Obama—can we finally use his middle name now?—gets closer than most.) Some Muslims are wise to this, and so presumably they will discount it. But the great majority? Who doesn't love pandering?

I leave it to others to parse the sparse policy pointers in the speech. (Rob Satloff does a nice job of it.) Some of the influences on Obama bubble to the surface. There is the Third Worldism: Muslims are victims of our colonialism (Obama has read Fanon) and the Cold War (has he been reading Khalidi again?) The primacy of the West is over: "Any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail." There is the implicit comparison of the Palestinians to black Americans during segregation, a familiar trope (Carter and Condi went for it too). Israel comes across as an anomaly. There is no appreciation of Israel as a strategic asset—its ties to the United States are "cultural and historical," and thus not entirely rational. (That validates Obama's other former Chicago colleague, Mearsheimer.) All of this has the ring of conviction—and of a Third Worldist sensibility.

Maybe the most disconcerting line is this one: "We can't disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretense of liberalism." The pretense? This discrediting of liberalism and its universal humanism is the classic stance of the Third Worldist radical. And did you know that the job description of the nation's leader now includes "my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear"? Perhaps it's possible to disband CAIR. America now has a president who knows "what Islam is, [and] what it isn't," and who even has a mandate to insist on closing "the divisions between Sunni and Shia." Perhaps an emissary should be sent from Washington to the pertinent muftis and mullahs: the mission would certainly be more congenial than closing divisions of General Motors.

Indeed, not since Bonaparte has a foreigner landed on Egyptian soil and delivered a message of such overbearing hubris. Were I a Muslim, this 6,000-word manifesto would have me worried stiff. This man wants to be my president as much as he is America's.

He walks with the Islamists, talks with the Islamists

Martin Kramer — Sat, 02 May 2009 17:04:00 GMT

If I consulted with quadrupeds
Think what fun we’d have asking over crocodiles for tea!
Or maybe lunch with two or three lions, walruses and sea lions
What a lovely place the world would be!

—Bobby Darin, lyrics from Talk to the Animals

You know things are headed downhill fast when Alastair Crooke warrants a profile in the New York Times, for his long-term project of "engaging" Hamas and Hezbollah. The profile flags his importance in these words: "Talking to Islamists is the new order of the day in Washington and London. The Obama administration wants a dialogue with Iran, and the British Foreign Office has decided to reopen diplomatic contacts with Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group." And so on.

In 2005, I debated Crooke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. This seems like a perfect opportunity to point to my remarks: here. The CSIS summary of my remarks and his: here.

An extreme case at Columbia

Martin Kramer — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 11:55:00 GMT

It's now up to Columbia's trustees to say what all the world south of 116th Street knows perfectly well: Joseph Massad does Columbia no credit. (For my past Massad writings, see the right sidebar.) Back in 2005, Columbia's faculty radicals, anticipating this moment, wrote a statement in favor of academic freedom, in which they tried to invalidate the statutory authority of the trustees to promote and tenure faculty. The minutes of the meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on February 16, 2005, contain the relevant exchange. One of the faculty (Andrew Nathan) put it thus:

Clearly, the Statutes of the University accord the Trustees and the President as their delegate almost total power on all aspects of governance including the granting of promotion and tenure to faculty. However, a reading of the Statutes should not close the subject. The question remains, under what circumstances, if any, should the President and the Trustees exercise these statutory powers. Decisions on matters as important as tenure and faculty promotion have... been made at Columbia over the last fifty or so years at the level of the Provost with the advice of faculty, without the intervention of the President and Trustees, and were passed on to the President and Trustees for formal approval under the Statutes.

Columbia president Lee Bollinger took issue:

The President has to be involved and is involved in promotions and decisions with respect to tenure. It is an aspect of his responsibility that he takes very seriously. So do the Trustees. The President continued that he concedes that by custom we operate in a very special way. It is indeed rare for the President or the Board of Trustees to reverse or overturn a decision that comes to them through the faculty, deans, and Provost. Deference that is paid to judgments made at lower levels is exceedingly important to the values of this institution. An extraordinary amount of deference is given to individual faculty, individual departments, and schools in defining their research and curricular agendas, and so it should be. It would however be a big mistake and incorrect as a matter of structural fact to think in the way that Professor Nathan is suggesting.

Bollinger went on to add that "our trustees understand they would intervene only in extreme cases."

Massad is perfectly aware of university statutes. When he told friends he'd already been tenured, it wasn't a mistake on his part, or a case of jumping the gun. It was a statement: Massad does not recognize the authority of the trustees to deny him tenure. This is the position of many of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, who in May 2006 published their own statement on academic freedom. In it they expressed their view that "[tenure] decisions are, by University statute, subject to review and approval by the trustees, whose customary deference to faculty in academic matters has been essential to the University's success." In other words, in the opinion of these faculty, trustees should only review and approve their decisions, and never overturn them.

But it's the trustees who have the statutes on their side. They are "academic officers" of the university, and if any of them do not take "very seriously" their role in tenure decisions, they shouldn't be on the board. Bollinger has defended their authority to veto the faculty in "rare" and "extreme cases," and if Massad isn't an extreme case, who is?

I was disappointed that Bollinger himself didn't nix Massad's tenure. But it might have been too much to expect from one man, even Columbia's president. He already faces a campaign of intimidation by faculty extremists, who think the job of the president is to defend their excesses. They've got a faculty letter going, demanding that Bollinger denounce Israel for allegedly violating Palestinian academic freedom. (To that end, they also held a media-free conclave on Thursday night.) Bollinger has told them to forget it, and I don't think he need lose any sleep.

Still, an argument can be made that as between Bollinger and the trustees, it is the trustees who should assume (and share among them) the burden of doing what must be done to save Columbia's name. The statutes empower them to do so, and Bollinger has defended their prerogative. They should not be timid. The larger part of the Columbia community—faculty, students, donors, and alumni like myself—would be grateful for a show of courage, by those who hold the university in trust.

Update, April 27: The New York Daily News this morning runs yet another editorial on Massad, ending thus: "It may not be too late for the board, composed of leaders like Chairman William Campbell, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit and real estate magnate Philip Milstein, to do the right thing: Deny Massad tenure."

Columbia set to crash

Martin Kramer — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:52:00 GMT

The New York Post features an article by Jacob Gershman on the Joseph Massad tenure case at Columbia. I highly recommend it. Gershman covered this story for the now-defunct New York Sun, and he knows all the ins and outs.

Gershman reports that Massad's file has already passed muster with President Lee Bollinger, and will be presented to Columbia's Board of Trustees for a final decision in about a week. Bollinger "buckled," Gershman writes, rather than face down a determined faculty clique. "The Massad tenure battle," he adds, "is about the failure of leadership of Bollinger—whose job it is to safeguard Columbia's academic integrity." Bottom line:

Columbia's trustees must decide: Do they attempt to clean up after Bollinger and stop this absurdity—or do they confer academic legitimacy on Massad's ideas and agenda? Hesitant to insert themselves in an academic matter, the trustees would be wise to consider the consequences of silence.

For Massad, of course, Columbia's trustees are just a rubber stamp. This is why he's been telling his friends he's been tenured, even though tenure is only conferred by the Board of Trustees. Rubber-stamping may be the usual role of the Columbia's trustees in tenure decisions. But I'm also sure that whoever invented the system also imagined that one day there might arise an exceptional case, compelling the trustees to veto a recommendation. If not, why require their approval at all? If so, Massad is that once-in-a-generation case.

"I know that trusteeship is now contrived as being as passive as possible," adds Marty Peretz on his blog The Spine, but then asks: "Is the professoriat as a whole so wise as never to be questioned at all? I daresay not. And I know something about universities. At Columbia increasingly, departments and schools in the social sciences behave in the process of hiring like gangs admitting new members." Peretz goes on to compare Columbia unfavorably to "any and all of the universities in the State of Israel," not one of which "is so intellectually and politically inbred as is Columbia University."

Joseph Massad is the most deformed offspring of this incestuous inbreeding, the ultimate mutant in the Columbia freak show. Three years ago, when Juan Cole was up for a position at Yale, I wrote that "I would be surprised, and even shocked, if Yale appointed Juan Cole." I never would have said that about Massad at Columbia. Indeed, I once described Massad as "the flower of Columbia University," a thoroughly Columbia creation. Columbia gave him his doctorate, Columbia University Press published it, and Columbia gave him his tenure-track job. Massad himself recognized that Columbia couldn't disown him without somehow disowning itself. As he put it in 2005:

An attack on my scholarship therefore is not only an attack on me and on MEALAC [his department at Columbia] but on Columbia’s political science department [which graduated him], [and] on prestigious academic presses, including Columbia University Press [which published his thesis]... an opinion expressed by Martin Kramer who also condemns Middle East Studies at Columbia.

I wrote in reply: "Massad couldn't be more right. All those who have accredited, acclaimed, and published him have scraped bottom, and that applies especially to Columbia University."

Incredibly, Columbia's faculty came close to denying Massad tenure. He received only a 3-2 vote in his favor from his ad hoc tenure committee. A split vote is not a sufficient recommendation, and Provost Alan Brinkley could have put an end to the farce then. But when Massad's faculty gang brothers threatened to riot, the administration quickly capitulated and authorized an unusual second review. At the time, Marty Peretz wrote: "Even Lee Bollinger won't be dumb enough to reverse." Well, Bollinger has reversed, but it isn't because he lacks intelligence. It is a deficit of courage. Way back in 2005, Dan Miron, the long-suffering Hebrew lit professor in the Middle East department, predicted that Massad would get tenure: "Columbia is not courageous enough to say 'no' to this person and face a whole choir of people who would say, 'Aha, you caved in.'"

So is Miron about to be vindicated? Is "Columbia not courageous enough"? The question now boils down to this: does any courage reside in the Board of Trustees? Or have they been carefully inbred as well, for passivity and acquiescence? We shall see.

Policy and the academy

Martin Kramer — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 21:47:00 GMT

"Scholars on the Sidelines" is the headline of an op-ed by Harvard's Joseph Nye in Monday's Washington Post. There he notes that the Obama administration has appointed few political scientists to top positions, and predicts a widening of the divide between policymaking and academic theorizing. His Harvard colleague Stephen Walt has echoed the complaint, placing the blame upon scholars who follow what he calls "the cult of irrelevance." Michael Desch, a Notre Dame political scientist, also has written in the same vein in a new piece entitled "Professor Smith Goes to Washington," claiming that while Obama may be "depopulating the Ivy League and other leading universities with his appointments," it's unlikely the academics can match the influence of the think tanks or overcome the anti-intellectualism that pervades society and government.

I addressed the question myself, in an article entitled "Policy and the Academy: An Illicit Relationship?" originally delivered as a lecture in 2002. The occasion was the tenth anniversary of the passing of Elie Kedourie (1926-1992), who taught politics at the London School of Economics and whose work has had an abiding influence upon many students of the Middle East, myself included. My subject was a short essay by Kedourie, dating from 1961, entitled "Foreign Policy: A Practical Pursuit." I explored (and contested) Kedourie's principled belief that policy and the academy should not meet, and that the divide benefited them both.

My piece is on the web and many have read it. But now that this debate has resumed, I think it useful to provide access to Kedourie's own text—a trenchant 1,100 words—which I think speaks rather more forcefully than my synopsis of it. Read his piece first, and only then read my discussion of it. (By the way, the poet he quotes is Eliot; the poem, Gerontion. And yes, Kedourie usually did put "social scientists" in quotation marks.)

Too late to stop Massad?

Martin Kramer — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:37:00 GMT

Isn't it too late to stop tenure for Joseph Massad? This question has been posed to me by a reader, in light of the claim by Massad (via the Angry Arab) that he's already been tenured.

There's no way for someone outside the system to know for certain where the process stands. But we do know this: when the Columbia Spectator sought to confirm the rumor launched by Massad via his friend, it found it to be false. The Spectator called it "chatter," and added this: "The outcome of the controversial Palestinian scholar's tenure process remains to be seen and the review has not concluded." (My emphasis.) The article goes on to explain the review process, which is also laid out in the Faculty Handbook. Once the ad hoc tenure committee has made a recommendation to the Provost, the department chair must inform the candidate of that recommendation. But a favorable recommendation still must be approved by the Provost and the President, before presentation to the Board of Trustees. The ad hoc committee only serves in an advisory capacity to the Provost.

Let's assume for argument's sake that Massad has been notified that the ad hoc committee has recommended in his favor, and that's why he's informing his friends that he's been tenured. Is a favorable recommendation effectively the end of the process? The same Spectator article quotes Alan Brinkley, outgoing Provost: "The most important part of the tenure process is the ad-hoc committee. Usually there is a strong connection between what the ad-hoc committee decides and what subsequent steps in the process do. They usually are all the same."

The key word here is "usually." Indeed, the Faculty Handbook describes as "unusual cases" those instances in which the Provost, President, or Trustees overrule a favorable recommendation by an ad hoc committee. But just how unusual are they?

For the period between 1989 and 1997, we know the answer to that question, because Columbia's then-Provost Jonathan R. Cole went before the Faculty Senate to review the statistics of all the tenure decisions made between those dates. He revealed that there had been 304 ad hoc reviews during the eight-year period, 38 of which ended in tenure denial. The Provost was responsible for 14 of the 38 denials, having overruled favorable committee recommendations. Put another way, ad hoc committees made 280 positive recommendations, and the Provost (Cole during the entire period) rejected 14 of them—a rejection rate of exactly five percent.

So rejections of favorable committee recommendations, while "unusual," weren't unprecedented or even rare in Cole's time. Indeed, overruling by the Provost appears to be a routine method of tenure denial: in the period reported by Cole, 37 percent of all tenure denials after full review constituted cases of the Provost overruling an ad hoc committee.

Massad's case is unusual by any reckoning, and would be treated with additional scrutiny by the Provost. But even if the Provost were to recommend tenure, this wouldn't absolve President Bollinger of his personal responsibility. The Faculty Handbook stipulates: "Upon completion of his or her review, the Provost will submit a recommendation to the President on whether the candidate should be awarded tenure. A nomination is forwarded to the Trustees for their approval only if the Provost and President are satisfied that the candidate deserves tenure." Massad cannot be tenured unless President Bollinger is satisfied that he deserves it—and, presumably, tells the Trustees why.

It isn't surprising that it's come to this: that the faculty would recommend tenure, and that the administration alone would have to assume responsibility for any decision to reject Massad. And as the tenure review seems to have reached just that critical point, the evidence on Massad needs full public airing now more than ever. This is the moment of truth—for Columbia, for President Bollinger, and for the survival on Morningside Heights of what President Bollinger has called the "scholarly temperament." I heard him, in person, describe his ideal in his Cardozo Lecture at the New York City Bar Association on March 23, 2005, and I've quoted his words often:

To set aside one's pre-existing beliefs, to hold simultaneously in one's mind multiple angles of seeing things, to actually allow yourself seemingly to believe another view as you consider it—these are the kind of intellectual qualities that characterize the very best faculty and students I have known and that suffuse the academic atmosphere at its best.

Joseph Massad hasn't a single one of these qualities. If President Bollinger notifies the trustees that he's satisfied that Massad deserves tenure—something he must know to be untrue—it will be a devastating admission of failure—his and the university's. Now we shall learn how much courage resides in Low Memorial Library.

Footnote: Read this damning new compendium of the wisdom of Massad. President Bollinger's contact information is here.

Massad's alcohol analysis

Martin Kramer — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 14:58:00 GMT

If you were a secular, liberal Palestinian intellectual (and perhaps a Christian to boot) living in the West Bank, would you have forebodings about Hamas coming to power? You might, and with good reason. Edward Said agonized over the Hamas problem, before reaching this conclusion: "For any secular intellectual to make a devil's pact with a religious movement is, I think, to substitute convenience for principle."

Ah, but there's another explanation for this secular, liberal reticence, offered by the deep, brilliant and possibly tenured Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, Joseph Massad. From the heights of Morningside, he assures us that these Palestinians oppose Hamas because... it might take away their booze. Here he goes:

West Bank-based Palestinian intellectuals, like their liberal counterparts across the Arab world, have been active in the last several years in demonizing Hamas as the force of darkness in the region. These intellectuals (among whom liberal secular Christians, sometimes referred to derisively in Ramallah circles as "the Christian Democratic Party," are disproportionately represented) are mostly horrified that if Hamas came to power, it would ban alcohol. Assuming Hamas would enact such a regulation on the entire population were it to rule a liberated Palestine in some undetermined future, these intellectuals are the kind of intellectuals who prefer an assured collaborating dictatorship with a glass of scotch to a potentially resisting democracy without....

The journey of West Bank liberal intellectuals, it seems has finally come to this: after being instrumental in selling out the rights of Palestinians in Israel to full equal citizenship by acquiescing to Israel's demand to be recognized as a racist Jewish state, and the rights of the diaspora and refugees to return, they have now sold out the rights of Palestinians in Gaza to food and electricity, and all of this so that the West Bank can be ruled by a collaborationist authority that allows them open access to Johnny Walker Black Label (their drink of choice, although some have switched to Chivas more recently). In this context, how could Israel be anything but a friend and ally who is making sure Hamas will never get to ban whiskey?

This isn't tongue-in-cheek. That's it—the sum of Massad's political analysis of why, in Ramallah, there's no desire to fall into the grip of Hamas and its "resisting democracy." Massad's approach is always the same: caricature and dehumanize anyone who won't kill and be killed to destroy Israel—even (and especially) if they're Palestinians and their sympathizers. Massad once even claimed that the regret over Gaza's secession expressed by the late Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish "can be explained by the monthly checks [Darwish] receives from the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority." If it's not booze, it's cash. A bit reductive, even for Columbia.

And what of Professor Massad? When the New York Times visited him at home in Manhattan to profile the armchair resister, it reported that the reading material on his coffee table was The World Atlas of Wine. "His elaborate freestanding Egyptian water pipe is stoked with apple-flavored tobacco as a weekend indulgence, accompanied by Cognac, after dinner parties." How ennobling it is to champion Hamas—from a safe distance.

The hypocrisy of Massad

Martin Kramer — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 13:11:00 GMT

Yesterday, I invited Columbia's president and trustees to look more closely at Joseph Massad's book Desiring Arabs, which Harvard University Press provisionally accepted as a proposal and later rejected as a completed manuscript.

This is not Massad's only recent publishing accident. The president and trustees might also take a closer look at why the College Art Association paid an Israeli art historian $75,000 in 2007, to avert a libel suit threatened against it for publishing a book review by Massad. The association also wrote to subscribers of its Art Journal, acknowledging that Massad's review made "factual errors and certain unfounded assertions," and asking them to excise the potentially libelous passages from their copies of the journal. It's unlikely any careful publisher will carry Massad again, before running his text past a lawyer.

Now I happen to concur with one of Massad's responses to the affair: "If every academic was going to think that any critique of academic scholarship was going to have to be defended in a court of law, the state of academic argumentation would be very different." Indeed. Unfortunately, Massad seems to think that only his criticism of others is protected speech. When his own work came under criticism in 2004, he seriously considered taking a newspaper to court. Massad himself told the story in his statement to the university committee that investigated him on charges of intimidating students:

I set up an appointment with Provost [Alan] Brinkley and met with him. I sought his help and the help of the university’s legal services to fight this defamation of character. The latest article in the New York Sun [by Jonathan Calt Harris] included such blatant and insidious misrepresentations that I seriously considered suing them for defamation. I provided copies of my written work to the Provost and told him of the campaigns to which I had been subjected in the previous years. While the provost seemed mildly supportive, he did not think that suing would be practical. I asked him if he could arrange for me to meet with legal services to which he reluctantly agreed. I had to remind him by E-mail to set up a meeting for me. After he put me in touch with legal services, my E-mails to them went unanswered. I asked the provost to intervene which he did. His intervention produced a response from their office asking me about my available times to set up an appointment. I sent it to them and never heard back. I dropped the matter after I left in mid summer for vacation abroad.

Two things are telling here. First, and most obviously, there is the hypocrisy. If Massad should be free to skewer an Israeli art historian's book without ending up in court, why shouldn't someone else be free to skewer Massad's writings without landing in court? Second, there is Massad's insistence that Columbia take up his case, when he could have opened the Yellow Pages and gone to any private attorney specializing in libel and defamation. Massad must have known that this would be a frivolous pursuit, but its purpose would be to align him and Columbia against the New York Sun. The state of academic argumentation would be very different if university lawyers had the duty to defend university faculty against intellectual criticism. Columbia rightly drew that line.

As for the Art Journal review, legalities aside, it raises questions of credibility and authorial style. Has Massad's tenure committee answered these questions to the satisfaction of Columbia's provost, president and trustees? Has it even asked them?

Pointer: There is an editorial on Massad's tenure in today's New York Daily News.

More Massad mystery at Harvard

Martin Kramer — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 20:31:00 GMT

In August 2006, I wrote a post entitled "Massad mystery at Harvard." There I asked why, for two years, Joseph Massad described his book Desiring Arabs as "forthcoming from Harvard University Press," only to announce that it would be published by the University of Chicago Press. I wrote the following:

Last spring [2006], Columbia promoted Massad to associate professor, a rank from which he could be tenured. Did the list of publications he submitted include Desiring Arabs as forthcoming from Harvard? If so, on what basis? What went wrong for Massad at Harvard University Press?...

Since Massad paraded the Harvard credential when he needed it, he should explain why it's evaporated. And if the elusive book figured in Columbia's promotion decision, the university should investigate Massad's conduct—again.

So did Columbia ever look into that Harvard mystery? Massad himself (perhaps in response to my post) gave his explanation in the acknowledgments to Desiring Arabs (pp. xiii-xiv). It turns out that it hinges on Edward Said:

Edward [Said] read drafts of three chapters of the book.... [During] the conference celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Orientalism in April 2003, he asked me if I would be interested in publishing the book in his Harvard University Press (HUP) series. I was in disbelief of this unexpected praise. I prepared a proposal quickly and sent it to him and then forwarded it to the HUP editor. The HUP approved the contract for the book several months later, in September—two weeks before Edward's death.... He called me on his cellular phone from the car while on his way home from yet another chemotherapy treatment at the hospital. "Any word from Harvard?" he asked. I told him that I had just heard half an hour earlier. He was thrilled. I was ecstatic.

Unfortunately, a few weeks before production was set to begin, the HUP editor and I realized that we had differing visions for the book, and we parted ways.

So the mystery has begun to unravel. "Forthcoming from Harvard University Press" was yet another Columbia inside job. At the time, Edward Said was the general editor of an HUP book series entitled Convergences. HUP apparently accepted Massad's book provisionally for publication in Said's series, on the basis of the proposal and Said's reading of a few chapters. But after HUP had the complete manuscript—and Said was no longer editor of the series—its own editor rejected Massad's finished product. ("We parted ways" is an amusing euphemism.) Presumably, this decision would have been based, at least in part, upon readers' reports on the completed manuscript. (At university presses, anonymous peer review is a precondition of publication. All books accepted as proposals still must be vetted.)

The president and trustees of Columbia University, if they haven't already approved Massad's tenure, might well bear HUP's decision in mind. Absent Edward Said, Massad must be judged strictly on his own merit. And they might take some interest in precisely why Massad's book failed to make the cut at Harvard. "My books are not controversial at all in academe," Massad recently steamed in a tirade against a critic of Desiring Arabs, "and [to] the extent that I am said to be 'controversial' at all, I am so for the New York tabloid press and for Campus Watch, and now for some right-wing gay newspapers upset with my book." Well, at Harvard University Press, they were less than impressed.

Footnote: The latest on Massad's book comes from Dror Ze'evi in the American Historical Review. Ze'evi is the author of Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900 (University of California Press). Money quote: "If Massad's evidence is to be trusted, then he is completely wrong in his conclusions." But move on, folks, no controversy here—at all.

Tenure for Joseph Massad?

Martin Kramer — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 23:30:00 GMT

There are reports that Columbia University has tenured the rabid Joseph Massad. At least this is what Massad, now in Cairo, has told his friends. I've written my response to such a development, but I won't post it until Columbia confesses to the crime. As of this moment, no one in the administration is confirming, denying, or commenting on the rumor, and there may be some final procedure to complete. In the meantime, read my past writings on Massad, linked from the right sidebar of Sandbox beneath "Kramer on Massad." And read Massad's latest contribution to our understanding of the Middle East: "The Gaza Ghetto Uprising."

Update, April 12: David Bernstein at Volokh Conspiracy, who's also been on Massad's trail, exposes Massad's addiction to the Israel-Nazi analogy, and his past deceit in denying it.

Calling all authors! Book prize

Martin Kramer — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:38:00 GMT

Robert Satloff, the director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has issued a last call for submissions to the 2009 Washington Institute Book Prize. I'd like to echo his appeal by redistributing it here. Satloff writes:

It’s time to remind new authors (and their publishers) that the May 1 deadline for the 2009 Washington Institute Book Prize approaches. This prize, inaugurated last year, is awarded annually to three outstanding new books that have illuminated the Middle East for American readers. It is also one of the most rewarding prizes in publishing. Gold Prize is $30,000, Silver Prize is $15,000, and Bronze Prize is $5,000. Watch one of last year’s jurors, Michael Mandelbaum, announce the 2008 prizes in this clip. Or read the Book Prize citations for the 2008 winners here. You may also watch Yaroslav Trofimov, author of The Siege of Mecca, accept the 2008 Gold Prize here.
The deadline for the 2009 competition is May 1, 2009, for books published during the year prior to the deadline. Read the full rules here.
Last year’s prizes went to scholars and journalists, university press books and trade hardcovers, works on history and politics. For the new crop of books, The Washington Institute Book Prize has a fresh new panel of three independent jurors, to keep things interesting. If you’ve authored or published a book over the past year, don’t miss the opportunity to submit.

Chas Freeman's Saudi fable

Martin Kramer — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:52:00 GMT

The other day, I brought this January 2004 quote from Chas Freeman, just named to head of the National Intelligence Council (NIC):

The heart of the poison is the Israel-Palestinian conundrum. When I was in Saudi Arabia, I was told by Saudi friends that on Saudi TV there were three terrorists who came out and spoke. Essentially the story they told was that they had been recruited to fight for the Palestinians against the Israelis, but that once in the training camp, their trainers gradually shifted their focus away from the Israelis to the monarchy in Saudi Arabia and to the United States. So the recruitment of terrorists has a great deal to do with the animus that arises from that continuing and worsening situation.

I offered this as evidence for Freeman's view of the roots of anti-American terrorism—his thesis that terrorism is America's punishment for supporting Israel. But some readers saw it as real evidence that terrorists are recruited through a bait-and-switch process. Bait: Fight the Israelis. Switch: Kill fellow Saudis and Americans. So I decided to check whether Freeman's story held water. Did the television show related to him by his "Saudi friends," and which he related to us, actually report what he said it did? After all, Freeman told this anecdote in Washington, on a panel in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, and he drew rather far-reaching conclusions from it. So it should hold water, right?

Freeman told the anecdote on January 23, 2004. He prefaced it by saying that he had visited Saudi Arabia "a week ago." The episode described to him by his "friends" would have been the dramatic broadcast on Saudi TV1 (state television) on January 12. Lasting 67 minutes, it featured several anonymous Saudi members of "terrorist cells" (their faces were shadowed) who gave brief details of how they were recruited, followed by commentary from Saudi experts. The program was a big deal, and was much commented upon by the Saudi press and foreign wire services. (Examples: Associated Press, BBC, and Agence France-Presse.) The official Saudi Press Agency provided a very detailed report, and the Foreign Broadcast Information Service prepared an exhaustive account of the program (both here).

And guess what? There is nothing in the program to substantiate Freeman's "bait-and-switch" version of it. In almost thirty short segments in which the terrorists described their recruitment, only one made reference to something said by a recruiter on Palestine: "I sat with them and heard them speaking about jihad, the duty of jihad, and jihad as an individual duty [fard ayn] that has become incumbent on every Muslim for almost 50 years, since the Jews entered Palestine." But another recruiter used this message: "We want to establish an Islamic state and carry out the prophet's tradition [Hadith]. He says with great pride: The prophet removed the infidels from the Arabian Peninsula." Some recruiters talked about the afterlife: "We ask them: What are we doing here? What do we get in return? And, they say it is in return for paradise." Then there was Afghanistan: "Two so-called mujahidin, who were in Afghanistan, came to me and told me stories about jihad, conquest, Afghanistan, the rewards of the steadfast, the graces bestowed on mujahidin, and the glory of jihad." Recruiters incited recruits against Saudi authority: "They only speak against Saudi rulers and men of religion. They concentrate all their efforts on Saudi Arabia." And they plied recruits with various radical fatwas and books.

Nothing in the program suggests that the recruitment of these terrorists had "a great deal" to do with Palestine, or much to do with it at all. Palestine was one message in a barrage of messages directed by recruiters toward recruits, and not in any particular order or priority either. There is not a shred of evidence for the "bait and switch" thesis in the program. Judge for yourself.

And yet the notion is out and about in America, thanks to Chas Freeman. He didn't see the television program; he said he was relying on his "Saudi friends." If so, he obviously didn't perform any due diligence on what they told him, before repeating it on Capitol Hill and drawing far-reaching conclusions from it ("the heart of the poison" and all that). It's not hard to see how this might serve some Saudi public relations interest. But can the United States afford to tolerate this kind of method at the top of the National Intelligence Council? And isn't the only explanation for this shoddy approach to evidence a combination of political spin and uncritical reliance on foreign "friends"—the most dangerous infections for any intelligence organization?

Freeman is hailed by some as a "contrarian" and "gadfly." After checking out this one episode, he looks to me like a shill or a sucker. Get your red pencils sharpened for those National Intelligence Estimates.

Update, late afternoon, March 10: Put the red pencils away. This announcment is just in: "Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair announced today that Ambassador Charles W. Freeman Jr. has requested that his selection to be Chairman of the National Intelligence Council not proceed. Director Blair accepted Ambassador Freeman’s decision with regret."

Chas Freeman's crystal ball

Martin Kramer — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:51:00 GMT

It is May 2000. You are Bill Clinton, contemplating what you still might achieve in the Middle East in your last eight months in the White House. You call in one of your intelligence chiefs, and ask a bottom-line question. Where is the Middle East headed? Your wise man gives you this answer:

I believe that over the coming year there will be some sort of Arab-Israeli peace. Israel will then reach out first to Iran and then to Iraq, in its own interest. If Israel does that, it will partially cure the frontal lobotomy that we are about to inflict on ourselves with this election. Then possibilities for movement in American relations with first Iran and then Iraq may well emerge.

You shrug off the bit about the lobotomy—it's just his colorful way of describing the effect on Washington of every change in administration. But the rest is eye-popping—enough that you say to yourself, maybe I should throw my presidential weight into getting that Arab-Israeli peace. After all, you've just been told that it's coming, and that anything is possible if you can get it. Israel will reach out to Saddam's Iraq! And even to Iran! Think of the possibilities. So you say to yourself: if the Israelis come with a plan for the big breakthrough, I'll run with it. Keep Camp David stocked with non-alcoholic beverages.

One year later, you're out of office, nursing a massive regret that you ever allowed yourself to believe that any of this fairy tale was true. You pushed, alright—and you helped to push Israelis and Palestinians into the abyss. They weren't ready for a peace deal, especially that jerk Arafat. And Saddam and the Iranians? Your failure has emboldened them. You scratch your head, wondering where you first heard that fantastic sky's-the-limit prognosis.

From Chas Freeman. No, he wasn't an intel chief in May 2000, he was just running his Middle East Policy Council. I made up the scenario—but not the quote. Freeman made that exact prediction on a panel he chaired in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on May 4, 2000. The National Intelligence Council (NIC)—which Freeman has been appointed to chair—is the nation's chief crystal-baller. The NIC is supposed to look into the future—sometimes as far as fifteen years. It would be good to have someone with an unbroken record of on-spot predictions in that job. Freeman is freethinking, alright. Maybe that's why his record is broken.

Update, late afternoon, March 10: This announcment is just in: "Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair announced today that Ambassador Charles W. Freeman Jr. has requested that his selection to be Chairman of the National Intelligence Council not proceed. Director Blair accepted Ambassador Freeman’s decision with regret."

Chas Freeman and preemptive cringe

Martin Kramer — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:54:00 GMT

Charles "Chas" Freeman, the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia who is slated to become chair of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), is being praised by his supporters as a brilliantly "contrarian" analyst. But has anyone gone back to examine the analyses? Here is an example from June 2002:

I'm a very practical man, and my concern is simply this: that there are movements, like Hamas, like Hezbollah, that in recent decades have not done anything against the United States or Americans, even though the United States supports their enemy, Israel. By openly stating and taking action to make them—to declare that we are their enemy, we invite them to extend their operations in the United States or against Americans abroad. There's an old adage which says you should pick your friends carefully. I would add: you should be even more careful when designating your enemies, lest they act in that manner.

So what has happened over the past seven years? The United States hasn't budged on its designation of Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist groups. (In September 2002, then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage even called Hezbollah "the A-team of terrorism" as compared to the B-team, Al Qaeda.) The United States has boycotted both organizations, and has insisted that others boycott them as well. Above all, it's supported Israel to the hilt in two wars, in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2009, in which Israel pounded first Hezbollah and then Hamas for weeks with U.S.-supplied aircraft and ordnance. There's little more the United States could have done, short of bombing Beirut and Gaza City itself, to demonstrate to Hezbollah and Hamas that they're on America's wrong side.

Yet here we are, nearly seven years later, and where is the wave of Hezbollah- and Hamas-sponsored international terror in and against the United States? It's not materialized, for a host of reasons that were already clear back in 2002. Freeman's warning was a classic example of preemptive cringe—in this case, shying away from merely naming an organization as terrorist for fear it might threaten you.

And this wasn't the only time Freeman did it. In October that same year, as war with Iraq loomed, he raised the specter of Saddam attacking the United States. This came in response to a cost-benefit analysis of war made by the strategist Anthony Cordesman. Warning that Saddam "would will use every weapon in his arsenal" if attacked, Freeman asked:

Is Saddam so stupid and autistic that he hasn't noticed that for several years the United States has been declaring our intention to come and get him—especially this president? And if he has noticed, do you think it's out of the realm of possibility that he has prepositioned retaliation against the United States here in the United States? Inspectors can find and eliminate nuclear programs because they're bulky, consume a lot of power and the like, and maybe they can do the same with chemical programs, but biological programs can be cooked up in the basement of relatively small houses. So I just wonder again, as we look at the possible benefits—and Tony [Cordesman] has made an eloquent case that, great as the risks are, the benefits are substantial, and waiting increases the risks—do we have a risk that we might experience an attack on our own homeland by unconventional means from this regime as it goes down?

"The problem with this argument is several-fold," replied Cordesman gently. "First, it means Iraq has to be very confident that its intelligence operations are clever and subtle. But I have never been impressed by the cleverness and subtlety of Iraqi intelligence." In any case, he added, "the threat of such risks also isn't a valid argument against going to war," since "presumably they can make the threat more sophisticated over time"—i.e., an Iraqi terror threat was an argument for U.S. action, not against it.

Of course, Saddam went down without launching an unconventional attack from a basement in America.

All this wouldn't raise an eyebrow had Freeman warned us in advance of the possibility of a 9/11-style attack coming out of Saudi Arabia—and remember, he'd been U.S. ambassador to that country when the threat began to coalesce. Some "contrarians" did warn, but he didn't, and he isn't even credible in explaining the attacks after the fact. (Example: "What 9/11 showed is that if we bomb people, they bomb back.")

So I don't see anything realistic about Freeman's sort of "realism," and if this is what constitutes "contrarian" thought—conjuring up threats to intimidate ourselves—then we'll only have dropped preemptive action in favor of preemptive cringe. Washington is teeming with real realists—rigorous thinkers who are independent of foreign billionaires and relatively free of that psychological scarring that induces an obsession with Israel. Is Chas Freeman the best this administration can do?

Update: Terrorism expert Thomas Joscelyn points out that Hezbollah did attack Americans more recently than Freeman allowed in his 2002 quote—to wit, the Khobar bombings, done by the Saudi Hezbollah in 1996 (here is the 2001 indictment). He asks how Freeman—supposed authority on all things Saudi—managed not to know that. It's an excellent question. Joscelyn also reminds us that Hezbollah has had a hand in attacks on American forces in Iraq. True, but this is not what Freeman had in mind when he warned against designation of Hezbollah. There were no American forces in Iraq yet, so he was cringing over something different: an attack on the homeland or international terrorism against Americans. They haven't happened.

Pointer: See my previous post on Freeman and 9/11.

Update, late afternoon, March 10: "Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair announced today that Ambassador Charles W. Freeman Jr. has requested that his selection to be Chairman of the National Intelligence Council not proceed. Director Blair accepted Ambassador Freeman’s decision with regret."

Chas Freeman and 9/11

Martin Kramer — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 20:55:00 GMT

How important has resentment of Israel been to Al Qaeda's terrorism? Here is one side of the argument, by an American who knows Saudi Arabia well:

The heart of the poison is the Israel-Palestinian conundrum. When I was in Saudi Arabia, I was told by Saudi friends that on Saudi TV there were three terrorists who came out and spoke. Essentially the story they told was that they had been recruited to fight for the Palestinians against the Israelis, but that once in the training camp, their trainers gradually shifted their focus away from the Israelis to the monarchy in Saudi Arabia and to the United States. So the recruitment of terrorists has a great deal to do with the animus that arises from that continuing and worsening situation.

And here is the opposing view, by an American who knows the Kingdom equally well:

Mr. bin Laden's principal point, in pursuing this campaign of violence against the United States, has nothing to do with Israel. It has to do with the American military presence in Saudi Arabia, in connection with the Iran-Iraq issue. No doubt the question of American relations with Israel adds to the emotional heat of his opposition and adds to his appeal in the region. But this is not his main point.

So now you've heard two sides of the debate. Who made the first statement? Charles "Chas" Freeman, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and the Obama administration's nominee to head the National Intelligence Council (NIC). Who made the second statement? Charles "Chas" Freeman, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and the Obama administration's nominee to head the National Intelligence Council (NIC).

The first quote dates from January 2004, the second from October 1998. The difference between them is 9/11, when it became the Saudi line to point to Israel's conflict with the Palestinians as the "root cause" of the September 11 attacks. The initial promoter of this approach in the United States (well before Walt and Mearsheimer) was Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed. "At times like this one," Alwaleed announced a month after 9/11, "we must address some of the issues that led to such a criminal attack. I believe the government of the United States of America should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance towards the Palestinian cause." That statement led then-mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani to return a $10 million check Alwaleed had just presented to him for a special "Twin Towers" relief fund.

Since 9/11 Freeman hasn't repeated his 1998 assessment ("nothing to do with Israel"), instead sticking with his Saudi-pleasing spin of 2004 ("the heart of the poison is the Israel-Palestinian conundrum"). It's not hard to figure out why. When the 9/11 Commission interviewed him in 2003, it noted that his position as president of the Middle East Policy Council "requires regular trips to the Persian Gulf for fundraising. While there, he meets with many senior Saudi officials." In 2006, Freeman finally went the extra mile, offering this explanation for 9/11:

We have paid heavily and often in treasure for our unflinching support and unstinting subsidies of Israel's approach to managing its relations with the Arabs. Five years ago, we began to pay with the blood of our citizens here at home.

Freeman was now touting precisely the sort of nonsense he had previously dismissed out of hand. And he hit paydirt for doing it: within months, Prince Alwaleed wrote a check to Freeman's Middle East Policy Council for $1 million. Here is a photo of Freeman, supplicant, visiting Alwaleed in the latter's Riyadh HQ.

Does Freeman really believe that Israel's actions caused Bin Laden's terror? Who knows? He's put forward two completely contradictory explanations. One would like to believe that in his heart of hearts, he still knows what he knew in 1998, that Bin Laden's "campaign of violence against the United States, has nothing to do with Israel." One would like to believe that in 2006, he was cynically shilling for the Saudis when he blamed 9/11 on "our unflinching support and unstinting subsidies of Israel's approach." Because if he wasn't just cynically shilling, he's gone off the rails. (Actually, there is a third Freeman explanation for 9/11, so bizarre that I don't know quite how to categorize it. Parse this: "What 9/11 showed is that if we bomb people, they bomb back.")

If Freeman's gone off the rails, he obviously shouldn't be taken out of mothballs to coordinate U.S. intelligence. But that's so even if he was just cynically shilling. “An ambassador," said Sir Henry Wotton, "is an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country.” In America, an ex-ambassador is all too often an honest man hired from abroad to lie to his own country. Freeman may have an impeccable record of past service, just as his old buddies attest. But if the National Intelligence Council and its products are to earn the respect of the American people, the NIC chair cannot be suspected of ever having deliberately twisted the truth into something else for our consumption, especially on a crucial issue of national security and at the behest of foreign interests.

Chas Freeman doesn't pass that test.

Update, March 9: Some have argued that the two opening quotes in this post are actually consistent with one another. So I offer the full context of the first quote from 1998, which demonstrates that on that occasion, Freeman was actively deflecting the thesis that Bin Laden's appeal rested on Israel and U.S. support for it. He was chairing a panel, and a member of the audience asked a question.

Q: I'm astonished that nobody has mentioned the name Osama bin Laden. And it astonishes me also that we do nothing, apparently, to indicate that we are not a colony of Israel, when his whole appeal depends on demonstrating and reminding Muslims the world over that the United States is identified with Israel. If we do not develop a firm disagreement with Israel, we are going to suffer repeated casualties and deaths, including Foreign Service personnel.

AMB. FREEMAN: Perhaps I could begin by saying that Mr. Osama bin Laden is a renegade from his family and from Saudi Arabia; his family has disowned him, and the kingdom has certainly dissociated itself from him. Mr. bin Laden's principal point, in pursuing this campaign of violence against the United States, has nothing to do with Israel. It has to do with the American military presence in Saudi Arabia, in connection with the Iran-Iraq issue. No doubt the question of American relations with Israel adds to the emotional heat of his opposition and adds to his appeal in the region. But this is not his main point.

So Freeman was actively deflecting an argument he himself would later make. It is interesting that this one-time-only absolution of Israel occurred while Freeman was playing host to a panel featuring Martin Indyk, at the time Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs. Maybe that explains it.

Pointer: See subsequent post, Chas Freeman and preemptive cringe.

Southwest Asia

Martin Kramer — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:19:00 GMT

The appointment of Dennis Ross as "Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for The Gulf and Southwest Asia" (announcement here) has caused some puzzlement, in part because the geographic focus of his title seems fuzzy. This is especially so for "Southwest Asia."

On the face of it, "Southwest Asia" looks like a geographic reference, and it has always had a few enthusiasts among geographers. It's also been favored by those who deem it less Eurocentric than "Middle East" or "Near East." (Maybe it is, but since Asia as a continent is a European idea, calling any region "Southwest Asia" hardly solves the problem.) Once there was even a maverick academic program, at SUNY Binghamton, called the Program in Southwest Asian and North African Studies (SWANA for short). But "Southwest Asia" got no traction in American academe, and even the SUNY program eventually swapped SWANA for MENA (Middle East and North Africa).

So when did "Southwest Asia" finally get its big break, and begin to turn up in high places as a near-synonym for the Middle East? "From the moment of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979," wrote U.S. diplomat and strategist John C. Campbell, "Washington began to talk of 'Southwest Asia' instead of the Middle East as the area of crisis and of American concern." Cold War strategists wished to emphasize that the region was crucial not because it was east of us, but because it was immediately southwest of the Soviet Union, which had a plan to push through to the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. The sooner Americans started thinking about the region as "Southwest Asia," the sooner they would grasp the nature of the threat.

National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski effected the shift in labeling. Two days after the Soviet invasion, he warned President Jimmy Carter that "the collapse of the balance of power in Southwest Asia... could produce Soviet presence right down on the edge of the Arabian and Oman Gulfs." Carter, reeling from the combined effects of the invasion and the Iran hostage crisis, opened a dramatic television address to the nation some days later with these words: "I come to you this evening to discuss important and rapidly changing circumstances in Southwest Asia." Carter proceeded to warn Americans of "a threat of further Soviet expansion into neighboring countries in Southwest Asia." A month later, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee jumped on board, and held a series of landmark hearings later published as "U.S. Security Interests and Policies in Southwest Asia."

"A new name has been devised to cover these counties on which attention has been concentrated during the past 12 months," wrote the military historian Sir Michael Howard in Foreign Affairs a year later. "Southwest Asia: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and the oil-bearing states bordering what now must tactfully be termed simply 'the Gulf,' all constituting a politically seismic zone of incalculable explosive potential." Campbell later gave a similar definition: "'Southwest Asia' includes everything from the eastern fringes of the Arab world to the western limits of the Indian subcontinent." (Campbell also added that "roughly, it is Zbigniew Brzezinski's 'arc of crisis.'" Brzezinski had coined that phrase a year before the Soviet invasion, and it figured prominently in a January 1979 story in TIME magazine, whose cover showed a Soviet bear looming over the Persian Gulf. TIME explained that Brzezinski's "arc of crisis" consisted of "the nations that stretch across the southern flank of the Soviet Union from the Indian subcontinent to Turkey, and southward through the Arabian Peninsula to the Horn of Africa.")

This "Southwest Asia," then, wasn't a geographic reference at all, but a strategic one with a Cold War application. Not surprisingly, both the CIA and the Pentagon quickly picked up the term and ran with it. The CIA established a Southwest Asia Analytic Center, which produced papers like "The Soviets and the Tribes of Southwest Asia." The Defense Department acted similarly, applying "Southwest Asia" (SWA) to a large area centered in the Gulf, but extending far beyond it. "Southwest Asia" is now the core of CENTCOM's "Area of Responsibility" (AOR), which runs from Kazakhstan to Kenya.

Which brings us back to the Ross appointment at the State Department. "Southwest Asia" isn't much used at State, which still prefers "Middle East" and hasn't even given up entirely on "Near East." ("Southwest Asia" is regularly used only in the Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, where it includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, India, and Sri Lanka.) After the Ross announcement, journalists wanted to know exactly what Ross's own area of responsibility covered. In particular, did it include Afghanistan and Pakistan, the original entry point to "Southwest Asia" of the Cold War strategists? Hadn't responsibllity for both countries already been given to Richard Holbrooke, named only a month earlier as Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan?

At first, even the acting State Department spokesman, Robert Wood, didn't know just what "Southwest Asia" included, which made for an embarrassing exchange at the Department's daily press briefing. (Question: "You guys named an envoy for Southwest Asia. I presume that you know what countries that includes." Wood: "Yes. Of course, we know. I just—I don’t have the list to run off—you know, right off the top of my head here."

But the next day, Wood had an answer:

MR. WOOD: Let me give you my best—our best read of this. From our standpoint, the countries that make up areas of the Gulf and Southwest Asia include Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Yemen, and those are the countries.

QUESTION: Not—not Afghanistan and Pakistan?

MR. WOOD: Look, Ambassador Ross will look at the entire region, should he be asked to, including Afghanistan. But this is something that would be worked out. You were—you asked the question yesterday about Ambassador Holbrooke and whether there was going to be some kind of, I don’t know, conflict over who is working in—on that particular issues in that country.

Look, Ambassador Ross and Ambassador Holbrooke will work together where necessary if they need to, if there’s some kind of overlap. But that’s, in essence, the State Department’s geographical breakdown of Southwest Asia.

QUESTION: Okay. So it does not—it is not the same breakdown as the military uses?

MR. WOOD: No, the military uses a different breakdown, but I’d have to refer you to them for their specific breakdown.

QUESTION: So it doesn’t include Jordan? It doesn’t include—

MR. WOOD: I just gave you the breakdown as I—as the State Department breaks it down.

QUESTION: So if Ambassador Ross is special envoy—special advisor for Gulf and Southwest Asia, what is the difference between Gulf and Southwest Asia?

MR. WOOD: Look—

QUESTION: For me, this is Gulf.

MR. WOOD: Well, it may be for you. For others, it may be different. I’d have to—I’ve given you what the Department’s position is with regard to the geographic makeup of the region.

Why did the State Department construe "Southwest Asia" so narrowly—so much so that it really is indistinguishable from "The Gulf"? That's a matter for speculation. One report says Ross did have Afghanistan and Pakistan on the list of countries he thought belonged in the package. Holbrooke reportedly insisted they both be dropped, and got his way.

But it's already clear that last week added yet another layer of confusion to the terminology the United States inflicts on the region to suit its own political, diplomatic, and strategic requirements. There is a "Near East" and a "Middle East" and a "Greater Middle East" (GME) and a "Middle East and North Africa" (MENA) and a "Broader Middle East and North Africa" (BMENA). And now, alongside the Defense Department's greater "Southwest Asia," we have the lesser "Southwest Asia" of the State Department as scaled down for Ross. (This is not to be confused with the "Southwest Asia" of the State Department's own Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. Not a single country in that bureau's "Southwest Asia" is identical to Ross's.) Of course, labels tend to slip and slide across the map over time, depending on circumstance. It's just remarkable to see them slip and slide at one time, in one building.

Meanwhile, in Iran, there is no confusion, only outrage that the appointment of Ross mentions "The Gulf," as opposed to the Persian Gulf. Iran has waged a persistent campaign to keep the Persian adjective firmly fastened to the Gulf. But the Iranian government won't take offense at Iran's inclusion in "Southwest Asia"—to the contrary. Last year a leading Iranian journalist wrote a column entitled "There Is No Middle East." The message:

The people of Southwest Asia and North Africa should not use the appellation Middle East to describe their home region because it was coined by European imperialists. The use of such non-indigenous terms only serves to reinforce mental slavery and subjugation.... The vocabulary that we use influences our thought patterns. If Muslims use Eurocentric vocabulary, even when speaking our own languages, it will undermine our sense of identity. A better substitute for the Middle East/North Africa would be Southwest Asia/North Africa, which could be abbreviated as SWANA.

Don't Persians know that the naming of Asia is owed to... the Greeks?.

Reposted from Middle East Strategy at Harvard.

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Below: Jimmy Carter delivers his January 4, 1980 televised address concerning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. (There is a brief preface on the Iran hostages.) His White House diary records this as an "Address to the Nation on the situation in Southwest Asia." Notice the prop in the opening shot: a globe positioned so as to show the region. Toward the end of this segment, the camera pans across a map. (If you cannot see the embedded clip, or wish to view the entire address, click here.)