(Opinion crossposted from Brainstorm) I think this Halloween, I’ll go as Edward Said. Professors of Middle Eastern culture seem to have just become the newest national bogeymen in an election season marked by a conveniently renewed vendetta against “elites.”
Forget for the moment the malicious nonsense about Rashid Khalidi being doled out by the Republican candidates, a sour ragout of mendacity and meanness. Two paragraphs leap out in today’s New York Times article about Rashid Khalidi’s introduction to the politics of character assassination. If you are looking for a textbook definition of guilt by association in action, Daniel Pipes all but supplies it:
“If one’s talking about American political life, he’s at the extremes, at the margins. If one’s talking about the field of Middle East studies, he’s in the middle of it. But the field itself is dominated by professors who do not permit other points of view.”
Oh, I see — even if one makes the case that Professor Khalidi is in fact a highly respected and judicious scholar, his entire field of study discredits that view. When it comes to “not permitting other points of view,” Pipes should have a pretty good idea of what that entails. The mission statement of his own Middle East Forum states that his group “seeks to define and promote American interests in the Middle East. It defines U.S. interests to include fighting radical Islam, whether terroristic or lawful, [and] working for Palestinian acceptance of Israel.”
It’s a development that should worry anyone in academia. It’s nothing new, of course, for those like Pipes to go to war against professors like Khalidi by demonizing their field of study. What is truly scary is to see this nickel-and-dime sideshow suddenly become a part of a national political stage. At least Maher Awartani, a student of Khalidi’s, articulated what to me is most depressing about this latest round of anti-academic pandering. Obama “should have been like, yes, I know him, and I’d like to know more Middle East experts, because that’s an important thing when you’re making policies.”
