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Jewish World Review Nov. 5, 2001 / 19 Mar-Cheshvan, 5762
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http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
WHOEVER paid attention to the American professors who specialize on the Middle East would have
heard some surprising things before September 11.
For one, they dismissed militant Islamic terror as unworthy of their attention. Listen to
Fawaz Gerges --- a well-known scholar whose credentials include connections to Oxford, Cambridge,
and Harvard, as well as a professorship at Sarah Lawrence College in New York:
Gerges declared himself skeptical of the U.S. government's warnings about terrorism and
criticized what he called "the terrorist industry" (a disdainful term for specialists on this
topic) for exaggerating "the terrorist threat to American citizens." Professor Gerges even
accused (in a sentence I expect him deeply to regret) terrorist specialists of indirectly
perpetuating an "irrational fear of terrorism by focusing too much on farfetched horrible
scenarios." Hmm.
Gerges, it bears noting, published these insights just a half year before the farfetched
suicide hijackings of September 11.
He is just one scholar of many who got it wrong, as my colleague Martin Kramer shows in his new
book, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Washington
Institute for Near East Policy). In fact, the professorate as a whole so ignored the militant
Islamic threat that not one of them ever "got around to producing a single serious analysis" of
Osama bin Laden.
Kramer recounts a string of missed opportunities, self-imposed isolation, and failed
predictions on the part of university-based academics. Some examples:
In all, Kramer concludes in his incisive and original study, "America's academics have failed
to predict or explain the major evolutions of Middle Eastern politics and society over the past
two decades." Time and again, they "have been taken by surprise by their subjects; time and
again, their paradigms have been swept away by events."
And when not getting it wrong, the university specialists neglected the problems facing the
United States in the region (such as rogue regimes and weapons proliferation) in favor of
studies with a theoretical bent without value for understanding practical problems.
These failures have not gone unnoticed off-campus, where they "depleted the credibility of
scholarship among influential publics," Kramer reports. In Washington, "the mere mention of
academic Middle Eastern studies often causes eyes to roll." Book agents run from them, while
television producers positively gallop. Foundations came to look at them askance. Even
"portions of the general public had begun to write [them] off," sensing that this guild of
experts has more information than common sense.
Journalists, think-tankers, and ex-government officials have largely filled the gap. Their
numbers are small and academics insult them as "intellectual counterfeiters" who purvey
"superficial and twisted analyses," but they speak a language Americans understand, produce in
a timely fashion, and get their subject right.
As a result, Kramer finds, some few dozen individuals working out of think tanks "managed to
establish more public credibility" than the two thousand-plus professors at American
universities. Professors found themselves left, in Kramer's biting words, "to debate one
another in growing obscurity,"
The Middle East presents the United States with singular dangers --- rogue states, militant
Islam, the Arab-Israeli conflict, disruption of oil and gas supplies, weapons of mass
destruction, terrorism, drug-trafficking, counterfeiting. The scholars' collective irrelevance
makes the formulation of correct policies that much harder.
And what Americans do in the Middle East has immense importance for the region, from saving
Kuwait to brokering Arab-Israeli negotiations to making war on the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan. Therefore, the failure Martin Kramer documents affects Americans and Middle
Easterners alike, not to speak of others around the world.
A change for the better, he shows, will result mainly from two sources: senior American
scholars, who need to recognize and rectify their mistakes; and those who fund Middle Eastern
studies -- from the federal government to university alumni -- who need to demand improvement.
The time is ripe for both of them to start making
By Daniel Pipes
JWR contributor Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and the author of several books, most recently Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes from. Comment by clicking here.
