Herd Mentality, Denial of Reality Characterize Middle East Studies

At Campus Watch, two pieces that we commissioned appeared today, and both further confirm the intellectual decline of academe in general, and of Middle East studies in particular. It is a field beset by raw prejudice, willful blindness to empirical evidence, and a degree of politicization as high as that found in any academic endeavor.

Writing for FrontPage Magazine, Franck Salameh, who teaches in the department of Near Eastern Studies at Boston College, is happy to see the advent of a new academic organization, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA).

In "Seeking True Diversity in Middle East Studies," Salameh takes on the old guard of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) for its Arabist biases. Too often, professors ignore, downplay, or deny the region's ethnic, linguistic, and religious heterogeneity in order to present a distorted, ahistorical picture in which all Middle Easterners are Arabic-speaking Muslims. Because these same professors provide "expert opinion" for countless news organs, many Americans share their biases, albeit without the culpability of the professors.

Also published today is a timely piece by Jonathan Schanzer, an adjunct scholar at Campus Watch and the director of policy for the Jewish Policy Center.

Schanzer's op-ed, "Pessimistic Predictions: The Middle East Studies Sector Continues to Deny Success in Iraq," appears today at NRO. It shows that scholars such as Juan Cole of Michigan, Rashid Khalidi of Columbia, and Fawaz Gerges of Sarah Lawrence College have ignored contradictory evidence to downplay or deny the successes of the Surge in Iraq.

Bruce has documented the New York Times's ongoing efforts to smear veterans as homicidal maniacs. Some professors are equally determined to deny them their due credit for victories on the battlefield, as well.