Category Archives: Journalism and Media

ASMEA: ASinine and MEAn

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Islamophobia, Journalism and Media, Orientalism, Terrorism Issue


The primary international professional association of scholars who study the Middle East is MESA, the Middle East Studies Association. If you go to the main website, you will read:

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) is a private, non-profit, non-political learned society that brings together scholars, educators and those interested in the study of the region from all over the world. From its inception in 1966 with 50 founding members, MESA has increased its membership to more than 3,000 and now serves as an umbrella organization for more than sixty institutional members and thirty-nine affiliated organizations. The association is a constituent society of the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Council of Area Studies Associations, and a member of the National Humanities Alliance.

Members of MESA receive two journals, the flagship International Journal of Middle East Studies and the revamped Review of Middle East Studies. Each year MESA holds an annual convention, this year in Denver. As noted, the association is non-political and contains members with widely divergent views on the controversial political and religious issues in the Middle East and North Africa.

So, why, you might wonder, is there a rival organization known as ASMEA, The Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, with its own journal housed with Taylor and Francis? Ah, politics. The founding fathers of the association are Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, who appear to have joined forces primarily because of a common distaste for the work of Edward Said and their unfailing attraction to the intelligence community. The welcome message suggests that ASMEA is filling a gap:

ASMEA is a new academic society dedicated to promoting the highest standards of research and teaching in Middle Eastern and African studies, and related fields. It is a response to the mounting interest in these increasingly inter-related fields, and the absence of any single group addressing them in a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary fashion.

Like MESA, it claims to be non-partisan, although it is hard to explain why having only one point of view constitutes being non-partisan. It is obvious that scholars, like everyone else, will have differing opinions about issues like Palestinian statehood, inflammatory religious rhetoric, gender and a variety of issues that call for better understanding through dialogue among scholars. But ASMEA is monologue on top of being superficially trite. The claims for the “highest standards of research” are laughable, given the contents of its journal. For example,the most recent issue contains one book review. The chosen book is Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion across the Islamic World by Robin Wright. The author of the book is a reporter, well-traveled (140 countries and counting) and with a prolific presence on all the media. With due respect to the importance of journalism in a free society, Ms. Wright is not an academic scholar; nor has her book been published through the peer review vetting of an academic press. I am not concerned with the value of her book, but it is the kind of book that routinely gets reviewed in major media outlets and rarely in academic journals. Is this the only book that ASMEA could find worth reviewing? [Update: In my original post I misidentified Stephen A. Emerson as Stephen Emerson, an unabashed partisan who sees jihadist terror behind every Islamic-looking bush.] Continue reading ASMEA: ASinine and MEAn →

Varisco on WBEZ

"Arab Spring", Anthropology/Sociology, Journalism and Media, Yemen


I was interviewed yesterday on the “Worldview” Program of WBEZ, Chicago. To listen to the broadcast, click here.

Yemen’s new president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, has been in power nearly a month. He’s facing trouble in the southern province of Abyan. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the fighting has displaced more than 150,000 people since militants seized several cities in the province last May. Worldview will discuss the humanitarian crisis with Daniel Varisco, professor of anthropology at Hofstra University.

Sharing our values…

Anthropology/Sociology, Islamophobia, Journalism and Media, Terrorism Issue, Yemen


This post is not about the value of journalism, but about the blind prejudice that infiltrates much journalistic writing about values. I am not talking about the caricature newscasting of a Fox News Geraldo Rivera, who thinks wearing a hoodie is a problem (just like some maintain that a woman wearing a miniskirt is asking for “it”). Rather it is the prize-touting expert-of-all-trades mentality of Thomas Friedman, whose talking-head status is, in journalistic terms, astronomical. Yesterday, Friedman posted a commentary in The New York Times entitled “A Festival of Lies.”

Friedman begins with a quote from the historian Victor Davis Hanson in The National Review:

“Military assistance or punitive intervention without follow-up mostly failed. The verdict on far more costly nation-building is still out. Trying to help popular insurgents topple unpopular dictators does not guarantee anything better. Propping up dictators with military aid is both odious and counterproductive. Keeping clear of maniacal regimes leads to either nuclear acquisition or genocide — or 16 acres of rubble in Manhattan. What have we learned? Tribalism, oil, and Islamic fundamentalism are a bad mix that leaves Americans sick and tired of the Middle East — both when they get in it and when they try to stay out of it.”

I certainly agree with Friedman’s gut reaction that “And that is why it’s time to rethink everything we’re doing out there. What the Middle East needs most from America today are modern schools and hard truths, and we haven’t found a way to offer either.” Bravo. Bombs make enemies and schools build friendships: this hardly seems like a new revelation, but it is the kind of truth spoken to power that needs to be voiced time and time again.

But it is what underlies the rationale where I find an all-too-familiar ritual of truths that carry along the heavy baggage of assumptions that belie the argument being made. Continue reading Sharing our values… →

AIPAC, buy me!

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Humor and Satire, Israel, Journalism and Media, Judaism

The leading right-wingers in America view Israel as a kind of political football made out of seven million residents, a football that can be kicked at the wall over and over.

By Boaz Gaon, Haaretz, March 7, 2011

I, Boaz Gaon, being of sound mind and body, hereby offer myself for sale to AIPAC. Should the committee decline, I offer the opportunity to Sheldon Adelson. In any event, I offer my internal organs for free, as a confidence-building gesture, to leading right-wingers in America – to all those who view Israel as a kind of political football made out of seven million residents, a football that can be kicked at the wall over and over. After all, we Israelis don’t feel any pain, and we know that our destiny is to be tossed around like a ball in some exclusive gym by Republican lobbyists, before they head off to the sauna and then cocktails.

I’m offering myself for sale even though I was warned by my lawyer that this is an irreversible step, and that in all likelihood I’ll find myself at Israel Hayom newspaper’s next conference, and/or at the next reunion of White House veterans who worked for George W. Bush – persons who are partners of the Israeli right (Daniel Pipes, Elliot Abrams ) – naked and trussed up, with an apple stuffed in my mouth and served on a silver platter that has a likeness of Irving Moskowitz inscribed on it.

I’m doing this because I can read the writing on the wall. Continue reading AIPAC, buy me! →

Anthony Shadid: An American Story

Journalism and Media, Lebanon, Syria


Dr. Michael Abraham Shadid (1882-1966), who founded the first medical cooperative in Elk City, Oklahoma in 1931.

By Anouar Majid 
 
The sudden and tragic death of Anthony Shadid affected me in ways I had not anticipated.  As a childhood asthma sufferer, I always pay attention when I hear about such death-causing attacks, but Mr. Shadid’s untimely death in Syria left me wondering about how a man who had endangered his life to report on the troubled region of the Middle East was destined to die in the land of his ancestors.  I don’t know much about his life beyond what has been reported, but through a brief exchange I had with him recently, I now read his death as part of the dramatic encounter between the Middle East and the United States since the late nineteenth century.
 
The story for me begins with Mr. Shadid’s relative, Dr. Michael Shadid, an unsung national hero.  A couple of years or so ago, I came across the story of one Michael Shadid, a progressive Syrian (as Arabs from the Levant were known at the turn of the 20th century) immigrant who tried to change healthcare in the United States and left a legacy that could inspire us today as we desperately search for the right solutions. I also wrote about him on TingisRedux .

Born in a tiny village on the slopes of Mount Lebanon in 1882, in a household of nine siblings and a widowed mother, Michael Abraham Shadid overcame nearly insurmountable odds to get an American education in Beirut before finding a way to get out of his native land in search of a better life in the United States. Like many immigrants, he was mesmerized by the sight of New York and America’s possibilities.  He worked hard peddling jewelry and trinkets, got a medical education, and, moved by the suffering of poor people in Oklahoma, fought against entrenched interests to establish the first cooperative medical facility in Elk City. Continue reading Anthony Shadid: An American Story →

Anthony Shadid’s Last Article

"Arab Spring", Ethics, Journalism and Media, Tunisia


The late Anthony Shadid

[The recent passing of New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid leaves a large gap in their coverage of the ongoing crises in the Middle East. Here is his last article on the political climate in Tunisia.]

Islamists’ Ideas on Democracy and Faith Face Test in Tunisia
By ANTHONY SHADID, The New York Times, February 17, 2012

This article was reported and written before Mr. Shadid’s death in Syria .

TUNIS — The epiphany of Said Ferjani came after his poor childhood in a pious town in Tunisia, after a religious renaissance a generation ago awakened his intellect, after he plotted a coup and a torturer broke his back, and after he fled to Britain to join other Islamists seeking asylum on a passport he had borrowed from a friend.

Twenty-two years later, when Mr. Ferjani returned home, he understood the task at hand: building a democracy, led by Islamists, that would be a model for the Arab world.

“This is our test,” he said.

If the revolts that swept the Middle East a year ago were the coming of age of youths determined to imagine another future for the Arab world, the aftermath that has brought elections in Egypt and Tunisia and the prospect of decisive Islamist influence in Morocco, Libya and, perhaps, Syria is the moment of another, older generation.

No one knows how one of the most critical chapters in the history of the modern Arab world will end, as the region pivots from a movement against dictatorship toward a movement for something that is proving far more ambiguous. But the generation embodied by Mr. Ferjani, shaped by jail, exile and repression and bound by faith and alliances years in the making, will have the greatest say in determining what emerges.

Their ascent to the forefront of Arab politics charts the lingering intellectual and organizational prowess of the Muslim Brotherhood, a revivalist movement founded by an Egyptian schoolteacher in a Suez Canal town in 1928. But intellectual currents that once radiated from Egypt now just as often flow in the other direction, as scholars and activists in Morocco and Tunisia, perched on the Arab world’s periphery and often influenced by the West, export ideas that seek a synthesis of what the most radical Islamists, along with their many critics here and in the West, still deem irreconcilable: faith and democracy. Continue reading Anthony Shadid’s Last Article →

Best of the Blogs

"Arab Spring", CyberOrient, Journalism and Media, Teaching Resources


Cartoon source: http://www.trafficgenerationcafe.com/blog-website-faceoff/

Bassam Gergi and Mazen Zoabi unroll their guide to the Arabic blogosphere

Open Democracy, 12/30/11

Jadaliyya aims to shape the debate in the west by providing a window into regional scholarship and knowledge. Where others see data points, they see “living communities and dynamic societies.” The site currently publishes posts in both Arabic and English.

Mamfakinch is run by a group of young Moroccan activists who founded the #Feb20 movement calling for broad political, economic and social change. It aims to highlight information often ignored or distorted by official media sources. The site currently publishes posts in French, Arabic and English.

Nawaat, which means ‘the core’, was created to provide a platform for Tunisian bloggers and cyber-activists. It played a critical role in the Tunisian uprising and recognises that the “conquest of freedom is a battle to be fought every day. It currently publishes posts both in French and Arabic. Continue reading Best of the Blogs →

A Buick in Kabul

Afghanistan, Journalism and Media, Orientalism, Photography, Travel


One of the most famous round-the-world journalists of the last century (or any century) was Lowell Thomas, most known for his blockbuster show on “Lawrence of Arabia.” In 1922 Thomas traveled to Afghanistan and visited the Emir Amanullah. A digital archive of 73 photographs from that trip is available online at Harvard University. Here are pictures of Kabul and other parts of Afghanistan from 90 years ago. Several of the photographs show the American Buick that Thomas drove for his visit. If you happen to be old car buff and interested in Afghanistan, this will be a visual feast.


Continue reading A Buick in Kabul →