Category Archives: Arab-Israeli Conflict

What the Heck, I mean Hayek…

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Lebanon, Terrorism Issue, YouTube Watch

[Webshaykh’s note: With so much discredited foreign policy decision-making, perhaps we should go back to the Nancy Reagan doctrine and look at the ouija board. Give political anti-realism a chance…what the heck, Mr. Hayek… See it for yourself on Youtube.]

‘Clairvoyant’ sees new Lebanese president, more assassinations, Hizbullah ‘surprise’

Daily Star staff
Tuesday, October 30, 2007

BEIRUT: Reputed clairvoyant Michel Hayek predicted late on Sunday that “Lebanon will witness the election of a new president despite current problems.” He also ruled out the “imminent” threat of civil war. In an interview with George Salibi on New TV, Hayek foresaw “a few skirmishes and problems” in the country.

“There is no impending end to the string of assassinations,” he said, referring to the political murders that have plagued Lebanon since 2005.

Nicknamed “the Nostradamus of the Middle East,” Hayek is known for his yearly predictions for Lebanon, the Middle East and the world. Continue reading What the Heck, I mean Hayek… →

Tenure Crashers Gone Wrong

Anthropology/Sociology, Arab-Israeli Conflict, Archaeology and Antiquities

In a previous post I commented on the media-made controversy over the tenure case of anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj at Barnard College. In noting a pingback to my post on another blog, I discovered that those who would try to interrupt the tenure process at Barnard have gone even further into the wrong territory. The “Deny Abu El Haj Tenure Committee” has created a website using Prof. Abu El-Haj’s name (http://www.nadiaabuelhaj.com/) in order to attack her. The url has even been copyrighted. For a group that claims to be interested in restoring “honor” to Barnard, it appears any means justifies their tenure crashing end. I am not a lawyer (as my salary would well document), but this site seems a prime case for a libel suit. How can a group copyright a person’s name for a website and use that to attack? Forget the bulldozer, this is what the bull drops on the ground and it sure doesn’t smell like a fact.

Daniel Martin Varisco

Open Letter to a Democratic President

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Iraq War, Taliban, Terrorism Issue

by Richard W. Bulliet

January 21, 2009

Congratulations on your inauguration. May history remember your term in
office as the greatest political turn-around in American history.

Now to Iraq, the puzzle your predecessor has left for you to solve:

1. Compounding one botched war in Iraq with a second one in Iran would
sink your presidency before it starts. President Ahmadinejad of the
Islamic Republic of Iran will be up for reelection in seven months (August
2009). The Iranian people must be given an unfettered opportunity to
retire him to private life and elect someone of more liberal temperament.
His unpopularity in Iran already points in that direction. So, the United
States should do nothing that would enhance his prospects of reelection.
Diplomacy must replace saber rattling, and the “axis of evil” rhetoric
must be retired. Let us do what we can to give the Iranians a chance to
change leaders through their own electoral system.

2. Begin immediately the relocation of combat units to bases outside the
major cities of Iraq as a first step toward the withdrawal of ground
forces from the country. Announce that combat operations will henceforth
be restricted to fighting against those who attack American troops, supply
lines, or physical assets. Open negotiations with the Iraqi government
about the possibility of leaving a small number of combat units in the
country for a fixed and limited period to interdict the infiltration of
foreign fighters and — in joint operations with the Iraqi army — combat
groups that both the United States and the Iraqi government agree are
primarily composed of foreign terrorists. Continue reading Open Letter to a Democratic President →

Lebanon is Laid Waste

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Lebanon, Poetry

[The Cedars of Lebanon, steel engraving by J. D. Harding after C. Barry, 1835]

Lebanon is laid waste.
I need no bible-toting prophet to remind me
that someone’s long silent God gave the order
to saw through the last cedars.

The litany of woes crosses the Litani
but no bridge is left behind to burn,
just the kindling of ersatz-born leaflets that first say “Flee”
then demand “Stop,”
but really mean “Do not breathe, we own the air.” Continue reading Lebanon is Laid Waste →

Bulldozing the [Arti]Facts

Anthropology/Sociology, Arab-Israeli Conflict, Archaeology and Antiquities, Journalism and Media, Orientalism

As an individual in Academe who has already achieved the career-defining rite of pedagogical passage known as “tenure,” the issue of a fellow scholar potentially being denied tenure in a highly politicized media campaign becomes an issue of concern. I am not so puffed up to think that tenure status is ipso facto a mark of praiseworthy expertise. There are far too many examples out there of professors who are not any better for having been collegially granted a life sentence or who drop out of publishing and professional sight once they are “in.” Some use the bestowed honor to promote their own partisan views at the expense of teaching others by example to enhance critical thinking. But one thing that I do find sacred about the status is that it is necessarily judged in the local academic context. If one’s peers and administrative lords agree that a certain professor deserves tenure, then so be it. It is not as though a pope is being elected to shepherd the whole flock. Outside interference is indeed interference, especially when the deliberated judgments of a range of responsible individuals at a major college are being challenged.

One current case at Barnard College has hit the media, a rarity except when an outside group has a strong partisan bias. This is the case of Nadia Abu El-Haj, who teaches anthropology. Continue reading Bulldozing the [Arti]Facts →

Blame it on the Bossa Nova. Or the Israel Lobby. Whatever.

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Israel, Palestine

by Gregory Starrett

One Monday late last March, I got back to my office after five days away and found e-mails from six different mailing lists and individual colleagues discussing, or linking to discussions of, or linking to the text of a London Review of Books article by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, two prominent American political scientists, on how “The Israel Lobby” in the United States distorts U.S. foreign policy. Journalists, academics, former government officials, and others have been busily taking notice of the piece, looking for their names or the names of their friends and mentors, (or for those of their bete noirs and whipping boys), and dutifully proclaiming either that it’s about time someone outside the ranks of the Left finally noticed AIPAC’s shenanigans, or squawking about the article’s myriad inaccuracies, basic unfairness, and blatant anti-Semitism.

As far as I can tell, there are three difficulties with Mearsheimer and Walt’s work. Continue reading Blame it on the Bossa Nova. Or the Israel Lobby. Whatever. →

The Problem with ‘My Problem with Jimmy Carter’s Book’

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Books You Should Read, Journalism and Media, Palestine

Middle East Quarterly, published by Daniel Pipes’ organization Middle East Forum, contains an article titled “My Problem with Jimmy Carter’s Book”, by Kenneth Stein, the first executive director of the Carter Center in Atlanta from 1983 to 1986, and currently a professor of Contemporary Middle Eastern History at Emory University. Stein, it will be remembered, resigned from his affiliation with the Carter Center, where he was a Middle East Fellow for over two decades, in protest over former President Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Touring the country explaining his objections to his former boss’s perspective on the Israeli Palestinian conflict, Stein has refrained from tarring Carter with the label “Jew-hater” (this from the ever-subtle David Horowitz), or claiming that Carter’s criticisms of Israeli policy stem from Carter having “enriched[ed] himself with dirty money”–dirty Arab oil money, specifically–from Shaykh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates, “an unredeemable anti-Semite and all-around bigot” (this from the extraordinary Alan Dershowitz in an article) It should be noted, since Dershowitz does not, that much of the alleged dirty money that flowed through the Carter Center would have supported—and in the early years, been managed and disbursed by–Professor Stein. Continue reading The Problem with ‘My Problem with Jimmy Carter’s Book’ →

Water rather than Whining

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Iraq War, Palestine


[“…I entered the city officially at noon, “December 11th”, with a few of my staff, the commanders of the French and Italian detachments, the heads of the political missions, and the Military Attaches of France, Italy, and America. The procession was all afoot, and at Jaffa gate I was received by the guards representing England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, India, France, and Italy. The population received me well…” (General Allenby in Source Records of the Great War, Vol. V, ed. Charles F. Horne, National Alumni 1923)]

[Note: Almost 90 years ago, on December 9, 1917, General Allenby marched into Jerusalem to accept the surrender of the city by Ottoman Turkish officials. But unlike the current debacle in Iraq, where liberation has not been followed up by tangible development, it was the ability of British engineers to provide clean drinking water that helped smooth the transition from Ottoman rule to a mandate, ultimately as unclean and messy as it would become. It is worth reading the following excerpt by W. T. Massey, not only for strategic advice on how to win over a conquered populace, but also for a prime example of the journalistic ethnocentrism in which the West provides a “civilising hand” to the poor Oriental.]

THE TOUCH OF THE CIVILISING HAND
by W. T. Massey (1919)

It is doubtful whether the population of any city within the zones of
war profited so much at the hands of the conqueror as Jerusalem. In
a little more than half a year a wondrous change was effected in the
condition of the people, and if it had been possible to search the
Oriental mind and to get a free and frank expression of opinion,
one would probably have found a universal thankfulness for General
Allenby’s deliverance of the Holy City from the hands of the Turks.
And with good reason. The scourge of war so far as the British Army
was concerned left Jerusalem the Golden untouched. For the 50,000
people in the City the skilfully applied military pressure which
put an end to Turkish misgovernment was the beginning of an era
of happiness and contentment of which they had hitherto had no
conception. Justice was administered in accordance with British
ideals, every man enjoyed the profits of his industry, traders no
longer ran the gauntlet of extortionate officials, the old time corruption was a thing of the past, public health was organised as far as it could be on Western lines, and though in matters of sanitation and personal cleanliness the inhabitants still had much to learn, the appearance of the Holy City and its population vastly improved under
the touch of a civilising hand. Sights that offended more than one of
the senses on the day when General Allenby made his official entry had
disappeared, and peace and order reigned where previously had been but misery, poverty, disease, and squalor. Continue reading Water rather than Whining →