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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Pipes has a Ph.D. from Harvard and is the author of 11 books, including the recent "Militant Islam Reaches America." Yet the professors he attacks say he's an outsider in the field. "The Middle East Forum is not really a forum. Somebody rich in the community has set [Pipes] up with a couple of offices and a fax machine and calls him a director," says Juan Cole, a Campus Watch target and professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan. "They put out this Middle East Quarterly. It publishes scurrilous attacks on people. There's no scholarship. It's a put-up job. As for Pipes himself, let's just say that he's not a full professor at a major university." Indeed, aside from Pipes, the Middle East Forum has a single researcher, whose job, according to the Web site, extends into fundraising.
Instead of the university, Pipes has made his home in the neoconservative movement. A veteran of Ronald Reagan's State Department, Pipes is a member of the Defense Department's Special Task Force on Terrorism and Technology and an adjunct scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a hawkish think tank whose board of advisors includes Richard Perle and Jeanne Kirkpatrick.
He would like to see academia look more like the circles he travels in. According to the Campus Watch Web site, we should be worried that "American scholars of the Middle East, to varying degrees, reject the views of most Americans and the enduring policies of the U.S. government about the Middle East." Right now, he argues, the university should be "helpful in fighting the war. "Our premise is that there's a problem in the university. The primary cause of that problem is the Middle East studies faculty," Pipes says. "There are many manifestations of the problem, such as almost uniform point of view, an unwillingness to tolerate other points of view, a tendency towards extremism, alienation from the United States and American interests [and] abuse of power vis-a-vis students who don't share this point of view. They don't like being challenged. We're saying: 'Get used to it.'"
Pipes' rhetoric and methods, with their deliberate echoes of past ideological witch hunts, are clearly meant to chill. Yet there's one thing that makes the issue more complicated than ordinary right-wing hysteria over intellectual decadence: Some of what Pipes says is true.
His rants against terrorist-loving tenured radicals are deceptive, but there's plenty of evidence behind his insistence that some pro-Israel Jewish students feel abused by teachers and peers fighting for the Palestinian cause.
According to Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, the intimidation is worldwide. "I'm one of the very, very few professors around the United States that vigorously speaks up on behalf of Israel, and I have gotten e-mails and calls from all over the world from students who feel chilled because no one speaks up for them."
Campus Watch is dishonest to lump Khalidi, whose arguments are radical but also lucid, humane and erudite, with the demagogic Berkeley graduate student Snehal Shingavi, who warned: "Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections" in the course description for his class, "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance." (After a national outcry, the administration forced him to remove the notice). Unfortunately, though, Shingavi may be as representative as Khalidi is of pro-Palestinian activism on campus.
At least, that's what pro-Israel Berkeley student Oren Lazar thinks. "There are definitely times when it's hard to be Jewish on campus, when Students for Justice in Palestine has one of their angry rallies," he says.
Lazar, a senior in political science who teaches a class in modern Israeli history, defiantly signed up for Shingavi's course. According to Lazar, the only historical framework used in the class is a book by Palestinian activist and literary critic Edward Said. The teacher's refusal to introduce an Israeli perspective is "an example of bias and intolerance of different points of view," Lazar says. "It creates an atmosphere where anti-Semitism is tolerated."
And, in fact, unambiguous anti-Semitism is cropping up nationwide. At Berkeley, Lazar says that a demonstrator at a campus Students for Justice in Palestine rally, held, tactfully, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, shouted, "Go Back to Germany!" at him. This spring, someone painted "Fuck the Jews" on Cal's Hillel building and threw a brick through the building's window. At San Francisco State in May, a flyer put out by a campus Muslim group had pictures of soup cans, with the slogan, "canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license." At the University of Colorado at Boulder, swastikas were recently sprayed on succah, wooden canopies built for the autumn Jewish holiday Succoth. Sam Peltzman, an economics professor at the University of Chicago who has been an informal liaison with aggrieved Jewish students, reports that when a yarmulke-wearing student stood up to ask a question at a lecture on the Middle East, someone shouted, "Jew, sit down!"
