"We are witnessing right now in the United States one of the most remarkable uprisings of black people against the structural regime of racial domination," exclaimed Rutgers University law professor Noura Erakat. In a June 3... 
Those concerned with the state of Middle East studies have a litany of common complaints: politicized professors that teach fringe academic theories, rampant anti-Semitism masking as criticism of Israel, instant capitulation to... 
Watching as a variety of actors, known and unknown, attempt to tear the United States apart at the seams has me thinking about the intifada, the Palestinian "uprising" against or "shaking off" of Israel. The "protests" (riots?)... 
Hamid Algar turns 80 years old this year. For 45 years (1965–2010) he used his position as professor of Persian and Islamic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, to celebrate the "genius" of Ayatollah Ruhollah... 
The recent appointment of Ilana Feldman as the interim dean of George Washington University's (GWU) Elliott School of International Affairs is extremely concerning on several levels. Feldman is an active known supporter of the... 
A cohort of professors of Middle East studies at American universities are making common cause with the Iranian regime and using the coronavirus pandemic as a pretext for demanding that the United States lift its sanctions on... 
In February, the College of Islamic Studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) in Doha, Qatar, hosted a panel titled "Global Islamophobia: Understanding its Roots, Challenging its Impact." It was a fitting venue for a... 
Last month, in one of the last public lectures before universities shut down in-person gatherings in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Darryl Li, an assistant professor of anthropology and lecturer in law at the University of... 
Howler of the Month (archive)"This article posits a theorisation of decolonisation in relation to queer as it emerges from the settler-colonial context of Palestine, what I call decolonial queering. The first part provides a new reading of Zionist settler-colonialism, which I define as hetero-conquest. Its novelty lies in refocusing the question of colonialism in native grounded knowledge of queering, while showing the limitations of those existing studies whose frames emanate mainly from American and/or global north contexts of racism and homo-nationalism." Walaa Alqaisiya, Fellow of Gender, Conflict, and Sexuality in the Dept. of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics; "Palestine and the Will to Theorise Decolonial Queering"; Middle East Critique, Vol. 29, 2020, Special Issue on Queering the Middle East. (link to source) 
We Couldn't Have Said it Better (archive)"The campus zealotry of Students for Justice in Palestine is hardly a spontaneous youthful expression of outrage funded by pocket money. Their activities include costly defamatory installations of so-called apartheid walls, checkpoints, die-ins, chants and hostile invasions of classrooms and meetings, and thuggish disruptions of visiting speakers. Its founder, Hatem Bazian, is a lecturer in ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley." Cynthia Ozick, American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, on the leading role of professors and other thinkers and writers in fomenting anti-Semitism over the centuries; in "Anti-Semitism and the Intellectuals"; the Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2020. (link to source) CAMPUS WATCH, a project of the Middle East Forum, reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North America with an aim to improving them. The project mainly addresses five problems: analytical failures, the mixing of politics with scholarship, intolerance of alternative views, apologetics, and the abuse of power over students. Campus Watch fully respects the freedom of speech of those it debates while insisting on its own freedom to comment on their words and deeds. |
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