Howler of the Month (archive)

"Israel & Netanyahu's banning @Ilhan and @RepRashida from entering Palestine represents the Palestinian Nakba; thus the insistence on the right of return for the 1948 refugees is a key demand for the BDS movement."

Hatem Bazian, director of the Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project at the University of California, Berkeley, comparing Israel's Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu barring BDS activists and US Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar from a planned trip to Israel to the Palestinian "Nakba," or catastrophe, the Arabic term for Israel's founding in 1948; Twitter, August 15, 2019. (link to source)

We Couldn't Have Said it Better (archive)

"One of the most enjoyable aspects of this engaging book is observing how Kelly uses his literary talents to take on his shallow and capricious peers in the field of Middle Eastern studies. His disdain for 'political panderers' and 'guilt-ridden ex-diplomatists' is only matched by his abhorrence of the 'bogus scholar' and the 'type of journalist who drifts occasionally into the Public Record Office to see whether any newsworthy items have been brought to light lately' (p.67). As a prolific reviewer of books himself, he has a particular issue with fellow reviewers on Middle East works whose 'sole acquaintance with the subject under discussion derives from the books they are reviewing' (p.77). The ignorant and uninformed may frustrate him but he is positively enraged by those who know the truth but instead choose, in the interest of ideology or professional advancement, to pander to the received doctrines of the day."

Rory Miller, Professor of Government at Georgetown University in Qatar, on the second volume of J.B. Kelly's "The Oil Cringe of the West"; "Middle Eastern Studies," January 2016. (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.