Modern Middle East studies exist not to advance our understanding of a complex, important region, says Andrew C. McCarthy, in a Middle East Forum/Campus Watch-sponsored essay appearing today at National Review Online. As he explains, it seeks to discredit the very notion of objective scholarship:
From its roots . . . modern Middle East Studies is a political movement aligning leftism and Islamism under the guise of an academic discipline. It is not an objective quest for learning guided by a rich corpus of history and culture; it is a project to impose its pieties as incontestable truth — and to discredit dispassionate analysis in order to achieve that end.
To read the rest of McCarthy's probing analysis of this problem, please click here.