Middle East Studies--More Propaganda than Scholarship [refs. Hamid Dabashi, Joseph Massad, Rashid Khalidi, George Saliba, Nadia Abu El-Haj]

Mideast Outpost warns that Middle East Studies departments are graduating our future Mideast “experts” who will be totally misinformed about the true nature of Islam. As Hugh Fitzgerald writes:

Fitzgerald points out that while the Soviet Union spent seven to eight billion dollars for propaganda through the seventy years of its existence, the Saudis have spent one hundred billion and counting for mosques and madrassas all over the West, and for departments and endowed chairs of Middle East Studies at various influential institutions. Students are being misinformed by apologists for Islam who do not expose them to the real scholarship on the Mideast but whitewash Muslim history and the realities of Islamic governance. He exhorts alumni to withhold contributions in the interest of preserving the institutions and conditions of freedom that make art and science possible in face of those who would lull us into indifference about the consequences of Islamic pressure on our society.

Speaking of the Mideast and President Bush’s trip there, the idea of two states, Jewish and Palestinian, living “side by side” really should have been a total non-starter. The Oslo process completely upended the only reasonable solution to the Mideast problem, as Hillel Halkin, after many tergiversations and much hand-wrigning over the past few years, has finally asserted in the January Commentary. There is just not enough land and not nearly enough resources to make a Palestinian state on the 1947 partition. Whatever they might get will not satisfy the Palestinians and will not really be viable, especially given their currently underdeveloped cultural and civilizational skills. They will only look on prosperous and prospering Israel just a stone’s throw away (literally), and be driven mad with envy and covetousness. The solution, which was there all along but which we have not heard sounded because Oslo drowned it out with the two-state business, is that the Palestinians and the land they mainly occupy must be absorbed into the true Palestinian state, Jordan, which received FOUR-FIFTHS of the territory of the British mandate after WWI.