James Gelvin |
On Thursday November 10, 2011, approximately sixty people gathered for a lecture hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles’s Center for Near Eastern Studies. The event was titled, “Taking Stock: The Arab Uprising on the Eve of Their First Anniversary” and it featured two history professors, James Gelvin of ULCA and Juan Cole of the University of Michigan.
Though the two-hour event promised to illuminate the various particulars and multi-layered realities of the Arab uprisings, it quickly dwindled into a platform for the type of postcolonial, anti-American, and anti-Israel rhetoric typical to the field of Middle East studies, and certainly to the notoriously biased Gelvin and Cole.