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...conducted think-tanks with close links Israel's ruling circles. Such attacks on MESA date back to 1967 and the Arab-Israeli war. The role of organisations such as ADL, AIPAC, AVOT and ACTA is examined, as is Campus-Watch and the attempt to introduce legislation in 2003 to place university-level Middle East studies under much closer government control (via HR 3077).
Keywords: ADL, AIPAC, Bush, Campus-Watch, HR 3077, Islam, Israel, MESA, Palestine, Right, war on terrorism
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Since the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, supporters of George W. Bush's Manichaean view of the world have mounted a sustained campaign to delegitimise critical thought about the Middle East. They have exploited the understandable fears of the American people to intimidate and defame ordinary citizens, public figures, scholars who study the Middle East and the Islamic world and elected officials who have publicly criticised the Bush administration's war on Afghanistan, the prospect of an endless 'war on terrorism', the assault on Iraq and the indulgence of Israel's repression of the Palestinian people. Universities and colleges have been a particular target of policing what may be thought and said about the Middle East because they are among the few institutions where intelligent political discourse remains possible in the United States.
The Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) has been subjected to a barrage of intemperate attacks. MESA is the largest organisation of scholars who study the Middle East. Its members include students, teachers and interested individuals from all the academic disciplines and are citizens of North America, Europe and the Middle East. Conservative pundits accuse MESA members, not the FBI or the CIA, of bearing responsibility for what befell us on September 11 because we failed to warn the American public about the dangers of radical Islam. They do not consider that President Bush might be held responsible for his failure to attend to terrorist threats the summer before the September 11 attacks. For the neo-conservative true believers, the buck never stops where a Republican president is sitting. Scholars who stray from their doctrine are a much easier target.
The current campaign of vilification, guilt by association, guilt by ethnic or religious affiliation and delegitimisation of dissenting opinions recalls the early years of the cold war. Then, the American people were whipped into an anti-communist frenzy by the infamous Republican senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). McCarthy and his minions epitomised the tendency in American political life that conflates dissent with treason. Claiming to find communist conspiracies in every corner of American life, McCarthy and HUAC conducted modern-day witch hunts. Scholars of East Asia were blamed for 'losing' China, and the Rosenbergs were blamed for the Soviet Union's development of nuclear weapons. Then, as now, fear of a foreign enemy and an unfamiliar ideology was deployed to bully the American people into abandoning customary standards of civil liberties, academic freedom and common sense. There are, of course, important differences between the two historical periods. But the similarities are nonetheless striking.
AVOT, ACTA and the 'defence of civilisation'
The hysterical tone and political character of the effort to muzzle criticism of the Bush administration's foreign policy are exemplified by the inflated rhetoric of Americans for Victory over Terrorism (AVOT), founded in March 2002 by former secretary of education, former drug czar and moralist to the nation William Bennett. AVOT is a subsidiary of the Project for a New American Century, the think-tank distinguished by its energetic efforts to promote a US war on Iraq since 1998. Its principal funder is Lawrence Kadish, chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition, which seeks to bring Jews into the Republican Party. AVOT aims to "take to task those who blame America first and who do not understand--or who are unwilling to defend--our fundamental principles'. On 10 March 2002, Bennett published an open letter as an advertisement in the New York Times describing the external and internal threats to the United States. The external threat comprises 'radical Islamists and others'. The internal threat consists of 'those who are attempting to use this opportunity to promulgate their agenda of "blame America first"'. AVOT's list of internal enemies includes former president Jimmy Carter. Carter's offence was to criticise the 'axis of evil' notion that President Bush advanced in his 2002 State of the Union address as 'overly simplistic' and 'counterproductive'. Other internal enemies include congressional representative and Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich of Cleveland and Democratic representative Maxine Waters of Los Angeles.
The first post-September 11 expression of the link between the neo-conservative political agenda and the attack on critical thinking about the Middle East was a report issued by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) in November 2001 entitled 'Defending civilization: how our universities are failing America and what can be done about it'. (1) As the title suggests, ACTA maintained that criticism of the Bush administration's war on Afghanistan on campuses across the country was tantamount to negligence in 'defending civilization' and proof that 'our universities are failing America'. ACTA alleged that American universities were brought to this sorry state by inadequate teaching of western culture and American history. Consequently, students and faculty did not understand what was at stake in the fight...
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