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You will remember the case of Nadia Abu El-Haj, the anthropologist who last year received tenure at Barnard after a furious controversy over her book, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Jane Kramer has written a panegyric to her for The New Yorker, simply brushing off serious-minded criticisms of Abu El-Haj's book.Furthermore: TigerHawk gets my point. And click here to see how Abu El-Haj will be spending April 28. Of course, she's there as an American, with no particular axe to grind.
"Bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are." —Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit
Professor John L. Esposito runs a slick operation at Georgetown with $20 million of funding from Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. The shared agenda of these two is to make us all feel guilty for having wondered, after 9/11, about Saudis, Muslims, and the contemporary teaching of Islam. Esposito now has a new book (with co-author Dalia Mogahed, who runs something called the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies), bearing the pretentious title Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think. It's based on gleanings from the Gallup World Poll.
The core argument of the book is that only 7% of Muslims are "politically radicalized," and that "about 9 in 10 Muslims are moderate." On what does this factoid rest? The authors explain (pp. 69-70):
According to the Gallup Poll, 7% of respondents think that the 9/11 attacks were "completely" justified and view the United States unfavorably.... the 7%, whom we'll call "the politically radicalized" because of their radical political orientation... are a potential source for recruitment or support for terrorist groups.So an essential precondition for being "politically radicalized" is to believe that 9/11 was "completely" justified. The pool of support is only 7%. Don't you feel relieved?
Respondents who said 9/11 was unjustified (1 or 2 on a 5-point scale, where 1 is totally unjustified and 5 is completely justified) are classified as moderates. Respondents who said 9/11 was justified (4 or 5 on the same scale) are classified as radicals.Wait a minute.... In 2006, then, these same authors defined "radicals" not only as Muslims who thought 9/11 was "completely justified" (5 on their scale), but those who thought it was largely justified (4 on their scale).
About 93 percent of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims are moderates and only seven percent are politically radical, according to the poll, based on more than 50,000 interviews.Can there be a more distorted interpretation than that? Sure. Here's the Deutsche Presse-Agentur, reporting the same "findings":
The overwhelming majority of Muslims—93 percent—condemned the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.Ah. So anyone who didn't "completely justify" 9/11 is now thought to have somehow condemned it.
Many continue to ask: If Muslims truly reject terrorism, why does it continue to flourish in Muslim lands? What these results indicate is that terrorism is as much an "out group" activity as any other violent crime. Just as the fact that violent crimes continue to occur throughout U.S. cities does not indicate Americans' silent acquiescence to them, the continued terrorist violence is not proof that Muslims tolerate it. An abundance of statistical evidence indicates the opposite. (p. 95)Of course, in America we don't have vast numbers of people who completely or largely or half-justify violent crime. We don't have bishops and journalists extolling its virtues. We don't teach our children that they'll go to paradise for killing a night attendant at a 7-11. And we don't wait for someone else to fight our crime; we police ourselves. Terrorism continues to flourish in the Muslim world precisely because many of Esposito's newly redefined "moderates" justify, excuse, and tolerate it—enough to allow it to burrow into the culture. This is why Who Speaks for Islam? is such a dangerous compendium of misinformation. Its purpose is to persuade us that Muslims don't have to do much of anything, and that the onus is on us—to banish "Islamophobia," or change our policies, or address the "grievances" of the "radicals." The book is a slick version of 9/11 denial. Its message is that the terrorists did what they did despite being Arabs and Muslims.
In one of the survey's most striking findings, majorities in Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan say that they do not believe groups of Arabs carried out the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The percentage of Turks expressing disbelief that Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks has increased from 43% in a 2002 Gallup survey to 59% currently. And this attitude is not limited to Muslims in predominantly Muslim countries—56% of British Muslims say they do not believe Arabs carried out the terror attacks against the U.S., compared with just 17% who do.
How can a book subtitled What a Billion Muslims Really Think not make so much as a single mention of this pervasive 9/11 denial? How many hundreds of millions out of the billion think 9/11 wasn't justified, because they suspect the CIA or the Mossad did it to smear the Muslims? And how would their believing that make them "moderate"?
On the Gallup website under "consulting," Esposito is now billed as a "Gallup Senior Scientist." In fact, there's nothing "scientific" about the Saudi-fueled advocacy of John Esposito, whose underestimations of deadly trends in Islamism a decade ago contributed to the complacency that made 9/11 possible in the first place. He's at it again, this time in partnership with the bottom-liners at Gallup. This book should carry a label on its jacket: Warning! Belief in Saudi-backed pseudo-science is dangerous to America's health.
Update, April 12: Don't miss Hillel Fradkin's devastating review of Who Speaks for Islam? at Middle East Strategy at Harvard. "The book is a confidence game or fraud," Fradkin writes, "of which Esposito should be ashamed. So too should the Gallup Organization, its publisher."
Walter Laqueur, at 86, continues in his prolific and provocative ways. In the past couple of years, he's published a memoir, a book on the new antisemitism, and another on the demise of Europe. It's been quite a performance by any standard. Now, with a nod to April Fools' Day and Israel's 60th anniversary (the two are not to be confused), he's produced a striking short paper, entitled Disraelia: A Counterfactual History, 1848-2008, for the new Middle East Papers series of Middle East Strategy at Harvard. It's not so much a narrative history as a collection of "documents," premised on a "what-if." What if antisemitism—the modern ideology of hate and the resulting pogroms—had appeared not toward the end of the nineteenth century, but closer to its beginning? What if Disraeli then, rather than Herzl later, had seized the moment and inspired a mass migration of Jews to Ottoman Palestine? What if two million of them had made their way to the country by 1855? I won't say more so as not to spoil the scenario. You can download the paper here.There is much reason to believe that this state [of Disraelia], given a high birth rate, would have some sixty million inhabitants at the beginning of the 21st century. It would have advanced industries, leading the world in fields such as nuclear and computer technologies. It would be the fifth-largest oil producer in the world, economically reasonably healthy with a growth rate of 6-8 percent, competitive with Europe, America and even Asia. It would have powerful armed forces, living in peace with its neighbors, at least to the extent that peaceful relations could be expected in this unquiet part of the world. It would not be a model state, but by the standards of time and place, considered much better that average. No one would dare to question its right to exist, and those who did would not be taken seriously.
In fact, Israel is many of these things. Even with a much smaller population than the imagined Disraelia, Israel is a world leader in a host of technological fields, its economic growth rate has been remarkable, it does have a powerful armed force, and it has won a hard-earned peace with some of its much larger neighbors ("to the extent that peaceful relations could be expected"). As for oil, it is an open question whether it is a boon or a bane, given that large oil wealth correlates very poorly with democracy.
As for legitimacy, Laqueur plays a trick, since his Disraelia isn't a Jewish state, or even a state of the Jews. It is a kind of binational or trinational state, of Jews, Arabs, and Kurds, in which "intermarriage, much to everyone's surprise, is fairly high." Separatist factions are ruthlessly suppressed. In a Middle East where even Kurds and Arabs cannot be kept in one state, there is something utterly utopian at the core of Disraelia. Indeed, it is this fantasy of supra-national coexistence that appeals to today's "one-state-solution" enthusiasts, precisely those who question Israel's right to exist.
The problem of legitimacy, then, may not be restricted to the size of the population, but may turn upon the essential character of the state. Laqueur's Disraelia is perhaps aptly named, precisely because it is de-Israelized. It also might not have lasted into this century. Middle Eastern states that lack a primary nationality are today vulnerable precisely because they are empty of identity at the core. Multi-ethnic, religiously diverse Iraq is a case in point—and had a Disraelia emerged, it is just as easy to imagine it reaching the same tragic impasse, oil and all.
So pardon me, Walter, for preferring Israel as it is. I'll take my chances. Still, he's provoked thought as always, and in my role as the co-convener of Middle East Strategy at Harvard, I'm delighted he has done so in the inaugural number of Middle East Papers.
Stephen Peter Rosen and I are the co-conveners of a website and group weblog, Middle East Strategy at Harvard. We have posted the following announcement on that site. If you qualify, apply.
From the inception of this public website, we imagined that it would have a companion forum for the exchange of ideas among persons with a professional interest in U.S. strategy and foreign policy. We call that companion MESHNet. MESHNet is a members-only message board, ideal for hosting open and structured discussions. We plan to develop MESHNet as a place where established and budding experts can express views among their peers, and where we can quickly congregate to enlighten and update one another during the crises that inevitably punctuate the affairs of the Middle East.
MESHNet will be launched next Tuesday, April 1. If you think you might qualify for membership, we urge you to apply. Read more about MESHNet here, and apply here.
At Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH), John L. Esposito has revisited a prediction he made over five years ago, in the lead-up to the Iraq war. "Five years after a U.S. war with Iraq," he wrote in November 2002, "it is likely that the Arab world will be less democratic than more and that anti-Americanism will be stronger rather than weaker." (Read his 2002 prediction here, and his new MESH post here.) Below I reproduce a comment I offered on his post:

