#Department of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies

[motherlanguageday]

A journey through Kurdish music and memory.

A MYSTICAL RETELLING OF THE NOVEL BY BACHYTAR ALI.

This mystical retelling of Kurdish stories in Sorani (with translation) will be a journey through Kurdish music and memory with harpist Tara Jaff. Featuring award winning author Bachytar Ali and translator Kareem Abdulrahman in conversation with Ruth Abou Rached from the Department of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at University of Manchester.

This event is a partnership between Landscapes of future memory: creatives, literatures, and cultures of Middle East and North Africa (AMES) and Defiance: Artists at Risk.

DATE: 21 February 2024 TIME: 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm AGES: All ages welcome THEME: Languages, Music,Read

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Jaryn Crouson

Professors connected to anti-Israel protests head programs that received millions of taxpayer dollars, according to a report released Wednesday by government transparency group Open The Books.

The Department of Education has spent $283 million on foreign studies grants since 2020, with over $22.1 million going towards programs studying the Middle East, Open The Books found. The study analyzed the top three grant recipients, Indiana University, Columbia University and Georgetown University, and found that each highlighted anti-Israel professors as distinguished staff in their programs.

“These universities all have multibillion dollar endowments,” Amber Todoroff, deputy policy editor at Open The Books, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “They get tax breaks, government-backed student loans, and enormous sums through federal grants and contracts. Through these Title VI grants, they’re getting funding specifically for departments that have hosted radical professors, instigating shameful protests nationwide. It’s high time Congress takes a closer look at how this money is being spent, and, with so many new ways to learn languages and international culture, if it’s even necessary at all.”

Universities received these funds in the form of two different grants: National Resource Centers grants, which go directly to departmental programs, and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) grants, which can be used to give students fellowships to study foreign regions or languages, according to Open The Books.

Columbia received $2.8 million in FLAS grants from 2020 to 2024, according to the report. Its program is meant to “examine transnational connections, develop Islamic studies, and deepen specialist expertise on the region,” according to Columbia’s 2018 grant proposal.

The 2018 application mentioned Joseph Massad, a professor in the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department, as a selling point for the university’s program, noting that his classes “focus on the modern history, gender, political economy, international relations, politics and culture of the region.” The university received $653,632 in an FLAS grant in the 2022-2023 school year that was used in part to fund a fellowship for a student to take Massad’s “Gender and Sexuality in the Arab World” class, according to Open The Books.

Massad was alleged by students to be biased “against both Israel and the West” in his classes, according to Open The Books, citing nonprofit group Middle East Forum. The professor published an article the day after Hamas’ attack in 2023 calling it a “stunning victory,” and he gave a talk at the university in 2002 titled “On Zionism and Jewish Supremacy.”

Columbia experienced intense anti-Israel campus protests during the spring semester that resulted in over 100 arrests and multiple safety concerns. (RELATED: Many Pro-Palestinian Protesters Remain In ‘Good Standing’ At Columbia)

🧵On October 8, Professor Joseph Massad described the Oct. 7 brutal terror attack as “awesome” and a “stunning victory.” He also happens to be the chair of an important academic approval Committee. Watch as @Columbia President claims: “he is no longer a chair of that… pic.twitter.com/rRU32HQnTv — House Committee on Education & the Workforce (@EdWorkforceCmte) April 17, 2024

Indiana University raked in $2.84 million in federal grants from 2020 to 2023 for its Middle East program, and touted professor Abdulkader Sinno its 2018 grant application for his specialization in “the evolution and outcomes of civil wars, ethnic strife and other territorial conflicts; Muslim representation in Western liberal democracies; Islamist parties’ participation in elections,” according the report. Sinno reportedly served as a faculty advisor for the university’s Palestinian Solidarity Committee, which was involved in hosting an “anti-Israel counter protest” where members confronted participants of a Hillel demonstration.

Sinno attempted to sidestep university policies to host the pro-Palestinian speaker Miko Peled for the organization, booking the speaker as an academic event rather than student event, according to the university’s students newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student. The decision led to a two-semester suspension from teaching and a year suspension from advising student groups, according to Open The Books.

Even after the suspension, Sinno gave a speech at an “alternative” graduation for anti-Israel activists during which he praised them for being part of a “proud tradition” and said that their protesting showed “empathy and caring,” according to WFYI.

More than 50 protesters were arrested on Indiana University’s campus in April after a clash with police that left multiple injured, according to Fox 59.

Georgetown received $2.64 million from the Department of Education from 2020 to 2023 in FLAS funding, and it named Associate Professor and Director of Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies Dr. Fida Adely in its 2018 grant proposal, the report found. Adely is a member of the Faculty for Justice in Palestine’s National Advisory Board, according to Open The Books, which is a group that “encourages academic and cultural boycotts of Israel and Israeli academic institutions,” according to its website.

Hundreds rallied on Georgetown’s campus during the spring semester, hosting an encampment that lasted more than a week and scuffled with police, according to the university’s student newspaper, The Hoya. Adely participated in an October rally, calling on the university to divest from Israel-linked companies, according to a separate student paper, The Georgetown Voice.

“By funding schools that teach radical ideologies and practice a far-Left DEI philosophy, controversial professors and administrators are also gaining access to a vast ecosystem of tax dollars, and influence over impressionable young people,” the report concluded. “These funds can be used to advance their research, build their standing as credentialed academics, gain tenure, and impact international policy discussions. Meanwhile, our national interest in these grants comes into considerable question. Are we encouraging more professionals who will be credible in these fields and represent U.S. interests, or more folks who are determined to ‘dismantle’ the ‘settler colonialism’ they see all around them?”

Columbia, Georgetown, Indiana University, Massad, Sinno and Adely did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

[knuckleduster]

"The study of the Middle East has been a national priority in Israel from its inception, a priority extending far beyond the university gates. In Israel, this form of expertise is termed Mizrahanut (Orientalism, literally translated).141 Orientalism, Edward Said argued, is the system of knowledge production about the “Orient” through which the power of the European and US empires operate. It reflects Western ideas and imaginations about the “Orient” articulated through its production as distinct from the “Occident.”142 Building on Said’s theorization, Israeli sociologist Gil Eyal argues that Mizrahanut is a generic name for the complex of Israelis’ encounter with their geographic environment. It is a mechanism that draws and polices boundaries and examines phenomena from what the Israeli state defines as “the other side.”143 Mizrahanim (Orientalists) in Israel therefore include not only academics, but government and military officials, journalists, and others engaged in monitoring the Palestinian population and neighboring Arab countries and participating in public debates on Middle Eastern affairs.144

Israeli Middle East Studies indeed developed at the intersection of Israeli academia, the military, and the state. Mizrahanut was central to the establishment of Israeli academia itself, with the Institute for Orient Studies developed as one of the first three schools of Hebrew University.145 In a study of the foundational generations of Israeli Middle East studies scholars, Eyal Clyne shows that many saw no distinction between their scholarly and national commitments.146 In the 1930s and 1940s, the Institute for Oriental Studies at Hebrew University trained entire cohorts of advisors and officials serving the Zionist movement leadership, who joined the “Arab branch” of the Haganah paramilitary and the departments for Arab affairs and politics of the Jewish Agency. They worked to monitor the Arab press, catalogue and index intelligence data collected on Palestinians, and survey actions, attitudes, and social relations in Palestine and neighboring Arab countries. Having served roles in political intelligence and hasbara in the prestate years, roughly half of these Mizrahanim returned to Hebrew University after the state’s establishment to found the contemporary Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies.147

Following the Institute for Oriental Studies, the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies was formed as a node of the Israeli state network of intelligence expertise. First called the Shiloah Institute, the center was established by the Israeli military, the Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs, and Hebrew University in 1959. It was annexed to Tel Aviv University in 1966 and was renamed after Moshe Dayan, former Israeli chief of staff and minister of defense, in 1983.148 At its inception, the Dayan Center was founded to serve as a bridge between the Israeli Intelligence Division and academia. It was staffed by both academics and representatives from Israel’s Foreign Office, and regularly published articles by military and state officials and hosted them at conferences.149 At Tel Aviv University, it continued to invite military leaders as guest researchers to publish their own work and to contribute to the institute’s publications. Many of its researchers—who formerly or continuously served in the Israeli Intelligence Corps—received classified military information for their studies, while intelligence officers and state officials staffed the institute’s committee to select research projects and award research grants.150 The institute operated within Tel Aviv University as a semi-secret enclave, barring access to Palestinian citizens of Israel and those without state security clearance, including access to master’s and doctoral theses that drew on classified data.151 As such, the center’s knowledge production was structured like the Israeli Intelligence Corps and served as the military’s auxiliary research arm.

This entanglement of university, military, and state expertise shaped the discipline in its early years. Many of the founding Israeli Middle East studies scholars moved between or held parallel roles in academia and the security establishment or were otherwise bound by loyalty and secrecy commitments to state apparatuses.152 Prominent examples include Meir Kister, Israel Prize laureate and founder of the Arabic language departments at Hebrew University and the University of Haifa, who also worked for the Haganah’s intelligence agency. Also at Hebrew University, Israel Prize laureate for Mizrahanut Yaakov Landau supplied research on Palestinian citizens of Israel to the Prime Minister’s Office Advisor on Arab Affairs, from which he received materials and proposed research topics. At Tel Aviv University, Yaakov Shimoni contributed his expertise in Arabic and Arab politics to the Israeli military, as well as to Israel’s decision to institutionally prevent the return of Palestinian refugees between 1947 and 1949, in direct violation of UN resolution 194.153

With Israel’s establishment of a military government in the Occupied Palestinian Territory in 1967 came renewed opportunities for academic cooperation with the state. Hebrew University professors Menachem Milson, Amnon Cohen, Moshe Sharon, and Moshe Maoz served as Arab Affairs advisors to the Israeli military and government. Milson also served as the inaugural head of the Civil Administration, Israel’s military administration in the OPT, and oversaw the forced closure of the Palestinian Birzeit University beginning in 1981; Cohen, Sharon, and Maoz served as colonels and worked with the military throughout their academic careers. At Tel Aviv University, professor Zvi Elpeleg drew on his expertise as a scholar of Palestinian history while repeatedly serving as military governor over various regions of the OPT, including the Gaza Strip and Nablus.154

Leading Middle East studies scholars maintain ties to security apparatuses to this day. Some serve in senior positions in the Intelligence Corps or other elite military units throughout their academic tenure, others secure data or funding from state agencies for their research, and others still are officially or in a classified manner employed by state and military institutions as researchers or instructors.155 Though they no longer officially operate under the Israeli security state, the leading Middle East studies departments and institutes continue to conduct research and offer expertise in its service."

Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, Verso (2024) (p. 59-63)

141 Eyal Clyne, Orientalism, Zionism, and Academic Practice: Middle East and Islam Studies in Israeli Universities (New York: Routledge, 2019), 527. 142 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Nadia Abu El-Haj, “Edward Said and the Political Present,” American Ethnologist 32, no. 4 (2005): 538–55. 143 Said, Orientalism; Gil Eyal, Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab Affairs and the Israeli State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 22–3. 144 Eyal, Disenchantment of the Orient. All major Israeli news media employ one or more full-time experts under the job title of “commentator/correspondent on Arab affairs.” Diverse government agencies such as intelligence and security bodies, the Ministries of Justice, Education, and Religions, and diplomatic offices employ officially titled Mizrahanim in advisory positions, as do independent think tanks, research institutions, and NGOs. Clyne, Orientalism, Zionism, and Academic Practice, 550. 145 Clyne, Orientalism, Zionism, and Academic Practice; Eyal, Disenchantment of the Orient. 146 Clyne, Orientalism, Zionism, and Academic Practice. 147 Ibid. 148 Ibid.; Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, “About Moshe Dayan Center” [in Hebrew], dayan.org.149 Ibid.; Eyal, Disenchantment of the Orient. 150 Eyal, Disenchantment of the Orient. 151 Ibid.

[mightyflamethrower]

What are the mobs in Washington defiling iconic federal statues with impunity and pelting police men really protesting?

What are the students at Stanford University vandalizing the president’s office really demonstrating against?

What are the throngs in London brazenly swarming parks and rampaging in the streets really angry about?

Occupations?

They could care less that the Islamist Turkish government still stations 40,000 troops in occupied Cyprus. No one is protesting against the Chinese takeover of a once-independent Tibet or the threatened absorption of an autonomous Taiwan.

Refugees?

None of these mobs are agitating on behalf of the nearly 1 million Jews ethnically cleansed since 1947 from the major capitals of the Middle East. Some 200,000 Cypriots displaced by Turks earn not a murmur. Nor does the ethnic cleansing of 99% of Nagorno-Karabakh’s ancient Armenian population just last year.

Civilian casualties?

The global protestors are not furious over the 1 million Uighurs brutalized by the communist Chinese government. Neither are they concerned about the Turkish government’s indiscriminate war against the Kurds or its serial threats to attack Armenians and Greeks.

The new woke jihadi movement is instead focused only on Israel and “Palestine.” It is oblivious to the modern gruesome Muslim-on-Muslim exterminations of Bashar el-Assad and Saddam Hussein, the Black September massacres of Palestinians by Jordanian forces, and the 1982 erasure of thousands in Hama, Syria.

So woke jihadism is not an ecumenical concern for the oppressed, the occupied, the collateral damage of war, or the fate of refugees. Instead, it is a romanticized and repackaged anti-Western, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic jihadism that supports the murder of civilians, mass rape, torture, and hostage-taking.

But what makes it now so insidious is its new tripartite constituency?

First, the old romantic pro-Palestine cause was rebooted in the West by millions of Arab and Muslim immigrants who have flocked to Europe and the U.S. in the last half-century.

Billions of dollars in oil sheikdom “grant” monies swarmed Western universities to found “Middle Eastern Studies” departments. These are not so much centers for historical or linguistic scholarship as political megaphones focused on “Zionism” and “the Jews.”

Moreover, there may be well over a half-million affluent Middle Eastern students in Western universities. Given that they pay full tuition, imbibe ideology from endowed Middle Eastern studies faculty, and are growing in number, they logically feel that they can do anything with impunity on Western streets and campuses.

Second, the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion movement empowers the new woke jihadis. Claiming to be non-white victims of white Jewish colonialism, they pose as natural kindred victims to blacks, Latinos, and any Westerner now claiming oppressed status.

Black radicalism, from Al Sharpton to Louis Farrakhan to Black Lives Matter, has had a long, documented history of anti-Semitism. It is no wonder that its elite eagerly embraced the anti-Israeli Palestine movement as fellow travelers.

The third leg of woke jihadism is mostly affluent white leftist students at Western universities.

Sensing that their faculties are anti-Israel, their administrations are anti-Israel (although more covertly) and the most politically active among the student body are anti-Israel, European and American students find authenticity in virtue-signaling their solidarity with Hamas, Hezbollah, and radical Islamists in general.

Given the recent abandonment of standardized tests for admission to universities, the watering-down of curricula, and rampant grade inflation, thousands of students at elite campuses feel that they have successfully redefined their universities to suit their own politics, constituencies and demographics.

Insecure about their preparation for college and mostly ignorant of the politics of the Middle East, usefully idiotic students find resonance by screaming anti-Semitic chants and wearing keffiyehs.

Nurtured in grade school on the Marxist binary of bad, oppressive whites versus good, oppressed nonwhites, they can cheaply shed their boutique guilt by joining the mobs.

The result is a bizarre new anti-Semitism and overt support for the gruesome terrorists of Hamas by those who usually preach to the middle class about their own exalted morality.

Still, woke jihadism would never have found resonance had Western leaders—vote-conscious heads of state, timid university presidents, and radicalized big-city mayors and police chiefs—not ignored blatant violations of laws against illegal immigration, vandalism, assault, illegal occupation, and rioting.

Finally, woke jihadism is fueling a radical Western turn to the right, partly due to open borders and the huge influx into the West from non-Western illiberal regimes.

Partly the reaction is due to the ingratitude shown their hosts by indulged Middle-Eastern guest students and green card holders.

Partly, the public is sick of the sense of entitlement shown by pampered, sanctimonious protestors.

And partly the revulsion arises against left-wing governments and universities that will not enforce basic criminal and immigration statutes in fear of offending this strange new blend of wokism and jihadism.

Yet the more violent campuses and streets become, the more clueless the mobs seem about the cascading public antipathy to what they do and what they represent.