Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, professor of practice at Simmons College, is president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.
Characterized by the same paroxysms of self-righteousness as were
evident in the much-maligned and tendentious academic boycott by the
American Studies Association (ASA) last month, members of the Modern
Language Association (MLA) head to Chicago during the first week of
January for the organization’s 129th convention. The annual meeting,
which is generally attended by a third of the MLA’s 30,000 members, has,
as New Criterion editor, Roger Kimball, wryly noted, customarily
“provided observers of the academic scene with a spectacle as appalling
as it is rich in unintended comedy,” complete with a “full range of
barbarous jargon, intellectual posturing, and aggressive politicization
that has infected the academic study of the humanities in this country
. . . .”
But this year’s conference promises even more intellectual acting
out, given that the MLA’s Radical Caucus has proposed a resolution that
will call on the U.S. State Department “to contest Israel’s arbitrary
denials of entry to Gaza and the West Bank by U.S. academics who have
been invited to teach, confer, or do research at Palestinian
universities.” Why the focus on Israel by these scholars of the English
language and humanities? Because, as presiding officer Samer M. Ali
smugly put it, as far as the MLA is concerned, Israel deserves to be
demonized for its perceived transgressions, and the “question that
[attendees] will be debating is not whether Israel is violating the
rights of Palestinians, but what to do about it.”
The lure of Palestinianism has proven to be positivity irresistible
to left-leaning humanists and literary scholars who burrow into Western
thought to uncover the dark underpinnings of imperialism, militarism,
colonialism, oppression, racism, and, as a result of one of the MLA’s
notorious past presidents, Edward Said, the theory of “Orientalism,” a
mode of thought which claimed to reveal the inherent racism and
imperialism imbedded in Western scholarship and politics. The
fascination with Third-world victimism, identity politics, and
multiculturalism, coupled with harsh critiques of both the U.S. and its
proxy in the Middle East, Israel, have all led academics like those in
the ASA and the MLA—whose fields are, in a normal world, unrelated to
these issues—to involve themselves aggressively in answering calls for
boycotts, divestment, and sanctions solely against the Jewish state.
As a result of this obsessive reverence for the purported victims
of Israeli policies, one panel planned for the MLA meeting has drawn
considerable attention, “Academic Boycotts: A Conversation about Israel
and Palestine,” which, as the MLA website put it, “addresses the
political movement Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel,
seen by its defenders as a viable means to end the Palestinian
occupation.” Besides its seeming irrelevancy at a conference for
scholars of language and humanities, this odious panel has been
condemned for its blatant one-sidedness: each of the four panelists is a
vocal and avowed ideological enemy of, and proponent of boycotts
against, Israel.
One of them, Omar Barghouti, ironically also a doctoral student at
Tel Aviv University, is the co-founder of the Palestinian Campaign for
the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), which has been
relentlessly urging academic associations to institute boycotts against
Israel. Barghouti apologizes for and condones the murder of Jews by Arab
terrorists, having mistakenly asserted that “International law does
give people under occupation the right to resist in any way, including
armed resistance.” He also, as is characteristic of those in the BDS
movement, accuses Israel of being a racist entity, suggesting that
apartheid is “alive and well inside Israel . . ; it is legalized and
institutionalized racism and that’s what makes it apartheid.”
Another panelist, University of California’s David C. Lloyd, is one
of BDS’s original supporters, whose belief it is that “If there has
been anywhere a systematic denial of academic freedom to a whole
population, rather than to specific individuals or to institutions, it
is surely in Palestine under Israeli occupation.” Moreover, Lloyd has
proclaimed, Israel is committing something he calls “scholasticide” on
the hapless Palestinians, since, as he wrote, “Palestinian education,
like Palestinian culture and civil society, has been systematically and
maliciously targeted for destruction, and “in the time-honored manner of
settler colonialism, a powerful and well-armed state seeks to
extinguish the cultural life and identity of an indigenous people.”
The fulminations against Israel expected from this panel are not
surprising given the MLA’s ideological history, nor is the fact that its
members have collectively already determined that this panel will be a
monologue of vitriol aimed at the Jewish state, not an academic debate,
and that there is one oppressor, Israel, and one victim, the
Palestinians.
When it comes to Israel, even academics, people who have chosen as
their life’s work scholarly discussion and open inquiry, are perfectly
willing to vitiate what the academy is supposed to represent and abandon
even the pretense of honest debate. The PACBI’s own language not only
confirms its disdain for Israel’s side of the conversation, it
specifically calls for suppressing opposing views, since Israel, in its
view, is illegitimate for being a racist oppressor in the first
place—exactly what is taking place on the MLA panel. “Events and
projects,” PACBI guidelines read, “involving Palestinians and/or Arabs
and Israelis that promote ‘balance’ between the ‘two sides’ in
presenting their respective narratives or ‘traumas,’ as if on par, or
are otherwise based on the false premise that the colonizers and the
colonized, the oppressors and the oppressed, are equally responsible for
the ‘conflict,’ are intentionally deceptive, intellectually dishonest
and morally reprehensible.” In other words, the default position is that
Israel is to blame, and that the Palestinians are blameless victims.
The charges of racism and oppression also enable the left-leaning
members of the MLA to excuse the moral transgressions of the victim,
and, as an extension of that thinking, to single out Israel and America
for particular and harsh scrutiny owing to their perceived
“institutionalized” racism and greater relative power. The
self-righteousness the left feels in pointing out Zionism’s essential
defect of being a racist ideology insulates it from having to also
reflect on the social and cultural pathologies of Arab states, since, as
Harvard’s Ruth Wisse has pointed out in If I Am Not For Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews,
liberals can excuse their own betrayal of Israel by holding it fully
responsible for the very hatreds it inspires. “In the case of the Arab
war against the Jewish state,” Wisse wrote, “obscuring Arab intentions
requires identifying Jews as the cause of the conflict. The notion of
Jewish responsibility for Arab rejectionism is almost irresistibly
attractive to liberals, because the truth otherwise seems so bleak.”
The rectitude of the MLA academics pushing for condemnations of
Israel manifests itself as what Boston University professor Richard
Landes has termed “moral narcissism,” the tendency of members of the
well-meaning, intellectual elite to align with causes and ideological
positions which are based, not on the actual viability or justice of a
cause, but on how the moral narcissist feels about him- or herself by
committing to a particular cause or movement.
“A moral narcissist,” observed legal commentator Jay B. Gaskill,
“lives in a self-approval bubble shared by other moral narcissists who
collectively have agreed that their cocoon of mutually agreed moral
gestures and self congratulations [sic] will constitute a perfect and
sufficient engagement with an imperfect world.” Like other members of
the academic left, who believe their worldview is correct because it
seeks to create a world in which social equanimity will be realized by
the downtrodden, members of the MLA, similar to their like-minded
brethren in the ASA, are content to support such intellectually
dishonest campaigns as academic boycott because it enables them to
denounce Israel as an imperialistic, racist, militaristic oppressor.
“Moral narcissists,” said Gaskill, “have adopted a camouflage strategy
to escape the moral disapproval of others [and] . . . they accomplish
this camouflage by cloaking their narcissism in the trappings of ‘social
justice positioning.’” The moral narcissist’s reasoning may defective,
ahistorical, counter-intuitive, or just wrong, but he still feels good
about himself. But in this worldview there can be only one enemy of
justice, and Israel is that enemy.
One wonders why, in asking the U.S. State Department to monitor and
report on instances in which U.S. scholars are denied access to
Palestinian schools in the West Bank and Gaza by Israel, the MLA’s
resolution limited the request only to instances in which students and
faculty are denied access to educational institutions as a result of
Israeli policy? Would not the self-anointed guardians of academic
freedom and unrestrained academic debate be concerned with similar
injustices plaguing other nations surrounding the one country, Israel,
where they have now focused their moral opprobrium?
The MLA is silent, for example, about the situation in Egypt where
universities in November reversed their policy of preventing police from
entering campuses to suppress student protests. A Cairo University
student was shot in the head and killed by police one week later; at
Al-Azhar University twelve students were sentenced to 17-year terms for a
campus takeover, thirty-eight students were sentenced to year and a
half sentences for protests, and another student was killed in his dorm
by police.
No MLA resolutions were forthcoming when bomb blasts decimated the
campus of Aleppo University in Syria during exam week, killing 82 and
wounding 192 in the explosions. The MLA resolution also apparently does
not request that the State Department monitor other instances where
students are denied access to their schools, such as the September 2013
incident when security forces of the genocidal thugocracy of Hamas beat
up and dispersed some 200 Palestinian students attempting to enter Egypt
and travel to their universities through the Rafah crossing. Hamas has
also been actively recruiting students from West Bank Palestinian
universities and sending them through its dawa, or indoctrination,
centers to recruit them into Islamist ideology and jihad.
The MLA scholars whose entire professional lives are defined by a
love of books and learning were also curiously silent when two-thirds of
over 80,000 historic books in the Greek Orthodox Al-Saeh Library in
Tripoli were destroyed by arson this month, the fire set by Muslims
enraged after a pamphlet insulting Mohammed was allegedly found in one
of the library’s books.
One might expect that the MLA would also be concerned with women’s
rights in the Middle East, given members like Berkeley’s feminist
philosopher, Judith Butler, who notoriously delivered a paper at a past
MLA conference entitled, “The Lesbian Phallus: Or, Does Heterosexuality
Exist?,” and who more recently, and almost surreally, commented that it
is important to view “Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are
progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left.”
Perhaps MLA resolutions should be passed to help offer Muslim women
greater educational opportunities, since statistics indicate that while
only 22 percent of men in the Middle East and North Africa are
illiterate, that rate soars to 42 percent for Muslim women. Hamas also
imposes dress codes on girls, and a UN report noted that in Egypt, over
99 percent of women and girls had experienced sexual harassment in some
form.
And, finally, if MLA members are so concerned with education and
Israel, and the side effects of social strife, perhaps they should also
ask for State Department reports on the unrelenting rocket fire from
Hamas-controlled Gaza into southern Israeli towns, such as Sderot, where
over 43 percent of middle school students suffer from post-traumatic
stress disorder as a result of prolonged shelling of civilian
neighborhoods and schools since the 2005 disengagement.
Of course, the MLA’s Radical Caucus is silent on all of these
obstacles to education and the free exchange of ideas, both in Israel,
the West Bank and Gaza, and the wider world of Israel’s neighbors. It is
easy to demonize Israel, and certainly it requires no bravery in
academia, where moral narcissists console each other in an echo chamber
of good intentions, willing to sacrifice academic integrity, true
scholarship, and vigorous, honest debate in the process.
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