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refusal of the American academy to squarely face the terrorist threat
to the United States — either before or since September 11
— will redound to its everlasting shame. Yet there is reason
to believe that the academy's multiculturalist blinders represent
more than a sad and silly waste of intellectual energy — more,
even, than the spiritual corruption of a generation of America's
youth. There is reason to believe that the reigning multiculturalist
foolishness of the American academy may be directly connected to
the intelligence failure that led to September 11.
A report
that the Clinton state department may have actually stopped our
government from accepting vital intelligence on Osama bin Laden's
activities offered by the government of Sudan raises a disturbing
possibility. According to the report, a "politicized"
state department passed up the opportunity to receive critical intelligence
on bin Laden, simply because that intelligence did not fit the department's
"conventional wisdom." But what was conventional wisdom
at the state department, and where did it come from? Quite possibly
it came from one John Esposito — the most prominent contemporary
American scholar of Islam. Esposito has long been an advocate of
political power for Islamic fundamentalists, and during the Clinton
years Esposito served as a foreign-affairs analyst for the Near
East and South Asia branch of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research
at the state department. Esposito's bad advice may have had a great
deal to do with the state department's foolish refusal even to look
at critical intelligence on Osama bin Laden's activities.
Esposito's
story has only recently been brought to public attention by Martin
Kramer's extraordinarily important book, Ivory
Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America.
(For my own account of Kramer's book, click
here.) Esposito's clever adaptation of Edward
Said's "post-colonial" theory holds that the political
program of Islamic fundamentalism is in fact democratic, and that
it is only our narrow Western definition of democracy that refuses
to see this. For Esposito, those who see "democratic"
Islamic fundamentalism as a threat to America's security are simply
repeating, in a new form, the simple-minded anti-Communist prejudice
of the Cold War era. So for fear of playing into America's alleged
proclivity for racist prejudice, Esposito and his followers, for
years, have simply refused to study Islamic terrorism. Most especially,
they have refused to study Osama bin Laden and his influence in
the Islamic world, even going so far as to condemn those scholars
and government officials who have long taken the threat from bin
Laden seriously.
In his book,
Kramer reports that during the Clinton years, Robert H. Pelletreau,
then head of Near Eastern affairs at the Department of State, spoke
at the opening of Esposito's influential "Center for Muslim
Christian Understanding" at Georgetown University, and that
the Department of State helped to channel money to support Esposito's
activities through the U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP).
The state department
had good reason to be interested in Esposito. Having traveled extensively
in the region, Esposito had connections with Islamic fundamentalists
all over the Middle East. It only made sense for the United States
to keep open a potential line of communication to the Islamists.
But the report that the state department turned away valuable foreign
intelligence on bin Laden because that information contradicted
the department's "conventional wisdom" raises the disturbing
possibility that the people running the Department of State may
actually have believed what Esposito was telling them.
And why not?
Esposito was — and is — the most important American scholar
of Islam. (At least, that is the judgment of the academy. Bernard
Lewis is the rightful holder of that title, but the academy rejects
him.). One might be inclined to forgive the state department for
thinking that Esposito, a one-time president of the Middle Eastern
Studies Association (MESA) and creator of the most influential academic
paradigm for understanding Islamic fundamentalism ought to be able
to tell our government something useful about current religio-political
trends in the Middle East.
But that apparently
rational conclusion fails to reckon with the madness of the contemporary
academy. Actually, the "post-colonial" scholars who dominate
Middle Eastern Studies — most of them deeply hostile to American
foreign policy — have long stigmatized and ostracized academicians
who work with the American government. Esposito was only able to
get away with forging government ties because his fellow scholars
knew that his sympathies were with the fundamentalists. With experts
in Middle Eastern languages and cultures in short supply, the state
department — partly because it had few other options, and partly,
no doubt, out of liberal naïveté — ended up relying
on Esposito for its assessment of the Islamic fundamentalists. Nothing
could have been more ill advised. Quite possibly, the state department,
under the influence of Esposito's advise, simply repeated the willful
blindness to bin Laden's terrorism that Esposito had already established
as proper behavior for the American academy.
In a now-infamous
statement made only six months before September 11, Esposito follower
Fawaz Gerges said:
Should not
observers and academics be skeptical about the U.S. government's
assessment of the terrorist threat? To what extent do terrorist
"experts" indirectly perpetuate this irrational fear
of terrorism by focusing too much on far-fetched horrible scenarios?
It hard to
be more embarrassingly wrong than that, but Esposito himself managed
to come pretty close.
It now turns
out that Esposito published an article called "The Future of
Islam" in the Summer 2001 issue of The Fletcher Forum of
World Affairs, just a few short months before September 11.
In that article, Esposito makes his usual derisive comparisons between
Ronald Reagan's belief that the Soviet Union was an evil empire
and those who see a serious threat to America from Islamic fundamentalist
terrorism. But Esposito goes further and attacks even the limited
and inadequate antiterrorism legislation on the books before September
11.
Esposito ends
with a brief reference to Osama bin Laden. But he doesn't really
say anything about bin Laden himself. Instead his preoccupation
is with what a gift bin Laden is to Esposito's enemies — those
intelligence officers and pundits who actually see Islamic fundamentalist
terrorism as a threat. There is indeed a parallel to the Cold War
here. The American Left was always more interested in Ronald Reagan's
belief in the evil of the Soviet Empire than in the fact of Soviet
totalitarianism itself. So, too, Esposito cannot bring himself to
say anything about bin Laden, other than the fact that bin Laden's
very existence gives comfort to Esposito's enemies in government
and academe.
So this is
the scholar who was subsidized and sought after by the Clinton state
department as a key intelligence adviser on the Middle East. And
this is the man who represents the best the American academy can
do when it comes to the study of contemporary Islam. Surely John
Esposito's advise must have contributed to the climate that led
the Clinton state department to reject vital intelligence on bin
Laden's activities when it was all but handed to us on a silver
platter. Who can say, then, that the corruption of the American
academy by the dogmas of post-colonialism and multiculturalism has
had no adverse practical consequences for our country?
It is time
to take the academy back. Following Martin Kramer's recommendation,
"Title VI" subsidies for programs of Middle Eastern studies
— nearly all of which are dominated by the post-colonialist
orthodoxy — must be significantly pared back. (The time for
a battle over funding will be this spring, at the hearings of the
House Appropriations Subcommittee for Education.) That money needs
instead to be plowed into programs beyond the control of the academy's
new dogmatists — useful programs (like the National Security
Education Program) that will build up real and meaningful expertise
in Middle Eastern languages in students committed to government
service. A serious cut in government subsidies for conventional
programs of Middle Eastern studies will provide the sort of salutary
shock to Deans and Provosts that might lead to real reform —
the admission to the academy of at least a small cadre of scholars
(now thoroughly excluded by the post-colonial dogmatists) who view
United States foreign policy as something other than the root of
all evil. Such a change might even lead to so unprecedented an event
as an actual debate at a some future meeting of the Middle East
Studies Association, rather than the convening of yet
another one-sided anti-American-foreign-policy cheering section.
Since September
11, John Esposito has continued to be widely quoted in the media
as a Middle East expert. It's time that some more pointed questions
were put to Esposito about his own failed intellectual paradigm,
and about the nature of the advice that he gave to the Clinton state
department. Certainly any congressional investigation into the intelligence
failures that led to September 11 needs to take testimony from Esposito.
In a piece published in Current History in 1994, Esposito
derisively presents the following quotation from Israeli Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin in December of 1992 as an example of silly and prejudiced
hysteria over the alleged threat posed by Islamic fundamentalist
terrorism:
Our struggle
against murderous Islamic terror is also meant to awaken the world,
which is lying in slumber. We call on all nations, all peoples
to devote their attention to the greater danger inherent in Islamic
fundamentalism [, which]...threatens world peace in future years.
Who's words
have proven more prophetic — the prime minister's or the scholar's?
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