After September 11, the CIA and the State Department were eager to hire Arabic-speaking people. It seemed as if suddenly, the U.S. had discovered there were people in the world who didn’t speak English and that the only way to figure out what they were up to was to speak their language. The government’s intentions certainly weren’t benign, given that Arabs were being profiled around the world, even at home in the U.S. But at least they encouraged Americans to learn to speak other languages, even learn about other people (though what they learned wasn’t necessarily unbiased or entirely accurate).
Since then, some U.S. leaders have retreated: Don’t learn Arabic. Don’t study the Middle East. Heaven forbid, you learn about an area of the world that has produced numerous religions and cultures — and where the U.S. has played a significant role (for better or worse) in the politics and daily lives of the people in this region. As Joel Benin writes,
A band of neoconservative pundits with close ties to Israel have mounted a campaign against American scholars who study the Middle East. Martin Kramer, an Israeli-American and former director of the Dayan Center for Middle East Studies at Tel-Aviv University, has led the way in blaming these scholars for failing to warn the American public about the dangers of radical Islam, claiming they bear some of the responsibility for what befell us on September 11.
From what we’ve been told since immediately after 9/11, the events of that day weren’t prevented thanks to intelligence shortcomings — or at least the failure of the Bush administration to heed the warnings of intelligence officials, as Richard Clarke suggests. There apparently weren’t enough Arabic-speaking people working for the CIA, or at least the hate and passion with which the CIA began recruiting people based on their abilities to speak Arabic and other Middle Eastern languages indicates that this was the case (trust me, I had more than one Arabic-speaking friend get recruited by the CIA during the fall of 2001 and the spring of 2002).
Playing this blame game has reached a magnitude of unspeakable naivete and self-righteousness. Did the U.S. government and its intelligence operatives seriously think they could avoid speaking a language that was spoken by so many people throughout the world?
As much as I hate to say it, I suppose so. Apparently, some U.S. leaders have decided that the answer to the problem of the failure of Middle East scholars to warn the government that there were some crazy men who happened to be Muslim and who also wanted to harm the U.S. is to closely monitor the activities of university programs studying the Middle East and Middle Eastern languages.
Last year, Congress refused to give in to the demands of a group of politicians and lobbyists who sought to reduce the appropriation for Title VI of the Higher Education Act, which provides federal funding to universities to support study of less commonly taught languages, such as Arabic, Turkish and Persian. But, as Benin indicates, proponents of the previously rejected legislation aren’t giving up — and this time, Congress is taking them more seriously. The House has already approved legislation to establish a political review board “to discourage universities and scholars from tolerating bad thoughts,” and the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions is now taking up the issue.
What exactly does this legislation do? Says Benin,
H.R. 3077 calls for establishing an International Higher Education Advisory Board with broad investigative powers ‘to study, monitor, apprise, and evaluate’ activities of area studies centers supported by Title VI. The board is charged with ensuring that government-funded academic programs ‘reflect diverse perspectives and represent the full range of views’ on international affairs. ‘Diverse perspectives,’ in this context, is code for limiting criticism of U.S. Middle East policy and of Israel.
Under the proposed legislation, three advisory board members would be appointed by the Secretary of Education; two of them from government agencies with national security responsibilities. The leaders of the House of Representatives and the Senate each would appoint two more … The advisory board could investigate scholars and area studies centers, applying whatever criteria it pleases. The criteria almost certainly would be political. The whole point of the legislation is to impose political restraints on activities of Middle East centers.
But if failure to understand our differences and refusal to acknowledge the existence, cultures, histories and harm done to others contributes to so many conflicts — both big and small, local and global — is ignoring them altogether really the solution to the world’s problems? Or is it merely a quick-fix solution to the problems of a select few egos who are most concerned with their own credibility and authority?
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