About the MESH blog
When I first saw that Harvard had launched a blog that allowed Middle East experts to debate the issues of the day, I thought, good for them. But after reading it for several months, I am finding that most of the time it’s full of the most right-wing drivel and venomous attacks on mainstream Middle East Studies academia you’ll see outside of Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes’ sites. And on top of it, it is reliably ultra-Zionist and unquestioning of Israel. It also features some reasonable people, mostly middle-of-the-road think tankers from Washington, but mostly it really appears to be the sort of folk who attend JINSA and WINEP conferences. Just check out this piece for instance.
Does anyone know why this is so?
Categories: Academia.
Andrew Exum used to lurk around here didn’t he? He worked for WINEP I believe but seems like a pretty decent dude. His contributions to MESH are some of the few worth reading.
Simple…any academic would tell you that these are some of the most biased and anti middle-east academic writers out there- there are a few exceptions but if you read just a few literature reviews of some of these people’s works then you will see exactly why the site is as it is.
Well yes as I said there have been posts by interesting people too, like Exum and Tama Cofman-Wittes, but also a lot of this highly ideologically charged stuff. I suspect if they continue like this there will be dwindling interest in contributing by less ideological people, and it’ll end up looking like Middle East Forum.
The short answer is that “MESH is convened by Stephen Peter Rosen, director of the Olin Institute, and Martin Kramer, Olin Institute senior fellow. The conveners select MESH members, all of whom enjoy blogging privileges at MESH.” (from the MESH website) I don’t know much about Rosen, but if Kramer is selecting the bloggers, a large amount of nonsense is to be expected.
The bigger issue is that there remain few incentives for left-leaning or non-doctrinaire pro-Israel academics to straddle the divide between academia and policy work, because US policy in the Middle East is so far from ideal, spending one’s career fighting for a pivot away from current policies is not appealing for a number of reasons, and there is no institutional infrastructure to support such work. The right, on the other hand, has a pre-existing infrastructure to promote even idiotic mediocrities like those that post on the MESH blog.
how do you plan on critiquing their viewpoints if you don’t want them published in the first place?
Andrew Exum totally sucks ass.. He thinks that by killing a good number of “hajjis” in Iraq that you can then qualify as a “good” expert on ME.. I just love how he throws every now and then a couple of arabic words in his postings on his blog to show he knows arabic.. he may well do good if he spares us his “expert” crap and stick to playstation, GI Joe cartoons, etc…
Whoever said that I don’t want their viewpoints published? Just wondering why a (supposedly) first-rate academic institution has such a lopsided view of Middle Eastern affairs.
I find there is a fair amount of variety and debate on the MESH blog. You give a post by Raymond Ibrahim as an example of what you don’t like, but he is regularly challenged in the comments by other experts (prime example, and another). As for Harvard, it has an Alwaleed Program and a Dubai Initiative. So the question is whether MESH is more lopsided than they are. Doubtful.
I have no idea, but I found them a month or two ago. I unanimously agree. I found it laughable one moron in their group talked of a quick stop off in Cairo which entailed meeting an MB brother of some importance. He took his statement “of course we are growing in popularity, look at all the muhajjibat” as a halfway decent metric.
Harvard should be ashamed of itself.
Alharaka refers to this exchange about Egypt, and something written by David Schenker. But Steven Cook (CFR) and Michele Dunne (Carnegie) contributed to the same exchange and said different things (as did a few others). I guess there are people who are offended by reading anything with which they disagree. MESH is a lot more varied than most group blogs, its members often disagree with each other, and they do so in a civil way. Why should Harvard be ashamed of that?
I read an article on Islamic War Doctrine in MESH:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mesh/2008/05/islams_war_doctrines_ignored/
It is surprisingly trivial.
To think trivially is to think uncritically, and thus one may accept some sort of narrative of how-things-stand-in-the-world without question. All facts and events must be forced into consonance with the narrative, else the narrative fails and one must come up with a new story line.
This is what triviasl thinkers cannot do.
Hence, they feel the need to continually and loudly reinforce the old scenario, even perhaps extending its boundaries into new fields, such as doctrines of war.
They labor to produce new wine, yet they are compelled to pour it into old wineskins. These, in the course of time, will burst.