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 [...]

I recently mentioned Victor David Hanson as one of the founders and board members of the new Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, a wannabe scholarly association that aims to challenge the MESA. The counter-insurgency blog Abu Muqawama points to a recent post at Small Wars Journal (an influential specialist blog [...]

The inevitable has happened: obviously frustrated that they are still a minority in the field of Middle Eastern Studies, a group of well-connected academics has set up an alternative to the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the respected multi-disciplinary group that gathers the brightest minds in the field. Who better to do this than the [...]

A Minnesotan university decides to ban a Desmond Tutu appearance because of anti-Israel comments he made — Banning Desmond Tutu:
Tutu’s appearance—slated for the spring of ‘08—was made possible by the university’s partnership with PeaceJam International, a youth-centered project that taps Nobel Laureates to teach young adults about peace and justice. For four straight years, the [...]

Readers may be interested to know that Berkeley Press has just launched the Muslim World Journal of Human Rights.

From George Packer’s blog in The New Yorker, an odd theory about why Professor Fouad Ajami is so upbeat about Iraq:
It would be wrong to see in Ajami’s version of Iraq the same delusional thinking as in George W. Bush’s. The difference between them is the difference between a strategy and a fantasy. The President’s [...]

Normal Finkelstein is barred from teaching, despite from having one year left on his teaching contract at DePaul University:

The required reading was at the bookstore, the students had the course syllabus, and space in Political Science 235, “Equality in Social Justice,” was standing-room only when DePaul University pulled the plug Friday on what was to [...]

I have read about the Alms for Jihad affairs in Britain — and I would fully support the Association of Librarians of America in keeping the book available in the US, regardless of the quality of the book (which I have no idea about).
OIF is hearing from librarians who are wondering if they must comply [...]

Update: Sign the counter-petition, which has already been endorsed by a number of A-list academics.
Alumni Group Seeks to Deny Tenure to Middle Eastern Scholar at Barnard College:
Controversial research on Israel and the Palestinian territories has become the basis of yet another campaign to prevent a professor from winning tenure. A group of Barnard College alumni [...]

More lobby efforts to prevent people from saying the lobby exists.

This fine piece on that moment in French intellectual history, in 1977, that saw the birth of the “nouveaux philosophes” should have pointed out that many of these philosophers (a title undeserved by BHL at least) are now the French equivalent of neo-conservatives: BHL as “liberal interventionist” or Glucksmann as Sarkoziste.

Uber-blogger and Middle East historian Juan Cole has a new blog on Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt, the first modern invasion of the Middle East by a Western power. It’s called Napoleon’s Egypt and goes along with Cole’s new book, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East. Cole is appears to be going through the invasion [...]

The French scholar Alain Roussillon, an expert on Egypt and the director of the CEDEJ in Cairo, passed away yesterday from a after suffering from a brain hemorrhage. He will be buried in Egypt, where his mother came from.
I last saw Roussillon on March 5, when we had a long chat about the constitutional amendments [...]

I don’t really have anything to add to what Richard Silverstein has written on the subject. It’s sad for Finkelstein, sad for DePaul University, and sad for academia generally speaking, especially as it is generally recognized that Finkelstein is an accomplished scholar and it appears he was denied tenure essentially because of his personality. Finkelstein [...]

Without wanting to get into the recent decision by the British Academics’ Union to pass a motion encouraging a boycott of Israeli universities and academics (I fully support this show of solidarity which remains, after all, optional and provides a course of action for selective boycott of academics who are in bed with the Israeli [...]

Oh yes it is:
The campus project was planned by conservative writer and activist David Horowitz as a response to attempts last year by officials at Pace University to prevent a Jewish student group from hosting a screening of “Obsession” on the university’s West-chester, N.Y., campus.
Mr. Horowitz, whose Terrorism Awareness Project is sponsoring tomorrow’s [...]

Click on the thumbnail below to read a letter of support to Egyptians against the amendments from the School of Oriental and African Studies’ Student Union.

I have a favor to ask readers with access to academic databases. The new issue of the Middle East Journal is out, I’d like to read it but there is no way to get it from their website other than ordering a paper copy, which won’t get to Egypt for ages. I asked a friend [...]

Ours, I tell you! Dirka dirka Muhammad Jihad! Muahahahahahahaha!!!!
Islam could soon be the dominant force in a Europe which, in the name of political correctness, has abdicated the battle for cultural and religious control, Prof. Bernard Lewis, the world-renowned Middle Eastern and Islamic scholar, said on Sunday.
The Muslims “seem to be about to take over [...]