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One of the more ridiculous incidents in the 21st century history of the “treason of the intellectuals” – in America we might better say, “of the academics” – occurred on July 16 when Stanford professor Joel Beinin, the current president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) delivered himself of a panicked e-mail warning that MESA members’ programs are under “public attack.” Beinin, whose pose is that of a socialist intellectual, and whose academic work is frequently neo-Leninist, seems to have forgotten the first rule of the Bolshevik: keep a cool head in battle.
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In MESA, powerful but varied interests, from the left and right, but equally inimical to America, come together. Beinin dreams about the red flag on the Nile while Esposito fronts for the Saudi monarchy. In this sense, the area is even more rotten than Soviet or Latin American studies were in their time. Frankly, Sheriff Beinin needs to turn in his star and let Pipes, Kramer, and Kurtz clean the town up for good.
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The leftists at the Middle Eastern Studies Association are at it again. This time they are boycotting the National Security Education Program of the Defense Department which is seeking to recruit Middle Eastern language scholars to help their country defend itself.
The saboteurs are led by the head of the Association, the radical leftist Stanford professor Joel Beinin. (Beinin is a red diaper baby. His parents and he were members of Hashomer Hatzair, a Marxist party in Israel, and he is currently a contributing editor of MERIP a magazine devoted to pro-PLO apologetics.)
It's time that Stanford retired anti-American ideologues like Beinin, who abuse academic freedom and scholarship in the service of their political agendas. But that isn't about to happen soon. Short of that, then, how about the Defense Department withdrawing its contracts from Stanford pending the adoption of a scholarly standard under which professors would conduct their partisan political projects off campus and not abuse the resources of the school to advance them?