What Happened Today: Nov. 3, 2022
Biden warns democracy under attack; failed assassination attempt on Pakistan’s former PM Imran Khan; Kyrie’s pseudo-apology
The Big Story
Speaking Wednesday night at Union Station in Washington, D.C., President Biden made his pitch to voters ahead of Tuesday’s midterm election by warning of far-right threats to democracy. “We the people must decide whether we’re going to sustain a republic where reality is accepted, the law is obeyed, and your vote is truly sacred,” he said, focusing his concerns not on the economy or rising rates of violent crime, but on the threat from Republican candidates who question the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. In an appearance on MSNBC two weeks prior to the speech, Democratic Majority Whip Jim Clyburn anticipated the president’s sentiment, telling host José Diaz Balart that choosing to vote on economic issues over “voting rights” would be making a “fool’s choice.” But not all Democrats agree. Bernie Sanders’ former campaign manager Faiz Shakir told Chuck Todd in the lead-up to Biden’s speech that “if you think about this address that he’s about to give tonight, I’d hope that they’re re-writing it to focus on the cost of living.”
Indeed, a recent NewsNation poll found that inflation remains the greatest concern among voters, with abortion and crime close behind. Making the economy a primary issue during the final weeks of the campaign trail appears to be paying off for the GOP, as the latest RealClearPolitics projections show Republicans sweeping the Senate races to take a controlling 54-seat majority, and an even stronger turnout for the House. Current estimates show the House going red, with 228 seats to the Democrats’ 174, though 33 districts remain a toss-up.
Biden’s nationally televised address on Wednesday night served as a bookend to the primetime remarks he gave in Philadelphia in September, when he warned that the “MAGA Republicans” who perpetrated the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol were an ongoing threat to “the very foundations of our Republic.” Seen as part of a longer-term strategy, Biden’s remarks might have been less about trying to sway voters for the midterms than preparing the ground for the 2024 election, during which “voting integrity” is likely to be a major focus for candidates. “That speech tonight was not a campaign speech,” novelist Walter Kirn wrote on Twitter. “It was a speech specifically meant to manage and mold expectations about the vote-counting process.”
Read More: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-speak-protecting-democracy-midterms-enter-final-stage/story?id=92547440
In the Back Pages: The Hijacking of Middle East Studies
The Rest
→ Former prime minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, was shot in the leg Thursday during a failed assassination at a political rally in the town of Gujranwala. The head of Shaukat Khanum Memorial Hospital where Khan was taken for evaluation said Khan is in stable condition, but emphasized that was only an initial assessment prior to his surgery. The attack comes just days after he began a slow caravan to the capital of Islamabad to agitate for early general elections; when Khan was deposed in April 2022, he blamed the United States for conspiring with his political enemies and has since built a populist movement across Pakistan with followers who want him restored. Criticizing Khan for “misleading the public,” the attacker, identified as Faisal Butt, said he was acting alone in a video leaked to the media after his arrest. As the dust settles, it is notable that Khan has been embroiled in a public spat with Pakistan’s military spy chief, General Nadeem Ahmad Anjum, and is already blaming Pakistani leadership for the attempt on his life. Last week, the Pakistani government announced it was aware of a potential threat against Khan and planned to increase security in the capital to coincide with his arrival. The attempt on Khan comes 15 years after Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in 2007, also at a political rally.
→ Apology of the Day:
NBA superstar Kyrie Irving issued a pseudo-apology and a huge payout on Wednesday for his controversial tweet in support of an antisemitic film, which he had first defended but has since deleted. “I oppose all forms of hatred and oppression and stand strong with communities that are marginalized and impacted every day,” Irving wrote in a joint statement with his team, the Brooklyn Nets. “I am aware of the negative impact of my post towards the Jewish community and I take responsibility.” Irving and the Nets, working with the Anti-Defamation League, have each committed $500,000 to organizations that focus on fighting racial intolerance.
→ The never-ending carousel of flip-flopping and mixed messaging on best practices for COVID-19 policies continues as this week the Supreme Court reaffirmed the constitutional right of the Transportation Security Administration to require masking on all forms of transportation. The decision was made even though the TSA hasn’t enforced masking since April, when U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle struck down the mandates as unlawful. Whether the TSA will bring mandatory masking back remains to be seen. The messaging is just as mixed in Washington, D.C., where despite only 45% of public school students remaining unjabbed for COVID-19, the D.C. city council decided to again delay its vaccine mandate for students age 12 and older, pushing the upcoming Jan. 3 deadline back to the fall of 2023. Part of that indifference to the vaccine requirement might have to do with the latest CDC numbers, which say at least 86% of American children have had COVID-19, though Council Member Mary M. Cheh (D) acknowledged the council’s own ambiguity could be engendering the low uptake. Her colleague, Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D), was more blunt in his appraisal: “We went too far in requiring the mandate.”
→ Just in case mild monkeypox wasn’t terrifying enough, it looks like researchers at the National Institutes of Health have combined the mild “West African” version that drove the worldwide outbreaks earlier this year with the much deadlier “Congo Basin” version in an attempt to better understand why the Congo version is that much more deadly. “It appears that the project is reasonably anticipated to yield a lab-generated monkeypox virus that is 1,000 times more lethal in mice than the monkeypox virus currently circulating in humans,” three House Republican Committee chairpeople wrote in a joint letter to the NIH. “The risk-benefit ratio indicates potentially serious risks without clear civilian practical applications.” An article published in September in Nature said that out of 57,000 confirmed infections of monkeypox in the recent outbreak, only 22 had died. This is an even lower infection fatality rate than in previous outbreaks of the “mild” strain, which usually kills between 1% and 3% of those infected.
→ Video of the Day:
Four days after the Brazilian presidential election, supporters of incumbent Jair Bolsonaro show no signs of calming down. On Tuesday, Bolsonaro’s chief of staff announced that he had “authorized” the process to begin the transition of executive power, and according to Supreme Court justice Luiz Edson Fachin, who spoke to local Brazilian media, Bolsonaro told him privately, “It is over. So, let’s look ahead.” Nonetheless, thousands of protestors have gathered outside military barracks across the country, pleading with the military to intervene in what they believe was a fraudulent election, chanting “Federal intervention now!” After former President “Lula” da Silva won re-election on Sunday by a slim 1.8% margin, heads of state from around the world rushed to congratulate him on his victory.
→ Glencore, the world’s largest commodities trader, has landed in hot water for perpetrating a global fraud. In a plot ripped from a Hollywood movie, the company found itself on the wrong side of a criminal case this week in a London court for flying huge shipments of cash across Africa in order to bribe local officials for preferential access to oil cargos, paying as much as $28 million in bribes.“Corruption was endemic within the corporation,” said a British prosecutor. “The approving and offering of bribes was an acceptable way of doing business.” Glencore will now pay a $308 million fine, on top of $1.1 billion in fines related to similar antics in the United States and Brazil. The bribery is in keeping with the tradition of founder Marc Rich, who executed comparable deals in the 1970s and ’80s.
→ The U.S. Treasury has begun to explore its legal options for a potential investigation into Elon Musk’s recent purchase of Twitter, The Washington Post—the paper of choice for strategic leaks from government officials—said Tuesday. According to the Post, insiders at the White House and FBI have raised national security concerns over Musk’s close ties with China and the major participation of Saudi and Chinese investors in the deal. The potential probe comes after recent reports of the Department of Homeland Security’s close collaboration with several Big Tech platforms, Twitter included, in policing content on things as varied as the 2020 election to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Musk also held a call with the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, and other leaders of civil rights organizations to discuss his plans for Twitter and content moderation. Greenblatt left the meeting “cautiously optimistic” but also told Jewish Insider, “Actions speak louder than words.”
→ Number of the Day:
18
The percentage of American adults who now live with friends and family without paying any rent, a jump compared to 11% a year ago, and the highest percentage ever on record. Though a historic number of people coming together in single homes because they can’t afford their own housing might seem like a bleak signal of an economy in tatters, some analysts say it’s a sign that the aggressive monetary policy by the Federal Reserve might be working, with the potential of a so-called soft landing as the Fed continues to ratchet up interest rates to tackle inflation. Higher costs of living will likely push even more people to seek roommates or move back in with parents, and eventually, the Fed hopes, it will drive down the red-hot rental market. The question is just when. At a press conference this week announcing the latest bump in interest rates, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said, “There will come a point at which rent inflation will start to come down, but that point is well out from where we are now. We’re well aware of that.”
TODAY IN TABLET:
Biden Administration Backs Qatar Lobby by Armin Rosen
When Elliott Broidy sued Qatari lobbyists for allegedly hacking his private emails, the foreign agents responded by going after Americans–many of them Jews–critical of Qatar. Guess who the Justice and State departments appear to be siding with?
The Dramatic Decline of the ‘Rothschilds of the East’ by Jordyn Haime
The Sassoons were one of the most powerful Jewish families in Asia. What led to their fall from grace?
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
The Hijacking of Middle East Studies
Funded by the federal government to improve US national security, Middle East Studies Centers have become hotbeds of anti-American and anti-Israel activism
By Asaf Romirowsky and Alex Joffe
Few trends in academia are more depressing than the continued domination of Middle Eastern Studies departments by post-colonial professors whose shtick involves recycling cliched attacks on the United States as the ‘Great Satan’ and Israel as the ‘Little Satan.’ The results of this trend are evident in faculty antipathy towards Israel, which is increasingly playing out in their support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.
This reached a new pinnacle in March 2022 when the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) voted to formally support an academic boycott of Israeli universities. "Our members have cast a clear vote to answer the call for solidarity from Palestinian scholars and students experiencing violations of their right to education and other human rights,” MESA’s President, Eve Troutt Powell, wrote of the resolution. “MESA's Board will work to honor the will of its members and ensure that the call for an academic boycott is upheld without undermining our commitment to the free exchange of ideas and scholarship.”
MESA, which has more than 2800 members and more than 50 institutional members, describes itself as a “private, non-profit learned society that brings together scholars, educators and those interested in the study of the region from all over the world.” Academic Middle East studies departments are crucial in the development of American students’—and by extension the American public’s—views of the Middle East. It is also the mechanism that informs and helps shape U.S. policymakers, from the State Department to the military and intelligence communities. MESA’s vote to boycott Israeli academics and institutions puts scholars on notice that professional acceptance in the organization now demands that they discriminate against individuals on the basis of their national, ethnic, and religious origins.
Part of MESA’s decision to boycott Israel is explained in a new report from the National Association of Scholars (NAS), a conservative non-profit organization that advocates for academic freedom, on the takeover of Middle East Studies Centers (MESCs). Established by the Federal government in the 1950s in the interest of advancing U.S. national security, MESCs have been hijacked by Arab and Muslim states who donate generously to universities and departments, the report finds, and by activist professors who have “repurposed critical theory to galvanize activism on Middle East issues.”
A now rescinded rule from the Trump Administration’s Education Department forced colleges and universities to divulge billions of dollars in foreign contributions. Not surprisingly it revealed that as Federal money has waxed and waned, private donations—especially from states like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar—increased, often after being funneled through opaque funding mechanisms such as ‘university foundations.’ Twelve universities disclosed a total of $6.5 billion in foreign funding. The true number is likely much higher.
In one sense, these revelations form part of the larger story of foreign states discretely buying influence in American universities and society as a whole. No nation has deployed this strategy as aggressively as China, which has spent more than a billion dollars in recent years—with $93 million gifted in the past decade to Harvard alone—to promote the values of the Chinese government. Confucius Institutes, established by the Chinese government at universities around the world, have been especially effective disseminators of Chinese Communist Party talking points, shaping the public’s understanding of “Tibet, Taiwan, China’s military buildup, [and] factional fights inside the Chinese leadership,” among other topics. Most of those donations have gone unreported. The institutes were finally designated as “foreign missions” in 2020 by the State Department and more than 100 of them closed, though some have since reopened under different names.
China tries to use its position within the American academic establishment for both commercial and ideological purposes, from the ‘Thousand Talents Program,’ which aimed to recruit “high-end foreign scientists, engineers, and managers from foreign countries” to steal trade secrets, to the Confucius Institute’s K-12 programs, which teach Chinese language and culture to thousands of American students.
The Arab and Muslim donor states funding MESCs prioritize a cultural and political agenda over an economic one, and universities that have taken money from Middle Eastern or Muslim countries dance to the tune those donors play. In the case of MESCs, that has involved apologetics and downplaying the dangers of Islamic radicalism, while suppressing objective scholarly inquiry into the fundamentals of Islam and the state of the Muslim world. Georgetown University, which received $20 million from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, offers a course on “Muslim Women and the West,” which is designed to counter the notion that Muslim women are “oppressed, silent, and victimized” by focusing on the “myriad ways in which they construct preferred futures against racist, capitalist, and heteronormative logics.” Harvard, which in 2005 also received $20 million from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, offers an “Islam in Early America” course that presents a revisionist history in which Muslims were among the first people to arrive in the U.S., and whose influence is supposedly reflected in Thomas Jefferson's ownership of a Koran. Another Harvard course, “The Arab American Experience in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture,” is largely a study in victimography.
The University of Texas-Austin’s teachers’ workshop “Critical Literacy for Global Citizens Summer Institute” is reflective of the growing orientation in MESCs, away from rigorous scholarship and towards activist polemics working in the interest of teaching and promoting identity politics. Georgetown’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding’s workshops are designed to correct “ignorant misunderstandings” and increase “cultural competency of the Middle East,” mostly by presenting simplemindedly positive perceptions of Islam. Yale’s Center for Middle East Studies Summer Institute for Teachers included a “keynote address on “BLM in the MENA: The Global Impact of an American Movement,” a musical retelling of the Palestinian and Syrian diasporas, and a presentation on the Sephardic & Mizrahi Jewish experiences”; language instruction or discussions of scholarly methods were absent.
Like the universities that host them, these MESCs serve an increasingly internationalized client base of donors and students. “The modern shift in Middle East studies,” according to the report, is that it “focuses on self-study and advocacy of Arab students rather than benefit to American citizens.” These programs are engaged in for-hire advocacy work rather than objective scholarship.
Still, the report notes that most centers “see themselves as builders of ‘cultural bridges of understanding’ between the East and West who have been appointed to tear down negative stereotypes of Muslims.” American interests, much less national security (which provided the basis for the MESCs’ founding and ongoing federal funding) are nowhere to be found. Building bridges, while perhaps a laudable mission for humanitarian organizations, is not always compatible with the pursuit of scholarly truth.
As the report recounts, wealthy Arab countries began funneling money into MESCs in the wake of Israel’s victories in the Six Day and Yom Kippur wars as part of a deliberate strategy of influencing American policy in the Middle East. But foreign influence is only part of the equation. At present, the report notes that centers that are not being funded by foreign countries display “the same extensive bias as those with significant foreign involvement.” Moreover, the report finds:
Foreign governments typically do not fund the most harmful materials produced by the centers, such as critical race theory (CRT) workshops for local K–12 educators. Instead, the U.S. government subsidizes these materials through Title VI of the Higher Education Act.
As the report makes clear, MESCs have followed newer trends in higher education, emphasizing ‘intersectionality,’ ‘diversity,’ immigration, critical race theory, and of course ‘Islamophobia.’ ‘Antiracism’ and ‘unlearning whiteness’ have become important causes, along with the effort to collectively portray Islam as a subaltern religion perpetually exploited by Western powers. The U.S. and capitalism, meanwhile, are treated as uniquely destructive forces in the Middle East and globally.
There are institutional alternatives to the MESC emerging that are comparatively small in scale but poised for growth among faculty not beholden to existing ideologies. In a few weeks, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA), in which one of the authors of this article serves as executive director, will meet in Washington, D.C. for a conference that will bring together hundreds of scholars from around the world to present scholarly papers on topics ranging from the role of World War II veterans in Nigerian politics to Fethullah Gulen’s conflict with the Turkish state to China’s Belt and Road Initiative in East Africa. Critical approaches will be on display that take all parties to task when appropriate as opposed to those that shoehorn complex realities into simple anti-American or anti-Israel morality tales. Israelis and Palestinians will be represented, of course, but will not dominate, and the politics of that region will not cast a stultifying blanket over the proceedings.
But even as some countervailing forces attempt to reestablish a spirit of open-minded inquiry and academic rigor in the field, the entrenched power of these state-sponsored MESCs will not be easy to dismantle. The deliberate location of the centers in influential Ivy League schools like Harvard, in Federal government feeder schools like Georgetown, and in institutions located in conservative states such as Arkansas, reflects the growing power of these programs.
It is tempting to suggest, as the report does, that the Federal government should simply cut off funding to National Resource Centers responsible for Middle East Studies. “Federal funding is not well suited to impose reform on Middle East studies,” the report argues, “but neither should the American public be required to fund a system of education antithetical to the national interest.” But academic centers have already been replacing foreign and Federal money with local donors. Additionally, as historian Martin Kramer has pointed out on his blog, the serious Arab and Muslim money has shifted to think tanks, all of which empower the remaining academic radicals.
Acknowledging the extent to which American colleges and universities have become post-American institutions, promoting the values of what analyst John Fonte has called “transnational progressivism,” in which transnational entities such as NGOs, international organizations, and courts usurp the legislative responsibilities of sovereign states, is a first step. From this flows a series of decisions for parents, students, alumni, and legislators whether they should continue supporting the university and its values. The crisis of the humanities is, at its root, a manifestation of students voting with their feet, shunning fields that are too negative, too abstruse, or simply not useful to young people. But the same process, ironically, empowers and radicalizes those students and faculty who remain.
Reengagement is necessary, but on new terms. The growing rebellion against ‘wokeness’ at all levels of education is an opportunity to redefine the mission of these institutions. Expunging identity politics and overcoming the current tyranny of feelings over facts is certainly part of the new equation.
How to keep academia out of the business of influence peddling is difficult. As the report suggests, the easiest solution is for the Federal government to demand absolute transparency regarding “contracts, memoranda of understanding, and other deals with foreign countries” and for the advisory boards of MESCs to include only American citizens. Universities will complain that this goes against their global mission and global orientation, but if universities genuinely believe this, they should be forced to defend it publicly. Meanwhile the rest of us will be able to judge the sources and impacts of foreign money.
Finally, as the Middle East undergoes an upheaval that is seeing Israel accepted as a full member of the community of nations, the obligation is on academics to study and represent the region as it really is. Post-colonialism was always an effort by intellectuals to remake the region in their own image; now foreign governments are using lavish gifts to universities to do the same. All of this must change. Quietly, a new generation of scholars is doing so.