From: Robertson, John List Editor: Charles Brown Editor's Subject: JINSA Links [Robertson] Author's Subject: JINSA Links [Robertson] Date Posted: Wed, 18 Feb 200403:50:08 -0000
I believe that Mr. Scham is either a bit disingenuous or perhaps poorly informed in describing JINSA only as representing an extremist element in Jewish and Israeli thinking (which is true) or as well funded (also true).
At least as important are its well-documented connections with various hawks of the Bush administration and the Defense Policy Board - which is, I would submit, more to the point of Mr. Teodoru's post.
As to whether US academics share some of the blame for the war, I agree with Mr. Scham that the administration would have taken the US to war no matter what. When people like Daniel Pipes (also well funded by the administration, and well connected, and now nicely rewarded with his presidential appointment to the US Institute for Peace), Martin Kramer, and Campus Watch were so pointedly and consistently denigrating some of the most eminent and respected professors of Middle East studies on US campuses, it's obvious that the rest of us had no realistic chance of diverting Bush et al. from their long-intended course.
Many of us, of course, asked Campus Watch to add our names to Mr. Pipes' list of dangerous Middle East experts (for which I was later rewarded with an anonymous letter to my university's president, decrying that he had a "terrorist sympathizer" among his faculty). Meanwhile, in our classrooms, during the run-up to the war many of us had to contend with students stunned by the events of 9-11, largely ignorant of Middle Eastern history, and (either as "war on terror" warriors or, all too often, evangelical Christians) hostile to Muslims at the time they enrolled in our classes. Most of them were only too willing to trust their president (whose ignorance of Islam and Iraq's history was profound), and at the same time be very wary of the "liberal professors" who actually know something about Islam and Iraq's history, but who (according to the Limbaughs, Coulters, and Hannitys of the world) are only set on destroying their country.