Middle East News
Juan Cole has a lengthy and fascinating response to Friedman's latest column, in which Friedman argued that discussion of democracy in the Middle East "was avoided because a toxic political correctness infected the academic field of Middle Eastern studies -- to such a degree that anyone focusing on the absence of freedom in the Arab world ran the risk of being labeled an 'Orientalist' or an 'essentialist.'" These ad hominem attacks on academia are of course standard rhetoric from the Right. (From what central director do they all get their talking points? Do they all have microchips implanted in their brains that spout out the latest spin every 4 hours or what?) Cole points out the fallacies in this argument, in particular as it was seemingly directed at the late Dr. Edward Said of Columbia University.

In a later post, Cole has more on the subject of liberal bias in academia:

I am saying that "bent" is not a relevant category of analysis when evaluating university teaching. Everybody has some bent. The question is, whether students come out of the class having learned to reason about a set of problems or not. The content is not as important, since they'll forget a lot of the content anyway, and will receive it selectively, both during and after the class. But if you teach them to take things apart and see how they work, to think about social and political causation, to see how things work together, in a particular field, then they can produce their own knowledge and understanding about it thereafter. They can also question their own and the professor's premises because they will have learned about hidden premises and how to bring them out in the open and interrogate them.

From what I can tell, the Gilead Conservatives™ absolutely positively do NOT want people thinking about "social and political causation" or questioning the premises of authority. They need a populace of under-educated, overfed sheeple to keep their grip on power.

Finally, Cole has more on the protests in Baghdad, Ramadi and Najaf yesterday, citing one report that indicated as many as 300,000 people may have participated in the Baghdad protest of the American occupation: "The demonstrators demanded a swift trial of Saddam Hussein, a timetable for US withdrawal, the release of Iraqis detained by the US, and an end to the marginalization of the opposition." (pictures here, via riverbend) Interestingly, CNN is reporting that newly-elected Iraqi President Jalal Talabani expects that US troops will be out of Iraq in two years.
- posted by TJ @ 6:46 PM