Fight Over Arabic and Hebrew Instruction Makes Me Pine for… Fairness

Last week I commented on the Washington Post’s decision to publish an attack on Arabic instruction, by neocon neophyte Joel Pollak, who sits at the knee of the Dersh. Two others have attacked the piece more effectively than I did–Matthew Yglesias with pure mockery. And here is Elijah Zarwan in Cairo, who knowledgeably dissects Pollak’s claims re the Arabic instruction book. 

While I don’t love Al-Kitab (I blame that book for my premature hairloss), Pollak’s assertions about it don’t hold water. Where Pollak finds totalitarian propaganda, most everyone else who has used the book finds only anodyne language exercises. Pollak tells us how he, like the ancient Israelites refusing to bow to Caesar, heroically refused to read a passage about Nasser to practice his pronunciation because it was propaganda. Here’s the passage as translated by a commenter on Matthew Yglesias’ blog:

Gamal Abdel Nasser was born in Egypt in 1918 and spent his childhood in Alexandria where his father worked in the post office. When his mother died, his father sent him to his uncle in Cairo. After his graduation from high school, he joined the Egyptian army and became an officer. He and a group of young officers called the ‘Free Officers’ ejected King Faruq from Egypt on 23 July 1952 and thus Egypt became a republic. In 1954 Abdel Nasser became the first president of Egypt, and remained president until his death in 1970. Afterwards, Anwar al-Sadat assumed the presidency of Egypt. Nasser’s most noted achievements included the nationalization of the Suez Canal, the United Arabic Republic, and the High Dam in Aswan.

Dangerous, downright un-American stuff.

And now an Arab friend passes along a critique of Hebrew instruction at Harvard:

a palestinian muslim undergrad i know took 4 years of hebrew at harvard and often faced outright zionist political propaganda in class. things like class days dedicated to learning about israeli independence and studying rap lyrics that explicitly call for the killing of arabs. she complained about the latter incident to the administrative campus group for race and inter-cultural relations (the harvard foundation). i don’t think there was any substantive resolution however. the excuse given was that to better understand israeli/hebrew culture, students need to be exposed to the modern political expressions of native hebrew speakers.

In the end my own response to this discussion is somewhat American, and isolationist. I’ve studied a little of both, but I don’t know Hebrew, I don’t know Arabic. I do know that Jews and Arabs haven’t been getting along there for a long time, and now we’re immersed in their cycle of violence. I don’t like getting stuck in either narrative. Both sides surely have truth in them; I imagine that even the ideologue Pollak is right about some of the things in that course. (As neocons are right when they talk about the absence of freedom in many Arab societies.) The goal for Americans is to stop being caught by these ideological narratives and restore evenhandedness, fairness. 

Related posts:

1. Bernard Lewis Riseth Again (Washington Post Gives Platform to Precocious Neocon’s Attack on Arabic Instruction)
2. Yet another instance of ‘fluent Hebrew and some knowledge of Arabic’
3. ‘Beth Elohim,’ leading Brooklyn temple, is said to have Hebrew school maps of Israel without Green Line
4. Steinhardt’s Hebrew Charter School in Brooklyn–What’s the Agenda?
5. ‘The Palestinian doctor spoke in Hebrew–except when he called to God’