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.
