Monday, June 22, 2015

Are they calling me vulgar?

"Perhaps the most intellectually and morally vulgar of these by a professor of Middle East studies was by As’ad AbuKhalil of Cal State Stanislaus. Claiming that Ajami was an “Arab Zionist” who was “never really known among Arabs” as was Bernard Lewis, and that his Middle East studies colleagues “never held him in high esteem,” Ajami “gave a respectable cast to the racist discourse about Arabs and shared ‘inside views’ about their culture.” He had “deep contempt and hatred for his people and the culture in which he was born,” and “left a harmful legacy for Arabs.” Revealing the bitterness of one for whom the falsehoods that bind the strains of ethnic solidarity trump truth and a sense of shame, he wrote:

    Ajami is like the one Jewish person who gets invited to anti-Semitic conferences to attest the views about Jews held by anti-Semites."