asinine middle east analysis

"Muslims Wont Play Together" Elfraim Karsh, New York Times

Efraim Karsh in Saturday's New York Times published this hilariously bad article about the 2010 Islamic Solidarity Games which were canceled over the Persian Gulf Naming Dispute. It wouldn't be so bad if he were not "the head of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King’s College London" and the New York Times was not considered a reputable newspaper of record.

He treats the Persian Gulf naming dispute like it's the only naming dispute in the world. Maybe he should ask a Greek about Macedonia, an Irish republican about Londonderry. You don't have to go to travel to the Middle East to find sectarian conflict, Belfast is less than a one-hour flight from London and is part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, thankfully the violence, for the most part, has ended with the Good Friday Agreement.

But most asinine omission is the fact the Taiwan has to compete in the Olympics as Chinese Taipei! Here's an article from today about the use of the term Chinese Taipei by NOAA's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center which outraged a Taiwanese DPP politician. Czechoslovakia broke up largely over a conflict regarding the name of the country in the Hyphen War.

The rest of the article is also a bunch of crap written by someone who definitely lives in London and thinks about "big things". I was brought to the attention of this article by The Abu Dhabi Review twitter feed, written by Peter C. Baker and Jonathan Shainin.

Efraim Karsh, ladies and gentlemen: "the House of War (as Muslims call the rest of the world)". http://nyti.ms/ddnZvf10:40 PM Feb 28th via webNot a day goes by that someone in Abu Dhabi doesn't ask me "Where are you from in the House of War?"10:40 PM Feb 28th via web@sepoy @abuaardvark I like his idea that the putative opposition of the "House of Islam" is the only possible downside to attacking Iran.10:45 PM Feb 28th via web in reply to sepoyMy work visa lists my nationality as "War, House of" and my religion as "kafir". For occupation it says "fitna", whatever that means.10:52 PM Feb 28th via webTweeps over in the House of War all riled up over hockey. Tehran, take note: Canada-hating Americans will not object to attack on Ottawa.12:52 AM Mar 1st via web

The blog, The Mezze, written by graduate students in the Middle East Studies program at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, wrote about the article in their post: "How to do really terrible Middle East analysis".

Talk about the essential nature of Muslims and/or Arabs and rely on events from the 7th century and the crusades to make your point. Karsh writes: “It took a mere 24 years after the Prophet’s death for the head of the universal Islamic community, the caliph Uthman, to be murdered by political rivals. This opened the floodgates to incessant infighting within the House of Islam, which has never ceased.” This is a popular tactic in bad Middle East analysis: trying to understand today’s politics and and prescribe policy based on tracing the essential nature of Arabs or Muslims back to the birth of Islam. This is like trying to understand EU politics only by reading histories of the Middle Ages. Later, Karsh repeats the error by using Muslim actions in the crusades as support for his policy prescriptions of today.

...and the key to understanding anti-immigration attitudes and rise of the BNP in Britain is 1066 and all that (also the name of a hilarious satire on British History).

Make the actions of Arabs or other Middle Eastern people sound strange or different, even when people all around the globe exhibit the same behavior. When explaining why there are divisions within the broader Muslim community, Karsh writes: “not only do Arabs consider themselves superior to all other Muslims, but inhabitants of Hijaz, the northwestern part of the Arabian Peninsula and Islam’s birthplace, regard themselves the only true Arabs, and tend to be highly disparaging of all other Arabic-speaking communities.” So, there aren’t ethnic or religious groups in the US that consider themselves to be superior to others? Does Karsh not remember growing up in Israel and seeing how Ashkenazi Jews spoke disparagingly of Sephardic Jews? I’m not saying that the facts in this quote are wrong, but Karsh makes it sound as if this case is special to the Arabs, which is patently false.

Yes, Levantine Arabs have a different culture and consider themselves different than people from the Gulf, Somalia, Morocco, too. Why would this be a surprise to anyone? It's not hard to imagine that the culture and people in Beirut would be different than the people and culture in Riyadh.