The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) has been laying the groundwork for years for what’s happening now.
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The pro-Hamas demonstrations that have become the latest social contagion to afflict the nation, with “encampments” springing up on college campuses across the country to demand “freedom” for “Palestine,” show clear signs of being orchestrated. One telling indication of this is that a massive number of these allegedly grass-roots protesters have identical tents, as if some well-heeled leftist bought them in bulk with the intention of helping this allegedly spontaneous movement get going. The groundwork for what is happening these days, however, has been laid for years. These demonstrations are in large part the handiwork of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) the professional organization of Middle East Studies Professors at colleges nationwide.
The Middle East Studies Association, whose members dominate the Middle East Studies faculties of most colleges and universities in the U.S., identifies itself as “a non-profit association that fosters the study of the Middle East, promotes high standards of scholarship and teaching, and encourages public understanding of the region and its peoples through programs, publications and services that enhance education, further intellectual exchange, recognize professional distinction, and defend academic freedom.” That’s all very noble and high-minded, but as is so often the case in academia today, the reality is considerably seamier. MESA is actually a far-left, pro-jihad activist group that gives an academic veneer to Marxist agitprop and Palestinian jihad propaganda.
This is abundantly clear from the 25 items that are currently on the front page of the news section of the MESA website. Two stories are pinned to the top of the page; one is actually on the side of genuine justice and human rights, decrying the Iranian Islamic regime’s dismissal of professors who supported the recent Woman, Life, Freedom protests in Iran. The other, however, is entitled “Campus Climate Resources,” which gives the impression that it’s propaganda about the myth of human-caused climate change; it’s actually about the “climate” on campus regarding support for the Palestinian jihad against Israel. MESA here offers a grab-bag of links to article denouncing the alleged “repression of protest on campuses,” the alleged “targeting of Palestinian students in Israeli universities,” and the like. One of these linked articles carries this headline: “MESA Board Joint Statement with CAF [MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom ] regarding the ongoing genocidal violence against the Palestinian people and their cultural heritage in Gaza
That article asserts that “the ongoing attack on Gaza by the state of Israel…has now claimed more than 100,000 Palestinian dead and wounded according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.” Despite still being offered by MESA as if it contained current information, it has not been revised to reflect Hamas’ admission that its casualty figures have been wildly inflated, or any indication that the UN still carries on its list of journalists supposedly killed by the Israelis the name of a man who is very much alive. In MESA’s world, only the Palestinian side of the story is told, and it is believed without question. That is what the self-righteous and ignorant students who are in the encampments have been told, and that’s all they know.
It is thus no surprise that the MESA website also contains the organization’s official endorsement of the frankly neo-Nazi Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which emulates Hitler’s National Socialists in boycotting Jewish businesses so as to demonize the Jews and limit their economic power. MESA also calls upon “calls upon the leaders of North American colleges and universities to steadfastly defend academic freedom and to champion freedom of expression—even when the ideas and opinions expressed are unorthodox or unpopular.” This is rich, because MESA members would be on the front lines protesting if a college or university gave a professorship, or even a hearing, to an opponent of jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women who spoke honestly about how the Palestinian “resistance” is really a jihad, and about how the global jihad is a quintessentially expansionist, imperialist movement that has denied the rights of “indigenous peoples” the world over.
What MESA is worried about is professors who are open supporters of Hamas facing discipline. Many of those 25 articles on the first page of its news section are letters to or from various universities regarding MESA protesting against the dismissal of such professors, or the disciplining of pro-Hamas students. There is nothing about the pro-Israel professor Shai Davidai getting barred from the Columbia campus, but plenty about how the cosseted toy revolutionaries on the campus lawn are being oppressed and their rights denied.
It’s easy to see, given MESA’s relentless anti-Israel stance, how university students all over the nation have gotten the idea that supporting Hamas’ genocidal jihad is right and righteous. MESA, like the universities where these students are posturing and screaming today, was not always this bad. Its Founding Fellows include groundbreaking scholars such as S. D. Goitein, Majid Khadduri, and Franz Rosenthal. Among its Honorary Fellows were some of the most renowned figures of the study of Islam, Arabs and the Middle East, including Sir Hamilton Gibb, Philip K. Hitti, W. Montgomery Watt, Maxime Rodinson, and Annemarie Schimmel. They have been followed, however, by a rogue’s gallery of academic hacks and propagandists. The pro-Hamas encampments on college campuses are their handiwork.
