By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 17, 2006

It is a sad fact that many feminist academics “have adopted a pro-PLO and pro-terrorist line of thinking.”[1] Middle East Studies specialists are among the worst.

The doyenne of this camp is Duke University’s Miriam Cooke, a professor of Arabic and Women’s Studies. Cooke champions what she calls the “production of knowledge,” especially on the Middle East, not to impart accurate historical information, but “to question structures of power.” Middle East academics must admit that they belong “to a power with definite interests in the Orient.” And students should only ask questions about power, not what is actually being said. They must learn “to ask, Under what circumstances would such an argument–no matter how preposterous–make sense? In what ways does it legitimate certain kinds of cultures while subordinating or outlawing others?” Cooke’s goal is no less than the eradication of Western “imperialism.”

Cooke is a card-carrying member of the “root causes” crowd. In October 2001, she bemoaned the “catastrophic” 9/11 attacks but blamed them on the U.S. The causes dated “back through the Gulf War to the establishment of Israel in 1948.” The U.S. had instigated the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, she alleged, and the “Afghans” (sic) rightly took their revenge. She also comes close to justifying mass murder; the “apparently innocent business of moneymaking in New York City and of policymaking in Washington DC,” seen as criminal elsewhere, had “direct and mostly negative consequences for most of the rest of the world.” There is little “apparent innocence” when it comes to capitalism. Continue reading “Feminist Middle East Studies” →

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