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Title: David Shuster Dismantles Fouad Ajami who compared Libby to our fallen soldiers
Source: Crooks and Liars
URL Source: http://crooksandliars.com/
Published: Jul 6, 2007
Author: Logan Murphy
Post Date: 2007-07-06 18:42:31 by Zipporah
Keywords: None
Views: 70
Comments: 3

David Shuster Dismantles Fouad Ajami who compared Libby to our fallen soldiers

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From the Nation

" The Native Informant"

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20030428/shatz/6

Ajami's admirers paint him as a courageous gadfly who has risen above the tribal hatreds of the Arabs, a Middle Eastern Spinoza whose honesty has earned him the scorn of his brethren. Commentary editor-at-large Norman Podhoretz, one of his many right-wing American Jewish fans, writes that Ajami "has been virtually alone in telling the truth about the attitude toward Israel of the people from whom he stems." The people from whom Ajami "stems" are, of course, the Arabs, and Ajami's ethnicity is not incidental to his celebrity. It lends him an air of authority not enjoyed by non-Arab polemicists like Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes.

But Ajami is no gadfly. He is, in fact, entirely a creature of the American establishment. His once-luminous writing, increasingly a blend of Naipaulean clichés about Muslim pathologies and Churchillian rhetoric about the burdens of empire, is saturated with hostility toward Sunni Arabs in general (save for pro-Western Gulf Arabs, toward whom he is notably indulgent), and to Palestinians in particular. He invites comparison with Henry Kissinger, another émigré intellectual to achieve extraordinary prominence as a champion of American empire. Like Kissinger, Ajami has a suave television demeanor, a gravitas-lending accent, an instinctive solicitude for the imperatives of power and a cool disdain for the weak. And just as Kissinger cozied up to Nelson Rockefeller and Nixon, so has Ajami attached himself to such powerful patrons as Laurence Tisch, former chairman of CBS; Mort Zuckerman, the owner of US News & World Report; Martin Peretz, a co-owner of The New Republic; and Leslie Gelb, head of the Council on Foreign Relations.

.......

Seeking to understand the causes of Ajami's transformation, I spoke to more than two dozen of his friends and acquaintances over the past several months. (Ajami did not return my phone calls or e-mails.) These men and women depicted a man at once ambitious and insecure, torn between his irascible intellectual independence and his even stronger desire to belong to something larger than himself. On the one hand, he is an intellectual dandy who, as Sayres Rudy, a former student, puts it, "doesn't like groups and thinks people who join them are mediocre." On the other, as a Shiite among Sunnis, and as an émigré in America, he has always felt the outsider's anxiety to please, and has adjusted his convictions to fit his surroundings. As a young man eager to assimilate into the urbane Sunni world of Muslim Beirut, he embraced pan-Arabism. Received with open arms by the American Jewish establishment in New York and Washington, he became an ardent Zionist. An informal adviser to both Bush administrations, he is now a cheerleader for the American empire.

......

In late May 1985, Ajami--now identifying himself as a Shiite from southern Lebanon--sparred with Said on the MacNeil Lehrer Report over the war between the PLO and Shiite Amal militia, then raging in Beirut's refugee camps. A few months later, they came to verbal blows again, when Ajami was invited to speak at a Harvard conference on Islam and Muslim politics organized by Israeli-American academic Nadav Safran. After the Harvard Crimson revealed that the conference had been partly funded by the CIA, Ajami, at the urging of Said and the late Pakistani writer Eqbal Ahmad, joined a wave of speakers who were withdrawing from the conference. But Ajami, who was a protégé and friend of Safran, immediately regretted his decision. He wrote a blistering letter to Said and Ahmad a few weeks later, accusing them of "bringing the conflicts of the Middle East to this country" while "I have tried to go beyond them.... Therefore, my friends, this is the parting of ways. I hope never to encounter you again, and we must cease communication. Yours sincerely, Fouad Ajami."

.....

By the mid-1980s, the Middle Eastern country closest to Ajami's heart was not Lebanon but Israel. He returned from his trips to the Jewish state boasting of traveling to the occupied territories under the guard of the Israel Defense Forces and of being received at the home of Teddy Kollek, then Jerusalem's mayor. The Israelis earned his admiration because they had something the Palestinians notably lacked: power. They were also tough-minded realists, who understood "what can and cannot be had in the world of nations." The Palestinians, by contrast, were romantics who imagined themselves to be "exempt from the historical laws of gravity."

......

The Saudi Way'

Ajami also developed close ties during the 1980s to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which made him--as he often and proudly pointed out--the only Arab who traveled both to the Persian Gulf countries and to Israel. In 1985 he became an external examiner in the political science department at Kuwait University; he said "the place seemed vibrant and open to me." His major patrons, however, were Saudi. He has traveled to Riyadh many times to raise money for his program, sometimes taking along friends like Martin Peretz; he has also vacationed in Prince Bandar's home in Aspen. Saudi hospitality--and Saudi Arabia's lavish support for SAIS--bred gratitude. At one meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations, Ajami told a group that, as one participant recalls, "the Saudi system was a lot stronger than we thought, that it was a system worth defending, and that it had nothing to apologize for." Throughout the 1980s and '90s, he faithfully echoed the Saudi line. "Rage against the West does not come naturally to the gulf Arabs," he wrote in 1990. "No great tales of betrayal are told by the Arabs of the desert. These are Palestinian, Lebanese and North African tales."

.....

Since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, Ajami has been a consistent critic of the peace process--from the right. He sang the praises of each of Israel's leaders, from the Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu, with his "filial devotion [to] the land he had agreed to relinquish," to Labor leader Ehud Barak, "an exemplary soldier." The Palestinians, he wrote, should be grateful to such men for "rescuing" them from defeat, and to Zionism for generously offering them "the possibility of their own national political revival." (True to form, the Palestinians showed "no gratitude.") A year before the destruction of Jenin, he proclaimed that "Israel is existentially through with the siege that had defined its history." Ajami's Likudnik conversion was sealed by telling revisions of arguments he had made earlier in his career. Where he had once argued that the 1982 invasion of Lebanon aimed to "undermine those in the Arab world who want some form of compromise," he now called it a response to "the challenge of Palestinian terror."

.....

Fortunately, George W. Bush understands this. Ajami has commended Bush for staking out the "high moral ground" and for "putting Iran on notice" in his Axis of Evil speech. Above all, the President should not allow himself to be deterred by multilateralists like Secretary of State Colin Powell, "an unhappy, reluctant soldier, at heart a pessimist about American power." Unilateralism, Ajami says, is nothing to be ashamed of. It may make us hated in the "hostile landscape" of the Arab world, but, as he recently explained on the NewsHour, "it's the fate of a great power to stand sentry in that kind of a world."

It is no accident that the "sentry's solitude" has become the idée fixe of Ajami's writing in recent years. For it is a theme that resonates powerfully in his own life. Like the empire he serves, Ajami is more influential, and more isolated, than he has ever been. In recent years he has felt a need to defend this choice in heroic terms. "All a man can betray is his conscience," he solemnly writes in The Dream Palace of the Arabs, citing a passage from Conrad. "The solitude Conrad chose is loathed by politicized men and women."

It is a breathtakingly disingenuous remark. Ajami may be "a stranger in the Arab world," but he can hardly claim to be a stranger to its politics. That is why he is quoted, and courted, by Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. What Ajami abhors in "politicized men and women" is conviction itself. A leftist in the 1970s, a Shiite nationalist in the 1980s, an apologist for the Saudis in the 1990s, a critic-turned-lover of Israel, a skeptic-turned-enthusiast of American empire, he has observed no consistent principle in his career other than deference to power. His vaunted intellectual independence is a clever fiction. The only thing that makes him worth reading is his prose style, and even that has suffered of late. As Ajami observed of Naipaul more than twenty years ago, "he has become more and more predictable, too, with serious cost to his great gift as a writer," blinded by the "assumption that only men who live in remote, dark places are 'denied a clear vision of the world.'" Like Naipaul, Ajami has forgotten that "darkness is not only there but here as well."

Zipporah  posted on  2007-07-06   18:56:20 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

intotheabyss  posted on  2007-07-06   19:10:42 ET  (1 image) Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

LOL!!!!!! To say the very least :P

Zipporah  posted on  2007-07-06   19:13:17 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

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