Joel Pollak Takes on Arabic Textbook and Loses
Other interesting reactions to Joel Pollak’s zany oped in the Washington Post are surfacing. Many refute his characterization of a standard Arabic textbook, Al-Kitaab, as propagandistic. Far from being based on facts, his piece exposed the currency of anti-Arab bias. Even esteemed outlets like the Post drop the evidentiary standards for gobbly-gook such as Pollak’s.
Pollak, a research assistant for prolific torture advocate Alan Dershowitz, was recently called a “precocious neo-con” by Phillip Weiss. The journalist dismissed Pollak’s analysis as “condescending” out-dated Orientalism.
The Atlantic’s Matthew Yglesias hit back at Pollak with a sharp, satirical riff applauding his courage to “speak truth to weakness and stand up for the view that as narrow a range of opinions as possible should be expressed in America.” [The comments section of his blog are quite illuminating as well -- one commenter used the book at the US Military's Defense Language Institute.]
These comments mirror our own QuiQui’s introduction to his piece. She warned you “might get a kick out of this alarmist, and I must say ridiculous, dangerous, and outrageous article.” That is, his arguments would be laughable if they were not so potentially destructive — only because absurdist vilification has been the name of the game in the Bush administration. We laughed at Bush and his silly mumblings…
Pollak’s analysis — like Bush’s imagined WMDs claims — falls apart at the seams. One commenter on Yglesias’s blogs argued:
Pollak is basically trying to cow Middle East studies departments by calling for more governmental oversight. This threat is based on a total disregard for facts:
1. Al-Kitaab’s 3 maps either DO show Israel or come from the WWI period — before Israel even existed.
2. The passage on Nasser that Pollak refused to recite because it was “propaganda” translates as follows (p. 338):
“Gamal Abdel Nasser was born in Egypt in 1918 and spent his childhood in Alexandria where his father worked in the post office. When his mother died, his father sent him to his uncle in Cairo. After his graduation from high school, he joined the Egyptian army and became an officer. He and a group of young officers called the ‘Free Officers’ ejected King Faruq from Egypt on 23 July 1952 and thus Egypt became a republic. In 1954 Abdel Nasser became the first president of Egypt, and remained president until his death in 1970. Afterwards, Anwar al-Sadat assumed the presidency of Egypt. Nasser’s most noted achievements included the nationalization of the Suez Canal, the United Arabic Republic, and the High Dam in Aswan.”
Not sure how that’s supposed to turn loyal Americans into west-hated fanatics.
Out of Pollak’s smoke-and-mirrors show, one thing is clear: Pollak is more than an innocent student hoping to learn Arabic. The Washington Post failed to pick up on his agenda.
He is a rabidly pro-Israel activist who plants suspicion of all things Muslim and Arab in every shadow. For instance, on his blog, he actually suggests that Harvard Law School is promoting Jihad. Why? It sponsored an Islamic finance forum. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs, Pollak waters at the mouth with images of terrorism when he hears the word “Islamic.” In the paranoid style of an Islamophobe, Islamic activities necessarily imply terrorism connections:
Shari’a-compliant funds must apparently donate money to charity to compensate for investments in non-shari’a-compliant enterprises. These charitable funds (zakat) have on several occasions been linked to terror funding networks.
Maybe Pollak should be spending more time studying the Al-Kitaab textbook and less time dreaming up Islamist conspiracies. “Zakat,” despite his junior attempt at translation, does not refer to the “charitable funds” of Pollak’s concerns. Zakat means “almsgiving” and is one of the pillars of Islam. It refers to donations, not the organized charity groups Pollak is thinking. A simple Wikipedia search could have helped.
There is something more ludicrous about his argument. American politicians have on occasion ripped off the public. So let’s have a panel on corruption in every conference on American politics. Or how would Pollak react to the argument that the many occasions of Israeli espionage in the United States means there should be a panel on Israeli spying during forums about US-Israel relations (though Israeli espionage in the US is a vastly under-discussed topic).
That the Washington Post gave voice to such a amateurish attempt at hatemongering, supported by deceptive distortion of a book too many are familiar with (and therefore was so easily refutable), is disappointing.
