How did this professoressa, how do all the inhorns (the "e" of the einhorn dropping off, possibly, during the era of World War I) of this world, get hired, and then promoted, and then are made heads of Middle Eastern studies at Yale? How did Carl Ernst manage to hire Omid Safi, when the faculty members at Harvard Divinity School, despite the cabal of Eck-Graham-Ahmad, manage to have the intelligence, and self-assurance (none of that "we don't know a thing about Islam" and "Diana and Bill and Leila say he's great")?
Who vetted her? Who pushed her?
And since - let's face it -- these MESA Nostrans can no longer be stopped, when will some professors in other fields openly discuss the scandal of the slow, steady, inexorable takeover of Middle Eastern departments, by out-and-out apologists for Middle Eastern regimes and politics, and above all, for Islam?
Don't be shy. Don't be afraid. You are right. And the students, the endlessly naive students, are and will suffer. And so will the formulation of policies that, as in Iraq, and now in Afghanistan and Pakistan, squander trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, and war materiél, and morale, and everything, while the heart of our own civilization -- Western Europe -- becomes ever more unpleasant, dangerous, and expensive for its indigenes (and for American scholars, students, visitors), because islamization continues, unopposed, through the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest. Imagine, given all the trouble, all the anxiety, all the disturbance,all the unease, caused by a Muslim population that now sounds small and manageable (but isn't) what will happen when the Muslim numbers double or triple? Europe, for its own citizens and for non-Muslim immigrants and visitors, will become --everywhere but in some islands of Infidels -- unendurable.
If Americans are to be informed adequately -- about, in the present case, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the role of Islam -- then the inhorns of this world have to lose their posts. Her own reports on her non-existent contretemps at the airport (and why, all over the world, what is the reason, that air travel is so difficult and unpleasant, and there is a need to arrive so early, and a need to undergo all kinds of inspections going, and then coming? The reason is Islam, and Muslims, and thousands of acts of terror, on land and sea and air, by Muslims -- there is no other reason, though apologists for Islam, and others who don't wish ever to take true note of Islam, can pretend otherwise, and point airily to the IRA, and ETA, and so on).
Let's start with members of the Yale faculty and students who care about free speech. Here's a free speech question. It has to do with your very own university and a professor -- head of a department no less - named Inhorn. What are the chances, by the way, that in this department an apostate from Islam might be hired? Or a truthful scholar of Islam, one whose scholarly memory goes back more than a few decades, and who is familiar with the work of so many who need to be constantly read and re-read, including Joseph Schacht, and Snouck Hurgronje, and Arthur Jeffrey and Henri Lammens and Georges Vajda and K. S. Lal and --- well, look around. A scandal has arisen. Will it be allowed to be insabbiato, that is "covered up with sand" just as, in Italy, political connections with mafia, camorra, and 'ngrangheta almost always are, and allowed, unseen and forgotten, to simply die?
This is a scandal involving the most important freedom of all: the freedom of speech. A book on Muslim reactions, and the reaction too of non-Muslims, to Muslim reactions, a book on those Jyllands-Posten cartoons about Muhammad and, as well, about representations through history, including such things as Gustave Dore's illustrations to The Divine Comedy, is to be stripped of its indispensable illustrative text -- presumably, these works of cartoon art can only be described in words. Ekphrasis on stilts.
The "scholar" who played a leading role, it appears, in this pusillanimous and dangerous decision, turns out to be Marcia Inhorn -- recently hired by Yale (or, to get into the spirit of grim academe, “a recent hire”) and this year, already, that appetizing thing, Head of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies. Oh, Marcia, Marcia, Marcia. What would Alexander Meiklejohn, or Learned Hand, or Alexander Bickel (once of Yale Law School), or other defenders of free speech, make of this demonstration of pusillanimity, Yale's degringolade? And what would they, or what should faculty members at Yale today, those who are in other departments, and need not curry favor with, or fear in any way, the members at Yale or outside Yale of MESA Nostra (which google), and who, if they can overcome their cultivated reluctance to make pronouncements outside their "fields of expertise" will look into the hiring, and the promotion policies, and the content of courses, including the reading lists, of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies in order to see if indeed the charges of critics have merit, or are simply hysteria, or what. They should begin by setting up a Faculty Commission to investigate the whole book-on-Muhammad-cartoons-but-hold-the-cartoons-and-all-other-depictions-of-Muhammad business. It would be of great pedagogic value, to the students at Yale, shining a little lux on a big veritas, and it's time to take back the study of Islam, and of the Middle East, from those who -- both Muslim and non-Muslim fellow travellers and apologists -- have in too many places, stealthily, counting on the diffidence of other faculty members, have managed to obtrain a near-stranglehold on what American students learn in colleges and universities, about the ideology of Islam the texts, tenets, attitudes, atmospherics, and about the 1350-year history of Muslim conquest of vast lands inhabited by non-Muslims, whose own cultures and histories and even languages so often were swallowed up in the maw of Islam, with so many being killed, or forcibly converted, not least through the need to escape from what must for many have been the unendurable aspects of the dhimmi condition, which was the very best that non-Muslims -- if they were considered ahl al-kitab, People of the Book, could expect. Islam did not bring woe into the world -- that was there long before -- but it has certainly helped to cause an artistic and intellectual wasteland once, after the first few centuries of conquest by Muslims, when the numbers and influence of the originally fructifying Christians and Jews and Zoroastrians was much diminished (the situation was slightly different in Hinustan and Eas Asia), and what is called, a bit inaccurately I'm afraid, High Islamic Civilization, disappeared as Islam spread, and non-Muslims lost their influence, their numbers, their everything.
The consequences of the decision, based on fear-mongering by carefully-unnamed “experts” on Islam, will if they remain unopposed and unchallenged, be more dangerous to the civilization of the Western world than anything that might happen because of the publication of the book as the author had wished it to be, with the cartoons and other images of Muhammad – and without which the book is fatally vitiated. It is amazing to consider that this Marcia Inhorn, this mocker of American “fear-mongering” about Iran and, by extension, those “dangerous Muslims” (as Martin Kramer has so memorably shown), should have been chosen to deliver the bad news to Jytte Klausen. It is amazing that someone of this caliber should have been hired, with tenure, at Yale, and what’s more, been given that appetizing post, head of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies.
Her behavior, in a well-ordered universe, would so arouse the faculty and students that they would demand her removal, and they would boycott her classes, and those of her now-absurd department, and she would feel compelled to leave. But that's not likely to happen, is it?
So then use the only weapon that will mean something to the beating heart of the university, the Development Office. Stop contributions. Explain why you are ending all contributions to Yale, until such time as these kinds of practices end, and this kind of usurper of a post, goes elsewhere -- she'll always be welcome at John Esposito's Saudi-funded operation in Washington. Let her go there. She'll fit right in.
And those two beautiful Persian carpets that she so tellingly mentions, that clearly meant so very much more to her than the misery, the hell, of the Islamic Republic of Iran where nothing appeared to her out of place --- those rugs that meant so much to her -- well, what did that make you imagine? I could only think of the wunderbar gifts such a person might have received from a grateful German government had she gone on a fact-finding visit, and found only the right facts, to Germany in 1938, or who come back glowing from having seen the future (and it works!) from Soviet Russia were everything was velikolepno and tickety-boo, and the White Sea Canal was coming along splendidly, thank you, and the Russians worshipped – absolutely worshipped – their splendid new leader, Joseph Vissarionovitch Stalin, he of the twinkling eyes and the avuncular moustache.
Should such a creature be spreading her nonsense, her apologetics, along with those two absolutely b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l Persian carpets she brought back from that fine place, the Islamic Republic of Iran, at Yale? Why not? The same thing is going on elsewhere, with Carl Ernst going to Teheran to proudly pocket some prize the Islamic Republic decided to award him, and Columbia – whose halls were once walked by Joseph Schacht, the greatest scholar of Islam ever to live in the New World, and whose administration was once held to the straight and narrow by the likes – are their likes? Is there anyone like? – Jacques Barzun. Marcia (E)Inhorn should not be spreading her nonsense at Yale. And she should not be allowed, not even for one second, to help engage in a monumental act of suppression, harming those real scholars who, like Jytte Klausen, refuse to play the game, refuse to engage in the kind of thing that the Marcia-inhorns of this world find come to them so naturally. But really, you should see those two Persian carpets!
