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Middle East Academics Disregard Quest for Balance

[Indianapolis Star] Pierre M. Atlas - The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) is the premier international academic society for those who study all aspects of the Middle East, its history, peoples, languages, and cultures. More than 2,000 scholars from around the world came to Boston for MESA's 40th annual conference. At a roundtable discussion on last summer's Israel-Lebanon war, the five panelists, some from Lebanon and some not, expressed nuanced differences when discussing Lebanon's internal politics. But they uniformly condemned Israel's actions in the war as "aggression," and repeatedly referred to Hizballah's actions as "resistance." Supporters of Israel argue that Hizballah started the conflict, and thus it bears ultimate blame for the war's costs. But the panelists expressed a view held by many in the Arab world that Israel has a long history of aggression against Lebanon, that it was looking for any excuse to start the war last summer, and that the U.S. gave it the green light. One panelist showed pictures of the war's massive destruction in Lebanon. But there were no pictures - or even any mention - of the hundreds of Hizballah rocket attacks on Israeli cities. Most of the audience's questions were sympathetic to the panelists' point of view, but not all. One MESA member asked why there was no Israeli perspective on the panel, and if this disparity was appropriate at an academic conference. He was told that they did not see the need to have an "Israeli apologist" sitting beside them. The five panelists flatly rejected the notion that they should seek "balance" on this issue. They said that, as scholars, what mattered was that they "speak the truth," rather than give equal time to all sides. All of history's totalitarian movements, secular and religious, have begun with people believing that they possessed "the Truth" with a capital T. Scholarly discourse, at its best, articulates and acknowledges different understandings of the truth, and thus serves as an antidote to such absolutist thinking. I sat stunned as the panelists asserted that there was only "one truth" to the Lebanon conflict. The writer is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the Franciscan Center for Global Studies at Marian College in Indianapolis.
2006-11-24 01:00:00
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