A Foundation With an Agenda, an Author for Hire, And His Virtual Reality “Straw Arabist”

By Andrew I. Killgore

Richard Parker, James Akins and Andrew Killgore are a “courtly and Waspy elite” (p. 154). But elsewhere in the same book Akins is “not courtly [and] not a rich Wasp, but a poor Quaker” (p. 172), Parker is “an Army brat” who studied at Kansas State University (p. 118), and Killgore came from “humble origins” on an Alabama farm (p. 156).

—The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite, by Robert D. Kaplan.

Straw man: “a person set up to serve as a cover for a usually questionable transaction”—Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary

In the 1950s in Beirut when I was studying Arabic at a branch of the Foreign Service Institute in the U.S. Embassy there, a major source of information for the expatriate community was the city’s single English-language daily. We called it “the funny paper” because its creative headlines frequently bore only a glancing resemblance to the substance of the articles that followed. We had a lot of fun during the grind of learning Arabic looking for the occasional headline that bore no resemblance at all to the article it was supposed to describe.

If contradictory headlines made that newspaper of nearly half a century ago occasionally funny, the internal contradictions in The Arabists, published six years ago by Robert D. Kaplan on a grant from the pro-Israel Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, make the book truly hilarious.

As Teresa A. Thomas pointed out in her review of The Arabists in the Winter 1995 Middle East Journal, details of the book, such as the excerpts quoted above, accurately describe virtually all of the post-World War II Arabists as coming from middle class or humble backgrounds. But Kaplan’s central theme is that those same Arabists, meaning State Department officers who had studied the Arabic language and Middle Eastern culture and who had lived and worked in Middle Eastern countries were, as the subtitle indicates, an upper crust “elite.” Readers were thus invited to imagine that these were children of privilege with degrees from prestigious universities looking down thin “Waspy” noses to criticize Israeli policies only because they didn’t like Jews. Yet a careful reading of the book’s descriptions of the individual foreign service officers concerned, as indicated at the beginning of this article, just doesn’t bear out the basic premise.

When we started our training we were overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Jewish plight.

But never mind. The basic themes of Israel’s cult of disinformation, called by Palestinian-born Dr. Hisham Sharabi, Georgetown University’s emeritus professor of European Intellectual History, a “verbal paradigm,” require complex and contradictory formulations in watertight compartments of the brains of the Israeli state’s loyalists in the United States.

Part of that paradigm is that the many Americans who received most or all of their university education on the G.I. bill after military service in World War II or afterward, and who made up the bulk of the Foreign Service Arabists, could not be depicted as a geographical and ethnic cross-section of the American middle class.

It would be much more convenient to blame their frequently negative reactions to some of Israel’s policies on a snobbish anti-Semitism than to consider the possibility that they found the displacement and persecution of the Palestinian Arabs on religious and ethnic grounds deeply offensive to American middle class values, and saw clearly the harm that U.S. support of such racism and bigotry would do to U.S. interests in the Middle East and throughout the Islamic world.

Thus was born the straw Arabist, a ludicrous methodology for turning out “aristocrats” in the egalitarian United States. But as former U.S. Senator James Abourezk remarked lightly several years ago when the Israel Lobby charged him and others with seeking to “discredit” Israel, “I’ve always wanted to make an enemies list!”

Getting into the U.S. Foreign Service was tough. We were constantly menaced by the possibility of “selection out” (being fired) if we didn’t get promoted rapidly enough. There was “room at the top” for those who moved up rapidly, but no room at all for those who didn’t.

Getting into Arabic language and area studies was even tougher because completing the course successfully opened up a lot of good jobs. But gaining competence in Arabic, described with admirable understatement as a “hard language” (along with Chinese, Japanese and Korean), required high linguistic aptitude and an unrelenting grind of work in class for five days and at home for seven evenings a week. But morale was much higher then than now.

The “New” Foreign Service

We were the “new” egalitarian Foreign Service who had acquired our interest in foreign affairs while serving overseas, and proven our ability to function effectively there in World War II, the Korean war, or peacetime service between or after them. We were proud of the roles we had played in “good” wars to defeat military dictatorships. We also were from all over the country, and by no means all white and male. There were then, as now, African American and women officers among the Arabists. And when we started our training we were overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Jewish plight.

It was only the jarring experience of seeing on the ground the Palestinian plight that made us begin to fear the consequences for Americans of being perceived as accessories to a persecution by the former victims of the Nazis in Europe, who seemed to have learned all the wrong things from their persecutors. But when from our embassies in the Middle East and North Africa we reported back to Washington that, up close, 20th century Israeli Zionism looked remarkably like the 19th century European colonialism we all disparaged, it was a very unwelcome message.

That wasn’t what politicians who owed their elections to Israel’s U.S. lobby wanted to hear. So they did what they wanted to do, which was to find new top advisers who didn’t know anything about Arabs but who had spent lots of time in Israel. Thus they could please the Israel lobby so that it would support them again.

And the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which also provided grants to the infamous Steven Emerson’s Muslim-bashing video “Jihad in America” and to Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute of Near East Policy, an Israel lobby think tank, and to the Foreign Policy Research Institute of Philadelphia, another pro-Israel think tank, commissioned a book to prove that those who said that what we were doing in the Middle East was immoral, short-sighted and deeply detrimental to our country’s long-term interests were nothing but a “Waspy elite.”

But, in fact, author Robert Kaplan got it half-right. I did come from a farm in Alabama. And if after all these years I’ve been promoted to “an American Elite,” I suppose, like Senator Abourezk, I should be amused. The book is a joke, but the methods of author Kaplan and the motives of the foundation that funded his book aren’t funny.

Andrew I. Killgore, a retired career foreign service officer and former U.S. ambassador to Qatar, is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.