Arab View of Gulf Area

Middlebury’s Arabic Morass – Middle East Quarterly – Summer 2006 — This is an excellent essay that notices the ever increasing intolerance of Islam, specifically Arab Islam.

At a time when Arabic language training lags at many universities, the Arabic summer school at Middlebury College in Vermont retains its reputation for quality language instruction. Indeed, it could be said to define the gold standard of Arabic language training programs. But even as students leave Middlebury with better Arabic, they also leave indoctrinated with a tendentious Arab nationalist reading of Middle Eastern history. Permeating lectures and carefully-designed grammatical drills, Middlebury instructors push the idea that Arab identity trumps local identities and that respect for minority ethnic and sectarian communities betrays Arabism…unlike Middlebury’s French, Spanish, and other language programs, its Arabic course goes beyond language instruction and subtly works to inculcate an Arab nationalist ideology. This takes two tacks: first, the school infuses its academic program with Arab nationalist content. Second, it constructs an atmosphere that replicates Arab nationalist hostility toward minorities and the United States.

When I worked as an instructor at Middlebury in 2004, students arrived at Hepburn Hall, their home for the nine-week program, and were greeted not only by Ahlan wa Sahlan (Welcome) posters but also colorful and smartly outlined maps of the Middle East adorning the hallway bulletin boards. In these, Israel is absent, replaced by Palestine stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The border between Syria and Lebanon was labeled a temporary frontier, a designation consistent with the refusal of Arab nationalists in Syria to recognize Lebanon as a separate entity.[15]

The Persian Gulf had morphed into Al-Khalij al-‘Arabi, the Arab Gulf. The term is anything but innocuous. While Arab nationalists first sought to rename the Persian Gulf after Arabs in the 1960s, the change in terminology is unscholarly and unrecognized.

This article works well with an older even more interesting report on how the Muslims have been driving away the various Christian populations of the Middle East since the end of WWI. Most will be gone by 2020. That article is also excellent and is linked here.

The transfer of power of Bethlehem from Israel to the Palestinian Authority just before Christmas 1995 inspired a spate of articles[1] on Bethlehem’s diminishing Christian presence. They noted that a place not long ago 80 percent Christian is now but one-third Christian. For the first time in nearly two millennia, the most identifiably Christian town on earth has lost its Christian majority. The same changes have taken place in two other famously Christian towns, Nazareth and Jerusalem. In Nazareth, Christians went from 60 percent of the population in 1946 to 40 percent in 1983. Jerusalem Christians in 1922 slightly outnumbered Muslims (15,000 versus 13,000);[2] today, they number under 2 percent of the city’s population.

The same applies in other parts of Israel. A report from the Galilee village of Turan quotes a Christian store owner: “Most Christians will leave as soon as we can sell our houses and shops. We can’t live among these people [Muslims] anymore.”[3] One journalist concludes that “The Christian community in the West Bank is close to extinction.”[4]

Nor are Israeli-held territories unusual in this regard; Christians are fleeing from all over the Middle East. Emigration began in the aftermath of World War I and has greatly picked up in the last decade. In Turkey, Christians constituted a population of 2 million in 1920 but now only some thousands remain.