早急に軌道修正を！ - ブログ版『ユーリの部屋』

まずは、櫻井よしこ氏から（http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily/20141118）。

（http://yoshiko-sakurai.jp/2014/12/04/5640）
2014.12.04 「憲法改正、今が最後のチャンスだ」
『週刊新潮』　2014年12月4日
日本ルネッサンス　第633回

・11月20日、アメリカの共和、民主両党で構成する「米中経済安全保障調査委員会」が年次報告書を発表。中国の軍事力増強に強く警鐘を鳴らした同報告書「習近平主席に高いレベルの緊張を引き起こす意思があるのは明らか」と非難。
・アメリカの対中抑止力、とりわけ日本に対する抑止力を低下させる、と明記。アメリカの日本防衛能力は下がり続ける。
・噴飯物の幼稚さ。中国はすでに何十年間も漁船、公船、軍艦を巧みに使い分け、他国の海や島々をサラミを切り取るように少しずつ奪ってきた。中国の狡猾な戦略、戦術、侵略の実態を、朝日社説子は研究していない。
・戦後の日本社会に浸透したのが憲法9条への盲信「できれば軍事力なしで、必要なら最小限度の軽武装に徹して、ひたすら経済繁栄を目指すという『軽武装・経済大国の道』を選んだ」
←日本を異常の世界に安住させてきた価値観。
・吉田茂・元首相は戦後の貧しい日本には軽武装による経済繁栄が必要と考えたが、時が来たら再軍備し、軍国主義にならない民主的な軍隊を持つことをマッカーサーと合意。

（部分引用終）

次は、池内恵氏を（http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily/archive?word=%C3%D3%C6%E2%B7%C3）。

（http://chutoislam.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-238.html）
『外交』に「イスラーム国」をめぐる中東国際政治の総論を
2014/12/03

・「イスラーム国」というものは、「何もかも植民地主義が悪い」→「固有の理念に基づけばうまくいく」→「だから運動だ」という類の、外部が中東に投影してきた現状打破への思い込みを見事にすべて反映。中東に「反米」の期待を託してきた外部世界の想いを全て体現してくれている。同時に、そのありとあらゆる悪い面を露骨に表出してしまっている存在。

・日本での中東をめぐる専門家あるいはそれに曖昧に根拠付けられた「思想家」の議論は、要するに中東の諸問題が何もかも植民地主義時代の政策に由来していると主張する「原因論」に大幅に依拠してきて、全く疑わない。自分がそのような言説の枠に嵌っていることにももはや気づけなくなっている場合が多い。観念的な原因論を追認するような「因果関係分析」が次々と提供されるので、異なる視座を構築してみる機会が阻害されているのかもしれない。

・私は植民地主義の遺産は、一つの要因として着目することは否定しないけれども、それで全てを論じ、さらには「だから今起こっている問題は欧米が悪い」という「責任論」「非難」に転化させることは論理的な混乱が大きいと指摘。さらに遠い日本でそういった「原因論」と「責任論」をごちゃ混ぜにして、中東に関わる特定の人々の狭い世界で同調圧力を掛け合って高揚して、「運動」することが大学の研究者の本分であるとする業界の主流の考えにはまったく同意できなかった。

・日本の大学のシステムの中で中東研究は、法学部や経済学部など現代の問題を扱う学部ではほとんどポストがなく、もっぱら西洋史や東洋史など歴史系の学部出身者が取り組んできた＝だから単に植民地主義の時代までの「古い時代」を専門にする人しかいないので、７０年前とかの話が常に今現在の事象の「原因」として主張される一方で、２ヶ月前とか３年前の話はうろ覚え・・・という実態を見て、個々の教員の能力とかやる気以前に、背後に「制度的要因」があるな、と気づいた。それからはいっそう、「植民地主義原因論」は疑わしく見えるようになった。

・その制度的な制約から、西洋史や東洋史やアラビア語学といった専門学科が主体となる中東専門業界では、一方で歴史学者が強みとする「植民地主義の時代」にのみ注目して現代までも語ってしまう風潮を是正するきっかけが生まれず、他方で「政府の新聞を毎日読んだらこう書いてあるからこれが真実だ」という類の極端な語学原理主義に結びつく。

・単に出身学部に基づいた自己主張と勢力争いではないか・・・と感じ始めたら、茨の道を歩むことになります。でも学問は基本的に孤独な作業ですのでそんなものです。

・（１）非欧米の固有の価値規範を掲げて、（２）植民地主義の負の遺産を払拭すると主張して、（３）欧米が引いた国境や政治体制を破壊する行動に出る運動が出てくるという、外見上は明らかにこれまでの中東研究で理想として期待してきたはずの要素を備えているが、しかしきわめて印象の悪い存在が現れてきてしまう

・極端な場合は「ゴミだ」

・「イスラーム復興」してイスラーム法を施行したら理想社会が実現するはずだったんじゃなかったの？

・「下」の立場はそれを批判しないでありがたがらないといけない

・自由な思考を阻害されて自足した民は立ち遅れて負ける。負けたくない人は付和雷同せずに自分の頭で考える力を身につけましょう。

・若いときにラディカルに現状否定・体制批判をしたような人が齢をとると権威主義（あるいは露骨な権力主義）の偉い人になりがちなのも興味深い。権威批判・権力批判をする人は、実際にはとてつもなく権力がお好きでお好きでたまらない人である場合がある。

（部分引用終）

しかし、池内氏のおっしゃっていることは、私もここ二十数年、いわゆる「第三世界」の「東南アジア地域」のマレーシア研究についても同様のことを感じていた。マレーシアにもPASというイスラーム主義政党があって、長年、中東に留学しており、巡礼や移住などを通して人的ネットワークができていて、系統的に思想が行き渡っているからである。植民地主義に反対だとか、反西洋だとか、上記に書かれている要点を私もレジュメに列挙して、某大学の授業で頒布したのはちょうど十年前。
だから、池内氏は、私にとって珍しい主張をされているとは思えない。至極真っ当である。
私との違いは、プレゼンスと、やはり肩書きや係累の雄弁さ。同じことを発言しても、世間に通りやすい人と通りにくい人があるという厳然たる現実。そして、仕事量。
ただ、池内氏の弁が浸透することで、同世代や一世代下の人々に風通しがよくなれば幸いだと思っている。現場にいた者よりも、肩書きを有して会合で適当なことを喋っている人の方が信憑性を持つとは、どう見てもおかしかった。でも、そういうボスが日本の中東学界で腕力を振り回していたらしいので、時間経過がある程度、必要でもあったのだろう。
「自由な思考を阻害されて自足した民は立ち遅れて負ける。負けたくない人は付和雷同せずに自分の頭で考える力を身につけましょう」。ここが最も重要な点である。「学問の自由」とは、権力や肩書きによって疎外したり阻害したり抑圧する行為そのものを排除し、真理を追究するという理念だったのに、実は「自分達の流儀に合わせない考えを持つ人を排除する」権力追求の自由に刷り変わっているのである。
その結果は？レベル低下や知的低迷と、自分の知らないことを発表する人に対する怒りやブーイングや苛立ちの表明である。
私は今でも覚えている。「こっちの知らないことを発表するな！」とまなじりつり上げて怒ってきた人のことを（http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily/20070926）。「毎回発表するな！」と怒りを漲らせてきた人のことを（http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily/20080310）。「どういうつもりで発表しているんですか？」と意味不明な問いを投げかけてきた人（http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily/20101105）。事実の列挙を細かくレジュメに書いて説明を始めたところ、「ひゃあ〜、ひゃあ〜」とあちこちから密やかな声が上がったことを（http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily/20080310）。資料集めの傍ら、ブログを先に書いた理由は、世間に公知する目的からであった。
一言ここで追加を。実は、これは日本の中東学界だけの話ではない。よく知られたマルティン・クレーマー氏（http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/archive?word=%22Martin+Kramer%22）の最新著述をどうぞ。

Commentary（http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/12/03/boycott-fever-at-mesa/）
Boycott fever at MESA, 3 December 2014
by Martin Kramer
3 December 2014

“It’s inevitable that MESA will adopt BDS,” announced Noura Erakat, Palestinian-American “activist,” to the members of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) last week. They had assembled at an open forum to discuss a boycott-Israel resolution scheduled for a vote the next day. “The question is whether MESA will be a catalyst or latecomer…. The importance of MESA adopting this cannot be underestimated.” Her plea was greeted by a round of applause. For a moment, I was tempted to join in myself.

As an Israeli educator, I’m strongly opposed to the academic boycott of Israel, especially by American academic associations. But there’s one exception: MESA, whose conference I attended last week. You see, I’m not a member or a well-wisher of MESA. I’d be perfectly content if it were finally exposed for what it’s mostly become: a pro-Palestine political society whose members just happen to be academics. If MESA were to decide in favor of an academic boycott, I’d have a field day, since I’ve been asserting for many years that MESA isn’t what it claims to be (a “non-political association” according to its bylaws). So I admit it: when MESA plunged into boycott politics before and during its annual conference in Washington, I figured it was a win-win. Boycott defeated? Win for Israel and scholarly freedom. Boycott adopted? Vindication of MESA’s critics, myself included.

You don’t have to take my word for it when it comes to MESA. More than twenty years ago, Edward Said (in Culture and Imperialism) declared MESA liberated territory: “During the 1980s, the formerly conservative Middle East Studies Association underwent an important ideological transformation…. What happened in the Middle East Studies Association therefore was a metropolitan story of cultural opposition to Western domination.” At almost exactly the same time, a MESA president informed the association that “our membership has changed over the years, and possibly half is of Middle Eastern heritage.” I’ll leave it to you to decide whether there might have been some link between the “ideological transformation” of MESA and the shift in the composition of its membership. For my purposes, what counts is that for a good part of MESA’s membership, boycotting Israel is just second nature. It’s practiced as state policy in their countries of origin, and practiced by them informally in their daily lives.

Given this reality, one might ask why MESA didn’t elect to boycott Israel years ago. Proposals were made. But the idea that an academic professional association should be situated outside politics isn’t dead yet, and it’s always had some supporters in MESA, even among some of Israel’s fiercest critics. The more farsighted members also suspect that if MESA were to boycott Israel, it wouldn’t be long before other boycott resolutions would pop up, against Egypt or Iran, Syria or Saudi Arabia. That’s because political grievances in the Middle East don’t end with Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians, and American “complicity” doesn’t end with U.S. support for Israel. Finally, Middle Eastern studies in the United States, at the higher-tier institutions, are addicted to subsidies authorized by Congress. These subsidies are already under heightened scrutiny and budgetary pressures. A boycott decision by MESA could turn into the rationale for Congress to do away with the funding altogether, and would represent a huge gamble with negligible upside.

So in the past, whenever the boycott demand percolated in the ranks, cooler heads prevailed. The problem is that the cooler heads are growing grey and losing authority. MESA’s more numerous militants are less likely to know that there’s any difference between scholarship and advocacy, and they have no clue what a “non-political” learned society does. Government funding has also been cut, so it’s less of a restraint, particularly among those who don’t share in it. And there’s no real need for MESA to be a place for the objective presentation of Israel, since Israel studies long ago moved out to a separate association. (Not surprisingly, nobody in MESA could be found to make the case for Israel in MESA’s open forum on the boycott; an Israel scholar who hadn’t been a MESA member had to be recruited to do the job. He was heckled and personally insulted for his trouble.) There are a few Israelis who study Arab countries and for whom MESA is a professional home, but their number is negligible.

All this has left MESA vulnerable to predatory BDSers, who are constantly on the lookout for openings. In the lead-up to this year’s conference, they targeted MESA with a stealth boycott resolution—stealth, because it doesn’t call openly for a boycott. Instead, it defends the right of members to advocate for a boycott, calls on MESA to sponsor forums to deliberate on a boycott decision, and “deplores” criticism of boycott resolutions by other academic associations as “intimidation.”

While the resolution may appear rather tame, it’s instructive to compare it to a 2005 letter that MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom issued in response to a British academic boycott of two Israeli universities (Haifa and Bar-Ilan): “We find thoroughly objectionable the call… to refrain from any and all scholarly interaction with the entire professional staff of two universities because of the policies of the state in which they are situated.” How far MESA has fallen! According to this new resolution, not only is such a boycott call no longer “thoroughly objectionable,” but even to criticize it is “deplorable” and an act of “intimidation.” Not only is the resolution intended to shut down criticism of boycotts (as Michael Rubin noted yesterday). It would actually reverse MESA’s past position.

People in the know, from among the cooler heads, have told me that the resolution would be still worse were it not for the heroic behind-the-scenes efforts of MESA’s current president, Nathan Brown, a George Washington University political scientist. He’s said to have steered a compromise: a resolution that the BDSers can cite as progress, but which falls short of endorsing a boycott. I saw him in operation in the “presidential forum” as a prelude to the formal vote. Brown scrupulously avoided taking a position on an academic boycott, but found subtle ways to hint at its possible consequences. MESA, he reminded the audience, is a small organization that relies largely on volunteers; defending a controversial boycott resolution could put huge demands on the secretariat. There might be litigation (read: legal costs). And of course, there’s that matter of funding (translation: Congress could punish us). I’ve heard that some of these same arguments were made by others in the next day’s business meeting where the vote took place. (I’m not a MESA member, so I couldn’t attend.)

It’s not hard to imagine Brown belonging to the cooler (greying) heads. It’s much harder to imagine his strategy (or any strategy) stopping MESA’s march toward some sort of endorsement of the academic boycott. At the business meeting, the resolution passed by a huge margin of 256 to 79—this, despite the fact that several former MESA presidents, known as severe critics of Israel, spoke against it. After the conference, Brown published an article meant to spin the “vote to vote to have discussions.” To read it, you would think that the resolution, now likely to be passed by a MESA-wide referendum, would merely “formalize” an endless BDS debate. “The list of questions such a discussion will entail is long,” he wrote, and “some of us will prefer to argue about these questions rather than answer them.” I actually think the majority of MESAns already have answers, before MESA’s “discussion” even begins. Tellingly, Brown omitted the vote tally for the resolution at the business meeting. If he was so effective behind the curtain, how is it that he found only 79 other cooler heads in all of MESA? The scene is now set for a denouement in a year or so, when the BDSers will propose a full-blown boycott resolution. Who’ll be in Brown’s seat then? MESA president-elect Beth Baron, a historian at CUNY, who over the summer signed a letter personally pledging to boycott Israeli academe.

Since MESA is beginning a discussion about boycotting Israel, it’s time to start a discussion about boycotting MESA. Back in 2007, the writer Hillel Halkin responded to British academic boycott resolutions with a call to shift gears. It is wrong, he said, “to turn the issue into one of the unacceptability of boycotts.… There is, in fact, nothing wrong with boycotts, academic or otherwise, if they’re aimed at the right targets.” Halkin called on supporters of Israel to “fight back” in “a massive and organized fashion—or, to call a spade a spade, by means of a counter-boycott.”

I’m doubtful whether a counter-boycott could be applied to individuals, as Halkin suggested, and not just because there are too many of them. But institutions? Why not? The BDS campaign claims that boycotting Israeli academic institutions is a perfectly legitimate response to their “complicity” in Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Well, what about MESA’s complicity in promoting rabid hatred of Israel that some believe spills over into Jew-hatred? What about MESA’s complicity in the whitewashing of Hamas? In the spring, BDSers Rashid Khalidi and Judith Butler mobilized signatories to a letter insisting that “boycotts are internationally affirmed and constitutionally protected forms of political expression.” By the simplest logic, that applies equally to counter-boycotts. And why shouldn’t the same bare-knuckle techniques used by the academic boycotters not be deployed against them in an academic counter-boycott?

How might a counter-boycott of MESA operate? Here are some preliminary ideas:

• Individual members could be encouraged and persuaded to resign their membership in MESA. One of the most poignant moments in the MESA public forum on the boycott was provided by Norman Stillman, a historian at the University of Oklahoma and a renowned expert on the Jews of Arab lands. He said that he’d been a member of MESA from its inception, and he’d attended its annual conferences religiously since 1972. But if MESA passed a boycott resolution, he would leave it. Stillman, it might be added, is already on the board of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA), a seven-year-old rival to MESA which is growing steadily. A campaign to encourage disgruntled MESAns to resign and join ASMEA, combined with an expansion of ASMEA’s own activities, would be the simplest measure of all.

• MESA publishes two journals. Faculty members on promotion and tenure committees could be urged to challenge the academic standing of all articles touching on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict published in these journals, with the aim of categorizing them as non-academic.

• MESA’s secretariat and its website are hosted by the University of Arizona in Tucson, and employees’ salaries go through the university. A political organization that boycotts Israel has no place on a university campus, and should be exiled to an office park. Pressure on the University of Arizona administration, from within and without, to terminate the university’s hosting of MESA would be an obvious measure in any counter-boycott.

• MESA has institutional members, most of them American universities represented by their Middle East centers. No self-respecting university should allow its name to appear as an institutional member of a political organization, a point that could be driven home by students, faculty, donors, and board members. (I would look to the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis to claim the honor of being the first to quit.)

• Many MESA institutional members are National Resource Centers, funded by U.S. taxpayers through Title VI of the Higher Education Act. Some center directors are already personally pledged to implement an academic boycott. If MESA now mandates the same, it’s time for Congress to investigate whether an academic boycott is already underway, formally or otherwise, in Middle East centers that receive federal funds and belong to MESA. Now that the Higher Education Act is up for reauthorization, BDS-committed center directors could be summoned to testify before the relevant subcommittee of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. (A subcommittee took testimony on Title VI during a previous reauthorization in 2003.)

Notice that these possible counter-boycott measures aren’t directed against individuals. Just as the boycott is (supposedly) directed only at Israeli institutions, so the counter-boycott would be directed only against MESA, its institutional projects, and its institutional affiliates.

Of course, I don’t advocate any of these measures yet, because MESA hasn’t passed a boycott resolution yet. But now’s the appropriate time to discuss them, in parallel with the discussion in MESA. Personally, though, I’ve already made my choice. I won’t ever join MESA, for reasons I’ve already explained. I attended this year’s conference as a non-member after a hiatus of sixteen years, and I think that’s about the right frequency. Yes, there are interesting panels at MESA—in between the rallies for Israel-haters and boycott-Israel agitation. On balance, MESA does more harm than good to the stature of Middle Eastern studies in America. That’ll be obvious after the MESAns pass their boycott resolution—and that’s why, in my heart of hearts, I eagerly await it.

（End）

上記で、幾つかポイントがある。
１．クレーマー氏の長年の戦いは、アメリカ中東学会の変容に対するもの。学者の出身国の日常の流儀や政策が、そのままアメリカに持ち込まれて実践されていることに対する異議申し立て。
２．税金でまかなわれている研究なのに、学者が自分勝手な研究資金の運用を行使していること。
３．エドワード・サイードの「解放」思想による学的偏向の蔓延。
４．希望のもてる事例はノーマン・スティルマン。オクラホマ大学の歴史家で、『アラブの土地のユダヤ人』で有名。初期からのアメリカ中東学会の会員で、1972年以来「宗教的に」年会に出席してきたが、ボイコットが決議されるならば、止めるだろう。中東アフリカ研究会の理事だが、ライバルとして、七年来、会員が成長し続けている。
つまるところ、「組織がおかしくなると、実力のある人からやめていく」の証左である。