QUOTE OF THE DAY - AT 9:07 A.M. ET - From Noah Pollack at Contentions.  Noting Yale University Press's disgraceful refusal to publish those Muhammad cartoons that created so much fuss in Denmark a few years ago in a book about the cartoons, Pollack points out that a key player in the censorship is Marcia Inhorn, head of Yale's Middle East Studies department, who wrote this about a trip to the Mideast: 

"I recently returned from a trip to Lebanon, the UAE and Iran—what most Americans would consider a journey into the heart of darkness, a veritable 'axis of evil.'  In fact, the trip was far from perilous, and I was treated as an honoured guest in every setting. . . .I have travelled widely and lived with my family for extended periods of time in Egypt, Lebanon, and the UAE. It saddens me that so few Americans will ever come to know the delights of the Middle East as my family and I have."

To which Pollack properly replies:

What saddens me, by contrast, is how important it is for leftist world travelers to be treated as royalty by their hosts, and how they respond to Potemkin Village–style tours of repressive and dysfunctional countries with hoary tropes about the nobility of the Orient. Because she was treated as an “honoured guest in every setting” in Iran, the fact that the regime promotes war and terrorism around the globe is irrelevant; the fact that it strings up homosexuals from cranes in downtown Tehran doesn’t matter; the fact that it brutally tortures its own dissenters is barely of any concern and neither is the prison rape of young girls before their executions.

COMMENT:  Brilliantly stated.  Inhorn typifies the kind of "scholars" found more and more in Middle East studies departments.  They are front operators for some of the worst regimes in the world, yet they call themselves "progressives," and they teach our children.  The tradition of academic freedom demands that we tolerate their distortions, but let us understand exactly what we are tolerating. 

August 19, 2009