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Jewish World Review June 5, 2003 / 5 Sivan, 5763
Michael Ledeen
Academic Standards: A Middle East scholar has his way with the truth.
In his PNS slander ("The Unknown Hawk," May 8),
Beeman claimed that I had advocated the military
invasion of Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, that I was
the dominant force behind Operation Iraqi Freedom,
and that I advocated "total war." He then presented a
quotation that he said had come from me:
Unlucky. I never said it. Of course, I never said most of
the other things he slimed me for, either: Never called for
military attack against Iran, Lebanon, or Syria indeed
I have said over and over again that I'm against it. So I
posted a reply on the PNS website, pointing out that he
had it all wrong, to which he "replied" with three long
fulminations, basically confessing malice he
announced that he had hated me for years, because of
an imagined slight during a terrorist "game" videotaped
in 1980 but never bothering to address his lies about
my work.
Unlucky again. One of the other bloggers tracked down
the quotation to another author. So when, a
couple of days later, the San Francisco Chronicle
published his slander as an op-ed, I wrote to the editor
to say that Beeman had falsified my ideas, and had, in
fact, known he had done it before the op-ed was
published, since this misquote had been documented on
a website discussion of that very article.
Within hours of my letter to the Chronicle, Beeman sent
me, the Chronicle, and PNS an apology for the
misquote (not for the other slanders, however), and
both published it promptly. PNS even invited me to
contribute an article of my own to their site, which I
intend to do. And you might have thought that would be
the end of it.
You'd have been wrong. A couple of days ago he went
back on the attack, this time in the Beirut Star, of all
places. This time he was out to make me into a
monarchist, a supporter of Reza Pahlavi, the son of the
late shah of Iran. It's a tough case to make because
there's no evidence for it. No problem for Beeman; he
just invents it:
He invents other things, too. He says I was a founder of the Coalition for
Democracy in Iran. Wrong again. I was asked to participate in its activities
well after its creation.
And so forth. He's an inventive slanderer who nonetheless holds an important
tenured position at one of most prestigious universities. To his credit, he
doesn't just invent things about other people; he even gets his own academic
record wrong. If you go to his vita on the Brown University website, you'll
find that he takes credit for organizing something and being paid for it
under the auspices of the "Office of Net Analysis" at the Department of
Defense.
Unlucky yet again. There is no such place. He meant to say "Net
Assessments," the Pentagon's think tank, often branded as a hawkish outpost
from which the likes of Paul Wolfowitz draw inspiration.
Just for extras, back in March he wrote that Bill Kristol was the editor of
something called the National Standard.
Maybe this sort of thing is stylish in today's postmodern academic universe,
where feelings trump facts and accuracy is all relative. Maybe I'm wrong to
think that university professors ought to check a fact or two before sliming
someone with whom they disagree. Beeman certainly had my e-mail address
after his first fiasco, and could should, in my view have asked if I were
a closet monarchist. But no, he liked the way it sounded, and so he said it.
It may well be that Beeman's academic work is better than his political sorties.
Let's hope so, because if his peers were to judge his scholarship based on his
journalistic forays, they'd regret their tenure decision. But this is unlikely to
happen, since he's part of a network that holds the same view of accuracy as
he does.
I knew that Beeman's slander was on the way at least a week before it
arrived, because there was a little announcement on Gary Sick's web page
which goes out to Middle East hands that share Beeman's and Sick's
fondness for the tyrannical regime in Tehran saying that Beeman was
looking for dirt on me, and anyone in possession of damaging material on any
aspect of my life should send it on to Beeman. Gary Sick was the creator of
one of the most monstrous hoaxes in recent American political history, the
myth of the "October Surprise," according to which the Reagan electoral team
used secret back channels to the Iranian regime to prevent the release of the
American hostages in order to win the 1980 election against Jimmy Carter.
After an exhaustive investigation, the whole thing was found baseless. Today,
Sick remarkably enough, a professor at Columbia University does all
he can to help Iran's leaders gain friends in the United States.
One final note. Last Friday I got an e-mail from a reporter at the Beirut Daily
Star, saying he was coming to Washington, and asking for an interview. I
suggested that he send me the questions by e-mail and I would respond in
writing. When he arrived in Washington on Monday, he tried again to get me
to do it on the phone, and I again said it would be better to do it in writing. I
haven't seen any questions from him, although he said he'd get them to me
very quickly.
I don't expect to see them. After all, the Star publishes William Beeman.
Isn't that where all top Ivy League professors like to see their essays
published?
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05/28/03: The Moment of Truth? U.S. policy could determine Iran's destiny
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