The Boston Globe has just run an op-ed under the headline “Ending the Stranglehold on Gaza.” The authors are Eyad al-Sarraj, identified as founder of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, and Sara Roy, identified as senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. The bias of the op-ed speaks for itself, and I won’t even dwell on it. But I do want to call attention to this sentence:

Although Gaza daily requires 680,000 tons of flour to feed its population, Israel had cut this to 90 tons per day by November 2007, a reduction of 99 percent.

You don’t need to be a math genius to figure out that if Gaza has a population of 1.5 million, as the authors also note, then 680,000 tons of flour a day come out to almost half a ton of flour per Gazan, per day.

A typographical error at the Boston Globe? Hardly. The two authors used the same “statistic” in an earlier piece. They copied it from an article published in the Ahram Weekly last November, which reported that “the price of a bag of flour has risen 80 per cent, because of the 680,000 tonnes the Gaza Strip needs daily, only 90 tonnes are permitted to enter.” Sarraj and Roy added the bit about this being “a reduction of 99 percent.”

Note how an absurd and impossible “statistic” has made its way up the media food chain. It begins in an Egyptian newspaper, is cycled through a Palestinian activist, is submitted under the shared byline of a Harvard “research scholar,” and finally appears in the Boston Globe, whose editors apparently can’t do basic math. Now, in a viral contagion, this spreads across the Internet, where that “reduction of 99 percent” becomes a well-attested fact.

What’s the truth? I see from a 2007 UN document that Gaza consumes 450 tons of flour daily. The Palestinian Ministry of Economy, according to another source, puts daily consumption at 350 tons. So the figure for total consumption retailed by Sarraj and Roy is off by more than three orders of magnitude, i.e. a factor of 1,000. No doubt, there’s less flour shipped from Israel into Gaza–maybe it’s those rocket barrages from Gaza into Israel?–but even if it’s only the 90 tons claimed by Sarraj and Roy, it isn’t anything near a “reduction of 99 percent.” Unfortunately, if readers are going to remember one dramatic “statistic” from this op-ed, this one is it–and it’s a lie.

Sarraj is a psychiatrist, but his co-author, Sara Roy, bills herself in her bio as a “political economist.” Her research, the bio reports, is “primarily on the economic, social and political development of the Gaza Strip.” You would think someone with this claim to expertise would know better than to copy some impossible pseudo-statistic on the consumption of the most basic foodstuff in Gaza. Indeed, in a piece she wrote a decade ago, she herself put Gaza’s daily consumption of flour at 275 tons. Did she even read her own op-ed before she sent it off to Boston’s leading paper? If she did, what we have here is a textbook example of the difference between a “political economist” and an economist.

Update: The Boston Globe, presumably after consulting Sarraj and Roy, has added this correction:

A column on Saturday by Eyad al-Sarraj and Sara Roy incorrectly said that Gaza requires 680,000 tons of flour daily to feed its population. It is 680,000 pounds, which means a reduction of 73 percent, not 99 percent, of flour allowed into Gaza.

What originated as a half-malicious, half-unthinking repetition of a fantastic charge against Israel, is now presented by Sarraj and Roy as somebody’s typo, compounded by a little bad math.

In fact, the “correction” is nearly as pathetic as the “error” it is meant to fix. Measuring the flour needs of Gaza in pounds is like measuring the distance from Boston to New York in yards. The UN, Palestinian ministries, and aid agencies all use tons. The pounds-for-tons “correction” is an attempt to cover up the authors’ original sin: they just copied the figure straight from the Ahram Weekly (which anyway doesn’t use pounds–it uses metric measurements). The Boston Globe should go back to the authors and ask for the precise source of their figures. It’s called fact-checking.

Today’s Harvard Crimson runs an article on the crisis at Columbia. There isn’t much new there, except at the end, where the reporter asks a Harvard professor of Middle Eastern history, Roger Owen, why Harvard isn’t plagued with a similiar problem. Owen’s reply: “Columbia, being in New York, gets invaded by the ideologies of the city itself. The Arab-Israeli dispute, which is hot in New York, tends to be represented on campus in a much more direct way than it would be on the Harvard campus.”

Owen has the order of things wrong. Columbia was invaded not by the “ideologies of the city” (to my ear, a suspect phrase). It was invaded, conquered, and occupied by the ideologies of radical third worldism and Arab-Palestinian nationalism, sometimes borne directly to it from the Middle East. The reason Harvard doesn’t have a comparable problem (at least not yet) is because the administration has pretty much blocked the development of the modern Middle Eastern field. Why? Perhaps it doesn’t particularly trust Owen and his colleagues to bring in the right people.

Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversity, which it marked by publishing a slick 200-page celebration of the Center’s history and ideas for its future. Many of the contributors to the volume complained that the university has avoided authorizing appointments. (“The primary weakness in the study of Middle East politics at Harvard,” wrote one contributor, is “the failure to make senior appointments in Middle East politics.”) But Harvard doesn’t need a Columbia-style train wreck, and if the Columbia disaster hasn’t resonated at Harvard, it means that prudence has paid off. Until Owen and friends acknowledge that the field has an internal problem, and propose a strategy to circumvent it they’ve done neither there’s no reason for the university to change course. Roger, over and out.

Last month, academics who run a discussion log on Middle Eastern studies exchanged ideas on how to justify their Title VI federal subsidy. One of them posted this:

The anecdote/argument that I find works best with gov’t officals concerning the importance of Title VI funding is to note that Lawrence of Arabia was only in a position to help the British war effort because he had a grant to study crusader castles as part of his academic studies before the war. Without that “soft,” non-policy oriented academic work, he would not have had the linguistic skills, cultural knowledge and geographic familiarity with the region to help the war effort….[this] does tend to open the eyes of more narrow-minded gov’t folks looking for a direct payoff between gov’t funding of area studies and potential national security benefit.

Another academic responded with this:

Not in the same league as the T.E. Lawrence anecdote, but a bit closer to home. It turns out that General Abizaid, who is taking Tommy Frank’s position, has an MA in area studies from Harvard.

These anecdotes seem to be the best Middle Eastern studies can muster to support the notion that they do contribute to national security. In fact, they actually demonstrate the opposite of what the academics claim.

T.E. Lawrence, Oxford student, did go out to Syria before the First World War, to study medieval castles and do some archeology. And he did acquire a knowledge of Arabic, a familiarity with the Arabs, and a lot of geographic knowledge. But how did he get out to Syria, and who put him “in a position to help the British war effort”? Answer: D.G. Hogarth his professor.

It was Hogarth, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and an Oxford don, who saw the potential of young Lawrence. It was Hogarth who arranged his travelling scholarship. It was Hogarth who employed him before the war, at his archeological dig in northern Syria. And it was Hogarth who directed the wartime intelligence branch known as the “Arab Bureau” in Cairo from 1916. Lawrence acted on its behalf in Arabia.

Lawrence always acknowledged his debt to his professor. “D.G.H. had been a god-father to me,” he later wrote, “and he remained the best friend I ever had.” “I owe to [Hogarth] every good job I’ve had,” he told two of his biographers. “He is the man to whom I owe everything I have had since I was seventeen.” And this, in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom: “Mentor to us all was Hogarth, our father confessor, and advisor, who brought us the parallels and lessons of history, and moderation and courage.” No Hogarth, no Lawrence this has been the considered opinion of more than one Lawrence biographer.

So the Lawrence anecdote really poses this question: where are America’s Hogarths? Where are the professors with a strong sense of the national interest, lots of knowledge acquired in the field, good intelligence connections, a willingness to recruit their students, and an eagerness to serve in times of war? No such person exists in Middle Eastern studies. Indeed, Hogarth-like activities would be enough to get even the most established professor drummed out of the field.

And this leads to the second example: the new commander of CENTCOM, General John Abizaid. It is true that Abizaid, a West Pointer, spent a mid-career year at Harvard, where he earned a master’s degree in Middle Eastern area studies. But before you give Middle Eastern studies any credit for Abizaid, consider this: Abizaid’s mentor at Harvard was later drummed out of the field, for his very low-key links to U.S.intelligence.

Abizaid spent the academic year 1980-81 at Harvard, where he studied under Nadav Safran, a noted professor of Middle Eastern studies. At the time, Safran was working on a RAND paper on Saudi defense budgets and concepts. Abizaid’s main product as a student was a 100-page seminar paper on Saudi defense policy, written for Safran. ”It was absolutely the best seminar paper I ever got in my 30-plus years at Harvard,” Safran told a reporter.

If Abizaid benefited from Harvard, it is because he found in Safran a professor open to mentoring a career military officer. Such professors stir the visceral antagonism of their “colleagues,” and when Safran went a bit too far, they crushed him. The story is well known: Safran landed CIA funding for his Saudi project and a conference on Islamism. When his rivals exposed the fact, it unleashed a frenzy of academic witch-hunting. The 1985 Middle East Studies Association conference issued a resolution that “deplored” Safran’s conduct, and the next year he resigned his directorship of Harvard’s Middle East Center. That killed him academically: Safran wasn’t even sixty, but he never published another book or significant article.

Safran committed the one unpardonable sin in his field. You can kowtow to Middle Eastern despots, take money from oil-sodden emirs, apologize for suicide bombers, and mislead the American public on a grand scale. Hundreds of professors in Middle Eastern studies have done all these things, and have gotten promotions. But get too intimate with the CIA, and you’re done. Safran passed away on July 5. The Harvard Crimson ended its obituary on this note: “He taught for a few more years after his resignation as director of the center and was disappointed that the controversy followed him. Later in life, he was interested in painting.” A young professor reading these lines can’t miss the message.

But without professors like Hogarth and Safran faculty willing to mentor and tutor officers, statesmen, and spies the United States is not going to get any Lawrences or Abizaids out of academe. That’s why it’s time for the United States to use its resources to promote diversity in Middle Eastern studies. Reform Title VI.

Michael Ignatieff has a meandering piece in today’s New York Times Magazine on American empire. In it, he tells us that “leaving the Palestinians to face Israeli tanks and helicopter gunships is a virtual guarantee of unending Islamic wrath against the United States.” The exit from the present situation is a “United Nations transitional administration [for the Palestinians], with U.N.-mandated peacekeepers to provide security for Israelis and Palestinians.” Without this, victory in Iraq won’t staunch the hemorrhaging of U.S. prestige in the Middle East. These ideas have been bouncing around for some time. Now they get the endorsement of a noted journalist and Harvard professor, in the most prominent spot in the print media.

I admit I have a hard time taking Ignatieff seriously on the Middle East, in part because of an article he published back in April in the London Guardian entitled “Why Bush Must Send in His Troops.” Before you decide that Ignatieff is a sure guide to things Middle Eastern, read it.

You’ll find that it includes, in one form or another, every trendy calumny against Israel. There is the infamous South African analogy: Palestinian self-rule was really “a Bantustan, one of those pseudo-states created in the dying years of apartheid to keep the African population under control.” The Palestinian Authority had “failed because Israel never allowed it to become a state.” Reading through this piece, you would never know that there were Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Camp David because they’re never mentioned. Perhaps Ignatieff didn’t want to get into the debate over what happened or didn’t happen in those talks, in which an Israeli leader proposed the creation of a Palestinian state on virtually all the lands occupied in 1967. But that would only have complicated things for Ignatieff’s inevitably Solomonic verdict: “Both sides have an equal share of blame.”

As for the Palestinian half of the blame, Ignatieff quickly shifts some of that to Israel’s shoulders, too. Israel kept the Palestinian Authority too weak. “Had Israel realized that its own security depended on assisting in the establishment of a viable and, if necessary, ruthless Palestinian Authority it might now be secure.” In particular, Israel did not allow the PA “enough military and police capability.”

Not enough? Did Ignatieff have a clue about what was going on in the PA? The PA (even according to David Hirst in the Guardian) had forty to fifty thousand persons in its security services ten to twenty thousand more than the number agreed upon in Oslo II. As one observer put it, “the PA has become the most heavily policed territory in the world, with an officer-to-resident ratio of 1:50; the U.S. ratio for police officers and sheriff’s deputies, in contrast, is 1:400.” So what, in Ignatieff’s view, would have been “enough military and police capability”? (And why military?)

In fact, the problem was never one of capability. It was one of will. The PA decided to wage war with the weapons it had been given to keep peace. Some think that had there been fewer “security services” and guns, there might not have been an intifada at all.

But the absolute low point of this article is Ignatieff’s invocation of the “sacrifice of the young people on both sides in a mutually reinforcing death cult.” It’s an insufferable case of false symmetry, especially coming as it did in the midst of the worst suicide bombings. Even if you believe Israelis and Palestinians are locked in a “cycle of violence,” you’re showing yourself ignorant if you compare the suicidal “death cult” rampant among Palestinians to the stoic resolve of Israelis.

“The Americans now face a historic choice,” pronounced Ignatieff back in April. “For 50 years, they have played the double game of both guaranteeing Israel’s security and serving as honest broker in the region. This game can’t go on.” This is the greatest of all the calumnies not just against Israel, but against generations of U.S. policymakers. A “double game”? It’s been an immensely successful strategy, which won the Cold War in the Middle East and produced the Israeli-Egyptian peace. This “double game” has prevented a general conflagration for thirty years. And it must go on, because the moment America’s commitment to Israel seems diminished in Arab eyes, the region is destined to spiral into war, just as it did in 1967 and 1973.

None of the nonsense Ignatieff published in the Guardian would have gotten past an editor at the Times, but all of it is implicit in today’s new piece. 9/11 has turned everyone into a Middle East expert for fifteen minutes. That’s about as long as it will take you to get through the lead article of today’s Magazine. Time’s up.