White American hasbara and a new look at the NAS report

Only Charcoal to Defend: Make the global local: community engagement makes a difference

My mind is still readjusting to Bowdoin. Soon the thoughts and concerns of summer will no longer feel so relevant, and before I am aware of it, I will be consumed with school life. I will have to solidify a major and satisfy requirements.
Events happening in faraway places will lose their immediacy when the leaves begin to change and when the lampposts glint like golden stars while I walk across campus late at night. But, if I lift my eyes from the microscope of one week to the next, what I see distracts me.
The world feels like it is changing dramatically. Civil wars, coup d’états, and social unrest permeate the Middle East; from the Occupy Movement to demonstrations against genetically modified food, people around the world are making their anger and dissatisfaction with current conditions apparent.

Only Charcoal to Defend: Expensive journal subscriptions must pave way towards open access information

In order to do some research for this article, I went to JSTOR and searched, ‘‘the high cost of scholarly journals.” On the side of the page was written, “Your access to JSTOR provided by Bowdoin College.”
“Awesome,” I thought to myself. And that is about all that I thought about when I saw it, because, as with all privilege, it meant that I didn’t have to think about what that disclaimer meant.
It meant that if Bowdoin College did not pay for my access, I would have to find some other way to read journals featuring top-tier academic and scientific research.

Only Charcoal to Defend

White American hasbara and a new look at the NAS report

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Christopher Wedeman

Columnist

October 3, 2013

Hasbara is a Hebrew word that means “explanation;” it is also a euphemism for Israeli propaganda. It frames the actions and history of Israel from the Zionist perspective—fixating on technological achievements and terrorism while excusing or ignoring human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing.

So I was not surprised to learn that the National Academy of Scholars (NAS) supports Israel, and frequently features stories and blog-posts that vilify Palestinian activists, effectively playing on fears of terrorism under the guise of academid scholarship.

It is a shame that after so much research—359 pages of information and analysis—the NAS report came to such a hollow conclusion: that Bowdoin has a misplaced interest in diversity and global thought, and that the College is somehow “antithetical to the American experiment.”

Somewhere there exists an account of US history detailing how, after sharing a peaceful Thanksgiving meal with indigenous Americans (who disappear after this part of the story), a group of brave and independent pilgrims naturally settled across the continent, scattering education and freedom everywhere. And, according to that same account, the United States never had an empire that reached from the Philippines to Puerto Rico. And after Martin Luther King Jr. gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, racism died.

But that history is the narrative of White American hasbara.

America is not a monolithic entity. It was never a country of united people. There have always been jingoistic and exploitative forces, class differences, racism and violence, just as there have been rebellious and liberating forces.

If the American experiment began with the genocide of a continent of native inhabitants, the slave labor of millions of African-Americans, the support and funding of repressive and authoritarian leaders around the world, and an ever-increasing gap between the wealthiest citizens and the rest, maybe we should take pride in being called antithetical to that experiment.
I believe that diversity and respect for other cultures and histories is crucial to the development of global consciousness.

After the Civil War, Joshua Chamberlain declared Bowdoin College “shut up in the past” and tried to prepare Bowdoin students for the postbellum United States. If Bowdoin does not teach us the hasbara that the NAS claims is missing from our syllabus, they do so in the spirit of Chamberlain’s effort to prepare students for a complex, changing world.

So I had to grimace when Barry Mills defended Bowdoin by outlining the College’s patriotism. In a response, posted on the Bowdoin Daily Sun on April 10, 2013, Mills wrote, “We are told by the NAS that ‘American Exceptionalism’ is ‘a term of derision’ on the Bowdoin campus.
Yet, this is the same campus that just this year hosted a public performance of the United States Marine Band in Farley Field House and where each year at Convocation, we open the ceremonies by singing ‘America the Beautiful.’”

Why must Bowdoin’s patriotism be defended? Exceptionalist nationalist hasbara sends soldiers to kill and die when there is no need. As Bowdoin considers which global histories are most relevant to students’ education, perhaps it makes sense not to glorify America or its history.

Maybe it is insensitive to sing “America the Beautiful” at convocation each year because there could be someone in the audience from Iraq who has personally experienced America’s exceptional violence abroad, or a Native American student who is expected to sing the words, “O beautiful for pilgrim feet”, knowing that the beautiful land in that song has been steadily destroyed since those pilgrim feet arrived.

American exceptionalism and the denial of imperialism are the result of American hasbara. As Noam Chomsky describes, “Education is a system of indoctrination of the young.”
And it seems as though Thomas Klingenstein and Peter Wood are upset that we are not being indoctrinated the way they would like the young to be.

I’m aware that College is inevitably indoctrinatory, and I don’t know what kind of indoctrination I am facing at Bowdoin, but I sure am glad that it is not the sort of hasbara that the writers of the NAS report would have me swallow.

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