...For MESAns [Middle East Studies Association], the Palestinians are the chosen people, and more so now than ever. More papers are devoted to Palestine than to any other country. There are ten times as many Egyptians as there are Palestinians, but they get less attention; there are ten times as many Iranians, but Iran gets less than half the attention. Even Iraq, America's project in the Middle East, still inspires only half the papers that Palestine does. Papers dealing with Israel are only half as numerous as those on Palestine, and only three of these are about Israel per se, apart from the Arab-Israeli conflict. More than half of the Israel-related papers actually overlap the Palestine category. MESA's Palestine obsession has reached new heights, suggesting this: academe is gearing up for its next intifada.

To appreciate that, you have to go beyond the numbers, to the content of this "scholarship." There you discover that many of the presentations, if not most of them, are blatant attempts to academize anti-Israel agitprop. Here are three quick examples, selected pretty much at random from the program.

There's a paper by one Nasser Abufarha, University of Wisconsin-Madison, entitled "The Making of a Human Bomb: State Expansion and Modes of Resistance in Palestine." It turns out that Abufarha, a grad student, is already well on his way to recognition as a one-man Palestinian propaganda machine. He made this speech at an April 2002 rally in Madison:

In 1948 the State of Israel stole Palestine of its people, its land... In 1967, the Israelis occupied the remainder of Palestine after stealing the nation as a whole....They came to Palestine and forced us, the Palestinians, to pay the price for their troubled history—and we are still paying with our blood and tears.... I salute my people in Jenin for defending our city in the face of the most brutal, murderous army, supported by the most lethal Amercan weapons.... Our message to Powell and Bush: join the world community that has called to impose sanctions on the apartheid state of Israel! (applause)...