There has been an interesting flap in Cambridge this past week regarding some appalling remarks made by one Martin Kramer . As some of you undoubtedly know, Kramer is a hard-line Israeli-American commentator who has made something of a name for himself attacking the Middle East studies profession, and just about anyone who is remotely critical of Israel’s actions or the U.S.-Israeli “special relationship.” (Full disclosure: he’s taken various ill-aimed swipes at me in the past few years). He was an early supporter of Campus Watch (the organization Daniel Pipes founded to blacklist scholars it disapproved of), and Kramer has also sought to convince Congress to curtail or at least closely monitor the Title VI funding it provides to support Middle East studies and other area studies programs at American universities. He is affiliated with a number of right-of-center organizations in the United States and Israel, and for the past few years, he’s also been a research fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs here at Harvard, under the auspices of its National Security Studies program. In any case, the ruckus started when it was revealed that Kramer had given a speech at the recent Herzliya Conference in Israel, where he advocated eliminating outside aid to Gazans (which he termed “pro-natal subsidies”) because — according to him — it encouraged them to reproduce, which led to the creation of what he termed “superfluous young males,” which, in turn, contributed to terrorism. He also suggested that Israel’s siege of Gaza was intended to deal with this problem. You can watch his remarks here, but the money quote is the following: “Aging populations reject radical agenda and the Middle East is no different. Now eventually, this will happen among the Palestinians, too. But it will happen faster if the West stops providing pro-natal subsidies for Palestinians with refugee status
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Kramer versus Kramer
