Hurricane Rita was clearly a factor. But even without dramatic natural disasters, the news media are ready, willing and able to downplay news about war -- and the antiwar movement -- for any number of reasons. Conventional wisdom on Capitol Hill or in newsrooms can tamp down media coverage of a surging movement. What’s crucial is that the movement not allow its momentum to be interrupted by media treatment.

If “journalism is the first draft of history,” the journalism of corporate media is usually the quickie top-down view of history that’s told from vantage points far removed from progressive movements. Media technologies and styles aside, what we’re experiencing now from major U.S.
news outlets is not very different from the coverage of the Vietnam War.

A persistent myth is that mainstream American news outlets were tough on the war in Vietnam while boosting the antiwar movement. And these days -- after a summer of plunging poll numbers for President Bush along with the profoundly important media presence of Cindy Sheehan -- many people seem to think that the news media have turned against the war makers in Washington.
But overall the media realities are something else. Actual history should make us wary of any assumption that the press is apt to be a counterweight to militarism.

Vietnam “was the first war in which reporters were routinely accredited to accompany military forces yet not subject to censorship,” media scholar Daniel Hallin wrote in his excellent book “The ‘Uncensored War’: The Media and Vietnam.” The authorities in Washington figured they could expect correspondents not to wander too far in terms of content; “the integration of the media into the political establishment was assumed to be secure enough that the last major vestige of direct government control -- military censorship in wartime -- could be lifted.”

Some reporters exercised a significant degree of independence. And, Hallin concluded, “this did matter: in 1963, when American policy in Vietnam began to fall apart, the media began to send back an image that conflicted sharply with the picture of progress officials were trying to paint. It would happen again many times before the war was over. But those reporters also went to Southeast Asia schooled in a set of journalistic practices which, among other things, ensured that the news would reflect, if not always the views of those at the very top of the American political hierarchy, at least the perspectives of American officialdom generally.”

Despite all the changes in news media since then, a systemic filtration process remains crucial. Strong economic pressures are especially significant -- and combine with powerful forces for conformity at times of war. “Even if journalists, editors, and producers are not superpatriots, they know that appearing unpatriotic does not play well with many readers, viewers, and sponsors,” media analyst Michael X. Delli Carpini has commented. “Fear of alienating the public and sponsors, especially in wartime, serves as a real, often unstated tether, keeping the press tied to accepted wisdom.” Journalists in American newsrooms don’t have to worry about being taken out and shot; the constraining fears are apt to revolve around peer approval, financial security and professional advancement.

Interviewed in early November 2003, with the Iraq occupation in the midst of turning into a large-scale war against a growing insurgency, Hallin compared media treatment of the two wars and saw similar patterns. “As you begin to get a breakdown of consensus, especially among political elites in Washington, then the media begin asking more questions,” he said. In the case of the Iraq occupation, “the Democrats were mostly silent for a long time on this war, and when things began to bog down, they started asking questions. There were divisions within the Bush administration, and then the media starts playing a more independent role.”

To a notable degree, reporters seem to await signals from politicians and high-level appointees to widen the range of discourse. “They need confirmation that this issue is part of the mainstream political discussion in the U.S.,” Hallin commented. “Journalists are very keyed into what their sources are talking about. Political reporters define news worthiness in part by what’s going to affect American politics in the sense of who gets elected the next time around. But it isn’t absolutely only elites. I think it also makes a difference that polls show the public divided, and that there are problems of morale among soldiers in Iraq. But the first thing that the journalists look to is: ‘What are the elites debating in Washington?’ That’s what really sets the news agenda.”

So, with the autumn of 2005 underway, what are the elites debating in Washington? With rare exceptions, they’re debating how to continue the U.S.
occupation of Iraq.

High-profile Democrats and even some Republicans like to bemoan “mistakes” and bad planning and the absence of an “exit strategy.” The prevailing version of Washington’s debate over Iraq still amounts to disputes over how to proceed with the U.S. war effort in Iraq. Top officials and politicians in Washington won’t change that. The journalists echoing them won’t change that. The antiwar movement must.

"These countries have avoided living up to their promises with a whole range of excuses and some governments have even dismissed our repeated attempts to get them to act," said Dr. Israel Singer, chairman of the World Jewish Congress. According to Singer, the issue has never been more urgent, with the number of Holocaust survivors dwindling by the day. The opening salvo of the new campaign was a series of meetings this week in New York between Jewish leaders and foreign ministers and senior diplomats from the 11 countries on the Jewish organizations' list.

Singer, who was closely involved in negotiations with the German government over compensation for forced laborers and with Swiss banks that held dormant accounts belonging to Jewish families killed in the Holocaust, headed the Jewish team at these meetings.

"We asked the foreign ministers to ensure that the issues of compensation and confiscated property are once again made a priority in their country," said Singer yesterday. "They have a moral and legal obligation to fulfill their promises."

Among the countries appearing on the list are Poland, Romania, Hungary, Ukraine, Slovakia, Lithuania and Belarus.

Most women complained that their husbands were terrible in bed. These were the findings of the 1949 Mass Observation Project, Britain's first sex survey, which asked thousands of men and women nationwide at random about their sexual tastes, on condition of anonymity.

Mass Observation worked closely with the fledgling Marriage Guidance Council, formed in 1947, but the results were considered so outrageous that they were not made public, and the survey was buried in an archive at Sussex University.

A BBC4 documentary, Little Kinsey, to be shown on Oct 5, reveals the findings. The programme is so named because the survey was conducted a year after the Kinsey Report in America.

The statement was addressed to President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his top ministers. Its signatories specifically urged the Turkish leaders to ensure that a landmark conference on the 1915-1918 mass killings and deportations of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, which is scheduled to start in Istanbul on Friday, proceeds “without harassment or interference.”

The three-day conference titled "Ottoman Armenians of an Empire in Decline" is organized by the private Bosphorus Univeristy of Istanbul. It will bring together Turkish scholars and intellectuals who question the official line on the Armenian massacres. The conference was originally scheduled for May, but was postponed after Turkey’s Justice Minister Cemil Cicek condemned the initiative as "treason" and a "stab in the back of the Turkish nation".

The comments were denounced by senior officials from the European Union who warned that they could complicate the upcoming start of Turkey’s membership talks with the EU. The Turkish government said subsequently that it does not object to the holding of the forum.

EDITOR'S NOTE In the latest issue of Perspectives, the president of the American Historical Association, James Sheehan, explains why he wrote a letter to the prime minister of Turkey complaining about the cancellation of the Armenian conference. Click here to read Sheehan's article and his letter.

But Elsie is no favorite among secular or liberal home-schoolers. They, too, have a backward-looking impulse, but they're more interested in the return-to-nature aspects of the olden days than in corseted Victoriana. Pat Farenga, who has written several books on "unschooling," a movement that rejects formal curricula and lets children decide what to study, used to run a home-schoolers' bookstore in Cambridge, Mass. He says that his store's best sellers always included Noah Blake's 1805 book, "The Diary of an Early American Boy"--which described old-fashioned crafts like nail-making and shingle-splitting. A more recent illustrated edition has been popular "because it has all these beautifully drawn pictures of how to do things before technology."

According to recent polls, nonreligious families now make up more than 40% of the home-schooling market. For much of this group, the reading list is determined by the "curriculum in a box" companies. The most famous of these are K12, founded by former Education Secretary William Bennett and popular with parents who want a heavy emphasis on "values," and Calvert, in Baltimore, which created the market in 1906, when it began mailing its lesson plans to the children of missionaries and diplomats.

Ambassador Miller said that when the Ethiopian Jews became stranded in Sudan in early 1985, he brought a copy of Prof. Wyman's book about America and the Holocaust, "The Abandonment of the Jews," to Vice President Bush. "This is a chance to write a very different history than the history of America's response to the Holocaust," Miller told the vice president. Miller said that in a later conversation with Bush, the vice president confirmed that Wyman's book "was a major influence in his decision to order to the airlift."

Miller's statement was part of a conference session, chaired by former U.S. Congressman Stephen Solarz, marking the twentieth anniversary of the publication of The Abandonment of the Jews. In the same session, noted criminal defense attorney Benjamin Brafman spoke about how the pioneering Soviet Jewry activism of his uncle, the late Morris Brafman, was influenced by the lessons of the Holocaust. Also speaking were Dr. Racelle Weiman of Hebrew Union College's Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education, and Prof Leonard Swidler, editor of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies. The journal's latest issue, coedited by Dr. Weiman and Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff, focuses on the impact of The Abandonment of the Jews and the issues it raised.

One part of the answer is that Dylan shares a problem with the 1960s as a whole: Scholarship and popular commentary alike are shaped by the baby boomers who lived through the period and have never quite transcended their own youthful enthusiasms. As Rick Perlstein noted in Lingua Franca several years ago, the preponderance of boomers in the historical profession—and, he might have added, in the culture overall—has made it hard for younger voices to gain a hearing for ideas that argue with the prevailing, familiar tale of the decade: Rebellious student youth challenges the conformity of establishment liberalism. Although some boomer accounts of the decade, such as Todd Gitlin's The Sixties and James Miller's Democracy Is in the Streets, remain as indispensable to studying the politics of the era as the '60s-centered writings of Christopher Ricks and Greil Marcus are to studying Dylan, they don't tell the full story.

But the problem isn't just that boomers are influential. Even historians of the post-boomer generation (i.e., mine) don't usually assume deeply critical attitudes toward the 1960s. Although a few historians have recently done admirable spadework in such new research areas as how conservatism in these years gained strength (as the news media were looking the other way) and the international dimension of the youth revolt, such efforts are not the norm. Revisionist scholarship about the student left, for example, tends to be minor and esoteric—contesting, say, precisely which social groups or political organizations formed the center of the era's social activism.

In Louisiana and New Orleans in particular there are a variety of things to report: the Jean Lafite collections have been moved out of New Orleans and the University of New Orleans archives appears to be dry. Power has been restored to the Notarial Archives and most of the 19th and 20th century records there have now been removed. Wet books and some records have been sent to Chicago for vacuum freeze-drying and the rest of the records have been placed in climate controlled trucks and are awaiting storage space

In an effort to assist in the hurricane relief effort, the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) has assembled two teams to visit Louisiana and Mississippi for the purpose of assessing the damage to historical resources and to rescue them. Working in cooperation with the American Institute for Conservation, the Southeast Museums Conference, the Louisiana Museums Association, and the Mississippi Museums Association, the AASLH hopes to be able to send follow-up teams to work with different museums and sites to help preserve the resources. It is important that this endeavor has all the help and financial support it needs to ensure that it is a success. Anyone who is interested in volunteering to be on a team can send their information to sawyer@aaslh.org.

The AASLH is looking for additional help as well. Anyone who has access to conservation supplies is encouraged to contact Richard Waterhouse, the director of the Southeast Museums Conference, at director@SEMCdirect.net. Individuals willing to contribute frequent flyer miles to help the teams get to the sites can e-mail Sharin Barkmeier at barkmeier@aaslh.org. Monetary contributions are also greatly appreciated. Donations can be made online at www.aaslh.org or checks can be sent in the mail to 1717 Church Street, Nashville, TN 37203.

Finally, the Society of Southwest Archivists (SSA) and the Society of American Archivists (SAA) have announced the creation of the SSA-SAA Emergency Disaster Assistance Grant Fund -- a fund established to address the stabilization and recovery needs of archival repositories that have been directly affected by Hurricane Katrina. Any repository that holds archival records or special collections and that is located in Hurricane Katrina-affected areas of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, or Mississippi is eligible to apply for a grant. The repository need not be a member of SSA or SAA. Grant monies may be used for the direct recovery of damaged or at-risk archival materials; such services as freeze drying, storage, transportation of materials, and rental facilities; supplies, including acid-free boxes and folders, storage cartons, cleaning materials, plastic milk crates, and protective gear; and to defray the costs for volunteers or other laborers who assist with the recovery.

The SSA/SAA are also inviting colleagues to support the fund; to this end visit http://www.archivists.org/katrina/contribute.asp in order to make a donation; both the SAA and SSA have each contributed $5,000 in seed money to establish the fund. Contributions by fax (using a credit card) maybe made by calling (312) 347-1452 or via snail mail to: Society of American Archivists, Attn: EDA Grant Fund, 527 South Wells Street, Fifth Floor, Chicago, IL 60607.

Organizations in need of assistance may apply for an initial grant of up to $2,000, though additional requests may be considered if funds remain available. Approved grant payments may be made directly to a service provider, upon the grantee's request, if an itemized invoice is presented. Recipients will be asked to provide a financial accounting of expenditures made using the award within six months of receiving the funding. A short application form is available on the SAA website at http://www.archivists.org/katrina/apply.asp. Or, if organizations prefer, a a letter may be submitted containing the information listed below. Ideally, the letter should come from the head of an organization, but it may come from a primary contact. Please include contact information for both the head of the organization and the primary contact if these are different individuals. Send the letter to: SSA President Brenda Gunn, Assistant Director for Research and Collections, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station, D1100, Austin, TX 78712; 512-495-4385; 512-495-4542 (fax); bgunn@mail.utexas.edu. The letter of application should address the following: the mission of the repository; a brief description of archival collection(s); a description of damage to the affected collection(s) (which may include supporting photographs or digital images); how much funding is being requested; a brief description of how the funds will be used; what other sources of funding are available to the repository; and if selected, to whom the check should be made payable.

A review panel comprising four SSA former presidents and the immediate past treasurer, along with one member of the SAA Council, will review applications and select the grant recipients. The committee will score proposals based on the application criteria. The Society of American Archivists is responsible for financial administration of the fund.

Earlier that day, Cline had set up his own home as safe shelter for people in his neighborhood whose houses had flooded in the storm surge. By evening, dozens of people were hunkered down with the Cline family.

Then tragedy struck home.

"At 8:30 p.m., my residence went down with about fifty persons who had sought it for safety, and all but 18 were hurled into eternity," Cline later wrote of the storm. "Among the lost was my wife, who never rose above the water after the wreck of the building. I was nearly drowned and became unconscious, but recovered through being crushed by timbers and found myself clinging to my youngest child, who had gone down with myself and wife."

Cline called the aftermath "the most horrible sights that ever a civilized people looked up."

Galveston, a sparkling city of 38,000 residents, was ruined. Once called the jewel of Texas, half the city’s buildings were washed away and perhaps as many as half its residents--not to mention seaside tourists.

"Where 20,000 people lived on the 8th not a house remained on the 9th, and who occupied the houses may, in many instances, never be known," Cline wrote.

Cline and fellow forecasters had issued warnings starting as early as four days before the storm, but there was no way to predict the hurricane’s ferocity. And there was no way to force people to leave. Instead of evacuating to safety, many stayed to watch the huge waves wash over the beach.

When the city was rebuilt, engineers erected a 17-foot seawall to keep out the waves should another 1900-scale storm occur. Galveston would never again claim its former prestige as a wealthy port and oceanside playground. But the wall still stands. And today, residents hope it protects them from the wrath of Rita.

The ruling, which drew fire from Brussels as expected, took place just ten days before the October 3 date for the start of Turkey's EU entry talks.

The Commission is warning Turkey that the decision to cancel the conference for a second time would be noted in an annual situation report due out in November.

Celebrities and criminals, rock stars and mobsters, athletes and artists -- scores of high-profile Americans have their very own FBI file, a bold-faced universe rife with dirt and scandal. It's no surprise that gossip columnists such as Walter Winchell turn up as sources.

The files chronicle mass marketer Walt Disney and mass murderer Ted Bundy, comic genius Groucho Marx and cosmic genius Albert Einstein. There are reports of canoodling (although the FBI prefers ''extramarital affairs"), heavy boozing, mob ties, drug use, and the rest of the requisite dish.

The sheer volume became clear in response to a Freedom Of Information Act request by the Associated Press for every FBI ''High Visibility Memorandum" filed between 1974 and 2005, allowing a lengthy traipse through the lives of celebrities from A (Louis Armstrong) to Kaye (Danny) to Z (Efrem Zimbalist). The AP's request produced more than 500 redacted memos totaling nearly 1,500 pages -- a stack of documents six inches high.

Tucked inside the pile of paperwork were FBI memos on spouses/stars Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball; football stars Dexter Manley and Walter Payton; mayors Marion Barry and Frank Rizzo; mobsters Carlo Gambino and Mickey Cohen.

The memos even contain information never made public. The February 2001 paperwork on film director Otto Preminger's file mentioned ''all of the information on Preminger's desire to be a source for the FBI is being withheld."

Until now.

A court Thursday ordered the cancellation of a conference where Turkish academics were expected to challenge the official version of the events surrounding the mass deaths among this nation's Armenians during and after World War I.

The gathering, which was to be held today in Istanbul, was seen as a first and important step in Turkey's efforts to confront its troubled past as it seeks membership in the European Union.

The case for blocking the conference was brought by the Turkish Lawyers Union and other lawyers. Court officials declined to comment on why the conference was canceled.

[Editor's Note: For a more substantial excerpt on this story, please go to HNN's Roundup section, "Talking About History": http://hnn.us/roundup/11.html]

The experiences of Simon Wiesenthal and Adolf Eichmann are like mirror images of that terrible time. Eichmann was the "Transportation Administrator" responsible for the logistics of the extermination of millions of people. He had been at the notorious Wannsee Conference in 1942 when the cream of Germany's planners, administrators and logisticians sat around and calmly set up the mechanics of the mass murder of "undesirables" - Jews, gypsies, blacks, homosexuals, communists and the mentally and physically handicapped. Eichmann was the man in charge of the trains to the death camps in Poland.

For the next two years, Eichmann performed his duties with considerable zeal. He is known to have often bragged that he had personally sent more than five million Jews to their deaths on his trains. When in 1945, fearing the war was lost, his bosses ordered Jewish extermination be halted - and all the evidence destroyed - Eichmann blithely ignored his instructions from the SS chief Heinrich Himmler and proudly continued his work in Hungary against official orders.

"The images of the devastation of 1900 are always with us. It's engraved in our collective consciousness even more than most communities," said Marsh Davis, executive director of the Galveston Historical Foundation.

"Time has caught up with us, and we are facing the first evacuation here in 20 years."

Recent images of Hurricane Katrina's ruin have been adequate warning for this island's residents, who have grown up with daily reminders of the 1900 hurricane.

Ten miles of sea wall separate residents from the Gulf, and plaques mark homes that survived the storm more than a century ago, more than 2,000 of which were elevated in the 1900s to protect them from future storms.

The local museum features an ongoing storm exhibit, and pictures on the walls of restaurants depict the storm's destruction.

A large, fading granite stone in a cemetery memorializes those who perished in 1900. For the 100th anniversary of that storm, a sculpture was added to the sea wall — of a man holding his wife and child and raising one arm to the sky.

"It's an event that people talk about," Davis said. "It was the defining moment for this community."

"There is a compelling obligation to illuminate the full history of this place and all its inhabitants - and no better place to do so than on the doorstep of the Liberty Bell," Mayor John F. Street said in a statement Thursday.

Washington and John Adams both lived at the site - now a wide sidewalk along Market Street - during the years that Philadelphia was the nation's capital, from 1790 to 1800. Historians say the site was also home to at least nine of Washington's slaves.
Click Here!

The president's house was torn down in the 1830s, but the new Liberty Bell Center, which opened in 2003, is located a few yards from where it once stood.

The project has been in the works for three years.

In 2002, Congress directed the National Park Service to build a monument commemorating the slaves who lived there. Last year, some black leaders accused the Park Service of dragging its heels; but park officials said the delays were caused by a disagreement among scholars over the exact location where Washington's slaves once lived, and a lack of funding.

Street committed $1.5 million in city funds to the project in 2003; now, the project also has the support of a $3.6 million federal grant, which officials said should cover the rest of the funding needs.

Other allegations have surfaced about the Foundation as the buildings, including the transformer stations that provide electricity to museums in Topkapi Palace, are dangerous for both life and property security.

Topkapi Palace Museum Director Professor Ilber Ortayli, who harshly criticizes the History Foundation, says, "This is an occupation," pointing out that the buildings that are being used for weddings and cocktail parties and that no restoration works have been carried out for the past 10 years.

The Istanbul Culture and Tourism Directorate would like the control of the historic buildings to be taken over by the Palace.

Her article:

In its 2004 annual report, the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation notes that it has"invested more than $400 million in pursuing a more secure world." After the Cold War, the foundation sought to prevent"nuclear weapons ... from falling into the wrong hands." The"Age of Terror," however, has urgently refocused MacArthur on its"duty" to understand"transnational terrorists," who they are, how they are organized, how they gain"moral, political and economic support"—and what"resentments and frustrations" drive them"to perpetrate terrorist acts." [1]

From this departure point—the wrongheaded belief that frustrations drive terror—it is a short leap to seeking a scapegoat. It explains the foundation's tendency, where the Middle East is concerned, to shower gifts upon researchers, universities and quasi academic institutions with an anti-American or anti-Israel bent. In doing so its grants cross the line into overt political advocacy.

Favorite Middle East grantees include"human rights" and"law" efforts with anti-American attitudes. [2] A $250,000 grant in March 2003 to Human Rights Watch"to monitor the human rights impacts of the war in Iraq" focuses primarily on U.S. rather than terrorists'"human rights violations." [3]

But studies of"Palestine" seem to be a foundation specialty. In October 2000, $51,000 was directed to the Institute for Palestine Studies—hardly a disinterested party—for a nine month study of"Palestinian Refugee Property Losses and Resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict." The grant evidently backed anti-Israel Randolph-Macon College history professor Michael Fischbach, who published a paper on Palestinian refugee compensation in its Journal of Palestine Studies. [4]

An October 2001 grant of $50,000 to the University of Chicago—to study"The Palestinian Defeat of 1948" and the"Lingering Impact of the Lack of State Structure"— was also typical, as was a $90,000 grant in September 2001 to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. [5] The latter was funneled to its London Middle East Research Programme, then headed by Cambridge professor and former Palestinian negotiator Yezid Sayigh.

Headed by IISS"research fellow" Nomi Bar-Yaacov, the program established a caucus to lobby for third-party involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict and hosted the architects of the Geneva Accord. Bar-Yaacov herself received a $75,000 grant in October 2001 for an 18 month study of"New Strategies and Mechanisms for the Protection of Human Rights in the Disputed Areas in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict." [6]

MacArthur has gifted academics with much larger sums as well. Tel Aviv University professors Nadim N Rouhana and Yoav Peled in October 2002 received $50,000 each to study"Palestinian Refugees and the Right of Return." [7]

Peled has unfortunately had a broad impact in American institutions: In 2003-2004, he was a visiting fellow at the Rutgers University's Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture and its Center for Middle Eastern Studies [8] and a visiting scholar at the Center for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia. [9] He has had frequent speaking engagements and news conferences, in which he espoused a pro-Palestinian view. [10]

Rouhana, a self-described"strong anti-Zionist" and Palestinian Israeli who supports"a bi-national state in Palestine," [11] has likewise left wide anti-Israel tracks in U.S. educational institutions. Currently a professor at George Mason University's Institute of Conflict Analysis and Resolution, [12] he was in 2004 a visiting associate professor at Tuft's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and previously a senior visiting fellow of Harvard's World Peace Foundation-International Security Program. [13] He too is on the anti-Israel speakers' circuit. [14]

MacArthur also granted an award to Sara Roy, [15] whom scholar Martin Kramer calls a"perennial" senior research scholar at the Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Her research purported to demonstrate that Palestinian Islamic movements in the West Bank were"moving toward a more pragmatic and non-confrontational philosophy." [16]

Roy believes that Israeli soldiers are"equivalent in principle, intent, and impact" to Nazis. She even blames suicide bombings on"the occupation." [17] But her renown garners her speaking engagements and invitations to symposiums nationwide. [18] Her work has been noted in advisories to the U.S. armed forces. [19] And she often writes in the Arab and academic press. [20] In one recent article she alleged that Israel intentionally wrecked the Palestinian economy. [21]

When it comes to understanding the Middle East, the MacArthur Foundation seems determined even to misapprehend the past. A five-year $500,000 genius award in 2004 went to Maria Mavroudi, an assistant professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley who insists that the Arabic world enriched Byzantine civilization rather than the other way around. [22] In fact, as Speros Vryonis Jr. shows conclusively in the encyclopedic Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh Century through the Fifteenth Century, far from enriching Byzantium, its Islamic conquest, transformation and conversion to Islam raped, pillaged and impoverished an entire civilization. [23]

The Macarthur Foundation is an unacknowledged NGO with a unacknowledged anti-American and anti-Israeli agenda. Its support for children's TV programming notwithstanding, the Macarthur Foundation's influence on America's understanding of the Middle East has been disastrous.

Alyssa A. Lappen is a writer based in New York. She wrote this piece for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum designed to critique and improve Middle East Studies.

[1]John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation, 2004 annual report, pp. 6-9.

[2]The Palestinian National Charter, 1968; The Palestinian Authority Constitution, Apr. 5, 2003; Khaled Abu Toameh,"Queri: Today Gaza, tomorrow Jerusalem," Jerusalem Post, Aug 4, 2005.

[3]"Iraq: US checkpoints continue to kill," Human Rights News, May 5, 2005;"Abu Ghraib: only the 'tip of the iceberg'," Human Rights Watch press release, Apr. 25, 2005;"Getting away with torture? Command responsibility for the US abuse of detainees," Human Rights Watch press release, Apr. 23, 2005; Joe Stork,"Give 'Chemical Ali' his due, fairly," The Daily Star, Feb. 26, 2005;

[4]Michael R. Fischbach,"The usefulness of the UNCCP archives for Palestinian refugee compensation/restitution claims," Stocktaking Conference on Palestinian Refugee Research, Ottawa, Canada, June 17-20, 2003.

[5]http://macfound.org/grants/gss/2001/gss2001_7_1.htm

[6]Ibid, http://macfound.org/grants/gss/2001/gss2001_7_1.htm .

[7]http://www.macfound.org/grants/gss/2002/gss2002_7_1.htm

[8]http://www.watsoninstitute.org/news_detail.cfm?id=162

[9]http://www.columbia.edu/~bwr2001/

[10]"Prospects for Peace with Justice: Israeli and Palestinian academics speak their minds," Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts, Oct. 22, 2003;"A road map to where," State University of New York at Stony Brook, Apr. 21, 2004;"Israeli media artist and political scientist discuss conditions of production there," The Thing, New York City, Jul. 21, 2004;"Alternative voices in the Middle East," International Affairs Building, Columbia University, Nov. 20, 2004;"War in the Middle East: the case for a just and realistic peace between the Israelis and Palestinians," Tufts University, Apr. 22, 2002; http://www.levantinecenter.org/pages/calendarOct02.html;"Faculty for peace," Mount Holyoke, Apr. 23, 2002; Jane Adas,"The fate of Jerusalem: 'An inevitable tragedy'?" Washington Report, January/February 2005, pp. 50-51;"No Arab Jews there: Shas and the Palestinians," Transregional Institute, Princeton University, Mar. 5, 2004;"The Or commission and issues of ethnic democracy," Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, Feb. 3, 2004; http://pioneer.csuhayward.edu/PioneerWeb/PioneerNews4-25-02/PioneerNews4-25-02-Page5.pdf;"Israeli and Palestinian fringe elements have worked to undermine the Oslo process, says Peled," Columbia University, Apr. 25, 2002.

[11]Nadim Rouhana,"Third world views of the Holocaust," Northeastern University Symposium, Apr. 18-20, 2001.

[12] http://icar.gmu.edu/faculty_nrouhana.htm

[13]http://bcsia.ksg.harvard.edu/person.cfm?item_id=811&ln=alumni&program=ISP

[14]Harriet P. Epstein,"Platform for extremist," Letters, Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, Jun. 3, 2005;"New voices from Palestine," University of Wisconsin at Madison, Nov. 19, 2002;"Israeli views on the refugees problem and the right of return: between denial and guilt," Trans-Arab Research Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dec. 5, 2000; http://web.mit.edu/shass/temp/bustani/bustani_seminar.htm;"Beyond signing of peace agreements: social-psychological perspectives on reconciliation and peace building," International Society of Political Psychology, Seattle, Washington, Jul 1, 2000;

[15]http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~mideast/scholars/associates.html

[16]Sara Roy,"The transformation of Islamic NGOs in Palestine," Middle East Report, #214,m Spring 2000.

[17]Sara Roy,"How to stop Hamas: first end the occupation," The Daily Star, Jun. 20, 2003.

[18]"On Dignity and Dissent: Reflections of a Child of Holocaust Survivors," Monmouth University 3^rd Annual Global Understanding Convention, Mar. 24, 2004;"The Palestinian-Israeli conflict and its impact on Palestinian society," Congregation Eitz Chaim, Jan. 9, 2005;"Palestinian-Israel Crisis: An Analysis," University of Delaware, Feb. 21, 2001;"From Oslo to the Road Map: Explaining the Failure of Peace in the Middle East," DePaul University, Mar. 6, 2004;"Is there a new blacklist," Apr. 13, 2005, see also http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/jewish/AcademicFreedom.htm; Martin Kramer,"Professors of Palestine," Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2002; Seth Wikas,"Both sides of the story," Daily Princetonian, Apr. 23, 2001; Friends of Sabeel North America, Apr. 12-13, 2002;

[19]Stephen Pelletiere,"Hamas and Hezbollah: the radical challenge to Israel in the occupied territories," Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, Nov. 10, 1994.

[20]Sara Roy,"Palestinian society: the continued denial of possibility," Journal of Palestine Studies, Summer 2001, Vol. 30, No. 4, Issue 120; Sara Roy,"Using war to swallow Palestinian land," The Daily Star, Sept. 23, 2003, see also http://www.lebanonwire.com/0309/03092318DS.asp; Roy,"The Palestinian state: division and despair," Current History, Jan. 2004; Roy,"A Nightmare Peace Destroying the Basis of a Palestinian State" Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture, Vol.11 No.1 2004 .

[21]Ibid.

[22]The MacArthur Fellows Program, Maria Mavroudi, 2004.

[23]Speros Vryonis Jr., Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh Century through the Fifteenth Century, (1971, 1986), pp. 69-142, 143-288, 351-402.

His conclusions, contained in Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man scheduled to be published next month by the University of Georgia Press, have sparked a fierce debate among scholars.

"I think 'devastating' is not underestimating some people's reaction to this notion," said Philip Morgan, a Princeton University history professor who has written about 18th-century slavery.

Some experts disagree with Carretta's conclusions, saying Equiano's account is too detailed and accurate to be a work of fiction. But others back Carretta's scholarship.

Carretta, a former fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, draws upon recently discovered documents, such as British baptismal and naval records that indicate a birth in the Carolina colony. Other documents show that Equiano was a Royal Navy officer's slave for 10 years before winning his freedom and becoming a free sailor based in England - never taking part in the Middle Passage.

The debate is set for Oct. 1 to mark the opening of a graduate studies program in governance at the University of Maastricht, organizers said Wednesday.

At the Yalta Conference, held in the resort town of then-Soviet Ukraine in February 1945, the three leaders carved up Europe into its postwar spheres of influence for the western powers and the communist bloc.

The discussion in Maastricht, a southern Dutch city on the German and Belgian borders will focus on "global politics and the state of Europe six decades later," said event spokesman Stephan Glerum.

Curtis Roosevelt, Winston S. Churchill and Yevgeny Dzhugashvili have not met before, Glerum said.