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Muqtedar Khan's Smoke Screen
By Winfield Myers
Front Page Magazine
December 21, 2007
In a move one would hope student groups nationwide might emulate, this past fall the College Republicans and College Democrats at the University of Delaware organized a panel discussion on "Anti-Americanism in the Middle East." Participants for the October 24 panel were to include two UD political scientists, Muqtedar Khan and Stuart Kaufman, and a graduate student.
But the panel was ideologically imbalanced. Kahn is a nonresident senior fellow at the left-of-center Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, and Kaufman a former member of Bill Clinton's National Security team. Both are on record as critics of American foreign policy in the region, and the graduate student was known to be sympathetic to their views.
So the students invited a fourth participant to offer a different perspective of the problem: Asaf Romirowsky, whose resume includes a stint at Campus Watch, a project of Daniel Pipes's Middle East Forum, which defends American interests in the Middle East. A resident of nearby Philadelphia, Romirowsky could drive easily to Newark, Delaware, thereby keeping the logistics of his participation simple. Like most Israeli males (he holds joint American/Israeli citizenship), Romirowsky served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). He agreed to the students' terms, and everything seemed set and ready to go.
Then came the unexpected: a terse email from Muqtedar Khan objecting to Romirowsky's addition to the panel. Written on October 23 from Washington, DC, where Khan had spent the day in his capacity as a Pentagon consultant, Khan offered what was to be the first of no fewer than four explanations for his objection to sharing the dais with Romirowsky:
I am also not sure how I feel about being on the same panel with an Israeli soldier who was stationed in West Bank. Some people see IDF as an occupying force in the West Bank. I am not sure that I will be comfortable occupying the same space with him. It is not fair to spring this surprise on me at the last moment.
But this self-evident, clear explanation—that Khan did not wish to appear with an IDF veteran—proved embarrassing for Khan and the University as word spread, first within the blogosphere, and then in the print media. Its bigotry was raw, and by extending his objections to other IDF vets, Khan's example might lay the groundwork for a wider discrimination of Israelis from academe.
Fearing the implosion of the panel and the negation of all their hard work, the student organizer's asked Romirowsky not to appear on October 24 and invited him to return, alone, the following week. He declined.
Senator Tom Coburn's activity on the Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, and International Security
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