Nature Middle East: “Emerging Science in the Arab World” is very clear in equating “the Middle East” with the “Arab World.” This is, to say, the least, extremely surprising.
There is today no Euro-American Middle East specialist, academic or journalistic, who would regard this formulation as accurate or reasonable. The “Arab World” is in many respects the major part of the Middle East, but certainly is not all of it. Equating the Middle East with the “Arab World” is a stunning misappropriation by the editor of “Nature Middle East.”
If Euro-American Middle East specialists would reject this equation, imagine what the Turks and the Persians will have to say about it, never mind the Kurds, Turkmen, Armenians, and others. Persians dominated the Middle East when Arabs lived only in Arabia, and later the Turks dominated the region and its Arab populations. Both Turkey and Iran are currently dynamic forces in the Middle East. It is absurd to define them out.
Furthermore, as Israel is the acknowledged science powerhouse in the Middle East (See for example the United Nations Development Programme’s Arab Human Development Report 2002, pp. 65-67), leaving Israel out of the Middle East can only be a result of political bias trumping science.
We, the undersign scholars and members of the Board of Directors for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, representing nearly 50,000 academics world wide believe this article only serves to perpetuate misunderstanding and conflict in a region that needs better understanding and less misinformation. Once again Science appears to have strayed from the pastures of science and fallen into the swamps of partisan political ideology. Is this not a betrayal of Science’s mandate?
SPME Executive Board
Peter Haas, Ph.D.(Case Western Reserve University, USA) President
Edward S. Beck, Ed.D. CCMHC, NCC, LPC (Walden University) Immediate Past President
Judith S. Jacobson, D.PH, (Columbia University) Vice-President for Internal Relations
Ruth Lichtenberg-Contreras, Ph.D. (Vienna, Austria) Secretary
Leila Beckwith, Ph.D. (University of California-Los Angeles) Treasurer
Samuel M. Edelman, Ph.D. (California State University-Chico) Executive Director
SPME Board of Directors
Jonathan Adelman, Ph.D.(University of Denver, USA)
Steven Albert, Ph.D., MSPH (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
John R. Cohn, MD (Thomas Jefferson University, USA)
Stanley Dubinsky Ph.D. (University of South Carolina, USA)
Awi Federgruen, DSc (Columbia University)
Rev. India E. Garnett, M.Div (United Church of Christ, PA)
Efraim Karsh, Ph.D. (Kings College, University of London, UK)
Matthias Kuentzel, Ph.D. (Political Scientist and Author, Hamburg, Germany)
Richard Landes Ph.D. (Boston University, USA)
Kenneth L. Marcus, J.D. (Baruch College of the City University of New York)
David Menashri, Ph.D. (Tel Aviv University, Israel)
G.S. Don Morris Ph.D.(Wingate Institute – IL, California Polytechnic Institute-Pomona, USA)
Donna Robinson Divine, Ph.D.(Smith College, USA)
Tammi Rossman-Benjamin (University of California at Santa Cruz)
Barry Rubin, Ph.D. (Interdisciplinary Center and GLORIA Center)
Philip Carl Salzman, Ph.D. (McGill University, Canada)
Ernest Sternberg, Ph.D. (University at Buffalo, State University of New York, USA)
