Peterson has often mentioned the work of Daniel Pipes in his blog, and you don't see him talk about Said or Juan Cole or characters like that. For that reason, I have assumed he is one of the rare Israel-friendly academics in middle eastern studies. It is hard for me to see how a person who references Daniel Pipes approvingly also fosters relationships with these other kinds except by subordinating the issues to something else. Or by being clueless as one is led by an attraction to important people with fancy international titles.
Yes, well, who knows? But remember that the politics of the BYU Jerusalem Center are quite fraught. Not a good look for BYU to have a professor of Arabic with a friendly connection to the anti-Semitic ambassador of a vicious and tyrannical regime that is in a cold war with Israel.Everybody Wang Chung wrote: ↑Sat May 15, 2021 4:18 pm
From the Jerusalem Post:
Has BYU ever had a professor that has brought more bad publicity and drama to the institution than DCP? For BYU, July 1st can’t come soon enough.One of the participants on the webinar, Daniel Peterson, Professor of Near Eastern History at Brigham Young University, wrote the Post that “I have received your inquiry” but did not answer any of the Post’s questions about Mahallati. Peterson later scrubbed a section he wrote about Mahallati on his blog. Andrew Skinner, another panelist and a religion professor at Brigham Young University, declined to respond to the Post.