After hald a centruy of bloodshed and tears, you’d think that Palestinian authorities and the Clinton administration would be serious about building a new government. Judging from the “expert” they’ve hired to help write the Palestinian constitution, they aren’t. The Palestinians requested, and CLinton’s Agency for International Development agreed to send, an obscure law professor who shills for leftist causes and changes here “expertise” like a suit of clothes.
She is Adrien Wing, who joined the University of Iowa law faculty in 1987, after six years of practice. In keeping with the fashion of the time, she quickly became an “expert” on South Africa. As recently as 1991, when she was part of a lawyers’ delegation to that country, Iowa City’s Press Citizen described her as “a specialist in international [law] and [the] comparative law of Africa.” She had produced a grand total of two publications on the subject, in addition to obtaining an M.A. in AFrican studies.
Three years later, suffering from dimming publicity, Wing transmogrified into an “expert” on gangs. Wrote the Press Citizen, “Wing, considered by some an expert on gang violence in the United States,” delivered an important message about gangs: “Stay out of ’em.” This was front-page news. Her credentials in this area were even more dubious — an internship with the L.A. district attorney’s office back when Jimmy Carter was president.
Now Prof. Wing is billing herself as an expert on the Middle East. Her scholarship here is slightly more extensive, but still suspect. She claims nine published articles on the subject, the first of which appeared in 1993. These articles have shown up most frequently in journals with a clear anti- Israel record, including Middle East Policy and the Arab Studies Quarterly. By 1994, she was telling the Des Moines Register that she was already in the process of “helping the Palestinians write their constitution.”
Her publication and her travel to the Middle East (including a visit to observe the Palestinian elections) have resulted in invitations to the most marginal of scholarly meetings — those held by the Palestinian Human Rights Campaign and the United Holyland Fund, two groups with a well-deserved reputation for anti-Israel bias. In the last year, this history-making ” expert” has not been quoted on the Middle East in national newspapers even once.
That Wing is little-known in this field is an understatement. In a sampling of a dozen established Middle East scholars and reporters, not a single one knew her name. Only among those involved in the American politics of the Middle East does it ring a bell, and even then the details are sketchy. A country so rich in foreign-policy expertise, and in constitutional experience, can certainly find a scholar who does more than flit in and out of subjects that are hot in the media.
In a March 1996 article (in which she is described as “an internationally acknowledged authority on elections”), Wing wrote, “I have obtained tenure and the rank of full professor on the basis of scholarship on Palestine.” That’s odd, since she became a full professor in 1993; prior to that year, the extent of her scholarship on the Middle East had been speaking at a handful of conferences, publishing nothing.
And Wing can hardly be expected to know why the peace process is moving so fast in the first place. Most Americans, of varying political stripes, recognize that it was the Gulf War that created the present opportunity for peace (if that’s what it is). Not Wing. She actively opposed the war, denouncing “Western imperialism” and shouting that infamous slogan “No blood for oil!” at campus rallies sponsored by the organized hard Left. At the time, she was friendly with the General Union of Palestinian Students, part of the PLO, which, at least in its Iowa chapter, was known for the intimidation of those who spoke in favor of the war, not excluding death threats.
Her acceptance of violence as a means to what she considers just goals is also evident in her writings on the Palestinian “Intifada.” In one article, she acknowledges that “coercive [Palestinian] tactics have been well documented by the media.” But later in the same piece she characterizes the edicts of thugs as “legitimate” because such edicts came to be obeyed, for the most part, without further resort to violence.
Nor is her thought on constitutionalism much better. In considering the elements of a constitution, she mentions, along with traditional rights, a ” right to an education, right to a job, right to housing.” “Palestine,” she says, “has to decide if they want to give some of those rights too.” If the Middle East thing doesn’t work out, no worry: Wing has in reserve a solid line-up of possible future areas of expertise. She has written an article on privatization (in case the Republicans take back the White House and really shake things up), and she’s attending conferences on abortion, immigration, and critical race theory, just to be sure.
But all of this academic cover is meaningless anyway. Wing’s views are those of an activist, not the views of a scholar. Before becoming a professor, she fancied herself an activist for Palestinian human rights (describing herself as such to reporters as late as 1995).
In 1984, she appeared on the front page of the New York Post in an embrace of Yasser Arafat. Later, she appealed for black Americans and Arab- Americans to unite against Israel, charging that “U.S. foreign policy is guided by racism.” She further claimed that U.S. policy makers view citizens of the Third World as “niggers.” The conclusion seems inescapable that Adrien Wing is just another politically trendy leftist professor. (She told the Des Moines Register that she named her second son, Che, after the Latin American revolutionary.) She is willing to pose as an “expert” in whatever field will garner her the most attention.
In the 80s, she flirted with Communist dictatorships in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada, while producing pointless “scholarship” like “Toward a Multiplicative Theory a of Being” and “Rape, Ethnicity and Culture: Spirit Injury from Bosnia to Black America.” She’s in the habit of touting “books in progress” — never published, never read (and which now total five) — with titles like “Bloods v. Crips: Dispute Resolution in South Central Los Angeles” and “Palestinian Democracy” (her latest, to go with her current gig).
The professor recently gushed to Iowa’s student newspaper, “It’s like helping the founding mothers and fathers of a country with their constitution. ” Perhaps hers is some help that the much-disappointed Palestinians can do without.
David M. Mastio, an editorial board member of USA Today, was a columnist for the Daily Iowan at the University of Iowa.
