Wing Nut
Mastio, David M.
Wing Nut by David M. Mastio After half a century of bloodshed and tears, you'd think that Palestinian authorities and the Clinton administration would be serious about building a new government....
...Palestine," she says, "has to decide if they want to give some of those rights too...
...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 keeping with the fashion of the time, she quickly became an "expert" on South Africa...
...foreign policy is guided by racism...
...Wing is billing herself as an expert on the Middle East...
...In one article, she acknowledges that "coercive [Palestinian] tactics have been well documented by the media...
...policy makers view citizens of the Third World as "niggers...
...The Palestinians requested, and Clinton's Agency for International Development agreed to send, an obscure law professor who shills for leftist causes and changes her "expertise" like a suit of clothes...
...Perhaps hers is some help that the much-disappointed Palestinians can do without...
...She is Adrien Wing, who joined the University of Iowa law faculty in 1987, after six years of practice...
...Her publications 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...
...district attorney's office back when Jimmy Carter was president...
...Only among those involved in the American politics of the Middle East does it ring a bell, and even then the details are sketchy...
...This was front-page news...
...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...
...She actively opposed the war, denouncing "Western imperialism" and shouting that infamous slogan "No blood for oil...
...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...
...The professor recently gushed to Iowa's student newspaper, "It's like helping the founding mothers and fathers of a country with their constitution...
...These articles have shown up most frequently in journals with a clear anti-Israel record, including Middle East Policy and the Arab Studies Quarterly...
...at campus rallies sponsored by the organized hard Left...
...That Wing is little-known in this field is an understatement...
...But all of this academic cover is meaningless anyway...
...She told the Des Moines Register that she named her second son, Che, after the Latin American revolutionary...
...in African studies...
...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...
...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...
...By 1994, she was telling the Des Moines Register that she was already in the process of "helping the Palestinians write their constitution...
...Her acceptance of violence as a means to what she considers just goals is also evident in her writings on the Palestinian "Intifada...
...Wing's views are those of an activist, not the views of a scholar...
...In a sampling of a dozen established Middle East scholars and reporters, not a single one knew her name...
...In the 80s, she flirted with Communist dictatorships in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada, while producing pointless "scholarship" like "Toward a Multiplicative Theory and Praxis of Being" and "Rape, Ethnicity and Culture: Spirit Injury from Bosnia to Black America...
...And Wing can hardly be expected to know why the peace process is moving so fast in the first place...
...Nor is her thought on constitutionalism much better...
...In 1984, she appeared on the front page of the New York Post in an embrace of Yasser Arafat...
...That's odd, since she became a full professor in 1993...
...Not Wing...
...She further claimed that U.S...
...Her scholarship here is slightly more extensive, but still suspect...
...prior to that year, the extent of her scholarship on the Middle East had been speaking at a handful of conferences, publishing nothing...
...She had produced a grand total of two publications on the subject, in addition to obtaining an M.A...
...Judging from the "expert" they've hired to help write the Palestinian constitution, they aren't...
...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...
...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...
...Three years later, suffering from dimming publicity, Wing transmogrified into an "expert" on gangs...
...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...
...The conclusion seems inescapable that Adrien Wing is just another politically trendy leftist professor...
...Before becoming a professor, she fancied herself an activist for Palestinian human rights (describing herself as such to reporters as late as 1995...
...She is willing to pose as an "expert" in whatever field will garner her the most attention...
...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...
...Now Prof...
...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...
...Her credentials in this area were even more dubious-an internship with the L.A...
...David M. Mastio, an editorial board member of USA Today, was a columnist for the Daily Iowan at the University of Iowa...
...In the last year, this history-making "expert" has not been quoted on the Middle East in national newspapers even once...
...She claims nine published articles on the subject, the first of which appeared in 1993...
...Later, she appealed for black Americans and Arab-Americans to unite against Israel, charging that "U.S...
...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...
Vol. 1 • May 1996 • No. 36
