Moon’s writing is such a vacuous assembly of cliches, it’s as though this subscription to The Guardian came with a bunch of refrigerator magnets with stock phrases printed on them. Each week, he shuffles them again, takes a polaroid, and mails it to his editor.

I had lunch on Friday with a Yonsei aquaintance of mine, and I asked about Prof. Moon. My friend tells me that Moon is Yonsei’s Poli-Sci ‘expert’ on Islam and Middle Eastern politics but that he doesn’t know Arabic well and became an ‘expert’ on the Middle East while in the States because he was a compromise choice for a poli-sci position that required one to teach Middle Eastern politics. The department there couldn’t decide between an Arab applicant and a Jewish applicant for the position and so chose Moon by default.

(Of course, that’s hearsay, you understand.)

Anyway, he’s now considered an ‘expert’ here in Korea, but I doubt that Martin Kramer would rank his expertise very high and would probably consider him to fall into the category of those ‘scholars’ that he critiques in Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America.

Jeffery Hodges

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