Rejecting the affirmative in the institutions of knowledge creation is a political act. This means that a negative ballot is sufficient to resolve the kritik.

Primitivization of knowledge in U.S. think tanks and the cor- •poratization of American universities are both coterminous with this development that I identify as epistemic endosmosis, in the sense that when we see a book written by someone like Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, while employed at the Department of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, or another by Ray Takeyh, while a professor of national security studies at the National War College, or a professor and director of studies at the Near East and South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, or else a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, then the knowledge that these gentlemen and their respective books and articles (they have recently started in fact writing joint articles) produce about Shi'ism or Iran, while both employed by the U.S. military, through a process of endosmosis flows through the membrane of their PR firms and mass media access into the currents of public at large and helps in the social construction of reality about Islam, Iran, "the Middle East," and if need be about Somalia, North Korea, Venezuela—anywhere that the U.S. military may need to engage in psychological operations at both the home front and on the battle zones. What we have witnessed in the famous case when the U.S. military commissioned a series of articles favorable to the U.S. military occupation of Iraq written by a PR firm in Washington DC, then translated into Arabic and placed in newspapers in Iraq9 is only a slightly exaggerated case of what Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr and Ray Takeyh are doing in the United States. The epistemic endosmosis that I suggest as the most recent phase of knowledge production about the Middle East is not limited to the bizarre condition in which the U.S. military (through Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr and Ray Takeyh) produces knowledge and disseminates it as psych-op for general public consumption—effectively changing the critical discourse away from the U.S. responsibility for the mayhem in Afghanistan and Iraq and blaming it on medieval sectarian hostilities among the natives. In this phase we have entered a mode of knowledge production that is no longer predicated on a particular manner of subject-formation (the study of "the Orient" cross-generated "the West" as the sovereign and knowing subject of history). Here such diverse figures as Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Fouad Ajami, Irshad Manji, Salman Rushdie, Pope Benedict VI, Prime Minister Tony Blair, President George W. Bush, Michael Ignatieff and the entire discourse of human rights, Allan Dershowitz and the Zionist propaganda machinery, Azar Nafisi and her brand of women's rights, the Danish cartoonist of Jyllands-Posten, the comic books of Frank Miller and the cinema of Zach Snyder, the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci and the expansive Islamophobia she represented are all integral to an amorphous manner of public knowledge production about Islam and "the Middle East" through a miasmatic spectrum that is not integral to any paradigmatic or epistemic formation. These modes of knowledge production about Islam or "the Middle East" are infinitely more popular, politically more potent, and socially far more formative of opinions, judgments, and even votes in democratic contexts than libraries full of detailed research conducted by qualified and responsible scholars. The thing that holds these people together is neither an epistemic cohesion, nor a paradigmatic modality, and certainly not a conspiracy to deceive and misinform. There is indeed a grain of truth in much of what people like Hirsi Ali or Irshad Manji or Ibn Warraq or Azar Nafisi say—a grain of truth wrapped inside insidious falsities at the service of mass deception—or a "noble lie" as Leo Strauss's version of Plato would say. These creatures of media and PR firms are competing with each other to grab a larger share of the public attention via a mode of knowledge production that is categorically miasmatic in its sentiments, spontaneous in its marketability, and above all disposable in the emotive universe it engenders. As such they address themselves neither to a specific audience, nor are they conducive to an integrated mode of subject formation. In manufacturing public consent, they are spontaneous and disposable—convincing in their self-fulfilling prophecies today, discarded for the next round of the U.S. military adventurism tomorrow.