🚀 go-pugleaf

"Communications of the ACM" (CACM) is a monthly publication of the
Association for Computing Machinery, a computer science professional
society.  The August 1992 issue of CACM includes an article in the
"International Perspectives" department by Sy Goodman and Jerrold Green
entitled "Computing in the Middle East".  Goodman is a professor of MIS at
University of Arizona, and Green is Director of the Center for Middle
Eastern Studies at the U of A.

Guess which country is hardly mentioned?  Israel, the computer science
regional super-power.  "Snapshots" (individual segments) are taken of
Egypt, Iran, Jordan, and Syria, but there is scant attention paid to Israel.
In fact, Israel is *only* mentioned only in these three sentences (out of a
4 page article):

1. "The role, status, and future of the information technologies (IT) in
   the Middle East, with the partial exception of Israel and Turkey, have
   been largely ignored or misunderstood by most of the world." (1st
   sentence in the article).

2. "Oil, a strategic location, a complex range of economic and social
   problems, and conflicts on many levels (e.g., Arabs/Israel, Iran/Iraq,
   Iraq/UN, Lebanon, Somalia) combine to make this an important, unstable,
   and rapidly changing part of the world." (in the first paragraph)

3. "Of the three prominent non-Arab countries in the region, Iran is
   unconnected [to global computer networks], but Israel and Turkey are."

The way in which Israel is overlooked is astonishing.  For example, consider
this quote:

	"Software industries are being nurtured in Egypt, Jordan, Libya,
	Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, and Tunisia, among others.
	So far, Egypt seems to have the most extensive and successful
	record, one which we hope to cover in more detail in a future
	column."

No mention of the large software industry in Israel -- an industry in which
well-known companies like DEC, Microsoft, National Semiconductor and others
participate.  Simply amazing!  Similarly, the article opines that "[d]uring
this time of incredible global proliferation of computer networks, the
Middle East is noteworthy for the near absence of this technology".
An odd comment, considering that Israel has a large number of USENET,
Internet and Bitnet nodes, and, in fact, has it's own national network.

In fairness, the article is not a political white-wash of the Arab world.
It clearly notes that the Middle East is "a part of the world where
monarchies, dictatorships, and theocracies are dominant" and talks at
length about the police state character of Syria.

If you'd like to address this remarkable oversight, you can send email to
Diane Crawford, CACM executive editor at crawford@acm.bitnet.  You can also
send email to Sy Goodman at goodman@mis.arizona.edu.