Bernard Lewis, the 87-year old Emeritus Professor of Islamic and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, is not your garden-variety professor. A celebrity of sorts who has often been invited to address White House staffers, members of the National Security Council and the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, Lewis also happens to be an unabashed bigot who has contributed in no small measure to the promotion of Islamophobic sentiment in the US, and to lending credence to the notion that that there is today a “clash of civilizations” between the Euro-American and Islamic worlds.

The Wall Street Journal recently devoted a lengthy front-page piece by one of its star reporters, Peter Waldman, to a profile of Lewis — not altogether surprising, considering the paper’s neoconservative editorial stance and its desire to plug the man’s views. “For Mr. Lewis and officials influenced by his thinking,” writes Waldman, “instilling respect or at least fear through force [in the Middle East] is essential for America’s security.” That’s pretty much down the paper’s alley.

There’s one problem here, though. Consider the lead in Waldman’s article. He tells us about the professor’s dismissive, almost contemptuous, view of Arabs by quoting a little anecdote (that “always garners laughs”) Lewis is allegedly fond of telling at public lectures: While in Amman, Jordan, chatting with a group of Jordanians, one of them trotted out the argument that Arabs can wait out Israel.

“We have time, we can wait,” this Arab says. “We got rid of the Crusaders. We got rid of the Turks. We’ll get rid of the Jews.”

Lewis, we are told, then proceeds to humble the man with a lyric retort, dished with robust clarity and urbane force — all in a cultured British accent — by shooting back: “Excuse me, but you’ve got your history wrong. The Turks got rid of the Crusaders, the British got rid of the Turks, and the Jews got rid of the British.”

Is the man senile, or does the Wall Street Journal have no fact checkers?

The Crusaders, who had conquered Jerusalem in 1099, were there for 88 years till their defeat by Saladin’s army in 1187, an army that hailed from Egypt. And Saladin assuredly was no Turk. (The Crusaders continued to maintain a presence in the Levant, in little enclaves, as a ghost of their old self, till their final expulsion by a Mamluke offensive, that also then hailed from Egypt.)

The Turks were kicked out of the Arab world thanks to the Arab revolt in World War I. If you don’t read history books, you perhaps have read the tale of that revolt in T.E. Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” or at the least recall the scene in David Lean’s movie “Lawrence of Arabia” of Arab — not British — horsemen-warriors hollering “Akaba, Akaba.”

And the British were kicked out of the Arab world by repeated indigenous revolts, in Egypt and Palestine (in the former, from the 1870’s right through to 1956).

It takes a fantasist, a propagandist or an advocate to claim that “the Jews got rid of the British in the Middle East. And that is exactly what Lewis is, an advocate — whose supercilious put-downs of Arabs borders on racism — not a scholar bound by the rules that guide his discipline, that is, complete literacy, meticulous documentation and faithful accuracy. We’re talking here about a kind of democracy of facts and an altruism of intellect. We’re talking, in other words, about a scholar’s reverence for truth and his professional, indeed moral, obligation to tell it as it is.

When scholars resort to egregious mendacity — in pursuit of pet ideas that reinforce their subjective biases — they tend to have a greater capacity for evil than others just because of the authority they wield in society.

After Bernard Lewis visited the White House recently in order to meet with Condoleezza Rice, we are told in the Wall Street Journal profile, President Bush was seen “carrying a marked-up article by Mr. Lewis among his briefing papers.”

Well, there you have it.