How did scholars of the Middle East and those engaged in moonlighting (non-specialists who write about the region) react to the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, 2013? Before the smoke cleared, some were predicting that the perpetrators would be “right-wingers” who sought to “disrupt tax day,” “neo-Nazis,” or “lone wolves.” Given that Muslims constitute 30 of 32 of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s list of most wanted terrorists, this represents either wishful thinking or willful blindness.
Many people think that the only way to buy your way into legal presence in the United States is through the EB-5 (immigrant investor) program. Not so.
There are three different ways that an alien can buy his or her way into legal status; each pathway has a different price, sometimes involving more than just money; and each pathway has its own advantages and disadvantages. Here is a summary, more or less in the style of Consumer Reports, for the three routes to buy legal status:
Note to the reader: This is the first article in a three-part survey of “Denying Islam’s Role in Terror.” The other two parts, by Teri Blumenfeld and David Rusin, look at the specific phenomenon of denial in the FBI and the U.S. military, respectively.
Over three years after Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s massacre at Ft. Hood, Texas, in November 2009, the classification of his crime remains in dispute. In its wisdom, the Department of Defense, supported by law enforcement, politicians, journalists, and academics, deems the killing of thirteen and wounding of forty-three to be “workplace violence.” For example, the 86-page study on preventing a repeat episode, Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood, mentions “workplace violence” sixteen times.[1]
I sometimes think about the problem of anti-Semitism and why this irrational prejudice preoccupies so many people these days — from elites in Europe, to bureaucrats and Islamists in the UN, to churches, unions and Left-leaning academics and politicians.
I believe that in the minds of people like Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, both of whom are children of Holocaust victims, they blame the ravages of the Holocaust on the group affiliation of the victims rather than on the perpetrators. They use the Holocaust nightmare to apply retroactive retribution to Jews for the existence of the State of Israel via the murderous hands of the Nazis. They apply a similar retribution to Jews in the present using Islamic terrorism as the battering ram of choice. During speaking engagements by these individuals, they reveal a loathing and disdain for Jews/Israel and perhaps they believe that the brutality of the Nazis was somehow a justifiable component and end result of the anger towards Jews by Europeans against the Jewish religion or against other characteristics of their Jewish victims. Do the “intellectuals” of today think that Jews did something wrong or that their beliefs got them into the mess known as the Holocaust and the wars carried out against Israel by its neighbors since the Holocaust? Do they think that Israel is receiving its just deserts today in terms of terror heaped on the country for being a Jewish state?
A few weeks ago, the New York Times reported Pro Palestinian speakers attract protests outside. The event at Brooklyn college was a Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) event focused on delegitimizing Israel. To read the New York Times account, one doesn’t get a sense of what was controversial about the event:
Controversy had grown over the past week at the Midwood college, where nearly a fifth of the undergraduate population is Jewish, over the event organized by a student group, Students for Justice in Palestine. The college’s political science department agreed to co-sponsor the speakers along with more than two dozen other groups.
Jewish leaders on and off campus had criticized the college and its president, Karen L. Gould, for sponsoring the talk, which they said helped legitimize the B.D.S. movement, which refers to Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. Its goal is to pressure Israel to restore disputed territories and grant equal rights to Palestinians.
Throughout the week, the right to academic freedom served as the backbone to arguments in favor of the college’s sponsorship of the event.
The recent boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) event at Brooklyn College featuring professional Palestinian Omar Barghouti and celebrity anti-Israel academic Judith Butler was true to form. A dual purpose was served. For one, students and staff were treated to calls for the destruction of Israel, conducted in a quasi-academic setting, with the implicit endorsement of the institution. Second, as always, trap was sprung on opponents of such campus abuses. Having successfully planned the event and represented it as an intellectual exploration of the one state solution, in which Israel is made extinct, the inevitable complaints regarding its one-sidedness and borderline antisemitism were met with the usual howls of censorship and demands for academic freedom. Politicians became involved on both sides. City Council members were opposed to the campus and tax dollars supporting an anti-Israel recruitment rally. Mayor Bloomberg then came out in favor, and with characteristic tact and insight, condemned the event’s content and scolded the presumably close-minded opponents, wittily telling them to apply to school in North Korea.
While it is all well and good to encourage the commonalities that unite Americans of all faiths, it is equally important to inquire into the bona fides of organizations that only claim to promote tolerance. Philadelphia presents a sorry but enlightening example of how groups whose agendas directly challenge American values get a free pass from the interfaith establishment due largely to the firmly held belief that “diverse” (and disquieting) viewpoints must be respected — as long as they are Muslim.
A prime example of this is the Mayor’s Office of Faith Based Initiatives (MOFI), “the primary liaison between the Office of the Mayor and Philadelphia’s diverse communities of faith and their leaders.” Despite being provided with evidence of the U.S. government’s case against one of its partners, the terror-linkedCouncil on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the office’s interim director, Reverend Malcolm Byrd, declared: “We will engage with CAIR. … We don’t have to endorse you to work with you.” After reviewing the evidence, MOFI decided to maintain the relationship.
Update 2: Perhaps Hamas was hoping for a spectacular provocation. After Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Kandil arrived for a visit to the Gaza Strip, November 15, Hamas launched a barrage of rockets and mortars at Israel, perhaps trying to provoke an Israeli counterattack that might shake up or even injure the Egyptian leader and get Cairo to escalate its involvement in the war.
Update 1: A few sirens went off in Tel Aviv around 6:30 PM, November 15 — not the whole system or the one outside my window but those a few blocks away — and didn’t stay on very long. Then there were two loud but short booms, the sound of anti-rocket missiles being fired. Rumors followed.
This being the age of social media, people insisted that something must have happened because somebody in California said so. Some people said with certainty that a rocket hit in this or that place; one claimed he saw the smoke from a building that had been struck. In the end, it was announced that a rocket from the Gaza Strip had been shot down far to the south. The atmosphere was reminiscent of 1991 when three dozen Iraqi rockets did hit Israel, one of them a few blocks from my home, and anti-missile batteries could be heard nightly firing at incoming missiles from Iraq.
For those who have ever pondered the eternal question of why Jew-hatred has reared its ugly head in every generation since time immemorial, filmmaker Gloria Greenfield of Doc Emet Productions enlightens and informs audiences in her riveting, new documentary entitled, Unmasked: Judeophobia. Meticulously researched and brilliantly presented, the film examines the alarming escalation of anti-Jewish animus through the lens of renowned historians, prolific authors, and respected voices in the arena of international law.
Covering this egregious phenomenon from key angles, Ms. Greenfield travels the globe as she assiduously seeks to explore historical Christian and contemporary Islamist polemics against Jews. Moreover, such timely and hot-button topics as the proliferation of anti-Israel bias in academia and cultural institutions, misinformation campaigns, and state-sanctioned calls for the destruction of the Jewish state and the genocide of Jews are treated with the gravitas that they deserve. The film is a clarion call to action and a grim reminder that anti-Semitism is not exclusively a nemesis to Jews, but to the human condition as well.
Here’s yet another, only-in-America news item: Hampshire College announced the creation of a scholarship fund this week specifically for illegal immigrants. The fund will reportedly provide $25,000 toward Hampshire’s $43,000 annual tuition. At least three states — Texas, California, and New Mexico — provide in-state tuition discounts for illegal immigrants, and UCLA and Cal-Berkeley also have scholarship funds for illegal immigrants.
I have no problem with illegal immigrants who were brought here by their parents as children and have grown up here attending college in the United States, but the idea of creating scholarship funds solely for families that broke the law is absurd. People who have no legal right to live in the country should not be entitled to a special scholarship that others can’t even apply for. How would you even vet the applications?
The sustained anti-Israel de-legitimization campaign is a corollary of the millenarian obsession with the Jews in the Christian and the Muslim worlds. Since Israel is the world’s only Jewish state, and since Zionism is the Jewish people’s national liberation movement, anti-Zionism—as opposed to criticism of specific Israeli policies or actions—means denial of the Jewish right to national self-determination. Such a discriminatory denial of this basic right to only one nation (and one of the few that can trace their corporate identity and territorial attachment to antiquity) while allowing it to all other groups and communities, however new and tenuous their claim to nationhood, is pure and unadulterated anti-Jewish racism, or anti-Semitism as it is commonly known.
By any conceivable standard, Israel has been an extraordinary success story: national rebirth in the ancestral homeland after millennia of exile and dispersion; resuscitation of a dormant biblical language; the creation of a modern, highly educated, technologically advanced, and culturally and economically thriving society, as well as a vibrant liberal democracy in one of the world’s least democratic areas. It is a world leader in agricultural, medical, military, and solar energy technologies, among others; a high-tech superpower attracting more venture capital investment per capita than the United States and Europe; home to one of the world’s best health systems and philharmonic orchestras, as well as to ten Nobel Prize laureates. And so on and so forth.
All those years of brainwashing by college professors, “progressives,” and many media outlets can take its toll on the truth, leading many people to take lies and distortions for granted. For example, many people “know” the term “West Bank” and believe at face-value that it belongs to the “Palestinians.” This is just part of the Big Lie invented to de-legitimize Israel. Read, watch, and learn:
… In 1967, from whom did Israel capture the West Bank? From The Palestinians? No. In 1967, there was no Arab nation or state by the name of “Palestine.” Actaully, was there ever? So, whose territory is it? Until 1917, the Ottoman Empire [now Turkey] occupied the whole region. After losing WWI, the Ottamans relinquished their 500-year control to the Allied forces, which decided to divide the old empire into countries. Britain recognized the Jewish peoples’ histoical right to their homeland, a small area equivalent to about 1/2 or 1% of the Middle East was designated for this purpose. But wait a second, do you realize what happened? The Jewish homeland originally included not only the West Bank but also the East Bank of the Jordan river. I guess you cannot say the Jewish people have not accepted some painful compromises already. When the Brisitsh Mandate ended, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 recommended the establishment of two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jews accepted it and went on to create a State of Israel, while the Arabs refused the compromise and launched a war to destroy the newly-established Jewsish State. …
AMCHA is an organization that wants Jewish students to be treated with the same respect, rights, and concern as all other students on California campuses. The Never Again Group (NAG) of Canada finds the escalating tensions and outright political war between California State University, Northridge (CSUN) officials and AMCHA to be unacceptable and repugnant.
The year 1880 saw the publication of a book that ranks as the single most important study of Islam ever. Written in German by a young Jewish Hungarian scholar, Ignaz Goldziher, and bearing the nondescript title Muslim Studies (Muhammedanische Studien), it argued that the hadith, the vast body of sayings and actions attributed to the Islamic prophet Muhammad, lacked historical validity. Rather than provide reliable details about Muhammad’s life, Goldziher established, the hadith emerged from debates two or three centuries later about the nature of Islam.
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