by Stephen Schwartz*

In 2005, Saudi prince Alwaleed Bin Talal donated $20 million dollars each to Harvard and Georgetown Universities. In the years since, Georgetown has earned considerably more press for its use of the prince’s largesse, through which it renamed an extant center founded in 1993 as the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU). This is due in no small part to the efforts of the center’s director, John Louis Esposito, America’s foremost apologist for ultra-fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam. The result of the Saudi-Esposito lash-up has been the emergence of ACMCU as an academic institution that promotes vigorously the “Palestinian narrative” and hostility to Israel.

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A briefing by Mark Durie*

Mark Durie is a theologian, human rights activist and pastor of an Anglican church. He has published many articles and books on the language and culture of the Acehnese, Christian-Muslim relations and religious freedom. A graduate of the Australian National University and the Australian College of Theology, he has held visiting appointments at the University of Leiden, MIT, UCLA and Stanford, and was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1992. On January 18, he spoke to the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia.

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by Phyllis Chesler

Jews and HIndus have both been victims of attempted extermination by Islamics. Of course, not all Muslims are terrorists. But today, most terrorists are Muslims. A speech to Hindu youth in Pune.

On January 8, 2012, I delivered a rather passionate speech in Pune, India via Skype. I was invited to do so by “Youth 4 Panun Kashmir.” The organizers were especially interested in my drawing parallels between Israel and India, Jews and Hindus both of whom have, historically, been genocidally exterminated and driven out of their holy places.

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by Efraim Karsh*

It is ironic that Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), Israel’s only university bearing the name of the Jewish state’s founding father, and established in the ancient desert he dreamt of reviving, has become a hotbed of anti-Israel propaganda at the expense of proper scholarly endeavor.

So much so that an international committee of scholars, appointed by Israel’s Council for Higher Education to evaluate political science and international relations programs in Israeli universities, recently recommended that BGU “consider closing the Department of Politics and Government” unless it abandoned its “strong emphasis on political activism,” improved its research performance, and redressed the endemic weakness “in its core discipline of political science.” In other words, they asked that the Department return to accurate scholarship rather than indoctrinate the students with libel.

The same day the committee’s recommendation was revealed, Professor David Newman — who founded that department and bequeathed it such a problematic ethos, for which “achievement” he was presumably rewarded with a promotion to Deanship of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, from where he can shape other departments in a similar way — penned an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post in which he compared Israel’s present political culture to that of Nazi Germany. “I will no doubt be strongly criticized for compared making such a comparison,” he wrote,

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by Asaf Romirowsky*

The Israel Academia Monitor (IAM) watchdog, which “monitors abuses of academic freedom and politicization of Israeli campuses by extremists and radicals,” has found, “Israeli academic institutions have been misused in recent years for radical anti-Israeli and even anti-Semitic propagandizing, often by tenured radicals with embarrassing academic records and dubious research credentials.”

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by Alan Jacobs*

Few professors in the controversial world of Middle East studies boast more about their own notoriety than Juan Cole, a man who believes the consistent criticism of his public positions to be a sign of distinction. Yale University’s decision not to hire him for an endowed chair five years ago due to insufficient scholarship led him to publicly charge that George W. Bush and the CIA torpedoed his candidacy. When organizations such as Campus Watch publicize Cole’s outlandish commentary, he cries “censorship” and labels them “McCarthyite.”

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By Gary Gerofsky

The only non-military response to Islamism and the creeping sharia (Islamic law) that is infecting the world is through strength and activism against this scourge and against those in power who are facilitating Islamist expansion. The generations that went before us defeated communism and fascism, and now we must step up to the plate to defeat Islamism. This task is made seriously difficult because we have a Muslim supporter in the White House and weak, ignorant, misinformed leaders married to multiculturalism, wishful thinking, and leftism that is intent on appeasing Islamists in all but a few places (For political reasons related to 9/11, Al Qaeda seems to be the only real Islamist concern for the Obama administration.) Our Western countries have become divided states, one part for the radicals and one for the majority of citizenry — and, by virtue of our free and fair society, they are both afforded the same rights. The new world order has its new world leader with Obama encouraging dissent and self-loathing among his own countrymen while boosting the political fortunes of Muslim Brotherhood forces who want us dead and who live by their belief in intolerance and a world ruled by Islamic edicts.

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By Fern Sidman

Mark Langfan, the American-Israel Security 3D-Map topographer, and this year’s co-recipient of the Justice Louis D. Brandeis Award at the upcoming Zionist Organization of America dinner along with his father William, has offered concrete evidence which conclusively debunks the litany of falsehoods and distortions found in the book “Israel Lobby” written by Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. The book, originally published in 2006 asserts that “Israel is no longer a vital military strategic ally of the United States.”

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by Cinnamon Stillwell*

When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney announced last month that Walid Phares — a Lebanese-American Christian, adjunct professor of jihadist global strategies at the National Defense University, and former Middle East studies professor at Florida Atlantic University — would be a special adviser on the Middle East and North Africa, it elicited howls of fury from the usual suspects. Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas funding case and the chief Islamist organ in the U.S. — sent a letter to the Romney campaign stating CAIR’s predictable objections, while publications such as the Daily Beast, Salon.com, and Mother Jones followed suit with error-filled hit pieces.

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By Gary Gerofsky

Richard Falk has no problem “put(ting) aside his ethnic identity,” because, in my opinion, he is a Jewish anti-Semite and he proudly carries out his maliciousness while the entire Middle East burns in the fires created by Islamic dictators and fascist religious fanatics.

The people “willing to confront the Zionist furies of Israel” as Falk puts it, are grounded in their vision of a world forced to suffer under terrorism, nuclear destruction, misogyny, oppression, honour killings, Koranic Jew-hate, and revisionist historical propaganda that distorts reality beyond recognition.

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By Gary Gerofsky

Peace Studies at McMaster University — non-violence, Gandhi peace events, love and peace — who could possibly take exception with such positive messages of global tolerance and efforts to make the world a peaceful place to live? Who would dare challenge this facade of eternal goodness and inclusion? Well, allow me to interject to explain why, in our Orwellian world, peace does not mean what it should and how a department has been hijacked by a monomaniacal agenda that concentrates on criticism of one democratic country and treats tyrants and terrorists as if they were angels. This is an agenda copied from what they do in the UN where peace has also been turned on its head to mean the enabling of: war, terrorism, historical revisionism, moral relativism, and support for groups that are anti-Western. This Peace Studies department must be viewed and scrutinized in the context of Israeli activist and sometimes-government-minister Natan Sharansky’s “3D test of Anti-Semitism: Demonization, Double-Standards and Delegitimization.” Confronting free and law-abiding countries and ignoring real tyrants as if they do not exist is now acceptable behaviour to certain academics and administrators who hide behind the false banner of “peace” to convey their love of concepts of non-peace, war, hate and envy. The custodians of higher education at universities, if they have anything to say at all, which is rare, hide behind free speech and academic freedom to slough off criticism of the campaigns being waged under their willfully blind leadership.

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By Barry Rubin

The easiest way to understand the current situation in the United States is this:

We are in a new version of the 1960s with four significant differences.

1. The radicals aren’t just demonstrating in the universities, they control them.

2. The radicals aren’t being ignored by the mass media, they control them.

3. The president of the United States is the leader of the New Left, sort of like the head of the campus branch of SDS and the Black Student Alliance put together. In comparison, Bill Clinton was the head of the campus Young Democrats.

4. The music’s not nearly as good.

Yet is support for the radical Left really higher than in the 1960s? I don’t think so. The movement has just camouflaged itself much better, including convincing millions of people that this is a mainstream liberal one.

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By Fern Sidman

Tensions flared between dozens of pro-Israel demonstrators and members of “Students for Justice in Palestine” on Sunday afternoon, October 16th outside of Columbia University on the third and final day of the 2011 National Students for Justice in Palestine “teach-in” organized by members to prepare for their upcoming Israel Apartheid Week events across college campuses throughout North America.

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by Steven Plaut*

Israel is under assault from within and not just from the usual suspects. Its legitimacy and, in many cases, its very existence are being attacked by a domestic academic fifth column. Hundreds of professors and lecturers, employed by Israel’s state-financed universities, are building careers as full-time activists working against the very country in which they live. And the problem is growing. Fortunately, the Israeli public has become aware of the problem and is increasingly demanding that something be done about it. A not inconsiderable part of the credit for this belongs to the Middle East Quarterly, probably the first serious journal to discuss the problem a decade ago, sparking a debate that continues to challenge the Israeli academy’s offensive against the Jewish state.

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By Gary Gerofsky

A young woman, 22 years of age, in her final year at York University (in Toronto, Canada) was looking for a course to fill out her credit requirements at the beginning of the new fall session. Sarah is her name — a quiet and confident woman who just wanted to maintain her good grade average and complete her education. She had never imagined getting involved in any politics or controversies on the way home to the graduation finish line.

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