Archive for the 'Academia' Category

Stand Up For Israel During Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW)

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

From the ADL:

Right now, Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) is taking place in more than a dozen cities and on many college campuses. In past years, IAW has been marked by extreme anti-Israel rhetoric, including accusations of Israeli racism and apartheid, and calls for boycott and divestment campaigns against Israel. We anticipate similar efforts to delegitimize Israel at this year’s events.

Your college student may encounter demonstrations or hear extreme anti-Israel protests in conjunction with IAW. To help students, parents and grandparents respond to these demonstrations in strategic yet powerful ways, ADL experts have developed and distributed resources on dealing with anti-Israel rallies on campuses.

We are closely monitoring the events and ADL Regional Office staff are available if your student needs help creating a response or is not receiving appropriate support from college administration officials.

Find your ADL regional office.

ADVICE TO STUDENTS

  • While anti-Israel protests are protected by free speech rights, protestors can’t obstruct access to school buildings or physically intimidate or threaten students. When protests violate these standards, students should ask administrators to act.
  • Students should be vigilant in responding to anti-Israel articles, op-eds and letters-to-the-editor in campus papers. ADL Regional Offices can help create an appropriate response.
  • If anti-Semitic materials appear on campus, students should publicly condemn the materials and ask the administration to combat the atmosphere of hate on campus.
  • Students should use social networking tools like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and campus blogs to post positive messages about Israel.

Visit our site to download “Fighting Back,” a comprehensive handbook for strategically responding to demonstrations on campuses. You will also find a range of resources on how people can support Israel.

IAW is scheduled to continue until March 14 and ADL will closely monitor events. You can stay up to date on IAW activity by visiting our Web site.

ADL regional staff are also here to help students respond to anti-Israel rallies on campuses. This is an example of the expertise and “on-the-ground” work of the Anti-Defamation League.

At ADL, we monitor, we advocate and we work to protect the Jewish people, but we cannot do so without your help.

Please consider donating to the Anti-Defamation League to help us always be ready to respond.

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The Goddess That Failed

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

by Phyllis Chesler

For years now, newly arrived refugees have been contacting me. They write to tell me that they’ve lost nearly everybody they once knew. Their whole world is gone now. Some whisper over the phone. Others write long letters. They ask me how I’ve managed.

I am talking about ideological refugees from feminism, leftism, gay liberation, socialism, and progressivism.

Yesterday, I received a letter from someone in Berkeley. She tells me that, earlier this week, she was “overjoyed to see the feisty Tikvah students on the steps of Sproul Plaza giving out Israeli flags and t-shirts and dancing in circles,” and how afterwards, some “went to confront the theatre of the absurd, enacting the checkpoints.” Referring to the feminist movement in Berkeley, she asks: “Could you ever have believed it? From anti-patriarchy to pro-Hamas in a few decades?” Her letter continues: Continue reading…

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Lancet Study Blames Palestinian Wife-Beating on Israel

Monday, January 25th, 2010

Does Not Mention Honor Killings, Forced Veiling, Arranged Marriages, etc.

by Phyllis Chesler

It’s official. Britain’s premier medical journal Lancet has been completely Palestinianized. It no longer bears any relationship to the first-rate scientific journal it once was. Perhaps Lancet is no longer a standard-bearer but has become a follower in the global movement in which standards have plunged, biases have soared, and Big Lies now pass for top-of-the-line academic, scientific work.

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Tariq Ramadan permitted to enter the U.S.

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

by Daniel Pipes*

The Swiss Islamist Tariq Ramadan was about to take up a position at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana in 2004 when the U.S. government prevented him from entering the country on the grounds that he had funded two Hamas-related groups. For five years, his exclusion has been debated and tried. Finally, it was reversed today. The Associated Press explains:

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Fort Hood and the Academic Apologists

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

by Cinnamon Stillwell*

In the wake of the horrific attack at the Fort Hood military base in Texas earlier this month, and the mounting evidence that the shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, was motivated by Islamist beliefs, the media has turned to Middle East studies “experts” for enlightenment. Instead, what the media, and, by extension, the American public, has received is the moral relativism and obfuscation that too often meets any effort to address Islamism or jihadism in an intellectually honest manner.

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Princeton, Columbia Cancel Free Speech: Darwish Silenced

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

By Phyllis Chesler

In our time, a speaker must face a gauntlet of hostility and a menacing crowd if she wishes to speak in favor of Israel or to tell the truth about Islam.

That’s if she’s lucky. Most such speakers never get invited or when they do, their invitations are canceled.

Nonie Darwish, the author of Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law and Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror, has faced on-campus hostility and disruption before. Over the years, I have interviewed her about this a number of times. Like many of us, she has also sometimes been forced to have security guards with her when she speaks. Continue reading…

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Why I Murdered 13 American Soldiers at Fort Hood: Nidal Hassan Explains It All to You

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

By Barry Rubin

How do we know that the attack at Fort Hood was an act of Islamist terrorism? Simple, Major Nidal Hassan told us so. You’ve seen reports of a long list of things he did and said along these lines. But what’s most amazing of all is this:

Hassan is the first terrorist in history to give an academic lecture explaining why he was about to attack. Yet that still isn’t enough for too many people — including the president of the United States — to understand that the murderous assault at Fort Hood was a Jihad attack.

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Juan Cole Between Madison and the Mullahs

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

by Jonathan Schanzer*

Juan Cole, the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, produces a steady stream of writings that downplays the threat radical Islam poses to America and the West. His opinions are at odds with the beliefs of most Americans. Now, through a project designed to foster an understanding of America in the Arab world, he appears to be at odds with himself.

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Killing Jews in Oregon, Embracing Terrorists Off-Broadway

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

By Phyllis Chesler

When the same kind of politics or world-view invades a small off-Broadway theatre group and a small Oregon student newspaper, I really get worried. Can Big Brother be far behind?

Last week, the student editors of Reed College’s Pamphlette responded to an incident of anti-Semitic graffiti in the library bathroom at a nearby college (Lewis and Clark) by publishing a “fake article” that said Lewis and Clark “students had killed all the Jews in their school.”

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Nonie Darwish Under Fire

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

By Phyllis Chesler

Not again. Ah, yes again and again until we have won this war of ideas.

Nonie Darwish, the warmest, sanest, least prejudiced Palestinian/Egyptian whom I know, has both been attacked and has not been defended by the administrative elite at the Whittier College Law School where she is scheduled to speak later today. According to Steven Emerson, the Muslim Student Association on campus defamed Darwish and tried to stop or at least delay her presentation.

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Hate Speech On Campus: A Film By “Stand With Us”

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

Reviewed by Fern Sidman

It is that time of the year once again. The new school term will begin in a matter of weeks. As the excitement and anticipation escalates for some, entering college or university for the first time can be a daunting and intimidating experience for the Jewish student. Always a minority, the secular Jewish student faces the foreboding prospect of living on a campus that has morphed into a raging hotbed of anti-Israel fanaticism.

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Tariq Ramadan Repudiated

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

by Stephen Schwartz*

In an important development for the fight against extremist Islam in the West, the Dutch city of Rotterdam and Erasmus University Rotterdam have dismissed Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-born Islamist academic, from his two local jobs.

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Middle East Studies, Changing for the Better

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

by Daniel Pipes*

Highly impressed by the post-9/11 and post-Iraq cohort to enter the field of Middle East studies, I have been predicting for years that by about 2015 the field will begin evolving in a more mainstream direction. The eccentrics and extremists of yesteryear who dominate academic studies of the region will be replaced by individuals with a greater dose of common sense and ambition.

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Ahmadinejad’s Academics

Sunday, July 12th, 2009

by Cinnamon Stillwell*

What a difference a popular uprising makes.

It seems like just yesterday that the Middle East studies establishment was busy defending Iran’s theocratic regime and its president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from the alleged predations of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy. Yet in the wake of the unrest in response to the stolen election, suddenly American academics have succumbed to intellectual honesty and moral clarity. Despite the best efforts of the Iranian regime to drum up conspiracy theories blaming the West for the uprising, the Iranians themselves have taken center stage.

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“The American Military Advisor”

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

by Michael J. Metrinko*

In August 2008, the Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute and the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, jointly published a manual entitled, The American Military Advisor: Dealing with Senior Foreign Officials in the Islamic World.[1] Authored by Michael J. Metrinko, a leading U.S. government expert on the eastern Islamic world, the 95-page manual is a refreshing and blunt how-to guide for civil affairs and political affairs officers, excerpts from which follow. Metrinko brings to bear considerable experience. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Turkey and Iran and spent fourteen months as a hostage when Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. Subsequent to the 9/11 attacks, Metrinko reentered government service. After assignments in Yemen and Iraq, he spent four years on provincial reconstruction teams in Afghanistan and eighteen months interfacing with the new Afghan National Assembly as an advisor on parliamentary affairs for the U.S. embassy in Kabul. –The Editors

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