By Andrew Whitehead

The California Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations recently published an article expressing the “Travesty of Justice” involved in the sentencing of the so-called “Irvine 11″. The “Irvine 11″ case grew out of a conspiracy by a group of Muslim students who planned the disruption of a presentation by the Israeli Ambassador at UC-Irvine. This group consisted of very confused Muslim youth who can neither appreciate common civility nor clearly understand the first amendment to the Constitution.

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by Phyllis Chesler

Words matter. They can enlighten or confuse us.

Despite what the western mainstream media say, Muslim terrorists are not merely “militants.”

An armed terrorist is not an “activist.”

Contrary to myth, an Israeli “settler” is not a “colonizer” — although many Muslims, who have “settled” in Europe and who have created hostile, violent, and separatist enclaves, (”no go zones”), are essentially “colonizing” Europe in order to establish a European Caliphate.

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by Phyllis Chesler

Recently, I participated in a Toronto conference which was sponsored by Advocates for Civil Liberties and coordinated by the rather wonderful Meryle Kates. The speakers were powerful and the audience was packed, respectful, incredibly sober and fully engaged. The title of the conference was “When Middle East Politics Invade the Campus.”

No heckling or jeering here.

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by Stephen Schwartz*

Gertrude Stein, the controversial modernist author, spent part of her childhood in Oakland, California, a city on the southern border of Berkeley, home of the flagship campus of the University of California system. Returning to Oakland later in life, Stein is supposed to have complained, “there’s no there, there,” referring to the disappearance of the city as she remembered it. The comment has been turned into a permanent gibe against Oakland, but could equally apply to certain aspects of the Berkeley campus, especially in regard to what one may call “the Berkeley definition of Islamophobia.”

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by Raymond Ibrahim*

In a world paralyzed by political correctness and warped philosophies, attention is proving to be one of the greatest enemies of Islamist encroachment.

Consider the difference between pre- and post-September 11: A decade after the 9/11 jihad got the West’s attention, many people — perhaps not unlike yourself — have become aware of Islam and its doctrines, especially the “anti-infidel” ones, certainly many more people than before Sept. 11, 2001.

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By Andrew Whitehead

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Berkeley University recently issued a joint report on “Same Hate, New Target: Islamophobia and Its Impact in the United States 2009-2010.” There are a few interesting questions arising from this joint effort between one of America’s largest Islamic hate groups and a university that prides itself on politically inclusive speech and “diversity.”

Some questions for Berkeley:

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by Efraim Karsh*

In the opening scene of Woody Allen’s 1983 film Zelig, F. Scott Fitzgerald is seen to observe a curious little man as he chats with socialites at a sumptuous bash, speaking adoringly of President Coolidge and the Republican Party — all in an upper class Boston accent. Then, an hour later, the renowned novelist is stunned to see the same man speaking to the kitchen help. Only now he claims to be a Democrat, and his accent has become coarse as if he were one of the crowd.

This scene comes to mind when observing the incessant, ideological acrobatics of the Israeli academic Benny Morris. For years, he basked in the dubious glory of being one of Israel’s foremost, homegrown bashers, deriding Zionism as “a colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement … intent on politically, or even physically, dispossessing and supplanting the Arabs” and going out of his way to fabricate Israel’s history so as to prove the sinful circumstances of its birth. He paraded the Arab canard of an age-old Zionist design to dispossess the Palestinian Arabs from their homes; he ignored the sustained Arab efforts to destroy the Jewish national cause and the no less sustained efforts of the Jews at peaceful coexistence, both prior to and after Israel’s establishment; he dismissed the Zionist acceptance of the November 1947 partition resolution as a ruse, claiming that “large sections of Israeli society” were looking forward to war as an opportunity for territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing; he even went so far as to present the Palestinians as the real victims of the pan-Arab assault on Israel in May 1948, with the Jewish state supposedly colluding with the invading Arab states to prevent the birth of a Palestinian Arab state.

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By Gary Gerofsky

I cannot hide the fact that I am pleased with the failures of the flotillas and the BDS (boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel) movement in general. These are movements that were borne out of ignorance, propaganda, lies and hate and, more significantly, the people involved want to do harm to others — physically, economically and emotionally. As protest organizers disguise their objectives as legitimate protests against Israel, they come to the aid of terrorists who have slit the throats of their own people just as Hamas did to their brothers in Fatah. Imagine a young man going off on a flotilla expedition telling his father and mother that he is risking his life for the sake of terrorists. What responsibility does western society and media have to expose the pure anarchy that is involved in such a decision and that is rampant and goes unchallenged in universities, unions and in Islamist groups?

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by Daniel Pipes*

Push back in the university. The past century has seen institutions of higher learning dominated first by liberals and then by leftists. While this chokehold continues and perhaps even increases with the vast numbers of online universities out there now, there are also signs of decay as the academic left stumbles and finds itself increasingly criticized, even ridiculed.

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by Daniel Pipes*

The troubled academic study of the Middle East and Islam by Americans is changing in fundamental ways. I offer some thoughts based on 42 years of personal observation:

From Western offence to Islamic offence: Muslim relations with Christians divide into four long periods: from Muhammad’s hijra to the First Crusade, 622-1099, during which time Muslims expanded at Christian expense; to the 2^nd siege of Vienna, 1099-1683, which saw a mix of Muslim advances (e.g., Anatolia) and retreats (Iberia); to the Arab oil boycott, 1683-1973, with Christians on the offense; and since 1973, with Muslims on the offense.

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We live in ominous times. Our government embraces false “allies” while betraying true ones; our right to be armed is threatened; our religious freedoms are threatened by unethical political dogmas and nefarious foreign funding; our entertainment is dominated by a depraved group of money-hungry, unethical anthopomorphs; our primary and secondary schools are poisoned with political correctness that teaches that no one is responsible for his/her own actions; our academia is dominated by anti-Semitic, Islamo-philic bigots; and, our government is filled with self-serving, lying, unethical thieves. It is time to remember the sacred words penned by this great nation’s Founding Fathers, the American Declaration of Independence:

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by Stephen Schwartz*

John L. Esposito, professor of religion and international affairs and director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (CMCU) at Georgetown University, is the leading defender of radical Islam in U.S. higher education — if not in the entire Western academy. He and his enterprise have returned to the public eye with the exposure that, in 2006-07, they were offered $325,000 by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to hold a conference on Islamophobia at the university.

A 57-member international body headquartered in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the OIC was founded in Morocco in 1969 to “protect” the Islamic sites in Jerusalem from Israel. It defines “Islamophobia” with considerable and questionable latitude, as any criticism of Muslim individual, institutional, ideological, legal, or cultural behavior. Combating Islamophobia as it conceives it, OIC seeks to prevent free discussion about Islam or the lives of Muslims under, for example, the radical Islamists dominating Saudi Arabia and ruling Iran.

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by Phyllis Chesler and Nathan Bloom

Recently, Yale shut down its Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism (YIISA). Some claimed that the center was perhaps too “political.”

Almost simultaneously, on June 23, 2011, the University of California at Berkeley’s Center on Race and Gender issued its first annual “Islamophobia” report. The report is a project of the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project (IRDP), whose mission statement says: “The IRDP focuses on a systematic and empirical approach to the study of Islamophobia and its impact on the American Muslim community. Today, Muslims in the U.S., parts of Europe, and around the world have been transformed into a demonized and feared global ‘other,’ subjected to legal, social, and political discrimination.”

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By Fern Sidman

In a stunning reversal of a previous decision that sparked polemical debate amongst Jewish leaders and academics, the provost of Yale University has announced the re-establishment of an interdisciplinary program on the study of anti-Semitism. Provost Peter Salovey who is the Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology at Yale said in a letter dated June 19th that, “I have been gratified to learn that Professor Maurice Samuels and a group of faculty colleagues have expressed interest in the creation of a new scholarly enterprise, the Yale Program for the Study of Anti-Semitism (YPSA), and that the Whitney Humanities Center has agreed to sponsor it.”

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By Gary Gerofsky

The video entitled, “Shariah Muslims Hate Free Speech,” filmed at an Israel “Apartheid” Week (IAW) hate-fest at the University of California (UC) at San Diego is a typical example of what is happening on North American campuses. This video is a microcosm of how some people, with a pathological need to appear to be fair-minded and even-handed, play into the hands of Islamists. This radical Muslim hate-speech goes unchallenged. These Islamists enjoy the right to free speech protected by the American constitution but, beyond that and for no good reason, are encouraged to spew the hate speech to which they feel entitled. People who should know better are abusing the Constitution by upholding local and campus rules and regulations in higher regard than the Constitution which has been effectively supplanted and undermined. Hate speech is being protected by bureaucrats, Islamist sympathizers, the peace-at-any-cost gang and the ignorant. Free speech is being challenged only when it comes from those who are seen to be interfering with hate as expressed by Islamists in venues such as IAW. Hate speech is seemingly being protected more than is the free speech to challenge the insidious hate.

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