by Winfield Myers*

The U.S. Department of State has awarded a grant worth $494,368 to University of Delaware political scientist, Brookings Institution fellow, and Pentagon consultant Muqtedar Khan, who last fall objected to serving on a panel with a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces. According to a UD press release, the grant is to be used, “to initiate a dialogue on religion and politics between key members of religious and community organizations in the Middle East and the United States.”

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by Asaf Romirowsky*

An Islamic group came to Temple University last spring with an offer to provide $1.5 million for an endowed chair in Islamic studies to honor religion professor Mahmoud Ayoub. After months of talks, the deal never got off the ground, once trustees and others raised concerns about the contributor, the International Institute of Islamic Thought, a nonprofit research group that had been under scrutiny as part of a government probe into the funding of suspected terrorists.

Some would like to consider money given by Saudis and other Arab nations to American universities as generous gifts to those U.S. universities who have educated their elites. A closer look reveals a different picture that includes incitement, anti-Semitism and a skewed view of Islam.

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by Winfield Myers*

Writing in his well-trafficked blog on Friday, University of Michigan Middle East studies professor Juan Cole illustrates the baleful consequences of the media’s reliance on Cole and other Middle East studies professors of his ilk to explain the Middle East to Americans: it makes possible the wide dissemination of a distorted, conspiracy-laden picture of that highly volatile region.

For in just a few paragraphs, Cole proposed or implied that:

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By Fern Sidman

On Thursday evening, November 29th, the University of Toronto hosted a lecture by former De Paul University assistant professor of political science, Norman Finkelstein. Finkelstein, 53, is a controversial figure in the academic community, as he has assumed the position of chief apologist for Palestinian terrorism while espousing a hard line anti-Israel viewpoint, mixed with vociferous attacks on the legacy of the Holocaust, its victims and survivors. In June of 2007, Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University and charged with “unprofessional attacks”. He was then placed on administrative leave for the 2007-2008 academic year, his single course having been cancelled. On September 5, 2007 he announced his resignation after coming to a settlement with the university on undisclosed terms.

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By Jonah Cohen

Recent studies show that, relative to their small population, the Jewish people have disproportionately and significantly contributed to “the top ranks of the arts, sciences, law, medicine, finance, entrepreneurship, and the media.” Oddly, Jewish day schools have yet to highlight such intellectual accomplishment in a coherent curriculum. This article argues that Jewish day schools are in need of a “Jewish Great Books” program which would introduce Jewish youth to the original works of eminent Jewish intellectuals in the various academic and artistic fields.

Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis, quipped Tertullian, what has Athens to do with Jerusalem? Answer: quite a bit. The metaphor that western civilization rests on two opposing cities, Athens and Jerusalem, highlights one of the major difficulties confronting Jewish day schools nowadays. How do we coordinate secular curricula and influences (Athens) with Jewish courses and values (Jerusalem)?

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By Andrew Whitehead

Choked for eight seconds against a wall, threatened with death by BB-gun, punched in the arm, and having a head scarf pulled off. Pretty scary stuff, especially if you are an 11 year old.

CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) recently pressed local school officials in Pinellas County (Florida) to investigate a threat it says was made against Hannah Chehab, an 11 year-old female Muslim student.

CAIR’s local executive director, Ahmed Bedier, said that CAIR’s primary concern is the safety of Hannah and the other students at the school.

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By Phyllis Chesler

Shades of Harvard’s Larry Summers! Columbia’s President, Lee Bollinger, has just come under faculty-fire for having mistreated Iran’s President Ahmadinejad, and in so doing, having “sullied the reputation of the University with (his) strident tone.” Bollinger has also been castigated by seventy faculty members for having “allied the University with the Bush administration’s war in Iraq” and for taking “partisan political positions concerning the politics of the Middle East.”

This is no parody. This is a seventy-gun opening salvo and the unmistakable sound of a bloody drumroll; the French Revolution has returned to Columbia’s campus.

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By Phyllis Chesler

So, here I am, sipping my morning coffee and reading my first twenty (yes, twenty) hardcopy and online newspapers (I read double that amount by the end of the day—doesn’t everyone?) when I read the brief New York Sun editorial titled “Colonizing Barnard”. And HERE is the Columbia Spectator coverage.

Apparently, over the weekend, Barnard quietly (very quietly) granted tenure to Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj. There! Take that you Pushy Jews!

Abu El-Haj is the professor who allegedly claims that Jews and therefore Israel have no or little historical or archaeological ties to the land of Israel or to the Temple Mount. I am not familiar with her work. Perhaps she does not make this claim. Perhaps this false claim constitutes only a teensy weensy part of her work which members of the all-powerful Jewish Lobby have seized upon to defame an ideologically true daughter of the late but very far from great Professor Edward Said, also Columbia’s own.

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by Dan Pine*

Daniel Pipes loves Arab cuisine, Arab literature and the Arabic language. When working in his Philadelphia office, he often plays Arab music in the background.

That’s about as far as he goes.

Otherwise, the soft-spoken Harvard Ph.D. and Middle East pundit is hard-pressed to speak well of the Arab world, at least when it comes to politics. Israel, he says, is at war with Arab enemies and “when a war takes place, you should try to win. Wars are resolved not through negotiations, but with one side giving up.”

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By Phyllis Chesler

NEWSFLASH! A CORRECTION.
I have just been told that the New York Times described this incident in their online edition today—not at length, not in any depth, but the swastika has definitely made it onto their radar screen. My informant happens to be my son—and therefore we both agreed that it would be safer and wiser if he sent it to me for a final, maternal inspection. What can I say? I am relieved, my faith redeemed, etc. I look forward to their in-depth hardcopy coverage of the many ways in which Israel and Jews have been demonized on American college campuses.
END CORRECTION

Just when I think I’ve seen it all—there is always more to see.

I am talking about my favorite newspaper: The even-handed, totally objective, fair-minded, high-stepping Grey Lady aka The New York Times and their unwritten policy about the Jews and Israel.

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by Bill Levinson

We are not qualified to give legal advice, but we encourage any University of Delaware student who has been made “uncomfortable” by the university’s mandatory “diversity” program to consult one. As reported by World Net Daily:

A mandatory University of Delaware program requires residence hall students to acknowledge that “all whites are racist” and offers them “treatment” for any incorrect attitudes regarding class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality they might hold upon entering the school, according to a civil rights group. …

According to university materials, RAs are instructed to ask students during one-on-one sessions questions such as: “When did you discover your sexual identity?” “When were you first made aware of your race?” and “Who taught you a lesson in regard to some sort of diversity awarness? What was the lesson?”

“Students who express discomfort with this type of questioning often meet with disapproval from their RAs, who write reports on these one-on-one sessions and deliver these reports to their superiors. One student identified in a write-up as an RA’s ‘worst’ one-on-one session was a young woman who stated that she was tired of having ‘diversity shoved down her throat,’” FIRE said.

This particular student responded to the question, “When did you discover your sexual identity?” with the terse: “That is none of your damn business,” FIRE said.

Again, we are not qualified to give legal advice, but here is what the U.S. Government (Equal Opportunity Employment Commission) says:

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By Phyllis Chesler

On May 31st, 1969, Hillary Rodham delivered the Commencement address at Wellesley. I have just read her speech and in my view, it says very little about a great deal. You just can’t pin her down—not then, not now. She tries to include everyone, offend no one, and she does so in an even-tempered, non-passionate way. She says:

“Part of the problem with empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn’t do us anything. We’ve had lots of empathy; we’ve had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.”

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By Phyllis Chesler

Despite the best laid plans of the Revolutionary Communist Party, we blessed three (Ibn Warraq, Christina Hoff-Sommers, and myself) quietly triumphed at Columbia during Islamo-fascism week. But you’d never know it if you read The Nation’s online coverage. Esther Kaplan, author of “With God on their Side: George Bush and the Christian Right, ” led with her bias showing.

In her article, Kaplan spends ten paragraphs demonizing David Horowitz and then dismisses us as fellow travelers in only a mere two paragraphs. I am not complaining. If she had written about us at greater length, she would only have misquoted us or taken our words out of context even more.

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By Fern Sidman

The voices of truth can never be diminished or drowned out, be it by the rain that fell in New York City or by the zealousness of truth’s adversaries. On Wednesday evening, October 24th, the electricity in the air was palpable on the campus of Columbia University. In a packed classroom in the mathematics building, a panel discussion was held as part of an ongoing series of lectures in a weeklong event being held on over 100 university and college campuses. This nationwide event is entitled Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week and is the brainchild of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

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By Phyllis Chesler

It is an honor and a privilege to be here today. Talking about Islamo-fascism and the violent Islamic oppression of Muslim women, Muslim intellectuals, and Muslim homosexuals is exactly the right thing to do at this moment in history. The western university campus is exactly the right place to do so since it is the university that has been hijacked, Palestinianized, Stalinized, Edward Said-ized, by a series of truly Great Lies.

It is time to take the campus back so that the rights of “free speech” and “academic freedom” also apply to those who tell the truth about Islam and who espouse minority and dissident intellectual points of view. Such rights also belong to those of us who are pro-American and pro-Israel and not only to those who demonize the West and valorize Islamist misogyny, death-cult terrorism, and Wahabi and Salafi fundamentalism.

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