The jihad against Jews and Israel on the
American campus...
Cravatts: Many of us have been concerned for some time with the relentless, deceptive, and dangerous attacks against Israel emanating from college campuses, particularly because academia was always thought to be a place where honesty debate and scholarly inquiry could flourish. But at least with regard to Israel, that no longer is the case. In fact, what I characterize as an intellectual jihad against Israel is taking place right now on campuses everywhere, characterized by such vile contortions of history and fact, and driven by such moral imbecility and double standards on the part of its adherents, that is has few parallels as a campus movement. It involves, first, a rapturous adherence to a cult of “Palestinianism,” in which seeking social justice for the ever-suffering Palestinians has become the primary intellectual mission of many liberals who deride Western values and democratic states, and a convenient cause for many in the Arab world for whom the Palestinians have become a club to use against Israel and Jews. On campuses, this has evolved into a dangerous “unholy alliance” between Islamists with a specific agenda to dilute Western institutions, and leftists who, in accommodating radical Islam, not only enable what Robert Spencer has called a “stealth jihad,” but help facilitate it.
On campuses, the stealth jihad is led by the Muslin Student Association, an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood whose 600 chapters serve as command centers for inviting guest speakers with incendiary rhetoric, annual hate-fests during which Israel and Jews are libeled, slandered, and demonized, shouting down or preventing speeches by pro-Israel, anti-jihad speakers, and other instances extremist behavior and destructive narratives about the Israel/Palestinian debate. This alliance between jihadists and Leftists, who ordinarily share little in common, ideologically, serves both sides well: Muslim students who wish to deflect the pathologies of Palestinian cause savor being able to assign the West’s worst appellation of ‘racist’ to Israel, and campus liberals at the same time fulfill their Marxist dreams of trying to envision and help create what Ruth Wisse of Harvard called the “ideal of the egalitarian state,” something that the Left had hoped that Communism would create, but which ultimately failed to be established anywhere and in the pursuit of which some 100 million souls perished during the twentieth century.
And petro-dollars have helped to lubricate this stealth jihad. Jay P. Greene, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute , noted that “Gulf Arabs gave a total of $88 million to 14 U.S. universities between 1995” and today. What does all that largesse buy? For one thing, academic recipients are going to shy away from any critical investigation of the donor’s own political system, autocratic rule, or abuse in the social and civil rights of the citizens of those oil-rich but often economically- and socially-backward countries. Though many of the funded centers, such as Georgetown’s, are established with the stated intention of helping to “build bridges” between the Christian West and Islam for the purpose of enhancing mutual understanding, in practice the centers end up serving as beachheads where Arab states can attempt to influence scholarship and indoctrinate a new generation of scholars.
Dr. Richard Cravatts, the author ofGenocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel & Jews. To order a copy, click here.
American campus...
Cravatts: Many of us have been concerned for some time with the relentless, deceptive, and dangerous attacks against Israel emanating from college campuses, particularly because academia was always thought to be a place where honesty debate and scholarly inquiry could flourish. But at least with regard to Israel, that no longer is the case. In fact, what I characterize as an intellectual jihad against Israel is taking place right now on campuses everywhere, characterized by such vile contortions of history and fact, and driven by such moral imbecility and double standards on the part of its adherents, that is has few parallels as a campus movement. It involves, first, a rapturous adherence to a cult of “Palestinianism,” in which seeking social justice for the ever-suffering Palestinians has become the primary intellectual mission of many liberals who deride Western values and democratic states, and a convenient cause for many in the Arab world for whom the Palestinians have become a club to use against Israel and Jews. On campuses, this has evolved into a dangerous “unholy alliance” between Islamists with a specific agenda to dilute Western institutions, and leftists who, in accommodating radical Islam, not only enable what Robert Spencer has called a “stealth jihad,” but help facilitate it.
On campuses, the stealth jihad is led by the Muslin Student Association, an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood whose 600 chapters serve as command centers for inviting guest speakers with incendiary rhetoric, annual hate-fests during which Israel and Jews are libeled, slandered, and demonized, shouting down or preventing speeches by pro-Israel, anti-jihad speakers, and other instances extremist behavior and destructive narratives about the Israel/Palestinian debate. This alliance between jihadists and Leftists, who ordinarily share little in common, ideologically, serves both sides well: Muslim students who wish to deflect the pathologies of Palestinian cause savor being able to assign the West’s worst appellation of ‘racist’ to Israel, and campus liberals at the same time fulfill their Marxist dreams of trying to envision and help create what Ruth Wisse of Harvard called the “ideal of the egalitarian state,” something that the Left had hoped that Communism would create, but which ultimately failed to be established anywhere and in the pursuit of which some 100 million souls perished during the twentieth century.
And petro-dollars have helped to lubricate this stealth jihad. Jay P. Greene, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute , noted that “Gulf Arabs gave a total of $88 million to 14 U.S. universities between 1995” and today. What does all that largesse buy? For one thing, academic recipients are going to shy away from any critical investigation of the donor’s own political system, autocratic rule, or abuse in the social and civil rights of the citizens of those oil-rich but often economically- and socially-backward countries. Though many of the funded centers, such as Georgetown’s, are established with the stated intention of helping to “build bridges” between the Christian West and Islam for the purpose of enhancing mutual understanding, in practice the centers end up serving as beachheads where Arab states can attempt to influence scholarship and indoctrinate a new generation of scholars.
Dr. Richard Cravatts, the author ofGenocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel & Jews. To order a copy, click here.
