Shikaki, by the way, has been lionized for years as a moderate Muslim voice. From the New York Sun, with thanks to Andrew Bostom:
WASHINGTON - Concern is mounting about the possible connections between a prominent Palestinian Arab scholar, Khalil Shikaki, and leading members of the terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Government wiretaps introduced at the trial of a Florida professor accused of operating the American wing of PIJ, Sami Al-Arian, show Mr. Shikaki distributed money in the West Bank for Al-Arian associates allegedly tied to PIJ - conversations the federal government argues may represent terrorist activity.Mr. Shikaki is, among many scholarly affiliations, the founder and director of a prominent polling institute, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, and last year was named a scholar at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. Among Palestinian Islamic Jihad's more notorious acts was an April 1995 bombing in Israel that killed a Brandeis student, Alisa Flatow.
He is also the brother of the assassinated founder of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Fathi Shikaki, and a former director of the Florida-based World & Islam Studies Enterprise. WISE was founded by Mr. Al-Arian and connected to several other figures involved in the recent PIJ terrorism trials in Tampa, Fla., during which Mr. Al-Arian and three co-defendants were acquitted.
Mr. Shikaki has not been indicted on any criminal charges in America, and has repeatedly denied any connection to his brother's terrorist operation; any knowledge of the connections between WISE and the Islamic Committee for Palestine - both alleged by the government to be front groups for Islamic Jihad - and PIJ, and any knowledge that top figures in the organization with whom he had associated, including its current leader, Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, and an Al-Arian associate affiliated with WISE, Sameeh Hammoudeh, were at all involved in PIJ. Mr. Hammoudeh was one of the co-defendants in the Al-Arian case, and was acquitted on all counts.
Wiretaps of conversations between Messrs. Shikaki, Shallah, and Hammoudeh introduced as evidence at the Al-Arian trial, however, suggest that Mr. Shikaki distributed money in the West Bank for Al-Arian associates, who raised the funds in America, and then stopped the money transfers in January 1995, shortly after PIJ was declared a blocked terrorist organization by President Clinton.
Read it all.
I never, ever, thought I'd hear of the the concept of a Bradeis Jihadist.
Go ahead, hit me. Terror professors are installed in our military academies at West Point, Annapolis, and Colorado Springs, aren't they?
Defining moderation in Islam is like defining moderation in drinking: At least in the college towns I've lived in, the world seems full of borderline or future alcoholics who consider themselves "moderate" or "social" drinkers. (I prefer coffee, and make no claims of moderation.)
In other words, very few in either camp are actually moderate, but minimize and make excuses for their own excesses by pointing to other people who take it even further.
So Shikaki isn't personally strapping on explosives. I guess that makes him moderate... like the person who's just holding up the beer bong instead of drinking from it. ;)
When the Hassenfeld family (of Hasbro Toys) decided to endow a chair at Brandeis in Islamic studies, a lecture wasdelivered by Bernard Lewis. Asked by the wife of the donor as to whether or not he had any ideas about who might hold the chair, Lewis was characteristically reticent. Asked about Kanan Makiya by an enthusiatic questioner, he replied that the best book by Makiya was the "one on architecture" (that is, about the kitsch of Saddam Hussein's monuments to himself), not exactly a ringing endorsement. Nonetheless, Kanan Makiya was appointed to the chair. There are dozens of Western scholars of Islam. Kanan Makiya is not a scholar of Islam. He was a political emigre from Iraq, whose claim on our attention is that he publicly deplored Saddam Hussein and wrote about it ("The Republic of Fear") and that he was one of the few Arabs to denounce the massacre of Kurds. So he is on the right side, more or less, though not quite as far along as Fouad Ajami. He still thinks the "Palestinians" can be talked about as a separte people and holds astonishingly conventional Arab Muslim views about the Arab siege of Israel. His sympathy for murdered Kurds is clear; a larger understanding of why the phrase "the Arab world" is both deceptive and cruel, and that the Jews, too, might possess rights to a homeland with defensible borders, and that the essentially endless nature of the Arab opposition ought to be admitted to, and spoken about -- by advanced Arabs such as himself -- is something that has not yet been entered his head.
Brandeis's Crown Center, clearly, is one more tribute to some rich donor's dreamy sense of "what needs to be done." Akin to those "camps" entirely funded by Jews, to which "Arab" and "Israeli" students come, and where it then turns out that some of those "Arab" students return to what they insistently call "Palestine" to fight the Jihad -- it has happened time and again -- these Centers for Reconciliation, Peace, Understanding, Dialogue are all taken advantage of by the Arab Muslim participants, and the dismal results always the same.
Money that might go, say, to Jihad and Dhimmitude Studies, where Jews and Zoroastrians, Maronites and Copts, and apostates from Islam (always, and everywhere, the most morally and intellectually advanced people to have been born into Islam -- and by far those with the best senses of humor), instead goes to these eseentially useless enterprises, that make the rich but clueless donors feel good, swell the coffers of the accommodating university, and a good though pointless or even, as the case in question makes clear, possibly a dangerous time, is had by all.
The case of Shikaki at the Crown Center does not surprise. What surprises is the depth and duration of the willingness to be fooled, to not see things steadily and whole, to avoid studying certain things, or fully assimilating their signficance if they are studied. A mass effort at self-disinformation.
Exhibit #1 is above.
Why don't those in charge of the Crown Center ask Ibn Warraq to come, and continue his important scholarly research on early Islam? Why don't they favor apostates for Islam, who have some truths to tell? And if the true, as opposed to the Received Islamic Version of Islam, is never to be investigated, what hope is there for finding a way other than open, mass warfare -- to weaken the forces of Jihad?
If Peace is sought, it can only be achieved by those willing to find other instruments by which to wage a war of self-defense against the varied instruments of Jihad. Study of the history of Islam, of its canonical texts, its tenets, its attitudes, its atmospherics, can both arm the Infidels under assault, and also serve to weaken the certitude of Muslims themselves.
Is that a bad thing? Or is that not the way to head off world war -- or if not world war, then the islamization, through the mere fact of Da'wa aimed at the economically and psychically marginal, and demographic conquest -- which otherwise, as Bernard Lewis (regarded as the Final Authority by some at Brandeis, who have set the bar low -- be against Esposito and Said, and be attacked by most of MESA Nostra, and you are in like Flynn. It may have been enough once. It is not nearly enough now.), is inevitable.
Would any of us wish for the islmaization of Europe? Have any of us quite grasped what that would mean? Does the Crown Family, or all those other donors who spend their lives making and managing money, and trust "the experts" to decide how to deal with it. Whatever "expert" at the Crown Center thought it was a wonderful idea to have a resident "Palestinian" activist was an ass, and a fool. No doubt nothing will be done about it.
So perhaps some other would-be donors, to whose attention this website may be brought, will think twice the next time they choose to endow some center for Islamic this or Peace that. Try to think. Try to hold onto your thinking caps. Try to take advice from the sensible. If Bat Ye'or is out, email me. I'll tell you where to get the biggest bang for your 501(c)(3) buck.
Shikaki has long been a favorite of foreign TV broadcasting from Israel. He does have that mild, academic manner. I have been aware of his brother's identity, of course, but I don't recall it being brought up on bbc or cnn.
As to Brandeis, they have an incurable disease of wanting to be part of academic fashion and dancing and dialoguing with "moderates" of all sorts and descriptions. As if dialogues with hypocrites and liars could do much good.
I'm not surprised by Shikaki's JI connections, but there is a slight distaste over Brandeis' moral corruption and stupidity [after all, given his brother's leadership in JI, could it be likely that he himself was not connected?]. Stop any contributions that you were intending or not intending to make.
What is the attraction to polling of certian people anyway? Questions can be carefully framed, results "interpreted" in a certain way. How did the Zogby brother (the other one) do in his predictions last time out? And what were they -- anyone remember? And has he ever polled on the subject of Middle East policies, or Islam, or things like that? And who are his clients, and what are his questions, and is there anything about his results that might raise an eyebrow?
And the same questions go for the wondering-how-to-explain-it-since-they've-got-me-on-tape Mr. Shikaki. Anything more than slightly tendentious in those "opinion polls" of his? Or not?
As I recall, bbc and cnn liked in the past to interview Shikaki from his Ramallah office or from venues like the atrium of the American Colony Hotel, where the foreign diplomats and the journalists like to hang out. It was all very charming, indeed rather warm, not coldly academic at all. He used to be careful not to be explicit about his terrorist sympathies but you could sense the fever and frenzy hidden --deeply but not too deeply-- behind his academic eyeglasses.
Why are we surprised? Since Al-Arian got off scott free its time for all the "islamic scholars" to start comming out of their dank little holes. You will never be able to pin anything on Shikaki anyway...just ask a potential jury of his peers...Islam is a religion of peace. I can hear CAIR now..."this esteemed gentleman is being unjustly accused because he's muslim...since when is sponsoring the Islamic Jihad Boy Scouts or the Hamas Girl Guides a crime!! Leave him be for goodness sake. All we want is to facilitate the take over of your country by hook or by crook. We are an oppressed minority, all one billion of us!"