Brandeis University has issued the following "Statement by Brandeis University Regarding Allegations made in Connection with the Appointment of Dr. Khalil Shikaki as Senior Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies":
This is a statement refuting allegations made in recent days that Dr. Khalil Shikaki, a Senior Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies, is a member or sympathizer of Islamic Jihad or any other terrorist organizations.
As far as I know no one has suggested that Shikaki is currently a member of Islamic Jihad. I cited evidence in my article linked above that he was involved with the organization up until 1995, when Bill Clinton added it to the list of terrorist organizations. It would seem that in this Brandeis is setting up a straw man, or at least not addressing the actual point.
Dr. Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, is a scholar widely considered to be among the most serious, responsible, credible, committed and courageous observers of Middle East politics. For more than a decade and a half, he has been at the forefront of numerous attempts to help reach a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. During this period, Dr. Shikaki has been lecturing at leading institutions in America and Israel dealing with Middle East affairs and has often briefed senior U.S. government officials and Jewish organizations in the United States. These include the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Anti-Defamation League, and the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Brandeis University is convinced that the allegations made against Dr. Shikaki are based entirely on unsubstantiated claims, mischaracterizations, innuendos, and guilt by association. Nothing in the material released in the framework of these attacks provides grounds for Brandeis University to reconsider its judgment that Dr. Shikaki has all the necessary credentials to serve as Senior Fellow at the Crown Center.
"Unsubstantiated claims, mischaracterizations, innuendos, and guilt by association." Really? Steven Emerson at the Investigative Project has compiled an exhaustive report: "Khalil Shikaki and His Role in the Formation of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Network in the United States." Read that and get back to me about "unsubstantiated claims, mischaracterizations, innuendos, and guilt by association."
Brandeis' defence of Shikaki sounds eerily like the old self-justification "I'm not anti-Semitic, I work for Jews".
Brandeis should be ashamed!
Statements by Shikaki himself, money transfers, how can one consider such evidence 'unsubstantiated'? Also, guilt by association is, of course, a fallacy, but there exists evidence that Shikaki at the very least shares sympathies with Al Arian and supporters of Islamic Jihad. Hence, the meaning of his associations with those who actively seek to finance terrorism should be rationally questioned. To brush it all off as 'innuendo' is irresponsible.
What does this tell us about Brandeis, if the university refuses at least to address directly the very real and well documented behavior of Shikaki in the 1990s?
Reinharz is making a mistake. To stand by your man when that man is someone caught on tape by the FBI, dealing with the galere of Sami al-Arian, is too much. To assume that the Brandeis "community" as colleges like to call themselves so smarmily these days (and the Greater Community of the Givers, those who get the honorary degrees who are not scholars or basketball players, but the necessary "philanthropists" -- we know what that word means at honorary-degree time, don't we?) are incapable of reading Emerson's report for themselves, and coming to conclusions quite different from that of this whitewash? And such people are also quite capable of finding out about the misleading role played by Shikaki as a highly misleading pollster, whose polls were used to promote Fatah in American (and Israeli) eyes, because Shikaki, no fool, understands perfectly that the jig is likely to be up if Hamas wins, and the "Palestinian" cause hurt. Fatah, after all, long ago applied just the right amount of makeup (a little blush, a little mascara) to satisfy those in the American and European countres who were dying to be deceived.
The Development Office (which solicits the funds which help to pay for such things as that unusually expensive redoing of the President's House that attracted such media attention and outrage a few years ago), is the beating heart of Brandeis. That beating heart may develop an arrythmia. Get those fibrillators ready.
Nasty bugger, that one, sure wouldn't let him near any child of mine.
Brandeis is nuts.
Shakaki is paid top money to poison minds at Brandeis; amazing, sad, sick, stupid and destructive.
Okay Brandeis, that he hasn't actually been charged doesn't matter, just look at the guy's activities and partners; and that is just the part we know about, which cannot be everything; this guy is poison in every way, the quicker you end this, the less the poison will damage Brandeis.
Here is some of the lowdown on Dr, Shikaki.
"Wiretaps of conversations between Shikaki, Sameeh Hammoudeh, Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, Mazen al- Najjar and Bashir Nafi, introduced into evidence at trial, indicate that Shikaki distributed money in the West Bank for Al-Arian associates and that his accounts were used to hold their funds, but that Shikaki cut his ties to the group in late January 1995, shortly after PIJ was declared a blocked terrorist organization by President Clinton".
If there were any sense that instead of getting on a defensive high horse, the Administration (in this case, the President, who has been so eager to start this Crown Center as a place that would be free of all tendentiousness -- the tendentiousness it is not free of, however, is the notion that those who are insufficiently impressed with outward and visible smoothness and "moderation," having run into the same phenomenon a hundred times before, must be McCarthyite mad dogs, instead of perfectly intelligent and well-informed people pointing out certain things that need investigation.
Does the President of Brandeis believe he has looked into Emerson's brief, and considered it and Shikaki's polling work that was clearly, as Martin Kramer says, tied to his eagerness to present a certain view of the "Palestinian" voter that would be helpful, Shikaki knew, to the "Palestinian" movement.
If Reinharz thinks that everyone will simply be satisfied because Brandeis is a "Jewish" university, and he a Middle Eastern scholar who is clearly sympathetic -- whatever that broad word may now mean, or cover for -- to Israel, he is wrong. It's a new world. Islam is an old menace, newly-comprehended after decades of slumber.
See, in this respect, Bruce Bawer's "While Europe Slept." Soon at bookstores near you.
'Guilt by association', is not always a bad idea. Criminals usually associate with each other, so do terrorists. 'Birds of a feather stick together'. You can learn a lot about someone by seeing who they hang out with...druggies usually hang out with other druggies ect. While 'guilt by association', may not hold up in court, I am not in court, and am allowed to form an opinion. If you associate with terrorists, you sympathize with terrorists, you support terrorists, you are a terrorist. Simple as that...get a rope...