Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald adduces some examples illustrative of the current crisis in American higher education:
A miscellany of indictments of the current state of American education:1) The alacrity with which Princeton University hired Cornel West as a university professor, and the delight expressed by the Provost and others in the Princeton administration at this great catch.
2) The elevation of Maria Rosa Menocal, author of a book that purports to study the wonders of the "convivencia" in Islamic Spain, to the supreme authority on this subject.
Menocal’s book itself is sentimental nonsense, not only in form but content. It is a perfect compendium of all the twaddle that has been passed off as history about Andalucia. Her bibliography, incidentally, fails to mention any of the authoritative sources on the history of Muslim Spain -- in particular, it does not even list (much less give any sign of her having actually read) Evariste Levi-Provencal. Nor does it show any sign that she has read Dufourcq.
Instead, her notions of Spain are right out of the works of romantic fiction -- Irving's Tales of the Alhambra (tales indeed) and Chateaubriand's Le Dernier des Abencerages. What is fine for Chateaubriand is not fine for what is supposed to be an historical study. I mean, for god's sake, some of his best passages in the Memoires d'Outre-tombe are entirely fictional: see his sonorous sentences about his visit to "les champs de Lexington," where he never was. And that’s not all: there is also much more fantasy about il sospiro del Moro, the nobility of those Muslims, the wonderful way Maimonides was treated (why, then, did he flee Moorish Spain?), on and on.
The failure to list, or even be aware of, the most authoritative studies of Moorish Spain would be disturbing in a high school paper. What makes it more worrisome, and perhaps representative of the age in which we live, is that Menocal, in her dreamy desire to emphasize convivencia, ignores the realities of Muslim rule and the real status of non-Muslims subjugated to that rule. She has not the slightest idea of what dhimmitude entailed, or why a Jew could be a court doctor or even high-ranking official, while all of his co-religionists would still be subject to humiliation, degradation, and the permanent insecurity that was apparent, for example, in the massacre of Grenada's Jews in 1066 -- and he himself could in a New York or Cordova minute be thrust down himself.Yet she is no goofy armchair historian, without access to a library. No, she is presented to us as the Director of the Whitney Center for the Humanities at Yale. Yale, as I understand it, likes to think of itself as having some standards. Where are they?
The latest issue of the Yale Review tells us proudly that four professors have been appointed to Sterling Professorships. Three were in science. The only one from outside science was Maria Rosa Menocal.
3) The delight expressed by Stephen Greenblatt at the appointment of Homi Bhabha to a professorship at Harvard a few years ago. Bhabha, who is a professor of English, cannot express himself clearly in written English. Not because he comes from abroad. No, his prose has won prizes because of its impenetrable jargon, its postcolonial projects of phallic hegemony, things like that. Things like the quintessence-of-nonsense paragraph specially written for the "MESA Nostra Contest" (which google).
4) Then there is Fawaz Gerges. It is stunning to think that Gerges has managed to climb the greasy pole at Sarah Lawrence, where Adda Bozeman, the unacknowledged source for much of Samuel Huntington's work, and herself the keenest early warner about Islam's threat to everyone else, once held sway.
5) There is also the entire disgraceful operation of lean, mean, jogging John Esposito, head and master of all he surveys at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown.
6) And finally, there is the MEALAC Program at Columbia. It is not possible, at Columbia's MEALAC program, to learn much of anything about the all-important subject -- Islam, its tenets, or the history of Muslim conquest and subsequent treatment of non-Muslims. So much attention is given by Saliba, Dabashi, Khalidi, El-Haj, etcetera etceterum to one subject -- "Palestine" – that they simply have no time for larger investigations.
Columbia once had the most distinguished scholars of Islam -- Joseph Schacht and Arthur Jeffery come swimmingly to mind. Now? Now it is the kind of place, in its MEALAC program, that only Adel Jubeir, and Saeb Erekat, and Amr al-Moussa, and of course 80% of the membership of MESA (the Middle East Studies Association of America, a de facto subsidiary of the Arab League in collaboration with Al-Azhar University and Hamas) could love -- or even take seriously.
In his "Edward Said" Chair, Khalidi is giving his crude money's worth. Why, he even takes part in panel discussions, sponsored by the New Yorker, on the Middle East. Everything, everything but Islam will be discussed, but especially the problem of Isr...oh, you know what I mean.
Could a professor at Columbia simply be a propagandist whose every sentence is a half-truth that keeps his audience from ever learning about Jihad, or about what really underlies the Arab refusal to contemplate a permanent acceptance of an Infidel state, mighty Israel, in its midst?
Jacques Barzun must not be pleased. Nor, one is glad to report, are many alumni. And the beating heart of Columbia, as at every American university, is its Development Office. Alumni, give that Development Office palpitations. Force them to spend on an in-house defibrillator. It may be the only way to get the attention of the trimmers and time-servers, those who rose to the top of academic administration without thinking clearly about their own duty to be informed, and to instruct, and not merely to deliver themselves of Comnmencement Speech pieties as they "take a leadership role." But their attention it will get.
And speaking of money for education...why not throw a little the way of Jihad Watch University? Hugh Fitzgerald and Robert Spencer together have educated more people, more profoundly about Islam over the years since JW/DW opened than any other single source.
It's tax time again and next year be sure that charitable donations column includes a few bucks for Jihad Watch.
There's a button there on left hand side for easy, breezy, simple donations.
We would be grateful for any amount you can spare.
The donation button is on the Jihad Watch side only.
Ah, Georgetown.
They will discuss "Justice and Rights: Christian and Muslim Perspectives".
The archbishop comments:
http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/releases/060323a.htm
You can smell the scent of lies and evasion in the prose ... "have often understood very differently" ...
So does "often" mean not always? And if so, where and when have the understandings not been "very different", and where is your detailed evidence of that?
What horrors hide behind weaselly words such as "very differently"? I begin to think he knows all right.
Which brings us back to David Horowitz and the remarkable work he is doing to restore academic integrity in our universities.
Did anyone else see Horowitz's speech at Duke televised on CSPAN2 yesterday? He was heckled and laughed at throughout his speech by radical faculty and students...it was disgraceful.
Horowitz deserves better. And for university professors to participate in the heckling just confirms the truth. It is a terrible statement of the corruption and intolerance at our universities.
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,17503875%255E25717,00.html
This is a link to a debate between Andrew Bolt and the RMIT (an arty uni in Melbourne. Down load a little movie in 4 parts on the page)
It's a great debate Andrew Bolt points out the predjudice towards freedom of thought in the uni systems very well and highlights the very clear bias towards PC via grants given.
By googling "Bad Writing Contest" there is this ex-unque-leonem example from the latest prize catch at the Harvard English Department, the one which so pleased those whose lives are cheerfully spent in david-lodgesque fashion going from grant to grant, from sabbatical to sabbatical, with the Bellagio-stop (just across the Lago di Como from George Clooney's house at Laglio, formerly owned by Ferreira Heinz Kerrey):
"This year’s second prize went to a sentence written by Homi K. Bhabha, a professor of English at the University of Chicago. It appears in The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994):
"If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality."
This prize-winning entry was nominated by John D. Peters of the University of Iowa, who describes it as “quite splendid: enunciatory modality, indeed!”
Look at that paragraph above. Now open Samuel Johnson, improving opinion into knowledge. Open C. S. Lewis or Empson or Barzun or James Jay Chapman or Gasparov or Nabokov or Jakobson or Tynanov or Shklvoski or Troubetskoy, or for that matter Charles Du Bos or Leo Spitzer or Randall Jarrell or Joseph Brodsky on Frost, or Flaubert's letters to Louise Colet, or Hecht's "Obbligati," or a thousand others who wrote about literature, and who help those who read them to improve their own opinions into knowledge, and in so doing, make one want to read.
Compare Johnson or any of the others mentioned in the paragraph just above with the paragraph from Homi Bhabha. Now look again at the delight expressed by Stephen Greenblatt (a Modern Master of the grants-and-blurbs Bellagio Game) at the appointment of Homi Bhabha as a professor of English, now the Rothenburg Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Center, at Harvard (just as Maria Rosa Menocal is director, or was, of the Humanities Center at Yale).
Now imagine your son or daughter has gone off to Harvard to retain, or acquire, a lively interest in English literature. Now imagine that son or daughter being taught by someone capable of writing that paragraph offered as a representative example above.
Now think about what this may mean.
I actually found it painful to read.
This expresses something of what is going on:
That was Chesterton. One can find similar thoughts, perhaps inspired by that passage, in Lewis. There is an amusing account by Wordsworth of his English master going through something he'd written - Hmm, I suppose you mean ... and thereby making the case for a simpler diction.
But there is more going on here. That passage, choked with its spurious technicalities is saying, "Hands off; don't question me; I know." It is dictatorial in its heart.
The name of the organization escapes me at the moment but it has been succesfully suing or threatening to sue colleges that trample students
based on campus "speech codes" which is just another term for "political correctness"
We don't have higher education anymore as it has
become a "political organization"
What many forget is that a lot this was started by Russia with its subversive and disinformation campaigns. Kruschev boasted that he would "bury us from within". If he were still alive, he would be proud of what he had created.
Mr. Fitzgerald:
May I call your attention to the two volume work entitled "The Jews of Moslem Spain" by. E. Ashtor. It was published in 1979 by the Jewish Publication Society. It has an extensive bibliography. It supports your criticism of Menocal and others who claim that Moslem Spain was a Golden Age for the Jewish population.
I don't have the author's permission to post but the words are so inspiring it would be a shame if they weren't more widely read.
"IT'S TIME TO WAKE UP!
I guess this is what the United States gets for turning its back on the God Who so mightily blessed this nation when it was first colonized as a glory to Him. If we look at the statistics since the 1960s (when we stood by and said nothing as prayer was kicked out of public schools), our entire culture has been degraded from "noble" and "good" to "greedy" & "gluttonous". We stood by and said nothing when abortion was legalized during the "if it feels good, do it" phase. We remained silent when the 1980s were proclaimed as the "me generation" ... when our culture was actually bragging about being focused on "me first and in all things". We chose to remain blind to the fact that the numbers of the homeless in our nation were doubling each year and teen-age pregnancies and suicides had increased by 600% in just 30 years. We wanted no part of God, what Jesus Christ had done for us, and no reminders of our moral responsibility for others ... all we wanted was our toys and our freedom to do whatever we liked without having our conscience pricked by the injustices in the world (or even in our own neighborhoods). In 230 years, folks, the United States has gone from the glory of God and the freedom to worship Him as we wished to "whoever has the most toys wins" ... and no God at all (the mere mention of Jesus Christ brings on a barrage of lawsuits).
So is it any surprise to the Americans that the Muslims (whose goal is to convert the entire world to Islam) have snuck into the USA and have been building mosques and spreading their ideology whenever possible? And we Americans actually helped them to root themselves into our culture because of our state of Godlessness & degradation. Now people are screaming "foul" when we should have been screaming 40 years ago and kept God right where He belonged ... in the forefront of this nation for which His Blessings were sought when it was first colonized!
May God help us wake up and guide us into doing whatever we can to prevent the Muslims from taking over with Islam. They, of course, are free to worship any way they please, but we do not want to be converted into an Islamic state (see how happy the citizens of Iran are once they became a theocracy after the overthrow of the Shah of Iran? Be careful what you wish for ... you just might get it). We also need to fight against the invasion of Islam into our public schools -- if Jesus Christ can't be mentioned or taught about, then neither should Islam! The life & mission of Jesus Christ can be taught just as easily under the same excuses used for bringing Islam into the classroom! The Muslims will use the wonderful freedoms we have here (which their theocratic countries do not have, by the way) to turn against us.
People of the west, I urge you to WAKE UP & do all you can to prevent the spread of Islam in our cultures -- unless you want to awaken someday and learn we have become an Islamic theocracy!"
Author - not me
Hugh,
you might check out the state of higher education in France too. I used to think that French universities were on a higher level than the American. At least that was their reputation. It may still be true, even if France has declined, because the American academy may have come down farther. In any event, there's somebody teaching at the ultra-prestigious College de France in Paris, one Henry Laurens. He wrote a 2 volume Histoire de Palestine, or some such title. There is some useful info in the book but on the whole its purpose seems to be propagandistic. He ignores or glosses over all the 19th century reports of how Jews, even more than Christians, were subject to dhimmi exploitation and humiliation in the Land of Israel in that period. But somehow, he claims that Jews who settled on the land as farmers around 1880 habitually beat Arab workmen on their farms. For this assertion, he provides absolutely no reference, no footnote, no endnote, no documentation whatsoever. Yet this is a book overflowing with pages and pages of endnotes. Nevertheless, for that very defamatory accusation, he supplies no reference. And the many contemporary 19th century accounts of Jews' being humiliated by Arab Muslims in Israel, in Jerusalem in particular [including one by Karl Marx], are glossed over, and I believe that some of the contemporary sources, including sources published in the 19th century in French, are omitted. As said above, he lectures at the College de France.
Australian education:
University of Melbourne actually offer three courses in Islamic law as part of its Graduate Diploma in Asian Law and LL.M.(LL.M. i don’t know what that is) degree.
They are:
* Fundamentals of Islamic Law
* Current Issues in Islamic Law
* Islamic Law and Politics in Asia
By their syllabuses shall ye know them.
There is actually nothing wrong with a Faculty of Laws studying whatever it is that Muslims regard as law; especially if it is a course on Asian law. What matters is the spirit in which it is studied, and I admit that in the current climate in higher education such things are guilty until proven innocent.
Meredith, M.LL. means Magister Legum, Master of Laws (in the plural). The double L, traditionally, indicates a plural. Master is the first step of postgraduate degree. In other words, there is no obligation on a law graduate, such as most Melbourne lawyers will be, to know anything about it; only if you specialize in Asian law after you graduate will you have the option of studying them.
A degree in islamic law?
Stone, decapitate, or hang?
Decisions, decisions
Here's some real history of the Arab conquest of Spain that I found in The Catholic Encylopedia-Copyright 1912
"The Moslem conquest of Spain occured for a variety of reasons. While the Gothic kingdom was decaying through effeminacy and the discord produced by the elective system of the monarchy, the fanatical sectaries of the Koran were advancing through North Africa."
"Legend has it that Count Julian, the governor of Ceuta, in revenge for the violation of his daughter, Florinda ( also called La Cara), by King Roderic, invited the Moslems and opened to them the gates of the Peninsula."
"The first expedition of the Arabs was led by Tarif, who gave his name to Tarifa; the second, by Tarik, who gave his name to Gilbraltar (Gebal-Tarik, ' Mountain of Tarik')."
" The Arabs spread rapidly through Andalusia, soon reaching Toledo, the Gothic capital, while the Jews, who were numerous in the cities, facilitated their entrance."
" Musa, governor of Barbary, came to share the triumphs of Tariq. Some of the Spaniards settled down to live UNDER Arab rule, calling themselves Mozarabs; the rest fled to the mountains where they formed the chief rallying points for the reconquest: Asturias, Navarre, Aragon, and Catalonia. "
Paolo,
Thanks very much for explaining that to me.
Yeh I agree it could be dam handy to know these things if they were taught in an true light, and as it is actual law to some degree it probably is, its the hate culture and political bias in the schools that is the problem.
Hopefully people who care about the future of Modern civilisation will take these courses, but I imagine they are actully bullied and shamed when/ if they attempt it.
Right in the middle of my degree at an arty uni here in Oz 9/11 happened, An Armeneian friend started wanting the 1915 massacre discussed during the history lectures on Turkey, she was ignored, a friend and I were shunned as war mongers for talking about joining the Red Cross to help in Afganistan. USA was often hated, and said to have deserved the attack, it was vile. An American history teacher lost his job, he openly approved of going into Afganistan, (co incidence or not)he was really angry at what ever it was that he was actully sacked over when i saw him later.
Pre 9/11 and more so after I was often considered someone with 'political problems' or at the kindest a bit nutty. The only person I have still stayed friends since with is the Armenian, one other actully attempted to censor me in my own home from talking about islam, as she was anti Isreal...
And hey I still didn't know what M.LL. was lol.
Don't worry I sucked its libary dry for my own interests.
Sorry to go on a personal rave, but that's how it was...and apparently still is.
I don't know if you are Aussie but Andrew Bolt is a good columnist here,
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,17503875%255E25717,00.html
This is a link to a debate between Andrew Bolt
and the RMIT (an more "arty" uni in Melbourne.
down load a little movie in 4 parts on the page)
It's a great debate Andrew Bolt points out the predjudice towards freedom of thought in the uni systems very well and highlights the very clear bias towards PC via grants given.