Recently in academia Category

Here is more evidence of how topsy-turvy our values have become in America ten years after 9/11: the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an unindicted co-conspirator in a terror funding case, opponent of essentially every anti-terror measure ever devised, and a group with several of its former officials in prison for jihad terror-related activities, is mainstream and given entree into public schools, while anti-jihadists who are trying to defend Constitutional freedoms and principles are vilified and shunned even by people ostensibly on the same side. This cannot and will not end well. "Hamas-linked CAIR in Your Kid’s Classroom," by Pamela Geller in Big Government, January 6:

Why is a Hamas-linked Muslim Brotherhood organization given entrée in public schools? In the American Thinker December 19, I asked: “Why is a representative of a terror-linked organization, a defender of jihad terror groups and an apologist for Islamic supremacism welcome to speak in public schools?”

I was referring to Hassan Shibly, a representative of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who spoke at Tampa’s Steinbrenner High School in November. After I broke the story at my website Atlas Shrugs on December 4, giving specifics of where and when the CAIR rep spoke, and then published the article in the Thinker, “Hamas High School in Florida?,” patriots made hundreds of calls and sent hundreds of letters, emails, Tweets and Facebook messages in protest to Steinbrenner school officials.

The main person responsible was Kelly R. Miliziano, a teacher in the Social Studies Department at Steinbrenner. And she announced Wednesday that the school has scheduled additional religious speakers to balance the CAIR operative — a Hindu priest or a Christian pastor.

The problem with that is that Shibly is a political speaker. A Hindu priest or Christian pastor won’t counter the poisonous propaganda that Shibly spews to our impressionable young minds. An informed counter-jihad speaker such as Robert Spencer, Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan or I myself must be given a chance to speak, so as to counter the lies of Hamas-tied CAIR.

Hamas-linked CAIR should not be speaking at all, but if the public school shills insist on presenting jihadi views, they must provide freedom lovers with the same opportunity. Further, political speakers should be off limits on school grounds.

Meanwhile, the email exchanges between CAIR and Steinbrenner High School are revealing. Miliziano wrote this in a November 14 email: “Every year I invite a representative from CAIR to speak to our AP World History Students.” After CAIR-Tampa responded favorably, Miliziano wrote again: “Over the years I have had many speakers from CAIR come to my classes, and it has been such a good learning experience for the students.”

Miliziano said that she “regularly asks” Shibly to speak. This is despite the fact that Shibly has a track record of defending jihad terrorist groups and acting as an apologist for the worldwide jihad and Islamic supremacism. Following the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War, Shibly granted legitimacy to the jihad terrorist group Hezb’allah by characterizing it as a “resistance movement” that provides valued social services to the Lebanese people. “They’re absolutely not a terrorist organization,” Shibly said, and “any war against them is illegitimate.”

Yet Miliziano refused to respond to parents’ requests to vet the notorious Mr. Shibly. Instead, she attacked the parents who complained. She even called parents’ concerns about CAIR “baseless and Islamophobic.” Yet although it presents itself as a civil rights group, CAIR actually has many links to Islamic supremacist and jihad terror groups. CAIR’s cofounders Omar Ahmad and Niwad Awad attended a Hamas planning meeting in Philadelphia in 1993 where they conspired with Hamas operatives to raise funds for Hamas. And several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various jihad-related crimes.

This should be grounds for Miliziano’s immediate dismissal. Freedom lovers should urge Steinbrenner’s principal, Brenda Grasso, to fire Miliziano at once demand equal time for freedom fighters, while calling upon Steinbrenner High cease and desist from inviting Muslim Brotherhood groups to speak to public school students. Call for Ms. Miliziano’s removal. Demand equal time for freedom fighters. Brenda Grasso’s email is brenda.grasso@sdhc.k12.fl.us....

Read it all, and politely email Brenda Grasso.

In "Hamas High School in Florida?" in the American Thinker today, Pamela Geller details how Hamas-linked CAIR has spread its propaganda in one Florida public school. And there is no telling how many other schools are subjecting their students to the same thing.

Why is a representative of a terror-linked organization, a defender of jihad terror groups and an apologist for Islamic supremacism welcome to speak in public schools?

Back on December 4, I published at my website AtlasShrugs.com the disturbing news of child abuse in Florida public schools: the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was poisoning the minds of high school students. CAIR was crowing about its propaganda putsch in getting their party line into high schools, but did not name the schools or who spoke. This shows that Hamas-linked CAIR knows what they are doing is subversion, and that the schools would be held accountable.

However, now we have been able to identify one school -- Steinbrenner High School -- where a representative of CAIR spoke to students. An informed source tells me it was the notorious Hassan Shibly.

Shibly has a track record of defending jihad terrorist groups and acting as an apologist for the worldwide jihad and Islamic supremacism.

Following the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War, Shibly granted legitimacy to Hezb'allah by characterizing it as a "resistance movement" that provides valued social services to the Lebanese people. "They're absolutely not a terrorist organization," Shibly said, and "any war against them is illegitimate" -- more on that here.

Nonetheless, he was welcomed into the school and spoke to several classes throughout the day, including AP World History, World History, and World Religions.

The email exchanges between CAIR and Steinbrenner High School are revealing. Kelly Miliziano, a World History teacher at Steinbrenner, wrote this in a November 14 email: "Every year I invite a representative from CAIR to speak to our AP World History Students." After CAIR-Tampa responded favorably, Miliziano wrote again: "Over the years I have had many speakers from CAIR come to my classes, and it has been such a good learning experience for the students." She added: "I would prefer to have a speaker for each period of the day so that students can really interact with the speaker and ask questions."

"Every year"? "Many speakers from CAIR"? "Each period of the day"? Hamas-linked groups are regularly talking to high school students? Unindicted co-conspirators in the largest terror funding trial in our nation's history are being given a platform to mislead impressionable teenagers? Miliziano suggested topics that would have given CAIR a magnificent platform to spread their disinformation among the students:

Topics can range from :
The mission of CAIR
Basic beliefs, practices, history of....
Confronting stereotypes and misconceptions (a favorite of students)
Sharia
Why does Islam look differently around the world?
Human Rights and Islam
Women and Islam in different countries
Any other topic you think students should know about.

These are important subjects for students to study, but Hamas-tied CAIR is the last place where they can find out the truth about them. Is this what our public schools are doing with our children -- subjecting them to indoctrination and propaganda? That is child abuse. Where are the counter voices? Where are the voices of freedom?...

Read it all. And Pamela has an action alert here. Politely and courteously register your protest against Hamas-linked CAIR being given a platform in public schools.

Hamas-linked CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case -- so named by the Justice Department. CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR's cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements.

And work the phones: Brenda Grasso, Principal email: brenda.grasso@sdhc.k12.fl.us Phone 813-792-5131

Kelly R. Miliziano, Ph.D. (extended the invitation to CAIR) Social Studies Department
Steinbrenner High School - (Rt 2)
5575 W. Lutz Lake Fern Rd.
Lutz, FL. 33558
813 792-5131 Ext. 264
Kelly.miliziano@sdhc.k12.fl.us
813-792-5131 Ext. 264
813-792-5135 (Fax)

A short while ago I wrote this to Douglas Hale, Head of School of Mercersburg Academy:

Dear Mr. Hale

Regarding the scheduled talk by Islamic supremacist Reza Aslan tonight, and the protests against it: please note that if you discuss the protests with Mr. Aslan, he will dismiss concerns about his record with personal attacks against me and my colleagues, including demonstrably false charges of racism and fascism, as well as vicious personal abuse. He will not address the particular charges we have made against him, such as his membership in a lobbying group for the Islamic Republic of Iran, his support for terror groups Hamas and Hizballah, etc.

He will, in short, respond with abuse rather than substantive refutation. He is not capable of substantive refutation, because the charges are true, so all he can do is try to smear his opponents.

I do hope you recall this email when Mr. Aslan does exactly as I have predicted, and that you will subsequently consider carefully the truth of his claims and our charges -- and that you will schedule a pro-freedom speaker for equal time at Mercersburg Academy.

Kindest regards
Robert Spencer

An update on this story. "Mercersburg Academy speaker draws fire from Jihad Watch," from Public Opinion, December 12:

MERCERSBURG, Monday, Dec. 12, 2011 -- A conservative blog has taken issue with the appearance of best-selling author and entrepreneur Reza Aslan tonight at a mandatory assembly for Mercersburg Academy students.

Jihadwatch.org, Robert Spencer's blog associated with the David Horowitz Freedom Center, claims that Aslan is an "Islamic supremacist" who "has tried to pass off Iran's genocidally-minded President Ahmadinejad as a liberal reformer."

Aslan's first book, an international bestseller, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, has been translated into 13 languages and named one of the 100 most important books of the past decade.

Spencer is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, The Truth About Muhammad and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). The Academy has received several telephone calls and e-mails after Jihad Watch posted an "action alert" on Saturday, but Aslan will speak as scheduled, according to an Academy spokesman.

According to Jihad Watch: "One of the most unfortunate aspects of the politically correct straitjacket that binds contemporary public discourse is that deceitful mediocrities and intellectual flotsam and jetsam like Reza Aslan, who aren't capable of independent thought or of defending their own positions except with lies and scorn, are lauded and lionized by the clueless and compromised elites, solely because they parrot currently fashionable opinions."

The school is "proud" to have Aslan speak, according to Wallace Whitworth, Academy director of communications.

"We're very happy to have him here," he said.

Whitworth said Headmaster Douglas Hale knows of Aslan's work and has immense respect for him.

Aslan is co-founder and chief executive officer of BoomGenStudios, the premier entertainment brand for creative content from and about the greater Middle East, and president of AppOvation Labs, a mobile applications company. He is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. He is also the author of How to Win a Cosmic War as well as editor of two volumes: Tablet and Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East, and Muslims and Jews in America: Commonalities, Contentions, and Complexities.

The talk is not open to the public because of limited seating. Aslan's lecture "The Youth Revolution in the Middle East" is a required event for Mercersburg students and faculty.

The Schaff Family Endowment was funded by, and is in honor of, Schaff brothers Phillip H. '38, Charles B. '41, and David S. '43. The endowment supports annual speakers "on topics related to fundamental human values-those principles which direct a person's decisions and actions because they clarify what is 'right' and what is 'wrong.'"

About 430 students from 34 countries and 30 states attend the private boarding school in Mercersburg.

Pity the poor captives.

NOTE Monday 1:00AM Pacific Time: I am reposting this Action Alert, which originally ran on Saturday, to ask those of you who have not yet done so to contact Douglas Hale of Mercersburg Academy at haled@mercersburg.edu today. Please notify him, politely and courteously, of Reza Aslan's allegiances, agenda, and abject intellectual incompetence, as noted below. Ask him, if he allows Aslan to spread his propaganda to Mercersburg students tonight, that he allow a pro-American freedom fighter equal time in the near future. This indoctrination of our young people has gone on far too long. It is time to make a stand.

-------------

Spreading hate and lies to captive audiences

Please contact Mercersburg Academy, a coed boarding high school in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania; this Monday, December 12, Islamic supremacist Reza Aslan is delivering the "Schaff Lecture on Ethics and Morals" -- a unfortunate choice, given the intellectually dishonest and deceptive Aslan's demonstrably unethical behavior over the years.

Even worse, the lecture notice says: "This is a required event for Mercersburg students and faculty."

One of the most unfortunate aspects of the politically correct straitjacket that binds contemporary public discourse is that deceitful mediocrities and intellectual flotsam and jetsam like Reza Aslan, who aren't capable of independent thought or of defending their own positions except with lies and scorn, are lauded and lionized by the clueless and compromised elites, solely because they parrot currently fashionable opinions.

Aslan poses as a modern, moderate Muslim, and fools many; in reality, however, he is a Board member of the president of the George Soros-funded National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a powerful Iranian lobbying group in Washington. Arash Irandoost of the Pro-Democracy Movement of Iran calls NIAC chief Trita Parsi "an intellectually dishonest regime apologist and an unofficial and unregistered lobbyist for the Iranian regime." According to Irandoost, "Trita Parsi contributes to the regime's agenda and serves the interests of those in power in the Islamic Republic of Iran, not the Iranians, nor the Iranian-Americans."

And the Progressive American-Iranian Committee says that when NIAC received funding for various projects from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), "NIAC's projects were approved and welcomed by the Iranian regime." NIAC coordinated its work inside Iran with Hamyaran, a "government initiated agency incepted [sic], initiated, founded and managed by the Iranian regime." NIAC even lobbied the U.S. Congress to "stop appropriating funds for independent democratic movements and NGOs that were not under Hamyaran or regime's control."

It is no surprise in light of Aslan's NIAC connection that he has tried to pass off Iran's genocidally-minded President Ahmadinejad as a liberal reformer. He has called on the U.S. Government to negotiate with Ahmadinejad himself, as well as with Hamas -- that is, with two of the most barbaric and murderous adherents of Sharia.

Aslan has even praised the jihad terror group Hizballah as "the most dynamic political and social organization in Lebanon," as well as the Jew-hating, women-hating, kuffar-hating Muslim Brotherhood, which is dedicated in its own words to "eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within." Aslan wrote: "The Muslim Brotherhood will have a significant role to play in post-Mubarak Egypt. And that is good thing." If, in 1932, someone had written that "the National Socialist Party will have a significant role to play in post-Weimar Germany, and that is a good thing," he would have rightly been called a Nazi sympathizer.

Aslan has also spoken at events sponsored by the Muslim Students Association, a Brotherhood group, and at an event co-sponsored by the Los Angeles chapter of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and moderated by the notorious Edina Lekovic, the Muslim Public Affairs Council flack whom Steve Emerson caught lying on national television, denying she was editor of a Muslim student publication that praised Osama bin Laden as a great mujahid. Emerson produced copies of the rag showing Lekovic's name on the masthead as editor on the very same page on which the praise for Osama appeared.

Why should the students of Mercersburg Academy be forced to listen to this lying Islamic supremacist? Please contact Mercersburg's Head of School, Douglas Hale, and politely and courteously ask him either to cancel the Aslan lecture or to allow equal time to a speaker with a pro-freedom perspective. I am confident that if Mercersburg Academy officials had known about Aslan's abject inability to defend his positions intellectually and his many ties to jihadists and Islamic supremacists, they would never have scheduled him to speak in the first place.

Douglas Hale
Head of School
Phone: 717-328-6113
Email: haled@mercersburg.edu

You may also wish to contact:

M. Deborah Rutherford
Associate Head of School, Spanish
Phone: 717-328-6115
Email: rutherfordd@mercersburg.edu

Ruth Roper
Assistant to the Academic Dean
Phone: 328-6147
Email: roperr@mercersburg.edu

Eugenio Sancho
Academic Dean, Spanish
Phone: 717-328-6326
Email: sanchoe@mercersburg.edu

Spreading hate and lies to captive audiences

Please contact Mercersburg Academy, a coed boarding high school in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania; this Monday, December 12, Islamic supremacist Reza Aslan is delivering the "Schaff Lecture on Ethics and Morals" -- a unfortunate choice, given the intellectually dishonest and deceptive Aslan's demonstrably unethical behavior over the years.

Even worse, the lecture notice says: "This is a required event for Mercersburg students and faculty."

One of the most unfortunate aspects of the politically correct straitjacket that binds contemporary public discourse is that deceitful mediocrities and intellectual flotsam and jetsam like Reza Aslan, who aren't capable of independent thought or of defending their own positions except with lies and scorn, are lauded and lionized by the clueless and compromised elites, solely because they parrot currently fashionable opinions.

Aslan poses as a modern, moderate Muslim, and fools many; in reality, however, he is a Board member of the president of the George Soros-funded National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a powerful Iranian lobbying group in Washington. Arash Irandoost of the Pro-Democracy Movement of Iran calls NIAC chief Trita Parsi "an intellectually dishonest regime apologist and an unofficial and unregistered lobbyist for the Iranian regime." According to Irandoost, "Trita Parsi contributes to the regime's agenda and serves the interests of those in power in the Islamic Republic of Iran, not the Iranians, nor the Iranian-Americans."

And the Progressive American-Iranian Committee says that when NIAC received funding for various projects from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), "NIAC's projects were approved and welcomed by the Iranian regime." NIAC coordinated its work inside Iran with Hamyaran, a "government initiated agency incepted [sic], initiated, founded and managed by the Iranian regime." NIAC even lobbied the U.S. Congress to "stop appropriating funds for independent democratic movements and NGOs that were not under Hamyaran or regime's control."

It is no surprise in light of Aslan's NIAC connection that he has tried to pass off Iran's genocidally-minded President Ahmadinejad as a liberal reformer. He has called on the U.S. Government to negotiate with Ahmadinejad himself, as well as with Hamas -- that is, with two of the most barbaric and murderous adherents of Sharia.

Aslan has even praised the jihad terror group Hizballah as "the most dynamic political and social organization in Lebanon," as well as the Jew-hating, women-hating, kuffar-hating Muslim Brotherhood, which is dedicated in its own words to "eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within." Aslan wrote: "The Muslim Brotherhood will have a significant role to play in post-Mubarak Egypt. And that is good thing." If, in 1932, someone had written that "the National Socialist Party will have a significant role to play in post-Weimar Germany, and that is a good thing," he would have rightly been called a Nazi sympathizer.

Aslan has also spoken at events sponsored by the Muslim Students Association, a Brotherhood group, and at an event co-sponsored by the Los Angeles chapter of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and moderated by the notorious Edina Lekovic, the Muslim Public Affairs Council flack whom Steve Emerson caught lying on national television, denying she was editor of a Muslim student publication that praised Osama bin Laden as a great mujahid. Emerson produced copies of the rag showing Lekovic's name on the masthead as editor on the very same page on which the praise for Osama appeared.

Why should the students of Mercersburg Academy be forced to listen to this lying Islamic supremacist? Please contact Mercersburg's Head of School, Douglas Hale, and politely and courteously ask him either to cancel the Aslan lecture or to allow equal time to a speaker with a pro-freedom perspective. I am confident that if Mercersburg Academy officials had known about Aslan's abject inability to defend his positions intellectually and his many ties to jihadists and Islamic supremacists, they would never have scheduled him to speak in the first place.

Douglas Hale
Head of School
Phone: 717-328-6113
Email: haled@mercersburg.edu

You may also wish to contact:

M. Deborah Rutherford
Associate Head of School, Spanish
Phone: 717-328-6115
Email: rutherfordd@mercersburg.edu

Ruth Roper
Assistant to the Academic Dean
Phone: 328-6147
Email: roperr@mercersburg.edu

Eugenio Sancho
Academic Dean, Spanish
Phone: 717-328-6326
Email: sanchoe@mercersburg.edu

Paul Derengowski was, until recently, a professor at Tarrant County College in Fort Worth, Texas. He tells the story in an email to Jihad Watch:

My name is Paul Derengowski, and I was hired by Tarrant County College in 2008 to teach Great World Religions, Bible History I & II, and Introduction to Philosophy.

On November 8, 2011, I gave the second of a two-part lecture on Islam, as I've been doing Spring, Fall, and sometimes twice in the Summer, dealing with Islamic history and doctrine, and more particularly Muhammad's move to Medina. A question had been raised by two Muslim students in the previous the lecture concerning the sources I used to discuss the raid at Nakhlah. At the start of the second lecture I provided my sources (The Life of Muhammad by Haykal and the Qur'an), which included reading Sura 2:216-217. That is when all hell broke loose.

Both Muslim students, for an hour, berated me, my sources, and my credentials. When other students in the class attempted to ask questions or make comments, then the Muslim students would interrupt them as well. Finally, toward the end of the class period, a student made a comment on how "scary" the person of Muhammad seemed to be. That's when the male Muslim blurted out "you ought to be scared," and then bolted for the door in a fit of outrage. I subsequently filed a campus police report on him out of concern for the safety of students and myself. The female followed suit as well, claiming later in a libelous email she passed around unbeknownst to me—that is, until one of the students forwarded the diatribe to me later—that she was not going to sit there and listen to me slander her religion, even though all I did was quote from Islamic sources.

It was the libelous email that really started the wheels in motion leading up to my resignation. The female Muslim student not only stealthily sent around the email to all the rest of the students in the class to (1) defame me behind my back, but also to (2) try and gather support for her reckless behavior. She ended up with zero support from anyone. In it she made the same baseless claims of slandering Islam, but included some selective quotes from a couple of Mormon bloggers who had done what she was doing, and that is malign me in a malicious way, as well as a portion of blog I had written in 2009 on the Abdulmuttalab idiot who tried to blow up the plane over Detroit.

Both Muslim students then turned to TCC administration to make their specious complaints. The sad thing is, as if what these students did was not sad enough, is that the administration kowtowed to them, called me in and questioned everything from my syllabus (which was already approved and essentially the same ever since 2008) to my motives for teaching, to the banner on my website dealing with Islam. I was informed that I was to teach "neutral" in my views on religion, my opinions and insights were not welcome, that the remainder of my syllabus would be nixed, and that I was to strictly abide by the department approved book (which in reality, I was the one who even selected it for the course). None of the other students were called in and questioned as to what happened. After a veiled threat concerning my employment for failure to abide by the neutrality mandate, I subsequently resigned.

Since my resignation on Nov. 15, I've received several letters of support from the remaining students, as well as notes of encouragement from past students for standing my ground. There are currently, at least, three grievances that have been filed by the students in the class with the administration, yet the administration continues to drag its feet. It has done NOTHING! TCC administration claims that an investigation is ongoing, but no one has ever been spoken to on the matter.

As of today, I've been interviewed by CBS, FOX, KLIF-Dallas, and The Collegian, as well as have several of my students, but as much as I appreciate some of the effort, the two Muslim students have gone unscathed in this whole matter. Grades have been overturned in their favor, which is a clear violation of TCC policy, as well as another slap in my face for acting in an appropriate manner when students are insubordinate, and they've been allowed to return to class, without repercussion, while several of the students in the class are now suffering discrimination, disrespect, forfeiture of return on money invested by their companies for taking certain classes, and lower grades. It is truly a despicable thing the TCC administration has allowed at what I termed a "terroristic act of jihad."

This is the Cliff Notes version of what has transpired. There are many more details and the story only keeps getting uglier. I hope this helps you to understand just a little of what has gone on, and is going on, these past weeks, as the "religion of peace" and its followers wreak havoc once again upon American soil, education, and freedom.

If you need to speak to me directly, you may contact me at apologetics@capro.info. Thank you.

It is surprising that Swamy lasted as long as he has in Harvard's hyper-politically correct environment; his original piece ran at Atlas Shrugs on July 16. At Harvard, the wheels of injustice grind more slowly than I would have expected.

In any case, here is another assault on the freedom of speech and another victory for the ongoing Leftist and Islamic supremacist attempts to demonize, stigmatize and marginalize all speech regarding any kind of resistance to jihad terrorism and Islamic supremacism.

"Harvard removes courses taught by Subramanian Swamy," from PTI, December 8 (thanks to all who sent this in):

NEW YORK: Harvard University has decided to remove courses taught by Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy at its annual summer school session, terming his views as " reprehensible" in a controversial piece he wrote on Islamic terrorism in India.

At a meeting of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, faculty members voted with an "overwhelming majority" to remove two economics courses - 'Quantitative Methods in Economics and Business' and 'Economic Development in India and East Asia' - that Swamy teaches at the three-month Harvard Summer School session.

The faculty meeting, convened to approve the 2012 Summer School course catalogue, resulted in a "heated debate" when Comparative Religion Professor Diana Eck proposed an amendment to exclude Swamy's courses from the catalogue, the Harvard Crimson reported.

In a July op-ed piece for an Indian publication, Swamy had recommended demolishing hundreds of mosques and suggested that only Muslims in India who "acknowledge that their ancestors were Hindus" should be allowed to vote.

Anyone who actually reads Swamy's piece will see that he recommended the first in response to Muslims targeting Hindu holy places, and the second in response to the jihad to turn India into dar al-Islam. Harsh? Maybe, but Eck and Harvard offer no alternatives for how Hindus can defend themselves from the jihad. They would prefer that they sit back passively and consent to Islamization rather than say something that jars the adherents of the Religion of the Perpetually Offended.

Eck said Swamy's op-ed "clearly crosses the line by demonising an entire religious community and calling for violence against their sacred places," adding that Harvard has a moral responsibility not to affiliate itself with anyone who expresses hatred towards a minority group.

And yet Harvard accepted millions from Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who after 9/11 demonized Israel by suggesting that U.S. Middle East policies provoked the 9/11 attacks. New York Mayor Giuliani was so indignant that he refused the 10 million dollar check Alwaleed had sent him for the rebuilding of New York. But as far as Harvard and the academic establishment in general is concerned, some forms of "demonization" are more acceptable than others.

"There is a distinction between unpopular and unwelcome political views," Eck said.

That's an arbitrary distinction. The anti-freedom Left and the Islamic supremacists are working very hard these days to drive all resistance to the global jihad and Islamic supremacism out of the realm of acceptable public discourse. This is just another small victory for them in that effort.

Earlier, more than 400 students had signed a petition calling for Swamy's removal after Harvard had decided to stand by him, affirming its commitment to free speech principles.

So much for free speech principles.

Here (thanks to Pamela Geller) is the FLAME ad. What in it is false? Why, nothing. But the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and Muslim Brotherhood groups in the U.S. including the Muslim Students Association are determined to shut down truthful speech about Islam and jihad, so as to allow that jihad to advance unimpeded. And these youthful tools and useful idiots in the University of Maryland student government vote unanimously to give them what they want, not realizing that there may come a day, as Islamic law continues to advance in the U.S., that they wish they had the freedom of speech, but they have already frittered it away.

"SGA votes to condemn Diamondback advertising department: Body requests formal apology; student group will not accept MMI.’s advertisement offer," by Leah Villanueva in the Diamondback Online, November 10 (thanks to Kent):

In a unanimous vote Wednesday night, the SGA joined a newly formed coalition of students in condemning The Diamondback's advertising department for running a controversial ad last month that several students referred to as "hate speech."

The Student Government Association resolution — which passed 24-0 with three abstentions — called on the department to make a formal apology to the student body for the publication of an advertisement called "You deserve a factual look at … Muslim Arab Anti-Semitism" for the Facts and Logic About the Middle East organization in the newspaper Oct. 19. The resolution also calls for the advertising department to refrain from publishing FLAME ads in the future.

After the ad's publication, outraged students formed the End Hate Speech at UMD coalition, and two members of the group met with two Maryland Media Inc. — the private company that owns The Diamondback — officials and Diamondback editor in chief Lauren Redding last week.

MMI General Manager Michael Fribush offered to provide free advertising space, which MMI has never done before, to print a rebuttal advertisement or for the group to publish a guest column or letter on The Diamondback's opinion page.

But Osama Eshera, who is a member of End Hate Speech at UMD and attended last week's meeting, said the group will decline the offer. While End Hate Speech at UMD appreciated the gesture, the group wants the advertising department to issue a formal apology, to refuse to publish FLAME ads in the future. They group also hopes to foster a conversation about hate speech across the campus.

See? This is a tried-and-tested tactic straight out of the Islamic supremacist playbook. They could have had space to prove the FLAME ad wrong, but they know they can't do that, because it is true -- so instead, they try to get FLAME ads banned. This is exactly the same thing that Hamas-linked CAIR, stealth Islamic supremacists like Reza Aslan, and non-Muslim tools like John Esposito and Karen Armstrong do with me: they can't refute me, so they decline my invitations to debate and pretend that what I say is out of the bounds of reasonable public discourse -- which is exactly where they are endeavoring to put it. And in all such motions, the goal is the same: to allow Islamic jihad and Islamic supremacism to advance unimpeded.

"This is about getting the campus more involved and getting the message out to students and faculty to understand the issue and having their opinions and stances heard on the issue," said junior bioengineering major Eshera, who is also a Diamondback columnist. "That creates a true discussion of these ideas and not just a statement."

However, Fribush said in an interview yesterday that he will not consider writing a formal apology, noting SGA legislators had not reached out to MMI to hear the company's reasons for publishing the advertisement.

Bravo, Fribush. Never apologize for telling the truth.

"I'm a little disappointed the SGA voted on this," Fribush said. "They only heard one side. They didn't hear both sides."

Fribush said if FLAME does submit advertisements to the newspaper in the future, the department will evaluate them for publication on a case-by-case basis, just as it does for all ads.

"We have to vet it on a case-by-case basis," Fribush said. "To just say no without looking at it and censor it goes against everything a newspaper is."...

Indeed.

Pamela Geller has much more here.

In "The Middle East Studies Establishment vs. Walid Phares" in The American Thinker today, Cinnamon Stillwell exposes the rogue's gallery of Islamic supremacist hacks and academic establishment poseurs who have taken aim at Walid Phares after Mitt Romney brought him into his campaign as an adviser. Anyone and everyone who dares to challenge the accepted lies about the Religion of Peace and Tolerance will be targeted in the same way that Phares is being targeted now, in a relentless campaign of personal abuse, defamation, libel, and more. Anyone. And some people today are getting it far worse than is Phares.

Yet some anti-jihadists nonetheless seem to think that if they mouth the prevailing politically correct pieties about "Islamism" and "moderate Muslims" and the "hijacking of Islam," and throw their more honest colleagues under the bus, consenting to their being silenced, that they will be spared the same savaging. They will not be spared.

Phares's moral clarity on Islamism and jihadism do not sit well with those who would rather engage in apologetics and obstructionism.  This explains why his fiercest opponents have included some of the worst from the field of Middle East studies.

California State University, Stanislaus political science professor and "Angry Arab" blogger As'ad AbuKhalil, writing for Salon.com, blamed Phares's appointment on "the Israel lobby and its affiliates," claimed that his "writings are only relevant to Zionist discourse and polemics," and concluded that "when the appointment of Israeli experts on terrorism is not possible, a man like Phares is the second best choice."

AbuKhalil's hostility towards Israel -- and hence, towards anyone who isn't an anti-Zionist fanatic --  is well-established.  He accused President Obama, of all people, of giving "free reign to the Zionist lobby" in a 2010 Al Jazeera television interview.  Speaking in April 2011, he ranted:

[N]ever will we recognize the Zionist State of Israel! ... The Arab World will never prosper until the Zionist regime is removed! ... We celebrate the demise of Israel; yes, Israel, your days are truly numbered!

I tangled with AbuKhalil many years ago on a radio show out of San Diego. He was rude, arrogant, hostile, and defamatory, after the same old tired pattern of all Islamic supremacists. But when I challenged him to find something actually false in my then-new book, Islam Unveiled, he of course could not do so and fell back on more haughty bluster.

AbuKhalil paints Phares's early years in Lebanon as those of a right-wing, Christian militant -- charges that have been repeated by many of Phares's opponents, despite being debunked on numerous occasions.  Yet it turns out that AbuKhalil may have questionable allegiances of his own.  According to John Hajjar at Family Security Matters, AbuKhalil "is known in the Lebanese and Middle Eastern American communities as the mouthpiece of [Hezbollah secretary general] Hassan Nasrallah in the world of petrodollar-funded Middle East studies." [...]

Omid Safi, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill who was quoted in the same Daily Beast article, declared the Phares appointment a "pathetic reflection on Governor Romney to have surrounded himself with such a person for advice on the Middle East and Islam" and likened it "to turning to [former KKK leader] David Duke to get advice on race relations."

Safi is accustomed to making these sorts of inflammatory accusations.  In a 2005 Belief.net article, Safi labeled the isolated prisoner abuse at Abu Graib prison in Iraq "a continuation of twenty years of American foreign policy centered on dehumanizing Muslims."  In April 2010, he falsely claimed that Islam scholar Robert Spencer "threatened me and my family with death" in a Facebook message.  The recipient's Facebook account was later disabled with no explanation, and although Spencer called Safi out for defamation, Safi never retracted the claim, nor did the university take action.

It does amaze me that a lying creep and pseudo-academic like Omid Safi could keep his job at a major university, but that is just another indication of the wholesale intellectual collapse of the American university system, and its utter abandonment of genuine academic standards. The Middle East Studies Association controls Middle East Studies departments all over the country, and ensures that propagandists and ideologues like Safi and his wali Carl Ernst get hired rather than real scholars.

In the Catholic magazine Crisis today, I question the anomaly of Saudi-funded dhimmi pseudo-academic John Esposito having a respected position at a Catholic University, Georgetown:

[...] While cheering conversions to Islam, Esposito has downplayed persecution of Christians in Muslim countries. Journalist Cinnamon Stillwell reports that when speaking in Stanford in 2008, Esposito did not welcome questions about that persecution: “When asked about the well-documented violence against Christians in Iraq and the persecution of Christians throughout the Muslim world, Esposito resorted at first to obfuscation and then bullying. After trying to chalk up the violence merely to ‘primitive’ behavior, he cut off one young woman angrily, telling her that it was ‘an absurd question.’” Esposito, according to Stillwell, claimed that “all religions produce violence,” and offered up “a litany of talking points in which he compared random and universally condemned acts of violence among Christians and Jews to the routine and often sanctioned bloodshed emanating from the Muslim world.”

During his Stanford talk Esposito displayed a deep hostility toward Christianity: “He referenced the Crusades three times in the first ten minutes, each in the false context of acts of purely Christian aggression. In a relativistic attempt to paint all religions as equally problematic, Esposito compared Islamic terrorists to ‘Christian militants,’ and referred repeatedly to ‘Christians blowing up abortion clinics’ and the ‘Christian Right.’” He didn’t mention that the handful of abortion clinic bombers were universally condemned by all Christian authorities, while the thousands of Islamic jihadists who have perpetrated attacks worldwide in the name of Islam since 9/11 generally enjoy the blessing of Muslim clerics.

Esposito generally tends to blame Christians for friction between Muslims and Christians. In his 2002 book What Everybody Needs to Know about Islam (Oxford University Press), he acknowledges that “Muslim-Christian relations have deteriorated,” and lays the responsibility for that deterioration squarely at the feet of Evangelical Christian leaders in the U.S. – and Jews: “The creation of the state of Israel has contributed to the deterioration of relations and the Christian fundamentalists like Robertson, Graham and Falwell have been the source of intolerance, persecution, violence and terrorism.”

Meanwhile, Esposito has praised one of the most notable of those clerics who exhort their people to violence. He has called Muslim Brotherhood Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who advocates suicide bombings, a champion of a “reformist interpretation of Islam and its relationship to democracy, pluralism and human rights.” An indication of Qaradawi’s firm commitment to “democracy, pluralism and human rights” came in January 2009, when during a Friday sermon broadcast on Al-Jazeera, he prayed that Allah would kill all the Jews: “Oh Allah, take this oppressive, Jewish, Zionist band of people. Oh Allah, do not spare a single one of them. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one.” He also declared: “Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by [Adolf] Hitler.”

To be sure, Esposito’s endorsement of Qaradawi may have been based on incomplete knowledge, although Qaradawi has made his positions abundantly clear in over a hundred books and an enormously popular television show on Al-Jazeera. The same cannot be said, however, of Esposito’s association with the unsavory Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which he has called a “phenomenal organization.” Esposito has spoken at CAIR fundraisers in order, he explained, to “show solidarity not only with the Holy Land Fund [that is, the Holy Land Foundation], but also with CAIR.” The Holy Land Foundation was shut down and prosecuted for funneling money to the jihad terror group Hamas, which once boasted on its website about its murders of civilians in pizza parlors and on buses; the Justice Department named CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in the case.

CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. (Esposito himself also refuses to condemn Hamas, as the Investigative Project notes: “In a 2000 interview in The United Association for Studies and Research’s (UASR) Middle East Affairs Journal, Esposito refused to condemn Hamas, which at the time was already designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the U.S. State Department.”) Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR cofounder and longtime Board chairman Omar Ahmad was reported as saying in 1998 that “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.” CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper has said: “I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future.” [...]

This guy again: "In March 2007, a KSU official said that [Julio] Pino, 48, had acknowledged providing news stories to a jihadist Web site but had stopped."

"Kent St. prof. reportedly yells ‘Death to Israel’ at event with Israeli diplomat," by Christopher Santarelli for The Blaze, October 26:

A Kent State history professor, who has allegedly been linked to elements of Muslim extremism, reportedly lashed out at a former Israeli diplomat speaking at the university Tuesday night.

The event was co-sponsored by the undergraduate student government and entitled “An Evening with Ishmael Khaldi.” Khaldi spoke in regards to his book, A Shepherd’s Journey, which details his life journey from a small tent in a Bedouin village to the inner-circles of the Israel Foreign Service. When his speech ended, Khaldi opened the floor to a Q&A, where History Professor Julio Pino rushed to be the first to question Khaldi.

John Milligan of KentWired, an independent student publication,reports that Pino began to question how Khaldi could justify speaking of foreign aid given from Israel to countries like Turkey, when that aid was financed by “blood money that came from the deaths of Palestinian children and babies.” Milligan, a senior majoring in magazine journalism, then captured the the most shocking part of the exchange:

“The crowd fell into an awkward silence as the two continued to exchange words from across the auditorium.

‘It is not respectful to me here,’ Khaldi said.

Pino responded by saying ‘your government killed people’ and claimed Khaldi was not being respectful to him.

‘I do respect you, but you are wrong,’ Khaldi said. ‘It’s a lie.’

The exchange ended as Pino stormed out of the auditorium shouting ‘Death to Israel!’”

Friday evening I was in Baltimore, Maryland, speaking before a packed house at the Institute On The Constitution -- the largest crowd they had had in nine years of featuring weekly speakers. At the beginning of the evening they surprised me with the plaque above, an honor as great as it was unexpected.

And while I do get death threats regularly, the favored device of Islamic supremacists in the West to silence their opponents is not assassination, but character assassination. The clownish Islamic supremacist Reza Aslan was on the road last weekend as well, peddling his "Islamophobia" snake oil to the hapless students at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. And in the course of his talk, he returned, as always, to the chief object of his obsession.

One of the most ridiculous aspects of our silly age is that utter mediocrities and intellectual flotsam and jetsam like Reza Aslan, who aren't capable of independent thought or of defending their own positions except with lies and scorn, are lauded and lionized by the clueless and compromised elites, solely because they mouth the proper politically correct opinions.

"Hope College speaker says bias against Islam prompted by ignorance, fear," by Greg Chandler for The Grand Rapids Press, October 8 (thanks to James):

HOLLAND — Ten years after the Sept. 11 attacks, anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States is at an all-time high.

What’s particularly disconcerting, says Reza Aslan, is that such beliefs have become increasingly part of the American mainstream, showing up in comments by members of Congress and commentators on Fox News.

“It’s become a receptacle in which Americans are throwing their fears and anxieties about the economy, their fears about the changing political landscape, their fears about the changing racial landscape in this country,” said Aslan, a contributing editor at The Daily Beast and author of the bestselling book “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam,” who spoke this week at Hope College’s Critical Issues Symposium.

“Whatever is fearful, whatever is frightening, whatever is uncomfortable, is being tagged as Islam.”...

This is so absurd it beggars belief. if Americans have "fears and anxieties" about Islam, it isn't because of the economy, or the "changing political landscape" (whatever that means, but Aslan probably doesn't mean Obama's imploding approval numbers), or the "changing racial landscape" in this country. Americans are concerned about Islam because of Naser Abdo, the would-be second Fort Hood jihad mass murderer; and Khalid Aldawsari, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Lubbock, Texas; and Muhammad Hussain, the would-be jihad bomber in Baltimore; and Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be jihad bomber in Portland; and Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square jihad mass-murderer; and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station jihad murderer; and Naveed Haq, the jihad mass murderer at the Jewish Community Center in Seattle; and Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh, who hatched a jihad plot to blow up a Manhattan synagogue; and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas airplane jihad bomber; and many others like them who have plotted and/or committed mass murder in the name of Islam and motivated by its texts and teachings.

But for Aslan, of course, this is all my fault:

Aslan, an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside, has been involved in numerous efforts to build bridges between Americans and the Muslim world. A native of Iran whose family escaped to the U.S. during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, he says a well-financed campaign involving such organizations as Jihad Watch, headed by Robert Spencer, has fueled anti-Muslim sentiment.

Aslan was probably here referring to the Center for American Progress "Islamophobia" report, which made much of $40 million donated over a period of nine years to several different organizations. Daniel Pipes notes: "It's pretty rich that CAP, an organization whose 2009 budget was $38,187,695, focuses on 8 organizations receiving about that sum over a period of 9 years."

Aslan also debunks efforts in more than 20 states to pass laws that would ban the establishment of courts based on Muslim law, or Sharia. He says such courts, which would deal primarily with family matters such as marriage and divorce, should not be seen as a threat on America.

“It is literally impossible for Sharia, as penal code, to creep its way into America,” Aslan said. “You’re not going to get to stone people in America tomorrow.”

How about the next day? Seriously, Aslan probably didn't tell his luckless marks at Hope that Sharia has already been used as a determining factor in court cases in 23 states.

The answer to change people’s minds toward Islam is not education, despite Aslan’s role as an educator. He says the answer is building relationships with individual Muslims.

“If you know one Muslim, it cuts in half the negativity rating you have toward Islam,” Aslan said. “If you get to know (a Muslim) as a person, as a human being … it’s hard to maintain that idea of otherness.”

I don't know. I expect that knowing Reza Aslan personally would double a person's "negativity rating" toward Islam.

The American Library Association is a foremost bastion of Useful Idiots who talk a good game about censorship and the dangers of book banning, but are led by their political biases into inconsistency in their understanding of what constitutes a "Banned Book." What they really mean by "Banned Books Week" is "Books Disliked by Conservatives and Freedom Fighters Week." Books that are disliked by their favored groups -- as mine are by Islamic supremacist groups such as Hamas-linked CAIR -- are never considered to be books that are "banned or challenged," no matter now often they are actually banned. Books that are genuinely controversial but go against their cherished Leftist multiculturalist assumptions are kept out of libraries and never given a fair shake.

The American Library Association, champion of banned books, has itself banned me, for daring to enunciate truths that they would prefer not be known. So do you want to read a real Banned Book for banned books week? Try The Truth About Muhammad, incinerated in the video above for telling truths the book-burner didn't like being aired (and yet in stark contrast to the aftermath of the threat of the burning of the Qur'an, nary a riot will ensue, and nary an innocent person will be harmed).

To be sure, my book is not "holy," and exhorts no one to kill, enslave or subjugate anyone for any reason. Maybe if it did, it would get on the ALA's list for Banned Books Week.

"Banned Books Week: Read 'The Hunger Games' or the 'Koran,'" by Liz Kelly Nelson for Zap2It, September 27:

Thanks to the vigilance of the American Library Association (ALA), the list of books banned or challenged in 2010-2011 isn't as long as it could be, but it's long enough to keep a person out of books for at least a year. Every year during Banned Book Week the ALA works to keep books considered controversial, obscene or profane on library shelves and in schools....

Except those that are controversial because they outrage the ALA's Leftist pieties.

The ALA asks that from Sept. 24 - Oct. 1, lovers of literature read a banned book. Below, some titles from the 2010-2011 list to get you started:

"The Hunger Games," Suzanne Collins
"The Diary of Anne Frank," Anne Frank
"Water for Elephants," Sarah Gruen
"Brave New World," Alduous Huxley
"The Koran"
"The Catcher in the Rye," J.D. Salinger
"Push," Sapphire
"Slaughter-house 5," Kurt Vonnegut
"Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India," Joseph Lelveld
"My Mom's Having a Baby," Dori Hillested Butler

Regarding the Georgia public school exercise that praises Islam and polygamy, about which we have written here and here, Pamela Geller has a great deal more here -- including pages from the classroom material itself (one of which I have posted above; see more in larger versions at Atlas).

Free citizens must stand up against this. Please contact Ethan Hildreth, the superintendent of the Henry County School District, where this material is being used, and explain to him politely that a curriculum that promotes polygamy and veiling of women is demeaning to women and contradicts American notions of the equality of rights of all people, as well as Judeo-Christian notions of the equality of dignity of all people. Tell him that this flagrant advertising for Islam also effectively amounts to proselytizing, of a kind that would never be tolerated in public school material if the religion were Christianity.

UPDATE: Pamela Geller has much more new information here.

Useful idiots in training. "Columbia Students 'Excited' About Dining With Ahmadinejad," by Clare M. Lopez for Radicalislam.org, September 17:

Students at Columbia University say they are "excited" about the prospect of dining with one of the world's most brutal chief executives, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Scheduled to speak on 23 September 2011 at his fifth United Nations (UN) General Assembly appearance, Ahmadinejad has somehow been permitted to invite Columbia student members of a group called CIRCA, the Columbia International Relations Council and Association, to a private dinner. When threatened with civil and criminal legal action by the Israel Law Center, Columbia president Lee C. Bollinger hastened to clarify that the event would not be held on campus. Nevertheless, the failure of Columbia students and faculty to recognize the moral repugnancy of appearing anywhere willingly in public with a man personally responsible for directing the vicious suppression of his own people's struggle to be free, as well as his country's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) programs and global terrorist activities is troubling, to say the least....

To say the least.

In Human Events today I discuss the sad condition of mainstream journalism:

The International Islamic News Agency (IINA) reported Sunday that “in a bid to run correct news reporting about Muslims, two American universities have launched a project to teach journalists how to tackle Islam-related issues. ... Titled 'Covering Islam in America,' the project was co-launched earlier this week by Washington State University and the Poynter Institute’s News University.”

The course, we’re told, “is designed to prepare reporters to run accurate information when reporting about Muslims and Islam-related issues.” Developed by Lawrence Pintak, a former CBS News Middle East correspondent, the course “covers a wide range of topics on Islam ranging from the Islamic teachings and the history of Muslim immigration to the role of women in Islam and the relationship between Islam and Christianity.”

We certainly could use some accurate information about Islam. The mainstream media is universally fawning and obsequious when it comes to reporting about the global jihad and Islamic supremacism. Journalists consistently downplay or ignore altogether the invocations of the Koran and Muhammad’s example that Islamic jihadists make on a routine basis, and continually assume that any Muslim who is not actively engaged in terror activity is a “moderate”—as the jihadist Imam Anwar al-Awlaki was dubbed in a glowing portrayal in the New York Times shortly after 9/11.

But that is not the kind of accurate information that this course is preparing journalists to supply. “We have no ax to grind, other than a desire to see accurate, balanced reporting of this topic,” Pintak insisted, but his courses is actually predicated on the assumption that Muslims and Islam are getting negative press coverage. That is, of course, howlingly absurd. After every jihad plot and jihad attack, journalists fill their publications with stories about pious, wise Muslims fearing a “backlash"—that never comes. As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approached, the mainstream media was full of stories about how wise, pious Muslims were bearing up after a decade of discrimination and harassment—despite the fact that hate crimes against Muslims are much rarer than hate crimes against Jews and others. News reports about Islamic jihad activity routinely characterize the perpetrators as “militants” or “insurgents,” or if they’re lone-wolf jihadis, as suffering from emotional or psychological problems—never as what they are, Islamic jihadis.

Ibrahim Hooper, old “Honest Ibe” himself, and others from the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) are frequently quoted in news stories as if they’re representatives of a neutral civil rights organization, while those who are trying to stem the advance of Sharia and Islamization in the West are just as routinely demonized in the press, hung with negative labels or undercut in their statements in a way that Hooper or Feisal Abdul Rauf or any of the others would never believe even possible....

There is more.

These courses are predicated on the assumption that Muslims and Islam are getting negative press coverage. That is, of course, howlingly absurd. After every jihad plot and jihad attack, journalists fill their publications with stories about pious, wise Muslims fearing a "backlash" -- that never comes. As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approached, the mainstream media was full of stories about how wise, pious Muslims were bearing up after a decade of discrimination and harassment -- despite the fact that hate crimes against Muslims are much rarer than hate crimes against Jews and others. News reports about Islamic jihad activity routinely characterize the perpetrators as "militants" or "insurgents," or if they're lone-wolf jihadis, as suffering from emotional or psychological problems -- never as what they are, Islamic jihadis. Ibrahim Hooper, old "Honest Ibe" himself, and others from Hamas-linked CAIR are routinely quoted in news stories as if they're representatives of a neutral civil rights organization, while those who are trying to stem the advance of Sharia and Islamization in the West are just as routinely demonized in the press, hung with negative labels or undercut in their statements in a way that Hooper or Faisal Abdul Rauf or any of the others would never believe even possible.

And yet after all this, we're told that Americans still have a negative view of Islam? That isn't because of biased media coverage. That's because of Naser Abdo, the would-be second Fort Hood jihad mass murderer; and Khalid Aldawsari, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Lubbock, Texas; and Muhammad Hussain, the would-be jihad bomber in Baltimore; and Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be jihad bomber in Portland; and Nidal Hasan, the successful Fort Hood jihad mass-murderer; and Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square jihad mass-murderer; and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station jihad murderer; and Naveed Haq, the jihad mass murderer at the Jewish Community Center in Seattle; and Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas airplane jihad bomber; and so many other Islamic jihad murderers and would-be murderers in America.

No number of seminars, no blizzard of fawning press coverage, is going to erase the impression those men and others like them have made upon non-Muslims in America. But I am sure academics and journalists will keep trying.

"USA/Islam-Press: US Journalists Taught How to Cover Islam," from IINA, September 18:

WASHINGTON, 20 Shawwal/18 Sept (IINA)- In a bid to run correct news reporting about Muslims, two American universities have launched a project to teach journalists how to tackle Islam-related issues.

“In our increasingly polarized media landscape, having the facts about any topic is vital to good journalism,” said Howard Finberg, director of interactive learning at the Poynter Institute, reported Ahlul Bayt News Agency.

“And this is especially important when covering topics such as religion.”

Titled “Covering Islam in America”, the project was co-launched earlier this week by Washington State University and the Poynter Institute’s News University.

The course is designed to prepare reporters to run accurate information when reporting about Muslims and Islam-related issues.

“We have no ax to grind, other than a desire to see accurate, balanced reporting of this topic, which has such broad impact on American society today,” said Lawrence Pintak, a former CBS News Middle East correspondent who developed the project.

The course covers a wide range of topics on Islam ranging from the Islamic teachings and the history of Muslim immigration to the role of women in Islam and the relationship between Islam and Christianity.

“Our e-learning module on NewsU is an effective and accessible way for journalists to get the training they need to cover Islam and Muslims in America,” Finberg said.

In addition to the online course, a version with more readings and analysis called “Islam on Main Street” is offered through WSU’s Center for Distance Education.

Sections about the diversity of religious expression, women and Islam, and Islam and the black community are also planned.

Though it is mainly initiated for journalists, bloggers and students, the course is also useful to educators, government officials and anyone involved in the conversation about Islam in America.

Reporters will be instructed by top-notch journalists and academicians, who have a long experience in reporting about Islam and Muslims.

“We turned to the scholars who know this subject inside out and helped them present their knowledge in a way accessible to general assignment reporters on deadline,” Pintak, said.

In addition to Pintak, instructors also include Stephen Franklin, a former Chicago Tribune Middle East correspondent, who spent years covering the Muslim world.

Pintak said the online course offers the kind of education about the Muslim community that he wished he had received before he was assigned by CBS to Beirut 30 years ago.

“I had been reporting on wars in Africa, so I knew how to dodge bullets. Of Islam, the dominant religion in the region, I knew essentially nothing,” Pintak said.

Hostile sentiments against US Muslims, estimated between six to eight million, have been on the rise since the 9/11 attacks.

A US survey has revealed that the majority of Americans know very little about Muslims and their faith....

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, head of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ), the US largest Jewish movement, had also accused US media and politicians of demonizing Islam and portraying Muslims as “satanic figures”,

A recent British study accused the media and film industry of perpetuating Islamophobia and prejudice by demonizing Muslims and Arabs as violent, dangerous and threatening people.

One of the oddest and most telling aspects of this Rick Perry/Aga Khan curriculum controversy is that when Pamela Geller and I started writing about the curriculum, it was scrubbed from the web. Now it has been scrubbed from the Google cache, as I noted here. This is highly suspicious, and gives the lie to those who claim that the curriculum material was actually innocuous, or that we weren't actually discussing the actual curriculum material, or that we were discussing curriculum material that was only used by a few Texas teachers at best. Clearly we had the right stuff, and clearly it was bad, and clearly Perry's people knew it was bad, and that is why it is gone now.

But Pamela Geller has screenshots of it all, as well as the full text, here.

When Geller and I first started criticizing the Rick Perry/Aga Khan curriculum on Islam for Texas schools, the response was furious, and primarily focused on two claims.

First, defenders of Perry such as David Stein and Ace of the Ace of Spades blog claimed that what we had wasn't the curriculum at all, and presented what they said was actually the curriculum. This turned out to be false, as I explained here: they were presenting one teacher's lesson plan as the official curriculum, while what we were presenting was actually the official material, developed by the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) and UT-Austin in a partnership known as the Muslim Histories and Cultures Program (MHC) and proudly announcing that it was the fruit of "Governor Rick Perry's desire to better educate Texas teachers on Muslim topics." It also says that "Governor Perry was instrumental in getting this program off the ground."

Neither Stein nor Ace nor any of those who have echoed their false claims have ever admitted that they were not working from the actual curriculum, and passing off as the official curriculum something that was not remotely that.

Second, as my old friend Bryan Preston claims here, many asserted that the curriculum -- the real one, that we presented -- wasn't so bad anyway, or as Bryan says, "I don’t think it’s a dawah." Preston also downplays the connection of Rick Perry to the curriculum, which I have shown in the quotes above. Dawah is Islamic proselytizing, and it takes many forms. In Methodology of Dawah by Shamim A. Siddiqi, a book that is designed to teach Muslims how to convert people to Islam, Siddiqi tells Muslims to present Islam in a "concocted or abbreviated form" and only introduce them to "the revolutionary aspect of Islam" after they convert.

Concocted = made up. Abbreviated = things are cut out. And that is just what the Perry/Aga Khan curriculum does: it presents a fantasy benign Islam, with all the violent and oppressive bits cut out. Here are some of the elements of the program that show it to be a whitewash of Islam:

Session One

• The main reading is from Carl Ernst’s Following Muhammad, the first three chapters. This book whitewashes Muhammad, saying that he “was, by all accounts, a charismatic person known for his integrity” (p. 85). Muhammad’s exhortations to make war against unbelievers, his multiple marriages and child marriage, and other negative aspects of his biography are explained away or ignored entirely. 
• The curriculum directs participants to “consider Carl Ernst’s statement, ‘It is safe to say that no religion has such a negative image in Western eyes as Islam.’” Then it asks them: “Why is this so? How have political and economic relationships between the Middle East and Western Europe and the United States impacted perceptions of Islam, in the past and the present? How have they impacted perceptions of the ‘West’ among Muslims?” Note that participants are guided to see the “negative image” of Islam as the result of “political and economic relationships between the Middle East and Western Europe and the United States.” No hint is given of the possibility that Islam might have a “negative image” in the West because of jihad conquests, institutionalized oppression of women and non-Muslims, and the like.
• The curriculum quotes Edward Said, who ascribed all critical discussion of Islamic jihad and Islamic supremacism to racism and neo-colonialism, as warning that one should speak of “Islams rather than Islam,” and warns that in dealing with Islam “one has entered an astoundingly complicated world.” This invocation of Islam’s complexity is frequently used to discourage those who point to the Qur’an’s violent passages and Muhammad’s exhortations to warfare as evidence of Islam’s bellicose intentions. Yet Islamic jihadists routinely refer to this material with no hesitation based on Islam’s “complexity.”

Session Two

• Readings for the session entitled “Muhammad through History” include Celebrating Muhammad: Images of the Prophet in Popular Muslim Poetry and The Miraculous Journey of Mahomet. It notes, correctly, that “for millions of Muslims around the world, the Prophet Muhammad has become the paradigm, or role model, who is worthy of being emulated.” However, there is no hint whatsoever of how Muhammad, as a model to be emulated, has inspired jihad warriors and terrorists.
• The common Islamic apologetic claim that Islam inspired all the greatest achievements of Western Judeo-Christian civilization appears in the assertion that “there is strong evidence to suggest that Muslim poetic accounts of the mi’raj, reaching Europe through the Arab courts in medieval Spain, inspired the Italian writer Dante to compose his famous work, The Divine Comedy.” No mention is made of how Dante placed Muhammad in hell as a false prophet.

Session Three

• This session on the Qur’an makes no mention whatsoever of the elements of the Qur’an that exhort Muslims to hate unbelievers and make war against them (98:6; 48:29; 47:4; 2:191; 4:89; 9:5; 9:29: 9:123; etc.) The text used is Michael Sells’s Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations, which doesn’t even include the sections of the Qur’an that most directly and emphatically call for violence against non-Muslims.
• The curriculum makes sure to point out that “believers point to this very perfection of the text as the proof of the prophethood of Muhammad,” and that “for many, the notion that the Qur’an is inimitable, that is, no human could possibly have produced anything so perfect, proves that it had to be God who revealed this message to Muhammad.” But it makes no mention of the text’s designation of non-believers as “the most vile of created beings” (98:6), the warlike passages noted above; its call to beat disobedient women (4:34) and the like.

Session Four

• This second session on the Qur’an tells participants to “discuss the role of the Qur’an in providing direction for an ethical life.” Here again, no mention is made of the ways in which Islamic jihadists use the Qur’an’s teachings to justify violence against and the subjugation of unbelievers.
• The curriculum lists eight central themes of the Qur’an. Although there are well over 100 Qur’an verses exhorting believers to jihad warfare, jihad does not make the list.

Session Five

• This session on the Sunni/Shi’ite split and other sects in Islam fails to mention one salient point: Islamic law calls for the execution of heretics and apostates; this law has been the foundation for an extraordinary amount of bloodshed between adherents of various Muslim sects throughout history and today.

Session Six

• This session dismisses as a “misconception” the idea that “Islam forbids music and representational art.” It does not explain why so many Muslims, including the Taliban who destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas, came to hold this “misconception.”

Session Seven

• Participants are asked, “What conditions in Baghdad encouraged such a vast array of discoveries and inventions?” But the readings give no hint of the fact that Jews and Christians in Baghdad actually accounted for the great majority of these inventions. See here for a full explanation.
• Participants are also asked: “Why was there such an abundance of inventions and discoveries attributed to Muslims in Medieval times but not today?” This question guides students toward a discussion of the trumped-up and manipulative modern concept of “Islamophobia.”
• The curriculum states: “The religion that the Prophet Muhammad preached provided his followers an ethical and moral vision for leading a life of righteousness.” Again, no mention is made of Muhammad’s exhortations to hate and violence, his child marriage (which many Muslims consider exemplary behavior and imitate it), and the like.
• The curriculum states: “Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians, who were subjects of new Arab rulers, could maintain their religious practices provided they paid jizya, a tax in tribute in lieu of military service.” It gives no hint of the institutionalized discrimination and humiliation that this dhimmi status involved.
• The curriculum quotes Maria Rosa Menocal, the modern scholar most responsible for the myth of a tolerant, pluralistic Muslim Spain. It also discusses this tolerant Muslim Spain as a fact. In reality, however, Jews and Christians had a humiliating second-class status in Muslim Spain. When one Muslim ruler appointed a Jew as a local governor in Granada in 1066, the Muslims rioted and murdered four thousand Jews. The curriculum doesn’t mention any of that.

Session Eight

• The readings for this session again include Carl Ernst’s Following Muhammad, as well as John Esposito’s The Straight Path. Both are highly apologetic, one-sided works that give the reader little idea why Muslims would wage jihad or commit violence in the name of Islam. No works of other perspectives are included.
• The curriculum blames the restriction of rights of Muslim women on European colonialism, ignoring the many Islamic texts and teachings that restrict women’s rights.

Session Nine

• The participants are again directed to read Carl Ernst and John Esposito, as well as another modern-day non-Muslim Islamic apologist, Charles Kurzman. No works of differing perspectives are presented.

Don't believe me? Fine. Examine the material for yourself here.

Unable to defend his own views

Now more than ever, Muslim and non-Muslim Islamic apologists are making broad-based and inaccurate attacks on my scholarship and integrity; but when it comes to backing up their claims in debate with me, they suddenly get cold feet. The list of Islamic "scholars" and non-Muslim "experts" who have refused to debate me keeps growing; it now includes Ahmed Afzaal; Akbar Ahmed; Karen Armstrong; Reza Aslan; Jamal Badawi; Robert Crane; Dinesh D'Souza (although I did best him in debate at CPAC in 2007, he refuses a return engagement, perhaps sensing the outcome would be the same); Carl Ernst; John Esposito; Mark LeVine; Khaleel Mohammed; Grover Norquist; Ahmed Rehab; Louay Safi; and the viciously mendacious academic propagandist Omid Safi, who ought to have been fired from UNC-Chapel Hill long ago for his vile false claim that I had sent him death threats.

And now we can add Juan Cole, the heavy hitter who has equated Sarah Palin with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and defended Saudi Wahhabism. Jihad Watch reader David wrote to him asking him to debate me. He received this response from Cole:

Hi, David.

Spencer is a fraud with no academic credentials in Islamic studies. For me to debate him would bestow on him a level of legitimacy his falsehoods have not earned him.

cheers Juan

When David sent that to me, I wrote this back to him and to Cole:

Hello, David. Manifestly, from what is below, it is Juan Cole who is the fraud, hiding behind the MESA ideological control of the academy to cover up his mediocrity and utter intellectual vacuity. He does not and cannot point out anything false in what I say, and smears me to hide the fact that he cannot defend his own positions and fears to debate me. In reality, if I were the "fraud" he says, he could debate me, win handily, and in doing so show me up. After all, he cannot deny that my work has influence -- how many bestselling books has he written again? Isn't it interesting that neither this coward nor any of his fellow academic poseurs, although their influence is far lesser than mine, will deign to do the world the service of showing me up publicly and thereby ending my baneful influence forever? Could it be that they can't do it? Sure looks like it, as Cole cowers in fear, fashions excuses, and slings insults. All that is easy. Refuting my work is not so easy.

Cordially
Robert

Meanwhile, speaking of debates, I had neglected to note a speaking engagement this Friday on my calendar, and thus inadvertently scheduled a conflict when I agreed to a rematch with the hapless Moustafa Zayed at that time. When I discovered the conflict I asked that the debate be rescheduled, and it has now been set for the following week, August 12, at 9PM EDT. The wretched Zayed took advantage of my request to claim that I was ducking him, thus revealing his utter desperation, but after all, he can only hope to win by lying. Here is our first debate, and watch for the rematch on the 12th:

Pamela Geller published Dr. Swamy's article here on July 16. Note that, contrary to the Daily Caller's headline, the article does not attack Muslims, but Islamic terrorism -- which all Muslims except for a Tiny Minority of Extremists are supposed to be against. So why is Swamy's article "distressing to many members" of the Harvard community? Does the Harvard community consist of a significant number of Islamic jihad terrorists?

"Harvard instructor under fire for anti-terrorism op-ed attacking Muslims," by C.J. Ciaramella for the Daily Caller, August 1:

A Harvard Summer School economics instructor is under fire and facing calls for his termination after publishing an article calling for strong political action to combat Islamic terrorism in India.

On July 16, Harvard instructor Subramanian Swamy wrote an op-ed in the Indian newspaper Daily News and Analysis, “How to Wipe Out Islamic Terror,” in response to the July 13th Mumbai bombings that killed 23 people.

In the op-ed, Swamy wrote that Muslims in India “are being programmed by a slow reactive process to become radical and thus slide into suicide against Hindus.” The solution, Swamy wrote, is a unified Hindu political front.

“We need a collective mindset as Hindus to stand against the Islamic terrorist. The Muslims of India can join us if they genuinely feel for the Hindu,” Swamy wrote. “If any Muslim acknowledges his or her Hindu legacy, then we Hindus can accept him or her as a part of the Brihad Hindu Samaj (greater Hindu society) which is Hindustan.”

“Others, who refuse to acknowledge this, or those foreigners who become Indian citizens by registration, can remain in India but should not have voting rights (which means they cannot be elected representatives),” he continued.

In the wake of the article, more than 200 people have signed a petition demanding the administration “repudiate Swamy’s remarks and terminate his association with the University.”...

Swarmy’s article is also causing controversy abroad. In India, a minorities commission called for the arrest of Swamy for his “extreme xenophobic right-wing thoughts.” State Minorities Commission Vice Chairman Abraham Mathai urged the Mumbai police chief to bring criminal charges against Swamy.

For now, the university appears to be standing by Swamy’s right to express his viewpoints. “As an institution of research and teaching, we are dedicated to the proposition that all people, regardless of color or creed, deserve equal opportunities, equal respect, and equal protection,” a Harvard spokesperson said in an email statement.

“Recent writings by Dr. Swamy therefore are distressing to many members of our community, and understandably so,” the statement continued. “It is central to the mission of a university to protect free speech, including that of Dr. Swamy and of those who disagree with him. We are ultimately stronger as a university when we maintain our commitment to the most basic freedoms that enable the robust exchange of ideas.”

Saudi-funded dhimmi pseudo-academic Islamic apologist John Esposito working with Hamas-linked CAIR to destroy the freedom of speech, cover up the truth about the global jihad and Islamic supremacism.

It's ironic: Islamic supremacist critics sometimes point to my working outside of academia as if it were some indication that what I say isn't true. But in reality, it's the universities that are bought and paid for by Islamic supremacist interests. The only honest work on Islam and jihad is taking place almost completely outside of academia these days.

"PJM Exclusive: Georgetown U. Received $325,000 Funneled Through Terror Front Group: Internal emails and faxes document the university’s collusion with the 56-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference to promote criminalizing 'Islamophobia,'" by Patrick Poole at Pajamas Media, June 14 (thanks to Paul):

Georgetown University has some explaining to do based on documents obtained exclusively by PJM from a confidential law enforcement source. The documents reveal a scheme to pass $325,000 through the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has been identified by the FBI as a front for the Hamas terrorist organization. The money was paid to Georgetown by the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to promote its “Islamophobia” agenda, which includes its stated international objective of criminalizing any criticism of Islam.

Even more troubling: evidence that Georgetown is not the only American university to cooperate with CAIR and the OIC in their joint plan to subvert the First Amendment right to free speech.

The plot was apparently initiated in 2006 by discussions between the OIC, CAIR, and Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (CMCU). An email dated November 20, 2006, sent from OIC permanent observer to the UN Abdul Wahab to Nihad Awad and Hadia Mubarak — a CAIR board member and Georgetown CMCU “senior researcher” — urged them to expedite arrangements. The email also promised that funds would be transferred to Georgetown as soon as the OIC received a letter from John Esposito, director of Georgetown’s CMCU.

Abdul Wahab’s email was followed up with a January 11, 2007, joint letter from CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad and John Esposito, which is referenced in a January 15, 2007, letter of reply from OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu (the letter is misdated as 2006). The letter offered $325,000 in cash from the OIC to finance an “Islamophobia” symposium to be convened at Georgetown University.

The OIC is the second largest intergovernmental body in the world behind the United Nations. It comprises every Islamic country in the world at the head of state level. OIC Secretary General Ihsanoglu said last year that the OIC functions as the Islamic global caliphate and embodies the “Islamic solidarity” of the ummah. Included as an agenda item in the OIC’s 10 year plan — stated in English on their own website — is to push for the international criminalization of Islamophobia (1.VII), in defiance of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights protections of freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

Georgetown’s CMCU was endowed in December 2005 by a $20 million grant from Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, one of the richest men in the world, who also gave another $20 million for a similar center at Harvard. Back in February 2008, I wrote about the extremist Wahhabi agenda that the center actively promotes. Congressman Frank Wolf has also written to Georgetown President John DeGioia expressing concerns about the potential Saudi influence of U.S. government foreign service personnel trained at the university. Wolf also queried whether the CMCU had ever written anything critical of the Saudis’ abysmal record on human rights, religious freedom, freedom of expression, women’s rights, minority rights, protection of foreign workers, due process, and the rule of law. Needless to say, they haven’t.

John Esposito, the CMCU’s director, described Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami Al-Arian at an August 2007 CAIR fundraiser in Dallas as “a good friend of mine,” even hiring Al-Arian’s son Abdullah as a researcher for the center. Esposito’s protégé, Hadia Mubarak, who now operates as a researcher at the Gallup Poll’s Muslim World project, is a virulent bigot who has gone so far as accusing other Muslims as having “a deep hatred of Islam” for daring to criticize American Islamic organizations and institutions that are Saudi-financed and promote their extremist Wahhabi agenda — such as the Georgetown CMCU....

Be sure to read it all.

Possibly in the audience that day was the underwear jihadist. And who knows who else. This speaker has continued to give talks at "London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, Queen Mary and Bart’s and at UCL." "Terrorism works, preacher told students," by Duncan Gardham for the Telegraph, June 6:

Abdur Raheem Green, a Muslim convert and former public schoolboy, told students at University College London that a “permanent state of war exists between the people of Islam and the people who opposed Islam”.

He gave the speech, seen by The Daily Telegraph, to the university’s Islamic society while Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab, the Detroit bomber, was a student there in 2005.

A review by UCL into the Abdulmutallab case failed to analyse speeches made by the preacher and other visitors. It concluded that “speakers with controversial but not illegal views were welcome to the extent that they could be expected to stimulate debate”.

The disclosure follows a statement by Theresa May, the Home Secretary, in an interview with this newspaper, in which she said there had been “complacency” by universities about Islamic extremism.

The Government’s Prevent strategy to combat extremism will say it is “concerned that some universities and colleges have failed to engage” with the project, and cite a study showing that at least 55 per cent of institutions did not frequently engage with authorities running the scheme.

Qasim Rafiq, a spokesman for the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, invited Mr Green to speak at UCL along with two speakers from the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir and another who has supported the Taliban.

Since then, Mr Green has been invited to give lectures at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, Queen Mary and Bart’s and at UCL.

Referring to bin Laden in his 2005 UCL speech, Mr Green, who claims he is not an extremist, said: “His rational [sic] is … we are going to keep on killing your women and children until you stop killing our women and children. How do you argue with that?”

Citing the IRA, he added: “The other thing is that it seems that terrorism works. We certainly have precedent.”

Saqib Sattar, a trustee of the Islamic Education and Research Academy, where Mr Green works, said: “The aim of the talk was to combat indiscriminate violence and terrorism and not advocate it.”

Violence and terrorism for discriminating tastes?

A spokesman for UCL said the inquiry had been aware of the speech but added: “Provided the law is observed, we do not operate a 'no platform’ policy in relation to speakers with controversial, distasteful or even repugnant views.”

An update on this story. Despite the concerns, despite the warnings, they took the money. They've been bought.

The college president has fallen for the notion that just because a group is putatively "non-violent," it is harmless -- a position newly rejected across the pond in Great Britain. Both violent and non-violent "extremist" groups peddle the same poison against Western civilization (often a dirty word in academia nowadays anyway), women (but multiculturalism trumps feminism), and non-Muslims (go back to sleep, and dream about the "convivencia!" That's an order!)

Even beyond that, the lack of concern about how this donation will affect bias and balance in the content of the new Islamic studies program is highly alarming. "College under fire for taking cash from groups linked to jihad," by Josh Dehaas for Macleans, June 2:

An Ontario college is being asked to turn down a $2-million donation that will fund a new Chair in Islamic Studies. Those opposed say that the groups donating the cash have obvious links to jihad and terrorism. But the principal of Huron College at the University of Western Ontario, who took the money, says she’s satisfied that the groups aren’t violent and that they won’t have any influence on courses or hiring.

The opponents, headed by London resident Rory Leishman, outlined their worries in a letter this week. They noted that the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC), which donated some of the money, supports Hassan Al-Banna’s vision of Islam. Al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood, an Arab political group that has acted violently against those who don’t follow Islam and which has called for the “obliteration” of Israel. Wael Haddara, president of the MAC, told The Toronto Sun that his group is not violent, even though they “firmly believe that there is a tremendous amount of good in the writings, works and life of Al-Banna and the traditions of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

But it’s not just influence from the MAC that opponents are worried about. Half of the donation will come from the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), whose past leaders were supporters of the terrorist group Hamas, according to a U.S. Customs report. Temple University University in Philadelphia rejected a $1.5 million gift from the group in 2008 over concerns about its links to terrorism.

Trish Fulton, Acting Principal of Huron College, said that she is satisfied that there are no links to terrorism. “We have a due diligence process that — it includes a site visit, a review of tax returns and any other information available on the organization — and we follow that before we entertain any gift of a certain size or gift from individuals or organizations,” she told The Sun.

“Islamic studies is a legitimate subject for academic inquiry and we are very proud that this is the first chair of Islamic studies in a family of theology in Canada,” added Fulton. The petitioners say they aren’t arguing about the establishment of a chair, but who the school should taking money from.

As an earlier report noted, there is also a "reluctance to co-operate with the police on the part of some universities that did not want to be seen to be 'spying' on their students." That is bad enough. But there is an even deeper reluctance to cause offense or challenge politically correct dogma by finding fault actual Islamic teachings. That reluctance encourages a deep state of denial that there could even really be that much of a problem. And so jihadist groups continue to flourish.

"Universities 'complacent' over Islamic radicals, Theresa May warns," by Duncan Gardham for the Telegraph, June 5:

Theresa May told The Daily Telegraph that universities were not taking the issue of radicalisation seriously enough and that it was too easy for Muslim extremists to form groups on campuses “without anyone knowing”.

She also said the Government would cut funding to any Islamic group that espoused extremist views, and set out the “key British values” to which those seeking support must subscribe. It is understood that about 20 groups are already losing their funding.

Mrs May made her comments ahead of the publication this week of the updated version of the Prevent counter-terrorism strategy.

“I think for too long there’s been complacency around universities,” she said. “I don’t think they have been sufficiently willing to recognise what can be happening on their campuses and the radicalisation that can take place. I think there is more that universities can do.”

Mrs May said universities had to “send very clear messages” and “ask themselves some questions about what happens on their campuses”.

She also criticised the Federation of Student Islamic Societies for not challenging extremism sufficiently.

“They need to be prepared to stand up and say that organisations that are extreme or support extremism or have extremist speakers should not be part of their grouping,” Mrs May said.

Her remarks follow comments made by Nicola Dandridge, the head of Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors, claiming there was no evidence that extremist speakers at university encouraged violence.

As part of the Prevent strategy, the Government will define as extremists anyone who “does not subscribe to human rights, equality before the law, democracy and full participation in society”, including those who “promote or implicitly tolerate the killing of British soldiers”.

There is some wiggle room for dissimulation on all of those terms except for the last. One line that Muslim groups in Britain consistently cannot cross without a public response rightfully continues to be the nation's expectation of respect for British soldiers.

Mrs May said: “We are looking at a set of values we believe we have here in the UK and those people opposed to those values are people who the Government won’t be funding or engaging with.”

It is understood that the strategy will also name 25 boroughs that are most at risk from Islamist extremism, including areas of London, Birmingham, Leeds, Bradford and Manchester.

There will also be a move to limit access to extremist websites from public buildings, particularly schools and public libraries.

That will be controversial, and could be quite a test for the moderate/extremist distinction.

Details of partnerships with YouTube and AOL to try to tackle extremism online, using lessons learned from anti-paedophile policing will be made public.

As well as fighting violent extremism, the Government will tackle extremist philosophies in general, including groups that can act as a “stepping stone” to terrorism.

“There’s an ideology out there that we need to challenge and when we first came in as a government one of the things we were very clear about here at the Home Office was we needed to look at extremism, not just violent extremism,” Mrs May said....

In the American Thinker this morning, Pamela Geller and I discuss our recent encounter with the thoroughly indoctrinated students and faculty that one finds on all too many university campuses today, and their increasingly thuggish atmosphere. What I saw in Stuttgart yesterday I expect to be seeing at American universities before too long.

How completely has indoctrination and propaganda replaced rational discussion and intelligent debate in America's universities? We were reminded of just how bad things have gotten several weeks ago at Ohio University, when we were invited to screen and discuss our documentary on the Ground Zero mosque controversy, The Ground Zero Mosque: Second Wave of the 911 Attacks. While universities today idolize "diversity," they actively discourage the one kind of diversity that matters most: genuine diversity of opinion. We saw instead the effects of the stifling intellectual straitjacket that universities force upon students on all too many campuses.

Joining us was our cinematographer, David Miles, who is an alumnus of Ohio University. But OU students and faculty were in no mood to discuss the issues our documentary raised: even before we arrived on campus, the student newspaper, The Post, ran a "review" of the film entitled "NYC mosque film inaccurate, bigoted." It was written by Brandon Kendhammer, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at OU. Kendhammer retailed libelous generalizations about us and about our work, without offering a single example of the inaccuracy and bigotry he purported to find in our film.

Indeed, Kendhammer couldn't have given an example of those things even if he had wanted to. Why not? Because he had not even seen the film. Got that? The Post ran a review of the film written by someone who could not have seen it.

With a fine Orwellian touch, Kendhammer claimed that we wished to undo America's legacy of religious freedom -- without explaining how opposing forces that would establish a law that institutionalizes discrimination against women and extinguishes the freedom of speech and the freedom of conscience amounts to opposing religious freedom, while fronting for this repressive ideology presumably amounts to supporting that freedom.

In reality, we oppose the Islamic supremacist political agenda that supports elements of Sharia that are at variance with Constitutional freedoms; nothing in such a position involves any infringement on religious freedom. ...

There is more.

If they take their money, they will echo their line and advance their agenda. "A $2-million gift that UWO might want to turn down," by Barbara Kay in the National Post, May 13:

For various reasons, some good, many Western universities are keen to establish Islamic Studies programs. And for various other reasons, the same is true of Islamist organizations -which tend toward a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. To this end, with a professed goal of fostering "understanding" of Islam, the latter offer hefty financial endowments to universities.

Some critics worry that such a scenario may be in progress at Huron University College, an affiliate of University of Western Ontario (UWO). Huron offers post-baccalaureate and professional degree programs in theology. The College recently accepted a $2-million endowment for a new Chair in Islamic Studies within the College's historically Anglican Faculty of Theology. About half the money is to come via fundraising facilitated by the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC), and the other, matching half from the Virginia-based International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). A cofounder of the latter group was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007-2008 trial of Sami al-Arian, an Islamist academic linked to jihadism.

On April 5, 26 self-identified "alumni, friends and faculty" of the university signed on to a letter written by UWO associate professor of economics John Palmer, protesting acceptance of the endowment (Google "electecon, islamic chair" for the full text of the letter). In it, Palmer contends that although MAC and IIIT claim they are moderate and democratic organizations, their approach is influenced by Imam Hassan Al-Banna, founder and even decades after his death still ideological guru of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), who, according to the MAC website, "best exemplifies [a] balanced, comprehensive understanding of Islam."

In Egypt and elsewhere, the Muslim Brotherhood often presents itself as tolerant in its outlook. Yet it has radical roots. A 1991 memorandum written by one member of the Muslim Brotherhood Shura Council proposed that Muslim settlement in Canada and the United States be viewed as a "'Civilization-Jihadist Process,' with all the word means. The Ikhwan [MB] must understand that their work in America is kind of a grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house." To my knowledge, neither principals of MAC nor of IIIT have ever distanced themselves from or denounced this pernicious statement....

Here is an update on this story. Go to that link for details on what the people are saying in this video: that Rauf (and Reza) have not proven trustworthy, and that their claims of moderation ring hollow. And be sure to watch to the end, to hear the most informed people on the sinister agenda of these two men.

The UCLA event, as might be expected, was tightly controlled and carefully orchestrated, so that freedom fighters didn't get a chance to ask any pointed questions of either one of these stealth Islamic supremacists. Pamela Geller notes the contrast:

This was very unlike the events where I speak (or Spencer), at which anyone can ask a question. On Wednesday night, for example, Robert and I spent an hour answering questions from hostile Muslim students and their left wing idiot enablers at Ohio University. And it bears mentioning that the invitations we get usually come from a student or one lone sane voice amid a collective of statist groupthink. Rauf and his cabal of evil clowns are usually invited by the universities and receive huge honorariums. It is important to understand just how grossly stacked the deck is in this fight. Let that serve to fuel your passion. It does mine.

Indeed. And we will fight on.

There is a "reluctance to co-operate with the police on the part of some universities that did not want to be seen to be 'spying' on their students'," but there is also a reluctance to acknowledge the content of Islamic texts and traditions, including the Qur'an itself, in the first place. "University campuses are 'hotbeds of Islamic extremism'," by Duncan Gardham for the Telegraph, April 28 (thanks to JG):

Islamic fundamentalism is being allowed to flourish at universities, endangering national security, MPs and peers said yesterday.

Academics are turning a blind eye to radicals because they do not want to spy on students, a report claimed.

Despite "damning evidence" of a serious problem, little progress had been made in tackling the unsustainable situation, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Homeland Security said.

They urged the Government to tackle the issue on campuses with "utmost urgency".

Such extremism "endangers our security at home and has international implications that are serious enough to threaten our alliance relationships", said the group, which includes the former home secretary Lord Reid.

Secret files obtained by The Daily Telegraph and WikiLeaks disclosed this week that at least 35 terrorists held at Guantánamo Bay were indoctrinated by extremists in Britain.

The leaked documents, written by senior US military commanders, illustrated how Britain effectively became a crucible of terrorism over the course of two decades.

The parliamentary group was set up two years ago to carry out research into homeland security issues.

Its inaugural report comes after a separate inquiry by the umbrella organisation for universities earlier this year said animal rights extremists posed a greater problem than Islamist radicals.

Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors, said it could do very little about extremism on campus. Instead it issued new guidance on the importance of freedom of speech. Their report followed the attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a former student at University College London, to blow himself up using a bomb in his underpants as a flight came in to land at Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009.

Abdulmutallab, an engineering student, was the Islamic Society president from 2006 to 2007.

The parliamentarians' report said Britain's homeland security strategy failed to address in sufficient detail how to tackle the threat of extremism at universities, how to strengthen businesses' ability to deal with a terrorist attack and how to ensure security over the internet.

The report said some universities and colleges had become sites where extremist religion and radicalism could flourish "beyond the sight of academics".

They also noted that there was a "reluctance to co-operate with the police on the part of some universities that did not want to be seen to be 'spying' on their students"....

A particularly galling orgy of Muslim claiming of victimhood in order to deflect attention away from the global jihad and Islamic supremacism. "Torturing the Truth at Duke Divinity," by Jay Schalin in the American Thinker, April 24:

Should we automatically accept -- at face value -- Duke University's first Muslim chaplain, Abdullah Antepli, as part of an emerging loyal, moderate American Islam, simply because he insists that we do so?

Perhaps not, when all his words and associations are taken into account.  He seems eager to join hands with others -- Muslim, Christian, and secular -- who express animosity toward this country and Western societies in general.  And at one recent event, he attacked the citizens of his adopted country for their failure to blindly assume Muslim immigrants mean them well.

"Being a Muslim in the United States is another form of torture, a psychological torture, an emotional torture, and it's just getting worse," he declared at the "Toward a Moral Consensus against Torture" conference at Duke University on March 25-26.  The conference attracted approximately 100 left-wing academics, theologians, and members of the local activist community for some old-fashioned America-bashing.

Antepli revealed that this so-called "torture" is not the result of overt acts directed at him, but comes from his perception that many Americans are antagonistic to Muslims and expect Muslims "to prove our loyalty to this land."  Such demands to "prove that we belong" stem from a "great level of arrogance," he added.

Antepli's condemnation of America did not stop there.  He claimed that our government's use of torture (if that is what we have indeed been doing) is merely a "symptom of a larger pathological issue."  American society, he contended, has been suffering from a "psychological, spiritual, moral disease." No mention was made about how Islamic societies compare in this regard.  If America is a "sick" society -- and Islamic societies are healthy -- then why are Muslims flocking to our shores in large numbers?

Antepli was joined at the torture conference by keynote speaker Ingrid Mattson.  She is the director and dominant figure in Islamic Studies at Hartford Seminary, where Antepli received his master's degree (and where he continues to be a doctoral candidate).  Given the small size of the faculty in that program, her prominence, and their common interests, it is hard to imagine that she had no influence on him. If so, what an influence she would be, for she has gained national notoriety as a defender of some of Islam's unsavory aspects. She was recently dubbed by the New York Times as "perhaps the most noticed figure among American Muslim women."  She is the former president of the Islamic Society of North America, which was named by the U.S. Justice Department as an unindicted co-conspirator in a case involving a charity that funneled money to Hamas.  Many sources say the ISNA is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood, the wellspring of terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Al Qaeda....

Read it all.

The video doesn't lie. The effort to derail Oren's speech is clearly pre-coordinated, and the participants are not only the carefully placed and timed individuals causing disruptions, but the very loud cheering section that responds to each incident. This was a large group effort that required extensive planning in advance. Or conspiring, if you will.

Grasping at straws to keep the case from moving forward, the defendants now object to their case being referred to as the "UCI Muslim Case," which they say indicates "religious bias." One problem: Which student group was found to be behind the disruption, and suspended for a time for their behavior? The Muslim Student Union of the University of California at Irvine. Now, apparently, a simple paraphrase is an indicator of Islamophobia.

An update on this story. "'Irvine 11' plead not guilty to disrupting UCI speech," by Vik Jolly for the OC Register, April 15:

SANTA ANA – Eleven current and former university students pleaded not guilty Friday to misdemeanor charges for disrupting the speech of an Israeli diplomat at UC Irvine last year.

Seven of the so-called "Irvine 11" defendants were present for the arraignment, and each answered "Not guilty, your honor," to the charges. The other four entered their pleas through their defense attorneys.

Last month, the defendants filed a motion asking Orange County Superior Court Judge Peter J. Wilson to remove the Orange County District Attorney's Office from the case, saying prosecutors illegally issued subpoenas and referred to the case internally as the "UCI Muslim Case," a term they say is evidence of "religious bias" against them.

Prosecutors say the defendants have failed, among other things, to support their motion with affidavits from witnesses competent to testify to its facts, and must demonstrate that the "conflict is so severe that it is unlikely" they will receive fair treatment. They add that the defendants' claims of prosecutorial misconduct are unsubstantiated and untrue.

Use of the term "UCI Muslim Case" in the heading in an internal district attorney e-mail does not show bias against Muslims as defendants, prosecutors wrote in their opposition papers.

"The term UCI Muslim is not a disparaging or derogatory term," the opposition papers say.

Wilson set June 17 as the date to hear arguments on the motion to recuse the district attorney from the case. Before that happens, the judge on May 13 will hear arguments and could rule on whether grand jury transcripts from the investigation that led to charges against the students should remain sealed.

As in the past, supporters of the students waited outside the court and stood by defense attorneys, who held a news conference following the afternoon court hearing.

The students were charged in February with conspiring to disrupt a speech, capping the grand jury investigation. The 11 were arrested, cited and released in the Feb. 8, 2010, incident during the UCI talk by Michael Oren, the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S.

One of the defendants has since graduated, while the others are still in school, either at UCI or UC Riverside.

Each is charged with one misdemeanor count of conspiracy to disturb a meeting and one misdemeanor count of the disturbance of a meeting. If convicted, each faces a sentence that could include probation with community service or fines or up to six months in jail.

There's a paradox buried deep within Western liberal attitudes toward Muslims, and it helps explain the otherwise incomprehensible behavior that multiculturalists exhibit when confronted with arguments, evidence, and finally proof that Islam is an aggressive ideology on the march. It will take a little digging, and several points of comparison, for me to uncover, but once I've done so, I hope my thoughts will help the reader deal more productively with the kind of people who are outraged by foolish stunts like Koran-burning, but blithely indifferent to suicide bombing, blasphemy laws, and the death penalty for escapees from Islam. To understand all is not to forgive all, but it can help build a bridge, across which we might be able to coax the occasional dupe back over to sanity.

In his New Republic review of That’s Offensive! Criticism, Identity, Respect, by Stefan Collini, Isaac Chotiner analyzes why it's considered essential in “enlightened” Western circles to avoid offending Muslims, but perfectly acceptable to outrage Christians. In the course of recommending the book, Chotiner writes:

Collini begins by defining “offense.” From a dictionary entry, he writes that the taking of offense is often seen as intensely related to one’s feelings. This may suggest, he writes, “that if someone does not feel offended, they have not been offended. And this may in turn seem to entail the reverse proposition, namely that each individual is the only possible judge of whether or not they have been offended.” For claims of offense to be given respect, however, an objective standard needs to have been violated by the offender. No one, for example, is offended by people who snore in their sleep. We might find them annoying, but they do not offend us. Nor is sympathy always granted to those who claim to have taken offense. To say of someone that they “do not easily take offence” is to compliment them, Collini notes. The bar, in other words, is higher than it could be.

Collini is also aware that in many societies today, free speech is highly valued, even at the cost of offense. “If we confine ourselves to the traditional form of the debate about ‘free speech,’ it is not difficult for those of a liberal disposition that the rights of criticism should be guaranteed in any tolerably open society, even when the activity risks giving offence to some of those being criticized.” And yet Collini sees the outlines of a problem: “Those who think of themselves as committed to ‘progressive’ moral and political causes have come to believe that two of the central requirements of an enlightened global politics are, first, treating all other people with equal respect and, second, trying to avoid words or deeds which threaten to compound existing disadvantages.”

Treating people with respect is a fine goal, but Collini notices that respect tends to be shown with special deference to so-called “out groups.” Claims of offense that would otherwise be ignored are instead given credence and even deference. Collini also correctly identifies the people who tend to fall into this trap. Very few “progressive” forces, for example, would have shown any “understanding” of hurt Christian feelings if Jesus had been mocked in a Danish newspaper. The entire force of the argument against the offensiveness of the Danish cartoons was based on the concern that Muslims were somehow less powerful than other religious believers. But this hardly qualifies as an adequate justification for a double standard.

To put things more concretely, a native Upper East-Sider in New York City enrolled at Columbia University cements his psychological sense that he belongs in the top 2% of American (and hence of world) society by attending lectures by visiting Palestinian terrorists. If on the way out he sees a “Bridge and Tunnel” construction worker waving a flag and holding a sign, that undergrad sneers disdainfully at the “Islamophobe” in exactly the same way he might at a painting by Thomas Kincaid, or a gathering of (white!) Pentecostalists singing hymns. Should that same undergrad—perhaps in search of really good hummus in the Arab section of Park Slope, Brooklyn—stumble into a mosque, he would never, never admit to having similar feelings of scorn for the open religiosity he'd witness there. For one thing, he'd get a frisson from how “exotic” the whole thing was. More importantly, if he permitted himself to admit to a feeling of cultural superiority, by that very act he would be lowering his own social status. He might as well toss out that jacket he bought at Barney's and put on a Walmart vest, then go home and crack a Coors lite while watching Glenn Beck.

There's another, darker side to the equation—the envy elite liberals feel of the very minorities they claim to succour. George Gilder had the cojones to point this out in his classic Men and Marriage. He wrote at length of the many ways in which feminism had truncated, quashed, and make disgraceful many of the traditional attributes of masculinity among men: Aggression, stoicism, physical courage, pride in one's name, patriotism, adherence to inherited tradition—all of these became stigmatized as toxic secretions of the “patriarchy,” and elite men who wished to mate with elite women learned to shed them. It's as if on some secluded island all the peahens “decided” they despised their cock's flashy tails, and in order to reproduce, those peacocks had to pull out all their own feathers.

However, when upper-crust liberals (I include here elite nonwhites such as Barack Obama, who had to take lessons, as he admits, in how to “walk black”) look at minority groups, they find that masculinity remains respectable there. All the attributes that would get you shunned on Morningside Heights are on proud display in the ghetto ten blocks north, and the SAT athletes who feel deprived of them can get a “fix” by blasting gansta rap in their iPods, or indulging in revolutionary politics. Likewise, I'd argue, liberals can live vicariously through Muslims—their “pride,” their group cohesiveness, their dogmatic certitudes and their truculent aggression.

Thus pro-Muslim liberals can at once retain their attributes of upper-class status by showing their generosity to the weak and distinguishing themselves from low-status “xenophobes,” while indulging at one remove the game-cock self-assurance, macho pride, and truculence of Muslims. It's really quite an impressive psychological adaptation our elites have made to the almost impossible mating conditions set for Western males, and I'm tempted to admire it. But I can't help looking at the bloody stubs where their tails used to be and feeling a twinge of sadness. No, make that contempt.

There—I've given the game away, and climbed down several notches in the social hierarchy. I shall turn in my collegiate tie for a Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirt. No peahen nookie for me.

Today's universities are hopeless: ideological agreement is prized far more than academic integrity, which is sorely lacking. And this story shows that academic integrity is by no means the most important thing that is lacking. "University Downplays Student's Jihad Threat," from Fox News Radio, March 21 (thanks to all who sent this in):

Montreal police are investigating a student who made threats against a conservative club at McGill University, even though university officials determined the student’s threats about jihad and wanting to “shoot everyone in the room” were harmless.

A spokesman for the Montreal Police Service told the Toronto Star they take the threat allegedly made by Haaris Khan seriously.

Khan attended a viewing of the documentary “Indoctrinate-U,” sponsored by Conservative McGill, a student organization affiliated with Canada’s Conservative Party. During the viewing, Khan is accused of making death treats using his Twitter account.

“I should have brought an M16,” he allegedly wrote. “I’m watching a Zionist/Conservative propaganda film at a secret Zionist convention, in case anyone’s confused.”

“Indoctrinate-U” is a documentary exposing political correctness on university and college campuses. It explores free speech issues on campuses and how schools sometimes punish people for what the filmmaker calls “mild speech.”

“My blood is boiling,” Khan allegedly tweeted. “I want to shoot everyone in this room.”

The following day, he allegedly tweeted, “The jihad begins today.”

Alexandre Meterissian, a member of the conservative organization, filed a complaint with campus security.

“I found it really disturbing that he would write those kinds of things,” Meterissian told Fox News Radio. “Those kinds of things are serious. It’s not funny. You have to be held liable for what you say on the Internet.”

Khan’s only comments on the incident were published in the student newspaper, the McGill Tribune.

“Whatever comes into my mind, I say it on Twitter,” he told the newspaper. “It’s kind of my outlet.

Khan apologized and said his tweets had been taken out of context, noting that he did not own a gun and he was not particularly religious.

Meterissian said he was more upset over the university’s response.

“The university really hasn’t been taking this seriously,” he said. “They didn’t deem it a big enough threat to inform the students or even consider suspending or expelling the student.”...

“Go sell crazy somewhere else—we're all stocked up here!” That is one of the great lines in 1990s American cinema. It was spoken by the misanthropic recluse played by Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, and it pretty well describes the business we're in, resisting jihad. Every day, at least one of the news stories Robert or Marisol posts reads like something that couldn't actually be happening, but instead is a first draft of a bad idea discarded by Evelyn Waugh or Anthony Burgess for a satire they thought to write, but tossed into the trash can as too implausibly caustic. Then somebody at Jihadwatch, desperately short of copy, fished the idea out, flattened the crumpled paper on his desk, retyped the thing and posted it as fact. Indeed, Robert and I have discussed the idea of creating an April Fools' edition, a Jihad “Onion” issue full of stories so wildly outrageous that readers would spot them instantly as parodies. But he's inclined not to do it, since (as he put it): “How could people tell? What's already happening is so completely insane I doubt you could improve on it.” Indeed, I've written acid satires in the past, only to see them pretty much come true before I could get them published. The speed with which reality outpaces parody these days is deeply dispiriting. Even with the Internet, it's hard to iron out the typos in a timely satire before real headlines spoil the thing. It's as if these horrific ideas that come to me are puppets like Pinocchio—and Satan loved them so much he made them real.

Which brings me to today's installment: The Ottoman Charter Schools of Pennsylvania. Doesn't it sound like some bitter fantasy cooked up over pork rinds and bourbon after a gun show? Perhaps it's the sequel to a bleak daydream like: The Cloned Scientologist Sex Slaves of Hawaii. Only this one is all too real, as the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Sunday:

Fethullah Gulen is a major Islamic political figure in Turkey, but he lives in self-imposed exile in a Poconos enclave and gained his green card by convincing a federal judge in Philadelphia that he was an influential educational figure in the United States.

As evidence, his lawyer pointed to the charter schools, now more than 120 in 25 states, that his followers - Turkish scientists, engineers, and businessmen - have opened, including Truebright Science Academy in North Philadelphia and another charter in State College, Pa.

has been criticised by a large number of secularists who believe that underneath a veneer of humanist philosophy, Gülen plans to turn Turkey’s secular state into a theocracy.

Secular Kemalists have compared him to Khomeini and fear that his return to Turkey might turn Ankara into another Tehran. The governments of Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are also weary and suspicious of his “Turkish schools promoted by Islamic missionaries.”

At the basis of Gülen’s teachings is the notion that state and religion should be reconnected as they were in Ottoman times and that Turkey should play the role of beacon for the Balkans and the republics in the Caucasus.

are funded with millions of taxpayer dollars. Truebright alone receives more than $3 million from the Philadelphia School District for its 348 pupils. Tansu Cidav, the acting chief executive officer, described it as a regular public school.

"Charter schools are public schools," he said. "We follow the state curriculum."

But federal agencies - including the FBI and the Departments of Labor and Education - are investigating whether some charter school employees are kicking back part of their salaries to a Muslim movement founded by Gulen known as Hizmet, or Service, according to knowledgeable sources.

Unlike in Turkey, where Gulen's followers have been accused of pushing for an authoritarian Islamic state, there is no indication the American charter network has a religious agenda in the classroom.

Religious scholars consider the Gulen strain of Islam moderate, and the investigation has no link to terrorism.

Of course, if AsiaNews is right, Gulen doesn't need to employ terrorist tactics. If democratic “reforms” in Turkey take hold and cut the already slackening grip of its secularist military and constitution, orthodox Muslims like Gulen will take power by the ballot box. As the anti-Semitic French authoritarian Charles Maurras once said, rakishly: “We will use any means to come to power—even democratic ones.” So will Gulen.

But if you can read past this bit of dhimmi nonsense the rest of the Inquirer report is thoroughly damning—of the broken American immigration system. Because as it turns out, Gulen's organization is staffing its schools with Muslim imports from Turkey. The paper notes that the investigation is “focused on whether hundreds of Turkish teachers, administrators, and other staffers employed under the H1B visa program are misusing taxpayer money.” And further:

Another aim of the Gulen schools, a federal official said, is fostering goodwill toward Turkey, which is led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the pro-Islamic prime minister, whose government recently detained journalists after they alleged that Gulen followers were infiltrating security agencies.

Gulen schools are among the nation's largest users of the H1B visas. In 2009, the schools received government approvals for 684 visas - more than Google Inc. (440) but fewer than a technology powerhouse such as Intel Corp. (1,203).

The visas are used to attract foreign workers with math, science, and technology skills to jobs for which there are shortages of qualified American workers. Officials at some of the charter schools, which specialize in math and science, have said they needed to fill teaching spots with Turks, according to parents and former staffers.

Ruth Hocker, former president of the parents' group at the Young Scholars of Central Pennsylvania Charter School in State College, began asking questions when popular, certified American teachers were replaced by uncertified Turkish men who often spoke limited English and were paid higher salaries. Most were placed in math and science classes.

"They would tell us they couldn't find qualified American teachers," Hocker said.

That made no sense in Pennsylvania State University's hometown, she said: "They graduate here every year."

Other school parents described how uncertified teachers on H1B visas were moved from one charter school to another when their "emergency" teaching credentials expired and told of a pattern of sudden turnovers of Turkish business managers, administrators, and board members.
...

Further evidence of the ties comes from a disaffected former teacher from Turkey who told federal investigators that the Gulen Movement had divided the United States into five regions, according to knowledgeable sources. A general manager in each coordinates the activities of the schools and related foundations and cultural centers, he told authorities.

Ohio, California, and Texas have the largest numbers of Gulen-related schools. Ohio has 19, which are operated by Concept Schools Inc., and most are known as Horizon Science Academies. There are 14 in California operated by the Magnolia Foundation. Texas has 33 known as Harmony schools, run by the Cosmos Foundation.

As Western economies continue to sputter, this kind of thing will become increasingly common, and will lead to Saudi purchases of many other things (as of course it already has done). And with Saudi money comes Saudi dictation. "Dalhousie medical school to sell Saudis 10 seats," by James Bradshaw in the Globe and Mail, March 17 (thanks to Rosine):

In an urgent bid to plug a hole in its budget, Dalhousie University’s medical school will sell 10 vacant first-year seats to students from Saudi Arabia for $75,000 annually.

Dalhousie’s medical dean, Tom Marrie, says a reduction in provincial grants last year left the program underfunded, and that generating money from empty spaces is crucial to balancing the books.

The scheme is a targeted, stopgap solution, and may not be repeated. But most Canadian universities, including Dalhousie, are trumpeting Canadian education and looking to increase their foreign student enrolment as global competition for top talent – including those with deep pockets – heats up....

The Saudi students will pay considerably more than their domestic counterparts, whose tuition and government funding amounts to less than $40,000, but Dr. Marrie said “that’s not unreasonable” when compared with other international fees. The 10 students are expected to return to Saudi Arabia for their residencies.

“We’ve got to find a way to run the place. This is one of those ways,” he said. “We just need this money to function.”...

Let's have a look at one example of how Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, spread compassion among the nations. As I explain in my book The Truth About Muhammad, Muhammad led a Muslim force against the Khaybar oasis, which was inhabited by Jews -- many of whom he had previously exiled from Medina. When he did so, he was not responding to any provocation; he encountered the men of Khaybar going out to work their farms, with no idea that they were about to be attacked. One of the Muslims later remembered: "When the apostle raided a people he waited until the morning. If he heard a call to prayer he held back; if he did not hear it he attacked. We came to Khaybar by night, and the apostle passed the night there; and when morning came he did not hear the call to prayer, so he rode and we rode with him....We met the workers of Khaybar coming out in the morning with their spades and baskets. When they saw the apostle and the army they cried, 'Muhammad with his force,' and turned tail and fled. The apostle said, 'Allah Akbar! Khaybar is destroyed. When we arrive in a people's square it is a bad morning for those who have been warned.'"

The Muslim advance was inexorable. "The apostle," according to Muhammad's earliest biographer, Ibn Ishaq, "seized the property piece by piece and conquered the forts one by one as he came to them." Another biographer of Muhammad, Ibn Sa'd, reports that the battle was fierce: the "polytheists...killed a large number of [Muhammad's] Companions and he also put to death a very large number of them....He killed ninety-three men of the Jews..." Muhammad and his men offered the fajr prayer, the Islamic dawn prayer, before it was light, and then entered Khaybar itself. The Muslims immediately set out to locate the inhabitants' wealth. A Jewish leader of Khaybar, Kinana bin al-Rabi, was brought before Muhammad; Kinana was supposed to have been entrusted with the treasure of the Jewish tribes of Arabia, the Banu Nadir. Kinana denied knowing where this treasure was, but Muhammad pressed him: "Do you know that if we find you have it I shall kill you?" Kinana said yes, that he did know that.

Some of the treasure was found. To find the rest, Muhammad gave orders concerning Kinana: "Torture him until you extract what he has." One of the Muslims built a fire on Kinana's chest, but Kinana would not give up his secret. When he was at the point of death, one of the Muslims beheaded him. Kinana's wife was taken as a war prize; Muhammad claimed her for himself and hastily arranged a wedding ceremony that night. He halted the Muslims' caravan out of Khaybar later that night in order to consummate the marriage.

Muhammad agreed to let the people of Khaybar to go into exile, allowing them to keep as much of their property as they could carry. The Prophet of Islam, however, commanded them to leave behind all their gold and silver. He had intended to expel all of them, but some, who were farmers, begged him to allow them to let them stay if they gave him half their yield annually. Muhammad agreed: "I will allow you to continue here, so long as we would desire." He warned them: "If we wish to expel you we will expel you." They no longer had any rights that did not depend upon the good will and sufferance of Muhammad and the Muslims. And indeed, when the Muslims discovered some treasure that some of the Khaybar Jews had hidden, he ordered the women of the tribe enslaved and seized the perpetrators' land. A hadith notes that "the Prophet had their warriors killed, their offspring and woman taken as captives."

Compassion!

"Armstrong: Islam came to spread compassion among the nations of the world," by Siddeek Tawfeek for Islam Online, March 17 (thanks to Jan):

As part of its cultural events, Georgetown University’s CIRS (Centre for International and Regional Studies), School of Foreign Services in Qatar, invited professor Karen Armstrong to deliver a lecture titled, The Core of Our Religious Traditions on 13th March 2011.

Professor Armstrong started her lecture by saying that religion has a main role in that it can provide a major contribution to build a global community where people can live in peace and harmony. She said that some believe that religion is the cause of violence and wars throughout history, refuting this concept by saying that wars and violence are motivated by greed and power. Each religion has its own particular and exclusive insights, but all religions have a thing in common, and that is the belief in the Supreme Being who is God. Words stop and fail when we begin to define God. Professor Armstrong summed up the situation by quoting in Arabic: “Allahu Akbar” (God is greater).

She pointed out that religion teaches us mainly to worship Allah and to do good, and the Qur’an calls for good actions. She quoted the Arabic word: (al-salihat) which includes doing whatever good to help people, be it kindness to orphans, and giving alms to the poor. In other words, The Qur’an calls for compassion, and compassion is the core of the Golden Rule which says: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” This is the bond of suffering. Professor Armstrong quoted the hadith (prophetic saying) of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH), where he says: “None of you will be a true believer until he desires for others what he desires for himself.”

Professor Armstrong said that after the September 11th event, the Muslim communities in the West have been exposed to a lot of suffering inflicted upon them. Such a treatment is too far from the Golden Rule of compassion. As a reaction to this injustice toward Muslims, cities in different parts of the world have developed campaigns to promote community compassion among its residents, where Muslim youths are significantly participating in these campaigns, especially in Amsterdam, Holland. The city of Seattle in north-western United States, leads the list of compassionate cities. On the other hand, Professor Armstrong cited Afghanistan and Iraq as examples of venues where compassion is non-existent.

It is doubtful that Professor Armstrong mentioned such inconveniently non-compassionate post-9/11 (and indeed, quite recent) Muslims as Khalid Aldawsari, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Lubbock, Texas; or Muhammad Hussain, the would-be jihad bomber in Baltimore; or Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be jihad bomber in Portland; or Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood jihad mass-murderer; or Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square jihad mass-murderer; or Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station jihad murderer; or Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas airplane jihad bomber. Mentioning them might have interfered with her narrative of Muslim persecution in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

“Just like a mother has compassion for her child, Allah has compassion for man. There was a time when Allah’s revelation to the Prophet (PBUH) stopped and the Prophet (PBUH) felt desolate, abandoned, and depressed” she added. Later, revelation returned and the Prophet (PBUH), feeling that the grace of the Lord was proclaimed, he went public in his message. The first Sura (chapter) that was revealed to him from Allah was “Al Duha”, whose opening Ayas (verses), Professor Armstrong quoted from memory: “By the morning hours, and the night when it falls. Your Lord has neither forgotten nor forsaken you. And the hereafter is better for you than present life. And verily, your Lord will give you so that you will be pleased.”

Furthermore, Islam came to spread compassion among the tribes, and consequently among the nations of the world. Compassion is very well testified when Allah ordered the Prophet (PBUH) prayers five times a day and not fifty times. This also indicates another aspect of compassion and that is to be moderate in order to be tolerant. The Qur’an preaches compassion by avoiding the infliction of pain upon others; compassion makes us closely akin to God....

Professor Armstrong is well versed in The Qur’an and has intimate knowledge of Islamic discourse and the life of the Prophet. Whenever she mentioned his name, she followed it by the phrase: Peace Be Upon Him (PBUH)....

That's interesting. Has Karen Armstrong finally converted to Islam? Does she believe Muhammad was a prophet?

In an interview with Bill Moyers published on March 2009 at Public Broadcasting Service site, Armstrong states that "Islam is a religion of success.… Mohammed was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually, and Islam went from strength to strength to strength." Armstrong argued that “until the 20th century, Islam was a far more tolerant and peaceful faith than Christianity. The Qur’an strictly forbids any coercion in religion and regards all rightly guided religions as coming from God; and despite the Western belief to the contrary, Muslims did not impose their faith by the sword”.

Armstrong is referring to the dhimma, which was so much more tolerant and peaceful than anything Christianity offered that at the dawn of the twentieth century, there were sixteen to seventeen million Jews in Christian Europe, and one million Jews in Islamic lands. And yes, Islam did not spread by the sword; non-Muslims were subjugated as dhimmis, and made subject to so many deprivations and legalized hardships that they freely converted to Islam just to have a chance at a better life. But no, no one forced them!

In another interview, Armstrong states that "Muslims should try to use the media; they have got to have a Muslim lobby. This is a jihad, an effort, a struggle, that is very important. If you want to change the media, then you have got to make people see that Islam is a force to be reckoned with politically and culturally."

They're doing that quite well already.

Prince Alwaleed has given considerable amounts of money to American universities as well -- notably Georgetown, where dhimmi pseudo-academic John Esposito heads the Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. This story shows why the intellectual climate in Middle East Studies departments all over the U.S., as well as the U.K., is so pro-jihad and anti-freedom, and doesn't allow for any dissenting voices.

"Libya and the LSE: Large Arab gifts to universities lead to 'hostile' teaching," by Stephen Pollard in the Telegraph, March 3:

Sir Howard Davies, the director of the London School of Economics, has at last done the honourable thing and resigned from the university’s governing council. The LSE’s shameless prostituting of its good name in return for Muammar Gaddafi’s blood money (as the Tory MP Robert Halfon has rightly called it) is as great a betrayal of the spirit of a university as there has ever been in Britain.

But while it will take the LSE quite some time to regain a seat at the table of respectability, it is not the only university that has reason to feel ashamed. The LSE is said to have received no more than £300,000 of the £1.5 million it was due from Libya.

Yet, on the most conservative estimate, other British universities have received hundreds of millions of pounds from Saudi and other Islamic sources – in the guise of philanthropic donations, but with the real intention of changing the intellectual climate of the United Kingdom.

Between 1995 and 2008, eight universities – Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, University College London, the LSE, Exeter, Dundee and City – accepted more than £233.5 million from Muslim rulers and those closely connected to them.

Much of the money has gone to Islamic study centres: the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies received £75 million from a dozen Middle Eastern rulers, including the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia; one of the current king’s nephews, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, gave £8 million each to Cambridge and Edinburgh. Then there was the LSE’s own Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, which got £9 million from the United Arab Emirates; this week, a majority of the centre’s board was revealed to be pushing for a boycott of Israel.

While figures since 2008 have yet to be collated, the scale of funding has only increased: such donations are now the largest source of external funding for universities by quite a long way. The donors claim that they want only to promote understanding of Islam – a fine goal for any university.

But the man who gathered the earlier figures, Prof Anthony Glees, argues that their real agenda is rather different: to push an extreme ideology and act as a form of propaganda for the Wahhabist strain of Islam within universities. They push, he says, “the wrong sort of education by the wrong sort of people, funded by the wrong sorts of donor”.

This is not simply scare-mongering. The management committees of the Islamic Studies centres at Cambridge and Edinburgh contained appointees hand-picked by Prince Alwaleed. Other universities have altered their study areas in line with their donors’ demands. And it works.

A study of five years of politics lectures at the Middle Eastern Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford, found that 70 per cent were “implacably hostile” to the West and Israel. A friend of mine, a former Oxford academic, felt that his time was largely spent battling a cadre of academics overwhelmingly hostile to the West, in an ambience in which students – from both Britain and abroad – were presented a world-view that was almost exclusively anti-Western.

Although much of the money is claimed to be directed towards apolitical ends, this can often be misleading. The gift by foreign governments of language books, for instance, can have a significant effect on what is taught; in one case, the gift of an art gallery was found to have had a direct impact on teaching and admissions policy.

This is all so easily done because there is no requirement for serious scrutiny of either the source of funding or its impact on research. As a report from the Centre for Social Cohesion puts it, our universities “are now effectively up for sale to the highest bidder”. If the LSE’s actions have a saving grace, is that they could help to expose the wider scandal surrounding the behaviour of UK universities.

And he is training tomorrow's diplomats. "Claremont McKenna’s Pro-Islamist Professor," by Charles C. Johnson in National Review, February 21:

Claremont McKenna College is a nationally recognized leader in training Defense Department officials and State Department personnel (including numerous ambassadors). Professor Bassam Frangieh is head of Claremont McKenna’s Arabic Department and Middle East Studies program, where he teaches tomorrow’s diplomats about the Middle East, plans study-abroad programs — and supports recognized terrorist groups, namely, Hezbollah and Hamas.

In the wake of Hamas’s election victory in 2006, Frangieh told an interviewer that he looks to Hamas with “great joy” and supports violence against Israel. Hamas’s control, he said, “might be able to produce the beginning of salvation. . . . I wonder what else would the Arabs have without Hamas and Hezbollah? Nothing. Except humiliation. I congratulate Hamas on its victory.” Meanwhile, in his academic work, he has written in favor of suicide bombing and martyrdom. In a speech at the University of Bridgeport in 2007, he said that Islam is “very democratic,” and he praised Saddam Hussein as a model leader who “wasn’t a thief” and who “really did something for his country.”

Frangieh has also made his views known through petitions, which, he says, “stem from the heart and are cast onto paper.” In 2006 he signed a pro-Hezbollah petition that was circulated along with a flyer encouraging its signatories to “Boycott Israel. . . . We are all Hizbullah now.” The petition, promoted by prominent anti-Israel, anti-American activists like Tariq Ali, Omar Barghouri, and Norman Finkelstein, demanded a boycott of Israel and encouraged Israeli academics to stop the “Zionist killing machine.” It called Hezbollah the “Lebanese Resistance” and a “legitimate” army, and praised its “heroic operations” against Israel. A 2007 petition blamed a “Zionist conspiracy” for then-senator Biden’s plan to divide Iraq into three separate autonomous regions. In 2009, Frangieh brought the Syrian ambassador, Imad Moustapha, to speak as an honored guest of the college; he had earlier instructed his students to warmly serenade Moustapha with singings from the Koran. (One student even asked, in all earnestness, what students could do to help Syria promote peace.) Syria, a designated as a state sponsor of terrorism, has been governed for 40 years by a brutal dictatorial dynasty. Along with the Muslim Student Association (MSA), Frangieh also brought to campus Imam Zaid Shakir, who blamed the Fort Hood massacre on America’s easy access to guns. Yet another major guest was PLO member Sari Nusseinbeh, who during the first intifada helped terrorists avoid arrest and secure funding....

The people of Orange County aren't buying the argument of 100 UC Irvine faculty members that not giving the Muslim students a pass here would damage the "healing process" on campus.

And by "healing," they mean, "shut up."

Again, what if the shoe were on the other foot, and another student group had conspired in the exact same way against a member of a fashionable left-wing cause? And for that matter, they insult the intelligence of their students -- or relegate them to a state of arrested emotional development through their low standards -- by acting as though they are too mentally fragile to see these students held responsible for their actions.

Here is the introduction, followed by excerpts from those letters to the editor. "Muslim students are not the victims here," compiled by Betty Talbert for the Orange County Register, February 12 (thanks to Twostellas):

Editor's note: This week the Register received 46 letters in favor of bringing criminal charges against the UCI Muslim Students and other students who protested against Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, Feb. 8, 2010 at a UCI event. Only two letters favored not bringing the charges. To weigh in on this issue or any other one send a letter to letters@ocregister.com. The Register encourages all views and perspectives. See the letters supporting the students sent to us by the Council on American Islamic Relations and posted on Feb. 4, "UCI Muslim protesters must not be singled out."

They're not being singled out. It's only, well, inclusive to hold them to the same standard as anyone else.

First letter:

The UCI Muslim Student Union students are a very disciplined, radical group dedicated to changing public opinion by creating hatred toward Israel and the Jews through the importation on campus of the world's most vile hate mongers like Amir Abdel Malik-Ali during "hate week" using our First Amendment rights to spew their poison.

Foreign Islamists dedicated to our destruction, are suspected as the source of funding for the speakers. According to a Sept. 22, 2009 letter from the Zionist Organization of America to the Chief Campus Council of UCI Diane Fields Geocaris, MSU has violated UCI rules and regulations with impunity and the organization has been protected by the political correctness mentality of the University administration.

On May 22, 2008 Pajamas Media reported that Shariah Law was attempted to be enforced on campus when its reporter was told by Dean of Student Services Sally Peterson that no one could photograph any Muslim female on campus. Later, a person taking campus pictures of a procession, including Muslim females was reportedly attacked by four MSU members.

According to the Zionist Organization of America memo it also appears money was raised during the week of May 21, 2009 by MSU speaker George Galloway that eventually found its way to Hamas, a U.S. listed Terrorist organization. The University took no action.

With more than 500 people in attendance, the UCI administration could not ignore the planned attack on Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren Feb. 8, 2010 to prevent him from speaking. As usual, the MSU lied about their careful planning and staging of the disturbance, but their e-mails to each other proved their guilt....

Another:

The sympathy expressed for the "Irvine 11" would be understandable if their disruption of Ambassador Michael Oren's speech were truly a spontaneous and isolated incident ... It was neither. I wonder why no action was taken when this same organization defied university rules by holding a fundraising event for George Galloway, a known Hamas supporter. The preparation for receiving donations was obvious. Anyone who follows George Galloway knows exactly where that money went.

I applaud the actions of District Attorney Tony Rackauckas and urge the O.C. Grand Jury to investigate this matter.

And another:

I was appalled at UC Irvine Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky's opinion piece Feb. 9 saying that the District Attorney's office should not pursue criminal charges against UCI Muslim Students Union members ["Don't prosecute UCI hecklers," Orange Grove].

Chemerinsky acknowledged that, "The school's Muslim Student Union orchestrated a concerted effort to disrupt the speech, " and "the students behavior is wrong and deserves punishment." He then offers the most perverse objections to the DA defending the First Amendment rights of the speaker and the public. He says they should not be prosecuted because of "scarce resources" that "criminal prosecution makes the students into martyrs" and, the worst objection, "criminal prosecution should be a last resort and used only when there are injuries or destruction of property of serious threat of harm."

There are many others at the link above.

Subversion. "Jumanah and the MSA Strike Back!," by Gabriella Hoffman at All-American Girl for the Restoration of Values, February 4 (thanks to David):

So, it’s two weeks till Islam Awareness Week here at UC-San Diego. And what do you know? Our pal Jumanah Albarhi (remember her endorsement of a Second Holocaust/Hamas?) and the beloved Muslim Students Association are at it again.

Watch the Horowitz v. Albarhi exchange that is inching close to 1.3 million views on YouTube if you haven’t already:

This is an email from the Provost of Sixth College regarding Islam Awareness Week:

Dear Sixers,

Some of you may already know that the Muslim Student Association at UC San Diego will be hosting its 11th annual Islam Awareness Week (IAW) during Week 7, February 14-18, 2011.

The Muslim Student Association is a campus organization that seeks to foster a sense of community for Muslim students, provide an outlet for personal development and social activism, and create an environment that promotes constructive and engaging dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims through education.

Sadly, the post-9/11 era has been characterized by rampant bigotry and racism against Islam and Muslim-Americans. IAW creates a space for much-needed discussion of the issues that Muslim-Americans face on a daily basis. It also functions as a platform in which Muslim students can help educate fellow students and community members about Islam and its true teachings.

The theme this year, Islam: Straight from the Source, will focus on providing our campus community with an accurate depiction of Islam and Muslims–a point of view that is often obscured by the current hostile political climate and biased media coverage.

I am happy to lend my endorsement to this important program, and encourage you to participate.

All best,
Your Provost,
Naomi Oreskes
Naomi Oreskes, Ph.D.
Provost, Sixth College
Professor of History and Science Studies
Adjunct Professor of Geosciences

Jumanah follows up with another e-mail about that week’s events. Feast your eye’s on an event with a CAIR representative (an alleged Hamas front group), “demystifying improperly quoted texts from the Quran” segment, and “Women in Islam” event. You should be weary where your tax-paying dollars are going to:

This year’s program is planned as follows: [...]

-Dr. Jamal Badawi, Professor Emeritus at St. Mary’s College Halifax, Nova Scotia, will be conducting an evening lecture on commonly misquoted and misunderstood Quranic texts. [...]

-Hussam Ayloush, Executive Director of the Greater Los Angeles Area's Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) chapter will be conducting an evening session on Muslims in America.

Badawi was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas terror funding case, as was Hamas-linked CAIR. The Muslim Students Association was founded by the Muslim Brotherhood, a group dedicated in its own words to "eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within."

There is much more. Read it all.

I'm speaking about this tonight in Los Angeles, and Jamie Glazov interviewed me about it in FrontPage:

[...] You will be on a panel discussion coming up soon in Los Angeles about what is going on in our K-12 public schools. Tell us who will be joining you on the panel, when exactly, and what all of this is about.

Spencer: Thanks, Jamie. The panel will be Tuesday night, January 11, at 7 pm at the Luxe Hotel Sunset (11461 Sunset Blvd) in Los Angeles.

The topic is: The Subversive Agenda of our Public Schools: What we need to know and how we can change it.

It features these people along with me:

Lance Izumi - Senior Director of Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute. He has written at length about how teacher union contracts severely limit our children's chances of getting a good public school education.

Mary Grabar - Teaches in the Program in Democracy and Citizenship at Emory University. She regularly speaks and writes about how American education has fallen into the hands of people who are doing their best to radically alter the way we educate our young.

David Upham - Professor of Politics at the University of Dallas. Specializing in political and legal theory, he recently inserted himself in the Texas curriculum-textbook controversy and came up with some interesting findings.

Larry Sand - Retired teacher and president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network. Realizing that so many are misled by our teachers' unions, he writes and speaks about the unions and their ongoing battle against any meaningful education reform.

FP: Ok, so tell us a bit about what is going on in our public schools. Is "multiculturalism" being forced on students? With what effect?

Spencer: Multiculturalism, certainly, but I am particularly concerned personally with the Islamic slant of public school textbooks. Of all the arenas in which the stealth jihad is advancing, the most crucial is in our schools, where stealth jihadists have found a welcoming environment among teachers deeply steeped in the multiculturalist ethos. With the mandate of "tolerance" robbing many educators of their ability to evaluate non-Western cultures critically, teachers are highly susceptible to an organized campaign by U.S.-based Islamic organizations and their primary benefactor, Saudi Arabia, to present a view of Islam that whitewashes its violent history and intolerant religious imperatives.

Meanwhile, in America's Islamic academies, teaching materials, some direct from Saudi Arabia, instill unequivocal hatred toward non-Muslims and a deep suspicion of Western culture. But none of that hatred appears in the material Islamic groups place in mainstream public schools - which would be positive if it represented a genuine departure from that Saudi-instilled perspective. But it doesn't; in fact, many of the Islamic groups that vet American public school textbooks for the accuracy of their material on Islamic doctrine and history are also Saudi-funded. And they make sure that the Islamic instruction in these textbooks presents a picture of Islam that is so pristine and whitewashed that it sometimes crosses the boundary from mere pro-Muslim bias into outright Islamic proselytizing.

And so the effect is that while Muslims in the West grow increasingly more assertive in demanding that Western institutions accommodate Sharia provisions, American schoolchildren are learning a partial and rosy view of Islam in American public schools - using books that have been vetted by organizations linked to the stealth jihad.

FP: What textbooks are being used to teach students? For instance, are your books part of the curricula in schools to help students understand the threat to our civilization and to help us defend it?

Spencer: I know of no public school that uses my books as part of a curriculum to help students understand the threat. I'd be surprised to hear of any curricula devoted to helping students understand the threat.

Instead, we get a whitewashing of Islam. In a study released in June 2008, the American Textbook Council, an independent national research organization that evaluates the quality of textbooks, issued a report finding that ten of the most widely used middle school and high school social studies textbooks "present an incomplete and confected view of Islam that misrepresents its foundations and challenges to international security." The books present highly tendentious constructions as undisputed truth, making common cause with West-hating multiculturalists to bowdlerize the presentation of Islam, denigrate or downplay Christianity and Western civilization, and transform many public school textbooks into proselytizing tracts. And this tendency has only intensified since September 11.

California seventh graders, for example, use a text called History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond, produced by the Teachers' Curriculum Institute. Defining jihad, the book tells students that "Muslims should fulfill jihad with the heart, tongue, and hand. Muslims use the heart in their struggle to resist evil. The tongue may convince others to take up worthy causes, such as funding medical research. Hands may perform good works and correct wrongs." It gives no idea that Muslims have ever viewed jihad as involving, in whole or part, warfare against unbelievers, or have ever waged war on that basis. Muhammad, meanwhile, far from exhorting his followers to subjugate unbelievers, "taught equality" and was a prototypical compassionate liberal who instructed Muslims "to share their wealth and to care for the less fortunate in society."[1]...

There is much more.