“sensitivity training" is nothing more than listening to biased views about Islam that are taught by Muslim apologetics.

political corectness protects Islam.

This is an interesting link:
http://kotisivu.mtv3.fi/jjokunen/political_correctness_and_islam.htm

Posted by: Johnathan at May 22, 2006 10:41 AM

I am a lucky one in regard to Islamic studies. Nearly 20 years ago, I took a course at my university (in the Deep South of the US) in Middle Eastern Studies. It was probably the only balanced course ever taught a state university in my lifetime.

It was co-team taught by two PHDs in history: One a former Israeli army officer, and the other an Egyptian Muslim. They strongly disagreed about almost everything but were personal friends and always civil to each other. The Israeli professor even pointed out contradictions in the Quran while the Egyptian explained that contradicting himself was Allah's prerogative. All the students really enjoyed that one. At least a third of the classes had Middle Eastern guest speakers from a wide variety of views.

Sadly, this course was offered only once and the university claimed that it was cancelled due to "funding restrictions". I've always wondered what the real reason was, because this same university now offers only dhimmi or Muslim taught classes on Middle Eastern history and neither the Israeli nor the fair-minded Egyptian professor were ever seen again on campus.

Posted by: Provoslavni at May 22, 2006 12:15 PM

In the wake of 9/11 I decided to try to enter the ranks of mainstream academia thinking that a PhD in political economy who had actually lived on the doorstep of Mecca for more than five years with a pretty good handle on the culture, language and history of the region might be welcomed. There was only one problem: I reject Edward Said's "Orientalists" thesis as immutable canon. I do agree with some of what he had to say but it is well known that I am a champion of much of the scholarship that Said and his cowering sychophants dismiss out of hand. There were a lot of babies thrown out with that wash. So, being branded as a "neo-orientalist", the doors to all the Middle East programs in the country that I have approached have been slammed in my face and in the face of my fellow independent scholars.

No bother. I am truly independent with ample private funding to pursue my research. The downside of course is that we "post-Saidists" do not have access to the student bodies who are currently being "Borg"-ed by the recycled petrodollar financed 5th column Saidist academics in schools like the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. So what we are discovering on the frontier of our research is currently being catalogued for future use rather than for access by present day policy makers except those with whom we interact with directly.

On a more upbeat note, that interaction is increasing by the day as more and more constituents of those policy makers become ever more aware of the profound disconnect between the fiction of the mainstream academic description of Islam and its history and the directly observable facts.

Posted by: DrMack at May 22, 2006 12:39 PM

I took two western civilization classes at my local university. We read everything from Greek folklore, the bible, but when we got to the Quran, the teacher was always interrupted by the Muslim students. It didn’t matter if the professor quoted peaceful or violent verses, these as*holes always had to “correct” him and then go on and on about how the Quran is the word of god. Finally the professor got fed-up and told them to shut the f&*k up, and some in the class stood up and repeated what the professor said. Sadly I didn’t see the professor the following semester. We had over 100 students in the class and I have to say and least half really had great respect for him.

Posted by: billybob at May 22, 2006 1:32 PM

The only potential impediment to the well-oiled saudi petrodollar/Western academia complex is that damned, pernicious "veritas" as they like to call it (but not necessarily pursue it) at Yale and Harvard. And too many of these damned, ignorant, overly impressionable college students keep trying to ferret out this "veritas", no matter how much carefully sanitized islam and rewritten re-edited history is spoon-fed to them. Chalk it up to immaturity. They'll outgrow it.

Posted by: Infidel33 at May 22, 2006 5:04 PM

california the next to fall to the demon allah..........In a recent federal decision that got surprisingly little press, even from conservative talk radio, California's 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled it's OK to put public-school kids through Muslim role-playing exercises, including:
Reciting aloud Muslim prayers that begin with "In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful . . . ."

Memorizing the Muslim profession of faith: "Allah is the only true God and Muhammad is his messenger."
Chanting "Praise be to Allah" in response to teacher prompts.

Professing as "true" the Muslim belief that "The Holy Quran is God's word."

Giving up candy and TV to demonstrate Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting.

Designing prayer rugs, taking an Arabic name and essentially "becoming a Muslim" for two full weeks.
http://www.michellemalkin.com/

Posted by: storagemanager at May 22, 2006 5:17 PM

Doesn't this remind us of Winston Churchill's famous words of 1933:

"The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage-earners. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians....Nothing can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told."

Swap "Britain" for "America" and it certainly applies.

Posted by: Spirit Of 1683 at May 22, 2006 5:36 PM

we are in a war for our way of life,but the enemy must remain un-named for fear of hurting his feelings.......rod serling we need you!

Posted by: storagemanager at May 22, 2006 6:03 PM

I took a course in my first year in college (after the Army) in Comparative Religion, with Buddhism and Islam as part of the agenda. While I might have objected that Buddhism is not a "religion" but "a form a mental hygiene against what most would call religion", I let it pass and enjoyed the witty dhyan/ch'an/zen texts.

But once Islam came up (and the course was being taught by a Catholic nun in street clothes), my constant critiques of its tenets and my objections to treating the intolerance and violence as mere cultural antiquities ended up getting me B (for clearly unwanted honesty), when I could have toed the line, pretended Mohammad was sane, and racked up an easy A.

And this was in the late 1980's, before the modern p.c. onslaught began.

I'm tempted to take a current course at a local ivy league U. and be a theocratic party-pooper, but the real world is so much more interesting.

Posted by: profitsbeard at May 22, 2006 7:38 PM

It is interesting to compare what I hear of Islam classes (profitsbeard, your habitless nun was almost certainly a Karen Armstrong-type sixties survivor and Catholic In Name Only) to what I experienced of Hinduism and Buddhism from the great Richard Gombrich, the former Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford and currend Editor-in-chief of the Clay Library of Sanskrit classics. Prof.Gombrich is one of the greatest Buddhist scholars in history; he has re-dated the Buddha, and regularly rethinks and reworks central features of the Buddhist canon, such as the LOTUS SUTRA, in the light of early Hinduism/ late Vedism (depending on how you look at it). His work has revolutionary implications for the understanding of the Buddha's doctrines. And do Buddhists threaten him or rage at him? Do they exclude his work from reading lists? Is his name mud in Buddhist countries? Hell no! Year after year, several Buddhist monks from all countries from Thailand to Japan come to study their own religion at his feet; he is regularly invited to lecture and hold seminars in every major Buddhist country (except for tyrannical Burma - he is a personal friend of the late Michael Aris and his wife Aung San Suu Kyi) and his work is taken into account everywhere. When dealing with Hinduism, he has from time to time met with a rather harsher spirit, but even then, if (for instance) he happened to encounter a racist reference to the "purity" of the higher "Aryan" castes of India as compared to the "lower" ones, his protests were received with perfect courtesy. Even under the unpleasant shadow of the BJP, which has been using state money to push a nationalist and unscholarly agenda in religious research, there has never been outright intolerance of opposing viewpoints in India. The worst that Hindutva has been able to do is nothing compared with what seems to be the regular, obsessional intimidation and denial that attends the study - if that is what we can call it - of Islam. And that proves that Chesterton was all too right when he said: "All religions are equal? I tell you that religions are so different that the meaner member of one will be sensitivive, whereas the most intelligent member of another will be coarse." I have seen that principle in action in real life. The good manners of educated Indians, even when poor, always made one feel as if you were a prince being welcomed in a palace; whereas even with the very best Muslims I have known (and I have known a few), one often came by chance on a coarse, obstinate, rebellious core. It really is Islam that is a force for wrong.

Posted by: Paolo at May 23, 2006 1:39 AM

Yes, we are in a war to save the worlds different civilizations from the onslaught of Jihad and Da'wa.

I say to all who read these words, that we must fight, fight for our freedoms, fight for our faiths and culture and for the future of our grandchildren.

This will be the challenge of our generation, my generation, the generation that saw Woodstock and the Vietnam war and now must do everything within our powers, with the last ounce of energy to stop these barbarians.

We must do this for our children and grandchildren and lead them with truth and courage to defeat those that would make our societies Islamic.

We must never stop, never falter, use both courge and ruthlessness to keep those who openly quote the Koran to justify our destruction.

It is the cherished obligation of parents to protect the future of one's children and we must be ready to lead them, direct them to the coming conclusion of this clash of the civilized world and the world guided by the words of hate for the Islamic prophet.

As I read the news everyday, I see the dark clouds gathering on so many fronts, god grant us force of will, because the storm that comes will be one of the e that mankind has faced, even greater then the unleashing of evil of the last century.

I am an old man who fears not for his own life but for the future of my grandchildren, yet I will do my part till my last dying breath!

Assault the bastions of untruth in our universities, starve them of money, shout them down in public with the righteous anger of loin protecting it's cubs.

Posted by: El Cid at May 23, 2006 1:46 AM

Profitebeard, your comments re Buddhism being
"mental hygene" inadvertently reveal what's been wrong with the teaching of comparative religion--and it's a problem going on for decades.

The "Cult de Jour" always gets prefernetial treatment, which in practical terms means that it gets bowdlerized in the process. That's why the bad news about Islam isn't presented today; and why in times past, Academic prigs made Buddhism seem a mere "philosophy" (and never mind its fasts, pilgrimages, beliefs about women polluting a monk by sitting on a bench reserved for the sangha, etc. etc.).

My suspicion is thatProfitsbeard is another grizzled fellow like myself, who went to college back in a simple era when anything "mystical" was great and anything textual was "UGH!--Fundamentalism!" Unfortunately, such a mindset, which now infects every level of our government, media, and academia gives us the current idiocy about Sufi'ism being nice and peaceful, blahblahblah.

Yes, I dislike Islam; but to be honest, the sole thing I like about Buddhism is that its temples on its home ground show devils leading around the souls of women who procured an abortion in stocks, while the aborted child tugs at its mother's skirts. Tell it like it is, FIfth Patriarch!

Posted by: Kepha at May 23, 2006 7:27 AM

It seems to me that the West would not have ultimately won the Cold War if all the higher education courses with regard to politics, economics and history in the Western world had been censored and taught by communists and their supporters and if some communist students had been on all such courses. Turgid works (that now read like the most boring irrelavance to reality) like Stalin's 'Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR' (1952) would surely have been on the syllabus of such courses. Perhaps one day Edward Said's works will be as irrelevant. These contain some major mistakes and misconceptions but the man himself was intellectually dishonest - how else would one characterise an Ivy League professor who was both an American citizen from birth and a Christian, yet who presented himself as a Palestinian spokesperson? In fact I remember seeing Said on a pro-Palestinian documentary on British TV once. He was filmed against a background of a Beduion encampment in Israel and it was quite obvious the puzzled Bedu in the background had no idea who Said was - however hard he tried to identify with them they were simply not his people (a bit like the English 'Gypsy leaders' we see on British TV from time to time who are often similar poseurs and clearly like to be filmed against a background of silent real Gypsies). Whatever the faults of the earlier 'Orientalists' they had, on the whole, a far more questing spirit than the post-modernists of subsequent dhimmi Middle Eastern studies. For instance, Sir Richard Burton the 19th century explorer and multi-linguist, made the Haj to Mecca disguised as a Muslim and lived to tell the tale - an adventure that would probably cost him his (and probably his publisher's) life if he wrote about it now.

Posted by: moris2 at May 24, 2006 10:16 AM

"Perhaps one day Edward Said's works will be as irrelevant."
-- from a postiing above

They already are, and he's hardly in the grave. They live on, ghost-like, in the tired courses of his disheartened epigones, but they know the jig is up. The steady chipping away at the ridiculous non-monument, by Keith Windschuttle, by Robert Irwin (yes, even he), and soon, in a forthcoming book that will roll a huge stone right over the grave of Said so that he will never re-emerge to haunt us, by Ibn Warraq.

He was not a learned man, not a good man, not a critic of value. There was nothing valuable about him. He should be seen as a symptom of widespread academic degeneracy. And that includes all his blurb-writing (often for books he never read), the mutual back-slapping for promotions, the liquid-brown-eyes shtick of "our Edward," who evoked such unnecessary and silly sympathy, and helped -- oh, so many helped -- to make the study of literature, rightly conceived, the most rara of avises.

Our Edward.

Posted by: Hugh at May 25, 2006 9:56 AM