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Middle Eastern studies must be removed from departments of Middle Eastern Studies. Those who obtain their degrees in such studies get them from such places as Columbia's MEALAC, and are thus presumably indoctrinated by such disinterested souls as Hamid Dabashi, Joseph Massad, Rashid Khalidi, the inimitable George Saliba, and Ms. Al-Haj. The latter is fresh from her incredible and intolerable achievement in obtaining tenure, despite her utter failure to meet minimal standards of scholarship, from a department that has lost its collective senses, and in a vote that can only be explained by a Namierian exercise in prosopography, examining each faculty member for prejudice or parti pris, or in the case of one particular voter, his wife or ex-wife, whatever she now is supposed for the outside world to be.
Presidents and Provosts must swallow their fear of interfering with "faculty autonomy." Other faculty members should not be shy, especially if they are trained in History and other relevant fields, to look into how their "colleagues" in Middle Eastern departments are actually teaching about Islam, for without Islam, no discussion of anything in the Middle East makes sense. (It would be like putting on Hamlet without the vacillating prince.) And one cannot rely on Muslims to demonstrate the same objective presentation that, for example, one can expect about the presentation of Western history by those who are real or nominal Christians, at least as scholarly standards developed in the West -- and never did in the world of Islam, which has no universities or scholarship equivalent to what both the West (Europe and North America) and, with a lag, now the East (of Japan, China, Korea, and also non-Muslim India) have both developed.
If such follies as Iraq are not to be repeated, with all their unnecessary squandering of men, money, materiel, then Islam must be understood. If it had been understood, had Americans in the corridors of power known that in Islam political legitimacy is located in the will expressed by Allah and not in the expressed will of the people, that might have prevented the whole absurd Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations project, by which "democracy" was to be transplanted in the sandy soil of Iraq, for "ordinary moms and dads" were said to long for it, rather than to long for settling scores, and seizing, or seizing back, power from their sectarian and ethnic enemies, and making sure that their sect, or their group, had as much power as it could grab, and keep.
And had Islam been properly understood, the naive and fruitless attempts to "solve" the Arab-Israeli dispute would end. They would be replaced by the recognition that there is no "solution" but rather merely a situation to be managed, because of the immutable Muslim belief that the Infidel nation-state of Israel must be whittled down and then destroyed, and because its continued existence, no matter what its size, constitutes a permanent affront to the Muslims -- for it does not accord with their world-view about land once part of Dar al-Islam having to be recaptured. Of course, in the end the entire world must submit to Islam, but until large numbers of Muslims were allowed to settle deep within Infidel lands, and until the Money Weapon supplied by oil revenues (some ten trillion dollars since 1973 alone), that larger dream seemed impossible, but it no longer does, especially in certain parts of Western Europe.
What if the KGB had had the kind of money to play with that the Saudis do? During the 70 years of its existence, Soviet Communism spent about 7-8 billion on propaganda worldwide. The Saudis alone have spent about one hundred billion, over the past few decades, with more being spent every year. It is spent on mosques, and madrasas, all over the Western world. It is spent on academic "centers," most connected with universities, and some stand-alone, as well as endowments for well-upholstered chairs at universities that are chosen either because they are conveniently located to centers of power (Esposito's Muslim-Christian Understanding operation is in Washington, at Georgetown, and so is the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies), or to curry favor with a new President (that Islamic studies money lavished on the University of Arkansas when Clinton was President), or at places where the reflected glory can do the cause some good (the "Guardian of the Two Noble Sanctuaries" professorship at Harvard Law School, with Frank Vogal now presumably passing the Saudi-lit torch to that thrusting young academic, whose entire oeuvre is not worth a page written of Joseph Schacht, Noah Friedman), such as Harvard and the other usual self-promoting self-described "world-class" universities.
And if the presidents and provosts and other alarmed faculty do not start looking into this, or even if they do, alumni should withhold contributions, no matter how keenly they may feel a loyalty to their alma mater. They owe a higher loyalty to the political and legal institutions, and to the conditions of freedom that make art and science possible, and that are under assault, slowly but steadily, by those who derive the meaning of their existence, and the regulation of that existence, from Islam. Ignorant undergraduates, unfortunately, are also impressionable. They are being carefully misinformed and mis-schooled, systematically so, by many of those, Muslims and also non-Muslim apologists for Islam, who are determined that the real Western scholarship about Islam -- that of C. Snouck Hurgronje, and Joseph Schacht, and Arthur Jeffrey, and Charles-Emmanuel Bousquet, and Georges Vajda, and Henri Lammens, and Antoine Fattal, and so many others -- is never brought to the students' attention, or is first carefully discredited by heavy doses of Edward Said's Orientalism That book was Said’s attempt, for so long successful, to undercut, in advance, centuries of Western scholarship on Islam. But recent books, and especially that by Ibn Warraq, have blown Said sky-high. All the horses, and all the men, even of those sinister maecenases, all daggers-and-dishdashas, with their sneers of cold command, deploying the money weapon from their palaces in Jiddah and Riyadh, can't put Orientalism back together again.
Posted by Hugh at December 15, 2007 10:24 AM
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this is one thing that I could never understand about this country: what prompts the alumni of our most prestigious schools, people who are presumably not lacking in common sense and even intelligence, in their respective fields of endeavor, shell out millions year after year to finance the rigmarole called American academe - seemingly without an iota of an effort to see how their millions are spent?
Posted by: yankee imp![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/nav-commenters.gif)
at December 15, 2007 10:40 AM
Not only alumni. There are those who like to preserve their memory, with a building or foundation or institute or something, at a "world-class" university even if, sometimes especially if (by way of reflected prestige) they did not attend the famous university in question.
And if you have ever had the chance to eavesdrop on the planning sessions at those Development Offices, you know how calculating, how clever, how leave-no-stone-unturned, those ruthless centers can be, as they send out this personable, even seductive, young man to cultivate that college-town widow (so that the royalties from her husband's books, and license fees for use of his copyrighted caracters, a monkey or a duck, can be left by that seduced widow to the grasping university, not content with its tens of billions iof dollars already piled up) and assign that worldly fellow one to do the rounds of L.A. movie-men, who will be asked to support the "Visual Studies Department," and that one, the barriers-to-entry boy, will be sent to Korea and Japan to visit alumni and to pick up loose change for the Business School. from assorted tycoons who are very impressed with the name of that university.
It's a racket, like so many American rackets. One racket after another.
Posted by: Hugh at December 15, 2007 10:57 AM
I live and work in Arkansas. The University of Arkansas effort shows the cunning and smarts of this academic Jihad effort. One, it can be viewed as a reward to the Clintons, but, perhaps more important, a promise of favorable future treatment to future favorably disposed politicians. Academic Jihad in Arkansas; what's next? cats and dogs living together.
Posted by: biorabbi at December 15, 2007 11:00 AM
Greetings:
Unfortunately, the bending of our students' twigs begins long before their trees show up at college. The process of undermining and subverting our WASPish national culture begins, more often than not, as soon as the kindergarten door closes behind the parents.
Our national culture is very much a parent-less child that is offered no organized or reinforced sustenance.
Posted by: 11B40 at December 15, 2007 1:24 PM
The rot stems IMO from universities becoming money making machines. Look at how tuitions rise at the twice the rate of inflation and where at the more prestigious universities its nothing for a 4 year degree to cost over a $100,000.00!!
So its no wonder they won't turn a blind eye to foreign money.
at December 15, 2007 1:36 PM
In order to put a well-deserved end to this nonsense going on in American Academia, Congress is probably going to have to pass comprehensive legislation limiting ANY school or school faculty members from accepting donations--especially monies-- from what amounts to enemy states (particularly jihadist sponsoring states) of the United States. Way too much co-opting of the American educational system by enemy ideologues of America has happened already.
It will probably have to be made a federal crime for any university officials to permit the subversion of the education process in any way (ultimately these people are responsible for what their schools 'teach' our children). A clear-cut definition of subversion of the education process CAN be arrived at and this law IS doable. That would put a stop to this baloney (if enforced--enforcement is always a sticking point with law-making).
But we need the cojones to act on this matter. NOW. I would contact my representatives in the US Senate and Congress about this matter (and in fact,I already HAVE).
It's getting late. Ward Churchill and his vile ilk are roaming at large to the colossal detriment of our nation's future.
Posted by: pythagoras at December 15, 2007 2:46 PM
What the hell do you expect with so called soft sciences! In this type of climate opinions matter, not rigor. Now if I had enough money and was able to establish a chair at Harvard, in for example the evolution in the style of Patagonian nose flutes from the 3rd century to the 5th century BC any old idiot who had an opinion that seemed a bit more reasonable than his neighbor would get the job. That is of cause if he was black. Now if the Saudis were to establish a chair in say the hard sciences such as Maths or Physics where logic and vigor are in demand, opinions don't matter objective proof is needed. This, not surprisingly demands intelligence. The higher the IQ the better chance you have of understanding the problem. This is the province where those pesky Jew are at there best. In 1954 in New York they did a study of all the IQs in the city of the 28 that were over 170 24 were Jews. Is it any wonder they ran the Manhattan project. Now these Jews would certainly have and opinion concerning Patagonian nose flutes, but would they have a chance of getting the chair. The answer is simply NO NO a thousand times NO. The time to look out is when the climate changes and fancy takes over from reason and these Yids (Yid by the way is a vulgar form for the word Jew) are driven from there posts as happened in Germany in the 1930s, then the end is near. Hugh has certainly a point, but in the end Science Maths and Biology will win, a rich capitalist society needs them to survive and the capitalist society we live in are not going to give them up, all the huff and puffing of the Muslims will not change that one iota.
Posted by: Holger Dansker at December 15, 2007 4:47 PM
Hugh:
thats a beautiful description of the hapless widow and the young viper and I am proud to have provoked you to write it :)
And yet I am sure that it is not just widows, and not just Hollywood crowd, and that there are CEOs in total compos mentis to whom it is enough to whisper "Go Blue!" and they will write you a check with NO stipulation on how it should be spent - something they would NEVER do in their normal course of action. A racket it is indeed, but in form only; in content it is a mass form of being spellbound and/or collective death wish. And yet someone finances a lot of conservative think tanks and plays golf with the same alumnus CEOs, but I dont know enough about the rules of behavior on the golf course to wonder why this issue cannot be brought up. As for us, mortals, we could join hands to boycott a company who gives money to endow a chair like this, no?
Pythagoras:
noble thought but I just dont see it happening. Since I am sure a lot of this money gets kicked back to politics in terms of electoral contributions, I just can't see politicians passing such a law.
Holger:
decline of modern sciences is a matter of deep concern, but I think it is a wider social issue and is not confined to academe. Just look at any high school - how many kids are willing to assume the "nerd" label and risk other social opprobrium and do something as hard as science as opposed to "communications"? Our educational establishment is utterly anti-science exactly because they hate to deal with an area where only hard data is accepted. MSM grabs at any stories that reveal "corruption" in science, whether real or perceived. The Hollywood idea of a scientist... oh, you know the story as well as I do.
at December 15, 2007 5:17 PM
"I am sure that...there are CEOs in total compos mentis to whom it is enough to whisper "Go Blue!" and they will write you a check with NO stipulation on how it should be spent..."
-- from a posting above
Please send me a list of any and all such people, via Robert, at once. At this point such a list would, for me, come in particularly handy.
Posted by: Hugh at December 15, 2007 6:29 PM
In sane world, academia would go one step further and shut down all departments that do not constitute not basic (and at least in principle) non-political disciplines. There is no reason for regional studies or any number of hyphen departments. The real scholars in these departments could be subsumed into traditional departments: history, political science, etc. The old argument that scholars who were not conservative or traditional enough for these departments and thus had to have their own departments does not hold. It was probably a canard to begin with.
Posted by: Wimbledon Womble at December 15, 2007 9:00 PM
Lets be honest, our highly touted system of "higher" education is a mess. It is a politically correct Mecca where truth and reason are secondary to socialist politics and anti-Western ideology.
Sites like jihadwatch are unfairly considered "right" wing in discussing Islam. However, the label does fit when taking on academia.
The main reason why I am fan of Horowitz is that he actually tries to take on the university monopoly---a hopeless task if you ask me.
I suspect that 1000 years from now, Islam will be in the asheep of history, but higher education will still be dominated by anti-western politically correct propagandists.
Posted by: JSobieski at December 15, 2007 11:21 PM
Imam Khalid Latif, Chaplain of NYU, Rutgers, Princeton,and NYC Prisons is also an Advisory Board member of the Khalil Gibran International Academy, a Brooklyn, NY public school. A public school in NYC has a religious Advisory Board member that was thrown off a Columbia University teacher-training program by the NYCDOE Chancellor Joel Klein for his anti-semitic remarks. Klein also said Latif shouldn't be near any educational venue. I can only imagine his input into a public school. Islamic indoctrination has filtered down from Universities to the K-12 grades.
Posted by: Brooklyn at December 16, 2007 2:44 PM
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