WHAT: Muslim Brotherhood Official to Visit NYU Law School’s Center on Law and Security
WHEN: Thursday, October 19, at 6:00 pm
WHERE: NYU School of Law, Vanderbilt Hall, 40 Washington Sq. South
CONTACT: Journalists wishing to attend the Open Forum should contact the Center on Law and Security at 212-992-8854 or email cls@juris.law.nyu.edu.The forum will be moderated by Peter Bergen, fellow at the Center on Law and Security, CNN terrorism analyst, and author of The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of Al Qaeda’s Leader. The panelists will be:
Dr. Abd El Monem Abo El Fotouh, senior member of Muslim Brotherhood Guidance Council and general secretary of Arabic Medical Union.
Dr. Alexis Debat, senior fellow at the Nixon Center and senior consultant to ABC News. Former advisor to the French Minister of Defense on Transatlantic Affairs and currently writing a study on the Muslim Brotherhood.
Nick Fielding, author of Masterminds of Terror: The Truth Behind the Most Devastating Attack the World Has Ever Seen, and former senior reporter at the Sunday Times (London). — From a press release
The whole thing was, in the topics and guests, scarcely a step up, in its import, than any of those Interfaith Gatherings with which we are familiar. There the Muslims present their own views, heavily laced with taqiyya, turn aside questioning with another dose of the same, fortified with tu-quoque, and a good time is had by all. And nothing whatsoever of real substance comes out, or is learned by the innocent Infidels.
This grand affair was conducted by Peter Bergen, famous for having interviewed Osama bin Laden, and therefore for being a “terrorism” expert. That, of course, does not make him an expert on all the other, much more important things one needs to know about — the tenets of Islam and the attitudes to which those tenets naturally give rise, Jihad and the dhimmi system, the varied instruments of Jihad and, finally, the internal weaknesses within the Camp of Islam that might usefully be exploited in order to defend the non-Muslim world.
Peter Bergen probably knows nothing of any of this. But he will continue to dine out for quite some time at universities and as a “consultant” on terrorism. The big paydays of these consultants on “terrorism” and their so-called expertise, both trivial and often irrelevant to larger matters, should be numbered.
Another party involved in this degringolade is Alexis Debat, a believer in the wonders of “Muslim economic theory” — which is short on economics, but long on Islam. He thinks, apparently, that we have much to learn from this part of Islam. When he senses Islam under attack, he is quick to invoke the Islam-is-not-monolithic mantra, constructing something and then demolishing that same something, which only a fool would have argued in the first place. It is precisely because “Islam is not a monolith” (the doctrine that unites Muslims above all else is at the core of Islam: the abyss that separates the Believer from the Infidel), above all that that one has argued here for the idiocy of the goals established by Bush for Iraq, and the further idiocy of ignoring those sectarian and ethnic and other divisions within Islam — you see, “Islam is not a monolith” — when he should be attempting to exploit them to the fullest.
One of the invited participants to this conference, Kamal Helbawy of the Muslim Association of Britain, was kept out even by our State Department. That tells you something about this Conference. I suggest that the ghost of Harold Acton insist on receiving back from NYU his spectacular Florentine home, Villa La Pietra, in order to turn it into a cultural center dedicated to preventing the spread of Islam in Europe and the threat that such a development would pose to the art, literature, and free and skeptical inquiry that is much of the legacy that Harold Acton thought he was protecting and promoting when he turned over that fabulous place to NYU.
Too bad Acton did not leave heirs who might have insisted that the intention of Acton himself was not being met by the university. But what can one expect when the twisted-mouthed, man-in-dramatic-black Tony Judt is put in charge of the “Remarque Institute”? Can you just imagine what Erich Maria Remarque and at least one of his wives (Paulette Levy Goddard) would have made of Tony Judt and his comprehension of Europe and the need to defend it from Islam?
Stop giving things to universities. They don’t deserve it. Stick to those who are in fact acting as protectors, defenders, and true transmitters of true culture. They are not to be found, at least not the way they might once have been expected to be found, in universities. They are elsewhere.