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Professors from Georgetown, Columbia, Berkeley, UNC attend conference led by convicted jihad terror leader

Oct 22, 2018 12:34 pm By Robert Spencer

No surprise, really. Al-Arian’s line is the dominant perspective on college and university campuses all over America today, with no dissent allowed.

“Why Are U.S. Academics Attending a Conference Led by a Terror Supporter in Erdogan’s Turkey?,” by A. J. Caschetta, The Tower, October 22, 2018 10:22 am

Why are American professors of Middle East studies attending an Istanbul conference chaired by former Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) board member Sami Al-Arian, who pled guilty to conspiring to provide services to PIJ – a U.S.-designated terrorist organization – while teaching at the University of South Florida?

And why, as if Al-Arian’s presence weren’t bad enough, are they cozying up to Turkey’s authoritarian Islamist regime that kidnaps Americans for its hostage diplomacy, threatens to conduct “operations” against opponents in the U.S., and dispatches thugs to beat up Americans as they peacefully protest in the streets of Washington, D.C.?

Because like so many of their colleagues in the discipline, they are apologists for Islamism or – worse – Islamists themselves. They gathered in Istanbul this week to participate in the Second International Conference on the Muslim Ummah at Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University (IZU) on October 14-16.

Al-Arian’s sordid legal history includes being charged with contempt, spending several years in prison, and deportation to Turkey in 2015 as part of a final plea agreement. Welcomed as a hero by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s lackeys, he is director of the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) and professor of public affairs at Istanbul Zaim University. The Americans’ participation in the conference legitimizes both Al-Arian and, more the point, the brutal government he supports….

Since the failed coup in July, 2016, Erdoğan has either jailed, killed or purged virtually every free-thinking member of the Turkish academia, leaving only his Islamist allies. In February, 2018, Al-Arian roused Erdogan’s professors at another academic conference in Istanbul by telling them that the U.S. is “our enemy.”

Al-Arian’s supporters in American academia hail from a variety of institutions, but especially Georgetown University’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Christian-Muslim Understanding (ACMU), a world-renowned home to both apologists for and practitioners of Islamism. Its director, Jonathan Brown, (who also holds the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization), offered welcoming remarks on Sunday and lectured on Monday. Brown, a convert to Islam who has defended slavery under Islamic law, is Al-Arian’s son-in-law, married to his daughter Laila, a journalist at Qatari-owned Al-Jazeera.

The conference’s rogue’s gallery of sponsors includes the emirate of Qatar, ever eager to provide cover for both terrorists – whether of the Taliban or Hamas variety – and Islamists. Demonstrating its alliance with Turkey, it sent a few professors from the College of Islamic Studies in Doha where, not coincidentally, Georgetown has a campus, where Al-Arian’s son Abdullah teaches history. He earned his Ph.D. at Georgetown.

In addition to lending Al-Arian a thin veneer of respectability, the conference provided a platform to denounce the evils of European (but not Arab, Turkish, or Persian) colonialism and compare Israel to Apartheid South Africa. IZU professor Mehmet Bulut complained about the U.S. moving its Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

All this rank hypocrisy on display is enough to make a decent person gag, and the Americans participating deserve to be called out for dragging their respective schools into the mire. They include:

• Joseph Massad of Columbia University, whose brutish behavior towards Jewish students was the subject of a documentary and an extensive Ad Hoc Grievance Committee investigation.
• Nader Hashemi of the University of Denver, an apologist for the Muslim Brotherhood.
• Mujeeb R. Khan of the University of California, Berkeley, who has defended Erdoğan at Al-Jazeera by portraying him as a democrat.
• Hafsa Kanjwal of Lafayette College (PA), an Al-Jazeera writer who sees Islamophobia everywhere, even in criticism of the Taliban.
• Sarah Shields of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, a prominent advocate of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign….

Not to get all Joseph Welch on you, but “Have you no decency?”

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Filed Under: academia, Featured, Islamic Jihad, Leftist/Islamic Alliance Tagged With: Istanbul, Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University (IZU), Sami Al-Arian, Second International Conference on the Muslim Ummah


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Comments

  1. Noel Anderson says

    Oct 22, 2018 at 12:47 pm

    Stop the funding to these uni’s……

    • Tom S. says

      Oct 23, 2018 at 10:05 am

      There must be a purge of anti-American academia after Truth and Reconciliation hearings following the restoration of the Constitution during a second Trump administration. A conservative North Carolina AG would be preparing sedition charges against Sarah Shields.

  2. AnneCrockett says

    Oct 22, 2018 at 12:57 pm

    trying to recall– isn’t he the rumpled academic?

    • Robert_k says

      Oct 22, 2018 at 6:18 pm

      Sami al-Arian, as I recall was a PhD professor of Electrical Engineering at Tampa University. Perhaps these professors were coming to hear his insights in Electrical Engineering.

  3. mortimer says

    Oct 22, 2018 at 1:30 pm

    Turkey is preparing for the next Ottoman empire.

    • b.a. freeman says

      Oct 22, 2018 at 2:01 pm

      +1

  4. b.a. freeman says

    Oct 22, 2018 at 2:01 pm

    we need to get mr. trump to start tweeting about these criminals; he should point out that the money funding the al-waleed bin talal center is from al-waleed bin talal, a member of the saudi royal family. right now would be a good time for him to tweet, too, given the khashoggi affair. he could then go on to point out that the majority, if not most, u.s. mosques are funded by the saudis as well, and ask whether or not that is a good thing. the left won’t like it, but people *will* talk about it, and if nothing else, many people, who are, as i once was, clueless about islam, may decide to check it out, if only to try to prove mr. trump wrong. most leftists in the u.s. are leftists only because they were indoctrinated into it from childhood, not because they chose the politics; they are still basically decent americans (just deluded, as i was up until a few years ago), and may want to “protect” muslims. this type of nominal leftist *NEEDS* to look at islam; at least some of them may wake up.

    no doubt the legacy media would go crazy, but i have come to believe that the only republican who can actually stand up to hard-core leftists is mr. trump. yes, he is a clown and a loose cannon, but that is to his advantage; no matter what they do or when they do it, or even if they don’t do it, he will be coming out with something outrageous soon. the left has spent the past several decades promoting leftists and denigrating non-leftists, and as the left has become more powerful, media attacks have become ever more severe. at this point, *any* other republican would have been totally trashed, humiliated, embarrassed, and driven from public life (and if possible, even from life itself). mr. trump is a showman, however, and is used to bad publicity. he knows that any publicity is better than no publicity, and rather than using the bully pulpit as a way to project his vision to the people, he is picking up the pulpit and bashing the left over the head with it. this behavior was totally unexpected by the media, and they have been continuously flummoxed by it. now we need mr. trump to flummox them again, this time about islam.

  5. gravenimage says

    Oct 22, 2018 at 2:07 pm

    Professors from Georgetown, Columbia, Berkeley, UNC attend conference led by convicted jihad terror leader
    …………………….

    Just appalling–and this includes a Muslim thug from my own alma mater.

    Here’s a book review by Mujeeb Khan, where he characterizes concerns over Jihad terror as a problem not with having violent Muslims in the West, but “as Norton [the book’s author] shows, often these questions have less do to with specificchallenges and issues posed by Muslims and more to do with particular identities, anxieties, and agendas held by majority populations in Western societies and particularly their political and intellectual/cultural elites”.

    In other words, if you don’t want Muslims murdering you, this is *your* problem, filthy Infidels…

    The other “academics” are likely as bad.

  6. Lydia Church says

    Oct 22, 2018 at 7:35 pm

    So they can better learn the hypnotics of indoctrination… my dear!

  7. Dan Schnittker says

    Oct 22, 2018 at 10:40 pm

    Did John Esposito and Noah Feldman have scheduling conflicts? This kind of submission by academics and others and others and others …. used to astonish me because I thought it was the exception. The desire to avoid conflict is very strong. Weakness provokes. From so many perspectives, it ain’t looking good on the old Defense of Western Civ front. Then again, there are many inspiring examples. Thanks, Robert Spencer et al.

  8. Vicky says

    Oct 23, 2018 at 6:39 am

    While American parents, still wearing their rose colored glasses, continue to send their young adult children to these leftest brainwashing centers.

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