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In 2005, Dr. Bazian told a Berkeley audience that modern-day “Palestinians” are direct descendants of the Philistines and that Israelis have no connection to ancient Jews. They are simply Russian converts to Judaism.
Dr. Bazian presented his alleged findings about “Islamophobia” on June 23, 2011, in D.C. at CAIR’s headquarters. Results include the conclusion that, on a scale from 1 (best situation for Muslims) to 10 (worst possible situation for Muslims), “Islamophobia” in America stands at 6.4. If Islamophobia is at 6.4, and there are eight times as many attacks against Jews as against Muslims nationwide, then how shall we measure anti-Semitism in America?
According to the report, the “worst” promoters of “Islamophobia” include Dr. Steven Emerson, Dr. Daniel Pipes (“the grandfather of Islamophobia in America”), Dr. Frank Gaffney, as well as “Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda and other violent extremists.” We wonder what these genuinely sober, grave, and learned gentlemen will make of being lumped together with the arch fiend terrorist, Osama bin Laden.
In its list of “Islamophobic” incidents in recent years, it includes the University of California at Irvine’s 2010 decision to suspend the university’s Muslim Student Union for one year after several of its members (including its president) heckled the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. during a speech, calling him a “killer.” The report describes this as a “peaceful protest.”
Thus far, no one has protested the politicization of Race and Gender Studies at Berkeley. So far, no one has demanded that Berkeley shut down the project to document Islamophobia.
We wonder whether Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt, who quickly praised Yale’s decision to shut YIISA down and condemned YIISA for too much advocacy, will be writing about the unacceptable combining of propaganda, activism, and advocacy with scholarship–when the matter concerns Muslims and not Jews. In a shocking display of opportunism and moral obtuseness, Lipstadt condemned the brilliant Dr. Charles Small, who founded YIISA, for allowing advocacy to perhaps interfere with hallowed scholarship.
As Ben Cohen writes in this week’s Forward, the problem with YIISA is not that it’s overly political but lies rather “in its determination to go against the grain. Yale may couch its justification for YIISA’s closure in terms of academic standards, but that does nothing to explain the undercurrent of hostility from others on the Yale faculty. If former YIISA director Charles Small is the equivalent of Stokely Carmichael, heaven knows where that leaves Columbia’s tenured anti-Zionist, Joseph Massad, or the London School of Economics, which carried out research funded by the Gadhafi Foundation. By closing YIISA after only five years, Yale has effectively sided with those voices that demean contemporary anti-Semitism as the fantasy of overzealous Israel advocates.”
We demand that the University of California at Berkeley consider whether its Center on Race and Gender meets the standards for Western scholarship or whether it merely provides pseudo-academic cover for anti-Semitic propaganda.
Nathan Bloom is an assistant to Dr. Phyllis Chesler. He majored in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.
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