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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene</title>
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		<title>‘Islamophobia’ Thought Crimes at Berkeley, Part II</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/islamophobia-thought-crimes-at-berkeley-part-ii/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=islamophobia-thought-crimes-at-berkeley-part-ii</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/islamophobia-thought-crimes-at-berkeley-part-ii/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Jun 2014 04:33:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berkeley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Center for Race & Gender]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamophobia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233280</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Coming soon to a university near you. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/islamophobe.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233289" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/islamophobe-450x253.jpg" alt="islamophobe" width="298" height="168" /></a><strong>[To order David Horowitz and Robert Spencer&#8217;s pamphlet <em>Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future</em>, <a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenterstore.org/collections/pamplets/products/islamophobia-thought-crime-of-the-totalitarian-future">click here</a>.]</strong></p>
<p><strong>To read Part I, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/islamophobia-thought-crimes-at-berkeley/">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>The <a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobiaconf2014">second day</a> of the University of California, Berkeley’s Fifth Annual International Islamophobia Conference—organized by the Center for Race &amp; Gender’s Islamophobia Research &amp; Documentation Project (IRDP)—featured as much hysteria, victimhood, and anti-Western rhetoric as the first (which we reported on yesterday).</p>
<p>Viewing the second day’s antics via live stream, two commercials ran repeatedly: one featuring sexy Latina actress Sofia Vergara selling shampoo for her long, flowing, decidedly unveiled locks, and the other seeking recruits for the U.S. Marines. This led one disgruntled online viewer, expecting an anti-American atmosphere to prevail in the virtual world as well as at the conference, to ask in the comments section, “What’s up with these super wack commercials killing Arab, African brown people?,” which elicited an apology from the organizers, who assured him they had no hand in picking the commercials.</p>
<p>During the afternoon, Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, an assistant professor of religion at the University of Vermont, spoke on, “Muslim Subjects and Citizens: Discursive Ties, Lingering Orientalism, and Islamophobias.” She attempted to draw parallels between the era of British colonialism and modern-day America, claiming that Muslims were seen, then and now, as “traitors,” “fanatics,” and as having “suspect, dual allegiances.” She described this phenomenon as the “insidiousness of Orientalism,” before reaching the ahistorical conclusion, “We find the same thing over 200 years later in America.”</p>
<p>She next asserted that the “rhetoric after 9/11 was similar to the British Raj,” including seeing “Muslims as agents of sinister forces.” In a thinly veiled allusion to Sharia (Islamic) law, Fuerst condemned what she called “anti-foreign law legislation” and chalked it and other efforts to combat Islamism up to being part of an “extended, insidious Orientalist discourse” rather than to the obvious desire of Americans to retain their constitutional liberties.</p>
<p>Deepa Kumar, an associate professor of media studies and Middle Eastern studies at Rutgers University, presented, “Islamophobia in the Obama Era: Liberalism and the National Security State.” Kumar proved to be one of the funnier, more engaging speakers of the day; in lieu of dry academic subject matter, she focused on popular culture, interspersing her talk with clips from movies and television shows such as “Homeland.” Yet her lively humor couldn’t hide her stale political correctness.</p>
<p>Referencing the films <em>Black Sunday</em> (1977) and <em>True Lies</em> (1994), she noted that even before the Islamic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, “Americans were convinced that terrorism comes with brown, male, Arab bodies.” She continued:</p>
<blockquote><p>9/11 cements the imagination. It was no longer necessary to keep demonizing brown people, but to justify a massive national security state.</p></blockquote>
<p>Shifting to the “post-racial era” of the presidency of Barack Obama, Kumar noted that:</p>
<blockquote><p>The language of liberalism and multiculturalism comes to be used to strengthen the national security state. Obama has done this quite effectively, picking up where [President George W.] Bush left off.</p></blockquote>
<p>To illustrate her point, she played clips from a Department of Homeland Security <a href="http://www.dhs.gov/if-you-see-something-say-something%E2%84%A2-campaign">video</a> DHS intended to “raise public awareness about terrorism” called, “If You See Something, Say Something,” the purpose of which she summed up as follows: “We are being recruited to become agents of a surveillance state.” Kumar argued that the filmmakers went out of their way to cast white actors as the suspected terrorists and a multi-ethnic group of actors as the good citizens who report them to the authorities. Despite its basis in reality, she mocked the film’s portrayal of “unattended luggage and backpacks” as threats, claiming that they, too, were merely stand-ins for “the brown terrorist.”</p>
<p>Instead of chalking up these decisions to liberal political correctness, she called them another form of “Islamophobia,” adding “This is how latent racism works: unconsciously.” By this logic, both portraying Muslims as terrorists in the pre-9/11 era and avoiding doing so in the Obama era are examples of “Islamophobia.” The question for Kumar is: what isn’t?</p>
<p>Arun Kundnani, who holds adjunct appointments at New York University, Queens College, and John Jay College (where he teaches terrorism studies), rounded out the panel with the presentation, “Racialization and Radicalization: Islamophobia and the Surveillance of Muslims in the U.S.”</p>
<p>Kundnani lamented the “legalistic, technical” tone of the debate on mass surveillance by the National Security Administration in the wake of Edward Snowden’s <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/edward-snowden">revelations</a>, which he claimed leaves out “the interlinking of race and surveillance” so that, “the last thing anyone wants to talk about is the experience of the targeted population.” He dismissed Snowden’s references to George Orwell’s <em>1984</em> and the idea that “digital surveillance is a new form of Big Brother” and claimed that “no one minds” that “surveillance works by targeting specific groups.” This surely dismisses valid concerns among Americans of all backgrounds over the potential loss of privacy to everyone, not just Muslims. Instead, Kundnani claimed we live in a “panoptical racist society,” in which “different races are policed differently.” Addressing the fact that Islam is a religion, not a race, he insisted that there are “racial signifiers in the discussions about Muslims,” which he compared to anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>Kundnani then likened U.S. authorities to the Stasi, the secret police in communist East Germany, but maintained that “using current data, we’re worse.” He associated Muslim-Americans with the “East German population,” alleging, absurdly, that the “everyday life of Muslims comports with classic accounts of totalitarianism.” Repeating his previous mischaracterizations, he concluded that “the minority is subjected to secret police because the majority doesn’t experience that.” Either Kundnani hasn’t properly understood the ongoing discussion about the scope of counterterrorism surveillance in the U.S., or he misrepresented it to suit his purposes, as the issue goes far beyond allegations of “Islamophobia.”</p>
<p>Ahmet Temel, a graduate student in religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, opened the next panel by speaking on, “Shariaphobia, A Recurring Obsession: Sharia as a Means to Justify Islamophobia.” Adding to the long list of supposed hatreds indicating a clinical diagnosis of “phobia,” “Shariaphobia” is used to smear opponents of the implementation of draconian Sharia (Islamic) law in the West.</p>
<p>Temel alleged that the “misrepresentation” of Sharia as “inherently brutal” and consists of only “three rubrics: punishment, the treatment of women, and fatwas,” which leads to “racism towards Muslims.” The “media creates an image of Sharia” that is “meant to make Muslims look archaic” and makes them “targets of Islamophobic attacks.” Moreover, “media reporting on Sharia shows images of stonings, veiled women, and bearded men,” which eventually leads to “physical attacks.” Yet Temel didn’t deny that stonings occur (he couldn’t given the numerous honor killings of veiled women by bearded men) and simply asserted that criticism of Sharia is nothing more than “a sophisticated way of attacking Islam as irrational, backwards, [and] violent.” He even bemoaned the “anti-Sharia, anti-Islamic agenda in the history” of his native Turkey.</p>
<p>The dissembling continued with Nancy A. Khalil, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Harvard University, who spoke on, “Jihad: American Media and Muslim Theology.” Disassociating jihad from its historic meaning, holy war, Khalil claimed that of the “different meanings of jihad . . . jihad against yourself is the most important one.” Similarly, she alleged that the word “Islam means both submit and peace.” She praised the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) “My Jihad” campaign, launched in response to activist Pamela Geller’s counter-jihad advertising series, as “reclaiming this appropriation of jihad from the association with violence” and “taking back jihad one hashtag at a time.”</p>
<p>IRDP’s is succeeding in its goal to instill the specter of “Islamophobia” into the West. In addition to the aforementioned December, 2014 conference in <a href="http://islamophobiaconparis.weebly.com/">Paris</a>, its expanded agenda includes upcoming conferences in both <a href="http://www.soas.ac.uk/csp/muslimstrustdialogue/07jun2014-beyond-islamophobia.html">London</a> and <a href="http://www.irdproject.com/salzburg-conference.html">Salzburg</a>. Last year, Bazian and other North American Middle East studies specialists participated in an international Islamophobia <a href="http://www.meforum.org/3621/islamophobia-conference">conference</a> in Turkey, while the Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies Chair at Indiana University-Bloomington organized its <a href="http://islamophobiaconference.blogspot.com/">own conference</a>. Bazian is fulfilling his pledge to create the new field of “Islamophobia studies” As there is no shortage of academics invested in pushing this agenda, look for its widespread use by those seeking to censor critics of Islam.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<item>
		<title>‘Islamophobia’ Thought Crimes at Berkeley</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/islamophobia-thought-crimes-at-berkeley/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=islamophobia-thought-crimes-at-berkeley</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/islamophobia-thought-crimes-at-berkeley/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 04 Jun 2014 04:39:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berkeley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hatem bazian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamophobia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[thought crimes]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233267</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Coming soon to a university near you. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/sd1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233283" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/sd1-381x350.jpg" alt="sd" width="283" height="260" /></a><strong>[To order David Horowitz and Robert Spencer&#8217;s pamphlet <em>Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future</em>, <a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenterstore.org/collections/pamplets/products/islamophobia-thought-crime-of-the-totalitarian-future">click here</a>.]</strong></p>
<p>What’s an “Islamophobia”-promoting academic to do when there simply <a href="http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2012/topic-pages/victims/victims_final">aren’t</a> enough <a href="http://www.islamist-watch.org/12057/hate-crime-stats-deflate-islamophobia-myth">hate crimes</a> to sustain the mythical narrative that Muslim-Americans are persecuted for their religion? The Islamophobia Research &amp; Documentation Project (IRDP) at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Race &amp; Gender came up with a brilliant idea for <a href="http://www.islamophobiacon.com/">this spring’s</a> Fifth Annual International Islamophobia Conference: they invented a thought crime called “latent Islamophobia.”</p>
<p>According to the conference <a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobiaconf2014">description</a> and “inspired by [the late Columbia professor] Edward Said’s work on <em>Orientalism</em>,” “Islamophobia” can be broken into two categories: latent and manifest:</p>
<blockquote><p>Latent Islamophobia is founded upon an unquestionable certitude that Muslims trend “towards despotism and away from progress.” They are constructed and “judged in terms of, and in comparison to, the West, so it is always the Other, the conquerable, and the inferior.” Manifest Islamophobia “is what is spoken and acted upon.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Near Eastern studies lecturer, IRDP director, and conference convener <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/search.php?cx=015692155655874064424%3A-cjrsa07xqe&amp;cof=FORID%3A9&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=hatem+bazian&amp;sa=Search">Hatem Bazian</a> supported this <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/04/latent-manifest-islamophobia-a-2014414124948207223.html">blatant effort</a> to condemn thought, as he promised in his opening remarks that this effort would eventually be a “field [and] a distinct area of study” called “Islamophobia studies.”</p>
<p>This is no idle threat. In addition to <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/12786">producing</a> annual UC Berkeley conferences and the <em>Islamophobia Journal</em>, Bazian said IRDP’s plans include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Publishing papers for the Second International Islamophobia Conference to be held in <a href="http://islamophobiaconparis.weebly.com/">Paris</a> this December.</li>
<li>“Down the line, [to] provide funding for graduate students and fellowships” at IRDP.</li>
<li>Establish “partnerships with other research institutes, in the U.S. and globally,” to build “a global faculty network.”</li>
</ul>
<p>The audience—much of which consisted of women wearing hijabs (headscarves)—of sixty to eighty people on the first day, was swallowed by the spacious Booth Auditorium housed in the Berkeley School of Law. In between panels, a bevy of academics and graduate students, many of them speakers, greeted each other and gabbed, while the few attendees outside the fold looked on. Bazian <a href="http://www.dailycal.org/2014/04/17/conference-illuminates-problem-islamophobia-todays-society/">boasted</a> that 6,000 people watched the conference online last year via the live stream and that this year, Duke University would be “carrying our live feed.”</p>
<p>Saeed Khan, a lecturer in history and Near East and Asian studies at Wayne State University, spoke on the second panel about “Islamophobia, the Conservative Movement, and the Creation of the Muslim Menace.” Khan is also a fellow at the Detroit-based Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, which co-commissioned a flawed May, 2013 <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/13364">study</a> alleging “Islamophobia” in the San Francisco Bay Area, of all places, that was co-authored by Bazian. He critiqued what he called “the conventional wisdom among Tea Party conservatives and other Islamophobes” that “Muslims are infiltrating every aspect of American society, particularly education” by quoting a <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/5229">2008 article</a> on the unconstitutional insertion of Islamic curriculum into American public education written by this author. He then made a nonsensical comparison:</p>
<blockquote><p>Cinnamon Stillwell, from here in the Bay Area. . . . She definitely takes the line that in spite of the “soft jihad” that is taking place, a soft crusade about the Christianity of the Founding Fathers is perfectly acceptable in public schools in a construct that is supposed to have separation of church and state.</p></blockquote>
<p>Khan’s alleged concern for separation of church and state would be more convincing were he to apply it to the very real threat outlined in the article in question, not to a nonexistent Christian “soft crusade” that its author did not reference.</p>
<p>He later complained about efforts in “Texas and Florida” to combat the use of biased textbooks in K-12 education, mischaracterizing valid concerns over the whitewashing and falsifying of Islamic history as opposition to inclusion and objectivity:</p>
<blockquote><p>A world history text is being reviewed to extricate Islam from the curriculum, or at the very least, to try and remove any reference to Islam that would be seen as objective or—in their estimation, the same thing—biased toward Islam.</p></blockquote>
<p>During the question and answer period, Khan actually complained that the “backlash” against Muslims after the 2013 Boston bombing that was predicted by speakers at last year’s Islamophobia <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/13168">conference</a> never happened. Referencing a <em>Boston Globe</em> <a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/04/16/muslim-america-shadow-marathon-bombings/JaSN4qicDX21KbGpQrviLJ/story.html">article</a> titled, “Inclusive Spirit Reassures Muslims After Bombings,” he concluded:</p>
<blockquote><p>This portrays Muslims being unnecessarily and unreasonably paranoid. It showcases the magnanimity and largesse of an American society that didn’t cause a backlash.</p></blockquote>
<p>We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.</p>
<p>The next panel, which boasted the Orwellian title, “Gender, Sexuality, Class and Colonialism in Transnational Latent and Manifest Islamophobia,” dished out a great heaping of academic jargon from the realms of queer, gender, and women’s studies.</p>
<p>Paola Bacchetta, an associate professor of gender and women’s studies at UC Berkeley, introduced her incomprehensible presentation with the even more perplexing sentence, “Muslims as enemy Others as queerphilia xenophobia.” She was just warming up:</p>
<blockquote><p>By that, I mean in which their queerphobia is displaced onto the enemy Others, who they now claim are the queerphobic ones. . . . Queers are now shifted to this position which under colonialism belonged to women: that is, queers are constructed as either silent self-hating collaborators with the presumed straight and queerphobic collective enemy Other camp, or imagined as enemy Other’s victims requiring dominant saviors.</p></blockquote>
<p>Bacchetta included “the Israeli state” in her “neo-colonial” enemies list for its supposed “pink-washing,” claiming that:</p>
<blockquote><p>[T]he idea that Palestinian queers are being saved by Israel . . . ignores the occupation and the many years of solid work done by Palestinian queers such as Palestinian Queers for BDS [boycott, divestment, sanctions].</p></blockquote>
<p>It’s hard to imagine that groups like Palestinian Queers for BDS are succeeding in helping their gay compatriots so much as engaging in self-preservation by attacking the preferred enemy, Israel.</p>
<p>Huma Dar, a Ph.D. candidate in South East Asian studies at UC Berkeley, compared “Israeli occupation” to “Indian Occupation” in her jargon-ridden presentation, “Latent and Manifest Islamophobia in Indian Occupied Kashmir: Queerphilic Imperialism and Hindu-homonationalism.” Echoing anti-Israel rhetoric, she denied that Islamism has any relevance to either conflict:</p>
<blockquote><p>Akin to the Palestinian situation, the struggle for Kashmiri independence is not a religious or theological matter, but a political one of indigenous people’s rights to territory and sovereignty. India, like Israel, has attempted to frame it as a fight against Kashmiri Muslims . . . riding on the coattails of a wave of global Islamophobia.</p></blockquote>
<p>Dar accused India of engaging in “queerphilic imperialism” by “projecting queerphobia onto the Kashmiri Muslims” and of “pinkwashing the Indian occupation akin to the Israeli occupation.” With all these “occupations” allegedly engaging in “pink-washing,” one would think that gays in the Muslim world were safe, when in fact persecution and capital punishment are common.</p>
<p>The day’s final panel included Zahra Billoo, executive director for the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (<a href="http://www.meforum.org/916/cair-islamists-fooling-the-establishment">CAIR</a>), which has been <a href="http://www.nysun.com/national/islamic-groups-named-in-hamas-funding-case/55778/">linked by the United States government to Hamas</a> and the <a href="http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/423.pdf#page=5">Muslim Brotherhood</a>. Her presentation, “California Muslim Youth Experiences with Bullying, Harassment and Religious Accommodation in Schools,” was based on CAIR’s own “statewide survey,” yet she was unable to report on any widespread persecution. Despite citing isolated instances of “bullying” in schools, her own data forced her to acknowledge that the “complaints are <em>not </em>coming,” leading her to lament that:</p>
<blockquote><p>It troubled some of our partners and allies, who said, “well, these bully figures are not as high as we think they should be.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Instead, they found that “the figures in the LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] community are far higher.” “At the federal level these complaints are handled by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights,” Billoo added, before launching into a gratuitous tirade against pro-Israel activists concerned for the safety of Jewish students on campus:</p>
<blockquote><p>And as a side note, this office is used by pro-apartheid Israel activists attempting to silence human rights activists on campus calling attention to that nation state’s racism and violent policies—but that’s a separate conversation.</p></blockquote>
<p>Apparently, bullying is only a concern when Muslim students are on the receiving end.</p>
<p>It turns out pushing “Islamophobia” trumps addressing myriad human rights challenges afflicting the Muslim world. More on this tomorrow.</p>
<p><strong><em>Part Two of this article will appear in our next issue.<br />
</em></strong></p>
<p>*</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Berkeley Prof: Terrorists Good, &#8216;Islamophobia&#8217; Bad</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/berkeley-prof-terrorists-good-islamophobia-bad/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=berkeley-prof-terrorists-good-islamophobia-bad</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 09 May 2014 04:40:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=225030</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An "interfaith" event bashes Israel. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/hatem_bazian.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-225048" alt="hatem_bazian" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/hatem_bazian.gif" width="300" height="231" /></a>When “interfaith dialogue,” “Islamophobia,” boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS), and academia collide, there’s a good chance that Friends of Sabeel – North America (FOSNA) will be involved. Case in point: FOSNA, the “voice of the Palestinian Christians,” recently held a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://fosna.org/content/pleasant-hill-ca-conference">conference</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> with the title, “Voices for Justice &amp; Peace in the Holy Land” that encompassed all four factors. It took place at co-host Christ the King Catholic Church in Pleasant Hill, California, a massive complex with plenty of room for the workshops that made up the bulk of the conference. Tables displayed with anti-Israel books, leaflets, flyers, and T-shirts lined the walls of the cafeteria; approximately 100 people attended, many sporting keffiyehs, including a tall woman wearing a patchwork-style dress composed entirely of the scarves. Radical </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.google.com/search?q=keffiyeh+dress&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=fR5gU4O9Eujj2AXQ2IGoDA&amp;ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&amp;biw=1600&amp;bih=775">chic</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> was all the rage.</span></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/unnamed.jpg"><img class="alignright size-full wp-image-225086" alt="unnamed" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/unnamed.jpg" width="183" height="275" /></a>Hatem Bazian—a senior lecturer in the department of Near Eastern studies, director of the Islamophobia Research &amp; Documentation Project at the University of California, Berkeley, and a <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/9742">regular</a> at Sabeel conferences and other “<a href="https://www.mecaforpeace.org/events/oakland-ca-interfaith-panel-working-together-just-peace">interfaith</a>” events—led the workshop titled “American Muslims and the Palestinian struggle for liberation.” It focused on the alleged connection between “Islamophobia,” counterterrorism, and the pro-Israel movement.</p>
<p>After devoting much of his talk to defending Islamist individuals and organizations indicted in terrorism cases, Bazian went a step further by pledging the financial and legal assistance of the <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7516">group</a> for which he is co-founder and chairman, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), a conference co-sponsor:</p>
<blockquote><p>We have a total of 4,300 cases; ninety percent are Palestinian [and] regarding ‘material support for terrorism.’ . . . Right now we are in the middle of planning another appeal on the Holy Land Foundation case, which already has cost us $5 million.</p></blockquote>
<p>However, AMP does not officially engage in legal advocacy, but, rather, “<a href="http://www.ampalestine.org/index.php/about-amp/amp-faq/215-what-does-amp-do">educational</a>” efforts, rendering Bazian’s claims, particularly the inflated figure of “4,300 cases,” suspect. Bazian sits on the <a href="http://mlfa.org/board-directors">board of directors</a> of the Muslim Legal Fund of America (MLFA), which <a href="http://mlfa.org/hlf-2255-motion-vacate-update">filed</a> a <a href="http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/2306.pdf">motion</a> to vacate the prison sentences of the five Holy Land Foundation defendants in late 2013. He may have had this in mind when he made the above statement, but his numbers still don’t add up, as MLFA lists only 48 <a href="http://mlfa.org/tags/cases">cases</a> wherein they are involved. Bazian should either verify the existence of the alleged 4,300 cases or to stop repeating this falsehood to the public.</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/unnamed1.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-225087" alt="unnamed" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/unnamed1-450x336.png" width="315" height="235" /></a>Bazian also outlined AMP’s specific efforts to “put Palestine back on the agenda,” including anti-Israel bus <a href="http://www.ampalestine.org/index.php/newsroom/articles/540-dc-ad-campaign-calls-for-end-of-us-aid-to-israel">ad campaigns</a>, “<a href="http://www.ampalestine.org/nakba/">Nakba commemorations</a>” (radicals use the word “Nakba,” Arabic for catastrophe, to describe Israel’s founding), and “coalition building” with the anti-Israel groups Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. Perhaps most <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/survey.php/id/75">ominously</a>, he noted that, “We are designing a curriculum for use in 475 Muslim schools to address Palestinian issues,” a promise that was echoed by <a href="http://www.investigativeproject.org/4346/ipt-exclusive-amp-telling-choice-of-heroes">speakers</a> at a recent AMP <a href="http://www.ciogc.org/index.php/mediarelations/articles-and-statements/264-4-14-14-amp-honors-dr-salman-abu-sitta-at-annual-fundraiser">fundraising dinner</a> in Chicago. Given that anti-Israel and Islamist propaganda masquerading as education has already <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/survey.php/id/75">infiltrated</a> American public schools, Bazian’s pledge should not be taken lightly.</p>
<p>Bazian, who is <a href="http://themuslim500.com/profile/dr-hatem-bazian">listed</a> in the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center’s “Muslim 500: The World’s Most Influential Muslims,” claimed that there is a coordinated attempt in the U.S. to “demonize Muslims and create a reflexive hate, and [to] keep them out of civil society.” These efforts, “gain more sympathizers for Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.” He included “pro-Israeli groups” among the “major Islamophobic producers,” claiming that their goal was stop “debate” on “the Palestinian issue.” If that were the case, they certainly aren’t succeeding on college campuses where anti-Israel academics and activists dominate the debate.</p>
<p>Bazian singled out Investigative Project on Terrorism founder Steven Emerson and Middle East Forum president Daniel Pipes as leading figures in the “Islamophobia industry.” In fact, both focus their work on the danger of Islamism, not Islam. Bazian accused Pipes of being “committed to the demonization of Muslims,” ignoring Pipes’s years-long <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/13033/can-islam-be-reformed">contention</a> that “radical Islam is the problem, but moderate Islam is the solution.”</p>
<p>Whether vilifying Israel’s supporters, advocating for Islamists and terrorists, drumming up unfounded fears of “Islamophobia,” bragging about nonexistent accomplishments, or slandering critics, Bazian’s calumnies were legion. And that is exactly what many have to come to expect from the ranks of Middle East studies. When “scholars” become nothing but political activists, truth is the first casualty.</p>
<p><i>Berkeley resident Rima Greene co-wrote this article with Cinnamon Stillwell, the West Coast Representative for</i> <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/"><i>Campus Watch</i></a><i>, a project of the</i> <a href="http://www.meforum.org/"><i>Middle East Forum</i></a><i>. Stillwell can be reached at</i> <a href="mailto:stillwell@meforum.org"><i>stillwell@meforum.org</i></a><i>.</i></p>
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		<title>Psychoanalysis, Islam, and Joseph Massad</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/psychoanalysis-islam-and-joseph-massad/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=psychoanalysis-islam-and-joseph-massad</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/psychoanalysis-islam-and-joseph-massad/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Mar 2014 04:10:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Denial]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Joseph Massad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sharia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stanford]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221127</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Jihad-Denial comes to Stanford University.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Joseph-Massad.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221159" alt="Joseph-Massad" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Joseph-Massad-450x315.png" width="315" height="221" /></a>What do psychoanalysis, liberalism, and Islam have in common? A recent <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/dept/islamic_studies/cgi-bin/web/2013/12/joseph-massad-psychoanalysis-and-the-other-of-liberalism/">lecture</a> at Stanford University with the curious title, “Psychoanalysis and the Other of Liberalism,” purported to answer that question. Delivered by <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/search.php?cx=015692155655874064424%3A-cjrsa07xqe&amp;cof=FORID%3A9&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=joseph+massad&amp;sa=Search">Joseph Massad</a>, an associate professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University and co-sponsored by Stanford’s Abassi Program in Islamic Studies, the talk was attended by approximately a dozen graduate students who sat around a long, rectangular table with several circulated chapters of Massad’s tentatively titled forthcoming book, <i>Islam In Liberalism</i>, in hand.</p>
<p>Massad began by describing his book, which he explained is not “concerned with liberal trends in Islam,” but with “how Western liberalism constituted itself and, in constituting, created an object called ‘Islam’ as its ‘Other.’” Claiming that polarization between the East and West was present at “the birth of European liberalism in the eighteenth century,” with Islam being unfairly associated with oppression, he blamed liberal thinkers such as Montesquieu and the concept of “Oriental despotism,” which he equated with “Islamic totalitarianism today.” That such negative associations have a basis in reality both then and now went unremarked; in Massad’s scheme, the Enlightenment was about little more than irrational opposition to Islam.</p>
<p>Referencing another forthcoming book, Massad examined “the deployment” of the word “Islam” as if its mere usage constitutes a weapon:</p>
<blockquote><p>The uses of the word have changed. Islam can refer to the Koran, Islamist politics, philosophy and history. Islam denotes all these things. It becomes difficult to understand what is the significance of this term for the person deploying it.</p></blockquote>
<p>He also contested the “Orientalist translations” of “Islam” as meaning “subjection and surrender,” claiming instead that “it means ‘deliverance.’” Contradicting his previous claim that “lumping the three [Abrahamic religions]” together “is an Orientalist invention, ecumenical invention, equalizing what it unequal at base in power relations,” Massad made the Islamic supremacist claim that Islam, “also means ‘monotheism.’ It is the religion of all the prophets who came before. Jews and Christians are Muslims because they believe in one god.”</p>
<p>In contrast to Islam, Massad maintained that Protestant Christianity acquired “a positive meaning” through the Enlightenment because it was seen as a “pre-condition of democracy.” “Islam as a problem for democracy also begins at that time,” he added.</p>
<p>Massad renewed his critique of Montesquieu, whom he blamed for creating the impression that women in the Muslim world were oppressed:</p>
<blockquote><p>Montesquieu was the first to depict Muslim women as somehow living in some sort of slave-like subjection. . . . This carried over to the nineteenth century white women’s movement, the later proselytization campaigns of the 1880s and 1890s, [and] the British campaigns going on in Egypt and India. Christianity and women’s rights were juxtaposed.</p></blockquote>
<p>He never denied that such “slave-like subjection” actually existed, but implied as much with a sarcastic tone to which his audience tittered appreciatively.</p>
<p>Massad did offer statistics for the deplorable condition of Muslim women in the twentieth century, referencing clitorectomies and honor killings, but lost all bearing when he equated the latter with the number of American women murdered each year by their husbands or boyfriends. Such crimes, he complained, are “never attributable to American forms of Christianity or culture” and are seen as going “against American cultural values.” Perhaps that’s because this is true: unlike honor killings, these murders are not sanctioned by religion, society, or authorities.</p>
<p>Massad, whose controversial 2007 <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/4253">book</a> <i>Desiring Arabs</i> posited that homosexuality in the Muslim world is merely a <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/9069">Western construct</a>, then warned of “an attempt to create a discipline of ‘queer Middle East studies,’” which he described as “a projection of the liberal constitution of itself as sexual citizenship.” He dismissed international efforts to fight the persecution of both gays and women in the Muslim world as:</p>
<blockquote><p>Christianity proselytizing to the heathens in order to save them, and if failing that, perhaps at least being able to save the women and the homosexuals, the save and rescue missionary campaigns.</p></blockquote>
<p>He bemoaned “the human rights activism that goes on at the UN and the NGOs” because it “seems to target religion itself and theology; that somehow the problem is lodged in Islam, something called the culture of Islam.” Massad’s concerns lay not with human rights, but with the alleged creation of “the Other,” which was in turn a “form of pathology” requiring psychoanalysis.</p>
<p>Massad concluded by discussing Sigmund Freud’s contentious book, <i>Moses and Monotheism</i>, but instead of emphasizing psychoanalysis, he stressed Freud’s opposition to political Zionism. Paraphrasing his mentor, the late Columbia University professor Edward Said, he praised Freud for his “subversive move . . . against Zionism and Jewish nationalism.”</p>
<p>Indeed, Massad’s overall stress on psychoanalysis was merely a pretext for sophistry. Noting that “psychoanalysis is precisely against the notion of a free subject . . . we do not choose; every action is governed by a complex of processes,” Massad concluded that “freedom to choose is meaningless; a laughable notion” that “undermines the entire rubric of liberal freedom.” In other words, universal standards of freedom do not exist. It’s all in your head.</p>
<p>Afterwards, an attendee praised the “high intellectual level” of the lecture, while a graduate student expressed her desire for a position similar to Massad’s at Columbia University. If hare-brained, politicized, jargon-spouting, morally vacuous talks such as the one Massad delivered at Stanford are the goal, she may find herself with a job. However, she might also require psychoanalysis.</p>
<p><i>Berkeley resident Rima Greene co-wrote this article with Cinnamon Stillwell, the West Coast Representative for</i> <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/"><i>Campus Watch</i></a><i>, a project of the</i> <a href="http://www.meforum.org/"><i>Middle East Forum</i></a><i>. Stillwell can be reached at</i> <a href="mailto:stillwell@meforum.org"><i>stillwell@meforum.org</i></a><i>.</i></p>
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		<title>Berkeley Profs: ‘Islamophobia’ Greater Threat  Than Islamic Terrorism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/berkeley-profs-islamophobia-greater-threat-than-islamic-terrorism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=berkeley-profs-islamophobia-greater-threat-than-islamic-terrorism</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 27 May 2013 04:45:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America’s Middle East studies establishment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berkeley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hatem bazian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamophobia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=190883</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[America’s Middle East studies establishment continues to nurture our surrender to Jihad. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Hatem_bazian.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-190929" alt="Hatem_bazian" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Hatem_bazian.jpg" width="320" height="404" /></a>The false narrative that “Islamophobia” is a growing threat received a boost at the “Fourth Annual International Conference on the Study of Islamophobia: From Theorizing to Systematic Documentation,” which <a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia-conference-2013">took place</a> at the University of California, Berkeley on April 19 and 20, 2013 under the chairmanship of its foremost conceptual proponent, <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/search.php?cx=015692155655874064424%3A-cjrsa07xqe&amp;cof=FORID%3A9&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=hatem+bazian&amp;sa=Search">Hatem Bazian</a>. A senior lecturer in UC Berkeley’s department of Near Eastern studies, Bazian directs the <a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia">Islamophobia Research &amp; Documentation Project</a> (IRDP), a program of the school’s Center for Race &amp; Gender, and sits on the editorial board for the <a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia/islamophobia-studies-journal"><i>Islamophobia Studies Journal</i></a><i>.</i> The IRDP is heavily invested in <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/12786">promoting</a> the belief that “Islamophobia” is on the rise globally and its annual conferences (click <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/12392">here</a> and <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/11269">here</a> to read about previous years) never fail to ratchet up the hysteria.</p>
<p>The conference opened just as a massive manhunt was launched in Boston for the two Islamic terrorists, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who bombed the Boston Marathon earlier in the week. Predictable anticipations of a coming “backlash” against Muslims—which never developed—were repeated throughout the event. Ironically, actual violence against Muslims came at the hands of Turks against <a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/syrian-refugees-victim-of-reyhanli-bombs-too.aspx?pageID=238&amp;nID=46962&amp;NewsCatID=341">Syrian refugees</a> after a car bombing killed 52 people in Reyhanli, Turkey on May 11, 2013.</p>
<p>An audience of approximately sixty-five students, many of them women in hijab (head scarf), attended the second day of the conference, eager to <a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia-conference-2013">learn about</a> the “‘Othering’ of Islam,” the “racialization of Muslims,” and <a href="http://www.islamophobiacon.com/">the definition</a> of “Islamophobia”:</p>
<blockquote><p>A contrived fear or prejudice fomented by the existing Eurocentric and Orientalist global power structure, which rationalizes the necessity to deploy violence as a tool to achieve ‘civilizational rehab’ of the target communities (Muslim or otherwise).</p></blockquote>
<p>In other words, it was a day of mind-numbing jargon delivered by academics bent on creating the very panic and division they claim to decry.</p>
<p>During the “Islamophobia, Law and Public Discourses” panel, <a href="http://ethnicstudies.berkeley.edu/faculty/profile.php?person=5">Keith Feldman</a>, an assistant professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, gave a presentation titled, “How (Anti)Terrorism Went Viral.” He focused on the likening in public discourse of terrorism to a virus or a disease that’s contagious, without boundaries, and to which no country is immune. Feldman’s evidence included comments by <a href="http://www.westernjournalism.com/gingrich-obama-not-dealing-with-terrorist-virus/">Newt Gingrich</a> and former George H. W. Bush special assistant <a href="http://2001-2009.state.gov/s/p/rem/5505.htm">Richard N. Haass</a>, and the <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/International_Terrorism_Challenge_and_Re.html?id=s8Pm37gg5JkC">1979 Jerusalem Conference</a> on International Terrorism (an <a href="http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1979/eirv06n28-19790717/eirv06n28-19790717_063-facts_behind_terrorism_jerusalem.pdf">obsession</a> of conspiracy theorists).</p>
<p>“In addressing the particular question of anti-Muslim racism,” Feldman concluded, such language is used to secure “the homeland against a medicalized threat in its capacity to pathologize subject populations”—a claim undermined by the unacknowledged fact that only the word “terrorism,” not “Muslim,” was used by those he cited to describe this metaphorical infection.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.clas.wayne.edu/faculty/khan">Saeed Khan</a>, a history professor and lecturer in Near East and Asian studies at Wayne State University, began his lecture, “Islamophobia and Other Anti-Progressive Campaigns in the Midst of Americas Demographic Shift,” by alluding to:</p>
<blockquote><p>[W]hat has transpired over the last several days in Boston and the unfortunate inevitable reaction I think many in the room are expecting will happen vis-a-vis Islamophobia in its various manifestations.</p></blockquote>
<p>Noting that some estimates put minorities in the majority in the U.S. by 2043, Khan predicted “an age of multiple moral panics because of this demographic shift” among whites and in particular, white Republicans. “I am situating . . . Islamophobia within this meta-panic,” he added, before devoting the bulk of his talk to the six “anti-progressive” issues he attributed to various Republican legislators:</p>
<blockquote><p>Voter ID and voter suppression efforts, immigration ‘reform,’ those efforts targeting the LGBT community, reproductive and contraceptive rights, collective bargaining rights at work, along with anti-Sharia, anti-mosque initiatives. . . . By some strange coincidence, a single political party is behind all these efforts: the same politicians targeting all groups. Muslim groups are part of a bigger ‘Other.’</p></blockquote>
<p>Khan didn’t explain how opposing the implementation of Sharia law in the U.S. dovetails with issues such as gay and women’s rights. Instead, he detailed his plans to conduct a “study, hopefully ready in time for the mid-term election season in 2014,” which “will be looking at all fifty states and DC, locating Islamophobia within these six groups as targets of a coordinated effort.” He left no doubt that this “coordinated effort” would include targeting the Republican legislators in question for defeat.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.wlu.ca/homepage.php?grp_id=1529&amp;f_id=35">Jasmin Zine</a>, an associate professor of sociology at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, spoke on “Constructing the ‘Enemies Within’: Muslim Youth, Islamophobia, and the Racial Politics of Canada’s ‘Home Grown’ War on Terror,” as part of the “Islamophobia in the Age of War” panel. Having based her research on interviews with young Canadian Muslims, Zine asked rhetorically how she could guarantee the confidentiality of her subjects under the “politics of empire” in “Canada’s war on terror.” As she put it:</p>
<blockquote><p>I am a well known activist, but . . . what if my data can be confiscated, because of a ‘person of interest’ label? . . . How do we do our research because of this context of Islamophobia?</p></blockquote>
<p>Lamenting “Canadian images of the home grown,” she complained that the “terrible tragedy in Boston has evoked this home grown terrorist . . . before the facts of the case were known.” The fact that the perpetrators of the Boston bombing were Islamic terrorists or that a <a href="http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/05/09/fbi-arrested-third-suspect-related-to-alleged-via-rail-terror-plot/">thwarted plot</a> to derail a passenger train traveling from New York to Toronto the following week involved three Islamic terrorists rather undermined her comments.</p>
<p>Noting that her interview subjects had expressed hesitation at playing paintball or “violent video games in public concourse at the university” for fear of looking like terrorists, Zine added, “I call this the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon">Panopticon</a> of self-surveillance; internalizing the gaze.” She described how she and her nineteen-year-old son also suffer from this alleged malady:</p>
<blockquote><p>We go to Muslim youth events. We play a game: Spot the agent. The guy with the beard, the curious white woman—who? We know someone is there watching; we are very aware of it.</p></blockquote>
<p>Beyond her paranoia and narcissism, Zine seemed unaware that these “hardships” weren’t exactly heartrending during a week when a number of Americans were killed and maimed by the very Islamic terrorists she deemed imaginary.</p>
<p>On the same panel, <a href="http://sas.lau.edu.lb/social-sciences/people/tamirace-fakhoury.php">Tamirace Fakhoury</a>, a political science and international relations professor at Lebanese American University in Beirut who was a visiting postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies in 2011, spoke about “Debunking Islamophobia?: the Discourse of Arab and Muslim Student Associations at UC Berkeley.” Her presentation explored the level of activism the “non-state actors” and “transnational contesters” in these student associations devote to countering “Islamophobia.” Her jargon-filled, stream of consciousness digressions were opaque:</p>
<blockquote><p>Colonialist and Orientalist perceptions generating counter-narratives; disentangling the Palestinian issue from Islamophobic connotations; recasting as a civil rights narrative . . . Transnational associations recasting discussion of Islamophobia . . . analytical framework, which consists of structural context and the discursive strategies of actions.</p></blockquote>
<p>In time, Fakhoury shifted course and suddenly stated, “The question here is whether these international associations of students matter.” Answering in the affirmative, assuming that “resistance” is their primary goal, she provided a list of helpful suggestions, including improving access to resources and fellowships, checking the ethnicity box on student applications “so that they could separate themselves with other Arabs,” and asking for courses that challenge the “Orientalist colonial narrative.” She urged students to invite speakers to campus to “show how and why Islamophobia is a policy construct of the United States” and to take advantage of “Berkeley’s opportunity structure” to further their “global commitment to morality social justice coalition building.”</p>
<p>Fakhoury concluded that students’ most significant objective should be to introduce resolutions at various campuses condemning “Islamophobic hate speech,” including the assertion that Islam is “inherently dictocratic.” She never mentioned the importance of free speech, an apolitical education, or the cultivation of an identity separate from one’s ethnicity or religion.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/05/uc-berkeley-islamophobia-prof-hatem-bazian-equates-boston-jihad-bombings-with-islamophobia.html">Hatem Bazian</a> concluded the day by examining Twitter activity surrounding the conference. A PowerPoint presentation featured the faces of the scholar of Islam Robert Spencer, blogger and activist Pamela Geller, and television/radio host Glenn Beck. Claiming that Spencer had issued an “Islamophobic tweet,” the contents of which he didn’t reveal, he warned the audience that, “The Islamophobes are there,” before adding jauntily:</p>
<blockquote><p>I always say thanks. There’s no such thing as bad publicity; it’s what you do with it, so once again we want to . . . thank them for engaging us in this material.</p></blockquote>
<p>He then invited conference participants to submit papers for the next issue of the <a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia/islamophobia-studies-journal"><i>Islamophobia Studies Journal</i></a> before summing up the hyper-politicized atmosphere of the conference by claiming that, “education is about social justice.”</p>
<p>When an audience member who identified herself as being from Cambridge, MA, asked, “What would you do if you were mayor of Boston?,” no one on the panel answered. Another audience member finally blurted out, “Stay calm, I’d say,” to which Mahan Mirza, the panel’s moderator and a teacher at Zaytuna College, Berkeley’s “<a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/10165">Islamic university</a>” and a cosponsor of the conference, responded: “I would be a radical mayor and advise the populace not to believe mainstream media reports.” The awkward silence that followed was broken only when someone asked about the previous talk, at which point the audience exhaled a collective sigh of relief.</p>
<p>The brutal terrorist attack on Boston and the then-growing awareness that the perpetrators were Caucasian Muslims did not fit the artificial “racialized” narrative of an academic enterprise devoted to battling “Islamophobia,” demonizing critics, silencing dissent, and politicizing higher education. Ideology and willful blindness to inconvenient facts are poor substitutes for honest examinations and rigorous debate about Islamist terrorism in the U.S. and beyond. As long as America’s Middle East studies establishment <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/13112">refuses to admit</a> the obvious, taking them seriously about the most vital issues of our day is a fool’s errand.</p>
<p><i>Berkeley resident Rima Greene co-wrote this article with Cinnamon Stillwell, the West Coast Representative for</i> <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/"><i>Campus Watch</i></a><i>, a project of the</i> <a href="http://www.meforum.org/"><i>Middle East Forum</i></a><i>. She can be reached at</i> <a href="mailto:stillwell@meforum.org"><i>stillwell@meforum.org</i></a><i>.</i></p>
<p><b>Readers may contact UC-Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and Center for Race &amp; Gender Director <strong>Evelyn Nakano Glenn </strong>to express their objection to the highly politicized Islamophobia Research &amp; Documentation Project:</b></p>
<p><b>Chancellor </b><a href="http://chancellor.berkeley.edu/">Robert Birgeneau</a><br />
<i>Office of the Chancellor</i><br />
200 California Hall # 1500<br />
Berkeley, CA 94720-1500<br />
Phone (510) 642-7464<br />
Fax (510) 643-5499<br />
<a href="mailto:chancellor@berkeley.edu">chancellor@berkeley.edu</a></p>
<p><a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/crg-staff">CRG</a><b> Director </b><a href="http://ethnicstudies.berkeley.edu/faculty/profile.php?person=6">Evelyn Nakano Glenn</a><br />
<i>Center for Race &amp; Gender</i><br />
638 Barrows Hall #1074<br />
Berkeley, CA 94720-1074<br />
<i>Phone:</i> (510) 643-8488<br />
<i>Fax:</i> (510) 642-9810<br />
<i>Email:</i> <a href="mailto:englenn@berkeley.edu">englenn@berkeley.edu</a></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>USF Prof. Stephen Zunes Still Shilling for Iran</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/usf-prof-stephen-zunes-still-shilling-for-iran/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=usf-prof-stephen-zunes-still-shilling-for-iran</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 23 Aug 2012 04:20:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[stephen zunes]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=141214</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Unholy Alliance is alive and well on the American campus.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/zunes.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-141352" title="zunes" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/zunes.jpg" alt="" width="280" height="190" /></a>On August 5, 2012, Stephen Zunes—professor of politics and international studies and director of the Middle East studies program at the University of San Francisco—made his seventh <a href="http://www.uucb.org/index.php?option=com_acymailing&amp;ctrl=archive&amp;task=view&amp;mailid=111&amp;key=6c8da9647291c0ab5e8942f505e048c4">appearance</a> at the hilltop Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley (UUCB) in the northern enclave of Kensington. Zunes is a regular at UUCB, no doubt because his views are in line with the church’s “Social Justice Council,” which, according to their <a href="http://www.uucb.org/index.php/programs/lecture-series/summer-forum.html">website</a><strong>,</strong> “sponsors forums focussing [sic] on social justice topics” in pursuit of the quixotic goal of “working towards a better, more just world.” Accordingly, there were copies of the British-based newspaper <em>Positive News</em> in the vestibule with the <a href="http://positivenews.org.uk/2012/wellbeing/7100/united-nations-calls-happiness-based-economy/">headline</a>, “U.N. Calls for Happiness-based Economy.” <strong></strong></p>
<p>The church may call for happiness, but as Zunes’s lecture demonstrated, it willfully ignores terrorists, who have been known to cause quite a bit of unhappiness, not to mention death. His topic was “The United States and Iran” and in keeping with his <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/12069">past talks</a> on the subject, Zunes assured the audience of approximately fifty people that Iran is not a threat. He claimed that Iran’s nuclear weapons would not be ready for another four to five years; that Iran would never strike first with nuclear weapons; that there are no Hezbollah cells in South America and on America’s southern border; and that reports of Iranian-sponsored global terrorism are exaggerated. <strong></strong></p>
<p>He emphasized repeatedly that sanctions and threats are counterproductive because they increase the regime’s repressiveness. Attacking Iran, he claimed, will ignite Persian nationalism and cause dissidents to ally with the regime. Thus assured that no action is needed, the audience was visibly relieved. <strong></strong></p>
<p>The real point of Zunes’s talk, however, was not to encourage inaction, but to condemn the U.S. Congress for its alleged belligerence towards Iran and to encourage the United Nations to create a “Middle East nuclear-free zone.” <strong></strong></p>
<p>Referring to two bills supported in the House of Representatives by large bipartisan majorities, Zunes asserted that, “Congress is really pushing the United States to go to war.” He continued:<strong></strong></p>
<blockquote><p>It’s a bipartisan calling for war. Never before has Congress forbid negotiations and deterrence. Obama’s threshold is Iran actually starting to build nuclear weapons. Congress lowered the threshold [to] Iran simply having the capability of developing nuclear weapons, which some in Congress say they already have.</p></blockquote>
<p>In pushing for a “Middle East nuclear-free zone,” Zunes ignored the fact that Israel—surrounded by enemies sworn to its destruction—must maintain control of its own defense and could never trust such a zone. He alluded to the U.N. General Assembly’s push for a nuclear-free Middle East, which is simply a means of pressuring Israel to disarm unilaterally. Zunes urged the audience to contact their members of Congress for the same purpose. <strong></strong></p>
<p>Returning to the theme of downplaying Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Zunes displayed the usual apologist naiveté:</p>
<blockquote><p>Iran really does have a nuclear program. At this point, however, no evidence suggests the current program is anything but peaceful. Even the U.S. government acknowledges that as far as it can tell it is an exclusively civilian nuclear program.</p></blockquote>
<p>This fails to acknowledge International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Yukiya Amano’s January, 2012 <a href="http://gulfnews.com/news/region/iran/iaea-has-proof-of-iran-s-nuclear-related-activities-1.972177">statement</a> that the IAEA, “has credible information that Iran is engaged in activities relevant to the development of nuclear explosives.” Just this month, <em>Haaretz</em> <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-print-page/obama-gets-new-u-s-nie-iran-making-surprising-progress-toward-nuclear-capability.premium-1.456921?trailingPath=2.169%2C2.225%2C2.226%2C">reported</a> that the Obama administration received a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report demonstrating that “Iran has made surprising, notable progress in the research and development of key components of its military nuclear program” <a href="http://www.theisraelproject.org/site/apps/nlnet/content3.aspx?c=ewJXKcOUJlIaG&amp;b=7712195&amp;ct=12106443&amp;notoc=1#.UCqLI6Aneml">and that</a> “the Iranian development of a nuclear weapon is progressing far beyond the scope known to the International Atomic Energy Agency.”</p>
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		<title>Iran As Victim? University of San Francisco&#8217;s Prof. Stephen Zunes Thinks So</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/iran-as-victim-stephen-zunes-thinks-so/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=iran-as-victim-stephen-zunes-thinks-so</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 16 Feb 2012 04:28:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Radical Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[San Francisco]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stephen Zune]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Radical Left calls for "day of action" in support of Iran. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/8028308_600x338.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-122526" title="8028308_600x338" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/8028308_600x338.gif" alt="" width="375" height="247" /></a></p>
<p>A crowd of would-be revolutionaries gathered last month at Revolution Books in Berkeley to hear <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/search.php?cx=015692155655874064424%3A-cjrsa07xqe&amp;cof=FORID%3A9&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=stephen+zunes&amp;sa=Search">Stephen Zunes</a>—chair of the program in Middle Eastern studies and professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco—speak on <a href="http://www.revolutionbooks.org/2012/01/us-israeli-assault-on-iran-escalates.html">a panel</a> with the improbable title, “U.S.-Israeli Assault on Iran Escalates: The Danger of War Grows.” The title originated with <a href="http://revcom.us/a/254/danger_of_war_grows-en.html">an article</a> by co-panelist Larry Everest, author and correspondent for <em>Revolution</em>, the newspaper for the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, an organization whose cult of personality revolves around well-known Stalinist Bob Avakian. Fittingly, event posters on the walls sported slogans such as “Re-visioning Socialism” and “Another World is Possible,” and the shelves were filled with books by Avakian and other communists.</p>
<p>Revolution Books inhabits a choice retail location just blocks from the University of California, Berkeley campus, and in contrast with other events featuring left-wing academics whose talks are assigned to students, the audience in this instance was largely middle-aged to elderly. Spanish speakers provided simultaneous translations in the rear seats, producing a continuous background hum, while a very casually dressed woman entered, radio to her ear, listening to President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address.</p>
<p>All who entered were handed a copy of <em>Revolution</em> along with a flier for International A.N.S.W.E.R.’s then-forthcoming “<a href="http://www.answercoalition.org/national/news/no-war-on-iran.html">national day of action</a>” in San Francisco, which trumpeted the do-nothing rallying cry, “No War on Iran, No Sanctions, No Interventions, No Assassinations!” Like the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py3rElWA9uM&amp;feature=mfu_in_order&amp;list=UL">rally to come</a>, the atmosphere at Revolution Books was fiercely anti-American, anti-Israel, and apologetic towards, even supportive of, the Iranian regime.</p>
<p>In a nod to the setting, Zunes proclaimed at the outset, “I’m not a communist,” but his repetitive references to “imperialists” demonstrated his familiarity with leftist jargon. He elaborated: “A lot of what I’m going to say overlaps, but I am coming from a slightly different angle.”</p>
<p>Affirming the contention of the preceding speaker, Larry Everest, that the Iranian regime had allegedly given up pursuing nuclear weapons in 2003 according to a 2007—and <a href="http://pjmedia.com/ronrosenbaum/2009/09/28/huge-intelligence-scandal-will-all-the-pundits-who-relied-onthe-discredited-2007-n-i-e-on-iran-now/?singlepage=true">later discredited</a>—National Intelligence Estimate, Zunes added, “No one who is intellectually honest could disagree with your analysis.” Was International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Yukiya Amano intellectually dishonest when <a href="http://gulfnews.com/news/region/iran/iaea-has-proof-of-iran-s-nuclear-related-activities-1.972177">he stated</a> last month that the IAEA, “has credible information that Iran is engaged in activities relevant to the development of nuclear explosives”?</p>
<p>Zunes reiterated a position he took in a 2009 <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/140707/why_u.s._neocons_ahmadinejad_to-win/">article</a>—on the heels of Iran’s stolen election—titled, “Why U.S. Neocons Want Ahmadinejad to Win”:</p>
<blockquote><p>What’s important is that Neocons and the imperialists in this country want the green revolution crushed. They need each other to justify the kinds of policies the U.S. imperialists want.</p></blockquote>
<p>This logic, such as it is, concludes that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad provides a handy excuse for so-called warmongers in the U.S. to block the Obama administration’s diplomatic overtures to Iran. Such a conspiracy theory ignores the fact that Neoconservatives and others on the right were strong critics of the Obama administration’s refusal to offer moral support to the green revolution at its outset.</p>
<p>Zunes insisted that U.S. intervention only inspires the Iranian people to side with their government:</p>
<blockquote><p>Everyone emphasizes the Islamic characteristics of Iran, but what’s really kept the regime in power is nationalism. The Iranians are the most nationalistic people in the entire world . . . it’s something the regime can capitalize on when it hears these threats [of sanctions]. What we don’t hear in the media is that the opposition supports the government in its conflict with the U.S. They oppose U.S. intervention.</p></blockquote>
<p>Yet dissident voices within Iran continue to express disgust with the regime and a lack of animosity towards the U.S.  For instance, a young Iranian woman who corresponds regularly with American journalist Michael Yon recently sent him <a href="http://www.michaelyon-online.com/a-young-iranian-woman-writes.htm">the following</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>To make the long story short, people in Iran, not just youth, hate the government and want to move out of the country as soon as they can. . . . The Iranians do not hate you nor do they hate ur [sic] government. This is all the media. . . . No one is against you here except for those on the government’s side.</p></blockquote>
<p>Iranian exiles who were tortured in Iran’s Evin Prison provided <a href="http://ngosummit.org/news_details.php?id=43">letters</a> and live testimony at the UN Watch-organized event, “We Have A Dream: Global Summit Against Discrimination and Persecution,” held in September, 2011 to coincide with the United Nations 66<sup>th</sup> Session of the General Assembly. To no avail, the organizers begged the international community to intervene.</p>
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		<title>The ‘Angry Arab’ Goes Mad</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/the-%e2%80%98angry-arab%e2%80%99-goes-mad/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-%25e2%2580%2598angry-arab%25e2%2580%2599-goes-mad</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 08 Dec 2011 04:05:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=114881</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[As’ad AbuKhalil lives up to his name. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/A-A-chou-lrg.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-114883" title="A-A-chou-lrg" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/A-A-chou-lrg.gif" alt="" width="375" height="251" /></a></p>
<p>As’ad AbuKahlil—a political science professor at California State University, Stanislaus—spoke last month at a day-long “teach-in” at the University of California, Berkeley titled, “<a href="http://arabspringteachin.org/">Building Solidarity with the Arab Spring</a>.” It consisted of a number of “workshop sessions” at the Valley Life Sciences Building, followed by a “plenary session” at the Multicultural Center, and was co-sponsored by the Arab Resource Organizing Committee, the Berkeley Muslim Students Association PAC, the International Socialist Organization, and the Syrian American Council.</p>
<p>AbuKhalil’s workshop on “The U.S. and the Arab Uprising” was held in a tiny, hot, windowless room filled with students wearing hijabs and keffiyehs. Immediately visible to all who entered was a sign leaning against the black board that set the anti-American atmosphere:</p>
<ul>
<li>Victory to the Arab Revolutions!</li>
<li>U.S. Out of the Middle East!</li>
</ul>
<p>AbuKhalil, author of the “Angry Arab” blog, was introduced as “the most influential Arab blogger in English and Arabic.” Wasting no time living up to his self-caricature, he presented the demise of Israel as his life’s work, referred repeatedly to the “usurping Zionist entity,” and characterized the U.S. as the source of all that ails the Arab world. For instance:</p>
<blockquote><p>Obama and Hillary always pat themselves on the back and say they are on the side of the Arab people. . . . They are on the side of counter-revolution. . . . There is a tyrannical order in the Arab world . . . in place since 1979 . . . the year Egypt was forced by the United States to sign a peace treaty with Israel. A dictator Anwar Sadat was conveniently armed, an unrepentant anti-Semite and Nazi.</p></blockquote>
<p>He did not elaborate on Sadat and no one questioned him.</p>
<p>AbuKhalil was exultant over the latest bombing of the gas pipeline from Egypt to Israel, a signal to him that the U.S. is no longer “all-powerful”:</p>
<blockquote><p>The United States wants to take our agency from us, they want to convince us, as Israel has tried to do all these decades, that we are incapable of changing the situation, the enemy is too strong . . . invincible.</p></blockquote>
<p>Displaying a lust for violence, AbuKhalil boasted:</p>
<blockquote><p>I am in favor of chaos because I’m really enjoying what’s happening in Egypt, especially what’s happening against Israel [the attack on the Israeli embassy]. I’ve played these scenes on YouTube more times than I’ve played songs.</p></blockquote>
<p>The audience laughed in agreement as he spoke.</p>
<p>AbuKhalil made his hatred of Israel clear in his description of hearing Israeli soldiers screaming—so he claimed—as they retreated from Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon in 2006. “It shows you if Arabs are allowed freedom to fight Israel, this is the kind of Palestine you will see,” he bragged.</p>
<p>More shocking was his blithe dismissal of Hamas’s constant barrage of rockets into southern Israel, which he called, “those firecrackers from Hamas [fired] at a town in occupied Palestine.” He then belittled the suffering the bombardment has caused:</p>
<blockquote><p>You will notice there were like ten injured and sometimes they had shocks . . . they actually list the injured; they [listed] those whose feelings were hurt; those who were startled. This war crimes thing is for victimhood reputation.</p></blockquote>
<p>Again, the audience laughed heartily.</p>
<p>Later, a member of the audience challenged him by asking about the recently released International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) report showing that Iran’s nuclear program has military dimensions. AbuKhalil dodged the question by raising Israel’s alleged nuclear program and what he called the “racist content of the notion that nuclear weapons are dangerous in the hands of Muslims, but safe in the hands of Christians and Jews.” He apparently has no worries about the Iranian regime’s threat to wipe Israel off the map, its constant threat to its neighbors, or the apocalyptic nature of the mullah’s theology; only Israel can threaten peace in the region.</p>
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		<title>Gilbert Achcar’s Anti-Zionism of Fools</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/gilbert-achcar%e2%80%99s-anti-zionism-of-fools/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=gilbert-achcar%25e2%2580%2599s-anti-zionism-of-fools</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Nov 2011 04:15:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anti semite]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gilbert Achcar]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[uc berkeley]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[“Don’t expect me to take a pro-Israel view. I’m an Arab.”]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/interview-inside1.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-111957" title="interview-inside1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/interview-inside1.gif" alt="" width="375" height="269" /></a></p>
<p>“Don’t expect me to take a pro-Israel view. I’m an Arab.”</p>
<p>So declared Gilbert Achcar—professor of development studies and international relations at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies—at the outset of his <a href="http://events.berkeley.edu/?event_ID=44479&amp;date=2011-10-20&amp;tab=lectures">lecture</a> last month at the University of California, Berkeley. Those in the audience hoping for scholarly objectivity were thus informed that Achcar’s ethnicity trumped intellectual independence and that, despite evidence to the contrary (Nonie Darwish, the founder of <a href="http://www.arabsforisrael.com/">Arabs for Israel</a>, comes to mind, as do the majority of Israel’s Arab citizenry), an Arab could not be pro-Israel. One had to give him credit for at least confirming his biases up front.</p>
<p>A Lebanese-born, self-described “academic, writer, socialist, and anti-war activist,” Achcar was on a University of California speaking tour to discuss his 2010 book, <em>The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives</em>. His UC Berkeley lecture was sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) and was held in its <a href="http://www.sultanfoundation.com/en/foundation_acd_prgs.htm">Saudi-largesse-provided</a> Sultan Room, with a glowing introduction from CMES vice chair <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/search.php?cx=015692155655874064424%3A-cjrsa07xqe&amp;cof=FORID%3A9&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=emily+gottreich&amp;sa=Search#646">Emily Gottreich</a>. The audience of around 75 students and adults had to strain at times to discern Achcar’s words, delivered as they were in a heavy accent and low tones, but the crowd appeared politically sympathetic.</p>
<p>Achcar’s book, which according to the lecture <a href="http://events.berkeley.edu/?event_ID=44479&amp;date=2011-10-20&amp;tab=lectures">description</a> purports to “cover Arab attitudes to Zionism, anti-Semitism, Nazism and the Holocaust from the aftermath of the First World War to our time,” joins a <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/11077">growing body</a> of scholarship that employs Holocaust studies to deny Israel’s legitimacy and downplay contemporary Islamic anti-Semitism. Such work enjoys significant legitimacy in academic circles, as it masks its outlandish conclusions with scholarly apparatus while confirming the biases of the left-leaning, anti-Israel Middle East studies establishment. In their <a href="http://engageonline.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/in-the-straightjacket-of-anti-zionism2.pdf">critical review</a> of Achcar’s book, atypical professors Matthias Kuntzel and Colin Meade conclude, “this is a book in which an author from the political left seeks to protect the dogmas of Western anti-Zionism from the reality of Arab anti-Semitism” (click <a href="http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/matthias-kuntzel-and-colin-meade-debate-with-gilbert-achcar/">here</a> to access a debate between the reviewers and Achcar).</p>
<p>Achcar wasted no time confirming the review’s thesis and slandering eminent Princeton University historian Bernard Lewis, who has written about the history of Nazism and Arab anti-Semitism, in the process. As Achcar put it:</p>
<blockquote><p>Mine is a scholarly investigation fixed into a current frame aiming at revising the image in western scholarship. The lies of Bernard Lewis are extremely biased, which produced an image of Arabs being pro-Nazi, the locus of the new anti-Semitism.</p></blockquote>
<p>The audience chuckled in agreement as Achar extended his attack on Lewis. He claimed that a close reading of Arab newspapers of the 1930s and 40s found an overwhelming rejection of Nazism in the name of liberal values. He identified four predominant positions: liberal Westernizers, communists, nationalists, and fundamentalists. Only among the latter, he alleged, were there serious numbers of anti-Semites—the result of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This tired argument of blaming anti-Semitism in the region on the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 is trotted out by apologists for Arab anti-Semitism despite ample historical evidence of its previous existence.</p>
<p>He continued in the same vein, claiming that, “At the time of the Dreyfus trial [in late nineteenth century France], there was philo-Semitism, but the Zionist project ruined that.” Later, he proposed that, “If Israel would shift, we could decrease the tension,” without elaborating on the extent of the “shift” he envisioned.</p>
<p>Achcar was determined to assign anti-Semitism’s origins to the West:</p>
<blockquote><p>The discourse of conspiracy theories about Jews is very Western. The shift was with increasing tensions in Palestine; the discourse was imported from the West.</p></blockquote>
<p>He briefly acknowledged a Koranic basis for anti-Semitism, but then pivoted to blame Christianity:</p>
<blockquote><p>Yes, there is an anti-Judaic element in Islam, but it’s part of the three monotheistic religions, and certainly there’s more enmity to Jews in Christianity than Islam.</p></blockquote>
<p>Achcar attempted to downplay the crucial role played by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the 1920s and 30s, as a <a href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/muftihit.html">Nazi-collaborator</a> and a <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/08/voices-of-palestine-haj-amin-al-husseini/">figurehead</a> for Arab anti-Semitism:</p>
<blockquote><p>[The Mufti as Nazi] is all blown out of proportion . . . it’s presented that he inspired the Final Solution. This is [the kind of] propaganda against Arabs that’s popular in English. . . . Thousands had a much greater role in the Holocaust than the Mufti. The Mufti was turned into central Zionist propaganda after 1945; [he] was aimed at the United Nations [for the purpose of] presenting Arabs as a continuation of the Nazis and the creation of a Jewish state as a moral duty. 1948 becomes the final battle of WWII; useful in saying the only other choice was genocide. [Based on this logic], the fate of Palestine would be decided by the world powers.</p></blockquote>
<p>He addressed anti-Semitism in the modern-day Middle East, but, as with his treatment of Bernard Lewis, blamed the messenger by alluding to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a <a href="http://www.memri.org/">website</a> that provides translations of regional media:</p>
<blockquote><p>Today in Israel there’s a huge amount of literature which monitors anti-Semitic expression. There are websites devoted to this search and funded by the [U.S.] State Department; biased websites such as the one founded by a high ranking person in Israeli intel. Anti-Arab attitudes in Israel are not monitored.</p></blockquote>
<p>The latter comparison is a red herring. Achcar didn’t acknowledge that, unlike its anti-Semitic counterpart, “anti-Arab attitudes in Israel” are neither widespread, promulgated through state-provided education and other official means, nor the primary reason for the continuation of the Arab-Israeli conflict.</p>
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		<title>The Misuse of &#8220;Never Again&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/the-misuse-of-never-again/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-misuse-of-never-again</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 24 Mar 2011 04:02:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=88319</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new campaign casts Israelis as the new Nazis.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a class="highslide" onclick="return vz.expand(this)" href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Hatem_Bazian.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-88324" title="Hatem_Bazian" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Hatem_Bazian.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="242" /></a></p>
<p>Just when it seemed as though <a href="http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=652">the misuse</a> of language and imagery associated with the Holocaust could get no worse, along came “<a href="http://www.neveragainforanyone.com/">Never Again for Anyone</a>.” A national speaking tour designed to coincide with <a href="http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/ihrd/comment_post.php">International Holocaust Remembrance Day</a>, “Never Again for Anyone” traveled the U.S. from January 25 through February 19, 2011, landing at the First Presbyterian Church in Oakland, California on February 17.</p>
<p>The purpose of the tour was pernicious: to draw a connection between the Holocaust and the Arab-Israeli conflict, with Israelis cast as the new Nazis and “Never Again” transformed into the Palestinian rallying cry. Accordingly, the <a href="http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/02/02/18670997.php">flyer</a> for the event juxtaposed a photo of Jews fleeing Warsaw in 1944 with a photo of Arabs appearing to do the same from Tulkarm, in the British Mandate of Palestine, in 1948. Conveniently omitted was any context for the photos: the former group was fleeing extermination and the latter voluntarily abandoning their homes at the behest of an Arab leadership who tried and failed to exterminate the Jews.</p>
<p>In an attempt to lend an air of credibility to this exercise in propaganda, the tour featured Hajo Meyer, an 87-year-old Auschwitz survivor-turned <a href="http://www.sacbee.com/2011/02/16/3406350/holocaust-survivors-planned-talk.html">fanatical anti-Zionist</a>. Joining Meyer at several locations was <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/4886">Hatem Bazian</a>, a senior lecturer in the department of Near Eastern studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Bazian—who <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/10385">gave the introduction</a> at a Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) event at UC Berkeley in October 2010—is a notorious <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/9732">anti-Israel activist</a>. He is also the director of the “<a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia">Islamophobia Research &amp; Documentation Project</a>,” a program of UC Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender.</p>
<p>Speaking to an audience of approximately 100 comprised largely of local leftist and anti-Israel activists who hung on his every word, Bazian wasted no time conjuring up the specter of Islamophobia. He referred to “the production of Islamophobia,” claiming that, “politicians use Islamophobia to win elections.” Holding up the grossly inaccurate comparison of the Japanese internment camps during WWII and the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings during the Cold War, he alleged that Islamophobia is part of the plan “to create a new enemy.” Bazian—using racial terminology to describe what is, in fact, a religion—asserted that, “Islamophobia reintroduces the pre-existing racial structure . . . Arabs, Muslims are racialized.”</p>
<p>Ratcheting up the hysteria several notches, Bazian later claimed that:</p>
<blockquote><p>They [the U.S.] want to produce reflexive hatred against Arabs and Muslims so that when they bomb Arabs and Muslims they do not feel that they are . . . destroying legitimate families like us[Americans]. . . . [They] need to create the feeling they [Muslims] do not belong to the human family . . . they are less than human, subhuman.</p></blockquote>
<p>After asking, “What interests are served by Islamophobia? Who benefits?,” Bazian cited an oft-mangled 2001 <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/1414/a-french-lesson-for-tom-harkin">quote</a> from Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes, strategically omitting the essential component (indicated below in italics):</p>
<blockquote><p>I worry very much, from the Jewish point of view, that the presence, and increased stature, and affluence, and enfranchisement of American Muslims, <em>because they are so much led by an Islamist leadership</em>, that this will present true dangers to American Jews.</p></blockquote>
<p>Although the quote had nothing to do with Israel, he then added:</p>
<blockquote><p>Muslims are part of civil society. But American Zionists want to keep it exclusive to themselves. They want to shut down the discussion of ‘does Israel serve our national interests?’ They want to shut down the debate; it’s a strategy of silence.</p></blockquote>
<p>He followed this with a rant about opposition to Park51 (the ground zero mosque), before reaching the ludicrous conclusion that:</p>
<blockquote><p>Right-wingers are leading the charge against Muslims in America. These are the same people as the neo-Nazi skinhead groups.</p></blockquote>
<p>Without pausing for a breath, Bazian launched into his favorite list of organizations and websites he hates: Campus Watch, Jihad Watch, The Investigative Project on Terrorism, the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Community Relations Council, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. He drew no distinctions between them, but expressed particular animus towards the Simon Wiesenthal Center.</p>
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		<title>How Does it Feel To Be a Victim? Ask Prof. Bayoumi</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/how-does-it-feel-to-be-a-victim-ask-prof-bayoumi/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-does-it-feel-to-be-a-victim-ask-prof-bayoumi</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 15 Mar 2011 04:03:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=87235</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An Islamist-apologist comes to UC Berkeley to proclaim a culture of victimhood.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/prob.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-87239" title="prob" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/prob.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="332" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/search.php?cx=015692155655874064424%3A-cjrsa07xqe&amp;cof=FORID%3A9&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=Moustafa+Bayoumi&amp;sa=Search#919">Moustafa Bayoumi</a>, associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, gave <a href="http://events.berkeley.edu/index.php/calendar/sn/cmes.html?event_ID=38762&amp;date=2011-02-10&amp;filter=Secondary%20Event%20Type&amp;filtersel=">a lecture</a> at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Middle East Studies (CMES) last month titled, “How Does It Feel To Be a Problem: Why Arabs and Muslim Americans Are at the Heart of Today’s Culture Wars.”</p>
<p>Bayoumi is the editor of <em>How Does it Feel To Be a Problem: Being Young and Arab in America</em>, a collection of biographical stories about young, Brooklyn-based Arab-Americans that the CMES website describes, among other things, as “a catalog of mistreatment and discrimination.”</p>
<p>Baymoui’s narrative of Arab victimhood extends beyond America’s borders—he is also the editor of, <em>Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: the Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How it Changed the Course of the Israeli-Palestine Conflict</em>, as well as co-editor of <em>The Edward Said Reader</em>; victimization has long been <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/6820">a staple</a> of his academic career.</p>
<p>CMES’s Sultan Room—so-named for its Saudi patron, the <a href="http://cmes.berkeley.edu/Programs/grants_sultan.html">Sultan bin AbdulAziz Al-Saud Charity Foundation</a>—was full. The audience of approximately 75 students and adults acted like fans; they laughed in all the right places, appeared to be in full agreement with Bayoumi throughout, and offered no challenging questions.</p>
<p>At the time, Egypt’s recent revolution was dominating the headlines and Bayoumi was on his way to speak on a UC Berkeley <a href="http://events.berkeley.edu/?event_ID=40486&amp;date=2011-02-10&amp;tab=lectures">panel</a> on the subject directly afterward. As a result, his lecture seemed rushed and, at times, the wording sounded remarkably similar to his October 24, 2010, <em>Chronicle of Higher Education</em> article, “<a href="http://chronicle.com/article/My-Arab-Problem/125019/">My Arab Problem</a>.”</p>
<p>Referencing the situation in Egypt, Bayoumi began his talk by quoting from <em>The Autobiography of Malcolm X</em>: “How is it possible to write about your life when it’s changing so quickly?” Later, he paraphrased <em>Invisible Man</em> author Ralph Ellison: “We are surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.” He noted that his book’s title, <em>How Does It Feel To Be a Problem</em>, originated with a quote from W.E.B. Du Bois’s <em>The Souls of Black Folk</em>:</p>
<blockquote><p>I stole the title from Du Bois; it resonated with me . . . what to do about the increasing dehumanization of the Arab American population.</p></blockquote>
<p>Clearly, Bayoumi is heavily influenced by African-American literature—the chapters of his book are prefaced by quotes from famous black authors—but in equating African-Americans with Arab-Americans, he is conflating two very different historical experiences.</p>
<p>To support his position that Arabs, including Muslims, in America are “dehumanized,” Bayoumi cited polls conducted by the <em>Economist</em> and the <em>Washington Post</em>, which found—not coincidentally—a steady rise in negativity towards Islam beginning with the 9/11 atrocities and culminating in the Park51 (ground zero mosque) controversy. He omitted any possibility of a rational basis for these negative perceptions and later rejected what he called “the rhetoric of the opposition to the ground zero mosque.” Echoing the <a href="http://www.forward.com/articles/128347/">project’s organizers</a>, he claimed that</p>
<blockquote><p>the idea behind Park51 was to improve our image; model our image along successful lines like the 92<sup>nd</sup> Street Y [92nd Street Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association]<strong> </strong>a major Jewish cultural institution.</p></blockquote>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p>This comparison is inapt in that the 92<sup>nd</sup> Street Y—in the secular tradition of Jewish community centers—does not include a synagogue, while Park51 is intended to include a mosque. Also, 92<sup>nd</sup> Street is not near a site where Jews massively attacked New York City.</p>
<p>Bayoumi next addressed the controversy that erupted in August 2010 after Brooklyn College assigned his book as its “common reader,” thereby making it required reading for all incoming students and setting up a “meet the author” discussion. Complaints poured in that the book was too lopsided and the debate eventually—as Bayoumi claimed the college feared—went “viral,” pulling him into “the center of a small culture war.”</p>
<p>Citing retired Brooklyn College philosophy professor Abigail L. Rosenthal, who, in <a href="http://www.jerusalemcentral.com/2010/08/brooklyn-college-stan-letter-from.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=Feed:+jerusalemcentralrss+%28JERUSALEM+CENTRAL%29">a letter</a> to college president Karen Gould, alleged that “the book smacked of indoctrination,” Bayoumi responded:</p>
<blockquote><p>Is my writing that powerful? No. They have not actually read my book, but only the Amazon page.</p></blockquote>
<p>He blamed the “tabloid media” and “conservative bloggers” such as Bruce Kesler—a Brooklyn College alumnus who broke the story by publicly <a href="http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/15284-I-Just-Disinherited-My-Alma-Mater.html">cutting his bequest</a> to the college over the Bayoumi decision—for the controversy. In fact, a variety of publications ran articles on the subject, including the <a href="http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/new_york/brooklyn_college_facing_criticism_over_required_reading_harsh_israel_critic"><em>Jewish Week</em></a>, the <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2010/08/31/2010-08-31_alum_to_cut_college_out_of_will_over_arab_tome.html#ixzz0yC1RnzR2"><em>New York Daily News</em></a>, the <a href="http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/brooklyn-college-furor-is-more-heated-online/"><em>New York Times</em></a>, and the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/31/brooklyn-college-alum-cut_n_700209.html"><em>Huffington Post</em></a>.</p>
<p>Summing up his thoughts on the matter, Bayoumi remarked that:</p>
<blockquote><p>Opposition to my book seems symptomatic of our times . . . all things Muslim or Arab are called radical.</p></blockquote>
<p>Bayoumi decried FBI counterterrorism efforts involving Brooklyn’s large Arab-American population, comparing it to investigating “the mafia; investigating family structures” and calling it “patronizing.”</p>
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		<title>Hatem Bazian: Berkeley’s Israel Boycott Advocate</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/hatem-bazian-berkeley%e2%80%99s-israel-boycott-advocate/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hatem-bazian-berkeley%25e2%2580%2599s-israel-boycott-advocate</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Nov 2010 04:01:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=76380</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The California university officially associates itself with Jew-Hatred. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/052010_hatem_bazian.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-76383" title="052010_hatem_bazian" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/052010_hatem_bazian.gif" alt="" width="375" height="289" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/search.php?cx=015692155655874064424%3A-cjrsa07xqe&amp;cof=FORID%3A9&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=hatem+bazian&amp;sa=Search">Hatem Bazian</a>, a senior lecturer in the department of Near Eastern studies at the University of California at Berkeley, provided the introduction at a Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) event at Berkeley on October 26, 2010, called “<a href="http://www.mecaforpeace.org/events/berkeley-ca-what-can-american-academia-do-realize-justice-palestinians">What Can American Academia Do to Realize Justice for Palestinians?</a>” Bazian is an <a href="http://www.israeldivestmentcampaign.org/endorsements.htm">endorser</a> of the Israel Divestment Campaign and a <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/9711">signatory</a> to the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. He is a committed anti-Israel <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/4886">propagandist</a> and <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/9732">activist</a>.</p>
<p>In his introduction, Bazian was unabashed about promoting a politically active role for academia:</p>
<blockquote><p>In academia are two narratives: academia produces embedded intellectuals in bed with power, and there’s an academia that challenges power, who say [sic] that the role of the intellectual is to speak truth to power.</p></blockquote>
<p>Accordingly, his remarks were peppered with exultant references to Berkeley’s glory days:</p>
<blockquote><p>This is a place that gave major contributions: the women’s movement, the anti-war movement, the labor movement, ethnic studies. This is a place where ideas were possible; this is a place where people wrote history.</p></blockquote>
<p>Bazian urged “the same students who stopped the war in Vietnam, who stopped the levers of the machine” to “stop the normalization of Israel and the silence of the U.S.” by pressuring American academia to cut off all ties with Israeli institutions. He was proud of the accomplishments of the BDS movement, boasting that</p>
<blockquote><p>I am comforted at a national level with the conferences I have just been to. We activists from North America and activists from Europe met recently in Montreal and Chicago to discuss boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel. People are committed to planning and organizing from college campuses.</p></blockquote>
<p>He went on to outline his expansive view of the BDS movement, one in which common cause can be made with various other struggles, no matter how disconnected:</p>
<blockquote><p>Specifically for here on campus, it requires us to be highly organized. The apartheid movement was very strategic with alliances [and] a large coalition—but across the board so that the bombs on Palestinians in refugee camps connect to the inner cities of the U.S.A. . . . We have to think of it as a continuum. We need an agenda that seeks change across the board.</p></blockquote>
<p>Bazian’s reference to apartheid in South Africa is a staple of the BDS movement. But it is an inaccurate comparison, as is the “inner cities” of the U.S. to Palestinian “refugee camps.” Such decontexualized verbal borrowings cannot be the work of an unbiased intellectual, as they confuse and blur meaning in order to incite passions.</p>
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