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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; professors</title>
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		<title>Profs Blame ISIS on ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘Grievances’</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/cinnamon-stillwell/profs-blame-isis-on-islamophobia-and-grievances/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=profs-blame-isis-on-islamophobia-and-grievances</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/cinnamon-stillwell/profs-blame-isis-on-islamophobia-and-grievances/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2014 05:05:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Denial]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[professors]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Reza Aslan]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245740</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[See no Islamic Supremacism, hear no Islamic Supremacism.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/reza.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245743" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/reza-450x241.jpg" alt="reza" width="293" height="157" /></a>President Obama’s infamous <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/09/10/statement-president-isil-1">proclamation</a> that ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) is “not Islamic” was received sympathetically within the ranks of Middle East studies. While many scholars of Islam and the Middle East have condemned ISIS’s heinous actions, a stubborn refusal to acknowledge their theological underpinnings lingers. Those who do concede ISIS’s Islamic supremacism are branded “Islamphobes.” Others attribute ISIS’s rampage of mass murder, beheadings, rape, slavery, and strict Sharia law in pursuit of a <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119259/isis-history-islamic-states-new-caliphate-syria-and-iraq">caliphate</a> to Western-inspired “grievances” or “root causes.”</p>
<p>John Esposito, director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, is at the <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/13958">forefront</a> of such obfuscation. Disregarding ISIS’s <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/fathima-imra-nazeer/isis-islam-quran-literalism_b_5737388.html">adherence</a> to Quranic literalism, <a href="http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/174204/interview-with-prof-john-esposito-on-isis-the-middle-east-and-terrorism.html">Esposito</a> declared:</p>
<blockquote><p>I do not think that this is a very Islamic vision at all. . . . Theirs is a kind of religion that is extraordinarily full of violence and abuse that is not in accordance with the Quran, the traditions of the Prophet or even with Islamic Law.</p></blockquote>
<p>Hatem Bazian, director of the Islamophobia Research &amp; Documentation Project at the University of California, Berkeley, lived up to his title by invoking victimhood. <a href="http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/is_isis_a_faith-based_terroris.php">Bazian</a> claimed that:</p>
<blockquote><p>When Islamophobes point to the Koran and Islam as the problem, they are epistemically reinforcing ISIS’s claims and also pushing every Muslim into the same categorization. . . . For me, religion is a rationalization rather than the root cause.</p></blockquote>
<p>Responding to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s public <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1408/29/cnr.02.html">acknowledgement</a> that British Muslims are joining ISIS, University of Michigan history professor <a href="http://garyfouse.blogspot.com/2014/10/juan-cole-condemns-david-cameron-for.html">Juan Cole</a> ranted, “It’s just a way of beating up on the Muslims in the UK. . . . Cameron is grandstanding about this and it’s Islamophobia, it’s just racism.” Perhaps Cole is unaware that Cameron, speaking at a <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/10/david-cameron-on-eid-al-adha-islamic-state-has-nothing-to-do-with-the-great-religion-of-islam-a-religion-of-peace">reception</a> for British Muslims, kowtowed to political-correctness by declaring that ISIS has “nothing to do with the great religion of Islam, a religion of peace.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/09/04/dont-blame-religion-for-rise-isis/">Sahar F. Aziz</a>, Texas A&amp;M University law professor, condemned those who are “blindly blaming religion . . . rather than root causes,” lamenting that, “Thousands of miles away from the Middle East, it is tempting for Americans to view the atrocities committed by the Islamic State (ISIS) as further evidence that something is wrong with Islam.” Instead, she asserted, “The politics of authoritarianism, rather than religion, explain the rise of ISIS.” Given that ISIS arose in a power vacuum, there is little basis for blaming authoritarianism.</p>
<p>Going to ridiculous lengths, <a href="http://www.onbeing.org/blog/is-all-morality-gone-condemning-isis-and-beyond-in-a-world-of-suffering/6910">Omid Safi</a>, director of Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center, faults humanity itself:</p>
<blockquote><p>I am mindful of the fact that much of the Islamophobic discourse of today holds Muslims in the West accountable for atrocities of ISIS. In that context, it makes a fundamental mistake. . . . All of us, Muslims and Jews and Christians and Hindus and Buddhists and people of no faith and people of occasional faith, we are all responsible.</p></blockquote>
<p>That is, since everyone is responsible for ISIS, no one is responsible.</p>
<p>After conceding that “Muslims have a responsibility to speak out against ISIS,” Safi then entreated,</p>
<blockquote><p>[A]ll of us to speak out with the same vehemence . . . about the victims of the American drones, about the victims of the allies of the United States? Can we mourn Palestinians? Can we mourn Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin? Can we mourn the 2.5 million Americans caught in a penal industrial complex?</p></blockquote>
<p>A better question for Safi would be whether there is any unrelated societal ill that <em>cannot</em> be associated with condemning ISIS?</p>
<p>University of California, Riverside creative writing professor <a href="http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/10/reza-aslan-on-what-the-new-atheists-get-wrong.html">Reza Aslan</a> denied that ISIS has any appeal whatsoever to devout Muslims, marveling over “how little religion plays a role in this group, how little the idea of reading the Koran or praying or those kinds of things play a significant role on the ground among these militants.” Granting that “religion is the sort of underlying, unifying aspect of it,” Aslan then contradicted himself: “But the idea that ISIS is drawing excessively religious people to it is factually incorrect.” <a href="http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/09/reza-aslan-on-the-islamic-state-theres-no-diplomacy-they-have-to-be-destroyed/">Elsewhere</a>, he alluded to the “grievances . . . that a lot of Muslims around the world have” and warned that ISIS’s appeal would remain, “unless those grievances can be addressed.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/talktojazeera/2014/10/tariq-ramadan-isil-not-islamic-2014101015462542487.html">Tariq Ramadan</a>, professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University, suggested that Muslim scholars respond to ISIS by proclaiming:</p>
<blockquote><p>What you are doing, killing innocent people, implementing so-called “Sharia” or the so-called “Islamic State”, this is against everything that is coming from Islam. . . . It is not a caliphate. It is just people playing with politics referring to religious sources.</p></blockquote>
<p>While it is indeed necessary for Muslim moderates—a group that does <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/4852">not include</a> Ramadan—to condemn ISIS, it is self-defeating to deny the Islamic basis for its behavior.</p>
<p>Other academics engage in moral relativism, equating ISIS’s unbridled aggression with the defense of Western democracies. Absurdly, <a href="http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/26743-how-much-moral-high-ground-does-the-us-have-over-isis">Musa al-Gharbi</a>, a University of Arizona instructor, described the U.S. as the bigger evil: “It would not be a stretch to say that the United States is actually a greater threat to peace and stability in the region than ISIS.” <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/10/there-are-groups-more-depraved--201410238520512942.html">Al-Gharbi</a> also dubbed Mexican drug cartels <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/blog/2014/11/shakir-al-gharbi-downplay-isis-atrocities-with">more destructive</a> than ISIS and maintained that, “What is fueling the disproportionate reaction to ISIL is Islamophobia.”</p>
<p><a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/9/barack-obama-islamicstatestrategyspeech.html">Mark LeVine</a>, a professor of Middle East history at the University of California, Irvine, simultaneously absolved Islam and demonized Zionism by likening ISIS fighters to religious “fanatics” of all types:</p>
<blockquote><p>[The Islamic State] is as real a form of expression of Islam as the violent and chauvinist Israeli settler movement is to Judaism or as extreme Hindu nationalism, Rahkine Buddhism and militant Christianity are to their religions in India, Myanmar and the United States.</p></blockquote>
<p>Georgetown University history professor <a href="http://freebeacon.com/national-security/k-i-l-l-i-n-g/">Abdullah Al-Arian</a> drew a cruder comparison on Twitter:</p>
<blockquote><p>Israel and ISIS sitting in a tree, K-I-L-L-I-N-G, First come the bombs, then come the savages, then come the U.N. to survey the damages.</p></blockquote>
<p>Likewise, <a href="http://www.truthrevolt.org/israel-revolt/virginia-tech-professor-likens-israel-isis">Steven Salaita</a>, a former Virginia Tech University English professor whose offer of a position at the University of Illinois was withdrawn, tweeted nonsensically, “#Israel and #ISIS are but two prongs of the same violent ethnonationalism.”</p>
<p>Stretching credulity even further, <a href="http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=4&amp;x_outlet=28&amp;x_article=2751">Rashid Khalidi</a> of Columbia University, alleged that ISIS “would be positively affected if the United States stopped its biased support of Israel.”</p>
<p>Seemingly bucking these trends is an <a href="http://www.lettertobaghdadi.com/">open letter</a> to ISIS “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi signed by over 120 Muslim leaders and scholars, including the aforementioned <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 href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/8787">Hamza Yusuf</a> of Zaytuna College, and Brandeis University’s Joseph E.B. Lumbard. However, the letter calls its sincerity into question in its calculated <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/10/is-the-muslim-scholars-open-letter-to-isis-really-enough">ambiguity</a>, <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/09/international-group-of-muslim-scholars-refutes-islamic-states-islamic-case-while-endorsing-jihad-sharia-caliphate">endorsement</a> of Sharia law, and the <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/14067">Islamist</a> bent of many of its signatories.</p>
<p>Plainly, these Middle East studies academics are reluctant to admit the existence of Islamic supremacism. The rise of ISIS has challenged their ideology even more than the growth of al-Qaeda. Instead of addressing the monster to which Islam has given birth, as French Muslim philosopher <a href="http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/8206.htm">Abdennour Bidar</a> recently put it, they blame the non-Muslim world. Quite simply, the “experts” have buried their heads in the sand.</p>
<p><em>Cinnamon Stillwell is the West Coast Representative for </em><a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/"><em>Campus Watch</em></a><em>, a project of the </em><a href="http://www.meforum.org/"><em>Middle East Forum</em></a><em>. She can be reached at </em><a href="http://mailto:stillwell@meforum.org/"><em>stillwell@meforum.org</em></a><em>.</em></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>Anti-Semitism Denial</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-l-cravatts/anti-semitism-denial/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=anti-semitism-denial</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 23 Oct 2014 04:38:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[AMCHA Initiative report]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[professors]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=243576</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Leftist professors and doublethink.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/antisemitism.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243580" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/antisemitism-450x300.jpg" alt="antisemitism" width="251" height="167" /></a>As yet more evidence that academics are regularly able to engage in what George Orwell sardonically referred to as “doublethink,” “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one&#8217;s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them,” this month 40 professors of Jewish studies published a denunciation of a study that named professors who have been identified as expressing “anti-Israel bias, or possibly even antisemitic rhetoric.”</p>
<p>While the 40 academic “heavyweights” claim they, of course, reject anti-Semitism totally as part of teaching, they were equally repelled by the tactics and possible effects of the AMCHA Initiative report, a comprehensive review of the attitudes about Israel of some 200 professors who signed an online petition during the latest Gaza incursion that called for an academic boycott against Israeli scholars—academics the petitioners claimed were complicit in the “latest humanitarian catastrophe caused by Israel’s new military assault on the Gaza Strip.”</p>
<p>“We believe the professors who have signed this petition may be so biased against the Jewish state that they are unable to teach accurately or fairly about Israel or the Arab-Israel conflict, and may even inject antisemitic tropes into their lectures or class discussion,” wrote Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and Leila Beckwith, co-founders of the AMCHA Initiative and authors of the report.</p>
<p>Calling “the actions of AMCHA deplorable,” the indignant professors were insulted by the organization’s “technique of monitoring lectures, symposia and conferences,” something which, they believe, “strains the basic principle of academic freedom on which the American university is built.” That is a rather breathtaking assertion by academics; namely, that it is contrary to the core mission of higher education that ideas and instruction being publicly expressed by professors cannot be examined and judged, and that by even applying some standards of objectivity on a body of teaching by a particular professor “AMCHA’s approach closes off all but the most narrow intellectual directions and,” as academics who do not want the content of their output to actually be examined for the quality of its scholarship are always fond of saying, “has a chilling effect on research and teaching.”</p>
<p>Only in the inverted reality of academia could a group of largely Jewish professors denounce a study which had as its core purpose to alert students to professors who have demonstrated, publicly and seemingly proudly, that they harbor anti-Israel attitudes, attitudes which unfortunately frequently morph into anti-Semitic thought and speech as part of discussions about Israel and the Middle East. Since the individuals named in the report teach in the area of Middle East studies, they are also likely to bring that anti-Israel bias into the classroom with them, and students, therefore, would obviously benefit from AMCHA’s report.</p>
<p>Specifically, it shows which professors have demonstrated that they bring to their teaching a clear bias against the Jewish state, and in fact have gone even further with that enmity by mobilizing as part of the global BDS movement to turn Israeli academics in intellectual pariahs by excluding them from the intellectual marketplace of ideas. Not Syrian academics; not Iranian academics; not North Korean academics; not Saudi Arabian academics; not the scholars of many other countries with despotic regimes and a prevailing absence of human and civil rights, not to mention academic freedom. Only Israeli academics.</p>
<p>Can anyone believe that had the AMCHA Initiative or other organization issued a report that revealed the existence of endemic racism, or homophobia, or sexism, or Islamophobia in university coursework, and had warned students who might be negatively impacted to steer clear of courses taught by those offending professors, that these same 40 feckless professors would have denounced such reports as potentially having a negative effect on teaching and learning? That they would question the motives of the organization that published the report? That they would deem the research and publication of such reports as being “McCarthyesque” or somehow undermining the civility of higher education by actually holding academics responsible for some of the intellectually deficient or corrupt ideologies to which they adhere and which they are more than happy to hoist on others—including, of course, their students.</p>
<p>Why should a professor’s political attitudes <em>not</em> be known to students, especially, as in this case, when those anti-Israel attitudes are extremely germane to their area of teaching, namely Middle East studies? The AMCHA researchers did not furtively investigate the private lives of the 200 professors, nor did they delve through their association memberships, reading habits, or private writings without the professors’ knowledge or consent. They were not spied upon and their courses taped by students.</p>
<p>The findings were based on the public utterances and writings of the professors, behavior and attitudes they apparently had no problem with making public and for which they were not hesitant to take responsibility. In fact, as often happens when anti-Israel academics are called upon to defend their libels and intellectual assaults against the Jewish state, they wish to freely pontificate on the many predations of Israel but do not like to be inconvenienced by being challenged on those often biased, and intellectually dishonest, views by others with opposing viewpoints.</p>
<p>Instead of defending their assertions and ideologies, they retreat from the argument, contending, at least in the Israeli/Palestinian discussion, that when their views are challenged, it is not done in good faith—an actual scholarly debate—but only as a way of suppressing their opinions, derailing their pro-Palestinian activism, and sheltering Israel from what they believe is justifiable and necessary criticism.</p>
<p>And there is another, more psychologically interesting aspect to a group of Jewish professors opposing a study that attempted to protect Jewish students and others from the pernicious effects of anti-Semitism in coursework, an aspect that Harvard’s insightful Ruth Wisse dealt with in her book, <em>If I Am Not For Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews: </em>the professors attacked the AMCHA study specifically because it deals with Israel, and how academia reacts to the debate about the Jewish state and its surrounding Arab neighbors. Rather than confront the lies and distortions promulgated by the Arab world against Israel over its alleged racism, apartheid, settlements, and lack of a just solution to the occupation, anti-Israel liberal Jews completely accept the spurious new narrative of Israel being the sole villain, and in fact often abet it with their own condemnations of the Jewish state. For Wisse, this behavior could “more accurately be described as the desire to disassociate oneself from a people under attack by advertising one’s own goodness,” a psychological pattern that has manifested itself conspicuously on campuses and seems to be at play in the current instance with the Jewish Studies professors. So worried are the 40 professors that by defending a report exposing academic anti-Semitism they will somehow be seen to be complicit in defending Israel, they would rather denounce the report and expose Jewish students to potential harm than stand up for principles that might tarnish their liberal credentials.</p>
<p>The signatories were also skeptical about the guidelines used by AMCHA to gauge instances of anti-Semitism and an acceptable definition by which campus speech, teaching, publications, and events could be judged to include manifestations of anti-Semitism and not just vituperation and critique of Israel—as anti-Israel activists regularly claim.   AMCHA’s “definition of antisemitism is so undiscriminating as to be meaningless,” the professors’ statement asserted, ignoring the fact that AMCHA based its own definition on earlier working definitions of anti-Semitism carefully developed by the U.S. State Department, the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (now the Fundamental Rights Agency), and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under the Law, among others.</p>
<p>And the professors also claim, without bothering to support the accusation with any proof, that AMCHA’s report—intent on exposing anti-Semitism in speech and behavior that can and has created a hostile campus environment for Jewish students—will somehow contribute to contracting, rather than enlarging, scholarly debate. In their zeal to preempt the insulating force of their notion of “academic freedom,” they seek to deprive those with alternate views of the same rights and protection; that is, while they want their fellow academics to be able to utter any calumny against the Jewish state and suffer no recriminations for their speech, even when it crosses the line into anti-Semitic expression, these professors view any speech from those challenging their views to be oppressive, stifling, and unacceptable. In fact, the professors contend, “Instead of encouraging openness through its efforts, AMCHA’s approach . . . has a chilling effect on research and teaching,” absurdly suggesting that excluding anti-Semitism from pro-Palestinian activism and teaching constricts scholarship and debate to “all but the most narrow intellectual directions.”</p>
<p>It is not as if campuses are unaware of the prevailing sensitivities of groups who are normally considered to be protected classes—black students, gay students, Muslim students, Hispanics, among others. Just this month, in a breathtaking act of moral incoherence, Britain’s National Union of Students (NUS) voted <em>against</em> condemning ISIS after the Black Students Officer, Malia Bouattia, opposed the motion, not because students did not have sincere concern for Syrians and Kurds being slaughtered, but because “condemnation of ISIS appears to have become a justification for . . . blatant Islamophobia.” In April, the Fifth Annual Conference on Islamophobia was held at UC Berkeley&#8217;s Boalt Law School, organized by Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian activist, co-founder of Students for Justice in Palestine, and professor of a current Berkeley course called &#8220;De-Constructing Islamophobia and the History of Otherness,” with part of the course requirements being that students open a Twitter account and tweet at least once a week about “Islamophobia.”</p>
<p>None of the Jewish Studies professors seemed to be concerned with investigations of purported instances of Islamophobia on campus and elsewhere, and how exposing those occurrences might lead to a stifling of someone’s academic free speech or “chilling” of scholarly debate. In fact, FBI statistics indicate that acts of anti-Semitism occur with eight times the regularity of anti-Muslim incidents, and that between 2011 and 2012 alone, the number of anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses tripled.</p>
<p>So regardless of how significant the professors seem to think the problem of anti-Semitism actually is, and whether they wish to minimize the virulence of anti-Semitism because they insist on conflating it with, and making it part of, the furious academic debate about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the AMCHA report shows us that the “oldest hatred” is still with us, creeping noxiously up the ivy walls.</p>
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		<title>Islamic Jizya: ‘Protection’ from Whom?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/raymond-ibrahim/islamic-jizya-protection-from-whom/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=islamic-jizya-protection-from-whom</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/raymond-ibrahim/islamic-jizya-protection-from-whom/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Jul 2014 04:40:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Esposito]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamic Jizya]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mideast Studies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[professors]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Reuters]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237432</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Another big lie from Mideast Studies professors.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Jizya.jpeg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-237434" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Jizya.jpeg" alt="Jizya" width="289" height="227" /></a></p>
<p>Is <i>jizya</i>—the money non-Muslims historically paid their Muslim conquerors—meant to buy them “protection,” including from outside enemies, as modern Western academics maintain?  Or was it simply extortion money meant to buy non-Muslims their lives, as Islam’s scriptures mandate?</p>
<p>The word jizya appears in Koran 9:29: “Fight those among the People of the Book [Christians and Jews] who do not believe in Allah nor the Last Day, nor forbid what Allah and his Messenger have forbidden, nor embrace the religion of truth, <i>until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued</i> (emphasis added).”</p>
<p>In the <a href="http://www.usc.edu/org/cmje/religious-texts/hadith/muslim/019-smt.php"><span style="color: #0433ff;">hadith</span></a>, the Messenger of Allah, Muhammad, regularly calls on Muslims to demand jizya of non-Muslims:  “If they refuse to accept Islam,” said the Islamic prophet, “demand from them the jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay jizya, seek Allah’s help and fight them.”</p>
<p>Keeping the above in mind, consider the following July 18 report from <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/convert-pay-tax-die-islamic-state-warns-christians-181415698--business.html?soc_src=mediacontentsharebuttons"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Reuters</span></a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>Islamist insurgents have issued an ultimatum to northern Iraq’s dwindling Christian population to either convert to Islam, pay a religious levy or face death, according to a statement distributed in the militant-controlled city of Mosul….</p>
<p>It said Christians who wanted to remain in the “caliphate” that the Islamic State declared this month in parts of Iraq and Syria must agree to abide by terms of a “dhimma” contract—a historic practice under which non-Muslims were protected in Muslim lands in return for a special levy known as “jizya.”</p>
<p>“We offer them three choices: Islam; the dhimma contract – involving payment of jizya; if they refuse this they will have nothing but the sword,” the announcement said.</p>
<p>“After this date [July 19], there is nothing between us and them but the sword,” it said.</p>
<p>The Nineveh decree echoes one that the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, the former name for the Islamic State, issued in the Syrian city of Raqqa in February, demanding that Christians pay the jizya levy in gold and <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/western-ignorance-of-the-conditions-of-omar/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">curb displays of their faith</span></a> in return for protection.</p></blockquote>
<p>Note how straightforward the Islamic State’s words are—jizya, conversion, or death—compared to the language of Reuters, which twice invokes the concept of “protection” without explaining from whom:  1) “a historic practice under which non-Muslims were <i>protected</i> in Muslim lands in return for a special levy known as “jizya”; 2) “demanding that Christians pay the jizya levy in gold and curb displays of their faith <i>in return for protection</i>.”</p>
<p>Reuters doesn’t bother to clarify this notion of “protection,” but rather leaves it vague, implying that the protection Christians receive is against some random elements.</p>
<p>The reason for this obfuscation is that Mideast academics in the West have been whitewashing the meaning of jizya for decades.  After all, the concept of jizya is one of the most ironclad proofs that Islam is innately intolerant of non-Muslims.</p>
<p>A very typical Western definition for jizya can be found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica: “The Muslim rulers tolerated the dhimmis [conquered non-Muslims] and allowed them to practice their religion. <i>In return for protection</i> [from whom?] and as a mark of their submission, the dhimmis were required to pay a special poll tax known as the jizya.”</p>
<p>Other academics have gone so far as to claim that non-Muslims paid jizya to buy Muslim protection against outside forces.  Consider the following excerpt from John Esposito, director of the Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University.  It essentially makes the idea of being subjugated to Islamic overlords and paying them tribute appear as an enviable position for non-Muslim minorities:</p>
<blockquote><p>In many ways, local populations [Christians, Jews, and others] found Muslim rule more flexible and tolerant than that of Byzantium and Persia. Religious communities were free to practice their faith to worship and be governed by their religious leaders and laws in such areas as marriage, divorce, and inheritance. In exchange, they were required to pay tribute, a poll tax (jizya) <i>that entitled them to Muslim protection from outside aggression and exempted them from military service</i>. Thus, they were called the “protected ones” (dhimmi). In effect, this often meant lower taxes, greater local autonomy (emphasis added) …</p></blockquote>
<p>The idea that jizya was extracted in order to buy “Muslim protection from outside aggression” is an outright lie—one that, as the equivocal tone of the aforementioned Reuters report indicates, has taken root in the West.</p>
<p>Equally false is Esposito’s assertion that jizya was paid to “exempt them from military service”—as if conquering Muslims would even want or allow their despised “infidel” subjects to fight alongside them in the name of jihad without first converting to Islam.</p>
<p>The root meaning of the Arabic word “jizya” is simply to “repay” or “recompense,” basically to “compensate” for something.  According to the <i>Hans Wehr Dictionary</i>, the standard Arabic-English dictionary, jizya is something that “takes the place” of something else, or “serves instead.”</p>
<p>Simply put, conquered non-Muslims were to <i>purchase their lives</i>, which were otherwise forfeit to their Muslim conquerors, with money. Instead of taking their lives, they took their money.  As one medieval jurist succinctly puts it, “their lives and their possessions are only protected by reason of payment of jizya” (<i>Crucified Again</i>, p. 22).</p>
<p>So jizya was, and is indeed, protection money—though protection, not from outsiders, as Esposito and others claim, but from surrounding Muslims themselves.  Whether it’s the first caliphate from over a millennium ago or whether it’s the newest caliphate, the Islamic State, Muslim overlords continue to deem the lives of their non-Muslim subjects forfeit unless they purchase it, ransom it with money.</p>
<p>There is nothing humane, reasonable, or admirable about demands for jizya from conquered non-Muslim minorities, as the academics claim. Jizya is simply extortion money. Its purpose has always been to provide non-Muslims with protection from Muslims: pay up, or else become one of us and convert to Islam, or else die.</p>
<p>And it is commanded in both the Koran and Hadith, the twin pillars of Islam.</p>
<p>In short, jizya is an ugly fact of Islam—one that, distort as they may, the academics can’t whitewash away, even as the world stands idly by watching its resumption in the twenty-first century.</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>Professors For Pedophilia</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/stephenbrown/professors-for-pedophilia/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=professors-for-pedophilia</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/stephenbrown/professors-for-pedophilia/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 15 Jul 2014 04:25:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Stephen Brown]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[paedophilia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[professors]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=236228</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Europe suffers horrific turn in its cultural landscape.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Academia.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236230" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Academia.jpg" alt="Academia" width="270" height="198" /></a>As Christian religious belief declines in Europe, the continent’s pagan heart comes more and more to the fore, and England, is only the latest European country to witness this growing phenomenon.</p>
<p>A major pedophilia scandal is currently rocking British society, in which as many as 20 prominent politicians, judges and other members of the British establishment are suspected of having abused children in the 1980s and 1990s as part of a pedophile ring. The victims were among society’s most vulnerable, being mostly boys from state children’s homes. And such abuse, it is suspected, may have been going on for decades.</p>
<p>“We are looking at the Lords, the Commons, the judiciary- all institutions where there will be a small percentage of pedophiles, and a slightly larger percentage of people who have known about it,” former child protection manager Peter McKelvie told the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), calling the predators “an extremely powerful elite” who have been abusing children “for as long as I have been alive.”</p>
<p>This latest episode involving sexual exploitation of children comes on the heels of other, jarring, pedophilia scandals to stun Britain this year. One involved the BBC itself.</p>
<p>BBC star entertainer Jimmy Savile, now deceased, was one of several BBC employees suspected of having molested literally hundreds of children and teenagers, some on BBC premises. Perhaps most shockingly, 28 British hospitals reported Savile may have molested patients on their wards, to which he was allowed access, sometimes even possessing hospital keys.</p>
<p>Another scandal saw artist and “iconic” children’s entertainer Rolf Harris, who once painted Queen Elizabeth’s portrait, found guilty this month of 12 counts of indecent assault on children and teenagers. Harris was described as a “part of millions of British childhoods” and was viewed as “a national treasure.”</p>
<p>One can correctly say pedophilia was not invented in Western countries in our times. But what differentiates the current climate concerning this once very taboo practice from earlier decades is the equally reprehensible movement underway in the West involving some academics, among others, to minimize its devastating effects on children, garner sympathy for the perpetrators and make the practice acceptable to the public. All of which is allowing pedophilia to creep into the cultural debate.</p>
<p>Journalist Andrew Gilligan recently pointed out in England’s <i>Daily</i> <i>Telegraph</i> an example of this gradual, ongoing promotion of pedophilia in mainstream society. Gilligan writes that only last year in July at a conference at the University of Cambridge, one of Britain’s most famous institutions of higher learning, pro-pedophilia positions were put forward. The conference was about classifying sexuality in “a standard international psychiatric manual used by the police and courts” that is produced by the American Psychiatric Association (APA).</p>
<p>One attendee was Ken Plummer, an emeritus professor of sociology at Britain’s Essex University. Plummer had previously stated he was once a member of the Pedophile Information Exchange (PIE), a British pro-pedophilia group, which advocated lowering the age of consent to ten. But Plummer said he had joined the now defunct PIE only for research purposes.</p>
<p>The results of Plummer’s &#8220;research,&#8221; however, was to produce such disturbing statements as: “The isolation, secrecy, guilt and anguish of many pedophiles are not intrinsic to the phenomenon but are derived from the extreme social pressure placed on minorities.” And another gem: “Many adult pedophiles say that boys actively seek out sex partners …&#8217;childhood’ itself is not a biological given but an historically produced social object.”</p>
<p>Former PIE chief Tom O’Carroll was also in attendance at the Cambridge conference. O’Carroll was once convicted for distributing 50,000 images of child abuse. BBC news stated: “Children, mainly boys and some as young as six, had been filmed and photographed being raped and tortured.”</p>
<p>But the most &#8220;interesting&#8221; academic at the Cambridge conference was Philip Tromovitch, a professor at Japan’s Doshisha University. In his presentation, Trofomich stated:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Pedophilic interest is natural and normal for males. At least a sizeable minority of normal males would like to have sex with children…Normal males are aroused by children.”</p></blockquote>
<p>It is not surprising that, according to Gilligan, Tromovitch and O’Carroll went together for drinks afterwards.</p>
<p>But what is surprising, though, is that persons of O’Carroll’s and Tromovitch’s ilk are even present at such a prestigious international conference alongside such reputable organizations as the APA, discussing important topics like psychiatric classifications &#8212; and at Cambridge University at that. The fact alone that Tromovitch and Plummer have positions at universities is viewed by many as a sign of serious civilizational decline.</p>
<p>There were other, similar enlightening presentations at the Cambridge function, such as “Liberating the pedophile: a discursive analysis” and “Danger and difference: the stakes of hebephilia.”</p>
<p>The APA representatives at the conference tried to have hebephilia (attraction to early pubertal children) listed as a disorder in the manual’s new edition but failed. Gilligan wrote that one American academic attending the conference believed such a listing would be abused in the United States, as convicted sex offenders would not be released after completing their sentences and be detained as “mentally ill” under “US sexually violent predator laws.”</p>
<p>The possibility of these offenders, once released, harming more children appears not to have merited the slightest consideration.</p>
<p>One APA attendee stated, however, that a way had to be found to include hebephilia as a disorder in the manual or that was “tantamount to stating that the APA’s official position is that sexual preference for early pubertal children is normal.” Which is probably what some at the conference want and why the APA proposal was voted down.</p>
<p>The attempt to normalise adult-child sex is not only limited to certain academics and paedophile groups in the West but has had its political supporters as well.</p>
<p>Germany’s Green Party more than outdid the Cambridge conference last year in notoriety for having once pushed for pedophilia’s acceptance. In 2013, shortly before Germany’s federal election, it was revealed the party had, at least in one German state, officially adopted in 1985 a position calling for the abolishment of the German law that criminalised adult-child sex. The party’s tolerance for pedophilia was such that it had a “Queer and Pederast” working group inside the party, promoting this position.</p>
<p>Even the Green candidate for chancellor in last year’s German federal election, Juergen Trittin, a city politician for the Greens in Goettingen in the 1980s, had signed a party platform statement calling for the decriminalization of child-adult sex acts “that occur without the use or threat of force.”</p>
<p>“This formulation makes a mistake. It is simply false. There are no consenting forms of sexual relationships between adults and children,” said Trittin, when forced to address the issue during the election campaign.</p>
<p>Trittin also regretted that it took his party so long to disown its pedophile past. But if it had not been for the revelations, one wonders whether the Greens would ever have recanted their previous child-adult sex position.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, the Green Party, despite the revelations’ shock to the German public, still received eight percent of the national vote. In the past, despite its small size, it has played an important part in German politics, having been the junior partner in a federal coalition government with Gerhard Schroeder’s Socialist Party between 1998 and 2005 as well as serving as a coalition partner in several state governments.</p>
<p>And some Greens not only supported their party’s outrageous position, but acted on it. An openly pedophile member of the Green Party’s executive committee for Germany’s most populous state, North Rhineland-Westphalia, formed a commune in the 1980s, visited by prominent Greens, where he and others molested minors living or visiting there. He justified his abuse of the children by saying the Greek philosophers also had their “lust-boys” and sexual contact with their pupils.</p>
<p>“These were sentences that, for me, were quite unusual, facts, as it were, since no one contradicted them,” remembered one former abuse victim last year in a newspaper interview. Now an adult, he was 12 when living at the commune and said he never realized the abuse, which occurred daily, was wrong.</p>
<p>Other Greens attended party conferences where members of invited anarchist communes, called “City Indians,” were openly affectionate with their boy lovers.</p>
<p>“There were also 30-year-olds there; they played with the children,” remembered one Green Party member in an interview with <i>Die Welt</i> last year. “Sometimes I felt rotten there.”</p>
<p>Interestingly, none of these “progressive” politicians at these Green party conferences, whose stated mission is to save the world from capitalist oppression, especially American, ever thought to call the police or a children’s protection service. Ironically, it was also the Greens who, years later, were to scream the loudest and the longest in Germany against the Catholic Church’s child sex scandals. Like many leftists, the Greens are used to pointing out, in paroxysms of outrage, the moral failings of others while ignoring their own. One can only be thankful the Greens never controlled any schools back then.</p>
<p>The unstated end game of those involved in making pedophilia acceptable for public consumption is to eventually have this immoral practice legalized, as in pagan Rome and Greece of antiquity (pedophile groups’ favourite reference point). But rather than from the past, it is from the present, in the form of sympathetic academics and modern “Greens,” that the pedophile movement currently gets its intellectual support, its ideological armor and tools to promote and justify its anti-child cruelty.</p>
<p>It has been pointed out, by Gilligan among others, that professors who sympathise with this deviant behaviour pose more of a threat than pedophile groups themselves, since academics are on the forefront of making child-adult sex at least presentable, if not acceptable to the public, and, perhaps, even eventually fit for polite society. And it is this eroding of moral barriers that could ultimately lead to pedophilia’s legalization.</p>
<p>But what stands out the most in the statements and research of academic sympathisers of pedophilia, like those at the Cambridge conference, is not just the immorality of their positions but also the inhuman lightheartedness with which they trample on children’s souls. There is no realization of the damage their pedophilia madness will do to “these frail beings,” as Victor Hugo once so compassionately called children.</p>
<p>Even in Juergen Trittin’s statement, like those of other Greens, there was never any admission of immorality on his part or on the party’s. They had simply taken a false position.  All of which shows, without a doubt, that the emerging pagan heart of Europe is definitely a heartless one.</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>An Unexpected and Important Education Victory in Colorado</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/sara-dogan/an-unexpected-and-important-education-victory-in-colorado/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=an-unexpected-and-important-education-victory-in-colorado</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 20 Sep 2013 04:40:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sara Dogan]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Academic Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Colorado University]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=204766</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Colorado University shields students from political harassment by their professors.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/paf.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-204772" alt="paf" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/paf.jpg" width="320" height="240" /></a>In a unanimous 8-to-0 vote, the Colorado University regents have passed a resolution to add “political affiliation” to the school’s non-discrimination policy, thus protecting students from political harassment by their professors, including punitive retributions for expressing their views in class. Colorado U. is also moving forward with a study, approved by the regents in June, which will evaluate whether professors currently show proper respect for the differing (usually conservative) opinions of their students. This path-breaking resolution was the work of the two courageous regents who sponsored the resolution, Sue Sharkey and Jim Geddes.</p>
<p>The resolution amends Article 10 of the UC “Laws of the Regents” to state, “The University of Colorado does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, disability, creed, religion, sexual orientation, GENDER IDENTITY, GENDER EXPRESSION or veteran status, POLITICAL AFFILIATION, OR POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY in admission and access to, and treatment and employment in, its educational programs and activities.”</p>
<p>It goes on to add that, “The university is committed to the principle of non-discrimination and does not tolerate harassment on any basis, including sex, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, GENDER IDENTITY, GENDER EXPRESSION or age, POLITICAL AFFILIATION, OR POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.” [Words in capital letters are newly added to the policy].</p>
<p>Speaking on the resolution’s impact, Regent Sharkey commented that it “really does send a very good statement about the University of Colorado, and in a very positive way. … We’re not going to discriminate based upon a person’s political philosophy, political affiliation, gender identity or gender expression.”</p>
<p>This critical victory in the fight to protect the academic freedom of students and faculty has been a long time in coming. In the fall of 2003, the David Horowitz Freedom Center launched a campaign in Colorado to promote an Academic Bill of Rights for students to achieve a similar result. The core principles of the bill were adopted in a Joint Resolution of the Colorado legislature but because of the opposition of the teacher unions and the Democratic Party were never enforced.</p>
<p>In the spring of 2004, the reform campaign went national as the Freedom Center’s newly created organization, Students for Academic Freedom, was activated on 100 campuses nationwide. Over the next seven years many victories were achieved in educating the general public about the problem of political persecution of conservative students. But equally many defeats were suffered as the powerful teacher unions and their Democratic Party allies went into action and blocked every single reform the Freedom Center was able to put in place. The unions were even able to remove all the regents who voted to adopt the Academic Bill of Rights at Illinois’ College of DuPage, and to expunge the principles of intellectual diversity they had put in place as well.</p>
<p>In the summer of 2004, the Students for Academic Freedom campaign approached 88 university presidents, including the president of Colorado University, and asked them to revise their anti-discrimination policies to include political, ideological, and intellectual diversity.  Only two of the 88 responded and neither of them was willing to consider the proposal.</p>
<p>Now, nearly 10 years later, two Colorado University regents have persuaded their colleagues, including several Democrats, to achieve that goal. Bravo, Sue Sharkey and Jim Geddes.</p>
<p>“I am thrilled with this result,” commented David Horowitz. “I applaud Sue Sharkey and Jim for waging what I am sure was a lonely fight among their fellow Republicans as well as Democrats, to do the right thing and begin to restore an academic environment to our beleaguered university system. I have spoken to thousands of students in almost fifty states and heard their tales of professorial discrimination, harassment and outright intimidation. I have known first-hand the determined opposition to academic freedom of the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers, and have felt the sting of their slanders. So I know the kind of backbone it took to get this resolution passed. What they have achieved lifts some of the burden of frustration from my shoulders, and I look forward to other universities adopting this needed reform in the coming months and years.”</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Academia’s Love Letter to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/cinnamon-stillwell/academias-love-letter-to-egypts-muslim-brotherhood/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=academias-love-letter-to-egypts-muslim-brotherhood</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Jul 2013 04:16:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=197618</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Sorrow, nostalgia and conspiracy theories.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/hatem.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-197643" alt="hatem" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/hatem.gif" width="263" height="202" /></a>Now that Egyptians have <a href="http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/07/10/the-nile-of-democracy-will-flood-egypts-jihadists/">overthrown</a> the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) government of former president Mohammed Morsi, how have scholars of the Middle East responded? With encomia, nostalgia, and conspiracy theories. (Click <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/13309">here</a> for a full collection of quotes).</p>
<p>Instead of acknowledging the ineptitude and dictatorial behavior that led to the Muslim Brotherhood’s ouster, some alluded to shadowy conspiracies involving the U.S. This despite the Obama administration’s open support for the Brotherhood and its push for MB participation in a new democratic political process, much to the <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=anti+obama+signs+in+egypt&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&amp;tbm=isch&amp;tbo=u&amp;source=univ&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=umzgUeGDMYLWyQHHsoG4Dg&amp;ved=0CEUQsAQ&amp;biw=1600&amp;bih=702">consternation</a> of the Egyptian street, not to mention many Americans.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.tariqramadan.com/spip.php?article12927&amp;lang=en">Tariq Ramadan</a>, professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University and grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna, claimed that “the decision to overthrow President Mohamed Morsi had been made well before June 30.” The Egyptian people, he alleged, “have been unwitting participants in a media-military operation of the highest order,” and, he concluded ominously, “The silence of Western governments tells us all we need to know.”</p>
<p>Similarly, <a href="http://www.contracostatimes.com/opinion/ci_23643420/blow-democracy-middle-east?source=email">Amer Araim</a> of Diablo Valley College claimed that, “The Egyptian military authorities . . . could not have staged the coup without a nod from Washington,” while <a href="http://whiterosereader.org/2013/07/12/the-coup-in-egypt-a-conversation-with-abdullah-al-arian/">Abdullah Al-Arian</a> of Wayne State University, the son of former professor and North American head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=671">Sami Al-Arian</a>, maintained that, “The U.S. likely gave some kind of endorsement, or at least did not object to removing the democratically elected president.”</p>
<p>Taking it a step further, <a href="http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2013/07/conspiracy-theory-about-egypt.html">As&#8217;ad AbuKhalil</a>, a political scientist at California State University, Stanislaus, posted the following at his “Angry Arab” blog: “[I]nteresting that while Obama was in deep trouble over the NSA spy scandal suddenly a revolution in Egypt bursts out . . . wiping out or at least putting lower on the front page news about the NSA spy scandal.”</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/HatemBazian/status/352945654563213312">Hatem Bazian</a>, who lectures in Near Eastern studies and directs the Islamophobia Research &amp; Documentation Project at the University of California, Berkeley, tweeted, “The ME, it’s [sic] oil, and wealth are far too valuable to be left to the Egyptians on the street to determine are the words said behind doors.”</p>
<p>Other scholars, reiterating their <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/blog/2012/07/professors-and-politicos-fooled-by-the-muslim">long-standing</a> affection for so-called “moderate Islamist” parties across the region, from the <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/11330">MB in Egypt</a> to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey and Ennahda in Tunisa, continued to hold out hope for Islamist rule.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/07/201378985916781.html">Khaled Abou El Fadl</a>, who teaches Islamic law and chairs the Islamic Studies Interdepartmental Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, lamented that, “What has been dealt a deathblow after the Egyptian coup is moderate Islamism.” The Muslim Brotherhood, he claimed, “believed in the political process and tried to practice it. . . . They believed that democracy and Islamism are reconcilable.”</p>
<p>Exhibiting a similarly wistful tone, <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/07/201374115114452703.html">Abdullah Al-Arian</a>, who wrote <a href="http://acmcu.georgetown.edu/227737.html">his dissertation</a> on <a href="http://www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/events/showevent.asp?eventid=9860">the MB</a> at Georgetown University, imagined the Islamist party’s disappointment at not losing power via an election: “One of the many tragedies of these latest events is that we have lost . . . the opportunity to witness the Muslim Brotherhood humbled through its preferred method of political contestation.”</p>
<p>Comparing the MB to Tunisia’s ruling Islamist party Ennahda, <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-05/don-t-blame-islam-for-the-failure-of-egypt-s-democracy.html">Noah Feldman</a> of Harvard Law preposterously and incoherently opined:</p>
<blockquote><p>Both parties believe in combining Islamic values with democratic practice. Both accept a political role for women and equal citizenship for non-Muslims, even if in practice they are both socially conservative and seek the gradual, voluntary Islamization of society.</p></blockquote>
<p>Meanwhile, Michigan’s <a href="http://www.juancole.com/2013/07/egypts-revocouption-democracy.html">Juan Cole</a>, having previously downplayed the <a href="http://www.juancole.com/2012/06/fox-smears-mursi-with-jerusalem-capital-lie-murphy.html">MB’s extremism</a>, pointed to Turkey’s ruling Islamist party as a role model for the Brotherhood (this despite the recent massive <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/16/us-turkey-protests-idUSBRE96F0MH20130716">protests</a> in Turkey and the AKP’s heavy handed response):</p>
<blockquote><p>[I]t depends on whether the Muslim Brotherhood is wise and mature enough to roll with this punch and to reform itself . . . If they take this course, they have a chance of emulating Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and one day coming back to power.</p></blockquote>
<p>Whether invoking conspiracy theories or advocating “moderate Islamism” as a solution to the region’s ills, these scholars do little to instill confidence in America’s Middle East studies establishment. Time and time again the field is proven wrong, making it an unreliable guide for students, government, business, the media, and the wider public. When next the “experts” purport to explain events in the Middle East, be afraid, be very afraid.</p>
<p><i>Cinnamon Stillwell is 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><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>Irish Teachers Union Calls for Academic Boycott of Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/richard-l-cravatts/irish-teachers-union-calls-for-academic-boycott-of-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=irish-teachers-union-calls-for-academic-boycott-of-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Apr 2013 04:20:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boycott Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Irish Teacher's Union]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jew-Hate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[professors]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=186296</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A tale of moral incoherence.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Boycott-Israel.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-186322" alt="Boycott Israel" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Boycott-Israel.jpg" width="275" height="275" /></a>In what has nearly become a perverse, recurring rite of spring, and yet more evidence that universities have become, as Abigail Thernstrom has described them, “islands of repression in a sea of freedom,” the Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI), which represents some 14,500 members, voted in early April “to cease all cultural and academic collaboration with Israel, including the exchange of scientists, students and academic personalities, as well as cooperation in research programmes [sic].”</p>
<p>Why employ academic boycotts against Israeli academic institutions? Because, its union members say, the union should “step up its campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against the apartheid state of Israel until it lifts its illegal siege of Gaza and its illegal occupation of the West Bank, and agrees to abide by International law and all UN Resolutions against it.”</p>
<p>But facts and history are not the concern of the morally-elevated, self-righteous professoriate. Based on this politically-charged, biased language, the boycotters expose that they have, with the breathtaking certainty that only the very sanctimonious and intellectually elite can do, framed the 65 year-old Israeli/Palestinian conflict in such a way that they have determined precisely which side is worthy of opprobrium and which, by virtue of its perennial victimhood, is worthy of complete moral support.</p>
<p>Then, in a disingenuous moral inversion in which academics are forced to assume personal responsibility for a state’s politics and diplomacy, all Israeli scholars are made culpable for the perceived sins of the Jewish state. “BDS is a noble non-violent method of resisting Israeli militarism, occupation and apartheid, and there is no question that Israel is implementing apartheid policies against the Palestinians,” said Jim Roche, a lecturer in the DIT School of Architecture and member of the TUI Dublin Colleges Union branch who proposed the boycott motion. “Indeed, many veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa have said that it’s worse than what was experienced there.”</p>
<p>Reciting this list of Israel’s continuing human rights abuses against the long-suffering Palestinians is, of course, a favorite pastime of the academic Left, in the U.S., Britain, and Ireland (not to mention, ironically, inside of Israel’s own universities), so it is no surprise that the litany of Marxist-tainted protests against the victim group of the moment show themselves here as justification for the shunning of Israel scholars from campuses worldwide. The problem, however, is that this view of Israel is the result of a long campaign of historical distortion, outright lies, and propaganda on the part of the Arab world and their apologists and fellow travelers in the West.</p>
<p>That academics so carelessly throw about politically-loaded, and inaccurate, terms when discussing Israel and sanctifying the Palestinians, words like “apartheid,” “occupation,” and “militarism,” indicates exactly why a boycott that seeks to make absolute moral judgments is bound to be perilous—especially for academics who give the pretense of standing for values of academic freedom, scholarly inquiry, a respect for history and law, and open debate over a complex geopolitical problem.</p>
<p>A boycott barring all Israeli academics from participating in Irish academic endeavors is also defective because it necessarily must assume that <i>all</i> Israeli scholars—regardless of their political orientation and social values—are painted with the same moral brush and deserve to be condemned and excluded merely because of the perceived political sins of the nation in which they live.</p>
<p>Critics of the called-for boycott, and there are many who have voiced immediate and thunderous opposition, both of the current Irish version and also of similar academic boycotts in Britain, wondered aloud why, of all countries on earth—countries where actual and chronic repression, genocide, occupation, militarism, and subjugation do exist—was Israel being singled out for the academics’ disdain. Many, of course, ascribe the obsession with Israeli faults as being symptomatic, and an outgrowth of, a more serious concern:  Europe’s long sickness of anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>Assuming that the Irish union is actually innocent of this pernicious hatred, and that their sanctimonious effort to right the perceived wrongs done to the Palestinians is, though misconceived, sincere, what is the just cause or set of values they purport to defend with their boycott? If they take the outrageous first step of denying Israeli academics any discourse at all in what is usually called “the academic marketplace of ideas,” of banishing them from the world of dialogue, research, and learning, have not they already struck a fatal blow to the core guiding principle of the academy? Since when has it been the responsibility of the university to control the actions of the state, or for its members to share culpability for the political decisions of a nation?</p>
<p>And if the union members in fact feel that academics shape and influence national policy and political behavior, their choice of the Palestinians, with their legacy of homicidal aggression against Israel, seems a bit troublesome. What should not be lost on observers is that in the Union’s decision to condemn and boycott Israeli academics, they therefore affirm the perceived ideological superiority of the Palestinian side of the moral equation. They have embraced ‘Palestinianism’ completely as their choice of a cause to defend—with the genocidal terrorism, rabid anti-Semitism, political truculence, internecine violence, and general despair that has defined the Palestinian cause since it was minted in the 1960s as a political tool against Israel.</p>
<p>Roche himself openly declared his allegiance to the Palestinian cause, confirming, if there was any doubt, that “The unanimous passage of this motion that shows that the Palestinian struggle for freedom, of which academic freedom is a key part, resonates with TUI members and sends a strong message of solidarity to their counterparts in Palestine.” That message of solidarity sounds very benign, and possibly helps Mr. Roche and his fellow union members feel good about themselves, but their academic “counterparts in Palestine,” as he calls them, have continued to practice the perverse indoctrination and teaching of terror in their “struggle for freedom.” When Hamas formed its cabinet after being voted into office, for example, 13 of its ministers had been teachers at either at the Islamic University in Gaza or at the Al-Najah National University in Nablus.</p>
<p>In fact, says Matthew Levitt,  director of The Washington Institute&#8217;s Stein Program on Terrorism, Intelligence, and Policy, with some 11,000 students, Al-Najah is the largest university in the territories and “the terrorist recruitment, indoctrination and radicalization of students for which al-Najah is known typically take place via various student groups,” among them the Hamas-affiliated Islamic Bloc. “Of the thirteen members of Al-Najah&#8217;s 2004 student council, eight,” he says—“including the chairperson—belong to Hamas&#8217;s Islamic Bloc.”</p>
<p>Perhaps TUI members have forgotten that sometimes Palestinian students take their ideological lead from college administrators who are not hesitant to make their political feelings known. In fact, Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al-Quds University, took the opportunity during a 2002 appearance on Al-Jazeera to congratulate the mother of a suicide bomber with whom he appeared by rhapsodizing, &#8220;When I hear the words of Umm Nidal, I recall the verse [from the Koran] stating that &#8216;Paradise lies under the feet of mothers.&#8217; All respect is due to this mother; it is due to every Palestinian mother and every female Palestinian who is a Jihad fighter on this land.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Irish boycotters may be frustrated that Israeli academics have not been influenced by their own government’s oppressive actions, but the same cannot be said of students at Bir Zeit University, when they actively participated in student government activities. “During student elections at Bir Zeit University in 2003,” Leavitt recounts, “Hamas candidates reenacted suicide bombings by blowing up models of Israeli buses. In one Bir Zeit campus debate, a Hamas candidate taunted his Fatah challenger by boasting, ‘Hamas activists in this University killed 135 Zionists. How many did Fatah activists from Bir Zeit kill?’”</p>
<p>But even the tranquility of the university setting, where this ideological stew can normally boil unmolested, was shattered with the 2007 internecine violence in Gaza between factions of Hamas and Fatah. Though the Irish lecturers excoriated Israel because, as one of their complaints went, it causes “disruption under checkpoint, closure and curfew regimes, and arrests, [and] beatings and killing of both students and teachers,” the “sanctity” of the Palestinian college setting was forgotten in 2007 when PA forces, believing it was being used as a staging area for Hamas rocket launches, stormed the 17,000-student Islamic University in Gaza, setting the entire campus ablaze, destroying books in its library , and gutting offices, classrooms, and the student center. Apparently the concept of academic freedom had to be revoked here, since virtually every leading figure of Hamas has taught or studied at Islamic University.</p>
<div>
<p>The notion that universities ought to facilitate a range of opinions and ways of thinking about complex issues should be at the core of academic freedom and a university’s overall mission.  It requires, though, that campuses allow many different views and perspectives, and do not try to exclude unpopular thought from being heard in the proverbial marketplace of ideas. Concern for the long-suffering Palestinians may be a commendable effort, but the isolation and demonization of Israeli scholars as a tool for seeking social justice for that one group “represents a profound betrayal of the cardinal principle of intellectual endeavour,” observes commentator Melanie Phillips, “which is freedom of speech and debate,” something universities should never stop diligently defending.</p>
<p>In fact, Phillips, in speaking about a similar boycott initiated in 2006 by the British teacher’s union, lamented how, in that instance, British academics, with a long tradition of learning, had incredulously shamed that legacy and that their action, as she put it, “represents a profound betrayal of the cardinal principle of intellectual endeavour, which is freedom of speech and debate.” The act of condemning Israel’s universities, of excluding them from the fellowship of the international academic community, was, Phillips thought, a disgraceful calumny that contradicted all those values that the university should, and usually does, hold dear. Instead, the boycotters have begun to behave in a repressive, unethical, and morally-questionable way.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>“Censorship, suppression of ideas and intellectual intimidation are associated with totalitarian regimes,” Phillips said, “which attempt to coerce people into the approved way of thinking.”  As Hamas shuts downs internet cafes, promotes genocidal incitement against Jews, murders its political foes, and begins introducing Islamic law in Gaza, one wonders if the Irish Union, in their misguided quest to make academic inquiry and unfettered learning flourish in the Levant, perhaps has chosen the wrong horse to ride.</p>
</div>
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		<title>Profs. on Mideast Turmoil: Blame America, Israel, and Free Speech</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/cinnamon-stillwell/profs-on-mideast-turmoil-blame-america-israel-and-free-speech/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=profs-on-mideast-turmoil-blame-america-israel-and-free-speech</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Oct 2012 04:38:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[blasphemy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Joe Wilson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Esposito]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=146872</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Free speech? Not according to these professors.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/John-Esposito.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-146982" title="John Esposito" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/John-Esposito.jpg" alt="" width="420" height="280" /></a>In the wake of the al-Qaeda attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11, 2012, the seizure of the American embassy in Cairo, Egypt, and the ensuing anti-American protests and riots throughout the Middle East—the latter ostensibly over an anti-Islam YouTube <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAiOEV0v2RM">film trailer</a> that originated in the U.S. months earlier—what do Middle East scholars have to say about the turmoil in the region?</p>
<p>As self-styled supporters of “academic freedom,” are they rushing to defend First Amendment rights instead of kowtowing to Muslim religious sensibilities? Are they denouncing the prospect of self-censorship rather than pushing YouTube to pull the “offending” video by claiming that it constitutes “hate speech?” Are they standing up for religious freedom instead of encouraging Americans to adhere to Sharia law-driven prohibitions on blasphemy? Are they putting aside their anti-Western biases and laying blame where it belongs instead of on America and Israel?</p>
<p>If the following quotes from Middle East studies academics are any indication, the answer to all those questions would be a resounding <em>No!</em></p>
<p>Let’s take a look at what these “experts” have to say.</p>
<p><strong>On First Amendment rights:</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/6417/rage_or_courage%3A_youtube_terrorism_take_two">Bruce Lawrence</a>, professor emeritus of religion and member of the Islamic Studies Center’s advisory board, Duke University:</p>
<blockquote><p>But what about hate speech? Is hate speech not a category that impinges on, and limits, the practice of free speech?</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.religionnews.com/blogs/omid-safi/12-essential-points-about-the-offensive-film-on-the-prophet-muhammad-and-th">Omid Safi</a>, professor of Islamic studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:</p>
<blockquote><p>In reality, pieces like the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ [sic] so-called film are best classified as ‘hate speech,’ as they seem to be of the same genre as anti-Semitic films of the 1930’s or <em>Birth of the</em> [sic] <em>Nation</em> KKK movies.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://gulfnews.com/opinions/columnists/an-appeal-to-contemporary-muslim-conscience-1.1077670">Tariq Ramadan</a>, professor of contemporary Islamic studies, Oxford University:</p>
<blockquote><p>[B]ehind the celebration of freedom of speech hides the arrogance of ideologists and well-fed racists who feed off the multiform humiliation of Muslims and to demonstrate the clear ‘superiority’ of their civilisation or the validity of their resistance to the ‘cancer’ of retrograde Islam.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://blog.georgetownvoice.com/2012/09/25/professors-discuss-effects-of-anti-islam-video-the-innocence-of-muslims/">John Brown</a>, adjunct professor of liberal studies, Georgetown University:</p>
<blockquote><p>Every culture or group of cultures has its own red lines. They might be legal red lines, but they are cultural red lines. There are taboos there are things people cannot say in public. In my experience, you just don’t speak badly of the Prophet Muhammad. It just does not happen.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.npr.org/2012/09/13/161082308/understanding-muslim-anger-over-insulting-film">John Esposito</a>, director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University:</p>
<blockquote><p>Indeed, it’s important to remember that, for Muslims, Mohammed is the ideal Muslim, as it was. He’s the living Quran. You know, he’s the model, you know. And so to go after him, OK, is to be the ultimate form, you know, the ultimate form of disrespect. It would be the ultimate blasphemy. . . . I think there’s a recognition of the freedom of speech, but you know, you still get into freedom of speech and then what are the consequences of it? . . . And so what you really have is a situation where this belongs to the genre of Islam-aphobia, which is just like [sic] anti-Semitic.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2012/09/to-american-politicians-do-you-think.html">As&#8217;ad AbuKhalil</a>, professor of political science, California State University, Stanislaus:</p>
<blockquote><p>U.S. officials have been really insulting my intelligence all week with talk of the ‘freedom of speech’ that we have here in the U.S. that Muslims don’t understand. . . . They understand that the U.S. government has made it illegal for anyone to express support for Hamas and Hizbullah in the U.S.  Muslim[s] do understand that the U.S. has banned TV channels [Hezbollah’s Al-Manar and Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV] from the U.S. because they deemed them offensive to Israel. . . . We remember that the Bush administration asked all U.S. news media after Sept. 11 to refrain from airing any Bin Laden tapes.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/12/reaction-to-anti-islam-film-fuels-debate-on-free-speech-versus-hate-speech/">Omid Safi</a>, professor of Islamic studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:</p>
<blockquote><p>Freedom of speech falls alongside other freedoms to live and be free from bombs falling on people’s heads and to be free from occupations . . . I will take free speech comments seriously when others take people’s freedom of life and dignity and to be free from occupation just as seriously.</p></blockquote>
<p><strong>On why YouTube should pull the video, “Innocence of Muslims”: </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.kqed.org/news/story/2012/09/14/107715/youtubes_video_decision_sparks_controversy?category=bay+area">Hatem Bazian</a>, Near Eastern studies senior lecturer, University of California, Berkeley:</p>
<blockquote><p>Take the ethical high ground and say, ‘yes, I understand that I have the legal right to do it. But ethically, I need to actually say no to it, because it does not represent the best of our values.’ I would say even to put it in the recycling bin would be an insult to the recycling bin.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://blog.georgetownvoice.com/2012/09/25/professors-discuss-effects-of-anti-islam-video-the-innocence-of-muslims/#more-41208">John Brown</a>, adjunct professor of liberal studies, Georgetown University:</p>
<blockquote><p>This movie reached new depths . . . I find it difficult that the most insulting thing ever made about the Prophet Muhammad in the history of Western civilization, as far as I know, doesn’t violate usage [Youtube usage] policy.<br />
<strong></strong></p></blockquote>
<p><strong>On blaming America, and Israel, and the West:<br />
</strong><br />
<a href="http://www.eurasiareview.com/19092012-embassy-protests-and-middle-east-unrest-in-context-oped/">Stephen Zunes</a>, professor of politics and international studies and director of the Middle East studies program, University of San Francisco:</p>
<blockquote><p>It is extremely unlikely that such vitriolic anti-American protests would have taken place were it not for decades of U.S. support, during both Republican and Democratic administrations, of allied dictatorships and the Israeli occupation, not to mention the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the ongoing military strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/201291510539957566.html">John Esposito</a>, director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University:</p>
<blockquote><p>The terrorist attack on the US consulate in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three embassy staff, and the Cairo riots seem similar but share in common the incitement and exploitation of popular outrage among many Muslims, as we have witnessed during the Salman Rushdie and Danish cartoons affairs. They exploit deep seated popular anti-American sentiment, based on decades of resentment over US and European foreign policies in the Middle East.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.juancole.com/2012/09/muslims-are-no-different-or-why-bill-mahers-blood-libel-is-bigotry.html">Juan Cole</a>, Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History, University of Michigan:</p>
<blockquote><p>The touchiness of Muslims about assaults on the Prophet Muhammad is in part rooted in centuries of Western colonialism and neo-colonialism during which their religion was routinely denounced as barbaric by the people ruling and lording it over them.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/201291391347458863.html">Mark LeVine</a>, professor of history, University of California, Irvine:</p>
<blockquote><p>Muslims in Egypt, Libya and around the world equally look at American actions, from sanctions against and then an invasion of Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and sent the country back to the Stone Age, to unflinching support for Israel and all the Arab authoritarian regimes (secular and royal alike) and drone strikes that always seem to kill unintended civilians ‘by mistake,’ and wonder with equal bewilderment how ‘we’ can be so barbaric and uncivilized.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/201292063638169981.html">Hamid Dabashi</a>, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University:</p>
<blockquote><p>Sam Bacile [the pseudonym for the alleged filmmaker, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula] is integral to a pattern, an Islamophobic streak of racism that runs deep into American culture.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.juancole.com/2012/09/why-they-hate-us-romney-secretly-plots-to-screw-palestinians-over-again.html">Juan Cole</a>, Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History, University of Michigan:</p>
<blockquote><p>From the 9/11 attacks to the embassy burnings of this past week, the U.S. pays the price for supporting the subjection of the Palestinians in widespread hatred for it from the Muslim world.</p></blockquote>
<p><strong>On downplaying the violent reaction of the Muslim world: </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/09/muslim-world.html">Dalia Mogahed</a>, Executive Director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, co-author, with Georgetown University’s John Esposito, of <em>Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think, </em>and nonresident senior public policy scholar at the American University of Beirut:</p>
<blockquote><p>So I think it would just be too much of a generalization to say Muslims react violently when they’re offended, whereas everyone else reacts peacefully. I think that riots and protests turn violent all over the world.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.npr.org/2012/09/21/161545499/a-look-at-islam-and-free-speech">Also</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>The other thing to keep in mind is that, sometimes, when there are offensive materials here in this country, people do protest against them and I think that that’s also part of freedom of speech that we have to look at and respect.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.juancole.com/2012/09/muslims-are-no-different-or-why-bill-mahers-blood-libel-is-bigotry.html">Juan Cole</a>, Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History, University of Michigan:</p>
<blockquote><p>[D]efending the Prophet and defending the post-colonial nation are for the most part indistinguishable, and being touchy over slights to national identity (and yes, Muslimness is a kind of national identity in today’s world) is hardly confined to Muslims.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/6417/rage_or_courage%3A_youtube_terrorism_take_two">Bruce Lawrence</a>, emeritus professor of religion and member of the Islamic Studies Center’s advisory board, Duke University:</p>
<blockquote><p>Should Muslim sensitivities be viewed any differently from their Jewish or Christian counterparts? Muslims do monitor their prophet. His legacy has been challenged within Islam at many levels, but his basic character has not been besmirched with the degree of ill will, bordering on savagery, that has been seen in the past 12 years.</p></blockquote>
<p>Whether it be John Esposito <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/11697">toeing the line</a> of his Wahhabi funders; Omid Safi <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/11861">engaging in</a> irresponsible, inflammatory rhetoric; Stephen Zunes <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/12069">blaming</a> the U.S. and Israel for all that’s wrong with the world; Dalia Mogahed <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/8558">whitewashing</a> Islamism; As&#8217;ad AbuKhalil <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/11925">justifying</a> violence; Mark LeVine <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/8536">exhibiting</a> contempt for America; or Juan Cole displaying the same disregard for the First Amendment he showed when <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/2524">he called</a> for the U.S. government to shut down Fox News these are the ideologues to whom the Western media turns for insight into the Middle East. Anyone hoping to understand the turmoil in the region as the consequences of the “Arab Spring” continue to unfold should look elsewhere.</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>Jihadist Junket</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/jihadist-junket/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jihadist-junket</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/jihadist-junket/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 24 Apr 2012 04:45:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[occupy wall street]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[OWS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[professors]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tehran]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=129696</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The disturbing rhetoric and radical associations of the pro-Occupy Wall Street professors who sojourned to Tehran. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Heather-Gautney-OWS-Tehran.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-129729" title="Heather-Gautney-OWS-Tehran" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Heather-Gautney-OWS-Tehran.gif" alt="" width="375" height="249" /></a>Three New York City sociology professors traveled all the way to Tehran earlier this year to badmouth their country in front of America’s Islamofascist enemies, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) <a href="http://www.memri.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/108/0/3339.htm">reports</a>.</p>
<p>All three are leftists who support the increasingly violent, anti-American, anti-Semitic Occupy Wall Street movement. The Iranian leadership and left-wing groups in the U.S. such as the terrorist-linked Code Pink also support the movement as a way of weakening America.</p>
<p>The teachers’ jihadist junket aimed ostensibly at teaching Iranians about the movement provides “living proof that although Communism for the most part is dead, useful idiots of tyrannies that do still hold power and endanger all of us still exist,” Ron Radosh <a href="http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2012/04/21/three-american-professors-useful-idiots-of-the-regime-in-tehran/?singlepage=true">writes</a>.</p>
<p>The three academics participated in the Tehran University Occupy Wall Street seminar in February. In so doing these overeducated dupes gave aid and comfort to brutal fundamentalists who call America and its ally Israel the “Great Satan” and the “Little Satan.”</p>
<p>As the country Islamists call the “Zionist Entity” contemplates attacking Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons, these New Yorkers’ activism could foreshadow the rise of a pro-Iran movement stateside. After all, a pro-Saddam Hussein movement cropped up on the Left a decade ago as the U.S. government pondered the invasion of Iraq.</p>
<p>The trio consisted of Heather D. Gautney of Fordham University, Alex S. Vitale of Brooklyn College (City University of New York), and John L. Hammond of Hunter College (CUNY). They appear in a news report from Press TV, a propaganda arm of the Islamic Republic.</p>
<p>Although Vitale and Hammond, a contributor to Marxist periodical <em>Monthly Review</em>, said little of substance in the video itself, the hijab-clad Gautney said the Occupy movement would agitate stateside this election cycle and push politicians to grow government.</p>
<p>“We have elections coming up in November and I think that the movement is going to be incredibly active in pressuring politicians to start addressing issues of social inequality,” said the self-described “Occupy Wall Street activist.”</p>
<p>The media-savvy Gautney has been adept at getting exposure for her views.</p>
<p>In an impressive feat of self-deception, Gautney <a href="http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/15/an-occupier-in-tehran/">wrote</a> at CNN’s website that “Occupy may be anti-corporate, but it is unambiguously pro-American.”</p>
<p>Gautney, whose absurd pronouncement suggests she has never graced an Occupy demonstration with her actual presence, claimed that the Marxist worldview promoted by the movement is somehow catching on in Iran.</p>
<p>“The discourse [in Iran] seems to be veering from ‘Down with America!’ to ‘Down with the 1 Percent!’” Gautney <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/03/01/us-professors-travel-to-iran-to-discuss-occupy-wall-street-movement/#ixzz1speI6gHG">told</a> Fox News on her return to the United States. “In my view,” the naïve left-winger explained, “this is quite a welcome development, and speaks to Iranians’ affection for Americans despite all the political conflict.”</p>
<p>The starry-eyed fellow traveler also reminisced about a visit with Zahra Mostafavi, daughter of the first Supreme Leader of Iran, the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Gautney romanticized the Iranian revolution, writing about the photographs detailing “dramatic scenes” from Khomeini’s life that she saw in Mostafavi’s house.</p>
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		<title>Hard Indoctrination, Soft Indoctrination, and the Books that Change Us</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-swindle/hard-indoctrination-soft-indoctrination-and-the-books-that-change-us/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hard-indoctrination-soft-indoctrination-and-the-books-that-change-us</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-swindle/hard-indoctrination-soft-indoctrination-and-the-books-that-change-us/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Mar 2010 04:11:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Swindle]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Antonio Gramsci]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ball state university]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[classroom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[communist propagandist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Howard Zinn]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Indoctrination]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[indoctrination u]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[outrageous cases]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[page thesis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[professor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[professors]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[radical professor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[undergraduate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[undergraduate political science]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[united-states]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[University]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[vantage point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[View]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[World]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=56351</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Indoctrination is not just about a radical professor abusing the classroom. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/bellhooks1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-56387" title="bellhooks" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/bellhooks1.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="328" /></a></p>
<p>There  are few problems as misrepresented or misunderstood as that of indoctrination  in American schools. I went through my own schooling as a &#8220;progressive&#8221;  undergraduate and wrote a 90-page thesis on indoctrination blasting David  Horowitz for his claims about professorial practices at my alma mater,  Ball State University (BSU.) I am writing about it now, after having  had second thoughts and joining the Freedom Center’s Academic Freedom  Campaign.</p>
<p>Looking  back at my own education from the vantage point of four post-graduate  years in the university of the Real  World, I must re-ask myself: Did I experience indoctrination as an undergraduate  political science and English double-major at BSU?  Once, my answer  would have been an adamant &#8220;No.&#8221; My professors were professional.  None subordinated their teaching to their politics or attempted in a  blatant fashion to impose their prejudices on their students. Many went  out of their way to argue contrary views and even preface their remarks  with,&#8221;Now understand that just because I argue a point it does  not mean I believe it.&#8221; I was never assigned <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=939" target="_blank">neo-communist propagandist</a> <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=939" target="_blank">Howard Zinn&#8217;s</a> obscene <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060838655?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0060838655" target="_blank"><em>A People&#8217;s History of the United States</em></a> or instructed to study it as though it were the Bible.</p>
<p>And it&#8217;s partially because  of this that when I first met Horowitz I took such issue with what I  regarded as a wild caricature of what had been my college experience.</p>
<p>My answer now is different,  though. Because after debating the question of what constitutes indoctrination  for years, it&#8217;s clear that &#8220;indoctrination&#8221;does not just include  the extreme examples that Horowitz frequently used in <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/donate.html?key=WOWRPR5ZNKR8" target="_blank"><em>The Professors,  Indoctrination U</em> and <em>One-Party Classroom</em></a>. (Horowitz&#8217;s reason  for emphasizing these outrageous cases is not because he ignores the  more general problem but because if one cannot grasp the harsh as detestable  then the subtle will be all but invisible.) Indoctrination is not just  about a radical professor consciously setting out to use (and abuse)  the classroom as a platform for changing the world.</p>
<p>There are two kinds of indoctrination  students, parents, and everyone concerned with high education should  consider, which I will call “hard” and “soft.”</p>
<p>In <em>One-Party Classroom</em> Horowitz defines &#8220;indoctrination&#8221; in this fashion:  &#8220;Indoctrination  takes place when professors teach a point of view that is contested  within the spectrum of scholarly or intellectually responsible opinion  as though it were scientific fact.” He then admonishes:  “Professors  should make their students aware that such opinions are contested, and  must not teach their point of view as though it were fact. Students  should be provided with materials that would allow  them to draw their own conclusions about contested positions.&#8221;</p>
<p>This is a definition I embrace  and would have accepted if it had been put in front of me when I was  an undergraduate. (Unfortunately, Horowitz was presented by people I  trusted then as a <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=130&amp;type=issue" target="_blank">McCarthyite</a> trying to control academic thought. Nothing  could be further from the truth.) Now lets refine it to understand the  differences in varieties of indoctrination.</p>
<p>In cases of hard indoctrination  the professor himself is a willing abuser of the academic classroom  and traducer of students’ academic freedom. He sets out to indoctrinate  students and to recruit them to his political cause. He takes a page  from Italian Stalinist Antonio Gramsci&#8217;s playbook and sees the university  as a “means of cultural production” that must be captured for the  revolutionary agenda. He decides that he will utilize his classroom  as a political tool. The purpose of his teaching is not to promote an  academic inquiry and inculcate an intellectual curiosity and scholarly  skepticism. His goal is to to fix the world by instilling a &#8220;progressive&#8221;  sensibility and perspective in his captive student audience.  Hard  indoctrination is an entirely conscious choice. It is indoctrination  by malice.</p>
<p>By contrast, in cases of soft  indoctrination the fault is one of omission and the academic culture  itself is the main instigator of the trend, the very absence of conservatives  on university faculties is a dramatic symptom of the problem. Professors  who practice soft indoctrination do so largely unconsciously and would  never think of forcing their students to make their political views match their own. The professor&#8217;s fault is to weight his course with leftist or “liberal”  texts and either fail to give adequate time to conservative views or  treat them with a comparable respect as a legitimate point of view with  which he may not agree. Horowitz has discussed the case of one such  professor in a recent article, &#8220;<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2010/03/02/indoctrination-in-american-colleges/" target="_blank">How Bad is the Indoctrination in our Colleges?</a>&#8221; This professor discussed the liberal  Warren Court’s transformative decisions without adequately presenting  the conservative and libertarian objections. By and large this is indoctrination  by ignorance and misdirection.</p>
<p>Looking back at my own education,  the syndrome that Horowitz discusses in this article is entirely common.  Yesterday I pulled one of my English major textbooks off my bookshelf  &#8212; <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312201567?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0312201567" target="_blank">Falling IntoTheory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature</a></em> by David H. Richter &#8212; and flipped through the table of contents. I noticed  several names stood out with fading yellow highlighter behind them:  Helen Vendler, Gerald Graff, Terry Eagleton, Paulo Freire, <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2217" target="_blank">bell hooks</a>,  Gertrude Himmelfarb, Janice Radway, Alan Purves. In other words: mostly  Marxists and neo-Marxist radicals. Himmelfarb, a well-known neoconservative,  is the single exception.</p>
<p>Did my professor consciously  victimize me and my classmates by assigning us this series of texts?  I don’t think so. But that does not mean he could not have provided  a much better educational experience if he had not been burdened by  the pieties of the Left and its dominance of his discipline. Is bell  hooks with her mantras about America’s alleged white supremacist capitalist  patriarchy really a vital voice for undergraduate English majors to  be exposed to in order to learn how to analyze texts? Is she really  consequential? Or is she actually there because she’s a black woman  expressing chic, leftist dogmas?</p>
<p>In assigning this book and  these readings my professor was pretty accurately introducing me to  the culture of literary studies at the collegiate level. This is what  he had to work with. Gramsci  has triumphed: Marxism has thoroughly  embedded itself within the discipline, as it has virtually all of the  liberal arts in Academia. Thus, a soft indoctrination is an inevitability.  One cannot prepare to become a professor of English without reading  a lot of Marxist texts. That&#8217;s what the field has been transformed into  over the course of the last 40 years.</p>
<p>So what&#8217;s to be done about  it?</p>
<p>Dealing with soft indoctrination  is in many ways easier than the hard variety. And here&#8217;s why: in the  university the student has tremendous freedom in shaping his education.  In the writing of papers and the selection of texts to read the student  is able to introduce authors of his own choosing into the discussion.  Professors who fall into the soft indoctrination category might not  bring conservative texts into the discussion on their own but given  their commitment to scholarly inquiry most are unlikely to aggressively  oppose them as a hard indoctrinating instructor might.</p>
<p>In fact under the canonical  documents of academic freedom, professors are obligated to require   texts presenting “divergent opionions” that challenge the classroom  orthodoxy. Here’s what  the 1915 <a href="http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/policydocs/contents/1915.htm" target="_blank">Declaration of Principles on  Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure</a> &#8212; the most important statement of  academic freedom principles &#8212; has to say on the subject:</p>
<p>“The university teacher,  in giving instruction upon controversial matters, while he is under  no obligation to hide his own opinion under a mountain of equivocal  verbiage, should, if he is fit for his position, be a person of a fair  and judicial mind; he should, in dealing with such subjects, set forth  justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other  investigators; he should cause his students to become familiar with  the best published expressions of the great historic types of doctrine  upon the questions at issue; and he should, above all, remember that  his business is not to provide his students with ready-made conclusions,  but to train them to think for themselves, and to provide them access  to those materials which they need if they are to think intelligently.”</p>
<p>So my advice to students: if  the reading list is one-sided or excludes views that dissent from the  leftwing orthodoxy bring this statement to the attention of your professor  and ask him to introduce intellectual diversity into his curriculum.  If he refuses, take it upon yourselves to widen the range of the classroom  debate.</p>
<p>This is the first step in  what will be a generational struggle to restore educational values to  the academic curriculum. If students can open the curriculum to diverse  views now they will do it when they&#8217;re the professors and administrators  decades hence. The goal is not to make the liberal arts conservative,  but to make them truly liberal, again &#8212; apolitical, skeptical,  and non-ideological. This is a task that may take a long time, but in  the process of attempting it you may just get yourself a quality education.</p>
<p>Tomorrow, in Part 2 of this article, I will discuss my transformation from a college leftist to a postmodern conservative working for the Freedom Center. I will also provide a summary of  the books that were instrumental in driving this change that has so baffled my friends, family, and former professors. Hopefully some of these texts might prove useful suggestions for conservative students looking to brighten the debate in classrooms darkened by the shadow of soft indoctrination.</p>
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		<title>Academics Get Reality Check</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/sara-dogan/academics-get-reality-check/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=academics-get-reality-check</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/sara-dogan/academics-get-reality-check/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:25:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sara Dogan]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Student Center]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[colleges and universities]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[professors]]></category>

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<p>There is such a disconnect between what colleges and universities offer and what students need that even professors are starting to notice.</p>
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>There is such a disconnect between what colleges and universities offer and what students need that even professors are starting to notice.</p>
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		<title>Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/sara-dogan/professor-is-a-label-that-leans-to-the-left/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=professor-is-a-label-that-leans-to-the-left</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:32:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sara Dogan]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Student Center]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservatives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Liberals]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[professors]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[
<p>Instead of looking at why most professors are liberal, researchers should ask why so many liberals — and so few conservatives — want to be professors</p>
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				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Instead of looking at why most professors are liberal, researchers should ask why so many liberals — and so few conservatives — want to be professors</p>
]]></content:encoded>
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