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Below are the video and transcript of remarks given by an outstanding panel at the Freedom Center’s 2023 Restoration Weekend – held Oct. 26-29 at the Ritz Carlton in New Orleans.
Transcript:
Evelyn Markus
Thank you all for coming to listen to this timely panel about the rise of anti-Semitism and we thought it could never happen again. The Jews are slaughtered in the cruelest way: burned, raped, beaten up. And yet we saw it in Israel two weeks ago, and we thought that the resurging anti-Semitism in Europe would never come to America. And yet we saw in the past two weeks that it did come to America in some ways even worse than in Europe. Well, students in Europe yell: free free Palestine, and Israel: genocide and so on. American students carry signs with paragliding murderers, glorifying them as liberators. Also, we heard university professors in America express their joy about the atrocities committed by Hamas. And we saw Jewish students being humiliated, intimidated, threatened, attacked on America’s campuses. This is worse than what happens today in Europe.
I hear from my European friends—and for those who don’t know, I am originally from Europe, from Holland, and emigrated to the United States in 2006. I hear from my European friends that Jews there are starting to pull their children from public school and put them in Jewish schools instead and that some are removing their mezuzah, the little scrawl from their front door posts, to hide their Jewish. The one and only Jewish newspaper in Amsterdam is now delivered in a white envelope. This is worse than in America. Yet I just heard the home of a Jewish family was invaded around the corner of our house in Studio City, Los Angeles, and the home invader threatened the family yelling free Palestine and kill the Jews.
What was much better in America than in Europe? In the past two weeks was the support for Israel and the Jewish people, among others from the media, but also the military support and public opinion; the personal support and sympathy from our friends and colleagues. Even CNN was better than the media in Europe. Our Jewish friends and family in Europe envy us for it. I remember Europe was like that, with all the support in all areas. I remember Europe was quite like that during the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War. But that is all gone now. And it started with the universities.
By the time I went to college in Amsterdam in the late seventies, universities had become bulwarks of Marxism, infusing us with white guilt over our colonial past and filling us with rage about the last colonial regime still standing—Israel. Arafat was glorified as a freedom fighter in the nineties. Every journalist in Europe had gone through this kind of education and as a result, the European media turned anti-Israel and often used classic antisemitic accusations like a nation of child killers. After the media turned, the population turned. A poll in the Netherlands last week showed that only 25% of the Dutch population is backing Israel in the current war. Many agree that Israel should stop the child killing. If we don’t stop the anti-Israeli and the anti-Semitism in America’s universities now, the majority of Americans will turn anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-Semitic a generation from now.
I have the honor to fully discuss all this with our two distinguished panelists. I will first introduce the panelist that is new to this audience: Naya Lehkt was born in the former Soviet Union and came to the United States with her family in 1989. She holds a Ph.D. in Russian literature from UCLA. She has done research and spoke about Soviet literature and film. At Club Z, she directed the education of Zionism and Jewish pride for Jewish youth. Naya is a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global anti-Semitism, or ISGAP, where she is analyzing current anti-Semitism and is developing methods for teaching youth on anti-Semitism. In addition, Naya is the educator, editor for White Rose Magazine, a magazine about extremism and teaching classical liberalism. And she has a monthly column in the Jerusalem Post.
Our other panelist hardly needs to be introduced to this audience. Our Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is the author of 27 books, including: The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, The Critical Qur’an: Explained from Key Islamic Commentaries and Contemporary Historical Research; and The Sumter Gambit: How the Left Is Trying to Foment a Civil War. Robert has led seminars on Islam and jihad for the FBI, the United Central Command and other national security and counterterrorism departments of the United States government. Robert is also a senior fellow fellow with the Center for Security Policy. Naya and Robert, welcome and thank you for coming on this panel.
Naya, I’ll start with a question for you. So the glorification and joy at American universities about Hamas horrendous attack is so incomprehensible to us that many of the nation’s brightest students, professors and university leaders cannot see the inhumanity of what happens in Israel. And hail it as the beginning of a better world, allowing campuses to become unsafe for Jews as is so incomprehensible to us.
You have experience and expertise in educating young people about anti-Semitism. Can you give us some insight into the twisted minds of these students and their professors and university leaders? What are they thinking and where did this come from?
Naya Lehkt:
Okay. Can you all hear me? Thank you very much for having me today. I want to begin by tracing just the last week and a half to two weeks in the United States of America. In Tulane University here, Jewish students were harassed and accosted and an Israeli flag was burned. About a day ago. This is on social media. About a week and a half ago, a former student of mine who was a freshman at U.C. Berkeley called me in a panic. He was harassed and he was actually attacked. He was walking across campus wearing a kippah and an Israeli flag. And they came up to him and they started to tear the kippah and the Israeli flag away from him. He said to me, But Naya, you’d be very proud, I didn’t let go of the Israeli flag. At Cornel University, we have a professor, Russell Rickford, who said it was exhilarating, exhilarating, the brutalization of women and children. At Cooper Union College in New York students were barricaded; I mean, in the United States of America in 2023, Jewish students are barricaded in a library because they feel that unsafe. A Jewish student was beaten with a stick at Columbia University two weeks ago. I realize this isn’t a conference per se about anti-Semitism, but this I’m going to begin with: anti-Semitism is an alarm system. Where there is anti-semitism, there is a much bigger threat to civilization. Israel is fighting on the front lines for the rest of the world right now because this isn’t just about Israel.
This is about attacking freedom, Western civilization. So I just wanted to start with that. But I do want to answer your question. In order to answer your question, how is it that we have professors who are screaming: “it was exhilarating”. How is it that we have multiple departments, most of them in humanities, who sign on to the BDS campaign, who equate Israel with the Nazi state?
Robert Spencer is going to speak more about the Islamic influence. I’d like to speak about the Marxist influence; about the Soviet Union. Indeed, I was born in the former Soviet Union, but I arrived here when I was six years old, and much of the stories that I learned about what is anti-Zionism, I learned from my parents. And I want everyone here to understand American Jews are not the first, so to speak, victims of anti-Zionism. These were the Soviet Jews. We, they, my parents, that generation experienced it first. The Soviet Union is a very interesting empire, if you will, to study in this particular case. In 1948, Stalin voted yes in the U.N. partition for the state of Israel. And but we won’t go into the history. I don’t have too much time. But by 1967, there’s a ginormous shift in the Soviet Union in the sense that you have 1948 approval sanctioning of a Jewish state because Stalin thought this would be, you know, a small Soviet state, an outpost in the Middle East for the Soviet Union. But it didn’t go that way. And when Israel actually turned towards the West rather than towards the Soviet Union, the Soviets turned very much against Israel. We can argue here whether they were informed or shaped by antisemitism. But what they produced is an anti-Zionist campaign, a very, very well fabricated campaign language, such as “Zionism is racism”. This was not born in the university hallways of the United States of America. It was born in the Soviet Union. Equating Israel to an apartheid state, not born in America or Europe. It was born in the Soviet Union. So the Soviets created this amazing anti-Zionist machine, if you will, and with it they also shipped a certain narrative framework. I’ve been to a few talks to today and heard about this framework that is obsessed with power; that we look at the world through a lens of oppression and oppressed.
You can also thank the Soviet Union/Marxism for that framework. And if you are going to look at the world and judge state actors based on such framework, if you are an alien and descended in and looked at Israel, you would most likely think that Israel is the oppressor because Israel has power. I mean, if you know nothing, no context, Israel has an army. The Palestinian Arabs do not. Israel has sovereignty. They do not. Israel has a state. They do not, right? They’re the quintessential underdog. And so in such a framework, the underdog, because of Marxism, everything is about powers, power structures. That’s how you analyze the world. For Marxism, it was about class and class consciousness.
In United States of America, we are dealing with race consciousness and gender consciousness. But that’s for another day. But when it comes to Israel and when it comes to how is it that these professors all of a sudden find themselves calling Hamas exhilarating and butchering of women and children exhilarating? because our students are on the front lines and they’re hearing violence is justified when a people is occupied, right. So if if if you’re looking at that lens, you know, oppression leads to violence, That’s just not true. Look at the Jewish experience. I talk to my Jewish students all the time. The Jewish people were kicked out of the land of Israel 2000 plus years ago. Okay. You can say, I could with confidence, the Jewish history is a history of oppression.
Jews were oppressed in Eastern Europe. Jews were oppressed in Arab lands, living as dhimmis; they did not seek violence. They did not go rape, butcher, children, women, elderly. So this entire framework, the only way to really deal with the problem, it’s not the problem of anti-Semitism. The problem is the framework itself, which breeds and primes want to become anti-Semitic. So I just wanted to explain. So in terms of the Soviet Union, the Soviets in 1967 fabricated this really behemoth of a campaign against Israel and against Zionists. And so and they shipped it to the West. They shifted to the Arab world. We heard from Melanie Phillips earlier where she discussed how the Soviets basically gave the Palestinians their national Palestinian narrative.
And Yasser Arafat would be coming all the time to Moscow, to the KGB. And Mahmoud Abbas, who’s the Palestinian Authority leader, wrote his dissertation in Moscow State University, effectively denying the Holocaust. So what we have, we’re picking up the remnants of the Soviet system. My mother, who’s not a historian, but she’s a very wise woman, she says, you know, Naya, the Soviets may have lost the Cold War, but they won the ideological war. And I think she’s right. I think seeing what we’re seeing and on our campuses and it’s not even campuses anymore, it’s K through eight. It’s in high schools where if you look at the world through such a framework where oppression is just everything you do, if you’re oppressed, you’re therefore justified. And if you’re the oppressor or well, you’re inherently evil. That is why effectively I believe that they’ve lost their minds, they’ve lost their moral compass, they’ve lost their ability to see clearly because they’ve gotten into this narrative. And our job is not necessarily fighting the antisemitism. It’s fighting the narrative which breeds the anti-Semitism.
Evelyn Markus:
Thank you. How did they manage to reach almost all of the school system? All of the college system?
Naya Lehkt:
How did they manage? Yeah. Well, it’s a longer conversation about academia and what happened in 1960s in academia and why, for instance, the Frankfurt School from Germany came to dominate. There were the neo Marxists. It really comes back to Marxist ideology. So I studied literature, right? I studied Russian literature. And lo and behold, in my Russian literature classes, we did postcolonial analysis of Anna Karenina. I mean, why would we be doing postcolonial analysis of Anna Karenina. We’re at peace? So that’s Michelle Fuko, Right. So Michelle Fuko is a very important philosopher, a theoretician, lauded, lionized by academics because, you know, if I had to really answer you, I think humans, all humans seek purpose. And if you don’t have God, then you’re going to create a different worldview wherein you want justice. These are not evil people. They want to help the persecuted. They just have terrible remedies. But to understand how they won the hearts and minds. They have won the hearts and minds. And I want to just really briefly just give you a study. So the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values in 2022 conducted a study. And I just want to show you something very interesting. And you think what you may of these results. So for them, they compared Democrats, Republicans and radical progressives. So what do Democrats in America care about? What do Republicans and what do progressives. So the top five for Democrats are inflation, economy, climate change, COVID and crime. For Republicans, the top five is: inflation, immigration, border, economy, crime and national security.
And for the radical progressives, the top five are: universal health care, climate change, structural racism, economy, jobs, inflation. So and what the study actually found is a high correlation. People who hold radically progressive views end up being anti-Israel. I want to stress this, it’s very important I’m the work that I do. It’s not that these people are inherently or inherently come with an anti-Semitic bias, but looking at the world where you care about universal health care, climate change, structural racism, inflation, economy, and you apply the lens of power and powerlessness, you are going to end up being against the state of Israel.
So the battle is a deep battle. It’s a long battle. Anti-Semitism is just the alarm. It’s the alarm that something is rotten in Denmark.
Evelyn Marcus:
Thank you.
Robert, we often hear these narratives of oppression and victimhood of the Palestinians and their lack of self-determination as the cause of Hamas’s brutal attack and as the root of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. What do you think of that narrative?
Robert Spencer:
The whole idea of situating this conflict in the language of oppression is just as Naya was saying to justify any action against the oppressor. And this is actually the most impressive achievement of Soviet propaganda. Starting from the 1960s, the creation of the Palestine and people themselves who were never in existence before the 1960s. You can look at all the literature, all the contemporary newspapers, all the UN discussions, everything regarding the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. And you’re not going to find any mention of the Palestinians since they did not exist. There were Arabs who were indistinguishable linguistically, culturally, religiously, from the Arabs of Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. They were created by the KGB and Yasser Arafat in the 1960s, precisely to be oppressed. There are no Palestinian people, apart from the Marxist language of oppression that Naya was discussing.
The Palestinian people only exist in order to situate the jihad against Israel, which is based on Islamic principles within the Marxist framework of the struggle of an oppressed people against its oppressor. And thus that is the source of the coalition between the Left and Islam. The reason why negotiations have always failed is because of the maximalism of the Islamic imperative. That is, as I explained this morning, the Quran passage drive them out from where they drove you out. That does not admit of a half solution or a negotiated peace or anything other than the total eradication of the state of Israel. Now, how do you get leftists on board with that is say: these are an oppressed people who need to be liberated from their oppressor.
So the PLO started, the PFLP- the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. They were Marxist organizations that became progressively more Islamic as time went on. The PFLP is still essentially a marxist organization, but it’s a minority among the Islamic groups, among the Palestinian groups. The Islamic aspect of this actually came second, second to the Marxist part, but they were able to capitalize upon this aspect of Islamic doctrine that will not allow a non-Muslim state on territory that Islam was once or ever ruled.
And this creates this terrible alliance that has persisted all this time and that we see bearing this bitter fruit today with so many non Muslim, non Palestinian college students all over, as Naya said, thinking their cause is righteous when they engage in this brutal and bloody behavior toward justify it.
Evelyn Marcus:
Thank you. Now, this is a difficult topic for for many of us, but I think we have to ask the question to start to understand it and then hopefully resolve it. How come there are even Jewish students and professors and going along with the glorification of what Hamas did two weeks ago?
Naya Lehkt:
It’s very painful to talk about this and it’s shameful. And I am going to speak about the failure of Jewish education. If you ask these people that Robert Spencer just said who are fighting for a quote-unquote righteous cause. Do you do you not like Jews? Are you anti-Semitic? They would say absolutely not. And they mean it. Who do they dislike? Zionists. We don’t have a problem with Jews. We have a problem with Zionism.
But that’s not on them. That’s on us. That’s on us Jewish Americans that we haven’t educated our Jewish children to understand that to be a Jew is to be a Zionist. It’s one and the same. My mother told me again from the Soviet Union right before we immigrated, and of course she lost her job. One of the coworkers came to her and said, All along, you’ve been making this into a Zionist nest. You’ve been transforming this job, this workplace, into a Zionist nest. And of course the left is brilliant, brilliant with language. The Soviets were brilliant. They didn’t say Jewish nest, they said Zionist because they couldn’t be outwardly anti Semitic. So again, they played that really, really well, the anti-Zionism mask. And so, it’s a big failure, a big, huge failure on Jewish institutions and legacy organizations. We have again, I’m going to say that word again, failed to teach that Judaism is not just a religion, it’s an ethnicity. We are a people from a land of Israel, number one. Number two, I also think that it’s nothing new or radical that Jews are anti-Jewish.
This is not new in Jewish history. Again, my area is the Soviet Union. When the Soviets had just taken over from the red, from the whites— the white being the vanguard of the tsarists—they set up many unions in many different sections. One of them was the Jewish section of the Soviet police. Do you know what they did? what their whole entire raison d’etre was, their entire goal and aim. They had to go to the pale of settlements where Jews once lived and basically humiliate, cut off beards of fellow rabbis in order to say you have to become a Soviet, you have to jettison your Jewish backwardness or Jewish religion.
We could have been sitting and having this panel in 1919. How could there be Jews running around in the Soviet Union cutting off beards and desecrating holy texts, prayers. So, it’s not a new phenomenon—Jews who are against Jews. But the only way I can rationalize it, the only way I can understand it in terms of the American context is that America, in terms of the Jewish establishment in education, massively failed in teaching their children what it means to be a Jew, that if you are a Jew, you are a Zionist, they’re synonyms.
Evelyn Marcus:
Okay, Thank you.
Robert, since we talked about campuses and the hearts and minds of young people, can you give us a very brief overview of how the radical left and Islamism have come to dominate our campuses?
Robert Spencer:
Yes, certainly. But just one note on Naya’s observations there, and that is that there are many Jews, of course, who are leftists, as we all know. But leftism, because it’s inherently collectivist, is anti-Jewish. And this is why it always ends up in anti-Semitism. And you have Stalin was going to persecute the Jews right before he died, and Hitler, who was essentially a man of the left in his core principles, persecuted the Jews and so many others. This is because of the kind of thing that Naya mentioned about the Jews going to various places and saying, You have to cut your beards to their fellow Jews. The whole idea of the collective is uniformity and everybody is the same. And the Jews as the people who’ve had no home for 2000 years and were in every other culture, in every other civilization and never gave up their individuality, they are a standing rebuke to the core idea of the left. And so it’s a fundamental contradiction for Jews to be leftists, but I think they haven’t really thought leftism through well enough. In any case, the campus aspect of this proceeded along the lines of that same Marxism. Now, we could have a whole discussion about how the Marxists took over the universities, and that’s another story. But we know that they did.
And the long march through the institutions is well known and it was capitalized upon very cleverly by the forces of jihad and the Islamic action against Israel. One primary example of that is Students for Justice in Palestine, which is a very extensive group on 200 campuses around the country. It’s essentially a gang of thugs that menaces Jewish and pro-Israeli students on a regular basis if they do anything to publicly in support of the state of Israel.
The Students for Justice in Palestine was founded at University of California, Berkeley, in 2001 by a professor named Hatem Bazian, who is still there, and he’s a professor of Islamophobia, which is of course, a made up word that’s designed to intimidate people into thinking that there’s something wrong with resisting jihad violence and the oppression of women and others, that is justified in Sharia.
So. Hatem Bazian is a very interesting case. He is not only the founder of Students for Justice in Palestine, he’s a Palestinian Arab himself from Nablus. He is a migrant to the United States. And he very skillfully from an early age, began to spearhead the identification of the Palestinian jihad with the left’s core ideals. For example, he was at one point, while he was a student, the leader of a group called the National People of Color Student Coalition. Now, if you’ve ever seen a picture of Hatem Bazian, he’s a white guy and the Arabs have always been classified as white in the US census, and the whole idea that Arabs are people of color, I think the absurdity of this is well summed up by Hatem Bazian’s friend and colleague Linda Sarsour, who has faded from public view. But she was quite prominent a few years back. The hijab wearing far left activist, part of the women’s movement and so on. You can find a video still there on YouTube of Linda Sarsour saying that before she decided to wear hijab, she was just an ordinary white girl. And then you can also find Linda Sarsour in numerous contexts, saying she is a person of color or brown. So the very putting on the hijab changed her race and that’s a remarkable thing. But the whole idea is here again, to situate the jihad against Israel in the struggle of the oppressed people against the oppressor that the left is supposed to be all about and Hatem Bazian is a tremendous example of the success of this.
As a professor at one of the leading most far left universities in the country, a professor of a concept that the left made up in order to demean and silence its critics. And he has openly called over 20 years ago for intifada in the United States. And nobody seemed to care, of course, because people who believe the same way as he does are ensconced in all the positions of power that might have called him to account. And so now we are seeing, bearing the fruits of seeds that have been planted decades ago.
Evelyn Marcus:
And, Robert, it the founder of Students for Justice in Palestine, Hatem Bazian, affiliated with Hamas?
Robert Spencer:
Yes, he’s pretty much an open supporter of it, but he was when he was also a student, he was in the Muslim Students Association. And the Muslim Students Association is the primary Muslim Brotherhood organization in the United States that has been explicitly tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, even in the secular media, which ordinarily ignores all this altogether. It was a big exposé in the Chicago Tribune in 2004 where the Muslim Students Association was identified as the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief arm in the United States.
Now, in order to understand the significance of that, look at the Hamas charter. And in the Hamas charter, it says the Hamas organization, which by the way, as you know, probably is an acronym for Islamic resistance movement. The Islamic Resistance movement is the Muslim Brotherhood branch in Palestine. And the Muslim Brotherhood, according to a captured internal document that was discovered some years back, is dedicated in its own words, to eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands. That is the hands of the Westerners. They’re going to kill themselves by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it falls and Allah’s religion is victorious over other religions. That’s a quote from the Qur’an, which speaks about how the enemies of Allah began to defeat themselves by their own hands.
That is, they turned against each other and began to fight. And that is one of the core ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood, that they will sow division in the United States so that ultimately the United States will fall. And you can see it’s working great.
Evelyn Marcus:
I think it’s two hundreds branches? the Students for Justice in Palestine?
Robert Spencer:
That’s right.
Evelyn Marcus:
The Students for Justice in Palestine have in America, been organizing most of these on-campus intimidations of Jewish students and others. So we basically have 200 branches of the Muslim Brotherhood on American campuses. My question to both of you…How can we reverse the anti-semitic brainwashing of students in America now?
Naya Lehkt:
There are two schools of thought. One is change current institutions, and the second, build your own. I’m of the mindset that we’ve lost the institutions. We must build our own. What do I mean by that? I mean, if you are waiting until college, it’s too late. We have to start winning back the hearts and minds of our children. And that means classical education and I think Chris Rufo spoke of a curriculum that he is part of, where they’re trying to basically—and they’re working with the state of Florida of course—they’re working with someone who is as open to it. But the point is, is there are tons of classically educated children who are going to classical education schools. Most of them, of course, are Christian schools. I think there needs to be a burgeoning of Jewish schools, Jewish day schools that are teaching Western values, pro-American values, God, morality, because that’s not happening in schools. And one thing tell you, I used to live in California as well. In California, during the height of COVID, most parents started to pull their children out of schools because they had a front row seat, the resume of what was happening in their children’s classrooms.
Once again, this isn’t just about the anti-Semitism. The anti-Semitism is signalling the other rot. And what they saw and what I saw, because at that time, my son was in second or third grade. What we saw was they had assemblies on Zoom pledging for BLM. They were taking time out of the classroom to pledge for BLM. Right. Teachers had their gender pronouns and told students to also use gender pronouns. And so what ended up happening? There was a massive wave of parents pulling their kids out. So we need to start a network, a movement.
So we need to start our own institutions. What else? PRAGER U. PRAGER U is a wonderful source. They have invested in a Prager U kids version of what they have for adults. They’re growing that educating children through YouTube with their own YouTube channel. But I do not believe that we can change the current institutions. And one more thing I’d like to just say how dire the situation is. So that study that I referenced, the study that was conducted in 2022, they found that amongst (no surprise) amongst the boomer generation, we have 52% in favor of Israel. Within one generation, millennials, it drops to 31. They didn’t study Gen Z. You can imagine Gen Z. The interesting thing about this particular study, and I can definitely share the results with with you all through the administrator, is that the people who were conducting this survey were not necessarily interested, let’s say, in who holds anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist or anti-Israel views.
They were interested in seeing how people who hold those views tend to vote, what they tend to believe. What they tend to believe about climate justice? What about reproductive justice? And there’s this huge correlation. So this is about getting our kids. And the only way to get our kids back is we have to build our own schools We have to build our own community programs. That’s what I believe personally. And classical education.
Evelyn Marcus:
Thank you. And University of Austin, Texas, is also an example of a new university that wants to bring classical education. Robert What do you think?
Robert Spencer:
Well, I couldn’t agree more.
Evelyn Marcus:
How can we reverse this, this brainwashing.
Robert Spencer:
Burn the universities down. And sew the ground with salt.
(Laughter-applause)
I just want to say hello to my friends in the NSA now. It was just a little quip, you know. In any case, the universities are in a terrible state and people don’t realize; the general public has no idea what propaganda factories that they’ve become.
I was talking to this guy a few years ago and he was down the line. He would have fit right in here. He agreed with the point of view that all the speakers have espoused during this weekend on all the various issues. And then he said that he was going to give $1,000,000 to his alma mater, which was one of the leading leftist universities in the country. And I didn’t want to be rude, but I thought I wanted to say, What are you nuts? The universities are standing against everything that we are trying to achieve, everything we’re trying to defend and protect. And so they have to be repudiated. We should see movements that want to deny them all funding that is based on taxpayer money in whatever way and every last support. Yes, that they have from the state needs to be removed. And then if George Soros wants to fund them, that’s his business. But at least it will be clear that these are institutions with a particular point of view and not neutral learning academies, then nobody should be fooled.
Naya Lehkt:
May I just add to that? In addition to what Robert just said, which is that our universities are basically financially owned by Qatar and so that, you know, we can pull all the funding out. You could pull your $100,000 donation, $1 million. It stands nothing against the $20 million that they throw. You know, I was at a conference this summer in Oxford. Somebody did a brief and showed us the map of the world and basically the chips that have been laid out by Qatar. Qatar owns 33% of the Empire State Building. Qatar owns 67% of Heathrow Airport. What about Georgetown University? Columbia, NYU? We cannot send our kids to college. I’m not sending my son to college.
Robert Spencer:
Absolutely. I’m sorry, but I can’t resist. Why do they own 33% of the Empire State Building and Heathrow Airport? Well, they have to have a place for the plane to take off to crash into the. Sorry. Sorry.
Evelyn Marcus:
But Robert, Do you see a way to get rid of the Qatari financing of America’s universities?
Robert Spencer:
That’s an excellent question. That’s a larger question than just Qatar as well, because you have the Chinese money, you have Saudi money, which actually is older and is waning now with the Saudi crown prince trying to change course. But the the damage is done to a tremendous degree. It would be interesting to see if you could get any interest in Congress for some sort of a measure to prohibit foreign funding of American universities. That would change the culture radically overnight, probably to the extent that all the politicians who’ve been bought by Qatar and Saudi Arabia and the rest would oppose it vociferously.
Evelyn Markus:
Thank you.
The former President, William Howard Taft, in a speech rightly and wisely, declared, “Anti-Semitism is a noxious weed that should be cut out. It has no place in America.”
Naya Lehkt said, “…we did postcolonial analysis of Anna Karenina. I mean, why would we be doing postcolonial analysis of Anna Karenina. We’re at peace? So that’s Michelle Fuko, Right. So Michelle Fuko is a very important philosopher, a theoretician, lauded, lionized by academics because, you know, if I had to really answer you, I think humans, all humans seek purpose. And if you don’t have God, then you’re going to create a different worldview wherein you want justice”
PLEASE please, correct the spelling to get the philosopher’s name correct. It’s Michel Foucault. It’s misspelled at least twice.