Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from an article that was originally published by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on April 18, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. After the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, universities with close ties to Middle Eastern governments have faced heightened scrutiny. In February, Texas A&M University announced it would close its […]
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The Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the world’s major organization devoted to studying this region, has jettisoned academic impartiality and the quest for truth in favor of political partisanship and extremist activism. In 2017, MESA dropped its self-designation as a “non-political learned society” so that it could pursue an anti-Israel agenda. MESA has not yet […]
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As the Arab Spring uprisings transform the history and face of the Arab world, the American University of Beirut, the oldest and most prestigious private university in the Arab Middle East, is preparing to launch the most ambitious fund-raising campaign in its 145-year history. The campaign will seek to raise more than $400 million dollars […]
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Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) displayed a fascinating range of opinion over the recent City University of New York decision to award Tony Kushner an honorary degree. First the Board of the group issued a statement deploring the award as “politicization of the university.” This drew a vehement letter denouncing the SPME […]
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How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America—the controversial book assigned for freshman reading at Brooklyn College—is, in my opinion, an important but seriously flawed work, and one that should be read, but not as a sole required text for incoming English students. In the book Brooklyn College English […]
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How About A Real Campaign Against Abuses? Every year at about this time, radical Islamic students—aided by radical anti-Israel professors—hold an event they call “Israel Apartheid Week.” During this week, they try to persuade students on campuses around the world to demonize Israel as an apartheid regime. Most students seem to ignore the rantings of […]
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On 2 December 2009 the curtain of Harvard’s famed Agassiz Theater rose on a production of Avrom Goldfaden’s Shulamis, one of the most famous plays in the Yiddish repertoire. An operetta set in the Land of Israel in late biblical times, it was last performed in Warsaw in 1939, and forcibly shut down by the […]
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Fourteen Columbia professors are protesting the university’s apparent decision to award tenure to Joseph A. Massad, a controversial anti-Israel professor of Arab studies. The professors are from the schools of law, business and public health. They expressed their concern in a five-page letter to the incoming Provost, Claude M. Steele. The letter asserts that the […]
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Those who suspect that “Middle Eastern studies” is actually a code word for anti-Israel advocacy have some new evidence to support their position: an entire academic conference scheduled for this week at York University in Toronto that appears to be entirely devoted to the idea of erasing the state of Israel from the map. The […]
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At its annual meeting, the American Association of University Professors declined to vote to criticize Israel, yet voted to condemn Iran. In December, the MLA rejected a statement defending critics of Israel and replaced it with a much-milder statement defending contentious Middle East research. They also resisted condemning Ward Churchill’s firing, and instead only objected […]
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Prince Al Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, the world’s 19th richest man with a net worth of $21 billion, recently gave a 16 million British pound donation to the University of Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh to launch two research centers for Islamic studies. The signing ceremony was attended by Prince Philip, the […]
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This past winter, Andy Ram and Jonathan Erlich, a men’s doubles team who captured the 2008 Australian Open championship, announced plans to enter the ATP tournament in Dubai. Normally, tennis players’ schedules aren’t big news. But Ram and Erlich are citizens of Israel, and the government of the United Arab Emirates prohibits holders of Israeli […]
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Columbia University enhanced its Israel-hating reputation by naming John Coatsworth as the new dean of its School of International and Public Affairs. The university has so many full-time detractors of Israel on its payroll that one would think an opportunity to name at least a moderate to the deanship would be overwhelming. Coatsworth signed a […]
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“…Middle Eastern studies programs have been distorted by “a degree of thought control and limitations of freedom of expression without parallel in the Western world since the 18th century, and in some areas longer than that… It seems to me it’s a very dangerous situation, because it makes any kind of scholarly discussion of Islam, […]
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Here is one response from Hawaii on the l8-day Israel-bashing conference sponsored by the University of Hawaii at Manoa: “I just found out that an anti-Israel activist spoke at my daughter’s school. She is in the fifth grade at Kamehameha a private school for those with some Hawaiian blood or ancestry. Her mom (my wife) […]
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U.S. universities pride themselves on their tolerance – religious, ethnic, gender-based, sexual orientation-based, whatever. But when it comes to lucrative consulting fees for partnering with universities in Mideastern countries where none of the above categories of toleration seems to exist, the campus open-mindedness apparently evaporates, and a strange variety of mulitculturalism takes over. Case in […]
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You can read a passel of editorials on Ahmadinejad above, and if you’re enterprising, you can easily find another, oh, thirty of so op-eds on the topic of his appearance. None of these, except for one, address any substantive findings from Ahmadinejad’s speech, because there weren’t any. That one exception, The Columbia Spectator now urges […]
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You might have seen John Coatsworth, the acting dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs posing questions to Ahmadinejad today. It was Coatsworth who declared that he would invite Hitler to speak at Columbia. He was also a signatory to a “Joint Harvard-MIT Petition for Divestment from Israel” when he was a professor […]
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Wow. The “mind of evil” – he really did mean Ahmadinejad. “Today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for,” Mr. Bollinger told Mr. Ahmadinejad. “I only wish I could do better.”
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The New York Times City Room is blogging on Ahmadinejad’s Columbia speech. Read this passage from President Bollinger and see if it makes any sense: “To those who believe that this event should never have happened, that it is inappropriate for the university to conduct such an event, I want to say that I understand […]
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Why is the jailing of Haleh Esfandiari to be regretted? Well… because it will encourage Orientalists, of course. Look to a novel account in this week’s Chronicle, where Fatameh Keshvarz registers her distaste for Azar Nafisi, Khaled Hosseini, and Asne Seierstad. Their fault? Well, failing to depict the “complexities” of life in the worse-governed portions […]
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