by Ben Shapiro
Professor Maysam al Faruqi of Georgetown University takes the cake. She says that the September 11 terrorists were frustrated at “the dispossession and killings of Palestinians who have been kept in refugee camps, more like concentration camps, for fifty years where they are born, live, and die without any hope of a normal life or the possibility to return to their homes and their lands.”
When asked specifically if she was referring to US support of Israel as the cause of September 11, al Faruqi answered, “Primarily, yes. . . . The United States keeps vetoing any resolution from the United Nations addressing the matter . . . In this way, and in providing financial and military support to Israel, it becomes responsible in the eyes of the Muslims for what Israel is doing. Israel perpetrated and still perpetrates acts of terror, and those who help it are seen to be as guilty as Israel itself is.”23 Better keep an eye on this woman. It sounds as if she’s not averse to ramming planes into buildings herself.
Osama bin Laden would approve of these professors. After all, they promulgate his agenda.
THE “JEWISH CONSPIRACY”
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the most notorious anti-Semitic document in modern history, has been debunked many times over. That work argued that Jews controlled the world. There is no global Jewish conspiracy. But many professors still believe in a Jewish-American political conspiracy to hijack the government, influencing government officials toward pro-Israel policies.
“Our President continues to issue toothless and ambiguous statements, while the Congress remains largely an ‘occupied territory,’” accuses Professor Joe B. Nielands of UC Berkeley.24
The Palestine Chronicle, a heavily anti-Semitic publication, states that its purpose is to “expose the influence of the strong Jewish American lobby upon our government, media, and institutions.” The board of the magazine includes Professors Noam Chomsky of MIT and Robert Jensen of the University of Texas, who serve alongside the likes of radical Palestinian terror-supporter Hanan Ashrawi.25
“Every US political figure of note, whether it’s a campaigner in a small district in northern New York State or a presidential contender, has had to declare himself or herself an unconditional supporter of Israel, because of the power of the Israeli lobby,” said the late Edward Said.26 “The US administration is effectively controlled by the Christian right and the Israel lobby,” Said stated.27 The Jews controlling the government. Where have we heard this before? How about pre-WWII Germany? And Tsarist Russia? And Stalin’s USSR?
An assigned reading for a UCLA political science class comes up with the same conclusion: “The truth about America’s Israel lobby is this: it is not all-powerful, but it is still far too powerful for the good of the US and its alliances in the middle east and elsewhere.” The reading slurs the Jewish-American community as having been “morally coarsen[ed],” and equates Palestinian terrorism against civilians with Israeli military retaliation against terrorists.28
When the teacher’s assistant asked our class what we thought about the article, I responded that I found it extremely biased and morally abhorrent. “No,” the TA said, “It was a very nice piece.”29 It wasn’t a very nice piece. It was a pack of lies. But the “Jews run the government” notion seems to be popular among academics.
HAMAS, ISLAMIC JIHAD, AND OTHER CAMPUS GROUPS
“Does anybody here think that Israel shouldn’t exist—that the extremist position represents the right and morally valid position?” Professor Donald Moon of Princeton University asked students at a teach-in.30 If students did think this, they’d probably be working on the faculty at a top-ranked university right now.
Harvard University faculty chose a special graduation speaker for their 2002 academic year. His name was Zayed Yasin, and his commencement speech was entitled “My American Jihad.” Yasin insisted that the “jihad” mentioned in his speech referred to spiritual struggle against ungodliness and that he discussed jihad in order to “reclaim the word ‘jihad’ from the way it’s been misused and abused.”
Professor Richard Thomas, the chair of the committee that selected Yasin, defended his choice: “It appealed because it began with a personal perspective of a Muslim American, questioning whether he fit as an American, and as a Muslim. And then expanded that out to include all of us in terms of the struggle it promotes and it urges on all of us.”31
Let’s look a bit deeper at Mr. Yasin to see just how anti-jihad he really is.
In November 2000, Harvard’s Muslim and Arab students held a fundraising dinner on the Harvard campus to benefit charities in the Palestinian Authority. The “charities” were the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and the Palestinian Red Crescent, both of which support terrorist groups like Hamas. The fund-raiser was coordinated by the Harvard Islamic Society and the Society of Arab Students. The president of the Harvard Islamic Society was none other than Zayed Yasin.
“I saw the HLF in action, and they were very professional. I’ve never heard anything bad about them,” said Yasin. “The benefit of [these] foundations is that they are fairly transparent, that where their money goes is clear.” So clear that the Anti-Defamation League and State Department officials already had them pegged as terror-supporting charities almost a year before the September 11 attacks. Yasin was clearly notified of the allegations against the “charities,” and authorized the final go-ahead to the monetary transfer.32 And as Yasin concedes, he feels that suicide bombings against Israeli military personnel are “a very difficult moral question. . . . I can see arguments on both sides.”33
Yasin isn’t the only Hamas supporter on campus. Mustafa Abu Sway taught about Islam at Florida Atlantic University. He has a PhD from Boston College, is an associate professor at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, and has penned two books. He has also won an award from the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley. He is a Fulbright scholar. He is also an active member of Hamas. When FAU was confronted with this information, they did nothing. Middle East experts Daniel Pipes and Asaf Romirowsky draw the obvious conclusion: “connections to Islamist terrorism [have become] acceptable and almost routine in Middle Eastern studies.”34
Then there’s Professor Sami Al-Arian. The tenured lecturer at the University of South Florida headed two front-organizations for terrorist groups. In one organization, Al-Arian employed a man who went on to become the head of Islamic Jihad, the terrorist group responsible for scores of suicide attacks in Israel. In the other, he employed a man who provided an interview with Osama bin Laden to ABC News.
That was only the beginning. Al-Arian used university rooms to host conferences with such notorious terrorists as Sheikh Rahman, the man incarcerated for planning to blow up tourist sites in New York. At a rally in Cleveland, Al-Arian spoke to the crowd under the title “head of Islamic Jihad,” and led the crowd in chants of “Jihad is our path. Victory to Islam. Death to Israel. Revolution. Revolution until victory. Rolling, rolling to Jerusalem.” A few weeks later, Al-Arian sent out a letter asking for donations to Islamic Jihad. At the time, then-President Bill Clinton had already frozen the US funds of Islamic Jihad, so this was clearly illegal.35 Al-Arian was banished from campus only after Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly interviewed him on the air and exposed him as a supporter of terror. By that point, he had taught at the university for sixteen years.36
Naturally, Al-Arian’s colleagues supported him. The University of South Florida Faculty Senate refused a measure by University President Judy Genshaft that would fire Al-Arian. As the St. Petersburg Times reported, a large majority of the senators voted with Al-Arian. The moral minority was justifiably outraged. “If we condone this, what happens next?” questioned an angry and bewildered Joseph Kools, who teaches Army ROTC.37
Al-Arian’s brother-in-law and former University of South Florida faculty comrade, Professor Mazen Al-Najjar, had worse luck than Al-Arian. Al-Najjar was detained by the INS for overstaying his student visa by twenty years and later accused by the Justice Department of having connections to terrorist group
s, Islamic Jihad in particular.38 Despite the skills of his defense council, Professor David Cole of Georgetown University, Al-Najjar couldn’t get off the hook. The INS did its job and Al-Najjar was deported from the United States to an unidentified country in August 2002.39
At Northeastern University, Professor M. Shahid Alam shocked the country with his fervent defense of Palestinian terror. In an op-ed piece for the Egyptian English-language publication Al-Ahram, Alam wrote: “resistance is a Palestinian right, as it was a right of all colonised [sic] peoples who faced dispossession. Of necessity, dispossession is implemented by force, and it follows that resistance to the coloniser must also be violent. The question, therefore, is not why do the Palestinians resist, nor why do they resist by violent means. There is a different question before the world’s conscience: why have we for fifty years abandoned the Palestinians to fight their battles alone, beleaguered by a coloniser whom they cannot fight alone?”40
Fellow Northeastern faculty members either offered wishy-washy condemnations of the piece or attempted to distance themselves from it. Professor Stephan Kane weakly objected to the piece, saying: “I’m angry, but by the same token I understand his frustration. But I think his arguments, his rationale and vitriolic behavior are unacceptable.” The president of the university did not condemn the piece, but merely dismissed it as Alam’s personal view on the matter.41
“GET OUT OF HERE, ZIONIST”
Zionists are unwelcome on campus. It’s okay to be “culturally Jewish,” and you’re grudgingly tolerated if you’re religious, but as soon as you say you believe Israel has a right to defend herself, there’s hell to pay.
A student at UCLA sent me the following e-mail: “There is a general hostility towards anything related to Israel or Jews on campus, coming from all types of people at the university. I was advised to forward you this e-mail, sent by one of my teacher’s assistants (who happened to be a Persian Muslim) to the entire class. This individual constantly utilized class time to impose her views of Israel on us relentlessly, and slammed any attempt for student feedback which contradicted her narrow views. Other students, even ones totally unaffiliated, felt she was extremely overpowering in terms of her views on Israel and authority over our grades. Though everyone was afraid to say anything, or bring it to the professor’s attention, many were very troubled by her conduct.”
The forwarded e-mail included by the student was stunning. The TA, Mona, encouraged her students to attend an upcoming rally entitled “NO OCCUPATION! NO TERROR! NO WAR!” and suggested that students read works by vitriolic anti-Israel authors like Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, David Barsamian, and Lyndon LaRouche. Mona also suggested that students vote for LaRouche in his bid for the presidency.42 Perhaps the best example of the anti-Zionist attitude on campus can be found by contrasting UC Berkeley’s treatment of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Colorado College’s treatment of radical Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi.
On November 28, 2000, Netanyahu was scheduled to appear at the University of California in Berkeley. Two thousand people bought tickets to hear the former prime minister talk about the Israeli-Arab conflict. But soon, three to five hundred rowdy students and professors blocked off the entrance to the venue, waving signs reading “Zionism = Nazism,” chanting “Support the Palestinians,” and threatening violence. Netanyahu’s security detail canceled his appearance due to the threat of violence. Meanwhile, Berkeley’s police department did nothing to clear the protesters from the area, instead allowing them to disturb the peace without threat of arrest.43
The problems didn’t end at Berkeley for Netanyahu. A similar protest shut down his speech at Concordia College in Canada, where anti-Israel protesters physically assaulted pro-Israel demonstrators.44 Rabble-rousers planned to do the same at the University of Pittsburgh. “To call him a ‘champion of peace,’ as they did in the lecture series brochure, is unacceptable,” explains Professor Ken Boas of the University of Pittsburgh,45 a card-carrying member of Professors for Peace and Justice, a leftist pacifist group against all international conflict.46
Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi received a far different welcome at Colorado College than Netanyahu did at Berkeley. Despite the fact that Ashrawi is as anti-America and anti-Israel as Osama bin Laden, she spoke without hindrance before an auditorium crammed with students. Over the objections of thousands of Americans, including Colorado Governor Bill Owens and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the speech went ahead as planned.47
In her speech, paid for with public dollars,48 Ashrawi labeled Israeli policies “ethnic cleansing,” and stated, in a clear reference to the Holocaust: “there’s no justification for doing unto others what was done to you.” She also called September 11 “an opportunity for a historic redemption of the Palestinian cause.”49
It is almost unbelievable. As columnist Daniel Pipes notes, “Ashrawi is smack on the side of America’s enemies in the War on Terrorism. For example, while the US government formally designates Hamas a terrorist group, Ashrawi states she doesn’t ‘think of Hamas as a terrorist group.’ Also, she considers Israeli civilians living on the West Bank to be ‘legitimate . . . targets of Palestinian resistance’—that is, legitimate targets for deadly violence.”50
A legitimately elected leader of a liberal democracy is prevented from speaking on campus, while a supporter of Palestinian terrorism speaks her mind freely and openly. Is that free speech at work?
THE DIVESTMENT CAMPAIGN
Of late, there has been a campaign underway for American colleges to divest from the State of Israel. By divestment, proponents mean that colleges should take their money out of companies that invest in the Israeli economy. The movement is picking up steam as more and more professorial extremists climb aboard.
The movement began at Illinois State University, where Professor Francis A. Boyle called for divestment from Israel until Israel pulls out of the West Bank and Gaza, accepts the non-existent Palestinian right to return, and ceases defending itself.51 Harvard University and MIT immediately jumped on board; fifty-seven faculty members from MIT signed the petition, and seventy-five Harvard faculty members affixed their names to the revolting document.52
Princeton University followed suit, with forty-three professors signing the divestment petition, blaming Israel for the Intifada and condemning it for “[violating] Palestinian human rights.”53 So did Columbia/Barnard, where 107 faculty members had signed the petition as of January 2004.54 The University of Massachusetts also hopped onto the Jew-hating bandwagon; forty-five faculty members had signed the petition as of January 2004.55 By October 2002, divestment petitions had spread to forty universities.56
The heart of the divestment movement is the University of California system. A whopping 223 UC faculty members had signed the UC divestment petition as of October 2003, including: ninety-six from UC Berkeley, fifteen from UC Davis, fourteen from UC Irvine, thirteen from UCLA, seven from UC Riverside, thirty-two from UC San Diego, five from UC San Francisco, sixteen from UC Santa Barbara, and twenty-three from UC Santa Cruz.57
The rhetoric of the professors is just as anti-Semitic as their support for divestment.
“Divestment can speak out loudly against Israel’s invasions, illegal settlements, and systematic destruction of Palestinian civil society,” declares Professor Karen Brodkin of UCLA. “[O]ppression breeds terrorism and that is exactly what the Israeli government has done and continues to do,” babbles Professor Isgoushi Kaloshian of UC Riverside on the Faculty Statements page of the UC divestment campaign Web site.58
“Israel has made itself into a white colonial settler state, mimicking South Africa before the end of apartheid,” spews Professor Lisa Rofel of UC Santa Cruz. “The Israeli occupation of Palestine and destruction of human rights and democracy is at least as severe as that of the South Africans,” agrees Professor Daniel Boyarin of UC Berkeley.
“American financial and military support provides Israel with $10 million a day,
blood money used to maintain its illegal and immoral occupation of Palestine. I oppose Israel’s racist apartheid regime,” writes Professor Leslie A. Mullin of UC San Francisco.
“For half a century, Israel has had military dominance in the Middle East but has not had peace. Military occupation, colonization, seizures of lands, destruction of houses and orchards, assassinations, expulsions have not brought security, but terror from both sides that will escalate to disaster,” spouts Professor Susan M. Ervin-Tripp of UC Berkeley. “It is time for us to unequivocally side with peace and Palestinian independence in every possible way.”
In October 2003, anti-Semites from across the country united at Rutgers University for the Third National Student Conference on the Palestine Solidarity Movement. Their goal: escalating their attacks on Israel and Zionism. Then they went back to their universities, and taught their students more of the same.
SELF-HATING JEWS
The obvious question in all of this: Where are the Jewish support centers, fighting back against the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment on campus? The answer: Many of them are fighting alongside enemies of the Jews.
At UCLA, the supposed Jewish leader is an apologist for Palestinian terror. Chaim Seidler-Feller is the head of UCLA Hillel, the UCLA wing of the largest national Jewish campus organization in the United States. He is also a professor of sociology and a rabid Peace Now activist who consistently sides with the Palestinians against Israel. Columnist Avi Davis described Seidler-Feller as “the cynosure for Los Angeles liberal-left causes, an organizer of conferences involving groups who spew the most venomous anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric and an adamantine critic of all right wing governments—whether Israeli or American.”59
Davis hit the mark with his description. At a memorial for victims of the Holocaust, Seidler-Feller spoke to the crowd of students, comparing Israeli treatment of Palestinians to Nazi treatment of Jews. Just because Jews were victimized in the Holocaust, he said, does not mean that Jews are “immunized from victimizing others.”60
