Campus Watch now on Facebook
Winfield Myers • January 26, 2012 15:50pm • Uncategorized
We’ve set up a Facebook page for Campus Watch, which I oversee. Campus Watch monitors and critiques the highly politicized, anti-American field of Middle East studies on North American campuses.
Visit our FB page–and be sure to “like” us!
Barack the Naked Emperor
Winfield Myers • January 24, 2012 23:31pm • Uncategorized
The most striking thing about Obama’s State of the Union tonight is just how hollow, how boring, and how utterly lacking in vision it was. He already speaks as a defeated man–as someone who knows just how difficult the task before him is, but who doesn’t believe he can muster the vision, courage, and heart to carry on. He strikes me as a spent force. Where was the soaring vision of the future? Where any rhetorical flourish to see his troops through the coming fight? Where the self-confidence, bordering on arrogance, we’ve come to expect? His is a failed first term, and he knows it. What’s more, he didn’t try terribly hard to cover that fact.
A few small proposals here and there, some pious language about patriotism and the American way, but all delivered in an almost deadpan manner, in a cadence less fit for attacking one’s foes than for covering one’s tracks. “Hey, we’re nice people, we Americans! Our alliances are stronger than ever! We’re taller than we’ve ever been! Iran better look out–unless they play nice! I mean, you believe me, don’t you? Don’t you?”
Not that he won’t be supported by the MSM, as ever, or that many won’t be fooled by his mere presence in office. But 2012 surely isn’t 2008. We knew the world would change, but four years ago did we ever think he would be so diminished, so naked before the world?
Obama’s Attack on Religious Liberty and Freedom of Conscience “literally unconscionable” Say Catholic Bishops
Winfield Myers • January 20, 2012 19:46pm • Uncategorized
The urgency of removing the Obama administration this fall stems not only from its attacks on property and free enterprise, or its determination to weaken America’s defenses lest we offend a dictator du jour. As described in today’s press release, reproduced below, from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius and the president have launched a “literally unconscionable” attack on freedom of conscience in their directive that Catholic employers must provide insurance that covers acts considered by Catholics to be sinful. There must be no deviation from the state, even in matters of conscience. What the secular state rules, the people must–must–accept. Again, this directive leaves no room for religious objections.
Thank God, literally, for the Supreme Court’s recent unanimous ruling in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which recognized a “ministerial exception” to employment discrimination laws. The Obama administration had supported the government’s ability to intrude into purely religious decisions. Given its eagerness to violate our Constitutionally protected freedom of religion, does anyone doubt that it would have intervened in myriad ways to “literally” take over decisions made in churches, synagogues, and seminaries?
Is it by chance that this administration has made a habit of using the phrase “freedom of worship” rather than “freedom of religion”–a right guaranteed in the First Amendment? Clearly not: it is part of a plan to drive religion, as faith in revelation and the intervention of God in history, from the public square, and it will be supported by the mainstream media as well as, sadly, many churches once called Mainline.
Here is the press release in its entirety:
U.S. Bishops Vow to Fight HHS Edict
WASHINGTON—The Catholic bishops of the United States called “literally unconscionable” a decision by the Obama Administration to continue to demand that sterilization, abortifacients and contraception be included in virtually all health plans. Today’s announcement means that this mandate and its very narrow exemption will not change at all; instead there will only be a delay in enforcement against some employers.
“In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” said Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan, archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The cardinal-designate continued, “To force American citizens to choose between violating their consciences and forgoing their healthcare is literally unconscionable.It is as much an attack on access to health care as on religious freedom. Historically this represents a challenge and a compromise of our religious liberty.”
The HHS rule requires that sterilization and contraception – including controversial abortifacients – be included among “preventive services” coverage in almost every healthcare plan available to Americans. “The government should not force Americans to act as if pregnancy is a disease to be prevented at all costs,” added Cardinal-designate Dolan.
At issue, the U.S. bishops and other religious leaders insist, is the survival of a cornerstone constitutionally protected freedom that ensures respect for the conscience of Catholics and all other Americans.
“This is nothing less than a direct attack on religion and First Amendment rights,” said Franciscan Sister Jane Marie Klein, chairperson of the board at Franciscan Alliance, Inc., a system of 13 Catholic hospitals. “I have hundreds of employees who will be upset and confused by this edict. I cannot understand it at all.”
Daughter of Charity Sister Carol Keehan, president and chief executive officer of the Catholic Health Association of the United States, voiced disappointment with the decision. Catholic hospitals serve one out of six people who seek hospital care annually.
“This was a missed opportunity to be clear on appropriate conscience protection,” Sister Keehan said.
Cardinal-designate Dolan urged that the HHS mandate be overturned.
“The Obama administration has now drawn an unprecedented line in the sand,” he said. “The Catholic bishops are committed to working with our fellow Americans to reform the law and change this unjust regulation. We will continue to study all the implications of this troubling decision.”
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First Amendment, heath care, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, Freedom of Conscience, U.S. bishops, United States Conference of Catholic bishops, President Obama, Sister Carol Keehan
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The Ugly War Against Israel on College Campuses
Phil Orenstein • December 26, 2011 23:32pm • Uncategorized
My article on the outstanding lectures by Irving Roth and Jeffrey Wiesenfeld on the campus war against Israel at Temple Beth Sholom on Long Island, was published in last week’s edition of Long Island Jewish World (p 3) and FrontPage Magazine. It is very important to be aware of the propaganda war against Israel and how it is gaining rapid momentum on our college campuses and how to fight against this rising anti-Semitic tide.
The Ugly War Against Israel on College Campuses
As Israel becomes increasingly isolated in the world, an organized propaganda war of hatred and incitement against Israel and Zionism is being conducted on college campuses today. Last Monday, November 14, the aptly named event, “The Ugly War Against Israel on College Campuses” at Temple Beth Sholom in Roslyn Heights was an inspirational call to action to stand up for Israel with the faith and integrity of Abraham. Those students and alumni who speak out and fight on the battlefield of our college campuses will make all the difference.
The event was part of an ongoing lecture series sponsored by the Rabbi Herbert Tarr North Shore Institute for Adult Jewish Education. The house was packed with students and attendees from across the political spectrum. Supporters of AIPAC, StandWithUs, a pro-Israel advocacy organization, National Association of Scholars (NAS), and others were in attendance. Various members of the National Conference on Jewish Affairs (NCJA), a new pro-Israel, anti-Islamist umbrella organization of Jewish leaders and groups were handing out literature. They work closely with young Jewish students in the belly of the beast on campus. Read more.
The American Idea
Phil Orenstein • December 3, 2011 17:33pm • Uncategorized
The following article was published in the Queens Village Eagle, the monthly newsletter of the Queens Village Republican Club. The American Idea was the title of Rep. Paul Ryan’s marvelous lecture at the Heritage Foundation, which represented a refreshing return to foundational principles in an America today that has lost its identity.
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Last year five students from a California High School were banned from wearing American flag t-shirts on the Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo. The students were ordered to remove the shirts or be sent home. School officials called the t-shirts “incendiary” telling the students that “their shirts would offend Hispanics” on “their” day. But more than 100 students with either Mexican flags or wearing the Mexican colors were not reprimanded or sent home. Recently a U.S. District Court Judge ruling on the case upheld the school’s ban on the American flag t-shirts.
How did we come to the point where we are losing our American identity in our schools and in our court system? Clearly the school was wrong to quash the student’s right to wear the American flag and the judge was absolutely wrong to rule in favor of the school’s ban. It is wrong to restrict one’s fundamental rights because the exercise of their rights is offensive to another. If our national symbol is offensive to others in American schools and in response they react violently and break the law, they are subject to arrest and prosecution.
How did we come to lose our pride as a nation? There are three answers to this question. One answer is our president. Obama has done everything in his power to diminish our American heritage, ruin our economy and weaken our national security. His answer to America’s problems is increasing the power of the federal government through taxation and spending as well as international moral equivalency which fails to distinguish between friends and foes. His destructive economic policies of bailouts, $ trillions in stimulus tax-dollars, Obamacare, hostility toward Israel, appeasement of enemies, disregard of the U.S. military, and failure to confront the threats of terrorism and radical Islam at home, has left us vulnerable and bereft of American strength and pride.
The second is that our schools have failed to teach American history. Without adequately transmitting our unique historical legacy that makes America an exceptional nation, students are indoctrinated to detest free market capitalism, self reliance, individual liberty and personal responsibility, the hallmarks of our great heritage. Rather, they learn how to transform America into a society of self-indulgence and self-doubt where the successful are punished and robbed of their property. They learn how to produce an ever expanding government welfare state which provides cradle to grave entitlements to all the poor oppressed minorities suffering the burden of the “class warfare” struggle.
Historian Howard Zinn’s sinister one-sided version of American history is required reading at the high school and college level. According to Zinn, Christopher Columbus was a profiteering genocidal murderer, as were the evil English settlers of Virginia, and Massachusetts, who perpetrated the massacre and enslavement of Native Americans and Africans. Our early patriots and Founding Fathers were white slave-owning ruling class elites who fomented a revolution to promote the frenzied greed for land and money that marked Western Civilization’s tyranny of the popes and kings of Europe that ushered in centuries of slavery in the New World. High on Zinn’s list of exemplary societies is Maoist China, “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control.”
What’s not taught in our schools today is that America’s free enterprise system and fundamental values of individual liberty, democracy and freedom originated well before the Constitution defined the limited powers of our government and the Declaration of Independence spelled out the self evident truths “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Back in 1607, Jamestown, the first English settlement and the start of the American nation, was a mercantile colony built on business, competition, investment and transatlantic trade. The first representative governments in the New World met at Jamestown and other colonies, which were established to protect the rule of law, property rights and liberties of free Englishmen engaging in commerce for the prosperity of the colonies.
In the early days of the colonies, African indentured servants were brought over to work for seven years to pay back the cost of transport and then freed. The most wretched laborers and hapless lower classes of aristocratic Europe had boundless opportunities to rise up and become the richest men in the colonies. Although simplistic, here is a hint of the other side of the story that tells of our historical foundation in free market capitalism, representative democracy, freedom and individual achievement that spawned the greatest and most prosperous society known to mankind that is missing from our school’s curricula. Capitalism wasn’t a recent political invention of fiscal conservatives. It is the innate part of our history that needs to be taught and transmitted to the next generation, in order to prevent socialism and other destructive ideologies from taking hold.
Thirdly, the Republican Party, has lost its message, although its principles embody the values that make America exceptional. The GOP has failed to communicate these principles effectively to the American people. One example of this debacle was when Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) proposed a bold new plan to deal with the looming insolvency of Medicare and Social Security as well as the soaring $15 trillion national debt. Passed by the House of Representatives earlier this year, the “Path to Prosperity” saves Medicare from its projected default in 2024, cuts over $6 trillion in deficit spending, spurs growth, cuts taxes, creates millions of jobs, includes drilling offshore and aggressive national energy policy, and many other significant elements.
But the Democrats did a much better job of “messaging” and effectively scuttled the bill and ruined the political career of anyone who supported it by mass marketing 30-second attack ads warning that it would “end Medicare as we know it.” Ryan has since learned a lesson in communication by returning to our roots. He recently spoke at the Heritage Foundation and presented a powerful vision of the “American Idea” celebrating freedom, prosperity, free enterprise, individual achievement and opportunity:
“The American Idea belongs to all of us—inherited from our nation’s Founders, preserved by the countless sacrifices of our veterans, and advanced by visionary leaders, past and present. What makes America exceptional—what gives life to the American Idea—is our dedication to the self-evident truth that we are all created equal, giving us equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And that means opportunity.”
Ryan is on the right track. The 2012 elections will determine the next 100 years of American history. In the war of ideas that divides our nation and is often reduced to mind-numbing attack ads and sound bites, it is critical that we of the GOP, the “Party of Lincoln” define ourselves, dedicate ourselves to the “unfinished work” which our Founders began, and find the great communicators and leaders to do so.
From Campus Watch: Academic Pay to Play: Radical Islamists Fund One of Their Own in Ontario
Winfield Myers • November 16, 2011 16:17pm • Uncategorized
On October 16 American Thinker published my Campus Watch article on the hiring of Wahhabi apologist Ingrid Mattson by Huron University College, a unit of the University of Western Ontario, to fill a chair in Islamic studies funded by Islamist organizations. “Academic Pay to Play: Radical Islamists Fund One of Their Own in Ontario” appears below.
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“Academic Pay to Play: Radical Islamists Fund One of Their Own in Ontario,” by Winfield Myers. American Thinker, October 16, 2011.
Huron University College (HUC) in Ontario announced Friday morning the appointment of Ingrid Mattson, a professor at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut and former president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), as the first London and Windsor Community Chair in Islamic Studies at its Faculty of Theology.
The move validates widespread concern, as revealed in this Campus Watch article by Canadian journalist Barbara Kay and a letter from concerned faculty and friends at HUC, both published in May, that the support of several Islamist groups in funding the chair would lead to the appointment of a radical Islamist as the first holder. In Ingrid Mattson, the funders’ wishes have been fulfilled.
Mattson, an Ontario native and convert to Islam whom the New York Times called, “perhaps the most noticed figure among American Muslim women,” has a long history of defending, denying, and obfuscating the true nature of radical Islam in settings both academic and political. She was the first woman and convert to lead ISNA, which has close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation, a terrorism financing case that tracked monies funneled to Hamas. Daniel Pipes has written that, under Mattson’s leadership, ISNA was “a key component of the Wahhabi lobby.” Journalist Stephen Schwartz noted earlier this year that, her tenure at ISNA complete, Mattson was “still advancing radical Islam,” as she did in an October, 2001, CNN chat room when she claimed that Wahhabi Islam “really was analogous to the European protestant reformation.”
Her new perch at HUC was funded in part by organizations with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood: the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC) and the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). In 2008, Temple University declined a $1.5 million gift from IIIT to endow a chair in Islamic studies, citing ongoing federal investigation of IIIT’s possible involvement in funding Palestinian terrorists. To make matters worse for HUC, the chair also involved the Islamic Centre for Southwestern Ontario — an organization with ties to a Libyan-based charity of now-deposed dictator Muammar Qaddafi.
As reported by the Ottowa Citizen on May 7, 2011, the Islamic Centre’s head, Assem Fadel, also led the Libya-based World Islamic Call Society (WICS), whose charitable status was revoked by the Canadian government this spring after it determined that a Libyan charity sent money to the private bank account of WICS’s head — the same Assem Fadel. Fadel then transferred the money to WICS, from which it was sent to terrorist organizations outside Canada.
The letter’s writers stated the problem succinctly:
Here we have a clear and indisputable link between Qaddafi-sponsored terrorist related activities involving the president of the Islamic Centre of Southwestern Ontario, a funding organisation of the chair in Islamic Studies.
In an April letter signed by twenty-six “alumni, friends, and faculty” of HUC, then-interim-principal (president) Trish Fulton was alerted to the radical nature of the chair’s supporters, including the Muslim Association of Canada’s boasts on its website that it seeks to practice Islam according to “the approach of Imam Hassan Al-Banna [who] best exemplifies [a] balanced, comprehensive understanding of Islam.” Al-Banna was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the inspiration of many contemporary radical Islamist groups, and its motto is: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qu’ran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
Fulton dismissed these objections in a telephone conversation with Barbara Kay in May:
To my [Kay's] question of whether she felt the beliefs and principles of MAC and IIIT were ‘compatible with [Huron's] values,’ I received a prompt and firm ‘yes.’ Dr. Fulton elaborated: ‘We don’t probe deeply into values held by donors.’ Huron, she said, is ‘concerned about the legitimacy and the civic presence’ of donors, but ‘not the views they may hold on a wide variety of cultural issues.’ In Dr. Fulton’s view, it is only a group’s ‘actions’ that would ‘compromise the academic pursuit.’
Fulton’s successor, Stephen McClatchie, took over HUC July 1, 2011. In the press release announcing Mattson’s appointment, McClatchie enthused, “Mattson brings an incredible wealth of knowledge and expertise to this area of study and Huron is privileged to have a scholar of her calibre.” He said that HUC is “honoured” that she accepted their offer.
It’s likely that the financial supporters of Mattson’s chair, with their ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Qaddafi regime, are equally honored by the College’s eagerness to do their bidding. After all, they got exactly what they paid for.
Winfield Myers is director of academic affairs at the Middle East Forum. This article was written for Campus Watch, a project of the Forum.
From Islamist Watch: National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Refuses to Be Politically Correct, Pulls Security Clearance of Analyst
Winfield Myers • November 16, 2011 15:32pm • Uncategorized
My Middle East Forum colleague David Rusin, director of Islamist Watch (IW), writes today at IW’s blog that the NGA has pulled the security clearance of a budget analyst whose wife has connections to several Islamist organizations. This action stands in stark contrast to the willful blindness displayed by many federal agents when confronted with radical Muslims and the organizations they support. Kudos to the NGA for their common sense action, and to David for another fine article.
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“Security Clearance Pulled Due to Wife’s Islamist Links,” Islamist Watch, November 16, 2011
A newly filed lawsuit claims that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), whose information products support U.S. security objectives, revoked the clearance of a budget analyst because his wife works for a suspect Islamic charity — perhaps the first case of a federal entity taking such action in response to a spouse’s Islamist ties. The man alleges discrimination.
According to the complaint, Mahmoud M. Hegab joined the agency in January 2010 and told the NGA that he had married Bushra Nusairat in the time between his security investigation and the start of his employment. Hegab mitigated some of the NGA’s concerns about Nusairat, which included her graduation from Virginia’s Islamic Saudi Academy — known for its hateful texts and a valedictorian who plotted to kill the president — and her affinity for protesting U.S. and Israeli policies. However, her job with Islamic Relief USA (IRUSA), America’s biggest Muslim charity, seemingly was a deal breaker. Citing Nusairat’s “current affiliation with one or more organizations which consist of groups who are organized largely around their non-United States origin,” the NGA canceled Hegab’s clearance and placed him on unpaid leave. He blames bias:
The revocation of plaintiff’s security clearance … was based solely on plaintiff’s wife’s religion, Islam, her constitutionally protected speech, and her association with, and employment by, an Islamic faith-based organization.
Despite collaborating with federal agencies on humanitarian projects, IRUSA is less than wholly benign — not that either the complaint or the 800-word Washington Post piece on Hegab offers any hint of this. Most troubling is IRUSA’s links to Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW), which names IRUSA among its “fundraising partners.” The Money Jihad blog notes that IRUSA “gave $9.4 million to IRW in 2009, $5.9 million in 2008, and $4.8 million in 2007.” IRUSA declares that the two are “separate legal entities,” but the cash flow suggests a close relationship.
This financial connection is problematic because IRW is steeped in radicalism: Senior members of Muslim Brotherhood groups have served as IRW officials. A NEFA analysis lists IRW as one of the “founding organizations” of the Union of Good, designated by the Treasury Department for having been “created by Hamas leadership to transfer funds to the terrorist organization.” Israeli forces arrested an IRW operative for aiding Hamas in 2006; he had pictures of Nazis and jihadists on his computer. IRW also has been accused of bankrolling rebels in Chechnya.
“Lawyers said the Hegab case was the first they knew of where clearance was revoked because of a spouse’s ties to Islamic organizations,” the Post reports, though “intelligence agencies regularly denied clearances to individuals whose spouses were involved with communist or so-called fellow traveler organizations” during the Cold War. The parallels should be obvious.
Islamism, like communism, is a totalitarian ideology with the West in its crosshairs. Thus, it merits comparable concern on the part of sensitive agencies such as the NGA. In an era of government bodies obfuscating Islamism or even giving radicals access to restricted data, it is refreshing to find one that apparently puts national security before political correctness.
The President’s Deadly Obsession
Jay Bergman • November 16, 2011 14:22pm • Uncategorized
A common conclusion in the commentary on President Obama’s denigration of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu at the G-20 summit conference in France two weeks ago – in which Obama said he, too, was “fed up” with Netanyahu after French President Sarkozy called Netanyahu a liar – is that it revealed Obama’s true feelings not only about the prime minister of Israel but about Israel itself.
This conclusion is correct. That the president was speaking privately to Sarkozy and thought his words were unrecorded means they had no intended political effect, and he meant what he said.
To be sure, it is entirely possible Obama hoped his comments would repair relations, his own as well as America’s, with an allied leader he had earlier snubbed by not hugging him the way he did Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan, who is hardly an American ally now that his government is systematically imposing Shariah law and ruthlessly suppressing the largely pro-Western Turkish military. But it also seems obvious that Sarkozy’s calling Netanyahu a liar touched a raw nerve in Obama by triggering the latter’s own long-standing dislike and distrust of the Israeli prime minister.
This, too, has been a staple of the commentary in newspapers and on the Internet. But there is an aspect of Obama’s comments that, as far as I know, has not been brought to light.
After Sarkozy’s remark, Obama could have said nothing or agreed politely, and then turned the conversation to a different and more consequential topic; the presidents of France and the United States don’t meet often, and one would think they would want to maximize their time together. But Obama did not do that. Instead, he implicitly minimized Sarkozy’s irritation with Netanyahu compared to his own (“You think you’re fed up with him?”) and then explained his irritation as the result of his having “to deal with him every day” – which is a way of saying that he thinks about Netanyahu every day.
There is something enormously self-revealing about this. Given the range, complexity and multiplicity of the issues the president, any president, has to understand in formulating policies he must explain and defend publicly, it is exceedingly unlikely Obama has to “deal with” Netanyahu every day. He surely doesn’t talk to him every day. Nor, I am fairly certain, does Obama devote his precious time to matters concerning Israel on a daily basis (especially now that the president is in “campaign mode”).
For that reason, the president’s complaint is more a reflection of his interior life, the subjective world of his fears, resentments and unspoken anger, than a function of the demands of the presidency.
I am not a psychologist. But it seems clear to me nonetheless, as I suspect it would to any reasonably intelligent person who took seriously the exact words with which Obama belittled Netanyahu, that the president is obsessed with Netanyahu and, by extension, with Israel. Such an obsession almost certainly does not make Obama happy. On the contrary, it probably makes him unhappy – which only increases his hostility to the Jewish state.
Whether Obama is happy or unhappy is of no concern to me. Nor should it be the concern of the American people.
What we should be concerned with is that people with obsessions sometimes act irrationally. In ordinary people, the consequences are usually trivial, but in the case of Obama, the most powerful man on the planet, they could be catastrophic not only for America but for Israel.
With its very existence threatened by genocidal religious fanatics in Iran, the last thing Israel needs now is to be the trigger for irrational behavior harmful to Israel by the leader of the only country in the world whose people overwhelmingly support it.
Obama’s comments should be deeply troubling and profoundly worrisome for Americans and Israelis alike.
Seven Billion Reasons to Celebrate
Brent Tantillo • November 12, 2011 10:43am • Uncategorized
That’s the title of the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt’s article appearing in The American magazine. Eberstadt takes on the soft underbelly of the international “overpopulation movement” in his article by exposing the fact that its intellectual underpinnings is eugenics:
It is an underside whose intellectual heritage traces back to the heyday of eugenics, with its then-explicit emphasis on the imperative of pruning away “the unfit” from the human race. As Ur-eugenicist and population-controller Margaret Sanger, the mother of these modern efforts, declared in the 1920s,
Feeble-mindedness perpetuates itself from the ranks of those who are blandly indifferent to their racial responsibilities. And it is largely this type of humanity we are now drawing upon to perpetuate our world for the generations to come.
And lest anyone forget: those high-minded eugenic precepts were parent to the concept of unlebenswertes Leben (roughly translated, “lives not worth living,” as determined by those other than the particular souls in question)—a notion that would fatefully come into vogue in Germany during that country’s darkest hour.
For obvious reasons, this is a pedigree that today’s population controllers do not strain to highlight.
But beyond the trail of tears being poured out by these birth controllers over the fact that the Earth will soon inhabit seven billion persons, the fact that is ignored is that these seven billion are living better than ever before:
Since 1987, according to the World Bank, life expectancy for the planet as a whole has risen by 4 years, to 69, adult literacy rates have increased by over 8 points, to 84 percent, and per capita income (in real 2005 PPP-adjusted dollars) has risen by over 50 percent, the ongoing global economic crisis notwithstanding.
These gains, to be sure, were unevenly distributed. Even so, since 1999, according to the World Bank’s numbers, the per capita GDPs of the low income economies have jumped by an average of more than 40 percent and the percentage of children completing primary school has risen by 16 points, to 65 percent. Over those same dozen years, the risk of infant mortality in these low income economies has dropped by about 1 percent per annum.
So why shouldn’t more people enjoy a better world full of more life and better conveniences? Because God forbid it’s not being shared by only blond haired, blue-eyed people?
For more on this topic see my post of October 18, 2011.
From Campus Watch: The Middle East Studies Establishment vs. Walid Phares
Winfield Myers • November 11, 2011 11:22am • Uncategorized
My Middle East Forum colleague Cinnamon Stillwell takes a close look at how far-left, anti-Semitic Middle East studies professors are attacking Middle East scholar Walid Phares, whom Mitt Romney has named a special adviser on the Middle East and Africa. The attacks are malicious, mendacious, and markedly immature–just about what we’ve come to expect from this crowd. Cinnamon’s article, which appears today at American Thinker, is reproduced below.
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“The Middle East Studies Establishment vs. Walid Phares,” American Thinker, November 11, 2011. By Cinnamon Stillwell
When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney announced last month that Walid Phares — a Lebanese-American Christian, adjunct professor of jihadist global strategies at the National Defense University, and former Middle East studies professor at Florida Atlantic University — would be a special adviser on the Middle East and North Africa, it elicited howls of fury from the usual suspects. Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas funding case and the chief Islamist organ in the U.S. — sent a letter to the Romney campaign stating CAIR’s predictable objections, while publications such as the Daily Beast, Salon.com, and Mother Jones followed suit with error-filled hit pieces.
Phares’s moral clarity on Islamism and jihadism do not sit well with those who would rather engage in apologetics and obstructionism. This explains why his fiercest opponents have included some of the worst from the field of Middle East studies.
California State University, Stanislaus political science professor and “Angry Arab” blogger As’ad AbuKhalil, writing for Salon.com, blamed Phares’s appointment on “the Israel lobby and its affiliates,” claimed that his “writings are only relevant to Zionist discourse and polemics,” and concluded that “when the appointment of Israeli experts on terrorism is not possible, a man like Phares is the second best choice.”
AbuKhalil’s hostility towards Israel — and hence, towards anyone who isn’t an anti-Zionist fanatic — is well-established. He accused President Obama, of all people, of giving “free reign to the Zionist lobby” in a 2010 Al Jazeera television interview. Speaking in April 2011, he ranted:
[N]ever will we recognize the Zionist State of Israel! … The Arab World will never prosper until the Zionist regime is removed! … We celebrate the demise of Israel; yes, Israel, your days are truly numbered!
AbuKhalil paints Phares’s early years in Lebanon as those of a right-wing, Christian militant — charges that have been repeated by many of Phares’s opponents, despite being debunked on numerous occasions. Yet it turns out that AbuKhalil may have questionable allegiances of his own. According to John Hajjar at Family Security Matters, AbuKhalil “is known in the Lebanese and Middle Eastern American communities as the mouthpiece of [Hezbollah secretary general] Hassan Nasrallah in the world of petrodollar-funded Middle East studies.”
Ebrahim Moosa, associate professor of Islamic studies at Duke University, told the Daily Beast’s McKay Coppins that Phares “is hostile to Muslims and Romney has adopted an expert who is going to alienate him from a good section of the voting public.” This coming from a man who downplayed the dangers of Saudi funding for higher education by telling the Charlotte Observer in February 2010 that “Wahhabism is like the Baptists; it’s kind of a denomination of sorts that started out in Saudi Arabia.” Similarly, Moosa, speaking at a University of California, Berkeley workshop in May 2011, and as described by journalist Stephen Schwartz, “defended Deobandism, the madrassa-based radical ideology that inspires the Taliban.”
Omid Safi, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill who was quoted in the same Daily Beast article, declared the Phares appointment a “pathetic reflection on Governor Romney to have surrounded himself with such a person for advice on the Middle East and Islam” and likened it “to turning to [former KKK leader] David Duke to get advice on race relations.”
Safi is accustomed to making these sorts of inflammatory accusations. In a 2005 Belief.net article, Safi labeled the isolated prisoner abuse at Abu Graib prison in Iraq “a continuation of twenty years of American foreign policy centered on dehumanizing Muslims.” In April 2010, he falsely claimed that Islam scholar Robert Spencer “threatened me and my family with death” in a Facebook message. The recipient’s Facebook account was later disabled with no explanation, and although Spencer called Safi out for defamation, Safi never retracted the claim, nor did the university take action.
In fact, Phares’s views are not hostile to Muslims, nor biased toward Israel. Rather, Phares is a scholar who advocates pluralism as the most effective means of triumphing over extremism, tribalism, and Islamic supremacism in the Middle East. He also calls out those in the West, and particularly in academia, who would point the finger at America, Israel, Christians, and Jews. This may be why, as claimed by AbuKhalil at Salon.com, “Phares has not been seen in Middle East Studies conferences for many years.” The Middle East studies establishment — and especially its leading body, the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) — is not particularly welcoming to academics who stray from the post-colonial, Edward Said-originated Orientalist narrative.
As Phares put it in his 2007 book, The War of Ideas: Jihadism Against Democracy:
In the West, the central battlefields over the perception of the world remain academic and educational… Even as the war with Jihadism is raging in the real world, and America is facing off with the most dangerous enemy infiltration it has ever known, the bulk of its students are being educated today by an elite that refuses to teach the real history and politics of the jihadists.
Fortunately, we have academics such as Phares himself and alternatives to MESA such as the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA), for which he often lectures, to help turn the tide. The usual suspects should indeed be afraid.
Cinnamon Stillwell is the West Coast representative for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. She can be reached at stillwell@meforum.org.
