Wednesday, November 8, 2023

Campus Rage World Wide Fueled by Middle Eastern Money - By Bari Weiss

You can bet your last dollar that this is NOT only happening in USA Universities and Colleges but rather going on around the globe in Canada, England, France, Spain, Germany, Greece Italy etc.

According to a new report, at least 200 American colleges and universities illegally withheld information on approximately $13 billion in undisclosed contributions from foreign regimes.

Since Hamas’s October 7 massacre, it has been hard to miss the explosion of antisemitic hate that has gripped college campuses across the country. At Cornell, a student posted a call “to follow [Jews] home and slit their throats,” and a professor said the terror attack “energized” and “exhilarated” him. At Harvard, a mob of students besieged an Israeli student, surrounding him as they bellowed “shame, shame, shame.” 


At dozens of other campuses, students gathered to celebrate Hamas. 

The response from school administrations has been alarming. With few exceptions, in the immediate aftermath of October 7, university presidents issued equivocal statements about the initial attack. Some professors even celebrated it. And the focus on the part of administration bureaucrats has been on protecting the students tearing down posters and being shamed for doing so.


Where did all of this hatred come from is a question worth pondering. As Rachel Fish and others have documented, for several decades a toxic worldview—morally relativist, anti-Israel, and anti-American—has been incubating in “area studies” departments and social theory programs at elite universities. 


Whole narratives have been constructed to dehumanize Israelis and brand Israel as a “white, colonial project” to be “resisted.” The students you see in the videos circulating online have been marinating in this ideology, which can be defined best by what it’s against: 

everything Western.


Many are rightly questioning how it got this bad. How did university leaders come to eulogize, rather than put a stop to, campus hate rallies and antisemitic intimidation? Why are campus leaders now papering over antisemitism? How could institutions supposedly committed to liberal values be such hotbeds of antisemitism and anti-Israel activism?


In large part, it is a story of the power of ideas—in this case, terrible ones—and how rapidly they can spread. But it is also a story of an influence campaign by actors far outside of the university campus aimed at pouring fuel on a fire already raging inside.


We’ve known for some time about the links between anti-Israel campus agitators, like Students for Justice in Palestine, and shady off-campus anti-Israel activist networks. 


But thanks to the work of the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a nonprofit research center, we now have a clearer picture of the financial forces at play at a higher, institutional level.


Today, after months of research, the NCRI released a report (comprising four separate studies) following the money. The report finds that at least 200 American colleges and universities illegally withheld information on approximately $13 billion in undisclosed contributions from foreign regimes, many of which are authoritarian.


Moreover, while correlation is not causation, they found that the number of reported antisemitic incidents on a given campus has a meaningful relationship to whether that university has received funding (disclosed and undisclosed) from regimes, or entities tied to regimes, in the Middle East. 


Overall, authors of the report write, “a massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry and free expression.”


The NCRI report found that:


  • From 2015–2020, institutions that accepted money from Middle Eastern donors had, on average, 300 percent more antisemitic incidents than those institutions that did not. 


  • From 2015–2020, institutions that accepted undisclosed funds from authoritarian donors had, on average, 250 percent more antisemitic incidents than those institutions that did not.


  • At least 200 American colleges and universities illegally withheld information on approximately $13 billion in undocumented contributions from foreign regimes, many of which are authoritarian. 


  • Campuses that accept undisclosed money are on average ~85 percent more likely to see campaigns “targeting academic scholars for sanction, including campaigns to investigate, censor, demote, suspend, or terminate.”


This chart from NCRI captures the relationship between concealed foreign donations and antisemitism on campus:

So who’s doing this concealed funding? Qatar, the country where Hamas’s leadership currently resides, is far and away the largest foreign donor to American universities, as Eli Lake recently documented in these pages:

Of course, correlation is not causation. Still, the NCRI report found that a reliable predictor of the intensity of campus antisemitism was the amount of undisclosed money a given university received from Middle Eastern regimes.


Former Harvard University president Larry Summers told me that he believes “donors and certainly authoritarian leaders who donate to universities may be looking to bolster their image or perception of legitimacy.” But he also said he doubts that “they are looking to or could succeed in changing attitudes or specific policies on campuses.”

“I’m cynical. I usually think things are about money. But I don’t think this is about money. Or at least not primarily,” a former president of a prominent liberal arts college told me. “If you look at the college professors signing on to these various statements, I don’t think it’s because those people got money in any significant way from a country like Qatar. It’s people who are ideologically part of a movement—whether you call it postcolonial or anticolonial—that is deeply opposed to Israel.”


There are other possibilities that may explain the NCRI’s findings. A fairly obvious one could be that Middle Eastern regimes are sponsoring professorships held by, or programs run by, professors or administrators who hold anti-Israel views and use their platform to spread them. This fact, itself, wouldn’t be news.


Another possibility is that universities, eager to attract and retain Middle Eastern funding, promote positions that they think will please the sensibilities of Middle Eastern regimes. Or maybe it is that universities that are indifferent to the atrocities committed or condoned by some of their largest funders are also indifferent to rising antisemitism on campus, allowing it to thrive. The same would hold true for freedom of expression and academic freedom. 


At the very least, the NCRI’s findings may explain why university presidents, whose main job is fundraising, may have been so slow to respond in the wake of the October 7 massacre, and when they did, they for the most part released weak statements. 


One thing I have a hard time believing is that these countries give nine- and ten-figure gifts to universities expecting nothing in return.


Sources: 

https://www.thefp.com/p/campus-rage-middle-eastern-roots-qatar

https://networkcontagion.us/reports/11-6-23-the-corruption-of-the-american-mind/

Saturday, November 4, 2023

Radical Palestinian Muslims and a Condoning Media/Academia Support of Terrorism

Gaza has been governed for the past 17 years, by the Radical Palestinian Muslims, who call themselves Hamas, which is a terrorist organization funded and directed by Iran, the world’s leading financier and supporter of acts of international terrorism.

Therefore, the fact is that any preserved humanitarian crisis caused in Gaza is and has been because of the elected self-governing body in Gaza namely the Radical Palestinian Muslims, who call themselves Hamas. Instead of helping the Palestinian Muslims, these Hamas Palestinian Radical Muslims have for more than 20 years continually sent bombs, rockets, and missiles of mass destruction indiscriminately against Israeli civilians, hospitals, shops, houses, babies and women and children with no regard for the laws of war or the laws of civil societies worldwide.

It is apparent that these Gaza Radical Palestinian Muslims, who call themselves Hamas and have governed Gaza, for the past 20 years have clearly shown that they Do NOT represent any semblance of a healthy just society of Muslim Palestine's respect for the rule of law, with clear and transparent justice which is a fair and independent process with safeguards to ensure that everyone is treated equally before international laws.

They (Hamas) are barbaric terrorists who on October 7, 2023, slaughtered and mutilated babies, women, children, and young adults then kidnapped over 200 innocent babies, women, children, and men and herded them back to Gaza, while the mainstream media to this day remains silent and with no demands for their release. 

These journalists; reporters have in many cases become conspiracy theorists and propaganda artists for Hamas and other Iran-backed terrorist groups who also have remained silent and are as guilty as the barbarian Palestine Muslims called Hamas who killed, raped, and mutilated babies, women, and kids and burned to death in front of others for no other reason than their hatred for all non-Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike.

Further, Academia and these so-called professors have been spewing, to students at universities and colleges for decades, a cultural Marxism with anti-Semitic twists found in Communist Marxist ideologies that want to distort historical facts and destroy Western civilization and the USA as a country from within, in my view. 

Their phrase “political correctness” is a covert assault on Christianity and the American way of life, and they continue with their attempts to jazz up political correctness and repackage it as an anti-Semitic theory that identifies Jews and all non-Muslims as nefarious communist and Marxism destroyers. 

These professors, academia and news media journalists and reporters seem intent on making democracies like the USA and Israel feel guilty and thus they are subverting the values of Christianity and its culture.

For example, in 1962, the American communist C. Wright Mills who openly stated, “I have been studying for several years now, the cultural apparatus (within academia) as a possible, immediate radical agency of change.”

And today we again witness the silence from all media outlets and these so-called free press reporters and journalists who are NOT demanding or calling for the immediate release of all the babies, women, young individuals and seniors brutally kidnapped by these barbaric Muslim Palestine terrorists who call themselves Hamas. These media types and their journalist and reporters are all accomplices to the barbaric atrocities of these Hamas Palestine Muslims, and they too must be held accountable for their support of such terrorist groups, in my view.

The media who have and continue to support the barbaric Muslim Palestine Hamas who kidnapped babies, children, women, and the elderly from Israel must pay the price for such support of terrorists.  

They have shown themselves not to represent a free imperial media and like the barbaric Palestine Muslim Hamas Do Not, as journalists or reporters represent any semblance of a healthy just society that respects the rule of law, with clear and transparent justice which is a fair and independent process with safeguards to ensure that everyone is treated equally before international laws.  

Shame on the Western media and its biased corrupt journalists and reporters, in my view.