Hypocrisy in Higher Education

The moral corruption of the American academic world is well underway. We now have academic departments, especially those devoted to Middle Eastern, Arabic and Islamic studies, that are funded by oil-rich Arab governments. We also have today branches of once prestigious American universities that operate in the Persian Gulf sheikdoms. Yale, once highly prestigious as one of the top schools of the prestige-encrusted Ivy League, kowtowed  to real or anticipated pressure from wealthy Arab patrons. This became notorious in August 2009 when the Yale University Press was about to publish a book about the Muhammad Cartoons controversy. After the Yale administration "consulted with experts" (according to the NY Times), the Yale Press decided not to publish any of the Muhammad cartoons nor any of the old and classic artistic representations of Muhammad that were to be in the book.

Now, it just so happens that in April 2009, Yale had appointed a woman who served as an academic operative for Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal to a prestigious, if temporary post.

"In April, Yale named Muna AbuSulayman a “Yale World Fellow” for 2009. This isn’t some honorific, and she’ll reside from August through December in New Haven. (Her Facebook fan page, August 16: “I need help locating a Town House/condo for short term leasing near Yale University… Anyone familiar with that area?”) Can you imagine a better way to set the stage for a major Alwaleed gift? Hosting for a semester the very person who structured the Harvard and Georgetown gifts, and who now directs Alwaleed’s charitable foundation? A stroke of genius." [Martin Kramer, emph. added]

Now, we see that  Madame Abu Sulayman had already been instrumental in bringing some of Prince Al-Waleed's generosity to Harvard and Georgetown. Could it be that Yale too was hoping to share in some of Prince Al-Walid's largesse? Maybe Yale was only acting  like those prestigious professors of mathematics who lent their names in exchange for money to the Mathematics Dept at King Abdulaziz University in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. Does this matter? Yes, it does, if academic integrity and honesty have any worth anymore. Yes, if the academic world is to have any more claim to the  respect of decent and informed people.

In this vein, Jonathan Marks has discovered another reason not to honor the academy. He tells a story involving the fanatical bds movement, the movement to boycott Israel which began with funding in part from the well-connected and well-established Ford Foundation.

. . . . this year’s award for higher education hypocrisy surely must go to eight signatories of the latest anti-Israel petition to emerge from our universities. The petition itself, signed by members of the faculty of New York University, is the standard call to punish corporations that can be connected in some way to Israel’s activities in the West Bank or Gaza. What’s striking about this one is that eight of the signatories, more than ten percent of the present total, are affiliated with NYU’s satellite campus in Abu Dhabi. NYU’s Abu Dhabi outpost, “wholly bankrolled by the oil-rich Abu Dhabi government,” opened in 2010, and its permanent campus, located alongside an “idyllic resort” under development on Saadiyat Island, was completed in 2014. So I wonder when these eight faculty members, who pompously stand on NYU’s “long and proud tradition of demanding that the university live up to its professed values,” will be renouncing their affiliation with the government of the United Arab Emirates. As Freedom House observes in its 2014 report, the UAE bans political parties, and “criticism of the government, allies [and] religion” is prohibited by law.
The UAE also has a labor problem. UAE’s mostly foreign workers do not have the right to organize, bargain collectively, or strike. Expatriate workers can be banned from working in the UAE if they try to leave their employer prior to at least two years of service. NYU responded to this difficulty by issuing a statement concerning labor values they expected to be adhered to in the building of the campus. Nonetheless, some of the workers who built the campus “lived in squalor, 15 men to a room.” Almost all had to pay a recruitment fee, consisting of about a year’s wages, for the privilege of getting the job, then worked 11 to 12 hours per day. Workers with the temerity to strike were arrested, beaten, and deported. But it’s a lovely campus, and I am sure the faculty members who want NYU to live up to its values are enjoying it. Who can begrudge brave and hardworking anti-Israeli petition signers their day at the beach? Besides as the signatories of this letter—who include three of the faculty members who signed the anti-Israel position—explain, “our partners are trying to do their best.” Moreover, many of the NYUAD faculty discuss “the complexities of labor in the Gulf” with their students, which is undoubtedly a comfort to the workers, who, because they were not allowed to hold onto their passports and sometimes not even to have their own bank cards, had little hope of escaping their employers, much less bettering their conditions.
It’s nice, though, that NYU’s Abu Dhabi faculty feels able to discuss labor “complexities” since, according to Freedom House, faculties at Western universities typically “take care to not criticize the UAE government or its policies out of fear of losing funding.” There are other incentives for silence as well: “in 2012, several academics critical of UAE government policies were dismissed from their positions and either arrested or expelled from the country.”
But it is commendable that these faculty members, busy enjoying a campus built by indentured servants, and the hospitality of a government that honors neither academic nor political freedom, have found time away from kayaking in Saadiyat Island’s lovely mangrove lagoons, to demand that NYU break with Israel and live up to its values. Some would call this breathtaking hypocrisy. I call it the quintessence of the academic anti-Israel movement.

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Talking about the conditions of indentured servitude in Abu Dhabi, reminds us that the working conditions and shameful treatment of workers in Abu Dhabi are similar to those in Qatar, although the situation in Qatar may actually be worse. The hypocrites and self-righteous Judeophobes who sign petitions to boycott Israel and who praise and justify Hamas, conveniently omit from their concerns the oppressed, exploited and humiliated foreign workers in Qatar who often die under the burden of their harsh working conditions. Qatar is of course a major funder of Hamas, which declares its genocidal goal regarding Jews in its Charter (Article 7).

While we're talking about the nefarious influence of Muslim money, of Islamic filthy lucre, on Western intellectual life, we may recall that more than 200 years ago the French playwright Beaumarchais put into his famous play, The Marriage of Figaro, how a play was censored because of the pressure of Muslim potentates on a European monarch. This was brought to light by the columnist Ivan Rioufol writing in Le Figaro, the newspaper precisely named after the hero of Beaumarchais' play.

Hamas Goes along with Corruption in Noah's Time and Now

Hamas goes along with corruption both in today's world and in the Biblical story of Noah and the Flood, read last sabbath in synagogues around the world. How so?

Hamas is a Hebrew word meaning brutality, thuggery, violence and the like. It appears in Genesis 6:11.
And the Earth became corrupt before God and the earth was full of hamas.

[ ותשחת הארץ לפני האלקים ותמלא הארץ חמס [בראשית ו, יא

Isn't that true today? The earth is corrupt and full of violence, thuggery, brutality. Who can deny it? And an Arab/Muslim terrorist organization, named Hamas, is a major perpetrator of brutality and thuggery against Jews and against its own people. Yet, major governments, Western govts, that pose as defenders of civilization, the United Kingdom & United States and others, not to mention the European Union, court the Hamas. Some want to bring it into "the political process" for the sake of making peace with Israel, supposedly. Yet Hamas's charter distinctly states the aim of destroying Israel, indeed, the charter expresses the aspiration to genocide of Jews. This is done by quoting a medieval Muslim hadith tradition in Article 7. To summarize: At Judgment Day the Muslims will kill Jews. The Jews will hide behind rocks and trees. The rocks and trees will address the Muslims, saying: A Jew is hiding behind me. Come kill him.

Those who cannot recognize that that is a call to genocide are corrupt. I don't say that they are stupid, for even a moron can understand what it means. Yet Tony Blair and his minion in British intelligence, the aptly named Alistair Crooke, have been dealing with Hamas for years, trying to bring them into the "political process" or "peace process." Condoleeza Rice, Prez Bush II's secretary of state, insisted that Hamas had to be allowed to take part in Palestinian Authority elections, for the sake of democracy. Other than the fact that Hamas is not truly democratic --unless democracy merely means majority rule, even if minority rights are not respected-- the Oslo Accords of 1993 banned any party from Palestinian Authority elections that did not accept the Accords and the so-called "peace process." Hamas does not accept those accords and openly declares the aim of destroying Israel and killing the Jews. Nevertheless, Ms Rice demanded Hamas participation in PA elections against the disagreement of both Israel and Abu Mazen's Palestinian Authority. It was all for the sake of democracy. Ms Rice just loves democracy.

Humorists describe Hamas' commitment to democracy as: One man one vote one time. In other words, once they get in power, they will never give it up willingly.

The corruption in Washington is not limited to Rice. All sorts of think-tank half-wits, "policy wonks," are calling for contact with Hamas and its elder sister, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which is the main source of Hamas ideology. These calls for an opening to Hamas and the MB are made in the name of "peace" and "democracy." Well, maybe it is all a matter of definition. I have no doubt that James Jones, the US national insecurity advisor is licking his chops at the thought of the bloodthirsty Hamas being elevated higher than it already is. Here the corrupt in Western govts embrace the party of lies and brutality, the Hamas.

Another blatant case of corruption is the United Nations, which was founded as an instrument -- the naive believed-- of attaining world peace. Within the UN, perhaps the most corrupt body is the UN "human rights commission," now renamed "human rights council." The body remains corrupt and a corruptor of the UN's original high ideals in a very Orwellian manner. Christian Rocca put it this way, in an article for Il Foglio April 27, 2005.

At the UN, the Torturers Watch over Human Rights

China, Cuba, Sudan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Libya have three things in common: they are ferocious dictatorships, they reject the concept of human rights, and they are enthusiastic members of the UN Human Rights Commission. In 2003, Libya even presided over its work... The regimes that torture and repress and keep their own subjects in chains are never missing from the Commission. Indeed, they are the ones that seek most tenaciously to get a seat at Geneva.... Even Kofi Annan's wise men have recognized that some countries go into the Commission "not to reinforce human rights but to protect themselves against criticism or to criticize other countries."

Here's Rocca's original:

Cina, Cuba, Sudan, Siria, Arabia Saudita e Libia hanno in comune tre cose: sono feroci dittature, rifiutano il concetto di diritti umani e sono stati membri entusiasti della commissione dell’Onu sui diritti umani. La Libia nel 2003 ha addirittura presieduto i lavori, mentre nel 2002, cioè subito dopo l’11/9, gli Stati Uniti sono stati esclusi dalla commissione per effetto della strana alleanza tra le dittature e quei paesi europei contrari alla politica di Bush. I regimi che torturano e reprimono e tengono in catene i propri sudditi non mancano mai dentro la commissione, anzi sono quelli che cercano più tenacemente di ottenere uno scranno a Ginevra. La metà di quei regimi che il rapporto annuale di Freedom House definisce “the worst of the worst”, “il peggio del peggio”, vuole entrare, ed entra, nella commissione. Il motivo è semplice: dall’interno è più facile evitare le critiche per non aver rispettato i diritti umani. Anche i saggi di Kofi Annan hanno riconosciuto che alcuni paesi entrano nella commissione “non per rafforzare i diritti umani, ma per proteggere se stessi contro le critiche oppure per criticare altri paesi”.

So "human rights" are used to promote political interests of states against other states and, no doubt, against their own peoples. Meanwhile, the UN "human rights council" with its Orwellian name is working to whitewash Hamas through the ill-begotten Goldstone Report. Corrupt?

Then we have the new JStreet gang in Washington that pretends to be pro-Israel and pro-"peace." Like Condi Rice, JStreet looks with favor on Hamas, viewing it as a needed part of the "peace process." By having James Jones, the Obama White House's national insecurity advisor, as the main speaker at its Washington conclave JStreet demonstrates once again that it was created with George Soros' money to support the State Department's long-standing anti-Israel policy. Various reports in the media indicate that JStreet sees encouraging State Dept and White House pressure on Israel to make concessions to Arab mass murderers as a main part of its mission.

The last case of corruption that we will now take up [but not necessarily the least] is the censorship by Yale University of a book published by the Yale Univ Press on the Muhammad Cartoons affair. A book about this affair ought to contain the cartoons too, so that readers know what is being talked about, right? Well, not at Yale or its Yale Univ Press. Martin Kramer suggests that Yale is trying to establish monetary relationships with Saudi Arabia and the oil rich Persian Gulf states. One potential Saudi contributor to Yale is Prince al-Waleed. We wouldn't want to insult our benefactors by publishing the cartoons that they didn't like, would we? So at Yale, academic standards go out the window, while money-grubbing comes in through the front door as Yale awaits its prince charming.

Of course, quite a few other American universities have already taken big bucks from rich Arabs to set up Muslim study centers and Islamic institutes and Middle Eastern studies centers and so forth, while allowing their Islamic benefactors/paymasters to set the terms for conduct and for research limits at these centers. The American university is already corrupt. Yale is not the first.
Nor the last.

And the Earth became corrupt and full of Hamas.