UC Berkeley’s annual “Islamophobia” conference is a reliable source of politicization, hysteria, academic jargon, and anti-Western rhetoric. In the latest Campus Watch research, CW contributor Rima Greene and I report on this year’s activities, which included a promise from conference convener Hatem Bazian to create a new field called “Islamophobia studies.” Part One of our coverage appears today at Frontpage Magazine:
What’s an “Islamophobia"-promoting academic to do when there simply aren’t enough hate crimes to sustain the mythical narrative that Muslim-Americans are persecuted for their religion? The Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project (IRDP) at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Race & Gender came up with a brilliant idea for this spring’s Fifth Annual International Islamophobia Conference: they invented a thought crime called “latent Islamophobia.”
According to the conference description and “inspired by [the late Columbia professor] Edward Said’s work on Orientalism,” “Islamophobia” can be broken into two categories: latent and manifest.
