“Islamophobia studies” is the latest addition to the academic pantheon of politicized, esoteric, and divisive “studies” whose purpose is to censor criticism of differing views by stigmatizing critics as racist or clinically insane. The University of California, Berkeley’s recent Sixth Annual International Islamophobia Conference—organized by the Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project (IRDP)—was titled, “The State of the Islamophobia Studies Field.” The problem is this “field” doesn’t yet formally exist in the U.S., but that didn’t stop speakers from engaging in victimology, academic jargon, and anti-Western rhetoric. Campus Watch West Coast representative Cinnamon Stillwell and contributor Rima Greene provide the details, and the latest CW research, at Jihad Watch:
The audience, including a number of women in hijabs (headscarves), ranged from twenty to fifty students and faculty members. Because the conference was preempted by another event, it had to shift between two venues. Adding to the confusion, the schedule was made available online only days before. While IRDP director and Near Eastern studies lecturer Hatem Bazian bragged at the outset that the conference livestream had garnered “seven thousand” viewers in 2014, this year, visual and audio problems often rendered it unwatchable.
In his introduction, Bazian apologized for these mishaps before launching into a glowing report about the alleged state of “Islamophobia studies,” which, according to the IRDP website, “has witnessed rapid expansion in the past fifteen years.” He claimed that the field had “come of age” in that there is “no longer . . . a debate over whether we should use the term or not” or if “it is real or not,” except for “those who really don’t want to confront Islamophobia” or “don’t want to deal with the reality of what has taken place.”
