Middle East Studies and the Boogie Man

Amid all the hysteria that has taken over American academia in the wake of the Trump election, the Middle East studies departments are in full-blown panic. Cinnamon Stillwell and Michael Lumish highlight some of the more extreme histrionics featuring some pretty familiar names to Fousesquawk readers.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/12/trump_terror_within_middle_east_studies.html

Juan Cole- “He declared 2016 to be “the equivalent of a red scare, only now it is a Muslim scare,” and warned of the coming “nativism” and, ludicrously, “the third big wave of the Klu [sic] Klux Klan.”

This is the guy who told a California State University Long Beachaudience a couple of years back that David Cameron was a racist for informing the British public that some 400 British Muslims had joined ISIS, “a minuscule number” according to Juano. If that is minuscule, what did Juano have to say about the 19 hijackers of 9-11? Incredibly, this boob runs a website called, “Informed Comment”, an echo chamber of like-minded opinions where dissenting comments are not welcome or posted.

But if Juano thinks the KKK is headed for a new wave of popularity in this country just because Trump has been elected, he has been smoking his “informed” socks. For years, it has been speculated that most KKK members are FBI snitches.

Reza Aslan- I have seen this smug character speak twice, first at UCLA when he appeared with the smooth-talking would-be Ground Zero mosque entrepreneur Faisal Abdul Rauf and later at UC Riverside, where he spoke about another boogie man, Islamophobia. Of course, Aslan could care less about Christians in the Middle East who have to explain to their kids why their neighbors are trying to kill them and why they are blowing up their churches-like just this week in Cairo (25 dead). On this speaking occasion (in answer to my question), Rauf dismissed any Christians in the Middle East who held Islamophobic feelings over these matters and refused to give them a pass.

Omid Safi- Remember the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris? Here is what Safi had to say about that. Imagine Muslims had been the victims in a shooting spree by Islamophobes. (When has that ever happened?) Do you think Safi would have written such an article in response?

Hamid Dabashi-Here is what Dabashi wrote about 9-11:

“Compared to the scale of death and destruction that the US has unleashed on major cities in Afghanistan and Iraq, and later Bashar al-Assad and his nemesis have visited upon Syria, the destruction of those two towers now appears as entirely negligible, even remembering them perhaps an insult to the memories of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings maimed and murdered and turned into hopeless refugees in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Syria.”

Hatem Bazian- Any discussion of pure hypocrisy must begin and end with Bazian. Not only did he call for an intifada in the US in 2004, he also has reportedly quoted the infamous hadith of hate that talks about the End of Days when the Jews hide behind trees and the trees call out, “Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.” He also reportedly suggested that a college audience count the number of buildings on campus with Jewish names on them.This is the man who co-founded the brown shirt organization, Students for Justice in Palestine. Ever since their founding, SJP has accumulated a long history of bullying, disruption and intimidation against Jewish students on campuses across the country. And yet, Bazian has the chutzpah to also be the co-founder of the “Islamophobia Research and Documentation Center” at UC Berkeley, an impressive name that conjures up images of the Holocaust Museum until you realize that it occupies a broom closet in room 638 of Barrows Hall. This is also the sponsor of a controversial (and one-sided) course on “Israeli Settlerism”, which is being taught by a student at UCB-who is also a member of SJP.

These professors have one thing in common: They are all activists who display selective outrage and a high degree of hypocrisy. Where is all the persecution, death and destruction that is done by “Islamophobes”? Death and destruction is the handiwork of fundamentalist Muslims. “Islamophobes” are those that dare speak out about it.

See more on this Topic
George Washington University’s Failure to Remove MESA from Its Middle East Studies Program Shows a Continued Tolerance for the Promotion of Terrorism
One Columbia Professor Touted in a Federal Grant Application Gave a Talk Called ‘On Zionism and Jewish Supremacy’