Muqtedar Khan | |
My latest article, which appears today at FrontPage Magazine, examines University of Delaware political scientist Muqtedar Khan’s four (4) reasons, given over a period of weeks, for his October 23 objection to appearing on a panel with Israel Defense Forces veteran Asaf Romirowsky.
In a move one would hope student groups nationwide might emulate, this past fall the College Republicans and College Democrats at the University of Delaware organized a panel discussion on “Anti-Americanism in the Middle East.” Participants for the October 24 panel were to include two UD political scientists, Muqtedar Khan and Stuart Kaufman, and a graduate student.
But the panel was ideologically imbalanced. Kahn is a nonresident senior fellow at the left-of-center Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, and Kaufman a former member of Bill Clinton’s National Security team. Both are on record as critics of American foreign policy in the region, and the graduate student was known to be sympathetic to their views.
So the students invited a fourth participant to offer a different perspective of the problem: Asaf Romirowsky, whose resume includes a stint at Campus Watch, a project of Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum, which defends American interests in the Middle East. A resident of nearby Philadelphia, Romirowsky could drive easily to Newark, Delaware, thereby keeping the logistics of his participation simple. Like most Israeli males (he holds joint American/Israeli citizenship), Romirowsky served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
