Writing for Campus Watch at American Thinker, Stephen Schwartz reports on a recent conference at UC Berkeley Law School in which “Islamophobia production” took center stage. It begins like so:
The exploitation of the University of California’s Bay Area law schools as a platform for Arab and Islamist propaganda continues. A convocation on “Litigating Palestine,” replete with extreme rhetoric against Israel, was held at Hastings Law School in San Francisco on March 25-26, 2011--without official endorsement by Hastings--and on April 20-21, an equally radical conference took place at UC Berkeley Law School. It was held in Boalt Hall and presented to the wider public via streaming video.
The Berkeley event was hosted by the University’s Center for Race and Gender (CRG) and titled, in the style of post-modern academia, “Islamophobia Production and Re-Defining Global ‘Security’ Agenda for the 21st Century.” Within CRG, the function appeared under the rubric of the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project, directed by Hatem Bazian, a senior lecturer in the department of Near Eastern studies. Conference publicity stated that the speeches “will be published in UC Berkeley’s Islamophobia Studies Journal, inaugural edition, Fall, 2011.”
. . . The heaviest hitters on the speakers’ list, with regard to their widespread public activities, were CAIR executive director Nihad Awad, Hamza Yusuf, and Hatem Bazian. The three appeared on an April 21, 2011, evening panel, which dealt with “Community Partnership” and was moderated by Munir Jiwa, director of the GTU Center for Islamic Studies.
