We Couldn’t Have Said it Better

“Academics in U.S. universities are far more radical in many ways than the people who run some of the Arab Muslim countries.”

William Jacobson, founder of the Legal Insurrection website and clinical professor of law at Cornell University, in a discussion with the Breitbart News Network about the impending vote by the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) on whether to adopt BDS as its official policy. Interview posted at SoundCloud, December 19, 2021. link to source

William Jacobson

“In the past decade, dhimmitude has become widespread. Normal kids at elite universities keep their heads down. Over the course of four years, this can become a subtle but real habit of obeisance, a condition of moral and spiritual surrender.”

R.R. Reno, editor of First Things, on why the widespread internalization of second-class status by non-activist students at elite universities makes them unattractive job candidates, and why he instead hires graduates of traditionally-oriented colleges or large state universities. “Why I Stopped Hiring Ivy League Graduates"; The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2021. link to source

R.R. Reno

“Middle Eastern Studies to a certain extent looks like the emperor’s new clothes: everybody knows the emperor is naked, but nobody will say it.”

Wang Xiyue, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and doctoral candidate at Princeton University who spent 40 months in an Iranian prison on false espionage charges, on the willful blindness of Middle East studies professors to the realities of life in the Middle East, including the brutality of the regime in Tehran. “‘Inform the World How Brutal this Regime Is': Scholar Detained for Three Years in Tehran Recounts Lessons from Captivity"; The Algemeiner, April 23, 2021. link to source

Xiyue Wang

“I expect Arab propagandists to spread such lies. I don’t expect the falsehoods to come from an academic center founded by a pro-Israel scholar and is funded in part by donations from pro-Israel members of the Philadelphia-area Jewish community.”

Moshe Phillips, national director of the U.S. division of the Zionist educational movement Herut, on the sponsorship by the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History at Temple University of an event featuring two critics of Israel speaking on alleged “increased state violence against Palestinians.” “Jewish Center at Temple University Shows Bias Against Israel"; Jewish Journal, April 14, 2021. link to source

Moshe Phillips

“Nothing I’d learned during my years in the ivory towers of academia had prepared me for the reality I encountered in an Iranian prison.”

Wang Xiyue, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and doctoral candidate at Princeton University who spent 40 months in an Iranian prison on false espionage charges, on how the Middle East studies establishment’s whitewashed view of Iran as a peace-seeking victim of American Orientalist imperialism allowed him to become a victim of Tehran’s corrupt, vicious regime. “What I Learned in An Iranian Prison,” The Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2021. link to source

Wang Xiyue

“The academic boycott of Israel is actually meant to isolate and stigmatize Jewish academics in America. It serves the aim of pushing Jewish academics out of shrinking disciplines, where Jews are believed to be ‘over-represented.’ That is how diehard supporters of the Palestinians find academic allies who have little interest in Palestine, in fields like American studies or English literature.”

Martin Kramer, professor of Middle Eastern history and founding president of Shalem College in Jerusalem, on the real motivations for the spread of the academic boycott against Israel. “The Unspoken Purpose of the Academic Boycott,” Israel Affairs 27, no. 1 (January 2021): 27-33. link to source

Martin Kramer

“Some of us came into history precisely to escape the passions of the moment, to gain the breadth of outlook that comes with a deeper historical perspective. We understand, as many of our contemporaries seem not to, that importing modern agendas into the study of the past makes us worse historians, less able to understand the past in its own terms.”

James Hankins, Professor of History at Harvard University, on the difficulties faced by history graduate students who resist the trendy methodologies and political ideologies that dominate the discipline. In “How to Renew Traditional Historical Studies in Graduate School"; the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, August 19, 2020. link to source

James Hankins

“I’m happy that the Maricopa Community College governing board has acknowledged the importance of the First Amendment and academic freedom, even into subjects that may be controversial — without that freedom of thought and inquiry, America just isn’t America anymore.”

Nicholas Damask, chair of political science at Scottsdale Community College in Arizona, on the support he has received in the face of a lawsuit brought by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) after a student objected to test questions on how Muslim terrorists are motivated by Islam. Caleb Parke, “Arizona Professor Sued for Including Questions about ‘Islamic Terrorism’ on a test"; Fox News, July 16, 2020. link to source

Nicholas Damask

“The campus zealotry of Students for Justice in Palestine is hardly a spontaneous youthful expression of outrage funded by pocket money. Their activities include costly defamatory installations of so-called apartheid walls, checkpoints, die-ins, chants and hostile invasions of classrooms and meetings, and thuggish disruptions of visiting speakers. Its founder, Hatem Bazian, is a lecturer in ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley.”

Cynthia Ozick, American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, on the leading role of professors and other thinkers and writers in fomenting anti-Semitism over the centuries; in “Anti-Semitism and the Intellectuals"; the Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2020. link to source

Cynthia Ozick

"[T]he particular funding program at issue provides funding for Mideast studies to promote knowledge of the Middle East to serve U.S. foreign policy objectives. As a result of this mandate, the relevant funding law requires universities to pledge that their programs will be balanced. In other words, monitoring balance is not some bizarre or aggressive anti-academic freedom initiative, but just enforcing the law, –a law, admittedly, that previous administrations failed to enforce.”

David Bernstein, a professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, responding to criticism of President Trump’s executive order that could impact Title VI funding for Middle East studies programs; Reason Magazine, December 12, 2019. link to source

David Bernstein