The first day of the conference brought in approximately eighty people at its peak, including a number of women in hijab (head scarf), typing furiously on laptops. Others sported keffiyehs and dreadlocks; a smattering of Arabic and French could be heard; and a scruffy, bearded fellow wandered around with what appeared to be a journal under his arm, Historicizing Anti-Semitism, that one suspects is not exactly kosher. It was just another day in Berkeley.

Hatem Bazian, IRDP director, Near Eastern studies senior lecturer, and conference convener started out by apologizing for the forty-minute delay in kicking off the event. He chalked it up to “Muslim Time”—a reference to the popular phrase among African-Americans, “Colored People’s Time”—and joked that “Swiss watches run forward, but Muslim watches run backward.” He thanked the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)—an Islamist organization posing as a defender of civil rights— for its participation in the conference (Zahra Billoo, CAIR Northern California Executive Director, spoke the next day) and for partnering with CRG to produce the 2011 report, “Same Hate, New Target: Islamophobia and Its Impact in the United States”—a report that falsely accuses a number of public figures of perpetrating “Islamophobia.” Bazian also thanked “individuals who send us hate mail” for demonstrating “the need for this conference,” about which, he claimed, there had been “considerable chatter,” including “wild” and “threatening” statements. All this “despite the fact that we have the first Muslim president,” he added, chuckling. This sarcastic reference to the American public’s perception of Barack Obama’s Muslim background would be repeated throughout the day as incontrovertible evidence of “Islamophobia.”

Tariq Ramadan, the controversial Oxford University professor of contemporary Islamic studies and grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna, demonstrated a capacity for what his critics have described as doublespeak with his keynote speech. Titled, “A Global Perspective on Constructing Muslim Otherness,” Ramadan’s talk was rife with contradiction. At one point, he acknowledged that the “victim mentality” is counterproductive for Muslims and other minorities:

People are relying on fear, mistrust, [and] nurturing the victim mentality. You can see this among Blacks, Latinos, [and] Muslims. Sometimes they play the victims. Victims are talking to each other. We are the victims of your colonization, legal colonization. It’s the way you accept the role given by the dominant: you become the victim.   

Yet pushing victimhood was the principal purpose of the conference. Moreover, Ramadan contributed to that narrative by implying that assimilation—the antidote to the balkanization caused by nurturing a victim mentality—was impossible in the U.S.:

At the end of the day, you might be a Muslim-American, Black, Latino, but not really. Us versus them. . . . After four generations, you are Muslim with an American background.

Ramadan admitted that something other than mere bigotry might be at the heart of what’s been disingenuously dubbed “Islamophobia”:

[S]ome of them are very sincere when it comes to being scared of the Muslim presence. . . . Try to understand the logic that is behind the whole thing . . . there is a great deal of mistrust towards our intentions as Muslims. We should go beyond the discussion of ‘we are discriminated’ towards a more comprehensive approach. . . . People can be genuinely scared; we have to face this.

He then added:

We have to get rid of this idea that the world is divided between the West and Islam. Instead of speaking about peace and living together, we respond with a discourse that is exactly the same.

But he went on to do just that, accusing both Republicans and Democrats of collusion—although he allowed that “some are less Islamophobic than others”—and claiming that “the people who are pushing it [are] the Tea Party and the Neocons.” Given that the Tea Party has focused exclusively on economic issues and that Neoconservatism is hardly a political force to be reckoned with of late, Ramadan’s rhetoric was hopelessly out of touch.

Ramadan eventually revealed why so many find him so dangerous by hinting at a belief in conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks and the Mohamed Merah shootings in Toulouse, France, which resulted in the deaths of three soldiers, a rabbi, and three children at a Jewish school. Acknowledging that “there is a new anti-Semitism in France, which is coming from Arabs and Muslims,” he then accused “strong Zionist groups” of complicity for somehow “nurturing this kind of racism.” As he put it:

I know about 9/11, but I still have some questions about behind the scenes, the way it was used . . . I still have questions about what happened in France [Toulouse]. We should try to understand the alliances we find behind old enemies.

To imply that “Zionists”  are benefiting from atrocities against Jews and others goes beyond the realm of conspiracy theory into classical anti-Semitism.

Leftist and Islamic supremacist thugs are planning to protest the Islamic Apartheid Conference that the David Horowitz Freedom Center is sponsoring at Temple University Monday. Hosted by Students for Intellectual Freedom, the Conference will feature Pamela Geller, Nonie Darwish, Simon Deng and me. In reporting on the coming protests, however, the Philadelphia City Paper noted only that “two of America’s most high-profile anti-Muslim bigots” will be speaking – Geller and me – and doesn’t mention Darwish or Deng even once. The omission was telling, revealing the hypocrisy of the protests as a whole.

Nonie Darwish is an ex-Muslim who grew up learning hatred for Infidels in a Muslim school in Gaza. Simon Deng is a South Sudanese Christian who was held as a slave by Muslim captors for several years. Both of them know Islamic apartheid firsthand, and have been its victims. The Leftists at the City Paper therefore could do nothing but omit them from their story attacking the Conference, for to include them would in itself have been to reveal the reality of what they’re denying: Islamic apartheid.

The City Paper’s story focuses on Pamela Geller, retailing hard-Left talking points against her consisting entirely of distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsehoods about things she has said and positions she has taken. Its objection to the Conference appears to be that Geller, and apparently therefore also the Conference as a whole, is “anti-Muslim.”

The irony is thick: organizing the protests are Occupy Temple, the International Socialist Organization, Students for Justice in Palestine, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and other hard-Left community and student organizations, none of which have ever raised the slightest objection to Temple’s Israeli Apartheid Week. Nor would any of them characterize the very idea of Israeli Apartheid Week as anti-Semitic, although anti-Semitism is rife at such events (and our event will not actually be “anti-Muslim” at all). The chief difference, however, between Israeli Apartheid Week and our Islamic Apartheid Conference is simply that there really is Islamic apartheid, but there is no Israeli apartheid.

In Israel, Arab citizens are represented in Knesset and enjoy full legal equality. The very idea of “Israeli Apartheid”  is an attempt to stigmatize, and ultimately destroy, Israel’s efforts to defend itself. Islamic Apartheid, however, is a very different matter. Is it “anti-Muslim” to point out that Islamic law mandates institutionalized discrimination against women? Muslim women are the first victims of Islamic law’s denial of basic rights for women; is it “anti-Muslim” to speak out for them and say that as human beings they deserve better?

Women are greatly burdened in many Muslim countries. Across the Islamic world, they endure restrictions on their movements, their marital options, their professional opportunities, and more. In Kuwait and elsewhere, women cannot vote or hold office. According to Amnesty International, in Saudi Arabia “women…who walk unaccompanied, or are in the company of a man who is neither their husband nor a close relative, are at risk of arrest on suspicion of prostitution or other ‘moral’ offences.”

The oppression of women in Muslim lands is not an accident. The proposition that, as the Qur’an says, “men have a status above women” (2:228) is all-pervasive in the Islamic world. Aisha, the most beloved of the Muslim prophet Muhammad’s many wives, admonished women in no uncertain terms to submit: “O womenfolk, if you knew the rights that your husbands have over you, every one of you would wipe the dust from her husband’s feet with her face.”

The oppression of women sanctioned by the teachings of Islam, and often by its holy book, manifests itself in innumerable ways. Among its most notorious are female genital mutilation, which an Islamic legal manual approved by Cairo’s prestigious al-Azhar University states is required “for both men and women.” Then there is wife-beating, sanctioned by nothing less than the Qur’an itself, which tells men to “beat” women from whom they “fear disobedience” (4:34). The Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences has determined that over ninety percent of Pakistani wives have been struck, beaten, or abused sexually — for offenses on the order of cooking an unsatisfactory meal. Others were punished for failing to give birth to a male child. Dominating their women by violence is a prerogative Muslim men cling to tenaciously. In Spring 2005, when the East African nation of Chad tried to institute a new family law that would outlaw wife beating, Muslim clerics led resistance to the measure as un-Islamic.

There is much more, including the phenomenon of honor killing. It is no accident or coincidence that Muslims commit 91 percent of honor killings worldwide. A manual of Islamic law says that “retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.” However, “not subject to retaliation” is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring” (‘Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2). In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law.

“Let me emphasize that Harvard University and the Harvard Kennedy School in no way endorse or support the apparent position of the student organizers or any participants. We would never take a position on specific policy solutions to achieving peace in this region, and certainly would not endorse any policy that some argue could lead to the elimination of the Jewish State of Israel.”

But wait! “…not endorse any policy that some argue could lead to the elimination of the Jewish State of Israel?”  How can Dean Ellwood make such a statement?  Is he not aware of Harvard’s Middle East Outreach Center?

The center’s stated mission is to promote “a critical understanding of the diversity of the Middle East region;” but its activities and its director display a dogmatic adherence to the polemical, often counter-factual Palestinian version of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Its director, Paul Beran, is an activist in the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement; and its reading list favors anti-Zionist writings of such polemicists as Edward Said and Ilan Pappe. It promotes the anti-Israel propaganda film “Occupation 101,” which features the one-sided and often mendacious rants of well known anti-Israel personalities such as Dr. Noam Chomsky and Richard Falk.  Moreover, Center speakers on the Arab‑Israeli conflict have been accused of focusing singularly on a Palestinian perspective while dismissing or ignoring the Israeli position.

Beran promotes the BDS movement when he lectures, and has forged bonds   between his outreach center and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), an activist group designated by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as one of the ten most anti-Israel organizations in the USA.

He has promoted the anti-Semitic lie of Jewish or Israeli control of the American Government, urged Harvard to consider former Israeli Chief of Staff Dan Halutz a war criminal, and when speaking to a Presbyterian audience compared Israel’s sovereignty over the West Bank to the Roman occupation of Judea at the turn of the millennium, asking his Christian audience: “How would Joseph and Mary get to Bethlehem with the now 25-foot high Separation Wall in their way?”

The Center’s activities[i] include educational outreach to local Boston high schools, and one of the texts used by the Center in high school outreach programs is The Arab World Studies Notebook, a seriously outdated text (last revised in 1998) which according to numerous studies[ii] is replete with factual errors and misrepresentations about Middle East history.  It  “….frequently steps over the line from teaching about (the Muslim) religion to….proselytizing for it,” and it uses polemical, one-sided language and even outright lies (such as falsely accusing Israeli soldiers of murdering Arab women and children in cold blood) to condemn Israel and depict it as a genocidal aggressor state, in order to generate anti-Israel sentiment in its high school audiences.

When challenged about the book’s egregious claim that indigenous North American Algonquins were converted to Islam by Muslim trans-oceanic voyagers to the New World five centuries before Columbus, the authors offered no defense or rebuttal.  They quietly removed the passages from the textbook.

Massachusetts education officials were shocked by the Center’s program and by its textbook, and denounced it as an attempt to foist a “manipulative” and “distorted” political agenda on unsuspecting teachers.

And “manipulative and distorted” don’t even begin to describe the Center’s programs on the Israel-Arab conflict.  Director Beran’s anti-Israel animus is well documented, as is his wife’s, Hilary Rantisi, a Palestinian-American who serves as director of the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School.  She has been active with the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, a Palestinian Christian Arab group operating in the West Bank that preaches the demonization of Israel to Christian audiences world-wide and compares Israel’s defensive actions against Arab terrorism to Nazi Germany’s oppression and slaughter of Jews.

The organizers promised a conference that would explore “the possible contours of a one-state solution and the challenges that stand in the way of its realization.”    But a variety of critics defined the conference as an anti-Israel hate-fest on the basis of its presenters, its sponsors (including notoriously anti-Israel groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Committee, Justice for Palestine, the Palestine Caucus, the Arab Caucus, the Progressive Caucus, and the Alliance for Justice in the Middle East), and its content.

Not surprisingly, controversy erupted well in advance of the conference itself. Alan Dershowitz, a tenured professor at Harvard Law School, condemned the conference as a genuine hate-fest because “virtually all of the speakers oppose Israel’s existence.” He described the call for a single-state solution as “a euphemism for ending the existence of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people…. The “one-state” solution is not ‘the alternative for Israel. It is the alternative to Israel.’”

Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) called on Harvard to cancel the forum: “I want to condemn in the strongest possible terms Harvard’s sponsorship of a conference exploring a ‘one-state solution’ to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. This is dangerous thinking that gives comfort to Israel’s enemies who view the ‘one-state solution’ as a euphemism for eliminating Israel as a Jewish state. Harvard may have a right to do this, but that doesn’t make it right to do it. The University should cancel this conference.”

Professor Richard Cravatts, president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), summed it up best:

A conference whose goal is to demonize and delegitimize Israel is not an academic enterprise. It is propaganda parading as scholarship, and violates not only one of the basic precepts of scholarship but also the spirit of the Kennedy School, which was conceived as a place where students could debate, with academic integrity, reason, and insight, the important issues facing decision makers.

The one-state solution, far from a rational plan for Palestinian statehood, actually proposes to do with votes and demography the same thing that Arab armies have themselves failed to do for the past 64 years.

It is thus no surprise that the participants at this conference were the usual suspects of the hate-Israel crowd.

Ilan Pappé, a notorious anti-Israel Israeli faux-historian, was one of the keynote speakers; despite the fact that he has been exposed as inventing history and distorting facts to fit his personal anti-Zionist ideology. As he himself has said, “I care less about veracity because I have an agenda to advance.”

The other keynote speaker, Ali Abunimah, co-founder of Electronic Intifada and author of the 2006 book “One Country, a Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse,” has made a career of Israel bashing.

Another participant for whom facts are irrelevant is Eve Spangler, who routinely accuses Israel of “genocide, apartheid, and sociocide.”  Elsewhere she has declared that “there is no ‘real’ history, only competing narratives.” So much for objective scholarship.

Another, Diana Buttu, a former legal adviser to the PLO, simply makes stuff up to demonize Israel and minimize the heinousness of terrorism.  She has repeatedly claimed, in stark contradiction to the oft video-taped explosions and destruction caused by qassams, that none of the almost 12,000 rockets and mortars that Hamas has rained down on Israeli towns “actually [had] an explosive head on them.” According to her, Hamas is just pretending to kill Israelis.

Among Harvard faculty and affiliate staff presenting at the conference were:

• Stephen Walt: author of the ferociously anti-Israel and factually shoddy The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which many consider an anti-Semitic tract. Ironically, he was the only speaker at the conference to acknowledge the possibility of a two-state solution.
• Duncan Kennedy: Harvard  professor of law who has leveled extreme, factually inaccurate charges against Israel and calls for boycott and divestment.
• Timothy McCarthy: lecturer at the Carr Center at the Kennedy School and a member of the board of advisors of Freedom Forward, a pro-Palestinian, activist group.
• Naor Ben-Yahoyada: a visiting lecturer at Harvard.  In 2007 he was part of a campaign that distributed wanted posters for Israel’s chief of staff, Dan Halutz, calling him a war criminal, and in 2009 he spoke at an Israel Apartheid Week event in Rhode Island.

In response to the criticism, the Weatherhead Center and the Carr Center for Human Right removed their sponsorships; but the Kennedy School logo remained. This should come as no surprise. The Kennedy School of Government, with its sharply skewed Middle East Initiative program; the university’s virulently anti-Israel Center for Middle Eastern Studies and affiliated Outreach Center[1]; the various anti-Israel programs and personalities at the Weatherhead Center, at the Carr Center for Human Rights and in other departments — all have in recent years promoted bigoted attacks against the Jewish state.

The conundrum of an orthodox rabbi and Israeli MKs at the Doha hate-fest is a topic for another essay, as is the thoroughly anti-Israel speech of an American self-proclaimed State Department representative. For now it is illuminating to focus on the broader content and outcomes of the conference itself.

The fundamental goal of the conference, as described on its website, was to legitimize the establishment of Jerusalem as the capital of the independent, sovereign Arab state of “Palestine” within Israel’s current borders.  To accomplish this goal the conference sought to legitimize, by the political and moral stature of its attendees and participants, its demand at the UN Security Council for a UN resolution to form an international commission to investigate the actions taken by Israel since 1967 to erase Jerusalem’s Islamic and Arab identity.

To that end, all but one participant was focused on delegitimizing Israel, denouncing its existence within any borders and denying thousands of years of Jewish history.  The speakers talked about Jerusalem as if Jewish history did not exist or was a fraud — as if all Jewish claims in the city were just a tactic to dispossess Palestinians.  The conference, then, sought to lend credibility to the latest strategy in the Arab political and propaganda war against Israel: the delegitimization of Israel’s history and the creation of a fictitious “Palestinian” history to replace it, thus eviscerating any Jewish claims to an historical and religious attachment to the Land of Israel.

There were two entities that emerged victorious from the conference.  Not surprisingly, one was the Palestinian Authority — but the other was Israel.

The Palestinian victory was the “Doha Declaration on the International Conference for Defense of Jerusalem” at the conclusion of the conference.  The declaration called upon the UN to create the commission described above; and upon all Muslim states to contribute to a “historic global mobilization for the expression of international solidarity with the Palestinian people in Jerusalem” and for support of their legitimate rights and to identify and confront illegal Israeli efforts to “judaize” (sic) the city; and upon “the international powers who remain silent” towards Israeli violations to assume their responsibility and compel Israel to implement all UN resolutions relevant to Jerusalem; and upon the UN and other international entities to stop Israeli illegal excavations and archaeological explorations which distort the “true history” of the site; and upon UNESCO to force Israel to stop its unilateral policies for imposing a fait accompli in Jerusalem, including the immediate cessation of all settlement activities, the removal of the “apartheid wall,” the preservation of Islamic and Christian sanctities, and to halt Judaization (sic) schemes.

In short, the Doha Declaration demands that the Muslim world compel the UN to impose upon Israel the demands that the Muslim world maintains on behalf of the Palestinians but has not itself been able to impose despite 65 years of war, terrorism, black propaganda, hate education for its youth, rejectionism, and an endless, relentless diatribe of genocide and rhetoric of annihilation by nuclear or political means.  Given the Arab oil sheikhdoms’ influence at the UN, such a commission as envisioned in the Doha Declaration is likely to be forthcoming in the near future.

Harvard University is a school of rich tradition. And in a few days it will be restoring a great Harvard tradition dating back to the 1930s: the tradition of hosting Nazis and violent anti-Semites on campus seeking the mass murder of Jews.

Harvard is to hold a pseudo-academic conference devoted to calls for Israel’s extermination. This “academic conference” will be little more than a genteel campus pogrom. Misnamed the “One State Conference,” it will definitely not have any discussion of any “one-state solution” under which all of Western “Palestine” remains one single Jewish state, while “Palestinians” unhappy about living there as a political minority move to one of the 22 Arab states. When the conference organizers and speakers talk about a “one-state solution,” what they mean is a Rwanda solution, a final one, to the “Jewish Problem” of the Middle East. They want Israel annihilated and replaced by a “bi-national” state with an Islamist Arab majority in control. And it does not take a great imagination to understand just how Jews will fare under such a “solution.”

Naturally, Harvard is defending this campus atrocity with the usual protestations about academic freedom and freedom of speech. The administrators who justify such open and violent bigotry in the guise of an academic conference are the very same people who never seem to express any objections when campus hooligans disrupt and harass talks by Israeli diplomats and rallies by Jewish students. Harvard administrators would be the first ones in the Ivy League to shut down as “hate speech” any “conference” devoted to proving that black people have lower IQs than others, that called for evicting all illegal Hispanics from the nation, or that promoted the view that homosexuality is a mental disorder.

In any case, a brief review of pedigrees of the participants in this “conference” illustrates just how clearly this is to be nothing more than a bash-the-Jews campus crusade.

The “star” of the Harvard pogrom will be Ilan Pappe, who is arguably the most thoroughly discredited pseudo-academic on the planet. Pappe is a notorious fabricator, someone who claims proudly that facts and truth are of no importance. “Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truthseekers,” the French newspaper Le Soir, has cited Pappe as saying.

Pappe is an expatriate Israeli who devoted one of his “books” to his sons with the wish that they may grow up in a world without Israel. His own University of Exeter recently chastised him for his infamous habit of playing fast and loose with facts. Pappe is best known as a fulltime anti-Israel propagandist who has done more than any other anti-Israel Israeli to promote the moral equivalence of “Nakba denial” with Holocaust denial. (For those who are unaware, “Nakba,” meaning “catastrophe,” is the term Arabs use to refer to Israel’s birth.) He is a “new historian” in the sense of pseudo-historian. His mission in life is to invent an imaginary Palestinian historic “narrative.” Nearly all those beating the “Nakba” drum today cite Pappe and his books about the supposed “ethnic cleansing” of Arabs by Israel in its war of independence.

Pappe was a lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa, but moved to resume a pseudo-academic propagandist position at the University of Exeter in the UK. Even other anti-Zionists have repudiated Pappe as a liar and fabricator. He openly calls for Israel to be exterminated and endorses Hamas terrorism. He considers Noam Chomsky insufficiently anti-Israel.

Pappe, who ran for the parliament in Israel on the slate of the Stalinist communist party and played a central role in fomenting boycotts of Israel in the UK and elsewhere, was also the central figure in the now infamous “Tantura Affair.” In this incident, Pappe coached a graduate student of his into inventing a non-existent “massacre” of Arabs by the Hagana Jewish militia (Alexandroni Brigade) in Tantura, south of Haifa, a “massacre” that Pappe claims took place in 1948. Not a shred of any evidence for any such “massacre” exists. Arab and other journalists who were present at the time of the battle that took place in Tantura reported no massacre. Arabs living in the town at the time confirmed that a battle did occur, but that after the battle the Jewish militiamen aided and assisted the townspeople, not massacring anyone. The graduate student in question was sued for libel by the veterans of the Hagana militia. He later admitted in court with his lawyer present that the entire massacre was an invention.

No matter – Pappe roams the world and continues to spread the lie about the imaginary Tantura “massacre,” a lie that has found its way into nearly every anti-Semitic web site and Neo-Nazi magazine on Earth, and even a handful of otherwise respectable mainstream journalists foolishly rely upon him. Pappe has lied about practically everything else, including about being “persecuted” by his own university in Israel. In fact, Pappe was never fired for his fraud and fabrication by the University of Haifa, although he should have been. (Some wags even suggested the university should be boycotted for not firing Pappe.) That did not stop Pappe from waving his stigmata as a “victim of Zionism” before the European anti-Semites promoting “divestment” from Israel. His recruitment by the University of Exeter proves how indifferent that school is to scholarly standards. His coming appearance as the star of the Harvard academic pogrom shows that things are not much better there.

While Pappe may be the most notorious fabricator at Harvard’s Destroy Israel Conference, he is hardly the only one. A close runner-up will be Stephen M. Walt, who – along with his sidekick John Mearsheimer – is best known for proliferating medieval “theories” about a grand Jewish cabal plotting to control the world. Walt and Mearsheimer spin yarns about the imaginary power of the “Jewish lobby” that sound very much like German propaganda from the 1930s. It would be an exaggeration to say that there is no Israel lobby whatsoever in the United States, but only a small exaggeration. The “Israel lobby” does not come up to the pinky toes in terms of the power of the farm lobby and the teachers union lobby. Walt’s partner Mearsheimer has been in the news the past few weeks for endorsing and celebrating a notoriously deranged British Israel-born Holocaust denier, Gilad Atzmon. Walt also defends Mearsheimer’s choice of Nazi chums on his own personal blog.

Reprinted from CarolineGlick.com.

I recently received an e-mail alert from CAMERA that my alma mater, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government is hosting a two-day conference which essentially begins with the proposition that Israel has no right to exist. This isn’t surprising. After all, the Kennedy School is home to my old professor Steve Walt. No one there batted a lash when he co-published his updated version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with University of Chicago’s John Mearshimer.

Not only did Walt suffer no recrimination from his colleagues at Harvard when he first emerged a professional Jew basher.  He suffered no recrimination when he used the controversy surrounding his book into a means of transforming himself into a celebrity Israel basher.

As I wrote in my recent column about mainstreaming Jew hatred, Walt and Mearshimer’s book has enabled anti-Semites to emerge from under the rocks where they had been hiding and proudly announce that it is reasonable to discriminate against the Jewish people and side either actively or passively with those like the Iranian regime and the Sunni jihadists from Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood who openly call for the annihilation of the Jewish state and the Jewish people.

Two thoughts on the Harvard conference.

Consider the long list of “professors” who will be speaking at the conference.

My sense is that the reason the Holocaust was more successful in killing Jews on a genocidal scale than say the Russian czars’ pogroms is because the Holocaust was fuelled from above – from elitist anti-Semitism and elitist xenophobia. It wasn’t the feudal lords who  organized the murder machine. Those lords just let their Cossacks murder couple hundred Jews to get their bloodlust satisfied for the year. Most of the surviving Jews were permitted to pack their suitcases and run away.

The Holocaust was different. It wasn’t the peasant class or their landed gentry lords that instigated the crime. And the Holocaust wasn’t perpetrated principally to satisfy their taste for Jewish blood.

In the decades before the Holocaust, an evil wind blew through academia and other elite quarters throughout the Western world. The doctrines of race and eugenics became all the rage of the anointed intellectuals. Even an otherwise liberal thinker like Oliver Wendell Holmes was drawn to the fashionable concept of killing mentally disabled in the name of eugenics.

These doctrines gave the German intellectuals the philosophical underpinning for their so-called “anti-Semitism.” That itself was a pseudo-scientific term for regular old Jew hating just like “anti-Zionism” is a progressive, politically correct term for regular old Jew hating today. That is, anti-Semitism was an elitist way of masking intolerance, even genocidal intolerance for Jews and making it socially acceptable to seek our annihilation.

And this is the precise function that the term anti-Zionism serves today.

The worker bees of Europe in the mid-20th century had been marinated in Christian Jew hatred for centuries. But they were mere commoners. They would never have made an Auschwitz or held a Wanssee Conference, but they were more than willing to fill Jewish babies with lead when given a chance. And the German intellectuals and their counterparts from Boston to Paris to London gave them the intellectual foundation of racism to kill Jews on a scale they could never have dreamed possible.

Likewise, today’s crop of corrupt intellectuals of the Walt and Mearshimer variety with all their allies in academia and the media and the blogosphere and politics are seeking to delegitimize Israel – the collective Jew — intellectually. Like the work of the eugenics champions of the late 19th and early 20th century, their work will provide Muslim Jew haters with the political leeway to murder Jews on a scale they could never have dreamed possible. Hence you’ll never find a so-called “anti-Zionist” like Walt lose sleep over the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, but rather over the prospect of Israel preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

There is no idea so hateful or useless that some university somewhere won’t hold a conference on it. The latest example of this unfortunate truism is the recently announced “Israel/Palestine and the One-State Conference” scheduled for early March at the Harvard Kennedy School. Nineteen speakers and ten panels will spend two days explaining why “’two-states for two peoples’ is no longer a viable option for Israel/Palestine,” as the organizers assert, and discussing a “solution” to the Israeli-Arab crisis that has absolutely no chance of ever being implemented.

The adherents of this veiled assault on Israel argue that the “two-state solution,” “in which Israel is secure and the Palestinians have sovereignty,” as President Obama told Time magazine, has been a failure. Of course, the two-state solution has failed because since 1948, the first time Arabs rejected a Palestinian state, a critical mass of Palestinian Arabs have wanted something more than sovereignty: they want Israel destroyed and her land possessed by Arabs from “the river to the sea,” as PLO chief Yasser Arafat used to say. The one-state solution, which envisions a single nation comprising Arabs and Jews under a single government, is a way to achieve the same aim. Such a state would obviously require the end of Israel’s Jewish identity, and would result in an Arabic demographic explosion that in any kind of representative government would marginalize Jews. Moreover, we can see the most likely sort of regime that would rule the “one state” by looking next door at Egypt, where Islamists are now in control and relations with Israel have deteriorated. Whatever the result, such a state would not resemble the liberal democracy of Israel today.

Perhaps the conference will address issues like Arab intransigence, genocidal anti-Semitism, and terrorist violence, but judging from some of the speakers, such balance seems unlikely. Among the usual obscure academics and Palestinian activists camouflaged as scholars, one finds anti-Israel luminaries like Stephen M. Walt, who along with John Mearshimer in 2007 published The Israel Lobby, an academic recycling of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in which nefarious American Jews secretly control U.S. foreign policy in service to their Zionist puppet-masters. Even more suggestive of the conference’s bias is the presence of Ilan Pappé, whose scholarly malfeasance got him cashiered from Haifa University over his involvement in a student’s master’s thesis that fabricated an Israeli massacre of Palestinians. Such an episode will surprise no one familiar with Pappé’s own work, which as historian Efraim Karsh has written, displays a “consistent resort to factual misrepresentation, distortion, and outright falsehood.” Pappé is clearly an ideologue and propagandist, as he frankly admits: he sneers at “objectivity,” professes that he is “not as interested in what happened as in how people see what’s happened,” and crows that “my ideology influences my historical writings.” That such a travesty of the profession of history is invited to speak at a prestigious university testifies to how intellectually and morally corrupt the American academy has become.

This rather loose attitude towards evidence and fact embraced by Pappé reveals itself as well in the on-line descriptions of the panel topics, where one finds libels such as references to “the original 700,000 [Arabs] who were ethnically cleansed from Palestine in 1948 and 1967,” moral cowardice in phrases such as “a great deal of violence has isolated the two peoples from one another,” and the de rigueur question-begging epithet: “How can justice for the victims of racism or violence be achieved?” You get the picture: racist Israelis who ethnically cleansed Arabs from their homeland and incited a “cycle of violence” need to abandon their Jewish identity and their ancestral lands in order to resolve a bloody conflict.

The Kennedy School conference, then, is a propaganda exercise the effect of which is to further the Palestinian Arab “phases” strategy for destroying Israel. In this regard, history provides an interesting parallel to the way the Arabs have manipulated Westerners and obscured their true aim, the destruction of Israel. In 1938, Hitler began fulfilling his plan to create a racial German empire, one that also was put into place by “phases.” Just as the Middle East regimes today claim that their hostility to Israel results from the maltreatment of the Palestinians, who have been dispossessed of their homeland by an oppressive invader, Hitler justified his aggression against Czechoslovakia as in fact the liberation of his fellow Germans from an alien government oppressing them and violating their rights. Thus Hitler’s pretext that national and ethnic self-determination for the Sudeten Germans, necessary because of the Czechs’ “brutal treatment of mothers and children of German blood,” as Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels put it, was the reason he was interfering in Czechoslovakia.

This weekend I’ll be participating in the Is the (Real) News Dead? International Conference at Pepperdine University in Malibu.

The conference is being put on by American Freedom Alliance and the list of participants can be found here.

I’ll tentatively be speaking on two different panels:

The first is “Impact of the media on the political process,” a breakout panel in the morning.

The second is an afternoon breakout panel exploring social media: “News in 140 Characters or Less: What role does social media play in shaping the news?”

I have plenty of things to say on both subjects but if anyone has any ideas to suggest then please let me know in the comments below.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Taliban suicide attackers struck at the national peace conference as it opened Wednesday in the Afghan capital, waging gunbattles near the venue. At least two attackers were killed but no delegates were hurt, officials said.

The attack, including rocket fire, started minutes after President Hamid Karzai began his opening address to some 1,600 dignitaries gathered for the conference, in which he appealed for rank-and-file Taliban members to stop fighting for the sake of the country.

The Taliban, which had earlier threatened to kill anyone who took part, claimed responsibility for the attack in a phone call to The Associated Press, saying they intended to sabotage the three-day conference.

The conference, known as a peace jirga, continued despite the attack....

Karzai's remarks were interesting:

"There are thousands of Taliban and Hizb-i-Islami, they are not the enemies of this soil," Karzai said.

He said continuing fighting would only prevent the withdrawal of international forces from Afghanistan.

"Make peace with me and there will be no need for foreigners here. As long as you are not talking to us, not making peace with us, we will not let the foreigners leave," Karzai said.

About 10 minutes into his speech, Karzai was briefly interrupted by an explosion outside, which police said was a rocket. Karzai heard the thud, but dismissed it, telling delegates, "Don't worry. We've heard this kind of thing before."

Soon afterward, an AP reporter nearby heard a loud explosion and saw smoke rising from a second apparent rocket attack that struck about 100 meters (yards) from the venue, a huge tent pitched on a university compound.

Bursts of gunfire could be heard to the south of the venue, and security forces rushed to the area. Helicopters flew overhead....

If anyone had any lingering doubts as to this administration’s position towards Israel — and it would take a narcoleptic not to have figured it out at this point — it was made painfully obvious a few days ago in, of all places, the UN.

On Friday the United Nations adopted a resolution for a nuclear free Middle East, specifically singling out Israel but curiously making no mention of nuclear powers-in-waiting such as Iran.

From Marius Schattner (AFP):

The resolution adopted by the United Nations on Friday calls on Israel to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and urges it to open its facilities to inspection.

It also calls for a regional conference in 2012 to advance the goal of a nuclear-free Middle East.

[…]

The document, which singles out Israel but makes no mention of Iran’s controversial nuclear programme, drew a furious reaction from the Jewish state who decried it as “deeply flawed and hypocritical.”

(Full article here.)

That last quote is a masterpiece of understatement. It doesn’t take Count Metternich to read beyond the language and figure out the true intent, which is to further weaken Israel, seriously compromise its greatest and possibly final deterrent, and generally make it more pliable to acceptance of “peace plans” which amount to capitulation and a  slow path to extinction.

The resolution itself is unremarkable. The UN is basically a Third World kleptocracy long since hijacked by a loose coalition of mullahs, commissars and tin pot dictators. There are no surprises when they trash Israel — that’s what they do. Israel for its part is giving the resolution the weight it deserves and has already indicated it won’t participate in the 2012 conference laid out in the resolution.

What is remarkable is the United States supported this resolution.

But it was US backing for the resolution which has caused the most consternation among Israeli officials and commentators, who interpreted the move as “a resounding slap around the face” which has dealt a very public blow to Israel’s long-accepted policy of nuclear ambiguity.

[…]

According to the top-selling Yediot Aharonot daily, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “furious with the Obama administration for having failed to prevent the resolution from passing… and for choosing to support it.”

[…]

“In the secret talks that Netanyahu held with Obama’s men… Israel was promised that the resolution would not focus on Israel and that if it did, the Americans would vote against.”

Short of publicly kicking Benjamin Netanyahu in the groin I can’t think of any clearer signal the Obama White House could have sent regarding their attitude towards, and plans for, Israel. In the alternate universe of Obama’s mind Israel is the problem, its national interests nothing more than one more impediment on the road to “peace in the Middle East,” which ultimately equates to Arab hegemony.

Others have stated that for the first time the United States is on the wrong side of history. Unfortunately, as this administration continues to embrace its enemies and vilify friends, it’s becoming a habit.

President Obama would have us believe that his administration has been in charge from Day 1, addressing the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  He said at his first solo White House press conference in nearly a year that:

I take responsibility. It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this down. This is what I wake up to in the morning, and this is what I go to bed thinking about – the spill.

Apparently, even Obama’s daughter is waiting for action.  According to the President, his daughter Malia knocked on the bathroom door while he was shaving a couple of days ago and asked:

Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?

Of course, as Bill O’Reilly repeatedly points out on The Factor, nobody seriously expects the President of the United States to put on a deep sea diving suit and do a James Bond act to fix the leak.  Obama rightly says that it is British Petroleum that has the knowledge, technical expertise, resources and ultimate responsibility to plug the hole.  And he said that he was wrong to take BP’s assurances at face value.  BP will have to face the consequences of its own decisions to save money at the expense of safety and not adequately plan for the worst case scenario that has ensued.

However, where the  Obama administration has failed miserably is in its own response to the crisis.

Democratic strategist James Carville said it best, speaking from Louisiana:

Man, you got to get down here and take control of this and put somebody in charge of this thing and get this thing moving. We’re about to die down here.

I assume that Obama’s plan to briefly interrupt his holiday weekend trip to Chicago for a photo op in Louisiana is not what Carville has in mind.

The Obama administration failed to mobilize in a timely fashion the equipment and ships requested by BP and Louisiana state officials.  It is allowing its environmental bureaucrats to slow down remedies to disperse the leaked oil on the grounds that an environmental impact study is needed to be done first.  Meanwhile, the spill is already creating the most serious environmental disaster in the nation’s history and anything that can remediate its effects – even with some minor adverse consequences of its own – is better than waiting weeks or months for the completion of an environmental impact study.

More than two weeks after Louisiana’s governor first requested permission to build sand barriers to protect marshes threatened by the oil, Obama finally gave his OK for just half of the 86 miles requested.

During his news conference yesterday, Obama struck back at his critics, saying that they did not know what they were talking about.  He took a swipe at the oil industry and at Sarah Palin’s slogan of “drill-baby-drill.”  Ironically, if the environmentalist crowd had not succeeded in blocking drilling in Alaska and other locations on land, there might not have been the need to drill for oil so far below sea level.  Obama, who had moved to allow expanded drilling just a few weeks before the rig exploded, is now going overboard in the other direction by ordering a suspension of virtually all current and new offshore oil drilling activity until a comprehensive saftey review is completed.  Most oil drilling has been done safely for years; yet one of Obama’s only decisive actions is to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Obama also tried to use the failure to plug the hole in the Gulf as another opportunity to plug his cap-and-trade energy bill.  All that will do is increase the cost of energy considerably for every American.  That is certainly not the kind of  hope or change we can believe in.

This week brought the Heartland Institute’s Fourth International Conference on Climate Change to Chicago. That may sound like last December’s climate conference in Copenhagen, but this gathering of scientists and policy-makers is unlike any other in the mad and often maddening world of global-warming debate. What separate’s Heartland’s gathering from the more famous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s doom-fests is that Heartland’s conference actually features a diversity of opinions and conclusions. It’s science the way it ought to be.

By and large, the mainstream media does it best to ignore the Heartland conference, since it’s far easier to dismiss something out of hand than to actually evaluate the arguments presented. Happily, this is increasingly not the case for the rest of the nation. This was Heartland’s biggest conference yet, attracting a number of politicians from across the country, bloggers and media from around the world and a surprising number of average Joes who are frustrated with the fallacy of “scientific consensus” about climate change and decided to further their personal climate-science education.

There are a number of misconceptions that progressives and environmentalists toss about when it comes to the Heartland conference, in an effort to smear the event so people don’t listen to the science that’s being presented. Let’s deal with a few of those myths up front. Heartland is not funded by Exxon-Mobil, Koch Industries, or Richard Scaife. In fact, Heartland hasn’t taken any money from any of them for years and – as a matter of policy – doesn’t not allow any group or industry sector to provide more than five per cent of its funding.  The sponsors of the conference (some of which do have ties to industry) don’t pay for that privilege. It’s rather the other way around: Heartland subsidizes their attendance in a number of cases. The scientists and policy-makers at the conference aren’t in the pocket of the energy companies either. Respected, distinguished scientists like ex-NASA climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer, MIT atmospheric physicist Dr. Richard Lindzen, University of Colorado atmospheric scientist Dr. William Gray and a host of others are independent voices of integrity and sanity when it comes to climate research.

Most important, there’s no marching in lockstep among these brave dissenters. Opinions vary, as they should in a field so intricately complex and poorly-understood as global climate. There’s no “consensus” at the Heartland conference. That’s a refreshing, invigorating atmosphere when one is used to being beaten about the head over and over again with the same, tired arguments that some alarmists wield like a club. There’s a decidedly friendly, open-minded tone to this conference, at once intellectually challenging and entertaining. The global warming argument, such as it is, is often advanced using this sort of statement: “human activities are causing catastrophic climate change.” That over-simplification disguises at least five, more subtle arguments, each of which is critical to making the case that mankind ought to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid planetary disaster. These are: 1) the climate is changing, 2) that change is alarmingly different than changes in the past, 3) that change is not occurring naturally, 4) greenhouses gases generated by mankind can affect the planet’s climate, and 5) it can therefore be proven that greenhouse gases generated by humans actually are affecting the planet’s climate in an unprecedented, catastrophic manner. The experts and policy-makers attacked at the Heartland conference tackled each of these issues, in accordance with their particular expertise.

No one, on any side of this debate, disputes proposition number one. As Professor Bob Carter of James Cook University (Queensland, Australia) adroitly put it: the phrase “climate change” is a tautology. You can’t have climate without change. The climate today is different than it was fifty years ago, fifty centuries ago and fifty millennia ago. Is the climate changing? Of course it is. That’s what climate does. Some scientists at the Heartland conference even presented evidence that we’re about to enter a significant cooling phase. That did not appear to be the majority view, but everyone I listened to agreed on the basic point: climate does indeed change, whatever mankind does or does not do.

The importance of proposition number two, that today’s changes are markedly different from historical climate changes depends on a couple of things, a) how far back you are willing to look, and b) how much faith you place on a given temperature record data set. The shorter the “look back” the more alarming recent climate changes appear. Viewed over geologic time spanning millennia, today’s variations are trivial. If one considers only the past century and a half or so, and if one ignores several troubling issues with temperature records over that period of time, today’s changes appear much more worrisome. This is a tough one to argue for the alarmist set and I’m not sure why they spend so much time trying to argue it. You can’t write off Ice Ages.

Proposition three is the most important battleground issue in this debate. Nobody disputes the fact that we experienced a warming cycle from about 1970 through 1998 and that this trend has since leveled off. Scientists like Phil Jones and Michael Mann attribute that warming trend to greenhouse gas emissions. Other scientists like Roy Spencer, Richard Lindzen, Jay Lehr and

Chris De Freitas used the Heartland conference to advance their arguments that natural forces have dominated, and will continue to dominate the climate picture. Using satellite and weather balloon data, contrasted against gaping flaws in the surface temperature record, Spencer, Lindzen and Lehr argued that greenhouse gases have a weakly negative feedback effect on climate. “Feedback” is the key here, because no scientist on any side of this debate believes that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases generated by man can directly influence planetary climate to a large degree. Rather, as the theory goes, the climate is so sensitive that a small increase in greenhouse gases will “force” stronger greenhouse gases – chiefly water vapor – to retain more heat in the atmosphere. However, an increasing body of data suggests that the opposite is true. Spencer has long advanced the theory that cloud over (which reflects sunlight and therefore has a cooling effect) is the misunderstood, underestimated factor in the global climate equation and that increased greenhouse gas concentrations marginally enhance this effect.

The scientific community has long recognized that the “El Nino Southern Oscillation” (ENSO) has a big effect on the climate, the only question is: how much? ENSO refers to the heat absorbing/heat releasing cycle associated with the Pacific Ocean. Phil Jones, Michael Mann and the like believe that ENSO explains roughly thirty per cent of recent global warming. Chris De Freitas presented a peer-reviewed paper that suggests that ENSO is responsible for about eighty per cent of the temperature rise. If one combines the importance of clouds with ENSO effects, there is a strong case to be made that recent temperature increases are largely – if not entirely – natural and that conclusion would rip the heart out of anthropogenic global warming theory.

No serious scientist disputes proposition number four, that greenhouse gases generated by man can affect the climate, it’s simply a question of how much. That question leads us to proposition number five. Most (though not all) alarmists rely on the surface temperature record to “prove” the case that human activities have been unduly influencing planetary temperatures. The invaluable work of Anthony Watts, and others, has shown how deeply flawed the surface temperature record really is. Moreover, as Spencer and some his colleagues have demonstrated, the atmospheric temperature record – the one that really matters – tells a much different story.

If cap and trade loving policy-makers and alarmist researchers were really serious about this issue, they would have been at the Heartland Conference, learning, discussing and exchanging information. One prominent scientist who continues to believe in AGW, Dr. A. Scott Denning of the Colorado State University, did show up and, at the end of the conference, he asked to address the crowd of skeptics that had gathered for the closing ceremonies. While Denning didn’t back off his basic positions, he did say that “it’s really too bad that more of my colleagues in the scientific community didn’t attend this…” and that “we have much more in common than our differences…” while calling for more discussion and less name-calling on all sides of the debate. (You can watch his remarks here). Kudos to Dr. Denning for doing what scientists are supposed to do: keeping an open mind. Would that more of his colleagues and the politicians pushing for climate change legislation did the same.

Every five years or so the United Nations hosts a foreign minister level conference to review the implementation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).  The United Nations has been hosting the latest such review conference this month.

This year, Iranian strongman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad decided to join the party.  He delivered, on the first morning of the review conference, his customary condemnation of Israel and of the United States while defending his country’s nuclear program.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke later the same day, accusing Iran of being the only country attending the UN review conference that is acting with impunity when held to account by the International Atomic Energy Agency and Security Council.  Iran, she said, is consistently violating its obligations under the NPT.   That was a good start, but then she rhetorically crouched into a defensive position.

Clinton said that President Obama had come to office with “an open hand” extended to the Iranian regime.  We “reached out” in many ways, she said, without elaborating and without acknowledging the fact that we have wasted over a year in this futile exercise while Iran marches on towards developing nuclear weapons.

Then, in order to show how transparent the United States really is, Clinton announced that the Obama administration had decided to unilaterally reveal the number of nuclear arms in our arsenal.  She reiterated Obama’s unilateral pledge to develop no new nuclear weapons.  And, in an implied threat to Israel, Clinton said that the United States was “prepared to support practical measures” towards the objective of a nuclear-free Middle East – a stalking horse pushed by Egypt and other Muslim countries in the region to force Israel to give up its suspected nuclear arsenal without any means of assuring that Iran or the other Islamic countries would desist from pursuing their own nuclear arms ambitions.  This was not just feel-good rhetoric.  U.S. officials are reportedly in talks with Egypt over a plan to make the Middle East a nuclear-free zone.

Some have criticized Israel for not joining the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and refusing to declare its suspected nuclear arsenal.  However, Israel has observed the conduct of rogue states that have joined the NPT like North Korea, which quit the treaty once it had successfully tested nuclear weapons, and Iran which regularly flouts its NPT obligations.  Faced with existential threats from Iran and its armed terrorist surrogates, Israel is correct in asserting that there must be real peace in the Middle East before agreeing to any nuclear-free zone.

Hillary Clinton also mentioned in her speech at the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty review conference that the Obama administration would submit Protocols to the Senate for ratification regarding nuclear-free zones in Africa and the South Pacific.  However, our Secretary of State said nothing about maintaining a nuclear-free zone in Latin America even though there is a real threat of the spread of nuclear arms technology from Iran and North Korea to Venezuela.  The reason for Clinton’s silence on Latin America, I believe, was not to embarrass Brazil, whose foreign minister addressed the UN conference immediately after Clinton.

Brazil, according to some reports, is busy moving forward with its own nuclear development program.  It has already had three secret military nuclear programs between 1975 and 1990, and is now embarking on the building of nuclear-powered submarines.  During his election campaign, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva criticized the NPT, calling it unfair and obsolete.  Although Brazil has signed the treaty, it has placed restrictions on inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency and has defended Iran’s nuclear program.

President Obama has called Lula, as the Brazilian president is called, “my man.”  Obama said he “loved this guy,” calling him “the most popular politician in the world.” Yet Lula is the same man whose pals include Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.  He is the same man who said that there was “no fraud in the Iranian election,” congratulating President Ahmadinejad on his stolen election.   He is the same man who decided to open a Brazilian embassy in North Korea shortly after Kim Jong Il’s missile testing. And he is the same man who laid flowers in the terrorist Yasser Arafat’s grave, but refused to follow the custom of other visiting presidents to Israel of laying down flowers in the grave of Theodor Herzl, revered in Israel as its founder.

Obama loves Lula and trusts him more than he trusts the leader of one of our closest allies, Israel.  He is willing to press Israel to give up its nuclear deterrent in pursuit of a nuclear-free Middle East that Iran is certain to ignore, while giving Lula (not to mention Hugo Chavez in Venezuela) a free pass to possibly pursue a nuclear arms capability.

Hillary Clinton’s speech to the UN Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty review conference was yet another demonstration of the appeasement policies that the Obama administration is recklessly pursuing.  It wants to show the world the virtues of nonproliferation by unilateral actions that put our security at risk.

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is ineffective and Clinton even admitted in her speech that it would not be fixed anytime soon to give it the enforcement teeth that it would need.  Yet the treaty appears to be a centerpiece of President Obama’s nuclear disarmament policy along with unilateral actions he is taking.

Not once did we hear Clinton mention the only multilateral mechanism that has proven effective in preventing dangerous nuclear proliferation – the Proliferation Security Initiative.  This Bush administration initiative involved naval surveillance and interdiction to stop the transport of nuclear arms materials and missile technology to and from states and non-state actors of proliferation concern.  It was used successfully, for example, to effectively end Libya’s nuclear ambitions.

President Obama has expressed support for enhancing the PSI, but there is scant evidence to date that he means it.  Instead of emphasizing muscular diplomacy to stop dangerous nuclear proliferation backed by a credible threat of interdiction, Obama wants to lead the way to total nuclear disarmament.  He may lead the way, but the world’s dictators who get their hands on nuclear materials will surely not follow.

A conference at the University of California, Berkeley, on April 28-29, 2010 (and continued at UC Davis on April 30), “Muslims and Jews Together: Seeing From Without; Seeing From Within,” was billed as a major international symposium for “the inauguration of the Program for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relations at UC Berkeley and the establishment of a UC-wide and West Coast working group for the study of Muslim-Jewish relations .”

The conference was a collaborative effort between the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at UC Berkeley and the Jewish Studies Program at UC Davis. Its stated purpose was to use the frameworks of traditional Middle East studies and Jewish studies to develop a new academic field focused on the historical interaction between Muslims and the Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews who once lived among them. Most of the participants were historians or anthropologists specializing in North African Jewry, particularly Morocco.

CMES chair Nezar AlSayyad introduced the conference with a discussion about “building bridges” by re-framing the term, “Jews of Islam,” into something that could be equated with Judeo-Christian civilization: something he called “Judeo-Muslim civilization.” CMES vice-chair and conference organizer Emily Gottreich echoed AlSayyed’s comments in her introduction to the first panel, describing the “Jews of Islam” as “an awkward and unfortunate” construction and seconding the notion of “Judeo-Muslim civilization.”

The emphasis throughout this first panel, which was titled “Framing,” was on synthesis, symbiosis, and challenging “the dichotomy.”  How does one teach about Jews in a Muslim country and teach about Muslims in a Jewish country? The first part of the question, however, cannot be answered, because very few Jews remain in the same Muslim countries where, prior to 1948, there were large, ancient communities. The reason for this exodus—the forced removal of Jews in response to Israel’s founding that year—went unexamined by panelists.

Oren Kosansky, an anthropology professor at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and the first speaker on this panel, brought up the concept of the dhimmi: the historical subservient, second class citizenship of Jews and other minorities in Muslim lands. Although dhimmi legal status entailed a whole series of humiliations and penalties for Arab Jews, Kosansky did not elaborate on the details. He claimed that the research on dhimmi status was “overstated” and that an “overly dyadic picture has been drawn, and relationships in daily life have been under-emphasized.” Religious identity was not the only identity, he continued, as there was also economic, gender, regional, and class identities. In what seemed to me a Western-centric omission, he left out clan or tribal identity. Kosansky then claimed that the “emergence of Zionism exaggerated the differences” between Moroccan Jews and Muslims. In fact, the function of Zionism was to rescue these Jews from intolerable environments.

During the discussion period for this panel, Lital Levy, assistant professor of comparative literature at Princeton University and a panelist at the UC Davis “Muslim-Jewish” conference, contradicted Kosansky. She disagreed that Zionism had resulted in an exaggeration of differences, and she pointed out that Jews who had converted to Islam were still considered Jews. It was, she maintained, an identity, a specificity that stuck to the individual in the Middle East over many centuries. She asked for a comment, but none of the panelists were willing to respond.

Daniel Tsadik, an assistant professor of Sephardic and Iranian Studies at Yeshiva University in New York and a visiting assistant professor at the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism, spoke next on the first panel. He claimed that the emphasis on religion blurs other, more significant, factors, and said he wished scholars would focus more on the reality of Jews and Muslims living together in a given place and as members of one society, rather than as majorities or minorities.

Tsadik questioned whether the framework of “Jews in Muslim lands” focuses on a true common denominator. He lamented the alleged political agenda of Jewish scholars attempting to “know the enemy,” as well as the dependence on written texts, which, he worried, could create unbalanced data. As an example, he brought up the edicts of the Iranian ulema (Muslim legal scholars), which record all the fatwas against Jews, thereby providing written evidence of a bleak fate. However, this “bleak fate” isn’t too far from the truth.

The major theme the following morning at the second panel, “Problematizing,” was to get beyond the Arab-Israeli conflict, or what participants described simply as “the Conflict.” Almost uniformly, speakers reiterated that “the Conflict” was not the eternal metaphor or model for the 1,400 year history of Muslim-Jewish relations; rather, it was a distorting mirror.

Nonetheless, there were plenty of distortions of “the Conflict” on this panel. Joel Beinin, Stanford University history professor and well-known anti-Zionist, claimed that Iraqi Jews fled to Israel in 1950-51 due to “collusion between the Israeli state and the Iraqi government of the time.” He offered no explanation or historical record of this alleged “collusion.”

It should be noted that Beinin was one of the signatories to a statement from California faculty members (posted at the website for the “U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel”) urging the UC Berkeley student senate to vote “yes” on a divestment bill. Fellow signatory, UC Berkeley Jewish studies professor Daniel Boyarin, chaired the second panel.

Matthias Lehmann, associate professor of history and Jewish studies at Indiana University, lamented that the conflict is always perceived as religious when it’s actually—according to his view and that espoused regularly by anti-Israel propagandists—between two nationalisms. To consider it a religious conflict, he continued, is “anachronistic, ahistorical, and irrelevant.” He said nothing about the role of radical Islam in furthering strife. Extending this theme, Sami Shalom Chetrit, a Mizrahi professor at Hebrew University who recited his poetry at the conference, said that calling it a religious conflict was “the big tragedy.”

During the roundtable portion of the second panel, Lehmann did question the lack of commentary—in a discussion by UC Irvine history professor Marc Baer on Jewish to Muslim conversions that conveniently left out the concept of dhimmi— on power differentials. Panel chair Daniel Boyarin softly interjected that power differentials depended upon whether the location was “Dar al-Harb” (house of war) or “Dar al-Islam” (house of Islam), to which the audience laughed knowingly. No one pointed out that Dar al-Harb and Dar al-Islam are religious concepts that just might relate to the supposedly non-religious conflict.

Considering the downplaying of such important concepts, one has to wonder if future students in the Program for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relations will be able to ask questions pertaining to apostasy, infidels, honor killings, Jews as “apes and pigs,” or global jihad?  In addition, will the program offer an equal number of scholars to represent both Jews and Muslims?

The makeup of the conference certainly did not inspire confidence. The brochure stated that “scholars of Middle Eastern Studies have returned—after a long hiatus—to re-discover the importance of non-Muslims within Muslim societies,” leading one to expect an inter-faith dialog. Yet, the panels consisted mostly of Jewish academics—a pattern that predominates at Muslim-Jewish inter-faith conferences.

During the reception, I pointed this out to Susan Miller, UC Davis history professor and one of the conference organizers,  and she replied that it was “not an inter-faith conference, but an academic conference, and that is who is here. It is irrelevant who they are; what matters is what they say.” In other words, she skirted the issue.

There was only one Muslim panelist on the two panels I attended: Mohammed Kenbib, a specialist in Moroccan Jewish history at Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco. At the reception I raised this omission to him directly by stating that “there should be more Muslims here.” To my surprise, he responded by leaning towards me and lightly kissing me on the forehead. “This is quite a warm, fuzzy event,” I said, smiling. His response was profound: “We are very far from the Middle East here.”

Indeed, and so too is the Program for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relations.

Rima Greene wrote this article for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

Patron of world terrorism, financier of Hamas and Hizballah, accuses the U.S. of being a patron of world terrorism. "Ahmadinejad likely to stir sanctions debate with address at U.N. nuke summit," by Bridget Johnson for The Hill, May 2 (thanks to Weasel Zippers):

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will stir the already stormy debate over sanctions on Iran's nuclear program when he pops in at the United Nations on Monday to address its nuclear nonproliferation conference.

Ahmadinejad's sudden intention to attend caught many by surprise, and comes on the heels of the Islamic Republic's vow last month to formally complain to the U.N. that President Barack Obama was threatening Iran.

What a ludicrous idea. I wonder if he himself believes it.

Before leaving Tehran on Sunday, Ahmadinejad gave a glimpse into the tone he would likely be taking into the U.N. "We have documents that prove [Washington] is the root of world terrorism," Ahmadinejad said in a speech Saturday, according to Iran's Press TV. "It has been aiding and abetting extremist groups over the past years."

Iranian media outlets reported Ahmadinejad saying that he was coming to the U.S. with the goal of global nuclear disarmament, criticizing the International Atomic Energy Agency for not reaching this goal and lamenting that nuclear weapons have posed "the single greatest threat" to the world for more than 60 years.

"I don't know what he's showing up for," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday on "Meet the Press."

"If Iran is coming to say we're willing to abide by the Non-Proliferation Treaty that would be very welcome news," Clinton said. "I have a feeling that's not what they're coming to do. I think they're coming to try to divert attention and confuse the issue."

What was your first clue?

Lawmakers had swiftly sounded off about the visit, admonishing Clinton to not allow Ahmadinejad in the country.

"This is preposterous, and allowing it to happen will make a mockery of the effort to stop the spread of nuclear weapons to rogue states and terrorist groups," a group of 14 Republican senators led by John Cornyn (Texas) wrote to Clinton on Friday. "There is simply no compelling reason for Ahmadinejad to be allowed to enter the United States."

In the lower chamber, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) led a similar yet bipartisan letter.

"Make no mistake: Ahmadinejad's attendance will make a mockery of a conference meant to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons," the lawmakers wrote. "...The U.S. must not allow this dangerous tyrant to use our freedoms and our obligations as a host country for the UN to force himself upon our country to spread his message of hate and violence."...

Reps. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) and Mike Pence (R-Ind.) sent a letter to Obama on April 19 with 366 House signatures calling on the president to "fulfill your June 2008 pledge that you would do 'everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon'" and urging Obama to use whatever presidential powers at his means to impose "punishing measures" on Tehran.

The letter, to which Obama has not yet issued a response, according to Jackson's office late Friday, also asks the president to "rapidly" implement the sanctions legislation -- passed in December by the House and the following month by the Senate -- when it comes out of conference....

Huey Long was once asked whether he thought fascism could ever come to America. His answer was “Yeah, but it’ll come calling itself anti-fascism.” America isn’t close to such a future, but I couldn’t help thinking about Long’s comment in connection with an episode that occurred recently at my alma mater.

The occasion was a conference at Columbia University, scheduled by a conservative organization called Accuracy in Academia. The conference title was “A Place at the Table: Conservative Ideas in Higher Education” and its purpose was to highlight the lack of intellectual diversity in the highly politicized environments of academic institutions like Columbia. Among the announced speakers were two university trustees, Ward Connerly and Candace DeRussy, as well as Dinesh D’Souza, the urbane author of “Illiberal Education.”

The ceremonies were to begin with a Friday evening dinner, addressed by Connerly, who is currently heading a national civil rights campaign. Connerly was coming off an important victory at the polls Nov. 3, when Washington state became only the second (after California) to ban racial preferences. According to Accuracy in Academia president Dan Flynn, 140 students and professors attended the dinner, which was held in the East Room of Columbia’s Faculty House.

But guess who else came to that dinner? The mere presence of Connerly, who expresses ideas the campus left doesn’t want to hear, was enough to rouse 100 raucous radicals into action. They threw up a picket line outside the dinner and hurled obscenities and racial epithets at those entering the building. Keep in mind that these students, like Columbia itself, had previously welcomed such rabid antisemites and racial demagogues as Khalid Muhammad, and had honored unrepentant Communists like Angela Davis, who in a recent appearance at Michigan State told students that the main problem in the world was white people. Columbia not only welcomes such race-haters, but pays them handsomely out of student funds to propagate their bigotry.

By contrast, the conservative conference featured no rabble-rousers, no hate-agendas, and actually paid the university $11,000 to hold its event on campus.

– Fascism by any other name

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A conference at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on April 16, 2010, offered “Critical Perspectives on the Criminalization of Islamic Philanthropy in the War on Terror.” Co-sponsored by the UCLA International Institute, the Critical Race Studies Program, and the UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law—and including speakers from UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES)—the conference proffered the usual apologist fare.

It was also an echo chamber. Of the approximately 30 people in attendance, 20 of them were academics. Several students showed up, in addition to the usual assortment of aging leftist revolutionaries.

The thrust of the conference was simple: The war on terror has led to a crackdown on Muslim charities, which has had a chilling effect on Muslims by rendering them unable to engage in Zakat (charity), one of the five pillars of Islam.

Unmentioned throughout this eight-hour infomercial was that the majority of the charities that have been investigated for financially aiding terrorism were found guilty and that decent Muslims are capable of giving to charities that do not foment bombings and beheadings.

Asli Bali, acting professor of law at UCLA, organized the conference and acted as one of the principal moderators. She responded to challenging questions from the audience by stating: “We will take three questions from presenters; others will have to wait.”

Jennifer Turner of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Human Rights Program was the speaker over whom everybody seemed to be fawning. Her presentation was titled, “Blocking Faith, Freezing Charity,” and, in typical ACLU fashion, she made excuses for Islamists’ bad behavior while bashing America.

She began by stating: “I’m not a social scientist. I am not here to offer any statistical analysis”—a fig leaf she employed to make wildly unsubstantiated claims, as when she announced that “the conviction in the Holy Land Foundation case was based on faulty evidence.” She didn’t bother to elaborate.

It turned out her “research” that had the entire room in a swoon consisted of the following:

I did 120 interviews with American Muslims in Michigan and Texas. People reported that they were unable to give Zakat. Some had stopped giving entirely. Some felt fear of deportation or denial of citizenship.

Turner excused her extremely small sample size with more platitudes about not being a statistician. She insisted that she did not ask leading questions, although the process was clearly an exercise in promoting victimhood. She did not verify the accuracy of her respondents or analyze any tax returns. In short, she relied on her own biased views to justify a predetermined conclusion.

University of Michigan, Dearborn, history professor Sally Howell actually found oppression in increased giving. As she put it:

Since 2001, there have been 14 new mosques, and 17 mosques have doubled in size. This is proof that people are not donating overseas.

Howell followed this with more bizarre commentary:

“The Arab charity LIFE [Life for Relief and Development] had their board resign one year after Israel invaded Lebanon.”

Foiled again!

“As a result of restrictive policies” a board member of another charity, according to Howell, “embezzled $10,000.”

Yes: and as a result of inconvenient and restrictive securities laws, Bernie Madoff was forced to steal. It was all America’s fault.

“Does government get to decide what is good Islam and what is bad Islam?,” she asked.

No, but it does get to decide what constitutes funding terrorism.

Howell concluded, “The FBI has to show results or lose resources.”

Erica James, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) anthropology professor, offered proof—of nothing:

“I have an anthropology background. I am here to theorize what is happening.”

Her solution to the supposed problems faced by Muslim charities? “Defiant giving.”

During the question and answer period of this panel, an audience member—resorting to the usual name calling directed at critics of Middle East studies— proclaimed that “well-known bigot Daniel Pipes wrote an article about ‘stealth Islamists.’”

The panelists all nodded in agreement. There was no word on Pipes’s findings regarding UCLA law professor—and moderator at this conference—Khaled Abou El Fadl’s status as, in fact, a stealth Islamist.

Laila Al-Marayati, the chairperson of KinderUSA—a charity that terrorism analyst Matthew Levitt included in his book on funding Hamas—portrayed the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah as harmless. As she put it, “Hamas helps Palestinian children in Gaza. I don’t consider Hamas and Hezbollah as threats to me and my family.”

Jonathan Benthall of University College, London, gave a talk that can be summed up in one quote: “The United States is the key to the problem.”

Mona Atia, assistant professor of geography and international affairs at George Washington University, claimed that “Egypt has been a model of fighting terrorism.”

Meanwhile, McGill University political science and Islamic studies professor Khalid Medani demonstrated willful blindness by opining, “Somalia is a place where Islamic terrorism is not possible because they are not organized.”

When asked if the definition of a terrorist was hard to prove, Medani responded, “You’re right. I try to critique them based on their own terms. I’m not a lawyer.”

No UCLA conference would be complete without offensive commentary from a member of the Center for Near Eastern Studies faculty. This time, CNES director and anthropology professor Susan Slyomovics—speaking during a break with colleagues about a book she’s working on—said:

If Jews can get reparations from Germany, then Palestinians should get reparations from Israel. After all, what the Germans supposedly did to the Jews [emphasis added] is what Israel is doing to the people of Palestine.

All the while, she kept smiling and laughing. Nothing makes for a good academic sitcom like Holocaust denial from a prominent professor of Middle East studies.

Despite eight hours of groupthink, I was able to finally cut through the leftist clutter to determine why the U.S. is investigating Muslim charities: 9/11 actually did happen, and the majority of the charities accused of funding terrorism actually did.

Only a UCLA Middle East studies conference could deliberately fail to grasp this.

Eric Golub is the publisher of the Tygrrrr Express blog. He wrote this article for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) has announced it is setting up a special division that will deal with human rights.

Following a Tuesday meeting with the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, OIC Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu said the organization was on the verge of creating a permanent and independent committee for human rights.

Ihsanoglu said he hoped that the committee's creation would bring about a "paradigm shift" in the OIC....

The OIC spans 57 countries over four continents, making it the second-largest inter-governmental organization after the United Nations. It was established in 1969 and aims to be the "collective voice of the Muslim world."

However, Mona Abousenna, secretary general of the Averroes and Enlightenment International Association, said the committee would only be effective if it avoided religious influences.

"Setting up a human rights committee at the Organization of the Islamic Conference could be a positive move in one case only, and that is if this committee does not derive its principles of human rights from Sharia [Islamic Law] and other divine sources, but from human principles and ideals," she told The Media Line.

But of course there is no chance of that whatsoever.

Her comments reflect a belief among some Islamic critics that Islamic tenets do not fall in line with principles of human rights.

That's obvious from any honest look at the teachings of Islamic law, and the day's headlines.

"Having stated what it is against, it has also to announce what it is for," she said of Islam, "namely, freedom of expression and acceptance of difference of opinions and, above all, a mind-set that is not absolutist and accepts a secular method of thinking - by which I mean thinking about relative issues in a relative, and not in an absolute way. It must accept all religions of the world as equal to Islam and respect their followers as much as it should embrace nonbelievers and skeptics."...

With freedom of expression under attack from Muslims in the U.S. today -- South Park, our bus ads, Franklin Graham, the Elyea case -- it is hardly likely that the OIC, which is trying to compel the UN to criminalize criticism of Islam, is going to come out in favor of freedom of expression.

Bat Ye'or, a British scholar and specialist on the history of non-Muslims in the Middle East, said the OIC's charter included the propagation, promotion and preservation of Islamic teachings and values based on moderation and tolerance.

"It is clear to me that the OIC needs to improve the image of human rights in Muslim countries, although these are not uniform," she told The Media Line. "It also needs to establish a general framework for its member countries. However, these human rights will be rooted in the Quran, the Sunna and the Shari'a. They will not be similar to the Universal Declaration, which is secular. They will be rooted in the religion, in Islam....

Indeed.

Iran's supreme spiritual leader Ali Khamenei has said Islam precludes the use of nuclear weapons. In his message to the participants in an international disarmament conference in Tehran he said the people of Iran are fully aware of the danger of the spread of weapons of mass destruction. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for an independent panel to oversee nuclear disarmament. Delegates from 56 countries are attending the disarmament conference in Tehran....