The Freedom Center’s president discusses his new book, A Point in Time, with New Books in Public Policy. To listen to the interview, Click Here.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click Here.

Ezra Levant interviews Middle East expert Dr. Daniel Pipes on Sun TV:

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle. Click here.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Lisa Daftari, a journalist specializing in Iranian affairs.  She is a guest contributor on Fox News and has been published in Frontpage Magazine, Washington Post, CBS.com, NBC, Voice of America, and PBS.

FP: Lisa Daftari, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to talk to you today about the future of Iran’s freedom movement.

I think the best way for us to start is for you to update our readers on the current status of Iran’s Green Movement. Tell us about its beginnings two years ago and how it has diminished. What has been the role of the reformist leaders in slowing down or progressing the movement over the last two years?

Daftari: Thank you Jamie, it is my pleasure to speak with you.

Well, I think I should start by differentiating between the understandings of what the Green Movement actually is. To a lot of people, the Green Movement simply refers to the uprising that occurred in Iran following the election of 2009 where many Iranians felt the election was fraudulent and rushed into the streets. This is the biggest uprising that Iran had seen in 30 years since the Islamic Theocracy has been in power. In actuality, the Green Movement is not a pro-democracy movement. It is a pro-reform movement, which means that Iran would still function under the Islamic Republic, but it would be led by one of the other candidates who would have won the Presidency. The two candidates were Karoubi and Mousavi, who are both veteran politicians within the Islamic regime.

Both were hoping to have a chance at the Presidency. Now when a lot of these young people came out into the streets, there was a fusion of sorts. They were asking to get back their votes, “Give me back my vote,” was the slogan of the uprising, but slowly people began to regret even walking into the polls, because when you vote, you actually acknowledge the government. They then turned this “Green Movement” into an anti-regime movement, saying, for the most part, we don’t even want these reformist candidates, we want the entire regime to be done away with. So there are different understandings of what the Green Movement actually signifies, what it actually represents.

Green is a very important color in Islam. We can see today in Libya, it is Qadaffi’s go-to color as well. So this Green Movement for some people just represents a freedom movement for the people of Iran, who actually want regime change. It also represents a young movement, especially because the world recognized for the first time in 30 years that the Iranian people are 70 million, many under the age of 30 and 35 years old. They are educated. They have a high energy. They know about the Western world and they want their freedoms. This basically got intertwined with the movement that these reformist candidates wanted to push forward. Also, a lot of people have problems with these reformist candidates because they have the blood of many innocent Iranians on their hands. They don’t exactly have clean records.

For example, the number of executions under Mousavi’s time, or watch, outnumber the number of executions done under Ahmadinejad’s watch, and I don’t know if a lot of people know that, or the fact that he is related to Khamenei, the clerical head of the country. So there are a lot of misunderstandings as to what is going on or what the people want. Obviously there is a lack of organization on the part of the Iranian opposition that leads to a lot of these misunderstandings and leads to a lot of confusion, both for the people and for the outside world trying to understand what is going on in Iran over the last two years.

FP: Can you please explain why the movement was successful in spreading to other parts of the world, but could not make significant changes in Iran before fading out?

Daftari: Right now we are watching the last moments of the Arab Spring unfold in the Middle East, and a lot of people give credit to Tunisia and Egypt for starting the movement, when in fact Iran was first in the region in 2009 to have full scale uprisings against their regime.  For Iran, it was the most significant anti-government display they had seen in the last 30 years, despite the fact that there had always been smaller protests throughout. In 1999 they had the”Hejdayeh Teer” or the 18^th of the month of Teer, the uprisings at Tehran University, but that was quickly quashed. That had been the most significant uprising until 2009.  It was only in 2009 when the people came out into the streets and said enough is enough, deciding that they would do whatever they could to let their voices be heard. But, unlike Egypt and Tunisia,  there was less brutality and violence against the people as there was in Iran. In Iran, they actually imported Basiji Militia men to be in the streets to stop demonstrators. They rounded people up. They came into people’s homes. So the regime is quite masterful at stopping these movements and keeping their stronghold on the government, not allowing these demonstrations to spread beyond the point they had already spread.

So unfortunately the movement slowed down. A lot of people were arrested. A lot of the consequences were too great for people, for their families, for professionals, for journalists, and photojournalists. I speak to people all the time who wanted to give everything they had, but unfortunately when the stakes are so high, the consequences become unbearable and people have to go home or leave the country in order to live another day. That being said, the Iranian people were extremely successful directly following the announcement of the election results in June of 2009 and months following, to go out into the streets, to have their stories heard, to use the Internet and social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter to tell their stories.

Where journalists were not allowed, the people went in, they told their stories, and were very much successful in turning the attention of the world to their plight and the gross human rights violations within their country. They brought attention to the fact that the only problem that the world has with the Iranian regime is not just their ongoing nuclear agenda, but also in spreading this terrorist and extremist ideology that they use against their own people.

FP: We see the mainstream media giving heavy coverage to Egypt, Libya and Syria, but Iran is virtually ignored. How come?

Daftari: The easy answer would be to say that journalists are not allowed in Iran.  Firstly, very few foreign journalists are allowed to be inside the country and secondly, even the Iranian journalists who are inside the country and want to express themselves and send out pictures are forced to face the consequences. A young man I interviewed took the cover shot that was used on Time Magazine’s cover of the 2009 post election uprisings. He was searched for. There was a warrant out for his arrest and he had to escape the country. On the one hand, getting your photo on the cover of Time Magazine is such a huge accomplishment, for anyone, particularly someone living in Iran. And to have his “reward” then be that he has to escape the country, leave his family, leave his friends, because of such a huge accomplishment…The obstacles are great; whether it be the fact that journalists are not allowed in the country or the fact that Iranian journalists are very fearful to contribute, to put their stories out, to do a blog, to actually be interviewed. I have a hard time getting interviews that are not “anonymous.” Nobody wants to speak. Nobody wants to be responsible. Nobody wants to put things up on Facebook, on Twitter. There are crackdowns and people are really scared to voice their opinions.

FP: What do you see as the future of the Green Movement or the results of the uprisings? Do you think the authority of leaders like Khamenei and Ahmadinejad will grow or do you think there is a chance that this regime will collapse?

Daftari: It’s going to be hard to tell what will happen. Obviously the people of Iran have understood that what happened in 2009 in the aftermath of the election will not be the solution, or will not result in the toppling of the regime, but that there has to be something more forceful, more organized. They definitely lack a viable leader, and I don’t think that the Green Movement, and the way I’m defining it, have real leaders in Karoubi and Mousavi. They will not be the leaders going forward because the Iranian people realized that in order to get the freedoms that they want, in order to have freedom of press, freedom of religion, women’s rights, gay rights, you name it, they will have to do away with this regime and this ideology.

I think that if the Iranian people were to come out into the streets again, risking their lives again, this time around they would go for it all; they would go for something that would actually make a significant change in their lives. We have elections coming up again in 2013 and as we get closer, hopefully the Iranian people will have a better chance at getting or at least expressing their views on what they want in a government. This time around I think they are looking more heavily to the international community to help and support them just as the allies have supported Libya, Tunisia and Egypt. Iranians believe they deserve the same chance.

FP: Thank you Lisa Daftari for joining us.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is David Yerushalmi, General Counsel to the Center for Security Policy, a Washington, D.C.-based national security think tank founded and headed by former Reagan administration official Frank Gaffney. He is considered an expert on Islamic law and its intersection with Islamic terrorism and national security. In this capacity, he has published widely on the subject, including the principle critical scholarship on sharia-compliant finance published in the Utah Law Review (2008, Issue 3). He has also designed and co-authored (with Mordechai Kedar) a ground-breaking peer reviewed empirical investigation on sharia-adherence and the promotion of violent, jihadist literature in U.S. mosques published in the Middle East Quarterly (Summer 2011).

FP: David Yerushalmi, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to talk to you today about your Mapping Sharia project. Now that it is published as a fully peer-reviewed study in the Middle East Quarterly, what can you tell us about the findings?

Yerushalmi: Thank you, Jamie.

We began this study in 2007, with a careful and rigorous methodological design.  The purpose was to measure sharia-adherence (or Islamic legal orthodoxy) among worshippers and their imams at U.S. mosques (i.e., the independent variable) and to measure that against both the presence of violent and jihadist literature and, more, the actual promotion of that literature by the imam (i.e., the dependent variables).  We took four years to conduct the study because we need a large enough random sampling of mosques across the U.S. to be able to say with some certainty that we can speak about U.S. mosques generally and because we understood that we would need to confirm our data during a subsequent survey so that we could be certain of the integrity of our results and so we were not merely taking a one-time “snap shot” of these mosques.

After surveying 100 mosques randomly chosen across the U.S., and after “auditing” our data, our results were troubling, to say the least.

First, of the 100 mosques surveyed, 51% had texts on site rated as severely advocating violence; 30% had texts rated as moderately advocating violence; and 19% had no violent texts at all.  Mosques that presented as Sharia adherent were more likely to feature violence-positive texts on site than were their non-Sharia-adherent counterparts.  In 84.5% of the mosques, the imam recommended studying violence-positive texts.  The leadership at Sharia-adherent mosques was more likely to recommend that a worshipper study violence-positive texts than leadership at non-Sharia-adherent mosques.  Fifty-eight percent of the mosques invited guest imams known to promote violent jihad.  The leadership of mosques that featured violence-positive literature was more likely to invite guest imams who were known to promote violent jihad than was the leadership of mosques that did not feature violence-positive literature on mosque premises.

FP: Were the results of the study a surprise?

Yerushalmi: Not for us in this field. For example, Shaikh Hisham Kabbani, a well-respected Sufi leader in the U.S., has reported to the Department of State that his personal research (albeit not based upon a rigorous empirical design) evidences that hard-core Salafists from the Wahhab sect of Saudi Arabia have taken control and spread “extremism” in 80% of U.S. mosques. (See here and here.)

In addition to this anecdotal evidence, the very credible Freedom House under the direction of Nina Shea conducted a serious survey of major mosques in U.S. urban environments and found Wahhabi-Saudi jihad literature literally permeating these mosques.  Again, while the study was of select mosques and not a random survey, it suggested a major infiltration that supported Kabbani’s reports.

Our findings that 81% of U.S. mosques contain this literature, while troubling, would not be considered surprising. What is surprising, was the degree to which the presence of this literature was correlated with the imams actually promoting this jihad hate literature.  In other words, one might expect a mosque to have some of this material but as reference literature, not as something the imams would actively promote.  What our study found was that mosques with this literature were not merely repositories but incubators for the messaging of this material.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Lisa Daftari, a journalist specializing in Iranian affairs.  She is a guest contributor on Fox News and has been published in Frontpage Magazine, Washington Post, CBS.com, NBC, Voice of America, and PBS.  She communicates with individuals living in Iran and tells their stories.  In 2006, she was invited to show her documentary on bringing regime change to Iran to a subcommittee of Congress.

FP: Lisa Daftari, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Tell us about your work in regards to Iran and what inspires you to engage in it.

Daftari: As a journalist, I am drawn to human stories, particularly ones that demonstrate the effects that society and politics have on ordinary peoples’ lives. In the case of Iran, these stories are quite numerous and revealing. Whether it is a story about a young girl who was arrested for her voicing her political views or a father of two who is forced to work four jobs just to put food on the table, I think these stories are the best ways to understand the struggles of the Iran people right now.  It is a well-known fact that the Islamic Republic is a radical, fundamentalist and unjust government, but through talking to the Iranian people and understanding their lives can we better grasp how this regime plays a role in daily routine of the people.

FP: What has drawn you to Iran?

Daftari: Obviously my background, as an Iranian-American, has played a significant role in fostering my passion and interest in the area. Every time I had a research assignment or paper in school, I would find some way to do my project on Iran.  Growing up, I was incredibly cognizant of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, or the Enghelab, the word for revolution in Farsi. I knew that it had changed the fate of my family significantly and that is how we found ourselves living in this country.  My family, like many other Iranian families, shared these conversations and anecdotes at the dinner table. My siblings and I felt a deep nostalgia for a time period we did not live through and yearned to understand and experience that time for ourselves. Later when I became a journalist, I wanted to tell human stories in the backdrop of larger social, political and cultural issues. Clearly, starting with my own people felt most natural, particularly when the Iranian people experienced their most crucial historic moment only 30 years ago.

FP: Tell us a bit about the radical, fundamentalist and unjust government that rules over Iranians.

Daftari: The Iranian people see their government as an imported entity; a group of fundamentalists whose beliefs in radical Islam are stronger than their nationalistic ties to the country.  This clashes strongly against a large population of Iranians who consider themselves extremely patriotic. We also have to remember that Iran is made up of a rich cross section of various religions, cultures and dialects. Obviously there is no government that can represent them all, yet they share and celebrate the Iranian culture and old heritage they have in common.

Above all, this regime, cloaked in religious fundamentalism, angers the people with its hypocritical actions. They deny the people so many of their basic rights, yet we have extensive evidence of their own indulgent lifestyles. We know of their lavish vacations around the world, their lucrative real estate portfolios, their international bank accounts storing millions of dollars, and their access to some of the world’s best universities for their children.  The people of Iran are savvy and resent the double standards.

FP: You have researched the Iranian American community and its evolvement over the last 30 years. Can you enlighten us a bit on your findings and observations?

Daftari: The Iranian American community has developed an extremely unique dual identity. Over the last thirty years, many of these Iranians had lost hope in ever going back to their homeland, and likewise in ever seeing this government change. The result has been an Iranian American community that has emerged quite successfully. They are represented in all types of occupations and areas of business.  They have excelled in politics, music, film, fashion, real estate and technology.  They have raised their American born children to share an unwavering allegiance to the United States. In June however, it was remarkable to see how invested even American born Iranians were in the fate of their inherited homeland.  In large cities across the U.S., Iranians and Iranian Americans gathered by the thousands to stand in solidarity with the protestors in Iran.  They felt a real glimmer of hope with this political impetus that really moved the community.  They had been waiting for such a moment for a long time.

FP: We know of course that Iranians are still bravely protesting and being tortured every day. The fascists who rule the country are cracked down on the protests and continue to crack down viciously and sadistically. Your thoughts? What’s coming up?

Daftari: Many describe the Iranian people at the time of the protests as a pot that boiled over. The impetus, or better yet, the excuse, was frustration over a fraudulent election, but the reality was that the Iranian people, both in Iran and abroad, had been waiting three decades for such a moment. With every breach of justice, with every hanging, with every whip that slashed down on an innocent woman’s arm, for every stone that was violently hurled at a young Iranian’s head, the grievances had amassed.

Since last June, Iranians came out in protest during holidays and other commemorative days, particularly those momentous to the regime. They came out on these days to show that their grievances are directly against the regime.  By protesting on Islamic holidays and on days special to the Islamic Republic, they made a stand against the government and what it stands for. The people of Iran are incredibly nationalistic. They are patriotic and their Iranian heritage runs deeper and stronger than anything else.

We are coming up on the one-year anniversary of those protests, and Iranians are organizing for smaller demonstrations.  We are seeing an evolving Iranian force, partly as a result of the threats that the regime has made against those who come out and partly because the Iranians realize that to be shot at, beaten and rounded up and taken to prison is not going to be the avenue to freedom. The main issue for the protestors is and has been a lack of leadership and strategy.

FP: Why is it, in your perspective, important to talk about Iran in the context of its people and their experiences and disenchantment?

Daftari: In the case of Iran, it is imperative to get to know the people, their struggles, their experiences and what they really want going forward. The Iranian people are multi-faceted. Iran is such a vast country that has varying religions, dialects and sub-cultures that create a rich cross-section of Iranian culture. In the past, many would erroneously group together the Iranian people together with their regime, but since the elections, I think it has become quite clear that that is not the case.  The people of Iran have a 30-year-old story to tell. Everyone in Iran is and has been dramatically affected by the political landscape in the country; just as the lives of Iranian Americans and Iranians living anywhere else in the world have been remarkably shaped by the political on-goings of the last three decades.

FP: What are the chances that the Iranian people can overthrow the despots who have them imprisoned? How can we best help the Iranian people to do so?

Daftari: If we were to look at the Iranian dilemma as a social one in addition to a political one, it has become obvious that the people of Iran have and will continue to further out-grow their government. Although this regime has only been around for 30 years, as a result of the Ayatollah Khomeini-backed baby boom following the Iran Iraq War, almost 70% of Iran’s population was born under this regime. That is a very significant statistic. It means that an overwhelming majority of the country is young, modern, and under the age of 30. Even though living under the confines of a theocracy is the only life they know, many of these young people are overtly disenchanted with their government.  Overthrowing, or maybe better stated, shaking this government is inevitable. Their grievances are specific and prevent them from living a normal life on a daily basis.  They just want to live normal lives and be free to blog, to sign onto Yahoo or Google, to walk down the street with their boyfriends and girlfriends, to go to college despite not having any connections to the clergy, etc.

There is a lot of pressure on the youth of Iran, and that is what is propelling them to go out to the streets in demonstration. They want better, and they know it is out there. The Iranian people are smart, savvy, intellectual people who refuse to be represented by fundamentalist, tyrannical leaders who are holding them back. Whether it is through demonstrations or any other way they can voice their frustrations, they will continue to do so until change is brought about.  There’s a lot of hopelessness, and that’s what this struggle is about.

The question that is frequently asked of the Iranian people is: What can the rest of the world do to support them in this struggle? I think the answer has always been to unconditionally support them. It would mean to educate oneself about what is going on in the region, to ask for Iran stories when the subject suddenly escapes the media, to ask questions of elected government officials, and as taxpayers, to interrogate the United Nations on not taking a serious stance on Iran and its nuclear agenda.

FP: Lisa Daftari, thank you for joining us.

PARIS - The Turkish Islamic charity behind a flotilla of aid ships that was raided by Israeli forces on its way to Gaza had ties to terrorism networks, including a 1999 al-Qaida plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport, France's former top anti-terrorism judge said Wednesday.

The Istanbul-based Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, known by its Turkish acronym IHH, had "clear, long-standing ties to terrorism and Jihad," former investigating judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

Bruguiere, who led the French judiciary's counterterrorism unit for nearly two decades before retiring in 2007, didn't indicate whether IHH now has terror ties, but said it did when he investigated it in the late 1990s.

"They were basically helping al-Qaida when (Osama) bin Laden started to want to target U.S. soil," he said.

Some members of an international terrorism cell known as the Fateh Kamel network then worked at the IHH, he said. Kamel, an Algerian-Canadian dual national, had ties to the nascent al-Qaida, Bruguiere said.

Among Kamel's followers was Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who was arrested in the U.S. state of Washington in December 1999 on his way to bomb Los Angeles International Airport as part of an al-Qaida plot.

"IHH had a role in the organization that led to the plot," Bruguiere said, reiterating sworn testimony he made in a U.S. Federal Court during Ressam's trial. Ressam is serving a 22-year prison sentence....

Pamela Geller interviews Bat Ye'or, the world's leading scholar of dhimmitude, Eurabia, and Islamic antisemitism, last Sunday. This is the full 53-minute interview.

Ruben, covered in blankets

Ruben, the Dutch boy who was the sole survivor of the terrible plane crash earlier this week in Tripoli, Libya, has gone back to the Netherlands. He wasn’t able to do so before today because he had to receive treatment in a Libyan hospital.

Although Ruben’s survival is absolutely miraculous, he did lose his mother, father and older brother. It seems that he will now be raised by his uncle and aunt.

Meanwhile, he is at the center of a major media scandal in the Netherlands. The country’s largest newspaper, the Telegraaf, proved that its longtime critics are right when they say that the newspaper’s editors have no sense of shame whatsoever. They had the audacity to sensationalize both the crash and Ruben’s suffering. The nine year old was hospitalized and his relatives had not yet told him that his parents and brother had died, because the shock would have been too great considering his physical weakness. The Dutch and Libyan governments tried to shelter this child from the media, most of whom showed that they actually have some morals and left him alone.

Except for the Telegraaf, that is. This newspaper secretly called with Ruben and interviewed him. The result of this conversation was, in the words of the newspaper itself, “a heartbreaking interview.” They promoted it to the best of their abilities, thinking it would help them sell a few extra copies.

Well, the fallout was tremendous. Readers have started a campaign to boycott the newspaper for its irresponsible behavior and its editors eventually felt forced to apologize for their actions.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s all too little and especially too late. You don’t exploit a young boy’s injuries and terrible loss of his parents and brother to make a quick buck. When you do, you prove that you’re beyond saving, that you’re not a journalist, but a vulture.

Let’s hope that Ruben’s aunt and uncle will be there for him and succeed in keeping the jackals from the mainstream media away. In the meantime, I’m happy that I canceled my own membership of the Telegraaf a few days before the terrible crash and the subsequent controversial interview.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Joseph Yeager, the author of the new book, Intellectual Assault: Academic Anti-Americanism and the Distortion of 9/11. He holds a Ph.D. in medieval Russian history from the University of Missouri. He is a member of the National Association of Scholars’ Argus Project, a watchdog group which keeps an eye on excesses and abuses in academia.

FP: Joseph Yeager, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

What inspired you to write your book?

Yeager: I was inspired by curiosity, Jamie, and a certain knowing suspicion.

Soon after 9/11 the professors and academic administrators began making their presence felt among the commentariat. Their sudden ubiquity was due partially to the media which understandably solicited opinions from experts about the tragedy, but it was also due to the egomania of a people who believe they are smarter than everybody else and thus deserve to be heard.

And what I heard was frankly quite disgusting. I’m sure your remember it well: America was to blame for 9/11; the terrorists and the society from which they sprang were actually righteous victims of American aggression; America is actually a terrorist state, so by what right may we punish the Taliban and al-Qaeda, ad nauseum.

These outrageous statements from the academics filled me with a desire to see if such views were outliers which received an airing precisely because they were so odious, or if they were the coin of the academic realm. As I suspected, and as my book makes clear, the academic anti-Americanism we witnessed after 9/11 is closer to being the rule than the exception on America’s campuses.

FP: So what is the prevalence of anti-Americanism in academia?

Yeager: For my book I did in-depth research on every single college and university website in American academia. I printed literally thousands of documents containing opinions about 9/11 from the faculty and administration. And while I did encounter a handful of academics who expressed sensible views about 9/11, and a fair share of others whose views might be characterized as cautiously critical of the terrorists and the Islamo-Arab world, the undoubted preponderance of opinion was that the United States was at fault and that the people of the Islamo-Arab world were victims meriting sympathy. The contours of this anti-Americanism are far more multifaceted than that statement suggests, but it does get to the heart of the matter. And based upon my research I suspect that perhaps two thirds of the academics, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, are basically anti-American.

FP: Does academic anti-Americanism vary significantly from state to state, region to region?

Yeager: Very little, Jamie. As I point out in my book, academia should be thought of as an anti-American archipelago. College and university campuses are essentially islands of Leftist radicalism in a great ocean of moderation and common sense. Moreover, these islands are closely linked to one another by a shared culture that is transmitted to future professors and administrators during their undergraduate and especially graduate years. Newly minted Ph.D.s go thither to California and Maine, Florida and Washington, Missouri and Wyoming, and they reinforce and replicate the anti-Americanism and Leftism they’ve swallowed throughout their years as students. Consequently, a tenured professor at Princeton will have far more in common with an instructor at Northern Arizona than he will with a pizza maker in Trenton; the Vice Provost at South Alabama will share more with the President of Stanford than he will with a physician in Birmingham. The surrounding political culture really has very little effect on the mental world of the university.

FP: How is 9/11 a lens through which we can understand academic anti-Americanism?

Yeager: The 9/11 attacks are so important for understanding academia precisely because they put the professors on the defensive for a change. Hence, the terrorists were constituents of academia. They were non-white, they were not Christians or Jews, they were from Third World nations and they were from parts of the globe that are comparatively impoverished, even if the actual terrorists themselves were anything but poor.

And these constituents of academia managed to unite American citizens, at least temporarily, in a conviction that the terrorists were evil and that they and their supporters had to be destroyed by military force. The academics were of course, aghast. How could Americans be so filled with hate? How could they rebel against pet academic nostrums such as “conflict resolution” and out-and-out pacifism? Did they not learn anything from the Vietnam War?

But most interestingly I believe the academics felt that the very notion of “diversity” was under siege. The terrorists were in no uncertain terms exemplars of diversity. And suddenly Americans were turning a gimlet eye on Islam and the Islamo-Arab world. They were also questioning the wisdom of easily acquired student visas, and open-door immigration policies.

This was too much for academia to stand. Believing their diversity ox was being gored, the professors and administrators sallied forth to defend the bearers of diversity and to attack Americans as rubes and racists. They even constructed a totally fallacious backlash by common Americans against Muslims and Arab-Americans where none existed. Rather than mass pogroms against these minorities, there were very isolated hate crimes which quickly petered out. My book deals with these issues in some depth.

FP: What is the biggest problem in US higher education?

Yeager: Believe it or not, Leftist propagandizing in the classroom, and even overt discrimination against conservatives on campus are not the biggest problems. Far more significant is the relatively subtle but ceaseless skewing of virtually every field in the social sciences and humanities to the left.

Because these fields are so ideologically unbalanced, so lacking in views emanating from anywhere on the political spectrum other than the far left, there is an inevitable drift of scholarship leftward. Liberal and Leftist assumptions about scholarly issues and problems, liberal and Leftist points of departure and ways of looking at the world are never even questioned. Indeed, the research questions which serve as the basis of scholarly projects almost inevitably stem from a liberal/Left foundation.

And how could they not? There are simply not enough centrists and conservatives in academia to even illuminate the liberal/Left bias, let alone to raise a din that would inspire greater self awareness among the majority scholars.

What results is a lifeless intellectual universe where poor scholarship is produced and indeed, the distinction between scholarship and propaganda is blurred. American students are thus getting a pathetic excuse for an education, and are paying ever more for this woeful product.

FP: So what can be done about all of this?

Yeager: As long as Americans are essentially apathetic about what goes on in academia the problem will only worsen. American citizens must recognize the seriousness of this situation and they must do something about it. And make no mistake, they have the power to make a difference.

Money, as always and everywhere, is the lifeblood of academia. Cut off the money supply and the academic power brokers will take notice and make changes. Concerned citizens should write their state representatives demanding accountability in academia on pain of voting for challengers should the incumbents not apply the heat. Alumni should cease donating money to their alma maters and make clear why they are no longer giving. Small businesses and corporations could help the cause as well by no longer requiring college degrees for work that can be done by high school graduates. The use of bachelor’s degrees as a winnowing device simply funnels a steady supply of students (and money) to the very people who would like to see this country crash and burn. The professors and administrators don’t much care for Americans; why should we continue to provision their sumptuous gravy train, with no strings attached?

FP: Joseph Yeager, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

Here is part 10 of my interview April 26 with NYC ITV. You can access all of the segments of the interview here (they're on the lower right).

Here is part 9 of my interview April 26 with NYC ITV. You can access all of the segments of the interview here (they're on the lower right).

Here is part 8 of my interview last Monday with NYC ITV. You can access all of the segments of the interview here (they're on the lower right).

Here is part 7 of my interview last Monday with NYC ITV. You can access all of the segments of the interview here (they're on the lower right).

Here are parts 5 and 6 of my interview last Monday with NYC ITV. You can access all of the segments of the interview here (they're on the lower right).

Here is part 4 of my interview last Monday with NYC ITV. You can access all of the segments of the interview here (they're on the lower right).

Here is part 3 of my interview Monday with NYC ITV, in which I answer the Question That Won't Die. You can access all of the segments of the interview here (they're on the lower right).

Pakistani terrorists behind the Mumbai attacks have threatened to launch a fresh jihad against India over disputed water rights.

The Indian and Pakistani prime ministers are due to meet on Wednesday amid escalating tensions over limited water resources.

Pakistan has repeatedly accused India of breaching the terms of a 1960 treaty governing the use of shared river systems, complaining that irrigation channels on its side of the border have emptied.

The issue has now been adopted by militants in Jamaat-ud-Dawah, widely regarded as a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Jihadi group fighting Indian troops in Kashmir and responsible for the November 2008 wave of gun and bomb attacks that killed at least 170 people in Mumbai.

Hafiz Saeed, the founder of Lashka-e-Taibi and head of Jamaat-ud-Dawah, threatened a water war with India during a recent TV interview.

"Look at India's attitude, especially after the 9/11 attacks. It has taken advantage of Pakistan's weaknesses and made dams and stopped our water.

Pakistan, for its defence, will have to fight a war at all costs with India if it is not prepared for talks on Kashmir and water," Saeed said in an interview with Frontline, a private TV channel.

His comments followed earlier statements claiming that control of water resources was being used as a weapon to weaken Pakistan.

"India is trying to hatch a deep conspiracy of making Pakistan's agricultural lands barren and economically annihilating us," said one....

Delhi broke off talks with Islamabad after the Mumbai attacks, which a senior Pakistan official later admitted had partly been planned in his country.

They resumed briefly in February but India insisted full negotiations would require Pakistan to prosecute those responsible for the Mumbai killings....

Is that unreasonable?

Yesterday I gave a lengthy and wide-ranging interview to NYC ITV. It is available in 36 parts (!) here -- you can find links to the other parts on the lower right-hand side of the page. The first part is above.

Naomi Wolf believes 9/11 truthers have “legitimate questions,” conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is a brave truth teller, and the early Bolsheviks opposed torture.

In 2007, 100 copies of Wolf’s book, The End of America, were donated to Code Pink for distribution to United States senators. In 2008, she announced that the fascist Bush administration was intercepting her mail, including letters from her 13-year-old daughter.  Later that year, she called Sarah Palin “the muse of the coming police state.”

And now we are told by Alternet that Naomi Wolf is considered a “Tea Party darling”? Huh? Did I blink and miss her overnight conversion from devoted leftist crank to Gadsen flag-waving protester?

Not likely. Camille Paglia provides some insight in a 1993 New York Magazine interview:

“I don’t think Naomi has any deep beliefs,” Paglia says. “She’s derivative, picks up on whichever way the wind is blowing, and uses that to advance herself.”

Over the last few years, Wolf has discovered that despite her leftist feminist roots, some small but vocal groups on the Right find her flavor of anti-government paranoia attractive.  Thus, her treatise on the ten steps to fascism (step 1: Bush lied, step 2: Bush lied again, and so on) is a runaway hit with conspiracy nuts and Ron Paul supporters (but I repeat myself.)  And Wolf is happy to substitute Obama for Bush now that the Rove/Cheney cabal has come and gone.

But it is a mistake to consider Wolf a libertarian ally.

Wolf’s recent article on the Tea Parties is dripping with feigned populist sympathy, but much like Alex Jones, she is a vampire feeding upon the Tea Party movement by appealing to the tin foil hat-wearing fringe. For example, when asked about FEMA concentration camps during the Alternet interview, Wolf replied, “I have heard some suggestive first-person accounts that some good reporters should follow up on.”  Hey, she’s just asking questions.

Wolf has also positioned herself as a transpartisan mistress of Godwin’s law, armed with Nazi comparisons for Democrats as well as Republicans:

Obama has done things like Hitler did. Let me be very careful here. The National Socialists rounded people up and held them without trial, signed legislation that gave torture impunity, and spied on their citizens, just as Obama has. It isn’t a question of what has been done that Hitler did.  It’s what does every dictator do, on the left or the right, that is being done here and now.

Wolf can speak moonbat, wingnut, and everything in between. But don’t be fooled. Camille Paglia may be right that Wolf has no “deep beliefs,” but those she has are reliably leftist, doused in conspiracy, and smothered in kooky sauce.

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Follow Jenn Q. Public on Twitter and read more of her work at JennQPublic.com.