Berkeley conference distorts Arab-Jewish relations

Bataween
Point of No Return
16 May '10

The good news is that academics in Middle East Studies departments in the West are turning increasingly to the study of relations between Jews and Muslims in the Arab world. The bad news is, as this Front Page report of a recent Berkeley conference shows, that the agenda often serves the propaganda myth of pre-Zionist 'peaceful coexistence', or in this case a 'Jewish-Muslim civilisation'. Why so few Jews still live in the Arab world today is never really addressed. The more radical think of Jews as Arabs of the Jewish religion, others downplay the dhimmi status of Jews under Islam. As Nathan Weinstock once described their unequal relationship: Jews were to Muslims as the horse to its rider - allowed to survive as long as the beast was useful to its master. (With thanks: Michelle, Ami)

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.”

(Read full article)

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Terror Training Grounds

Caroline Glick
31 July 09

From 1970 to 1980, Bernardine Dohrn was a terrorist fugitive on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. Now she's a law professor at Northwestern University Law School where she teaches a course on law and the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

During her time as co-commander of the Weather Underground terrorist organization with her husband, education professor William Ayres, the group committed some sixteen bombings. Among its targets were the State Department, the New York Queens Courthouse, military recruiting offices in Brooklyn and the home of New York Supreme Court Justice John Murtagh while Murtagh was asleep at home with his wife and children.

Dohrn, her husband and their colleagues emerged from hiding in 1980 when terror charges against them were dropped due to a technicality. None of them ever served hard time for their crimes. Neither Dohrn - whom FBI director J. Edgar Hoover once referred to as "the most dangerous woman in America" - nor Ayres ever expressed the slightest remorse for their actions.

Indeed, in a 1998 interview with ABC News, Dohrn said that looking back on her career as a terrorist, her only regret was that she hadn't committed more attacks. As she put it, "We'd do it again. I wish we had done more. I wish we had been more militant."

But then, those who cannot do, teach. And now Dohrn is passing on her knowledge of terrorism to a new generation of students through her seminar on Palestinian terrorists.

Dohrn is no newcomer to the subject. In 1974, together with her fellow Weather Underground terrorist colleagues, she published a book called Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism. As the David Horowitz Freedom Center's Discoverthenetworks.org website makes clear, Prairie Fire was the Weather Underground's declaration of war against the United States. Among other things, it asserts, "Our intention is to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside."

Dohrn and her co-authors dedicated their book to the Who's Who of the terrorist murderers club. Among their honorees was Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian terrorist who murdered Robert F. Kennedy. No doubt, for Dohrn the unapologetic terrorist, teaching a course on the Palestinian terror war against Israel is like closing a circle.

Dohrn's class is notable because it is likely the only current instance in a U.S. university where a formerly active terrorist is teaching a class about terrorists. But by paying someone like Dohrn to teach a course on terrorists, Northwestern is not pushing the envelope very far along.

In both major and minor universities throughout the U.S., supporters of Palestinian terrorists are teaching American students the history, sociology, politics, law and culture of the Arab and Islamic world's war against Israel. The fact that the narrative they teach has little to no connection to historic truth or to objective, measurable reality is of no interest to anyone.

ACTUALLY THAT is not true. In many cases, the professors who stir up the most controversy for their incendiary support for terrorists and condemnation of Israel and its supporters are of great interest to university administrators. Indeed, they arguably owe their careers to their hostile stance toward Israel.

Case in point is newly tenured Columbia professor Joseph Massad, a little-accomplished professor of Middle East studies whose resume includes no scholarly achievements. Massad rose to prominence with the David Project's 2005 release of its documentary "Columbia Unbecoming" in which Jewish students at Columbia related the intellectual intimidation they suffered in the classroom at the hands of Massad and his colleagues. A university panel formed to investigate the students' allegations found that Massad exceeded "commonly accepted bounds" of behavior in his treatment of one of his students.
(Full article)
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