RUTHFULLY YOURS

In 2016, Brandeis University hired an anti-Semitic Islamist formerly linked to al-Qaeda to teach students about Islam.

Brandeis offered Boston-based cleric Suheil Laher a job in its Near Eastern and Judaic Studies department despite his long history of involvement with extremist causes. That history includes his leadership of a now-defunct charity that raised funds for jihadist causes in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan.

This academic year, Laher is teaching two courses at Brandeis: “Introduction to the Qu’ran” and “Muhammad: Life, Teachings, and Legacy.” Given Laher’s past, what strain of Islam is he likely to promote?

Before Brandeis, Laher was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Muslim chaplain for almost twenty years. While at MIT, he also served, from 2000, as head of a Boston-based charity named CARE International (not to be confused with the current charity of the same name). Originally named the “Al Kifah Refugee Center,” the charity was founded by Abdullah Azzam, a founding member of al-Qaeda and a mentor to Osama Bin Laden.

CARE served to support jihad. According to J.M. Berger, a fellow with the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague:

[H]undreds of thousands of dollars passed through CARE for distribution to jihadists and jihad-support organizations overseas.

CARE also arranged public screenings of jihadist videos, and published a newsletter called “Al Hussam” (“The Sword”), which “was stuffed with short, informative news items from various fronts in the global jihad.”

Berger notes:

CARE’s tactics included dinner speeches and events at local mosques and universities, among them MIT, Boston College, and Boston University, usually slipping them in under the auspices of the local Muslim Students Association.

As the MIT Muslim chaplain, Laher would have overseen MIT’s Muslim Students’ Association and have been able to promote CARE’s jihadist causes among the Muslim students under his leadership.

While at MIT, Laher did not hide his Islamist views. His personal website at the time featured attacks on Jews, Christians, and kuffar (non-believers):

The kuffar, including the Jews and Christians, can never become our intimate friends, confidantes or close allies.

Laher’s personal website featured al-Qaeda leader Abdullah Azzam’s infamous call to jihad. It also linked to an al-Qaeda fundraising website. It urged Muslims to reject the “evils” of the West.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265477/jew-hatred-dressed-justice-john-perazzoEditor’s note: The following is the first in a series of articles highlighting the network of major hate groups in America that are supported and funded by the Left. For more information on Students for Justice in Palestine, visit the organization’s profile at DiscoverTheNetworks.org.

Founded at UC Berkeley in October of 2000, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is a highly influential campus organization with chapters based at approximately 200 American colleges and universities, where it organizes and sponsors anti-Israel events and campaigns more actively than any other student group in the nation. SJP’s declared mission is to “promote the cause of justice,” “speak out against oppression,” and “educate members of our community specifically about the plight of the Palestinian people” at the hands of alleged Israeli abuses. The benign tenor of this mission statement stands in stark contrast, however, to the countless reams of SJP propaganda that echo much of what is said by the Hamas terrorists who seek to permanently end Israel’s existence as a sovereign Jewish state. The reason for this is simple: SJP was in essence formed to help spread anti-Semitism through the halls of American academia; to wage a campus war against Israel by providing rhetorical support for the Jew-hatred undergirding the Second Palestinian Intifada which Hamas and allied terrorists had recently launched in late September 2000.

SJP’s principal founder, Hatem Bazian, has quoted approvingly from a famous Islamic hadith which calls for the violent slaughter of Jews and which appears in Hamas’s founding charter. He once spoke at a fundraising dinner for a Hamas front group that the U.S. government later shut down due to the organization’s ties to Islamic terrorism. On another occasion, Bazian portrayed Hamas as “a classical anti-colonial nationalist and religious guerrilla movement.” And he described Hamas’s victory in the 2006 Gaza elections as “a monumental event.”

Notwithstanding Hamas’s calls for the mass murder and genocide of Jews, the website of SJP’s UC Berkeley chapter describes Hamas not as a terrorist group but rather as “a vast social organization” that “provides schools, medical care, and day care for a number of Palestinians who otherwise live difficult lives”; a group with a “clean record as far as domestic corruption in governance [is] concerned”; and an entity whose “officials have often stated that they are ready for a long-term truce with Israel during which time final status negotiations can occur.”

It is commonplace for SJP’s rank-and-file members to support, or to at least decline to condemn, Islamic terrorism. As a Columbia University SJP member said in 2002: “We support the right of Palestinians to resist occupation and do not dictate the methods of that struggle. There’s a difference between violence of the oppressed and violence of the oppressors.”

That same year, SJP’s national convention was sponsored by the Islamic Association for Palestine, a now-defunct, Illinois-based front group for Hamas. The conference featured keynote speaker Sami Al-Arian, a former University of South Florida professor who served as the North American leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist organization whose objectives include the destruction of Israel, the elimination of all Western influences in the Middle East by means of armed warfare, and the convergence of all Muslim countries into a single Islamic caliphate.

Routinely denouncing Israeli self-defense measures as assaults on the civil and human rights of Palestinians, SJP generally neglects to judge those measures in the context of Palestinian terror attacks. For example, in a September 2014 “vigil” at Binghamton University in honor of Palestinians who had been killed in Operation Protective Edge—Israel’s then-recent military incursion into Gaza—SJP member Victoria Brown told the campus newspaper that her group’s goal was to “commemorate” and “humanize” the Palestinian “children, women and innocent civilians who were massacred” by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Yet she made no mention of the fact that the IDF’s actions were in response to a massive barrage of deadly rockets that Hamas terrorists had been firing indiscriminately into southern Israel.

On another occasion, New York City’s SJP created posters lauding the Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled—who in September 1970 had participated in the multiple hijacking of five jetliners—for “committing her life to be a freedom fighter in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.”

Two graduate students and two undergraduates recalled personally experiencing the July 15, 2016 coup attempt against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government at a December 7, 2016, Georgetown University panel, before a youthful audience of about fifty. As crews from Turkey’s TRT Haber television network and Anadolu Agency (AA) filmed/recorded, the panelists praised the coup’s popular foiling as a democratic victory, irrespective of Erdogan’s dangerous Islamist policies.

Such willful blindness mirrors that of other American-educated Middle East studies scholars whose actions and pronouncements lend a veneer of legitimacy to Erdogan’s dictatorial policies, including mass purges and arrests of academics and teachers throughout Turkey. Erdogan’s personal spokesman is Ibrahim Kalin, a George Washington University Ph.D. who serves as a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. He joined Juan Cole of Michigan, Cemil Aydin of UNC Chapel Hill (Harvard Ph.D.) at an October 2016 conference in Istanbul even as innocent educators languished in prison or faced academic ruin.

Islamism certainly colored the experiences of the panel’s two graduate students, Harvard University Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations doctoral student Rushain Abbasi and his wife Safia Latif, who were in Istanbul during the attempted coup. Abbasi is a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB)-affiliated Muslim Students Association and a former teacher at the Boston Islamic Seminary, an affiliate of another MB group, the Muslim American Society. His previous writing stereotypically attributed Islamist violence to the “histories of colonialism, imperialism, and economic exploitation that still plague the non-Western world,” maintaining, “[i]t is not the texts of Islam . . . that are in need of reform.”

Latif, a Boston University doctoral student in religious studies who earned an M.A. in Middle East studies from the University of Texas, was like-minded. She previously participated in a conference chaired by the notorious Islamist and UC-Berkeley lecturer Hatem Bazian at California’s Zaytuna College. Having witnessed Egyptians in 2013 overthrowing the Muslim Brotherhood-led government of President Mohamed Morsi, she despaired of the same thing happening in Turkey. “To see another democratically elected government with an ostensible Islamist president fall was almost too much to bear. My first reaction was a religious one; I took to the prayer mat and I began praying for the Turkish people.”

As Inauguration Day nears, “Post-Traumatic Trump Disorder” is ubiquitous. Many of the president-elect’s supporters “suffer” from excessive jubilance, bordering on ecstasy, while many of his detractors are wallowing in angst, panic, and rage, and the latter, PTTD group is making life miserable for children across the country. Los Angeles may be ground zero for the disorder.

The United Teachers of Los Angeles — or, more aptly, the United Trump-Loathers Association — led by its radical, agenda-driven president, Alex Caputo-Pearl, is planning a major demonstration before school on January 19, the day before the new president is sworn in. The demonstrators are being instructed to launch a tweetstorm to Trump (#schooltrump) and hold symbolic shields at school sites, to show that “educators are united with our students and our communities against Trump’s racially charged and anti-immigrant proposals and that we will continue to fight attempts to privatize public education.” The union is urging the public to join “tens of thousands of students, parents, educators, school staff, and community members . . . to shield our public schools from the Trump/DeVos/Broad agenda.” (Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick for education secretary, is a voucher proponent, while billionaire Eli Broad has donated millions to charter schools. Union involvement in both private and charter schools is minimal.)

Nothing like an early-morning dose of union-led political indoctrination for the kids to digest along with their Froot Loops.

Actually, the early-morning festivities on the 19th are just a kick-off for what Caputo-Pearl sees as a two-year offensive. (“Offensive” in both senses of the word.) The issues that are paramount to the union boss are “green spaces on a campus” and “a plan to achieve strike readiness by February 2018,” as well as fighting charter co-location (in which charter schools occupy space in public-school buildings) and getting union-friendly school-board members elected in March of this year.

The pre–Inauguration Day merrymaking is not limited to Los Angeles, or even California. The Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, a national network composed mostly of teachers’ unions and groups they fund, is planning a “National Day of Action” on the 19th. AROS insists that the “best way to ensure each and every child has the opportunity to pursue a rich and productive life is through a system of publicly funded, equitable and democratically controlled public schools.” In fact, one of their demands is “billions of dollars for public schools in black and brown communities.” I guess the $670 billion we currently spend nationally on “democratically controlled public schools” isn’t enough for the AROS crowd.

As the teachers’ union goes off the deep end, how have Los Angeles Unified School District officials responded to Trump’s election? Clearly suffering from advanced PTTD, the school board also is in a state of sheer panic. The mandarins who rule over the massive school district have set up a hotline to deal with students’ concerns, which, of course, have been exacerbated by the education establishment’s regnant hysteria. While Trump has indeed made some questionable comments about immigration, certain educators and a compliant mainstream media have blown things way out of proportion and worried many children needlessly. So school-board members should not be the ones counseling frightened children; let their parents do that, please.

The school-board members also spent time at a recent meeting passing resolutions as a hedge against actions that they expect the Trump administration to carry out. Consulting “social-emotional learning experts” and declaring its schools “safe zones” are of paramount importance to the board these days. Actually, if anyone needs a “safe zone” at this time, it’s students who dare to wear “Make America Great Again” hats.

Maybe instead of playing psychologist and engaging in dubious policymaking, the school board should focus on its mandate, which is to educate children and, at the same time, be judicious in spending taxpayers’ money.

As for the education component, LAUSD, not to put too fine a point on it, is doing a rotten job. While California students did not fare well on the recent standardized tests, L.A. kids’ scores were in the toilet. In fact, 56 percent of the district’s 85 ranked middle schools were assigned the lowest overall ranking of 1, based on the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, a test taken by students this past spring. The “good news” is that just 20 percent of the district’s elementary schools received the lowest rank, as did 31 percent of its high schools. (The latter number would be higher, but many poor-performing eleventh-graders drop out of school before the test is given.)

Fiscally, LAUSD is also failing. As explained in LA School Report earlier this month, the district may not be able to meet its financial obligations in the future because it faces a cumulative deficit of $1.46 billion through the 2018–19 school year. But LAUSD chief financial officer Megan Reilly, maintaining a smiley face, assures us that with just the right combination of smoke and mirrors, the district may be able to winnow the deficit down to a mere $252 million. Don’t bet the mortgage on that, however.

The University of Maryland has a new lecture series coming up that makes the claim that Donald Trump won the White House not because his policies spoke to people better, or that his strategy understood the Electoral College better than Hillary Clinton’s did, or that he was running against an arrogant, corrupt, and dismissive candidate. No, the series seeks to illustrate that Donald Trump won because of racism.

I can’t make this crap up, folks:

The University of Maryland is hosting a series of post-election lectures on how a “commitment to white supremacy” fueled the Trump train, blaming “white America’s spiritual depravity” for his unexpected victory.

One talk scheduled for the February 13 “Understanding Race and Class in the 2016 Election” event, set to be delivered by Professor Paula Ioanide from Ithaca College, will apparently discuss the “spiritual degradation of white America in the age of Trump,” during which Ioanide will elaborate on the “spiritual depravity, deadening, and social alienation” of America’s working class.
Sponsored

“I argue that these collective symptoms are fundamentally rooted in white Americans’ investments in gendered racism, which teaches whites not only to deaden themselves to the suffering of others but to their own humanity,” her abstract for the lecture notes, suggesting that “white America will either reckon with and remedy its collective spiritual degradation, or the chickens will come home to roost.”

Sigh.

She couldn’t give Trump better advertising if he was paying her. Sure looks like something is coming home to roost.

A primary problem with this line of thinking is that it doesn’t require those who buy into it to actually listen to their opponents. Those who stand against the leftist forces at work in this country offer arguments regarding the Constitution, economics, and individual liberty, yet those who think like this just scream racism, cutting themselves off from reality and making dialogue impossible.