Foreign Policy Analyst Suggests Shutting Down College Middle Eastern Studies Departments
“Through these departments, dozens of American college students have at best been indoctrinated to despise this country and whitewash the crimes of terrorists”
Lisa Daftari went through one of these programs and suggests shutting them down could end some of the radicalism we are seeing on campuses.
She writes at FOX News:
College Middle Eastern studies departments are broken — shut them down to end campus radicalism
Shut down the Middle Eastern studies departments in our universities. I was a student in one of these programs, and I say it plainly: shut them down.
A majority are corrupted and compromised. Through these departments, dozens of American college students have at best been indoctrinated to despise this country and whitewash the crimes of terrorists, and at worst pushed toward genuine radicalization and extremist plots.
These programs have been the soft underbelly through which universities quietly accept foreign money and, with it, foreign influence that dictates curriculum, hiring, admissions, scholarships and more. They serve as conduits that funnel cash into extracurricular groups, adding an extra layer of protection and plausible deniability while financing the encampments and harassment campaigns that have erupted on campus in recent years.
This influence has been seeping into our institutions for more than two decades, but it has become brazen precisely because there have been few, if any, consequences. As someone who has had a front‑row seat to the jihadification of American academia, this is where much of it begins. Shut it down.
The rot is no longer theoretical. It has names, funding streams and institutional addresses. At Columbia University, Mahmood Mamdani, father of New York City’s mayor-elect, has been criticized for presenting Israel as a purely colonial project while downplaying the terrorism of groups such as Hamas, shaping how students in African and Middle Eastern studies understand the region.
At Oberlin College, Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, a former Iranian diplomat, has faced allegations that he helped cover up the Iran regime’s mass executions in the 1980s and has spoken of Hamas “resistance” in ways that minimize its terrorism.
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Comments
this could save quite a bit of money as well as closing several more programs/fields that have become more radical and extremist than educational over the past 50+ years
I’d also like to recommend re-instituting required (for the male students: women and “others” on a case by case basis only) ROTC while the student is in attndance
We let propagandists into our schools to teach our children foreign countries’ propaganda.
Meanwhile, what do foreign countries teach their population about us?
Mark Zuckerberg posted a video of him and his wife preparing separate turkeys for Thanksgiving this year.
A Russian propaganda version immediately surfaced, pointing out details from the video like the wooden utensils, the wooden countertops, and the lack of a visible refrigerator or a mixer prominent on the counter, to “explain” that Americans are much poorer than our globally accepted “propaganda” indicates, and in fact few Americans can afford meat to begin with.
We don’t owe such countries any accommodation.
I found the propaganda post, which hilariously refers to Zuckerberg and his wife as “a fairly successful family (by U.S. standards, of course)… [in which] the head of the family is forced to spend his leisure time making tableware out of wood.”
I am reminded of a joke from Soviet Union days. There is a foot race between the Soviet ambassador and the U.S. ambassador. The U.S. ambassador beat the Soviet ambassador.
Pravda reports on the race: “In the country of $#%, there was a race between the Soviet ambassador and the USA ambassador. The Soviet ambassador finished second, and the USA ambassador finished next-to-last.”
He’s correct these “departments,” were previously “peace studies” if anyone remembers that incarnation. Now they are “middle east studies” or basically antisemitism factories or gross anti-western ideology. Of course if they got shut down then they’d just morph again with a new name, the money from Qatar is just too good for Harvard and the supposedly “elite” schools to turn down.