The Saudis Are Subsidizing Middle East Studies Across the U.S.

Lee Kaplan, in frontpagemag.com (April 5, 2004):

... Saudi infiltration works on several levels. By creating new Middle East Studies Centers and such endowed chairs on campuses across the US, the Saudis are able to influence the curriculum taught to the next generation of American students about the Middle East situation as taught at Saudi-funded madrassas both here and abroad. That curriculum is decidedly anti-Western and full of incitement against Christians and Jews.[13] Based not on truth as much as the agenda of the totalitarian regime in power, it “molds” the next generation to hate Israel and to hate America as an “imperialist” or “racist” nation.[14]

For example, according to Middle East historian Martin Kramer, Columbia University has become the “Bir Zeit (University) on -the- Hudson”[15]. Bir Zeit is a university built for the Palestinians by Israel in the West Bank. Instead of its being a source for educational prosperity and peace, it is a breeding ground for totalitarian terrorist ideologues and their ilk. Faculty write scholarly works about Middle East history against the US and Israel as a matter of course. At Columbia, Palestinians dominate the teaching of the modern Middle East and do not encourage a diversity of approaches in doing so. [16] When a chair is endowed by Saudi money it is filled by academics known for their Palestinian or Saudi activism less than for their scholarship.

Thus Columbia’s new chair was given to Rashid Khalidi, a University of Chicago historian and Palestinian activist. Khalidi took over the “Edward Said Chair Of Arab Studies.” Said, who died recently, and who was raised in Egypt, was a member of the Palestine National Council and anti-Israel activitist thought the Oslo peace process was a "sellout." [17] He was an English literature professor, whose expertise was Jane Austen, yet his anti-American and anti-Israel writings dominate the perspectives of Middle East Studies departments across the nation.

Khalidi is on record defending the killing of Israeli soldiers: “Killing civilians is a war crime, whoever does it, but resistance to occupation is legitimate in international law”. [18] Khalidi is an obsessive Israel basher and has stated Americans are “brainwashed” by the Middle East’s only democracy. He also considered US popular support for overthrowing Saddam Hussein an “idiots' consensus”. [19]

Another Palestinian professor in Columbia’s Middle East Studies program is Joseph Massad, who also rails against the US and Israel. Massad likes to denigrate American democracy by alluding to early 19th century history when slavery was a worldwide institution, and accuses America of nuclear genocide for using the atomic bomb to end World WarII. He has also characterized Israel as an “imperialist” and “colonial” concoction of the Europeans. [20]

With Khalidi’s appointment as chair and Massad as the main teacher of politics and history of the Middle East at Columbia, what students will be exposed to with no alternative views isn’t hard to imagine. Even Lisa Anderson, head of International Studies at Columbia has conceded publicly that Middle East Studies at Columbia are not balanced, nor are they at other Middle East Studies centers nationwide.[21] What is more telling is that Columbia tried to conceal where the money came from to fund Khalidi’s chair until pressure from outside academics and even the state of New York required it.[22] Daniel Pipes has remarked that choosing Khalidi for the Columbia chair is “particularly egregious because he is one of a team of Palestinian falsifiers who are all giving us this propagandist, non-scholarly interpretation of the Middle East” and that Columbia’s cover-up of the donors “doesn’t smell right”. Steve Emerson, who reports to Congress frequently on terrorism issues, has stated publicly that “Khalidi’s statements raise serious questions about his attitudes on violence” [23]

But Columbia is not alone. Such departments and professors are now found in Middle East Studies programs nationwide.

UC Berkeley’s Center For Middle East Studies website boasts of receiving a $5 million dollar grant courtesy of Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud and Sheikh Salahudin Yusef Hamza Abdeljawad, another major donor. Both are linked to Islamic charities which the US government says are front groups for funding Al Qaeda and both are now part of a $1 trillion dollar lawsuit by the families of the victims of 9/11.

Their contributions link through a labyrinth of front banks and charitable institutions which ultimately finance terrorism against the West. Al-Saud gives generously to the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, the Muslim League and World Assembly of Muslim Youth—all established fronts for terrorist funding named by the US State Department. And Abdeljawad is linked to the Saudi Dar-Al_Maal-Islami Bank founded by Osama Bin Laden and managed by Osama Bin Laden’s brother that is known by the State Department to also fund terrorism as well. Did the Sultan Al-Saud give money knowingly to charity that made its way to Bin Laden? [24]

A visit to the Sultan’s foundation website in Saudi Arabia tells much more. It lists a “Higher Council” or board of directors which includes one Abdulrahman bin Ali Jeraisy who has been openly funding Al Qaeda according to a report to Congress.[25] UC Berkeley’s Saudi funded academics have more than satisfied Saudi goals of using US campuses to teach hate for America and Israel. The Israel divestment petition was begun at UC Berkeley and has been promoted by faculty there. [26] A Jewish student who complained to her Arabic instructor about the anti-semitic Protocols Of the Elders Zion was told that the ficitious "protocols" were indeed written by Jews. She was then attacked by the instructor’s supervisor, who openly called her a liar and threatened her with a libel suit. He even lied to the press claiming an investigation had been conducted of the student's claims when the student was never interviewed. The instructor held so firm to his comment about Jews being authors of the forgeries that the campus newspaper believed afterward that the "protocols: were actually written by Jews. [27]

Saudi endowed chairs and departments have produced faculty at the college level in America who spout the propaganda provided to 8th graders in Saudi Arabian schools, where textbooks claim that Jews “are people of treachery and betrayal.” At Connecticut State University, Norton Mezvinsky, has declared Judaism a religion of “racism” whose followers believe that “the blood of non-Jews has no intrinsic value” and that the killing of non-Jews does “not constitute murder according to the Jewish religion” and that Judaism teaches “the killing of innocent Arabs for revenge is a Jewish virtue.” While textbooks in Saudi Arabia claim “the Zionist Jews are the enemies of Islam and supporters of the modern Crusaders” Joel Beinin, Middle East Studies professor at Stanford and former head of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), rails against America’s “Zionist lobby” that controls the US government by blocking democracy and economic development in the Arab world” and uses power “to make and unmake regimes”. ...