It was 60 years ago that William F. Buckley published God and Man at Yale, a book critical of the hostility toward religion prevalent at the Ivy League school. But now religion may be poised to make a comeback at the institution — at least, that is, if its god is called Allah.
Just this month, Yale took the striking step of shutting down the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism (YIISA), supposedly at the behest of powerful Muslim forces. Writes FrontPageMag.com’s Phyllis Chesler:
The Palestinianization and Stalinization of the American professoriate coupled with the likely prospect of funding from the Arab world made this outcome inevitable….
Only last year, there were bitter and very public complaints the Palestinians and their supporters made in response to YIISA’s best-ever conference on contemporary global anti-Semitism, which was held last August. And why? Because the scholars gathered by YIISA from at least five or more continents dared to focus on the Muslim and Islamist face of genocidal anti-Semitism.
The YIISA global conference…was utterly unique in focusing not only upon the politically correct view of anti-Semitism as a Christian, Western, and European phenomenon, but also on its current and lethal incarnation in the Islamic and Islamist worlds.
Now, personally, I would take no issue if YIISA had been eliminated in the name of reducing focus on “victimology” in general and next on the cutting block were afro-centric and feminist studies (which, incidentally, could also rightly cite contemporary Muslim oppression). But it was a casualty of victimology — and the allurement of the almighty dollar.
As for the latter, it does talk in academia, from determining textbook content to enforcing Title IX dictates to coercing the dumbing-down of tests whose only sin is discrimination against the ignorant. And now money is also used to leverage discrimination against the infidel by, writes Chesler, “Arab, Saudi, and Palestinian money men [who] have patiently, carefully, silently, funded the American professoriate and media.”
If Yale were still authentically religious, its professoriate might note that a certain pretty old book tells us, “The love of money is the root of all evil.” Yet the Muslims’ 30 pieces of silver wouldn’t mean much were American academia not morally and intellectually corrupt to the core. As Chesler, a college professor herself, says about education’s pro-jihadist bias:
[I]f objective and sophisticated documentation and analyses do not lead to the only politically correct conclusion, one which blames America, Europe, and Israel — but not Islam — for a history of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery; if…one departs from the format of Big Lies and actually tries to tell the truth, one is castigated as a propagandist, reactionary, activist, non-academic, [and] anti-academic.
(I must note an irony here: Chesler’s field, “Women’s Studies,” isn’t exactly known for its appreciation of politically incorrect conclusions. And when you encourage intellectual rot, don’t be surprised when it eventually collapses your own house’s foundation.)
Be this as it may, the fact is that Western intellectuals specialize in Reality Denial 101. And what can we say about condemning the West and Israel for the aforementioned ills of man while giving Islamic civilization a free pass? Well, it would be comical.
Were it not so tragically dishonest.
Islam was born of the sword and was spread by it. While most people are unaware of the fact, Christianity was the dominant religion of the Middle East and North Africa by the 400s A.D. and remained so until the Muslim hordes conquered all the old Christian lands. They then came perilously close to subduing Europe, getting within 150 miles of Paris. And later in history, Muslim aggression would spark something else for which the West is blamed: the Crusades. Moreover, the prophet Mohammed was a man of war himself, launching numerous military campaigns and leading many personally.
In addition, the Islamic slave trade has probably been more expansive and certainly has been more enduring than the European one; it in fact exists to this day, especially in Africa. And it was, mind you, infamous for seizing young African and European boys and then castrating them before selling their broken bodies into bondage.
As for anti-Semitism, it’s no surprise that it’s rife in the Islamic world. The Koran itself teaches that Jews are accursed, that Allah turned some of them into “apes and swine” and that Muslims should “Take not the Jews and the Christians as friends….” Given this, an anti-Semitism studies course that doesn’t focus on the Muslim world is an obscene exercise in self-delusion.
But this is just part of a Western intellectual lassitude that is begetting dhimmitude. And if the police in places such as Britain are so afraid of being labeled bigots that they’re covering up contemporary Muslim crimes, we shouldn’t be surprised when the powers-that-be cover up historical ones.
