Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Dr. Richard Cravatts, a Professor of Practice and Director of the Master’s Program in Communications Management at the Simmons College School of Management. He is President of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, a grassroots community of over 50,000 academics on more than 3500 campuses worldwide, and a board member of the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, the Investigative Taskforce on Campus Anti-Semitism, and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. He is also the author of the new book, Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel & Jews (David Horowitz Freedom Center).
FP: Richard Cravatts, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Illuminate for us the jihad against Jews and Israel on the American campus.
What is the extent to which the campus Left is allied with jihadist elements, Muslim student associations, and funded by Saudi money? Why do you think they have the formed this “unholy alliance”?
Cravatts: Many of us have been concerned for some time with the relentless, deceptive, and dangerous attacks against Israel emanating from college campuses, particularly because academia was always thought to be a place where honesty debate and scholarly inquiry could flourish. But at least with regard to Israel, that no longer is the case. In fact, what I characterize as an intellectual jihad against Israel is taking place right now on campuses everywhere, characterized by such vile contortions of history and fact, and driven by such moral imbecility and double standards on the part of its adherents, that is has few parallels as a campus movement. It involves, first, a rapturous adherence to a cult of “Palestinianism,” in which seeking social justice for the ever-suffering Palestinians has become the primary intellectual mission of many liberals who deride Western values and democratic states, and a convenient cause for many in the Arab world for whom the Palestinians have become a club to use against Israel and Jews. On campuses, this has evolved into a dangerous “unholy alliance” between Islamists with a specific agenda to dilute Western institutions, and leftists who, in accommodating radical Islam, not only enable what Robert Spencer has called a “stealth jihad,” but help facilitate it.
On campuses, the stealth jihad is led by the Muslin Student Association, an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood whose 600 chapters serve as command centers for inviting guest speakers with incendiary rhetoric, annual hate-fests during which Israel and Jews are libeled, slandered, and demonized, shouting down or preventing speeches by pro-Israel, anti-jihad speakers, and other instances extremist behavior and destructive narratives about the Israel/Palestinian debate. This alliance between jihadists and Leftists, who ordinarily share little in common, ideologically, serves both sides well: Muslim students who wish to deflect the pathologies of Palestinian cause savor being able to assign the West’s worst appellation of ‘racist’ to Israel, and campus liberals at the same time fulfill their Marxist dreams of trying to envision and help create what Ruth Wisse of Harvard called the “ideal of the egalitarian state,” something that the Left had hoped that Communism would create, but which ultimately failed to be established anywhere and in the pursuit of which some 100 million souls perished during the twentieth century.
And petro-dollars have helped to lubricate this stealth jihad. Jay P. Greene, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute , noted that “Gulf Arabs gave a total of $88 million to 14 U.S. universities between 1995” and today. What does all that largesse buy? For one thing, academic recipients are going to shy away from any critical investigation of the donor’s own political system, autocratic rule, or abuse in the social and civil rights of the citizens of those oil-rich but often economically- and socially-backward countries. Though many of the funded centers, such as Georgetown’s, are established with the stated intention of helping to “build bridges” between the Christian West and Islam for the purpose of enhancing mutual understanding, in practice the centers end up serving as beachheads where Arab states can attempt to influence scholarship and indoctrinate a new generation of scholars.
FP: What damage does the campus Left cause because of its ideological attacks on Israel as a racist, apartheid state, and how it reinforces other items in the leftist agenda (i.e. attacks on “colonialism” and political correctness, etc.)?
Cravatts: Canadian MP Irwin Cotler has said that the most serious crime one could be accused of in the twentieth century was racism and Nazism, and it’s interesting that both of those terms are now used promiscuously against Israel on campuses around the world. The academic enemies of Israel have created a false narrative in which the “colored”, indigenous Palestinians have been dispossessed by occupying “white” European Jews with no real connection to Israel, that the presence of Jews in the Palestine is yet another indication of colonialism, imperialism, militarism, and Nazi-like brutality.
The frequent condemnations, on and off campus, that Zionism is equivalent to racism and that Israel is an “apartheid” country (a charge given credence by such luminaries as former President Jimmy Carter, among others), is very purposeful, because if it can be asserted, over and over, that Israel is a racist state, that it was built on stolen land, and that it continues to exist in violation of international human rights and at the expense of the Palestinian victims, it can legitimately be attacked, vilified, and even dismantled for its sin of racism.
What you yourself, Jamie, have identified as the “Left’s sacred cow of multiculturalism.” has also meant that faculty as well as students have been seeped in an ideology which refuses to demarcate any differences between a democratic state struggling to protect itself and aggressive, genocidal foes who wish to destroy it with their unending assaults. For the multiculturalist Left, the moral strengths of the two parties are equivalent, even though the jihadist foes of Israel, for example, have waged an unending struggle with the stated aim of obliterating the Jewish state through the murder of Jews.
Thus, this inclination to worship multiculturalism forces liberals to make excuses for those cultures which have obvious, often irredeemable, moral defects, such as the Islamist foes who currently threaten Israel and the West. As commonly happens when liberals appraise the relative merits of their own countries and others, one set of expectations are used to measure Third-world countries and their leaders, and a totally different, far more stringent (if not unreasonable) set is used when evaluating the behavior and values of the United States, the EU, or Israel. This cynical, nearly hypocritical, view has meant that the Left frequently denounces Western democracies as imperialistic, racist, militaristic oppressors, precisely because they wish them to evolve to a purer, newly-structured society and feel that they have the collective insight and moral strength to effect this change as they strive for social justice.
The danger in all of this, of course, is the campus enemies of Israel and the West, by excusing terror and Islamism at the same time they criticize the West’s attempts to protect itself, emboldens are enemies, and cast Israel—and its supporters—as the villain and the actual obstacle to world peace.
You could have been a lot tougher on the f—ck—g commies
We need every American Jewish Organizations to push for the candidate running against BHO and every Jewish American to vote likewise.
This administration is anti-Israel.
This president embraces Islam.
There is not one good reason for American Jews to support Obama and every reason to remove him from office.
The liberal left media continues to support BHO and gives him a pass on everything he does including lying and fuzzy math.
The Dark Ages return when Muslim oil meets the American left on Jews and Israel.
I know, I know… We are extremists or like some AIPAC folk call us, “troblemakers”…
What to do, we conclusively are not part of the Stephen Wise and Naum Goldman US styled “shhh… quiet” crowd.
Nor of the Peresite, Barak, Netanyahu etal JINO aggregates.
Years before today we were advocating educating Jewish youngsters to be able to defend themselves at ALL LEVELS.
Our children followed us in our footsteps and learnt military grade contact self defense, (KRAV MAGAH MESHULESHET). Two graduated from the IDF training and service. The young one is learning intensively combat contact defense. That while throughly learning Torah and general education items as well as electricity, computer science and agriculture.
There is no contradiction between self assurance in front of enemies and obtaining top level education, in fact that complement each other. I am a former Senior-Fellow Engineer US DoD Military Avionics Programs, holding patents in that field and published by the UTA. Also an Invited Consultant to the Israeli MoD. And again Invited to resume my Professorship assignments even after retirement.
And,
I was a heavyweight amateur boxer, sharpshooter and front line soldier in two military services. Recipient of the OT Lebanon.
Our co religionaires in the US must either wake up and stop joining the likes of Mr. Soetoro or this time face the music themselves. Their profile is beyond pathetic. And regretfully in cases inimical to other Jews…
They would be welcome here in Eretz Israel, but they will have to settle in the front lines and jump in. We certainly do not need “community organizers” akin the the fellow in the WH. North Tel Aviv is a branch extension of the New York types and that element is fading away kicking but going anyway.
There is no quick fix for combating Jihadism/Genocidal Liberalism, but there are steps that can be taken for starters.
Dr. Richard Cravatts, SPME, STNADWITHUS, Allan Dershewitz, Ruth Wisse, Major Jewish Organizations , Wiesenthal Center, to name just some, could take on the fight, if only they were to unite, and create a strong, not politically correct Think Tank. First thing on the agenda should be , a counter Conference to Harvard’s “One State Solution’.
Needless to say that this academic and diplomatic counter-war can only be won with effective leadership of the Government of Israel, who for decades has neglected to assert her Legal Rights to the Land of Israel.
Finally, Yuli Edelstein would do well, to call upon the above mentioned influential individuals, and organizations to make every effort to eradicate once and for all such hate fests.
By silently standing by, allowing the venom to spread, and infect the minds of the best of our future intellectuals, and leaders, is tantamount to suicide for Israel, for Jews, as well as students of all civilized countries
Yamit (Unlce) I have to agree with that statement. That will be a great game changer. Serving in the IDF would build real character and I assure you these Muslim clowns would think twice before encountering them.
Once upon a time in America
“The police had to escort them to safety off campus” These Jewish kids are an embarrassment. They pay tens of thousands per year to attend such Universities and had to be escorted off campus for their own safety.
The provocateurs should have needed the police to escort them off campus for their safety.
Jews who won’t or can’t defend themselves are finished.
Running from the violent bully only causes and stimulates them to more violent attacks.
Cowardice and appeasement won’t work today any better than it has in the past. Every Jew should be taught how to fight and every Jew should get a firearm (Licensed) if possible.
Jewish kids should go to University in Israel serve in the IDF and go home if that’s what they want afterwards. That might be a game changer for Jewish Youth in the diaspora and Israel as well.
Notice no real solution was offered. Bankruptcy of Jewish leadership is generational and each couple of years seems to get worse.
Toynbee remarked that History was just a matter of “Challenge and Response”. I do not see American Jews rising to the challenges that threaten them as individual or collective Jews. The writings on the wall and if they choose correctly they might survive with most of their assets otherwise look to our not so distant past for another possible result.