Monday, October 23, 2006
More Campus Jihad
1. In-classroom leftist indoctrination:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=25014
2. Battling the Anti-Semites:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=25030
3. More on Neve Gordon's guru:
Neo-Nazi Norman Finkelstein and Holocaust Denial:
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=245
When the Arab terrorist interviewing him claims there was never any
Holocaust and at most 50,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis, Finkelstein
has no response other than to tout his own "books".
But he calls "MEMRI" a nazi group.
4. October 23, 2006
Campus Jihad
By ANTHONY GLEES
October 23, 2006; Page A15
LONDON -- U.K. intelligence officials have just provided a chilling
assessment of the terrorist threat Britain faces. The country has become
"al Qaeda target No. 1," security sources told me, confirming last week's
press reports. Intelligence services now judge Britain's "home grown"
terrorists to be organized, trained and controlled either directly from
Pakistan or via Pakistani networks in Britain.
Until now, intelligence services thought British Islamist terrorists had
no hard links to al Qaeda despite sharing its ideology. "Clean skins" in
the security jargon, they were believed to have acted alone or in
self-constructed cells. This theory was the product of what MI5 thought it
knew about the terrorists before last year's July 7 bombings, which was
far too little. Just two months before the attacks, MI5's Joint Terrorism
Analysis Center concluded, "there is not a group with both the current
intent and capability to attack the U.K."
The ringleaders of the July 7 bombers, Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shahzad
Tanweer, both former students at Leeds Metropolitan University, showed up
on MI5's radar on as many as nine occasions before the attacks. According
to Whitehall sources, credible intelligence indicated that Mr. Khan had
visited Pakistan between November 2003 and February 2004 and sought to
contact al Qaeda. But MI5 discounted the significance of these visits at
the time and only started taking them more seriously early this year. The
London bombers' connections to Pakistan were initially dismissed as
harmless, requiring no further analysis. It was "obvious," security
sources explained in the aftermath of the attacks, that people of
Pakistani descent would visit "their families" back home or take a "long
holiday or gap year" there. The generally accepted theory was that the
terrorists had simply used information from the Internet to build their
organic peroxide bombs.
Senior military intelligence officers now dismiss this line as well,
believing the bombers received crucial weapons training in Pakistan. They
argue that if Britain is now al Qaeda's primary target, it makes sense to
look much more carefully at the Pakistan dimension and also at the links
between virulent Islamic groups in Pakistan and the U.K. Many British
Islamic colleges have ties to fundamentalist Pakistanis. Other links exist
to extremist Kashmiri groups, in turn allegedly connected to al Qaeda or
the Pakistani secret service.
MI5 has hugely upped its game, as recent arrests show. But MI5 also
believes that the number of extremists is rising and not just because it
now knows better where to look for them. MI5 keeps very close tabs on more
than 1,000 extremists; 14,000 British Muslims are considered potential
terrorist threats, security sources told me.
I believe a significant number get radicalized and recruited on university
campuses. At least 13 convicted Islamist terrorists and four suicide
bombers have been students at British universities. Radical Islamist
student societies make full use of university resources. They operate Web
sites, hosted by university servers, which direct visitors to
organizations that glorify jihad and terror. These "religious" groups are
given "prayer rooms" on campus, which are also used to disseminate
extremist literature and DVDs. Muslim students concerned about these
developments tell me that at many of these Islamic societies terrorism is
portrayed as justified acts of "resistance." A leading imam in Birmingham
often preaches on British campuses that the London bombers have to be seen
as "martyrs."
Organizations like Hizb Ut Tahrir and Al Muhajiroun, which advocate a
world caliphate, demand that Britain adopt the Shariah and express a
violent hatred for the West and Jews, have repeatedly tried to gain
student converts at the University of East Anglia. It is only thanks to a
courageous campus imam that their infiltration attempts have been thwarted
so far. His colleague at London Metropolitan University, Sheikh Musa
Admani, repeatedly warns about Islamic radicalization at his and other
London campuses. Just two months ago, the head of an Islamic student
society and several fellow students at London Metropolitan were charged
with planning to smuggle explosives on a plane bound for America. Yet
university authorities usually consider these societies as "religious
gatherings," and thus off limits.
Government minister Ruth Kelly two weeks ago urged universities to monitor
their students more carefully and report signs of extremism to the
security services. But many British universities are reluctant to step up
security. Universities U.K., an association of British universities,
criticized Ms. Kelly's proposals as "unreasonable," saying "there are
dangers in targeting one particular group within our diverse communities."
When I suggested last year similar measures the government now proposes, I
was myself attacked by Universities U.K. The vice chancellor from the
University of Sunderland asked my own vice chancellor to "shut me up." I
was threatened with legal action if the name of a particular university
was mentioned in connection with terrorism. Unfortunately, my research
showed that Islamic radicalization is a threat on campuses nation-wide.
But British universities prefer burying their heads in the sand of
political correctness. When the Foreign Office invited 100 academics to
bid for 1.3 million of government funds to participate in a
counter-radicalization program, the academics said no. John Gledhill,
chair of the Association of Social Anthropologists, welcomed their move,
saying last week that "it did appear to be encouraging researchers to
identify subjects and groups involved with terrorism . . . that could be
interpreted as encouraging them to become informers." Martha Mundy, a
lecturer at the London School of Economics, dismissed the government plans
as having "an overtly security-research agenda" starting from the (false)
premise that there is a "link between Islamism, radicalization and
terrorism."
Is Ms. Mundy seriously saying there is no connection between Islamism and
terrorism? "Security" is not a dirty word, even if totalitarian regimes
have abused it. Every British university subscribes to the 1997 Dearing
Report, which states that the "aim of higher education is to play a major
role in shaping a democratic, civilized and inclusive society." This is
the basis on which the British taxpayer agrees to fund them.
Academic institutions should surely help protect Britain from those who
clearly do not believe in democracy, are not civilized, and who try to
harm us. Now that we are the prime target for Islamist terror, Britain's
universities must get real.
Mr. Glees is director for the Brunel Center for Intelligence and Security
Studies.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116155302363600240.html
5. Bulldozed by Naivete
Terror advocate dies in accident. Atrocious drama ensues.
http://opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110009131
BY TERRY TEACHOUT
Saturday, October 21, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
NEW YORK--Politics makes artists stupid. Take "My Name Is Rachel Corrie,"
the one-woman play cobbled together from the diaries, emails and
miscellaneous scribblings of the 23-year-old left-wing activist who was
run over by an Israeli Army bulldozer in 2003 while protesting the
demolition of a Palestinian house in the Gaza Strip. Co-written and
directed by Alan Rickman, one of England's best actors, "Rachel Corrie"
just opened off-Broadway after a successful London run. It's an
ill-crafted piece of goopy give-peace-a-chance agitprop--yet it's being
performed to cheers and tears before admiring crowds of theater-savvy New
Yorkers who, like Mr. Rickman himself, ought to know better.
So why don't they? Because Palestine is the new Cuba, a political cause
whose invocation has the effect of instantaneously anesthetizing the upper
brain functions of those who believe in it. Take Mr. Rickman, who
evidently intended "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" to be a pro-Palestinian
equivalent of "The Diary of Anne Frank." Alas, wishful thinking is not the
stuff of exciting theater. The script is disjointed to the point of
incoherence, the staging crude and blatant, while Megan Dodds's
performance as Rachel Corrie is frankly cartoonish.
Part of Ms. Dodds's problem, however, is that the real-life character she
is portraying was unattractive in the extreme, albeit pathetically so.
Whimsical, humorless and--above all--immature, Corrie burbles on about her
feelings ("The salmon talked me into a lifestyle change") without ever
troubling to test them against reality. When she finally does so by
thrusting herself into the middle of the Israeli-Palestinian blood feud,
she sees only what she passionately longs to see: "The vast majority of
Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are engaging in Gandhian
nonviolent resistance."
In an act of unintended self-revelation, "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" ends
with a film clip of the 10-year-old Corrie prattling away like a baby
robot at her elementary school's Fifth Grade Press Conference on World
Hunger: "My dream is to give the poor a chance. . . . My dream can and
will come true if we all look into the future and see the light that
shines there." She grew older but no wiser, and in the end died a martyr
to her own naivet..
Needless to say, political drama has an impeccable theatrical pedigree.
Only last week New York playgoers were treated to the Roundabout Theatre's
revival of "Heartbreak House," the 1919 play in which George Bernard Shaw
sought to show on stage how the European leisure class plunged that
continent into a world war by heedlessly immersing itself in the pursuit
of pleasure. But Shaw was a great (if erratic) writer who dramatized his
ideas instead of merely asserting them. "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," by
contrast, is a scrappy, one-sided monologue consisting of nothing but the
fugitive observations of a young woman who, like so many idealists,
treated her emotions as facts. "I am disappointed," she declares, "that
this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in
it. This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world." To
mistake such jejune disillusion for profundity and turn it into the climax
of a full-length play is an act of piety, not artistry.
The cancellation of last season's New York Theatre Workshop production of
"My Name Is Rachel Corrie" triggered a noisy row in the New York theater
community, many of whose members jumped to the not-unreasonable conclusion
that the producers were cravenly bowing to backstage pressure from donors
who found the play's politics obnoxious. As a result, the belated opening
of "Rachel Corrie" at the Minetta Lane Theatre has had the predictable
result of bringing it far more attention than it would otherwise have
received.
That's the only lesson to be drawn from this exercise in theatrical
ineptitude. It is by far the worst political play I've covered in this
space, not excluding Tim Robbins's "Embedded," and no amount of earnest
hand-wringing can make it anything but dull.
Mr. Teachout is The Wall Street Journal's theater critic
6.
http://phibetacons.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDhiODZkY2I1MTI0MTVhNjA2NzM1NjNiOGZiNzg5YmU=
Anti-Semitism on All Sides
[Carol Iannone 10/23 11:58 AM]
Anti-Semitism is truly now more a phenomenon of the Left rather than the
Right, but leave it to the present day academy to entertain the extreme
right when it can be counted on to condemn Israel and the Jews. A group
called The Pacifica Forum sponsors talks at the University of Oregon, and
one of their featured speakers this year is a man who describes himself as
a white separatist and racialist, and who is also anti-Israel,
anti-Semitic, and a Holocaust denier who finds "a lot of truth in Mein
Kampf." (registration may be required)
Other Pacifica Forum events at the university were talks on Holocaust
denier David Irving, and a program that featured a videotape on William
Luther Pierce, founder of the National Alliance white separatist group.
Programs described as "less controversial" this year have included
lectures and videos with such titles as "Israeli-American Militarism,"
"Kosher Apartheid" and "Washington, D.C.: Israeli-Occupied Territory."
Last year's offerings included programs that blamed the Jews for
Kristallnacht.
Although the Pacifica Forum may sound leftish in some of its aspects.its
founder describes himself as a lifelong pacifist.clearly it is in the camp
of the most extreme, utterly discredited, loony right, and yet it has a
perch at the University of Oregon because the founder is a former
professor. The university does not intend to take any action and defends
the forum's programs on the grounds of free speech. OK, as far as that
goes, but a university also has an obligation to the truth, no?
