Frontpage Magazine Weighs in on UC Berkeley Controversy

Hat tip Frontpage Magazine, Discover the Networks, and Investigative Project on Terrorism


Daniel Greenfield, writing in Frontpage Magazine has some background on the UC Berkeley professor (Hatem Bazian) who has assigned his students to send in weekly tweets on Islamophobia.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/anti-semitic-muslim-professor-forces-students-to-tweet-on-islamophobia/

Of course, Bazian is no stranger to the UC Irvine campus, where he has spoken on several occasions on behalf of the Muslim Student Union during their annual bash-Israel events. As to the statements attributed to him in the Frontpage article about an infamous hadith that talks about the End of Days when a Jew will be hiding behind a tree, and the tree will call out to the Muslim to come kill him and all that rot, and referring to names of Jews on university buildings, I pointedly asked him if those comments were true when he spoke at UCI back in 2010. I also asked about a quote attributed to him calling for an intifada in the US. Here is what I got for answers.

http://garyfouse.blogspot.com/2010/05/hatem-bazian-at-uc-irvine.html

Had I known about Bazian's connection to the so-called charity Kind Hearts,(linked in the Frontpage article), I would have asked him about that as well. (Hat tip Discover the Networks) Here is more on Kind  Hearts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KindHearts_for_Charitable_Humanitarian_Development

"On February 19, 2006 (immediately following the aforementioned conference) -- after a two-year Senate investigation into terrorism financing -- federal agents padlocked Kindhearts' office and froze its assets, charging that KindHearts officials had coordinated with Hamas leaders and had made contributions to Hamas-affiliated organizations. According to Stuart Levey, Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, "KindHearts is the progeny of [the] Holy Land Foundation and Global Relief Foundation, which attempted to mask their support for terrorism behind the facade of charitable giving."  


So it seems that Bazian and a certain Muhammad El Mezain spoke at a Kind Hearts charity dinner (is there any other kind?) in San Diego back in 2004.



Muhammad El-Mezain? Could that be the same Muhammad El-Mezain as this man (below)?

http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/514.pdf

So where does that leave us? I want to be fair here. The Frontpage article says Bazian helped raise funds for Hamas and calls him an anti-Semite. I am not quite ready to jump to that conclusion. After all, maybe Bazian had no inkling of what Kind Hearts was up to in their fund raising. Maybe Bazian had no idea of what Mr El-Mezain was going to be convicted  a few years after that 2004 speaking appearance in San Diego. Who knows? Maybe this is a different Muhammad El-Mezain for all I know. As for charges of anti-Semitism against Bazian, I can only repeat what I wrote in 2010 after he came to UCI and I asked him about those two anti-Jewish quotes attributed to him. Those are the answers he gave me.

So while I am willing to give Professor Bazian the benefit of the doubt on those two points, I feel it does merit pointed questions to be posed about the 2004 speaking appearance in San Diego as well as the questions I asked in Irvine in 2010, questions which have been raised again in the referenced Frontpage Magazine article. Hopefully, someone ( a "smart alek", perhaps?) in the audience will ask him about those issues.

Maybe the next questioner will have better success than I did.