My colleague Cinnamon Stillwell has written a great piece for American Thinker in which she highlights the vulgarity that many of our Middle East studies professors engage in when dealing with their adversaries. Naturally, there are some familiar figures featured like UC Irvine's Mark LeVine and UC Riverside's Reza Azlan. Stillwell illustrates how these characters resort to angry four-letter words when confronted by those who disagree with them.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/06/bonfire_of_the_vulgarians_middle_east_studies_in_decline.html
"F— you. Call me uncivil, but still, f— you. F— all of you who want to make arguments about civility and how Israel wants peace. . . . There is only one criticism of Israel that is relevant: It is a state grown, funded, and feeding off the destruction of another people. It is not legitimate. It must be dismantled, the same way that the other racist, psychopathic states across the region must be dismantled."
-Mark LeVine
But wait a minute! Could this be the same Mark LeVine who lit into me with a profanity-laced tirade in front of his own students when I called him an "anti-Israel activist" at UC Irvine a few months back?
Mark LeVine-PhD
That's him alright.
Then there is the pride of UC Riverside, Reza Aslan, a self-styled intellectual. I attended (and videotaped) the referenced speaking event on Islamophobia at UCR. I asked him during the q and a whether he would dismiss all those Coptic Christians in Egypt, the Christians in Syria and Iraq, the Baha'i in Iran and the Jews in Europe as simply being "Islamophobes". He replied affirmatively to my question saying that just because somebody was treated badly by a Muslim doesn't give them license to be bigoted against Muslims.
Reza Aslan-PhD
Stillwell's article goes on to include intellectual "luminaries and celebrities" like Juan Cole, Steven Salaita and others. As for Cole, I saw him speak on October 16, 2014 at Cal State Long Beach. That was the time a student asked him about all the Brits like "Jihad John" going to join ISIS. Cole responded by calling British Prime Minister a racist and Islamophobe for alerting the British public that some 400 British Muslims had joined ISIS-out of a population of 4 million- a minuscule number. It seemed to me at the time that 400 ISIS men returned to the UK could wreak a lot of havoc. Since then I believe the number has gone up to 1,000 give or take a few.
Juan Cole-PhD
Not having head the "pleasure" of seeing the others babble in person, I will close here. Suffice to say, it seems to me that Middle Eastern studies in the US mostly consists of biased, agenda-driven people, who in most cases, have probably been educated beyond their intelligence. When confronted with inconvenient facts, they resort to f-bombs and sh-bombs. What an example for their students.
There. I didn't even resort to bad language, did I?
1 comment:
Mark Levine flatters himself.
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