Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (29 page)

I ask you, how far will the perverse use of funding to American universities by the Saudis continue before Americans realize that they have helped and even encouraged the brainwashing of our future generations to hate America, resent our foreign policy, work with our enemy against us, and indirectly sabotage everything we are doing to fight this war on Islamo-facism?

After receiving a $2 million grant from a Saudi sheikh, Khalid al-Turki, Harvard chose Zayed Yasin, a graduating senior, as its commencement speaker for its 2002 graduation ceremony, seven months after 9/11. In his speech—originally titled “My American Jihad” but changed after criticism arose to “Of Faith and Citizenship: My American Jihad,” though listed on the program as “Of Faith and Citizenship"—he attempted to mollify his audience with a pacifistic explanation of jihad. In other statements he has praised Hamas and supported the efforts of suicide bombers, arguing that their families must be paid. Yasin also raised money for the Holy Land Foundation, a charity that was linked to al Qaeda before it was shut down by the Bush administration.
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According to Martin Kramer, a historian whose subject is the Middle East, Columbia University has become a breeding ground for terrorists.
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When a chair is endowed by Saudi money, it is usually filled by a Palestinian activist who presents not only a one-sided view of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but anti-American sentiment as well. One such professor is Joseph Massad, a relentless antagonist of the United States and Israel. He preaches hatred and intolerance for America to students, constantly alluding to America’s history of slavery and accusing America of mass murder during World War II, using nuclear weapons to end the war.
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Ironically, Massad forgets to mention the genocide (2 million) and enslavement (2 million) of black Christians in the Sudan by Muslims.
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Terrorist propaganda in the classrooms abounds at Columbia. Lisa Anderson, head of the International Studies Program, has publicly stated that Middle Eastern studies programs at Columbia and at other universities across the country are unbalanced.
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The Web site
Campuswatch.org,
which reviews and critiques Middle Eastern studies programs on North American campuses, observes examples of abuses of power over students. Middle East scholars impose their views on students and sometimes expect students to embrace their own politics, punishing those who do not with lower grades or weaker recommendations.
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A student in a class on contemporary civilization taught by Massad wonders why he must listen to “an apoplectic rant about U.S. foreign policy” when the subject matter at hand has nothing to do with current events.
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In a UC Berkeley course called “The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance” conservative students were informed that they should seek other sections:

This class takes as its starting point the right of Palestinians to fight for their own self-determination. Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections.

A student who took the course found “anti-Semitism tolerated” by the instructor.
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At the University of Chicago, a doctoral student in the Middle Eastern studies program was discouraged by faculty from studying militant Islamic ideologies, told that this topic was created by a “sensationalist media” and promoted “Zionist” interests.
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I have spoken on college campuses across America, including Columbia, Duke, and Carnegie Mellon, and have seen the far-reaching hand of Saudi petrodollars coming back to haunt us. The sentiment of all the Saudi-supported schools is the same; anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiments reign supreme. Pro-American, pro-Israeli, and anti-radical Islamist conservative speakers like me who do not accept any excuse for murdering innocent civilians in the name of resistance are met with blatant harassment by school administrations and student Arab communities. I was one of the speakers at a Duke University “Antiterrorism rally” in October 2004 on the eve of the Palestinian Solidarity Conference, which was practically a hatefest of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. When I started condemning the justification of suicide bombing in Israel and around the world, Arab students started hurling insults at me. As I walked off the stage, many of them were shouting in Arabic, “How dare your betray the Arabic cause?” and “You are an insult to the name Arab” and “You are a traitor” and “You deserve to be dead.” Many pro-American and pro-Israeli speakers like me have to have security while speaking on any campus in the U.S. and Canada. While security officers surrounded me on one side of the Duke University campus, Daniel Pipes, who was speaking in another hall, had metal detectors for people to go through before entering his lecture. It is a sad state of affairs when any speaker on any American university campus has to fear for his or her safety when giving a speech. America is the country where free speech was invented, and it is protected under the Constitution.

The University of Idaho, Washington State University, Ohio State University, Arizona State University, the University of Michigan, UC Irvine, UC Berkeley, UCLA, the University of South Florida, Georgetown, Columbia, Harvard, and numerous other schools have been linked to terrorist ties funded by Saudi money.
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In fact, UC Berkeley, Harvard, and Georgetown have each been given large sums of money by Saudi benefactors who are currently being sued by the families of the victims of 9/11 as having financed the brutal and cowardly attack on American citizens.
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I would like to point out one alarming parallel in history. Adolf Hitler exploited the minds of university students and professors by using anti-Semitic sentiment and Nazi propaganda. Hatred for the Jewish people became so prevalent that in 1938 the Nazi Party decreed that Jews were forbidden to attend any and all universities.
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Academic administrations across Germany quietly complied. Ironically, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Yasser Arafat’s kinsman, role model and predecessor of the Palestinian Arabs, directly helped Hitler to carry out his plan to eliminate millions of Jewish people.
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Al-Husseini played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in urging Nazis and pro-Nazi governments in Europe to transport Jews to death camps, in training pro-Nazi Bosnian brigades, and in funneling Nazi loot into postwar Arab countries.
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I believe it was in Hitler’s plan to use the degradation of the Jewish people to distract Germans from his plan of mass elimination of any individual who did not fit the description of a member of the “Aryan race.” My background as a Middle Easterner and as a journalist makes me very aware of how people’s minds are manipulated. On 9/11 America cried and the civilized world cried with it. Three years later you have people on college campuses across America saying that America asked for the attack by its behavior in the world. We even have Professor Ward Churchill stating that the Americans who died on September 11 deserved to die.
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How did we get from the sympathy of 9/11 to the resentment of America today? It’s Muslim dollars and the PR machine at work on our college campuses, nurturing young, impressionable minds and shaping them into whatever they want them to believe.

As a Maronite growing up in once predominantly Christian Lebanon, I witnessed the genocide of my people by the Palestinians and the rest of the Muslim community, who came from all over the Muslim world to fight the Christians. They too distracted the rest of the world with anti-Semitic sentiment while quietly slaughtering and scaring off the Christian population of Lebanon. Yet all the world remembers about the Lebanese war is the Israeli invasion and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that took place on our soil. Islamic radical Hezbollah rules with an iron fist in Lebanon today and has won its way into the Lebanese parliament. The radical Islamic movement has the same plans for America and the rest of the world.

While the Muslim groups on college campuses are distracting the college communities with their anti-Semitic and anti-American attitude, they are paving the way for an easy and forgiving public opinion of barbaric terrorists, who are excused for being driven to commit such acts. “It’s not their fault,” these groups say. “Let’s look at what we have done to have them hate us so much.” Can you imagine us analyzing and trying to understand the Japanese after attacking Pearl Harbor and wondering what we did to deserve their hatred? It would have been unthinkable. America’s protection was the number-one factor that all Americans united on. This is not so today. We have young Americans who hate our country so much they would rather see us fall than be the “aggressor.” Our universities have become the battleground where we must fight to win back the opinion and allegiance of our American youth.

I can say from experience that these Middle Eastern studies departments, professors, and groups that spew hatred and violence for Israel and the U.S. in American universities are sympathizers of the enemy that uses airplanes as missiles and flies them into skyscrapers. I have argued with professors and faculty members who attended my lectures at the University of Pittsburgh and at SUNY Purchase who were justifying and defending the actions of the terrorists who attacked us and pointing out that it is our fault that we were attacked. They are sympathizers with beheaders of Western hostages, with suicide bombers, and with terrorists—in their opinion, freedom fighters—around the world who kill in the name of resistance. We are dealing with monsters, and these monsters are infiltrating our universities and using our children to engage in their criminal activities and to spread their violent propaganda. They may be more Westernized in their view of their faith and not as radical or vicious, or perhaps they are naive and being manipulated, but they are still working toward the same goals.

Incredibly, the Nazi card is still being played against America today. In February 2005, Malik Shabazz, a Black Muslim who is Louis Farrakhan’s right-hand man, was invited to speak at Carnegie Mellon. Immediately after he walked in, he asked the students seated to “raise your hand if you’re a Jew! Now! Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.” His entourage, dressed in brown shirts and jackboots to simulate Nazis, pointed to those students whose hands were raised and shouted, “We’re watching you! We’re watching you!” Amazingly, Michael Murphy, dean of student affairs, was in the audience and sat in his seat doing nothing, even as the students' cries filled the room.
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(I wonder whether Shabazz or Farrakhan know that in Muslim culture, the word “black"—
abeed
in Arabic—means “filth” or “slave.")
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Why was there nothing done on the part of the university and the part of the parents to protect the civil liberties of the students? Why didn’t the media report this incident? Apathy. No one wants to make waves. Apathy played a huge part in the demise of the millions of people who were exterminated under Hitler’s regime, Jews and Christians. And what school administration wants to upset the fat cat Arabs with the big checkbooks? Apathy and money are allowing our social conscience to be whittled away.

So we now have innocent parents slaving night and day to send their children to college only to find the purveyors of Islam brainwashing them, and using their wealth in the name of charity to poison the minds of our academic community with anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda. When is it going to stop?

We, as parents and as citizens of the greatest country in the world, the United States of America, must become involved in combating the emerging Islamic indoctrination of our nation’s youth on college campuses. As parents, when do we say enough is enough? When do we demand that universities not accept blood money from terrorist-linked organizations and individuals, using treason as our rationale? When do we demand that Congress take a long hard look at what has happened to the programs that Title VI helps finance? When do we demand that anti-American and anti-Jewish sentiment not be allowed as part of a college course, endorsed or deliberately overlooked by a university, using incitement to hate as underlying principal? When do we demand that the media step in and accurately inform us of terrorist activities? When do we start to feel rage at the subtle and not so subtle terrorist behavior that is increasingly infiltrating our universities and poisoning our children’s minds? When do we know when the time is right to act? Now is the time! Before it’s too late.

The main objective in the radical Islamists' strategy to dominate the world is the destruction of the United States. They know that if America, the keystone, falls, then the arch of Western civilization will collapse. A parallel strategic objective, of perhaps greater symbolic importance, is the destruction of the state of Israel. The Arab world has been pursuing this goal with bloody single-mindedness since 1948.

Some Americans still believe that the terror war against Israel and the terror war against the United States are somehow unrelated. Others believe that radical Islam is waging a terrorist war against the U.S. because of America’s support for Israel. Americans who subscribe to either of these theories need to remember that through Islamo-fascist eyes, Israel is merely “the Little Satan.” The United States is “the Great Satan.” Even if Israel were to disappear, the destruction of America and the subjugation of non-Muslim civilization would continue to be the strategic objective of radical Islam.
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When it comes to concocting
taqiyya,
there is no lie about America, Israel, or the Jewish people that is too ugly or too crazy to be spread and believed in the Arab and Muslim world and Iran. These lies are not confined to “extremists” on the fringes of Arab and Muslim society. They are told and retold by religious leaders, high government officials, and teachers—in schools, in mosques, on radio and television stations, in books and newspapers, all rigidly directed and controlled by Arab governments. With repetition they become the topics of everyday conversation. “Hey, Ahmed, did you hear this one about those murderous filthy Jews? Did you hear what the American butchers did in Iraq? I read about it in the paper and heard it on the radio, so it must be true!” And on and on until they take on a life of their own, with further embellishments as they spread.