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March 29, 2012
Oil and Anti-Semitism
Historian Victor Davis Hanson asks "Why does the international community hate Israel so much?" The answers include not just the dimming memory of the Holocaust and, with that, the lessening restraint on anti-Semites and the far-left's pernicious claim that Israel is an imperial force, but also the vast impact of Arab, especially Saudi, oil money spreading enmity toward the Jewish state.
[S]ince the 1960s, trillions of petrodollars have flowed into the Islamic Middle East, not just ensuring that Israel’s enemies now were armed, ascendant, and flanked by powerful Western friends, but through contributions, donations, and endowments also deeply embedded within Western thought and society itself. Universities suddenly sought endowed Middle East professorships and legions of full tuition-paying Middle East undergraduates. Had Israel the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia, then “occupied�? Palestine might have resonated at the UN about as much as Ossetia, Kashmir, or the Western Sahara does today.
The recent One-State conference at Harvard University is but the most recent instance of the expanding influence of anti-Israel ideology in the academy, a shift occurring against a backdrop of millions in donated oil money.
Harvard's Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program is named after the donor of $20 million who underwrites that endeavor.
In the UK too, Alwaleed Bin Talal and other oil potentates have poured funds into universities, influencing discourse against both Israel and the West generally.
According to a 2011 Telegraph story:
Between 1995 and 2008, eight universities – Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, University College London, the LSE, Exeter, Dundee and City – accepted more than £233.5 million from Muslim rulers and those closely connected to them
(Bin Talal's largesse in the form of a $10 million donation was rejected by Mayor Giuliani in the wake of 9/11 because of the Saudi's linkage of the terrorist attack to Israeli treatment of Palestinians.)
Posted by AL at March 29, 2012 12:52 PM
Comments
Harvard has sold its soul for a measly $20 M. What has suffered is the diminished competency of its scholarship and its increase in academic bias. The Kennedy School has become a hack institution, as exemplified by its recent conference of anti-Jewish/anti-Israel blathering.
Posted by: Richard A. Finn at April 12, 2012 02:05 PM
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