UNMIA

By Hillel Stavis - FrontPageMagazine.com

Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman touched off a fierce debate when he recently wrote in The New York Times Magazine that Islamic Sharia law represents the highest state of “the rule of law.” But what many of Feldman’s critics did not recognize is that his argument has been building over several years.

Just as an old photographic print slowly becomes visible when immersed in developing solution, Noah’s claims about the alleged virtues of Sharia first surfaced in his 2005 book, Divided by God written when he was still a professor at NYU. Three years later, Feldman, who helped draft the Iraqi constitution, has turned his argument into a new book, called The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. The book marks Feldman’s emergence as a leading academic advocate for Sharia law.

If this seems like a bizarre role for someone who attended the Orthodox Maimonides School near Boston, it is in line with the career trajectory of a very bright young man who wants to be preeminent among the severely compromised academics inhabiting the Middle East Studies Association. Thus, one week after his article, “Why Sharia?” was featured in the Times’ magazine, Feldman presented …

What do they do in those conferences? Read on…

By Mary Madigan
FrontPage Magazine and Campus Watch
April 10, 2008

The poster advertising New York University’s “Academic Freedom in the Age of Permanent Warfare” conference featured a scolding Statue of Liberty pointing an accusatory finger and stating: “YOU! Stop Asking Questions. You’re Either With US or You’re With the TERRORISTS!”

The speakers and attendees gathered around the pastry-laden table at NYU’s new Frederic Ewen Academic Freedom Center last week didn’t appear to be oppressed or under attack. But once they wiped the sugar from their mouths and stood up to speak, they assured the audience that they were, in fact, victims in an “age of permanent warfare.”

According to keynote speaker Roger Bowen (of “Revolting Behavior” fame), director of the Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellows Program, the purported enemies of academic freedom include the “rabid right” and/or “Republicans, conservatives, the elderly, and the uneducated.”

Joan Scott of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, decried the loss of academia as a sanctuary, both from public opinion and the “enmity of patriots and trustees.” David Hollinger, professor of history at UC Berkeley, noted that fellow academics in engineering and the hard sciences often felt “no …

by Ido Zelkovitz
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2008, pp. 19-26
http://www.meforum.org/article/1874

Many U.S. and European diplomats contrast Fatah’s Palestinian nationalism with Hamas’s Islamism. At a November 28, 2007 press conference, U.S. national security advisor Stephen Hadley praised Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas and cited President George W. Bush’s argument that “Hamas, Hezbollah, and Al-Qaeda [are] different faces of the same evil: a radical ideology seeking to impose its world-view throughout the Middle East and beyond.”[1] But, while Fatah, the core of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), may have its roots in the revolutionary, secular-oriented ideologies of the 1960s and 1970s,[2] Islamist discourse is also integral to the movement.[3] Indeed, even as Western diplomats seek to bolster Fatah’s Abbas as an alternative to Hamas, they underestimate the degree to which Palestinian nationalism now intertwines itself with Islam.[4] Since the 2000 Palestinian uprising, Fatah has fused national and religious symbols in order to use Islam as an instrument of mobilization.[5]
Fatah Imagery in the Twentieth Century

In the 1970s, Fatah graphic art promoted the culture of armed struggle which was at the heart of Fatah’s ideology. (See Figure 1.) This enabled Fatah to mobilize the masses in the absence of a solid ideology among the divided and …

We frequently hear that the Israel Lobby, Neo-Cons and Zionists in general stifle debate and don’t allow anybody to say anything bad about Israel in government, education or the media, a pretty amazing claim, given the facts. However, this lament is currently very popular in anti-Zionist circles. Following is an editorial by Amy Isseroff which does a good job of refuting this claim, especially where it relates to universities.

by Amy Isseroff of the Zionism & Israel Center

A widely recycled essay about “The New McCarthyism” charges that “a network of right-wing activists” is trying to curtail academic freedom by stifling views that are inconvenient for Israel and its supporters.

The author, Larry Cohler-Esses, cites a number of varied cases: Norman Finkelstein, who was denied tenure at De Paul university, Nadia Abu El-Haj whose bid for tenure has been attacked in numerous articles and a petition (but apparently has been approved regardless of the furor) and Debbie Almontaser, a New York City high school principle, who was fired after she had defended “Intifada” T-shirts, explaining that”stated that “intifada” means “shaking off” and the shirts represented women “shaking off” oppression.

Cohler-Esse’s shot gun approach raises many issues. It is never clear …