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	Please take a moment to visit and log in at the subscriber area, and submit your city & country location. We will use this information in future to invite you to any events that we organize in your area. Dear Reader, As Campus Watch pursues its mission to reform Middle East studies by producing rigorously researched articles on professors' teaching and scholarship and on-site reporting of their public lectures, we turn to you—our loyal readers—to support our work. In the article below, for example, CW brings you word of a radical, chaired law professor at UCLA who denied the dangers of Shariah while lying about his critics. CW is regularly attacked by academics such as Harvard's Stephen Walt—co-author of the infamous book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. These attacks reflect CW's effectiveness, which is possible through the generosity of people like you. I hope you will aid us by donating to the Middle East Forum. (The Forum, an IRS-designated 501 (c) 3 organization, offers 2010 tax credit for donations by U.S. taxpayers received via credit card by 9:00 p.m. EST on December 31 and for checks dated until December 31.) Yours sincerely, Winfield Myers Director Campus Watch UCLA's Professor of Fantasy by Cinnamon Stillwell and Eric Golub American Thinker December 24, 2010 http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/10523 Send RSS Share: Be the first of your friends to like this. The Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES) at the University of California, Los Angeles and the UCLA School of Law's Journal for Islamic and Near Eastern Law co-sponsored a lecture (podcast available here) last month by Khaled Abou El Fadl, chair of the Islamic Studies Interdepartmental Program, with the vague title "Shari'ah Watch: A View from the Inside." The flyer for the lecture promised "an informed discussion about Shariah and its role and impact in the West," yet Abou El Fadl delivered neither. Instead, his audience of 35 -- comprising mostly seniors and left-wing students -- witnessed a meandering, repetitive lecture that had little or nothing to do with the stated premise. Indeed, despite acknowledging the growth of Westerners' interest in Shariah in the wake of 9/11, Abou El Fadl expressed surprise that an intelligent person would find it a remotely interesting topic: "It's exciting for me, but it's rarely exciting for people who do not relish medieval legal discourses ... to say the least it's a rather odd position to suddenly find Shariah jumping into public discourses in the West." What is odd is why more Middle East studies professors don't relish the opportunity to condemn the medieval practices sanctioned by Shariah -- stonings, beheadings, honor killings, and execution for apostasy, for starters. Instead, Abou El Fadl spent over fifteen minutes describing alleged acts of violence worldwide against Muslims by non-Muslims, a trend he ascribed to "the effect of the Islamophobic hate tract." When he did get around to discussing Shariah, it was only to claim that its detractors were motivated by bigotry: We look at the history of anti-Islamic discourse, particularly in my field, a discourse in which Shariah is flattened to be a symbol of barbarism. ... This is what Edward Said responded to in his famous book, Orientalism. I describe it as a civil anti-Muslim discourse. Actually, most of its critics merely want to stay alive, for it turns out that barbarism does indeed come with the territory. In what would come to constitute the bulk of his lecture, Abou El Fadl launched into a litany against what he called a "frenzy of self-appointed experts" -- individuals who have dared to criticize Shariah and who have opposed its implementation in the West: [There is] a battle over the authority, legitimacy -- in academia, especially -- over who gets to speak for Shariah in the West. ... The various discourses that we find from the Steven Emersons, the Robert Spencers, the Daniel Pipes, countless 'watch' folks, the Jihad Watch folks -- various pseudo-experts on whatever they wish to be experts on. ... The idea is these people [Muslims] don't even respect each other's lives, so how can you expect them to respect anyone else's life? Now this fundamental message of Islam, which is argued to have been from the start to this day: one can politely ignore it, but the fact remains that it is a violent, totalitarian, dominating ideology. In fact, it's the apologist discourse emanating from the Abou El Fadls of the world that is the "dominating ideology" in universities across the country. Abou El Fadl then proceeded to examine quotes by writers he believes exemplifies this alarming "discourse" and to which he attributed "serious consequences" and "challenges to the post-humanist ethos." They included Bruce Bawer, Michael Savage, Mark Steyn, Glenn Beck, and, again, Islam scholar Robert Spencer, who, El Fadl claimed: [j]ust made $4,000,000 dollars last year. ... A lecture like this with him would cost the sponsors $10,000. Islam bashing is very lucrative. Shariah bashing ... is also extremely lucrative. To make $4,000,000 at $10,000 per speech would require four hundred speeches per year. When contacted by the authors for comment, Spencer confirmed that "I have never made $4,000,000 in a year, or anything close to it. I have never charged $10,000 for a talk, or anything close to it. Khaled Abou El Fadl is lying outright." This statement points to Abou El Fadl's making things up -- shocking behavior for a professor of law at a leading research university. And it didn't stop there. Abou El Fadl went on to paraphrase a quote from one of Spencer's books: Spencer summed it up: 'Sure, there are violent quotes in the Bible, but the difference is Muslims don't have an interpretative tradition.' ... But that's what being a Shariah scholar is all about: an interpretative tradition. To which Spencer has responded: I never said that. I said that they don't have an interpretative tradition that mitigates the literal force of the Qur'anic verses inciting to violence. Obviously they have an interpretative tradition; I discuss it at length in several books. The smear-campaign continued. Lamenting the alleged participation of such experts in government-sponsored counterterrorism measures, intelligence-gathering, and terrorism trials, Abou El Fadl noted with dismay that Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes -- who, not coincidentally, has been a critic of Abou El Fadl's scholarship -- was appointed to the U.S. Peace Institute in 2003 and that Investigate Project on Terrorism founder Steven Emerson is: [a] member of the very influential Ethics and Public Policy Institute. I discovered that while I was invited to Qatar to schmooze with the royalty once, I admit, in my life, Emerson is a regular. ... He brags about [it] constantly -- he rubs elbows with the ambassadors, with the royals. The irony is ... he gets to tell these people 'you're terrorists, you're animals, you're disgusting' and he'll be invited again and welcomed again and celebrated again. For the record, Steven Emerson, contacted by the authors, responds that he is not a member of the Ethics and Public Policy Institute, nor has he ever been to Qatar, let alone conferred with Qatari royalty. Abou El Fadl simply made up a story to suit his narrative. One wonders if El Fadl teaches his law students that lying about one's political opponents is acceptable, professional behavior. In answer to a question about the 2010 Oklahoma "Save the State" ballot initiative banning the future implementation of Shariah or international law, Abou El Fadl called it a "xenophobic measure" and claimed that "this initiative ... was supported by Brigitte Gabriel, hardly an authority on anything Islamic." Actually, Brigitte Gabriel -- a Lebanese native, author, and counterterrorism expert whose Christian family was persecuted by Muslims -- would seem to know a thing or two about the subject. Referring to the emergence of Shariah courts in England -- something the Oklahoma measure seeks to avoid in the U.S. -- Abou El Fadl cited one of his student's research to the ludicrous effect that "Shariah courts in England are overcompensating and that women, on average, are faring better in Shariah courts than in secular courts. ... If [the student is] correct, it's very interesting." Becoming even more unhinged, El Fadl next compared critics of Shariah to Osama bin Laden. These critics, he claimed: [h]ave a complete ... disinterest in the subtleties and nuance of argument and law. ... If I want to learn about Jewish law, do I find the best Rabbinic authority ... and read that person, or do I go buy a book on Jewish law by a student of bin Laden and read that as an authoritative statement on Jewish law? ... What's happening in the U.S. is that people here are preferring books on Shariah by students of the bin Ladens of the world. When the question-and-answer period ended, Abou El Fadl had defended the concept of Shariah without ever defining it. When he did address Shariah, it was to imply that it is a benign, uncontroversial -- even boring -- legal system. But there is a difference between being boring and being harmless. Instead, El Fadl spent much of his lecture insulting and fabricating stories about political opponents such as Spencer and Emerson. For the chair of UCLA's Islamic Studies Interdepartmental Program -- and the Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor in Islamic Law at UCLA's School of Law -- this is inexcusable. Now that this information is publicly available, will Abou El Fadl's superiors take steps to prevent a repetition? We call on law school dean Rachel F. Moran to investigate this incident and to look more generally at Abou El Fadl's record. We call on UCLA chancellor Gene Block to draw a clear line against dishonesty among his faculty. Cinnamon Stillwell, the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, co-wrote this with Eric Golub, publisher of the Tygrrrr Express blog. Stillwell can be reached at stillwell@meforum.org. Related Items Other writings by Cinnamon Stillwell Other writings by Eric Golub Other items from American Thinker Other items related to University of California, Los Angeles Answering Khaled Abou El Fadl by Daniel Pipes December 24, 2010 http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2010/12/answering-khaled-abou-el-fadl Send Comment RSS Share: Be the first of your friends to like this. "Shari'ah Watch: A View from the Inside" blares the headline of a talk announced for Nov. 3 by the Center for Near East Studies at UCLA, "Lecture and Extended Q&A with Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl, Moderated by Professor Asli Bali. Please join us for an informed discussion about Shariah and its role and impact in the West." I, sadly, could not make it to the "informed discussion." Fortunately, however, the center posted an audio version of the talk by Abou El Fadl, a professor whom I have repeatedly criticized. Announcement of "Shari'ah Watch: A View from the Inside" by Khaled Abou El Fadl. For a Campus Watch report on the lecture as a whole, see "UCLA's Professor of Fantasy" by Cinnamon Stillwell and Eric Golub. They pay particular attention to Abou El Fadl's false statements about Robert Spencer and Steven Emerson – that's the "fantasy" in the title. His falsehoods about them are so egregious, they deserve to get Abou El Fadl sacked. He also mentions me repeatedly in the course of his lengthy, rambling, and self-indulgent meander. First, he wonders whether my colleagues and I even matter: The various discourses that we find by the Steven Emersons, the Robert Spencers, the Daniel Pipes's, the countless "watch" folks, the Jihad Watch folks – various pseudo-experts on whatever they wish to be experts on. Does it make a difference? Does it actually have a concrete effect in any form or context? Oddly, Abou El Fadl avoids replying to his own question but, obviously, his devoting a whole talk to us strongly suggests we do make a difference. Second, he distorts our shared hope that moderate Muslims will arise to challenge the Islamist hegemony: at the same time that the Daniel Pipes's, the Robert Spencers, the Steven Emersons, the Glenn Becks … say "Well, in order for Muslims to prove to us that Islam can change, is capable of changing, we need to see a virtual civil war between the moderates and the others—extremists, militants, whatever you want to call them … something akin to a religious civil war in the Muslim world." At the same time, they often point to any inter-Muslim violence as evidence of the failure of these people as a people. For the record: We hope that moderate Muslims will challenge Islamists in the realm of ideas, not by starting a religious war or engaging in violence. Third, Abou El Fadl gets personal, referring to my lengthy 2004 analysis of his work titled "Stealth Islamist: Khaled Abou El Fadl." What I mean by "stealth," he replies does not necessarily mean that all Muslims are stealth agents, but, rather, stealth in the sense of sleeper cells, that Muslims, just being in the right set of elements, environmental elements, the right set of circumstances, and they will come into contact with this essential core of their faith and therefore, immediately become prone to turning jihadi or violent. No, that's another distortion: My article does not suggest that Abou El Fadl is a sleeper agent who might engage in terrorism; it argues that he is an Islamist posing as a moderate. Finally, he mangles what I wrote in a 1990 article and reminisces that when Pipes wrote this in the 1990s, I actually recall, I was giving a lecture at Irvine and there were a few professors attending the lecture and when I read this quote—in conversation with two professors afterward, they were basically saying "You're exaggerating. No one takes Pipes seriously; he's insane. Your concern about a statement like this shows your own cultural anxieties about fitting in as an immigrant [from Egypt]," blah, blah, blah. At the time, I have to admit, I thought "Well, maybe they have a point." But the Pipes-type discourse … was reserved and more civil than the discourses after 9/11. 9/11 presents a watershed moment where remarkably it becomes open season. Comment: How interesting that Abou El Fadl, even as he distorts my message and calls me names, belatedly and reluctantly appreciates my "reserved and more civil" position opposition to Islamism, as opposed to all of Islam. (December 24, 2010) Related Topics: Daniel Pipes autobiographical, Islamic law (Shari'a), Middle East studies This text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an integral whole with complete information provided about its author, date, place of publication, and original URL.
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