BDS
Profs vs. the Muslim Leadership Institute
by Cinnamon Stillwell
FrontPage Magazine
August 21, 2015
|
|
Share:
|
Be the first of
your friends to like this.
Who would
object to a program
that sends American Muslims to Israel to meet with Jewish, Muslim, and
Christian residents in order "to explore how Jews understand
Judaism, Israel, and Jewish peoplehood"? Answer: Middle East studies
professors intent on scuttling coexistence in favor of delegitimizing
Israel through the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.
Participants in the Muslim
Leadership Institute (MLI), a program of the Shalom Hartman Institute (SHI) founded
and directed by Duke University chaplain Imam Abdullah
Antepli and author Yossi Klein Halevi, partake in two twelve-day
seminars at the SHI campus in Jerusalem. The program includes visits to
religious and historic sites, northern Israeli Arab communities, and the
West Bank.
Since its inception in 2013, MLI has met with fierce resistance from
the BDS movement, including Middle East studies professors who coauthored
at least two petitions this year aimed at shutting it down.
The first
petition calls "for an immediate halt" to the program,
calls its financiers "Islamophobia sources," and declares,
"We reject the upcoming third cohort of MLI, refuse to meet with its
participants, or facilitate their visit to meet with any
Palestinian." For inspiration, it cites the Palestinian BDS National
Committee, which insisted
on a boycott of MLI in January, 2014. Among its authors are such
anti-Israel luminaries
as San Francisco State University's Rabab
Abdulhadi; University of California, Berkeley's Hatem
Bazian and Kamal
Abu-Shamsieh; Illinois State University's Issam
Nassar; and Steven
Salaita, the would-be University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
professor who now
teaches at the American University of Beirut.
The second
petition repeats the arrogant demand for an "immediate
halt" to MLI, maintaining that the program is "part of the
Hasbara Israeli propaganda operation," "a violation of
BDS," "an Israeli attempt to 'normalize' relations," and,
worst of all, "deliberately designed . . . to make Muslims more
sympathetic to Zionism, and to present an anti-BDS perspective." It
culminates in the inane statement, "To engage the occupier without
sitting down in solidarity with the occupied first is politically
delusional, morally misguided, and ethically callous." Coauthors
include Bazian, Abu-Shamsieh, Duke University's Omid
Safi, and Yale University's Zareena
Grewal.
The petitions' authors issue a set of "recommendations"
that, if enacted, would effectively end the program, while complaining
that SHI and Antepli, after meeting with opponents, "refused calls
for reform." Accordingly, the
latter has been declared "personae non grata."
Antepli, a Middle East advisor to the less-than-stellar
Secretary of State John Kerry, has not always been a voice of reason in
the field of Middle East studies:
- Earlier this year
at the University of Texas, El Paso, he committed an ahistorical,
moral equivalence by comparing
the Islamic State to Christian "crusaders."
- At a 2011 Duke
University conference, he made this ludicrous
assertion: "Being a Muslim in the United States is another
form of torture, a psychological torture, an emotional torture, and
it's just getting worse."
- He and Halevi coauthored
a 2014 article praising Brandeis University for rescinding the offer
of an honorary degree to ex-Muslim dissident Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
- His anti-Israel
commentary at a 2009 Duke
"Gaza Teach In" included the claim,
"As a state, Israel is shooting herself in the foot and pumping
into the hearts and minds of millions of people anti-Semitism."
Whatever Antepli's views on Islamism and "Islamophobia,"
that fact that he has withstood the considerable pressure of fellow
academics to terminate or weaken the MLI program suggests that his
approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict has evolved. Indeed, he made this
clear in a 2014 op-ed,
beginning with the confession that, growing up in Turkey:
All I learned about Judaism, Jews and Israel was through the lenses of
this bloody conflict, and I inevitably developed very negative views of
Jews and Judaism to an extreme degree.
Rejecting "hate and anger," Antepli developed first a
friendship with Halevi and then later, a partnership with SHI. He
explains his reasoning:
It was critical to engage with a self-identified Zionist Jewish
organization because they are the groups American Muslims rarely engage,
because we often exist on the opposite political spectrum and in isolated
silos.
While Antepli remains a critic of Israel, he deserves credit for
choosing to engage in outreach and dialogue rather than the intransigence
and demonization of the BDS movement.
Meanwhile, MLI's academic opponents continue to fume. Sa'ed
Adel Atshan, a Tufts University lecturer and BDS activist
whose anti-Israel rhetoric Jewish students
have described as "extremely destructive," has
accused MLI of "faithwashing," or downplaying Israeli
"occupation" by emphasizing the religious (i.e. Islamic
supremacist) motivation of its opponents instead of defining it solely as
a territorial dispute. He labels SHI a "Zionist Israeli
institution" whose "role in the program," much to his
consternation, places MLI "in contravention of the Palestinian civil
society call for BDS."
Kamal Abu-Shamsieh, one of the aforementioned petition authors, is a doctoral candidate at
UC Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union, an Islamic chaplain, and, as he
put it in an op-ed
in May, "the only Palestinian-American who participated" in the
MLI. Abu-Shamsieh joined the program despite being "aware the
majority of Palestinian-Americans' response to MLI was very
negative" and admits that it "resulted in a better
understanding of Zionism."
Abu-Shamsieh eventually became disillusioned with MLI, but his
reasoning displays little understanding of or sensitivity to Israel's
ongoing security concerns. Moreover, his participation
in the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT)'s 2014 Summer
Institute for Scholars renders him a suspect source. (IIIT is a Muslim
Brotherhood-founded think tank based in Virginia whose goal,
assisted by
academe, is "the Islamicization of knowledge.")
The campaign to defame MLI demonstrates how deeply embedded the BDS
movement is among
professors of Middle East studies. So, too, did the Middle East
Studies Association (MESA)'s passing
of a
resolution at its 2014 annual meeting that is likely to result in an
academic boycott of Israel. When the mere act of engagement inspires
hysterical opposition, we have abandoned scholarship and reason for
unbridled political activism. The line between the two realms is quickly
disappearing.
Cinnamon Stillwell is the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, a project
of the Middle East Forum.
She can be reached at stillwell@meforum.org.
This
text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an
integral whole with complete and accurate information provided about its
author, date, place of publication, and original URL.
Related Items
|
No comments:
Post a Comment