Israel Matzav

Caroline Glick takes on Brandeis

Last week it was reported that major supporters of Brandeis University have cut off their donations in retaliation for the university's hosting of Israel and American-Jewry basher and former president Jimmy Carter on campus.

Carter was invited to the American Jewish university shortly after fourteen Jewish members of an advisory board at the Carter Center resigned their positions in light of Carter's malicious attacks on Israel and tolerance of Palestinian slaughter of Israelis in his recently published diatribe Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.
Although the recent storm of protest over Brandeis's willingness to give legitimacy to Carter and his hostile message has received great attention, it is only the latest in a series of controversial and irresponsible moves that Brandeis has taken over the past year in relation to the war against Israel and the global jihad.

Last January Brandeis hired Khalil Shikaki, head of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, as a senior fellow at its Crown Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Shikaki is the brother of Fathi Shikaki, founder of the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization who was slain in Malta in 1995. He was recruited to Brandeis by Shai Feldman, who heads the Crown Center and formerly directed Tel Aviv University's leftist Jaffee center for Strategic Studies.

Shikaki's ties to Islamic Jihad go far deeper than his blood ties to its founder and first terror master.

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Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz also refused to contend with the documentary evidence linking Shikaki to the Islamic Jihad. He deflected the criticism of Shikaki by accusing Klein and ZOA of "Jewish McCarthyism."

Then, in December 2006, Natana DeLong Bas, a lecturer at Brandeis's Near Eastern and Jewish Studies Department, was vacationing in Saudi Arabia when she gave an interview to a reporter for the London pan-Arab daily Al Sharq Al-Awsat. DeLong Bas told the newspaper that she does "not find any evidence that would make me agree that Osama bin Laden was behind the attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. All we heard from him was praise and acclaim for those who carried out the operation."

This was not the first time the Brandeis faculty member acted as an apologist for jihadists. Indeed, she seems to be making a career out of it. According to a FrontPageMag.com expose of her career, in 2004 she published Wahhabi Islam: From Revival to Global Jihad, awork partially funded by Saudi Arabia that defends the extremist Wahabi strain of Islam that has formed the basis of the belief system of men like Osama Bin Laden and the September 11 hijackers.

DeLong Bas has similarly provided impassioned defenses of the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood which spawned such terrorist organizations as Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and Egyptian Islamic Jihad which, before being fused into al Qaeda, was headed by Bin Laden's deputy Ayman Zawahiri.

Responding to criticism of the university's treatment of the global jihad and the jihadist war against Israel, Reinharz recently protested, "I [do] not want to see Brandeis University become a battleground of the Middle East."

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:27 AM