Why I just disinherited my alma mater

By Bruce Kesler

Bruce Kesler

ENCINITAS, California–I just updated my will and trust and, with heavy heart, cut out what was a significant bequest to my alma mater, Brooklyn College.

What caused the disinheritance is that all incoming freshmen and transfer students are given a copy of a book to read, and no other, to create their “common experience.” This same book is one of the readings in their required English course. The author is a radical pro-Palestinian professor there.

When I attended in the 1960s, Brooklyn College – then rated one of the tops in the country — was, like most campuses, quite liberal. But, there was no official policy to inculcate students with a political viewpoint. Now there is.  That is unacceptable.

The book is How Does It Feel To Be A Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America It is interviews with seven Arab-Americans in their 20s about their experiences and difficulties in the US. There’s appreciation of freedoms in the US, and deep resentment at feeling or being discriminated against post-9/11.

The seven are not a representative sample. Six are Moslem and one Christian. According to the Arab American Institute, 63% of Arab-Americans are Christian, 24% Muslim. The author chose those interviewed and those included in the book. 

The title of the book is drawn from communist WEB DuBois’ same question in 1903 in his treatise The Souls of Black Folk. The current book consciously draws a parallel, ridiculous on its face, between the horrible and pervasive discrimination and injustices that Blacks were subjected to a century ago and Arab-Americans today.

The author asserts “The core issue [of Middle East turbulence] remains the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination,” that the post-1967 history of the entire area is essentially that of “imperialism American-style,” and that the US government “limits the speech of Arab Americans in order to cement United States policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Again, preposterous.

The author is Moustafa Bayoumi. He is called an “Exalted Islamic Grievance Peddler” with the following summary of his background:

“The second featured speaker at WCU’s forum was Moustafa Bayoumi, an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College and co-editor of The Edward Said Reader. Bayoumi contends that in the aftermath of 9/11, armed INS officials, U.S. Marshals, and FBI agents routinely roused Muslims from their beds ‘in the middle of the night’—indiscriminately arresting, shackling, and investigating them for possible terrorist connections.”

In September 2002, a year after 9/11, Bayoumi lamented that “an upswing in hate crimes [against American Muslims] has already begun.” As proof, he cited statistics, which would be thoroughly discredited, put forth by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). He then pointed to CAIR’s claim that “57 percent of American Muslims report that they have experienced bias or discrimination since Sept. 11,” and that “48 percent of [Muslim] respondents believe their lives have changed for the worse since the attacks.” “This is hardly surprising,” Bayoumi reasoned. “For the past year, Muslims have endured a daily barrage of demagoguery, distortions and outright lies about their faith. Never well understood in this country, Islam is now routinely caricatured.”

In March 2006, Bayoumi took up this theme again, asserting that “Muslim-bashing has become socially acceptable in the United States.” In 2008 he wrote: “It’s been seven years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, and many young American Muslims are convinced that much of American society views them with growing hostility. They’re right.”

The theme of Muslim victimhood is by no means restricted solely to Bayoumi’s view of the United States. Indeed, he depicts Palestinian suicide bombings as little more than desperate reactions to “a brutal [Israeli] military occupation that has been strangling the Palestinian people for decades.”

Most recently, Bayoumi edited a book, Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestinian Conflict, defending it and calling it Israel’s Selma, Alabama, the focal point for US civil rights struggles in the 1960s.

Online I found two professors who protested to the college president. One, retired from Brooklyn College, said:  This is wholly inappropriate.  It smacks of indoctrination. It will intimidate incoming students who have a different point of view (or have formed no point of view), sending the message that only one side will be approved on this College campus. It can certainly intimidate untenured faculty as well.”

Another, currently on the faculty, said: While our community of learning is committed to freedom of speech and expression, does that require that we must expose new students to the anti-American and anti-Israeli preachings of this professor? At the least, do not our students deserve a balanced presentation?

Another retired professor living in Brooklyn, protested and received back from a Dean:

Each year professors in the English Department and I select a common reading for our entering students. We choose memoirs (a genre familiar to students) set in New York City, often reflecting an immigrant experience, and written by authors who are available to visit campus. Students in freshman composition respond to the common reading by writing about their own experiences, many of them published in Telling Our Stories; Sharing our Lives’. This year we selected How Does It Feel to be a Problem: Being Young and Arab in America by one of our own faculty members, Professor Moustafa Bayoumi, because it is a well-written collection of stories by and about young Arab Brooklynites whose experiences may be familiar to our students, their neighbors, or the students with whom they will study and work at Brooklyn College. We appreciate your concerns. Rest assured that Brooklyn College values tolerance, diversity, and respect for differing points of view in all that we do.”

The professor tells us what happened next: 

“S I wrote to her again, and again, and then again once more, suggesting that she provide some balance to Bayoumi’s book, that she provide additional authors and additional speakers. I even suggested another author, Paul Berman, also resident in Brooklyn, also writing on Arab themes, also willing (I would assume) to speak to her students. And what did Dean Wilson reply to these repeated suggestions of mine ? You guessed it, she did not deign to reply at all.

Another professor’s unpublished letter (which I verified with him; I’ve verified the others also) to the college president said: “Anyone who has taught at a university during the past quarter-century and more knows that the slogan of ‘diversity’ generally alludes to its opposite (i.e., imposed uniformity of thought camouflaged by diversity of physical appearance) and also foretells mischief.”

I will always appreciate the excellent liberal arts education I received at Brooklyn College, and the critical thinking that has caused me to disinherit it.

A Board member tells me the 55,000-member Scholars for Peace in the Middle East is now considering its next move.

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Kesler, a freelance writer based in Encinitas, also published this article on the Maggie’s Farm website.

Think you’ve got it bad in this economy? Think again!

By Rabbi Leonard Rosenthal

Rabbi Leonard Rosenthal

SAN DIEGO — When I opened this morning’s paper, I groaned when I saw that the stock market had dropped below 10,000.

I began to feel sorry for myself until I read the next headline: “Flooding displaces one million more in Pakistan.” At least 1,600 people have been killed and 17 million displaced since monsoon floods began in Pakistan a month ago.  Maurizio Giuliano, a spokesman for the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said, “An already colossal disaster is getting worse and requiring an even more colossal response.”

In ancient Israel the first of all harvests, the bikurim, were offered to God. The Torah instructs the Israelites to include the poor of society in their celebration: “You shall enjoy, together with the Levite and the stranger in your midst, all the bounty that the Lord your God has bestowed upon you and your household.” (Deut. 26:11)

I have always explained this as requiring us to include gifts to the poor and hungry whenever we celebrate happy occasions. Our joy is never complete until the needy are provided for.

The commentator known as Lekutei Yehoshua, however, suggests another interpretation of this mitzvah. He writes that when you share your celebrations with the downtrodden of society, the joy you experience is of a special nature: it is the joy of one who is happy with what they have. (cf. Pirkei Avot 4:1: Ben Zoma says, “Who is wealthy? The one who is content with what they have.”)

Jealousy of one’s neighbor’s possessions, he writes, is the source of much sadness and anger in life. We always think that we will be happy if we have more.

However, if we think about our poor neighbors, rather than the wealthy ones, we quickly realize how fortunate we are and conclude that we must be grateful and content with the blessings that are already ours.

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Rabbi Rosenthal is spiritual leader of Tifereth Israel Synagogue in San Diego

Commentary: Transnational loyalties have affected many religious groups

By Ira Sharkansky

Ira Sharkansky

JERUSALEM–The issue of Islam touches a problem with ancient lineage that appears in modern societies that pride themselves on diversity, and suffer from conflicts with people who are both outsiders and insiders.

Josephus describes the civil war between Judeans who identified with the culture of the Romans, and those who rejected any deviation from what they defined as the essence of God’s law. The Roman perspective, like that of Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks before them, was to manage their multi-cultural empire by allowing considerable freedom to its parts, as long as they did not challenge the peak leadership to govern the empire as they saw fit. Keeping the balance was not easy, and failure was among the explanations for the crumbling of one empire after another. The British, French, and Russians have experienced the problem in our lifetime. The Chinese are trying their skills with Tibetans, Muslims, and religious Christians.

It is the task of Barack Obama to maintain the balance between norms of accepting variation between cultures (including religion), and forceful opposition to those who challenge his imperial regime.

The quarrels about the New York mosque touch part of this. Al-Jazeera has focused on the question: how does the American military train its soldiers, who include Muslims, to fight at a time when all the wars are against Muslims in one place or another? Al-Jazeera quotes a soldier who says, “Islamophobia Pervades U.S. Military’; ‘The Training We Get and the Information That We Are Subject To – Constitute Propaganda Against Islam”  
 
The issue appeared in World War II, although without the emphasis on religion, per se. After a debate as to whether to enlist them at all, the US Army accepted Japanese-American volunteers, kept them in one unit, and sent them to Italy. The issue did not arise about Americans with German ancestry. If it had, there would have been a problem in sending Dwight Eisenhower to Europe.

Israel faces the problem in connection with its non-Jews. Early on, the leadership of the Druze community offered its sons to be drafted, and most of them serve without ethnicity becoming an issue. During the fighting with Lebanon, however, some asked whether Israeli Druze should be sent against Lebanese Druze. Another problem involves the Druze of the Golan who identify with Syria. As Private Sharkansky, I once traveled from lecture to lecture in Lebanon alongside a Bedouin who manned the machine gun on the back of my jeep. A Druze lieutenant colonel said that he considered himself army property whenever he wore his uniform.

My father served with the US Army in France during World War I, against Varda’s grandfather in the German army. Her Uncle Albert was a sniper who once was aiming at a French soldier. The armies were close, and he heard the Frenchman saying his morning prayers, “Shema Yisrael . . .” Uncle Albert did not fire.
When I conveyed this to a Jewish colonel teaching at West Point, I gathered that he did not like the story. It goes down well in Israel.

Slogans and platitudes do not solve the most difficult matters. Most people think and speak in slogans and platitudes, but neither are likely to offer the sensitivity and nuances required. Absolutes do not help. The United States is fighting Islam, even if its leadership does all it can to resist that idea. It also must maintain working relationships with Muslim countries, and provide a decent environment for the Muslims living in the United States.

I am back to my guiding concept of coping. It does not provide details about how to deal with problems, except to emphasize that there are no simple ways to solve them once and for all times. Balance rather than proclamations, subtlety of management, low flame, compromise, and half a loaf. Final solution is a term that must be avoided at all cost.

None of this is easy. Armies and other large organizations must work on the principle of simplicity. It is essential to giving orders that are clear, and assuring that all the troops operate in concert. In domestic affairs, it is important that low level bureaucrats deal with similar cases in similar fashion.

I am pretty sure that Uncle Albert did not tell his superiors about the French soldier he did not kill.
It is at the crucial points of extreme sensitivity where simplicity must give way to nuance and flexibility. Not on the battlefield or the social service office where agreed upon actions are to be implemented. But where it is appropriate to explain actions to a complex audience in a way to minimize the need to engage in further combat.

There are times when it is necessary to fight. The task of the IDF is to train nice Jewish boys to do ugly things. Arab violence against Jews, and then 9-11 have provided their lessons to Israel, the United States, and others.

There is no shortage of Muslims, from the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, who are arguing that the location of the mosque near Ground Zero is not likely to serve the interests of Muslims in the United States or elsewhere. We will see how their fear of escalating phobia against Islam plays out against the insistence of the promoters and supporters who have invested their egos in slogans about religious freedom and property rights.

The United States military will continue to battle Muslims, and train its soldiers how to kill the enemy while devoting some of the training to religious tolerance. Israel will continue to employ Druze and other Arabs in the IDF, while seeking to preserve the balance between a democracy that honors civil rights and a country that is primarily Jewish.

Simpletons of the world–It isn’t for you.
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Sharkansky is professor emeritus of political science at Hebrew University