Posted on 04/29/2024 8:19:32 AM PDT by MtnClimber
The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) has been laying the groundwork for years for what’s happening now.
The pro-Hamas demonstrations that have become the latest social contagion to afflict the nation, with “encampments” springing up on college campuses across the country to demand “freedom” for “Palestine,” show clear signs of being orchestrated. One telling indication of this is that a massive number of these allegedly grass-roots protesters have identical tents, as if some well-heeled leftist bought them in bulk with the intention of helping this allegedly spontaneous movement get going. The groundwork for what is happening these days, however, has been laid for years. These demonstrations are in large part the handiwork of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) the professional organization of Middle East Studies Professors at colleges nationwide.
The Middle East Studies Association, whose members dominate the Middle East Studies faculties of most colleges and universities in the U.S., identifies itself as “a non-profit association that fosters the study of the Middle East, promotes high standards of scholarship and teaching, and encourages public understanding of the region and its peoples through programs, publications and services that enhance education, further intellectual exchange, recognize professional distinction, and defend academic freedom.” That’s all very noble and high-minded, but as is so often the case in academia today, the reality is considerably seamier. MESA is actually a far-left, pro-jihad activist group that gives an academic veneer to Marxist agitprop and Palestinian jihad propaganda.
This is abundantly clear from the 25 items that are currently on the front page of the news section of the MESA website. Two stories are pinned to the top of the page; one is actually on the side of genuine justice and human rights, decrying the Iranian Islamic regime’s dismissal of professors who supported the recent Woman, Life, Freedom protests in Iran. The other, however, is entitled “Campus Climate Resources,” which gives the impression that it’s propaganda about the myth of human-caused climate change; it’s actually about the “climate” on campus regarding support for the Palestinian jihad against Israel. MESA here offers a grab-bag of links to article denouncing the alleged “repression of protest on campuses,” the alleged “targeting of Palestinian students in Israeli universities,” and the like. One of these linked articles carries this headline: “MESA Board Joint Statement with CAF [MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom ] regarding the ongoing genocidal violence against the Palestinian people and their cultural heritage in Gaza
That article asserts that “the ongoing attack on Gaza by the state of Israel…has now claimed more than 100,000 Palestinian dead and wounded according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.” Despite still being offered by MESA as if it contained current information, it has not been revised to reflect Hamas’ admission that its casualty figures have been wildly inflated, or any indication that the UN still carries on its list of journalists supposedly killed by the Israelis the name of a man who is very much alive. In MESA’s world, only the Palestinian side of the story is told, and it is believed without question. That is what the self-righteous and ignorant students who are in the encampments have been told, and that’s all they know.
It is thus no surprise that the MESA website also contains the organization’s official endorsement of the frankly neo-Nazi Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which emulates Hitler’s National Socialists in boycotting Jewish businesses so as to demonize the Jews and limit their economic power. MESA also calls upon “calls upon the leaders of North American colleges and universities to steadfastly defend academic freedom and to champion freedom of expression—even when the ideas and opinions expressed are unorthodox or unpopular.” This is rich, because MESA members would be on the front lines protesting if a college or university gave a professorship, or even a hearing, to an opponent of jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women who spoke honestly about how the Palestinian “resistance” is really a jihad, and about how the global jihad is a quintessentially expansionist, imperialist movement that has denied the rights of “indigenous peoples” the world over.
What MESA is worried about is professors who are open supporters of Hamas facing discipline. Many of those 25 articles on the first page of its news section are letters to or from various universities regarding MESA protesting against the dismissal of such professors, or the disciplining of pro-Hamas students. There is nothing about the pro-Israel professor Shai Davidai getting barred from the Columbia campus, but plenty about how the cosseted toy revolutionaries on the campus lawn are being oppressed and their rights denied.
It’s easy to see, given MESA’s relentless anti-Israel stance, how university students all over the nation have gotten the idea that supporting Hamas’ genocidal jihad is right and righteous. MESA, like the universities where these students are posturing and screaming today, was not always this bad. Its Founding Fellows include groundbreaking scholars such as S. D. Goitein, Majid Khadduri, and Franz Rosenthal. Among its Honorary Fellows were some of the most renowned figures of the study of Islam, Arabs and the Middle East, including Sir Hamilton Gibb, Philip K. Hitti, W. Montgomery Watt, Maxime Rodinson, and Annemarie Schimmel. They have been followed, however, by a rogue’s gallery of academic hacks and propagandists. The pro-Hamas encampments on college campuses are their handiwork.
Many of these are professional protesters that are paid to cause trouble.
Because they are Jew-hating leftists and have bought into the Nazi propaganda that Jews are rich and therefore are automatically the oppressors of everyone else.
I like this guy.
I think that $ is behind a lot of this
Reminds me of the old Li’l Abner comic strip from 1966 in which the Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything (S.W.I.N.E.) take over the campus.
The terrified University Regents decide to sell the University! The only buyers were the Mafia who brings in the mob enforcers.
Here come the SWINE protesting!
I still get a thrill remembering how the leader of the S.W.I.N.E. used his front teeth to assault the brass knuckles of the mob enforcers. Who says brass won’t make a spark! These did. Big ones at that!
Anyone else remember that old comic strip? Could easily be reprinted today with no changes.
Why? Cheap labor.
Also, all the little shits are socialists.
Many of the pro-Hamas protesters are a Rent-A-Mob, these are the same people that dressed as ANTIFA, BLM, and Occupy Wall Street, whenever/where ever they are needed. I believe more than half of those arrested at Columbia were not students OR faculty
Rich leftists who finance this stuff should be indicted under RICO.
It is organized crime.
It’s OK to hate white people.
It’s OK to hate Jews.
The Left is based on hate, so here we are.
NO I do not like these guys. I like the tech baron featured below that’s trying to clean up San Francisco.
Years of professional brainwashing, paid for by us through public education.
Fake gender, abortion, hate Trump, racial victimhood, you name it , we’re financing it.
Time to eliminate the DOE, & government funding of colleges.
Most students on campuses are not doing the protesting or setting up camps or disturbing the peace. The people doing so are very few and many of those are paid activists from outside campuses and not even students in those universities. The problem gets louder when the media gives them huge audience via TV and radio and print media and social media.
It gets even worse when the authorities in the universities refuse to act for fear of being branded racists or anti-Palestinian or anti-Muslims, etc. To boot, some authorities at the universities do support the anti-Jew hatred and pro-Palestinian cause.
In addition, when democrats become complicit with the demonstrators, it just goes towards emboldening more Jew-hating rhetoric.
Soros is a big player, and until his organization is not acted against, the protests an interruptions at the universities will continue.
Free speech is not being threatened if those protests are stopped. Those doing the protests are just calling for hatred and destruction of Israel and Jews.
Because for decades the intellectually and morally corrupt leftist staffs have told us that all cultures are equal and we cannot criticize/shame someone we disagree with.
So, the monsters supporting the ‘palestinians” have had years to convince every soft brained liberal arts toad that they could say and now do anything they wanted.
Soros $$$ All we need is another George Floyd incident and it will be the summer of 2020 all over again
I might be wrong about it (it wouldn’t be the first time), but I think we are witnessing the jump-the-shark moment for traditional colleges in general and the elites in particular. The last time there was this kind of mayhem, during the Vietnam War, there was a genuine split in the country between the pro- and anti-war groups, but this time practically no one outside the radical left and the Muslicrats supports Hamas—it’s as if the ethnic Japanese were to have taken over universities in early 1942 because of the Doolittle raid.
What Hamas did on 10/7 is the modern equivalent of the Rape of Nanking and Pearl Harbor rolled into one, and we can argue about how much money to send to Israel or how many troops we want over there, but only the Nazi-antisemites among us say they can’t defend themselves by any means necessary from what Hamas wants to do to them. The more the colleges look like they support the protestors or aren’t willing to despise them, the less Americans are going to want to support the colleges or their graduates.
Many others have no clue why they are there. It’s just a big social event for them. They get caught up in the moment. Few actually understand what they are involved in. I saw the same with my son’s college when blm crap was spreading.
We have a generation of kids who received poor education and substantial indoctrination and are of low esteem with little or no accomplishments.
Protesting makes them feel significant as they are insignificant.
These protestors have been brainwashed to hate Jews, just like Palestinians teach their children hate the Jews.
The students have no concept of the real truth about Islam, Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinians. They had a two-state solution in the hands with Israel. All they had to do was formally recognize Israel’s right to exist. . . they refused and have continued intermittently attacking Israel ever since. They richly deserve what they are getting from Israel because of their evil behavior and for putting Hamas in charge of what government they have. Israel, finish the job of wiping out Hamas because it is the right thing to do.
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