PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ISLAM
By Avi Davis

If you were to plot the overthrow of a large Western democracy, which of the following methodologies would prove most effective?
 
a. A military coup, led by  a sympathetic officer corp
b. A series of  domestic terrorist attacks designed to spread fear     and instability within the population
c. Penetration of the country's legislative, judicial and clerical      bodies, making it a legal and moral crime to suggest that the     enemy is, in fact,  the enemy
d. Funding the country's academic institutions and educational                                          system, so as to encourage a widespread embrace of a foreign                                          ideology and its belief system 
                                     e. All of the above.
 
Perhaps the documentation is yet to be uncovered but many years ago Islamic regimes may have weighed these choices and concluded that option d. was the proper entry point for any campaign to defeat or destabilize  the West. And in fact, over the past thirty -five years, the effectiveness of such a starting strategy has been exemplified in Britain, a country whose academic institutions have been the recipient of greater Islamic largesse than any other nation on earth.
 
This point was driven home this week by the publication of  The Centre for Social Cohesion's  A Degree of Influence - an alarming British report on the foreign funding of the country's universities.  Among its many findings is the revelation that over the past 30 years, at least 10 major universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, have accepted donations from Muslim governments totaling hundreds of millions of pounds.  
 
Yet the quantity of this funding pales when contrasted with its educational and societal impact. 
 
Among the report's most crucial findings: 
  • Censorship of discussion of certain aspects of Islam in UK universities
  • Administrative changes conducted to suit Islamic donors, including allowing certain donors to choose the academics who run the programs and the students accepted within them.
  • An absence of academic objectivity -  failure to hew to traditionial academic rules of balance and fairness in discussion of Islamic topics
  • The use of the university progams as diplomatic instrumentalities of the donor countries involved
  • Deep financial reliance (and dependence) of the donnee instittutions on undemocratic countries with histories of human rights abuses
  • An absence of transparency (the report itself admits that only 5% of foreign donations to British universtities has been reported in the public record.  The quantity of funding is almost certainly much higher. )
  • Insufficent safegaurds to prevent donations from affecting the way universities are run.
Over the course of 120 pages, the report paints a clear picture:   Donations pouring in to the British university system are ravaging academic freedom and corrupting the administrative apparatus by which the system operates.  
 
Those who believe these problems are isolated to Great Britian should think again.   At How Free Is the University?  AFA's  2008 summer conference, it was revealed that  the problems identified in Britain seem to have now surfaced, sometimes in even more extreme form, in the U.S.   It was if the potentates of rich Islamic countries, recognizing the phenomenal victories they had scored in the U.K., had decided to repeat that success in the very heartland of academic freedom itself.
 
They have certainly found a willing clientele. 
 
 Under Title VI of the Higher Education Act, (passed in 1958 as a Cold War measure designed to bring Americans up to speed on other cultures and political systems), federally subsidized Middle East Studies centers are required to pursue public outreach. This entails designing lesson plans and seminars on the Middle East for America's K-12 teachers.  Yet, these university-distributed teaching aids usually slip into the K-12 curriculum without being subject tothe kind of public vetting or scrutiny one would expect.

The Saudis take full advantage of this open window. By lavishly funding several organizations that design Saudi-friendly English language K-12 curricula, the Saudis assist federally subsidized universities in producing materials that sanitize Islam and the Saudi kingdom while viciously attacking Judaism, Christianity and the West.
 
An example of this is the  Harvard Center for Middle East Studies'  The Arab World Studies Notebook.   This teaching guide, as acknowledged by its own editor Aubrey Shabbas, is designed to present only an Arab or Muslim point of view on the Middle East, inducing teachers to embrace Muslim religious beliefs and supporting the political views of the Middle East Policy Council, a Washington lobbying group funded by the Saudis.   The Notebook, in its hubris, even goes so far to claim that Muslims beat Columbus to the New World, crossing the Atlantic in 889 A.D.  
 
This academic travesty is all ably documented in Sandra Stotksy's report  The Stealth Curriculum: Manipulating America's History Teachers  produced by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.   The report is a devastating critique of  Title VI training  manuals and the complete absence of federal ovesight which allows foreign governments to directly influence the way our children are educated.  This study was further corroborated by a four part Jewish Telegraphic Agency report titled Tainted Teachings, What Your Kids are Learning about Israel, America, and Islam

The money the Saudis are shoveling into our universities in the form of gifts and endowments is as alarming as it is in the U.K.: King Fahd donated $20 million to set up a Middle East Studies Center at the University of Arkansas; $5 million was donated to UC Berkeley’s Center For Middle East Studies from two Saudi sheiks linked to funding al-Qaeda; $2.5 million was donated to Harvard; $8.1 million went to Georgetown; $11 million passed to Cornell; $1.5 million dollars to Texas A&M; $5 million dollars to MIT; $1 million dollars to Princeton.$5 million dollars to Rutgers.   Other recipients of Saudi largesse include Columbia, UC-Santa Barbara, Johns Hopkins, Rice University, American University, University of Chicago, Syracuse University, USC, UCLA, Duke University and Howard University, among many others.

Such is the allure of Saudi funding that the Muslim kingdom does not even need to go scouting for potential donee universities any longer.   They will come to them.

In April 2008, The Australian revealed that Griffith University in Queensland- described by vice-chancellor Ian O'Connor as the "university of choice" for Saudis - offered the Saudi embassy an opportunity to reshape the Griffith Islamic Research Unit during its campaign so as to get some "extra zeros" added to Saudi cheques.  And in Canada , Concordia University funded a delegation to travel to Saudi Arabia " to explore opportunities for cultural exchange," -  a clever euphemism for fundraising.

Here we face one of the gravest challenges to our own civilization:   In accepting money from brutal dictatorships who deny rights to women, are founts of rabid antisemitism and who refute the validity of basic Western values, we have not only given those regimes our endorsement; we have provided them, and their corrupted ideologies, with access to our students who are not given the least benefit of countervailing points of view. 

The re-published  The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic Czarist-fabricated screed dating from the late 19th Century, is a popular bestseller in many Muslim countries.   There readers will discover a malign Jewish conspiracy to run the world and strip it of its resources.   But a more readable and factual tract might be titled The Protocols of the Elders of Islam.  This document would, with hard, unassailable facts and calculated amounts, report on the extraordinary campaign of Muslim countries to undermine and pervert the West's basic institutions.    The campaign might begin with the buying off of the universities, move on to the West's legislative, judicial and clerical institutions, seek then to destabilize society through unremitting terror campaigns and then consummate the effort with military coups. 

Sound improbable?   Sit in a class of almost any Muslim-funded Middle East Studies department on an American or Britiish campus today, then give me your answer. Perhaps then you might be educated enough to hazard a response to the multiple choice question I posted at the beginning of this article.

It is, frighteningly, " all of the above." 


The Western Word - An International Weekly Digest 3-27-2009