Saudis Funding Islamic Curriculum at U.S. Colleges

Comforting thought, isn't it?

Two years ago this month, a Saudi prince caused a media splash — and raised eyebrows — when he donated $20 million each to Georgetown and Harvard universities to fund Islamic studies.

Although few details have been released about how the money has been spent, at Georgetown, the money helped pay for a recent symposium on Islamic-Western relations held in the university's Copley Formal Lounge. The event attracted about 120 persons: students, Catholic priests, men in business suits and several women in colorful head scarves who all came to hear religion experts from several American universities, as well as from Bosnia, Ireland and Malaysia.

A member of the Norwegian royal family said he flew in just for the event.

"I just came here to learn the language scholars are using about these things," Prince Haakon of Norway said.

Some call the Saudi gift Arab generosity and gratitude for the years American universities have educated the elite of the Arab world. Others say the sheer size of the donations amounts to buying influence and creating bastions of noncritical pro-Islamic scholarship within academia.

"There's a possibility these campuses aren't getting gifts, they're getting investments," said Clifford May, president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. "Departments on Middle Eastern studies tend to be dominated by professors tuned to the concerns of Arab and Muslim rulers. It's very difficult for scholars who don't follow this line to get jobs and tenure on college campuses.

"The relationship between these departments and the money that pours in is hard to establish, but like campaign finance reform, sometimes money is a bribe. Sometimes it's a tip."

Read the rest.

Largest Planet Discovered

PHOENIX (AP) - Scientists have discovered the universe's largest known planet, a giant ball made of mostly hydrogen that is 20 times larger than Earth and circling a star 1,400 light-years away.

Scientists believe the planet is 1.7 times the diameter of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, and has a temperature of 2,300-degrees.

"There is probably not a really firm surface anywhere on the planet. You would sink into it," said Georgi Mandushev, a research scientist at Lowell Observatory and lead author of an article announcing the finding in the peer-reviewed Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Lowell, along with the California Institute of Technology's Palomar Observatory in San Diego County and telescopes operating in Spain's Canary Islands, discovered the planet circling a star in the constellation Hercules.

Lowell announced the finding Monday. Scientists first spotted the new planet, called TrES-4, and a smaller one in spring 2006. Scientists at Caltech, Harvard University and the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii later confirmed the discovery.

"It's very solid stuff," astronomer Alan Boss at the Carnegie Institution of Washington said of the discovery of TrES-4. He marveled at the planet's extremely low density, about half that of Saturn in our solar system.

"It's just letting us know that nature has some surprises for us ... a much wider range of possibility than we could imagine," Boss said.

In an unrelated development, scientists also discovered an enormous object of extremely high density, pink to red in color and tentatively called Planet Pantsuit. It is rather wobbly, changes appearances often, shows no signs of intelligent life and is quite willing to put aside personal dignity in a quest for planetary power.

Harvard Moonbat Wants to 'Talk' to Osama

In an interview that displays astonishing naivete, an alleged terrorism "expert" from Harvard, Louise Richardson, suggests back-channel diplomacy with Osama bin Laden will repair America's image.

Pathetically, she's sure to have a lot of people agreeing with her. Read the whole thing, but what follows are a few absurd excerpts.

Could Back Channel Diplomacy Prevent the Worst?

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The suspects were presumably screened before being hired by the NHS. Is it possible that they were radicalized in the short time after they arrived in Britain?

Richardson: We don't know whether they came to the UK as a sleeper cell with this plan in mind, or whether they were radicalized since they came. There seems to be some evidence that they were radicalized by the war in Iraq, and that would then speak to a years-long process. ... But, if you look at the reaction of the family members to these attacks in Britain and to those July 7, 2005 attacks in Britain, the family members seem to have been stunned by the news that their kin was involved. And that's telling.

If she were such an "expert," she might understand Islamists are trained to lie. But of course, it's only George W. Bush who's been lying to us.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Then was the failed suicide attack in Britain a humiliating experience for the terrorists involved?

Richardson: Absolutely. It is humiliating to come away from a suicide attack still alive. Interestingly, in the instance of a failed attack, terrorist groups try to mitigate the humiliation by destroying the video suicide notes before they can reach the public.

Aww, the poor things, humiliated by their failure to kill innocent people. Where's my world's smallest violin?

SPIEGEL ONLINE: If revenge is one of the motivations for terrorist attacks, how can governments evaluate the legitimacy of the terrorists' grievances?

Richardson: It's very effective to take into account what your enemy is thinking. As we've found out, if you don't try to understand terrorists, you may well just be playing into their hands. A purely military response might only exacerbate the perceived grievances that motivate terror attacks. It's unbelievable, but the public diplomacy budget of the United States is only two-thirds of one percent of its military budget -- even though public diplomacy could be an effective way to combat the impression of the United States as an imperialist power.

There you go. If we just had diplomacy, then these cuddly terrorists would lay down their arms and we'd all be one big happy world.

That's the same mindset dunces like Madeleine Albright preached during the 1990's, and look where that got us.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You've mentioned the possibility of setting up talks with groups like al-Qaida. How would such talks be set up?

Richardson: Well, I'm not suggesting that President Bush sit across a table from Osama bin Laden. They would be informal, set up through back channels. These sorts of efforts from the British government were instrumental in the successful resolution of conflict in Northern Ireland. And it's conspicuously lacking from the United States right now.

Talks wouldn't have to be negotiations. Sometimes diplomacy is just a matter of feeling the other side out, of finding out what they actually want. If we could find splits within the organization of al-Qaida, we could play them off of each other for our benefit, isolating the most radical elements. Some people say that setting up talks with terror groups would grant them too much legitimacy. But, in my view, declaring war on a terror group is actually the most effective way of granting legitimacy.

Is she so stupid to believe that "negotiating" with Osama bin Laden would go over with the American public? No doubt some Democrats would be all for it, but seriously, this one really needs to put down the crackpipe.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Has the Democratic Party done enough to resist the Bush administration?

Richardson: Unfortunately not. Perhaps the country hasn't recovered from the hysteria encouraged by the Bush administration. Just a few weeks ago, John Edwards, one of the Democratic nominees for president, suggested that the "war on terror" terminology should be disbanded -- and he was excoriated. Hopefully, the Democrats will be able to make more headway towards an effective anti-terror policy before the next election.

God help us. Hysteria encouraged by the Bush administration? The only hysterical types I see are the ones with a D after their name.

It's muddle-headed thinking like this which endangers us all.

Subsidizing Terror Propaganda

Joel Mowbray takes a look at Al-Hurra, and it's not a pretty picture.

With an annual budget now over $70 million, Al-Hurra has for three years served as the centerpiece of America's aggressive post-9/11 courtship of the Arab world. Insiders maintain that the network was fulfilling its mission until it hired former CNN producer Larry Register last November. Mr. Register has not, to his credit, changed Al-Hurra's dedication to showcasing the full range of U.S. politics. The other side of the network, however, has been "gutted," in the words of one staffer. Even though Mr. Register has made some improvements since the March column, Al-Hurra still produces far fewer stories about Arab government corruption and human-rights abuses. (Mr. Register did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.)

Al-Hurra was intended to cut through the anti-West and anti-U.S. propaganda that permeates even mainstream Arab media. Stories in that vein no longer see significant airtime, and nowhere is this more apparent than Al-Hurra's new approach to the Holocaust--the treatment of which in Arab society embodies so much that is wrong in that critical region of the Muslim world.

It is precisely because of Arab society's persistent refusal to accept the existence of such a defining--and indisputable--event in modern history that Al-Hurra dared to do things Al-Jazeera would never fathom, such as interviewing Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and airing the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. But that was under Mr. Register's predecessor, a Lebanese-born Muslim named Mouafac Harb.

Under Mr. Register, Al-Hurra covered the Holocaust denial conference in Tehran last December. But in a stark break from Mr. Harb's era, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the attendees at his conference were treated with unmistakable deference.

Read it all.

Curious how this producer Register went from one pro-terror outlet like CNN to another like Al-Hurra.

Speaking of terror propaganda, get a load of this story from Weasel Zippers.

America’s alienation of its Muslim community has ominous parallels to the British experience, in which increasing numbers of disaffected and radicalized Islamic youth led to the London bombings of July 2005, said a member of the British House of Lords at Fordham Law School on March 6.

Baroness Kishwer Falkner, a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords who is on sabbatical as a fellow at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, said that Muslims in England are near the bottom of the socioeconomic scale. Although the economic situation is different for Muslims in the United States, she said that there is a strident anti-Muslim sentiment evident in everything from talk radio to television programs.

This “Islamophobia” could serve to radicalize American Muslims, she said, in the same way it has in the United Kingdom.

Unbelievable.