By Clarice Feldman | American Thinker
From the halls of Ivy to the Fourth Estate, once-respected institutions are revealing themselves to be at the forefront of efforts to upend the mores and conduct which make ours a civilized society worth defending against barbarism. I’ve already detailed some of the outrageous anti-Semitic, anti-American actions which so many colleges and universities have tolerated. (Canary Mission has done an outstanding job detailing what’s been going on in academia.)
This week, some have responded, not all with the kind of appropriate vigor and clarity which these actions call for. It’s hard to disagree with Iowahawk, ”One of the major lessons we’ve all learned in the last 33 days: send your kids to a party college.”
It’s been my sad experience that no one is easier to buy than an academic, so I’m not at all surprised to learn that Qatar, a major funder of intifadaists, is also a major funder of our top American universities.
Qatar, the current residence of Hamas’ former leader, has been the largest Arab donor to American universities for decades. Not only do six leading American universities have campuses in Qatar, but they also receive hundreds of millions from ruling elites.
At least six American universities have campuses in the country of Qatar — which is currently home to former Hamas leader and recent global “Day of Jihad” progenitor Khaled Meshaal.
These institutions are Carnegie Mellon University, Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar, Georgetown University, Northwestern University, Texas A&M University, and Virginia Commonwealth University. Reportedly, these universities struck a bargain with Qatari leaders to allow Qatari residents to receive American degrees without having to travel overseas. The Washington Post reported in 2015 that these institutions receive a total of more than $320 million each year in exchange.[snip] Campus Reform previously reported that Ivy League universities were among the top recipients of $8.5 billion in Arab funding over 35 years. Now, student groups at recipient colleges have come out in support of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
For example, Cornell University received over $1.5 billion in funding from Arab countries. Now, its Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter has repeatedly participated in pro-Hamas student social media campaigns.
“Among other factors, I believe funding by Middle Eastern countries of American colleges and universities has generated support for Hamas, while causing a rise in antisemitism on college campuses,” said Campus Reform higher education attorney and former Brandeis University instructor Ken Tashjy.”
Tashjy also highlighted more connections between pro-Hamas student activity and donations from Arab countries.
“According to a report published in 2020 by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy, there is a direct correlation between the funding of universities by Qatar and the Gulf States and the active presence at those universities of groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which maintains over 200 chapters throughout U.S. higher education,” he also stated.
And then there’s the biggest Hamas supporter in the U.S., CAIR, whose headquarters sits three blocks from the Capitol and has 35 offices around the country. Paul Sperry at Real Clear Investigations has been monitoring them and the government’s acquiescence in their subversive activities for years. He has a detailed history of CAIR’s activities and the FBI’s hands off policy, with only some highlights noted here:
Christopher Wray, FBI Director: He warned last month of Hamas terror on U.S. soil. What he didn’t say is that the FBI has been investigating Hamas’ biggest ally in America for the past 30 years — without filing any charges.
Launched in 1994 as a secret front organization to support Hamas, according to declassified FBI wiretap transcripts and FBI testimony, the Council on American-Islamic Relations has, in the decades since, become an accepted member of Washington’s lobbying community. The New York Times and other influential newspapers routinely describe CAIR as a “Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization.”
Although it has not repudiated its support for Hamas — which is committed to the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people — CAIR was enlisted by the Biden administration in May to take part in a White House initiative to fight antisemitism.” In the case against the Hamas charitable front named the Holy Land foundation, “the largest terror funding case in the U.S.”, the Department of Justice included CAIR “on a list of co-conspirators underwriting Hamas terrorism — though CAIR and its founders were never indicted in the case.”
Why? Sperry reports former agents offered “political interference” as the explanation for the lack of an indictment.
Sperry continues: “Currently, CAIR is directing efforts at the ground level across the United States with organizations known for violent extremism,” [a former FBI counterterrorism agent] added in a recent interview with RealClearInvestigations. “Again, the FBI is doing nothing to adhere to their oaths of office and protect the American people.”
If you’re wondering why so many of the Hamas supporters gleefully rip down posters of kidnapped Israelis, babies, toddlers, women, included, William Bernstein’s explanation in The Delusions of Crowds is the best explanation for this performative act of hostility to decency.
“People do not deploy the powerful human intellect to dispassionately analyze the world, but rather to rationalize how the facts conform to their emotionally derived preconceptions. Over the past several decades, psychologists have accumulated experimental data that dissect the human preference of rationalization over rationality. When presented with facts and data that contradict our deeply held beliefs, we generally do not reconsider and alter those beliefs appropriately. [Instead] we avoid contrary facts and data, and when we cannot avoid them, our erroneous assessments will occasionally even harden and, yet more amazingly, make us more likely to proselytize them. In short, human ‘rationality’ constitutes a fragile lid perilously balanced on the bubbling cauldron of artifice and self-delusion.”
No institutions have contributed more to ”the bubbling cauldron of artifice and self-delusion” than the Western press, and this week the Fourth estate’s hands are bloody.
The Press and the Islamists
This perfectly anodyne cartoon appeared briefly in the Washington Post before it was yanked. It had been personally selected for publication by the editor of the op-ed page. At first the paper claimed they did so because readers claimed it was Islamophobic (a ridiculous term which suggests this is actually a thing, though experience and statistics prove otherwise — it’s a way to diminish the real and statistically valid assertion of anti-Semitism.) In fact, it was pulled because the Post’s editor Sally Buzbee, “caved to staff pressure.”
Buzbee formerly headed the AP, and denied knowing it shared offices with Hamas in Gaza. The artist, probably the finest political cartoonist since Nast and Nasby combined, responded:
Ramirez expressed his disappointment over his cartoon’s removal, calling the move “a blow against … the freedom of speech.”
“When the intellectually indolent try to defend the indefensible, they always seem to resort to playing the race card,” Ramirez told the Free Beacon. “They’re trying to claim that this caricature is a racial exercise, when in its specificity, it is Ghazi Hamad, who is a senior Hamas official, who went on Lebanese television praising the brutal Oct. 7 attack and systematic slaughter of women, children, and men and pledged to do it over and over again until the annihilation of Israel.”
“I am presenting this because I think this is a blow against democracy and the freedom of speech,” Ramirez continued. “I’m a big believer that America has to have the free expression of ideas to advance thinking.”
In addition to Buzbee’s note addressing her newsroom’s “concerns” with the cartoon, the Post published letters to the editor that maligned Ramirez’s cartoon as “deeply malicious,” “deeply racist,” and “full of bias and prejudice.” Shipley referred to those letters in his editor’s note, writing that the cartoon “was seen by many readers as racist.”
“The reaction to the image convinced me that I had missed something profound, and divisive, and I regret that,” Shipley said. “This is the spirit of opinion journalism, to move imperfectly toward a constructive exchange of ideas at all possible speed, listening and learning along the way.”
Jeff Bezos bought himself a turkey in the WaPo and I doubt it can ever recover its once-considered more authoritative voice, certainly not with Buzbee at the top.
But the Post is not alone in the press for having exposed itself as defenders of barbarism and animus to Western civilization. Sometimes it’s even exposing itself to well-deserved ridicule.
CNN, NYT, AP and Reuters were found to have employed Hamas fighters as stringers and photographers (”freelancers’) who joined Hamas on October 7. One of them even posted on Facebook a picture of himself riding in with the murderers as he held a hand grenade. If you didn’t catch on to this earlier — i.e. the Green Helmet fiasco, where among other things they paraded dead babies taken from Iraqi morgues before photographers to send to our press, Iowahawk explains it to the naïve.
Let’s face it. Orgs like CNN, NYT, AP, and Reuters are straight up forbidden by Hamas from sending their own reporters into Gaza, and are reduced to hiring “freelancers” from a handpicked Hamas “press pool.”
At this point it isn’t an extraordinary claim that these local “reporters” are aligned with, and abetting, war criminals. The burden of proof should be on CNN, NYT, AP, and Reuter to show they *aren’t*.
At least one of the named stringers has been killed by the IDF and Israel’s internal security agency announced that when it eliminates all the October 7 massacre participants, it is including “’photojournalists’ who took part in recording the assault.”
The Western press gaslighting for Hamas is so ridiculous that a Hamas actor known to online posters at X as Mr. FAFO who posed daily in different guises — i.e., tour director, bombing victim, pressman, medical tech — was seriously interviewed by the BBC while MSNBC ran one of Mr. FAFO’s photos as if it were a real thing. Videos of Assad bombing Arabs (he killed 200,000 of them) are reframed and published as Israeli attacks. A Lebanese artists’ film in which actors pretend to be beset Gazans is run as a real documentary. Domestically, attendants to a screening of Hamas atrocities at the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance were taunted and physically confronted by pro-Hamas leftists. This provocation and deliberate disruption was described by ABC 7 as “clashes breaking out between two groups.” Daniel Horowitz noted, “The media failed to report that J Town Action and Solidarity, the group planning to disrupt the Museum of Tolerance screening, expressed support for terrorism against Jews. It failed to report that the pro-Hamas rallyers had been urged to ‘mask up’ and told to shut shit down’. Other calls for violence were similarly not reported on. The media failed to tell the truth. Elected officials failed to condemn Hamas supporters trying to shut down a screening of Hamas atrocities at a Holocaust Museum. They failed to condemn hate groups invading a Jewish community and attacking Jews.”
In an ironic note, the New York Times, which offered up the weakest response to the impropriety of these using Hamas stringers, a paper which continues, by the way, to employ admitted Hitler lover Soliman Hijjy, was stormed and invaded by pro-Hamas, masked creeps on Saturday for being too pro-Israel. It’s true what the Bible says “God works in mysterious ways.”
