Arkansans deserve better
My series on the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville’s King Fahd Middle East center began as a critique of the anti-academic plan to have two anti-Israel Fahdians as the only speakers conducting a presentation about the war between Israel and Palestinian terrorists. Today’s column continues this discussion by addressing Fahdian professor Mohja Kahf’s most recent erroneous comments.
I conclude that Arkansas’ Saudi-funded propaganda machine must be shuttered.
Kahf disputes my description of European Jews—who, along with Middle Eastern Jews, were founders of modern Israel—as “Indigenous” to the Holy Land. She claims, rather, that Jewish “Europeans newly arrived to Palestine, whose ancestors had been living in Europe for centuries despite Europe’s horrific levels of antisemitism (unmatched in the Arabic-speaking world), through violent takeover in 1948, imposed a colonial-settler state that marginalized indigenous Jews who had lived there continuously.” Let’s unpack these misinformed tropes.
1. Kahf’s suggestion that European Jews aren’t Indigenous to Israel is belied by science. DNA tests confirm the opposite. Kahf’s real claim is that European Jews’ entitlement to their homeland expired, while the claim of subsequent Arab invaders somehow hasn’t. This charade—that forcibly displaced Indigenous Jews no longer have the right to their ancestral homeland—is applied to no other displaced people.
2. Kahf’s assertion that “antisemitism in Europe [during WWII] … [is] unmatched in the Arabic-speaking world” is sadly untrue. Butchers beheading Jews, terrorists raping and mutilating Jewish girls and parading their bodies before cheering crowds, and murderers burning Jewish babies alive—these crimes against humanity were all committed by Palestinian terrorists. The Hamas charter mirrors the insane-conspiracy theories underlying millennia of genocidal antisemitism:
“The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them … [Jews] have been scheming for a long time … and have accumulated huge and influential material wealth. With their money, they took control of the world media … stirred revolutions … formed secret organizations—such as the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs and the Lions … in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests … stood behind World War I … and formed the League of Nations … [to] rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains.”
Who knew that the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs and the Lions were all part of a secret Jewish cabal—not to mention that the Jews orchestrated WWII?
During World War II, the former Mufti of Jerusalem gleefully met with Hitler, wherein Hitler stated his support for the “annihilation of Jewry living in Arab space.” And in the last 100 years, Arab countries and Iran have expelled or killed virtually every Jew. The distinguishing characteristic of Nazis isn’t their antisemitism, it’s merely their effectiveness in implementing it.
3. Kahf’s contention that European Jews returning to Israel did so “through violent takeover in 1948” is pure revisionism.
In 1948, the United Nations divided land controlled by the British Empire—and the Ottoman Empire for centuries before—between Jews and more-recent Arab invaders. The Jews (European and Middle Eastern) agreed and celebrated, while Arabs from throughout the Middle East attacked Israel. Both in 1948 and after Oct. 7, Jews responded to Arab attempts at annihilation, not the other way around.
4. Kahf’s averment that European Jews “colonized” the land of “marginalized Indigenous [Middle Eastern] Jews” is incomprehensible. Israel was created by both European and Middle Eastern Jews. Currently, more Middle Eastern Jews live in Israel than Jews of European descent. That’s a remarkably ineffective “colonization.”
Thereafter, Kahf doubles down on the myopia of the King Fahd indoctrination center. When I’d asked why Fahdians only teach Arabic, Kahf first responded that they only cover the period after Arabs invaded. When I reiterated that the post-Arab invasion period also includes the Hebrew-speaking Jewish state of Israel, Kahf’s response was that they also don’t teach Turkish.
Doesn’t that prove my point? Of all the languages spoken in the Middle East, the only one taught in the indoctrination center named after the former king of Arabia is Arabic.
Finally, Kahf continues her attempts to discredit Phyllis Chesler—the noted Jewish-feminist scholar and supporter of the right of Israel to exist—who was prevented from speaking at an Arkansas conference because some claimed Chesler’s criticism of Islamic “honor” murders “promote[d] bigotry.” Bigotry against murderers, that is.
Kahf now asserts that the school also canceled Chesler because Chesler published a pamphlet with the David Horowitz Center, which Kahf says is “described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the renowned Somali-born Black feminist, wrote in The New York Times: “[T]he SPLC is an organization that has lost its way, smearing people who are fighting for liberty and turning a blind eye to an ideology and political movement [Islamic extremism] that has much in common with Nazism … Like neo-Nazis, Islamic extremists despise liberalism. They deny the equality of the sexes, justify wife-beating and, in some cases, even the enslavement of female unbelievers. The Islamic State and groups like it regularly murder gay people in the most heinous ways. Islamic extremists are also virulently anti-Semitic, like the Nazis before them. And like today’s American Nazis, they brandish swastikas, chant slurs and peddle conspiracy theories.”
I’ll take the word of Chesler and Ali over that of Fahdians.
The propagation of barely veiled, demonstrably false propaganda is but one of myriad reasons the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville needs to disband its imperially branded indoctrination center. Arkansans deserve better from our flagship public university.
This is your right to know.