Saudi prince gives $20 Million to Harvard and Georgetown who support pro-Muslim, anti-Israel propaganda in high schools. editor
By Stephen Schwartz, The American Thinker. In 2005, Saudi prince Alwaleed Bin Talal donated $20 million dollars each to Harvard and Georgetown Universities. In the years since, Georgetown has earned considerably more press for its use of the prince’s largesse, through which it renamed an extant center founded in 1993 as the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU). This is due in no small part to the efforts of the center’s director, John Louis Esposito, America’s foremost apologist for ultra-fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam. The result of the Saudi-Esposito lash-up has been the emergence of ACMCU as an academic institution that promotes vigorously the “Palestinian narrative” and hostility to Israel.
Harvard’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program has developed at a much slower pace, and as a result, it has received considerably less media attention. Its director, Ali Asani, is an Indian Muslim from Kenya. As described on its website, the Harvard product of Alwaleed’s philanthropy “funds four new professorships promoting scholarship and teaching about contemporary Islamic life and thought and Islam beyond the Middle East.” Yet only one chair had been filled as of the end of 2011, with Malika Zeghal, who was trained in France, serving as Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal professor in contemporary Islamic thought/life since 2009.
Zeghal is formally affiliated with Harvard’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. She was, to say the least, unprepared for the rise of Islamist politics in the Arab states over the past year. In a Harvard event in February 2011, she downplayed the role of radical movements like the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab upheavals, stating, in the words of the Harvard Crimson:
That the unrest should be seen as a nationalist revolution, rather than as a religious one like the 1979 Iranian Revolution. … “If the Islamists come back — and they have started to come back — they will have to participate in a democratic transition as any other movement,” Zeghal said.
Unfortunately, she was wrong: Islamists have used the Arab uprisings of 2010-11 for a power-grab, disregarding a “democratic transition.”
Harvard also runs a Center for Middle East Studies (CMES), which includes an Outreach Center directed by one Paul Beran. The Outreach Center has been “awarded National Resource Center status by the US Department of Education’s Title VI program and serves educators, students and the general public on topics related to the Middle East region.”
