search
Yossi Raskas

The False Facade of Liberal Academia

Liberal academia has oft-displayed a notoriously poor track record of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, an effect which has penetrated deep into the Western psyche. Today, that caste was joined by the prominent news outlet, CNN.

On Sunday, CNN global network’s website displayed an editorial by Noam Chomsky, the anti-American professor who says, among other outrageous things, the US is responsible for the Cambodian genocide and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In the byline of the article, CNN farcically describes Chomsky as a “liberal academic.”

If there is any shred of truth to the application of the term “liberal” by CNN to the author’s byline, it is that liberal academics like Chomsky often willfully employ that terminology as a smokescreen, behind which they comfortably couch their racist, bigoted ideologies.

In fact, Chomsky’s moral malaise is neither a unique phenomenon nor indicative of a new academic trend. Rather, it is merely the most recent manifestation of a long succession of similar occurrences.

For instance, earlier this year professor emeritus of international law and practice at Princeton University and United Nations Rapporteur on Human Rights in Palestine, Richard Falk, declared moral bankruptcy, when he blamed the Boston terrorist attack on the US.

In an article titled “A Commentary on the Marathon Murders” in the Foreign Policy Journal, Falk insinuated that President Obama’s recent trip to Israel is what caused the Tsarnaev brothers – two very demented individuals, at least one of whom was motivated by a radical form of Islam – to kill four innocent Americans and injured hundreds more at the Boston Marathon.

“As long as Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political establishment, those who wish for peace and justice in the world should not rest easy,” he writes.

Then Falk compared the Boston bombing to the attacks on 9/11, saying that both incidents have prompted America to embrace “Islamophobic falsehoods.”

In 2009, the anti-Semitic, anti-American Falk was joined at Princeton by an additional faculty member, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian diplomat with links to the assassination and murder of Iranian political dissidents in German, who was then hired by the university.

From 1989 to 1997, Mousavian held the position of Iran’s ambassador to Germany, coinciding with what is referred to as the Chain Murder years. As the Weekly Standard reported, “The Chain Murders of Iran were a series of murders and disappearances from 1988-1998 by the regime operatives of Iranian dissident intellectuals who had been critical of the Islamic Republic. The victims included more than 80 writers, translators, actors, poets, and political activists that were killed by a variety of means using Iranian secret service and Hezbollah operatives.”

Before that, in 1992, Mousavian supervised the Mykonos operation, in which four Kurdish dissidents were eliminated by an Iranian hit squad in the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin. Mousavian was the highest Iranian official in Germany at the time of the operation.

Now, Mousavian works as Associate Research Scholar for the Program on Science and Global Security at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Not a bad gig for a terrorist.

And who could forget the recent hire of convicted killer Katherine Boudin by Columbia University. During the 1970’s, Boudin and fellow Weather Underground terrorists bombed the Pentagon, the US Capitol and various other sites in New York and Chicago. Later, in 1981, Boudin and Black Liberation Army members robbed a Brinks armored truck in Rockland County, New York. The group shot and killed one guard and two policemen, and wounded another guard. Boudin was eventually captured by police and sentenced to 19 years in prison.

Today, Boudin holds an adjunct professorship in the school of social work at Columbia University, where she has been lecturing since 2008. In April of 2013, she was also named the Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at NYU Law School.

It doesn’t take master-chef Emeril Lagasse to smell the faux-moral indignation brewing in the Ivory Tower.

Fundamentally, both Israel and the US are character-driven societies. This is a reflection of the fact that both countries’ constitutions are based upon Judeo-Christian values in general, and upon the notion of commitment to one’s fellow man in particular.

As an American Jew who spent time studying in university, both in Israel and in the US, it is therefore dismaying to see the lack of moral outrage by those in the West against prestigious universities that hire terrorist killers as professors – thereby, effectively providing them with a public platform to espouse ludicrous anti-Semitic and anti-American propaganda.

Now that the media is complicit in promoting these pernicious platforms and in propagating those frightful falsehoods, it is time for the “liberal academia” to honestly ask itself: Is there really no shame?

About the Author
Mr. Raskas is a combat veteran of the IDF.