Foreign Muslim Funding of Western Universities

[Deleted]

Western Universities: The Best Indoctrination Money Can Buy

The tendency of modern liberals to wring apologies out of governments for the actions of their ancestors, from the slave trade to Orientalist depictions of the peoples of Islam, is a pointless attempt to re-write history. There are, of course, no calls for Muslim governments to apologize for anything from their slave trade to the early Arab conquests.

"The ethics of establishing a campus in an authoritarian country are murky, especially when it inhibits free expression." -- Professor Stephen F. Eisenman, Northwestern University (which has a branch in Qatar)

Oxford and Cambridge, have accepted more than 233.5 million pounds sterling from Saudi and Muslim sources since 1995 -- the largest source of external funding to UK universities.

"Several agreements made between the MEC [Oxford's Middle East Centre] and donors appear to indicate that funders have sought to influence the centre's output and activities." -- Robin Simcox, A Degree of Influence, 2009, p.35

One of those "dilemmas" is the influence by teachers across the United States on impressionable students who organize Israel Apartheid Weeks. They join with assorted anti-Semitic demonstrators, condemn Israel for every sin under the sun, and use intimidation against Jewish and Zionist colleagues, but are never told any historical, legal, or political facts by their equally biased faculties.

Fundamentalist Islam, backed by vast monetary power, is corrupting our dearest Enlightenment values.

Do a handful of donations from Muslim governments to a number of European and American universities merit an entire article that starts out with claims that Western civilization is under threat? As a matter of fact, the scale of the donations is far beyond a handful, the universities involved are among the top academies in the world, the money involved is hundreds of billions of dollars, and the targets of Islamic finance are, for the most part, specific and form part of a distinct agenda. Some money may be given to business schools or science departments, but the overwhelming majority goes to support or create large departments and academic centers for Middle East, Islamic, or Arabic Studies.

The academic targets of Islamic finance are specific and form part of a distinct agenda.

There is a seeming logic in this – aren't extremely rich Muslim states entitled to further the study of their own societies, history, and religion?Shouldn't they have an interest in creating a corps of knowledgeable men and women with the requisite language skills and close familiarity with the subjects they first study then teach, or with which they engage as government advisors, civil servants with governments, the UN or international NGOs, think tank members, public experts, media analysts and perhaps politicians? Well, if they observed complete neutrality and left academics to their own counsel, their input would pass as simple generosity or as a contribution to good relations within the international community. What could be nicer? Isn't the Islamic world badly misunderstood in the West, and wouldn't more teaching and research on it and its beliefs be a real boon? And how can someone like myself, who has spent a lifetime studying, teaching and writing about Islamic and Middle Eastern subject think badly of such an endeavour?

One obvious criticism is the sheer scale of the operation, meaning that fundamentalist Muslim states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar now effectively exercise a swathe of influence over the way in which Islam and Middle East Studies are taught in key Western universities. The dilemma for the universities is a harbinger of crises to come. Even fairly rich universities such as Harvard and Oxford experience financial difficulties. State funds are often hard or impossible to obtain; academics have to scramble to find funding for their projects, their jobs or their departments.

Universities have responded in a number of ways. One has been to bring in more and more students from abroad, including extremely high numbers from Islamic countries (where the standard of education is almost uniformly poor)

Scholarships and degree programs are the favorite and easiest weapons of the Islamist regimes to influence the Western academies and their freedoms. Eight universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, have accepted more than 233.5 million pounds sterling from Saudi and Muslim sources since 1995. The total sum, revealed by Anthony Glees, the director of Brunel University's Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, amounts to the largest source of external funding to UK universities.

Universities that have accepted donations from Saudi royals and other Arab sources include Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, University College London, the London School of Economics, Exeter, Dundee and City.

The MEC has received substantial sums of money from sources in the Middle East. The way in which this money has been used means there is a clear risk that donors will seek to influence the output and activities of the MEC. In addition, many large donations to the MEC have been anonymous, creating a lack of transparency. In many cases, Oxford has knowingly accepted money from undemocratic states with poor human rights records.... Several agreements made between the MEC and donors appear to indicate that funders have sought to influence the centre's output and activities.[5]

Of Cambridge, he writes:

Cambridge University is an example of how funding has had a significant impact upon how the university is run. Recent donations have been attached with conditions that could lead to donors gaining oversight via university Management Committees. While the principal donor's intentions seem honourable, a precedent appears to have been set where wealthy donors can influence the running of an independent academic institution.[6]

http://www.meforum.org/6205/foreign-...n-universities

Ever wondered why most western students are not encouraged, if not discouraged to criticize these undemocratic states with poor human rights records as well as the ideology that goes with it?

Here is your answer: They don't bite the hand that feeds them. Sponsored hypocritical cowardice.

[Shinra1]

fear-mongering article - nothing to see here.

The author of this article is so islamophobic that its shocking how he was allowed to post this and the implications with ISIS and shariah law are not even implicit but are so blatant that I have been left speechless...

[satimy]

fear-mongering article - nothing to see here.

The author of this article is so islamophobic that its shocking how he was allowed to post this and the implications with ISIS and shariah law are not even implicit but are so blatant that I have been left speechless...

Isis is funded by Wahhabism, the same people that Trump just made a massive arms deal with.

[Deleted]

the implications with ISIS and shariah law are not even implicit but are so blatant that I have been left speechless...

`Nowhere in the article does he mention isis or sharia law so what the fuck are you talking about?

[Deleted]

muslims are prefered to stay out of western countries, they should not be welcome!!!

[Kolbjorn]

<various angry stuff mad that foreigners are funding our universities>

There's a simple fix for this. If the U.S. prioritized education and funded colleges properly, we wouldn't need donations from various foreigners paying full out-of-state tuition. (The article doesn't mention the large number of affluent students from countries including China that are also subsidizing our Universities.)

I mean, y'all angry crazy peeps can't have it both ways. You can't both be anti-education AND be anti-foreign money in education. Pick one, because your stance on education funding is why the foreign money is there... I'd recommend joining the rest of the western world and funding education properly.

[Deleted]

There's a simple fix for this. If the U.S. prioritized education and funded colleges properly, we wouldn't need donations from various foreigners paying full out-of-state tuition. (The article doesn't mention the large number of affluent students from countries including China that are also subsidizing our Universities.)

I mean, y'all angry crazy peeps can't have it both ways. You can't both be anti-education AND be anti-foreign money in education. Pick one, because your stance on education funding is why the foreign money is there... I'd recommend joining the rest of the western world and funding education properly.

There is another fix: Instead of pouring money in a bottomless pit that are the exponentially increasing university costs, grab the problem by its roots: the outrageous costs themselves

"BOULDER, Colo. — ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after.

This is the story college administrators like to tell when they’re asked to explain why, over the past 35 years, college tuition at public universities has nearly quadrupled, to $9,139 in 2014 dollars. It is a fairy tale in the worst sense, in that it is not merely false, but rather almost the inverse of the truth.

The conventional wisdom was reflected in a recent National Public Radio series on the cost of college. “So it’s not that colleges are spending more money to educate students,” Sandy Baum of the Urban Institute told NPR. “It’s that they have to get that money from someplace to replace their lost state funding — and that’s from tuition and fees from students and families.”

In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher.

Continue reading the main story
In other words, far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education. If over the past three decades car prices had gone up as fast as tuition, the average new car would cost more than $80,000."

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/o...s-so-much.html (not a fan but not every article is rubbish, especially from 2015 and older)

[GennGreymane]

People at Uni criticize them all the time. Odd.

[Deleted]

"What so many fail or prefer not to grasp is that the subventions from Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular are part of a much wider pattern. The Saudis for decades have disbursed hundreds of billions of dollars in order to propagate their puritan form of Islam, Wahhabism, across the globe, while building hundreds of mosques, schools, libraries, and Islamic centres, and sending out streams of hardline preachers trained in their seminaries and Islamic universities, to spread their message to Muslims everywhere, creating and financing bodies for Islamic missionary work, recruiting young Muslims to commit to an extreme form of their faith – all to the end of making the Saudi state the key player in the world of Islam and a leader in the propagation of Islam in the West. That is the nature of the doctrine. Deep pockets for academic study in Europe and North America are stitched tightly against their pockets that fund the missionary work and the enforcement of the most fundamentalist form of the Islamic faith."

- https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8...indoctrination

Islam is not political at all guys, not at all. lol ...

"
Another way of looking at it is that earlier this year, Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti, Shaykh Abd al-'Aziz bin-Abdullah al-Shaykh, issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims to play chess. He is far from the first to do so. He justifies the ban by saying, "The game of chess is a waste of time and an opportunity to squander money. It causes enmity and hatred between people". On February 3, 2016, a young Saudi cleric, Shaykh Sa'ad al-'Atiq, appeared on a fatwa advice programme on al-Ahwaz TV, and stated that if people publish pictures on social media sites, someone else may copy them and apply sorcery to them, which will result in the original poster becoming ill with cancer and other diseases. He even says he knows many cases of this. Over the past several years, several people have been beheaded in Saudi Arabia on charges of witchcraft and sorcery."

Dont use social media guys you will get cancer. Also dont play chess someone might get angry.

"The moment Western scholarship infringes the sensitivities of the Saudis, Qataris, Kuwaitis, Bahrainis and others, the barriers go up. Academics are denied visas to attend conferences, criticism of Gulf states is toned down, debate is shifted away from the Gulf monarchies themselves, and, compared to study of other Arab regions, rigorous critiques on subjects in the Gulf, such as political reform, human rights and suppression of dissent are largely excluded. According to Kristian Coates Ulrichsen of Rice University's Baker Institute, "Almost every centre of Middle East studies in the UK is linked somehow to a Gulf backer. It's created dilemmas, especially over the last few years as the threshold for self-tolerance of any dissenting view has got lower".

One of those "dilemmas" is the influence by teachers across the United States on impressionable students who organize Israel Apartheid Weeks. The students join with assorted anti-Semitic demonstrators, condemn Israel for every sin under the sun, and use intimidation against Jewish and Zionist colleagues, but are never told any historical, legal, or political facts by their equally biased faculties. America's Campus Watch monitoring organization keeps a close eye on this sort of abuse by identifying teachers and researchers who go far outside the boundaries of balanced academic discourse to mislead, indoctrinate, and validate student extremists. It exposes professors who make exaggerated claims about Islamophobia or who offer support to terrorist entities such as Hamas. Its steady record of news associated with Middle East Studies provides ample evidence of the distortions now hawked as balanced scholarship."

Slavehandlers do what they do best, indoctrinate and control people brains.

[Kraenen]

There is a certain large corporation that has very close ties to the university I attend and donates quite a bit of money to it. That doesn't translate into an inability to criticize them. Likewise, simply because donations are coming from the Middle East doesn't mean people can't criticize them either. Your article shows that donations occur, but does absolutely nothing to establish that any of its claims about the consequences of these donations are true. Quite frankly, it borders on conspiracy theory.

Assuming the financial ties really do check out, how different is this really, from congresspeople being paid in campaign donations and being 'good friends' with their donors?

[Xjev]

well money talks!

[Khaza-R]

Rubbish article. American universities enforce values that violently different than that of conservative Islam

[Allybeboba]

muslims are prefered to stay out of western countries, they should not be welcome!!!

Does that include Muhammad Ali and his family.

[Deleted]

Does that include Muhammad Ali and his family.

dont know who that is and dont care

[Super Kami Dende]

There is a certain large corporation that has very close ties to the university I attend and donates quite a bit of money to it. That doesn't translate into an inability to criticize them.

Last time I checked people can criticize companies, yet criticizing Religions will get you some sort of discrimination idiocy brought upon you.

[Deleted]

dont know who that is and dont care

And we have a new benchmark for absolute ignorance, lol.

[Omega10]

There is another fix: Instead of pouring money in a bottomless pit that are the exponentially increasing university costs, grab the problem by its roots: the outrageous costs themselves

The best way to make sure that China, India, and Germany pass the US as world leaders is to do exactly as you are suggesting: stop funding American Universities, and wait for other countries to lead the world in technological advances. As China and Germany especially lead the way in new technologies, especially in renewable energies, the world is taking notice. And India is racing as fast as they can to catch up.

I don't know why you hate America so much, and why you are working so hard to undermine our country. Unfortunately, you are succeeding

[XDurionX]

That's why you don't privatize education. Watch and learn.

[May90]

I haven't read such rubbish in a while...

[Noxx79]

http://www.meforum.org/6205/foreign-...n-universities

Ever wondered why most western students are not encouraged, if not discouraged to criticize these undemocratic states with poor human rights records as well as the ideology that goes with it?

Here is your answer: They don't bite the hand that feeds them. Sponsored hypocritical cowardice.

You should ask your president about that, but he's too busy bowing before kings and giving them money.