How can a free society protect itself against conquest by organized anti-freedom ideology?
Selected quotations from the linked article:
Student activists’ apparently spontaneous demands to establish more Middle East studies departments, to hire more Palestinian and Middle East faculty, and to integrate Palestine into DEI and ethnic and race-based curricula should be viewed as the intentional expansion and consolidation of leftist institutional power.
Many of these programs aim to create a reserve of activists who cover a wide array of ethnic and identity grievances and causes that extend beyond the halls of academia, with recruitment beginning in grade school.
From a young age, an increasing number of American students are being fed anti-Western and anti-Israel material funded and distributed by a constellation of dark money, left-wing groups and foreign governments.
Worse, their success to date can largely be attributed to backing, financial and otherwise, from our own federal government.
Archived documents retrieved by the National Association of Scholars show that Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) relied heavily on foreign countries in its early days during the 1970s. … Today, the center is one of about a dozen Middle East National Resource Centers (NRC) that receive more than $3 million in funding from the [US] federal government. Harvard University’s Center for Middle East Studies started in the 1950s with funding from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations and then-American-owned oil company Aramco. Soon thereafter, it received funding from the federal government …
Today, the old foundations have combined with new ones to push for more ideological education on the Middle East not only on college campuses, but also in K-12 education. Left-wing organizations such as [George Soros’s] Open Society Foundations and the Tides Foundation actively fund efforts to bring K-12 education in line with progressive dogma and socialize American kids into its politics.
This same network of organizations funds many of the pro-Palestinian student demonstrators who have taken over elite campuses.
As we deal with the fallout of the anti-Israel protests over the coming months, it will be tempting to look for easy solutions. Perhaps universities can rework their policies to prevent future disruptions. Maybe some programs can be defunded. But the process that led to this was years-long, requiring the coordination of dozens of organizations and millions of dollars in funding. Undoing it will require reversing the proliferation of sectarian fake disciplines and leftist identitarian studies programs, and replacing activist curricula with fact-based lessons that promote critical thinking—a tall order, to be sure.
Middle East education at all levels needs a complete overhaul. It has gone from an attempt to help inform our geopolitics and augment our security posture against the various threats facing the United States in the region, to a factory of apologists for America’s enemies and advocates on their behalf.