Yale cows to Arab Lobby

The Hebrew words "Urim" and "Thummim" appear on the Yale seal

Saving the Yale Anti-Semitism Institute -Walter Reich

Yale just killed the country's best institute for the study of anti-Semitism - the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism. Why? The answer is simple.
The institute held a three-day conference last August on "Global Anti-Semitism: A Crisis of Modernity," where more than a hundred scholars delivered papers. Some spoke, inevitably, about the fastest-growing and most virulent manifestation of contemporary anti-Semitism - the anti-Semitism in the Arab/Muslim world.

The conference provoked a firestorm. A Syrian American law student published a broadside in the Yale Daily News attacking the institute and the conference as fueling "anti-Arab bigotry and Islamophobia." The PLO representative to the U.S. wrote to Yale's president accusing the conference of demonizing Arabs.

Yale administrators and faculty quickly turned on the institute, accusing it of being too critical of Arab and Iranian anti-Semitism. A requisite five-year review of the institute was held five months after the conference. Its director was told that the institute would be shut down and its staff fired.

[S]hould Yale maintain its decision on closure, the institute should quickly be grabbed as a scholarly and policy gem by another university. A great university in Washington — George Washington, Georgetown, American, Maryland, Catholic — or other research institution, such as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, would be an outstanding venue where scholars and policy-oriented audiences could hear the products of its vital contemporary focus.
The writer, professor of international affairs, ethics and human behavior at George Washington University, is a former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
(Washington Post)
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