SCHOOLS OF HIGHER EARNING

Universities’ inaction on anti-Semitism all about almighty dollar

Follow the money.

That’s the best strategy when trying to get to the bottom of a political scandal. Follow the money and you’ll eventually find the bad guys.

But what about ethical and moral scandals? What about, say, when the presidents of some of the most prestigious universities on the continent – Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)  – appear before a U.S. congressional committee, and smirk their way through non-answers about Jew hated on their campuses? What then?

The rule still applies: follow the money.

Some background first. The Harvard, UPenn and MIT presidents were asked  to appear before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce last Tuesday. There were there, mainly to field questions about how they are are dealing with an explosion in anti-Semitism at their Universities.

To say that they didn’t do well is an understatement of epic proportions. Harvard president Claudine Day, Penn president Liz Magill and MIT president Sally Kornbluth smirked and smiled and sniggered when asked, repeatedly, whether “Calling for genocide of Jews” was against their respective codes of conduct.

Every time they were asked that question – to which the answer, always is “yes” – the university presidents seem to conceal their true feelings and were evasive in their answers.

Said Magill, echoing the other two: “It is a context-dependent decision.”

No, it isn’t . It’s not even a difficult question, either: calls to exterminate a people based on their faith are clearly against the rules at every place of higher learning in the world – and, in countries like Canada, a criminal act.

It is also wildly bad PR. Donors and students are now boycotting universities where anti-Semitism is going unchecked, and politicians are talking about withdrawing funding. So why don’t these university presidents do the right thing?

It’s all about prejudice, of course. But it’s also about the money.

In the book called Unholy Alliances, it detailed how outlaw Middle Eastern nations – Libya, Iraq, Syria, Iran and others – have been jamming “students” into Canadian, American and European universities for decades. And too often, some of those students aren’t there to study.

The book revealed how the FBI uncovered a Libyan plot to use students as spies, terrorists  and intelligence-gathering operatives. During a raid at the Virginia home of one Libyan ‘businessman,” Mouse Hawamda, the FBI found dozens of documents relating to the Canadian Bureau for International Education, World University Services Canada and similar organizations.

The CBIE, WUSC, and others work to find spaces for foreign students at Canadian universities and colleges. The FBI didn’t make any specific allegations about these groups – but they alleged that some of the Libyan students were indeed involved in terrorist plots, including one to assassinate former White House aide Oliver North.

Arranging spots for Middle Eastern students is big, big business. Despite the 1986 pledge of then – External Affairs Minister Joe Clark – to keep Canada from becoming “a backfill,” as he put it, for students who posed a security risk – Libya, to cite just one example, gave $35 million to place 900  students at educational institutions across Canada in that very same year.