Wednesday, April 30, 2008

TAXPAYERS FUND HIGHER EDUCATION'S RADICALISM

I am a firm supporter of and believer in free speech. However, I certainly do not want my tax dollars used to support a radical group's call for an "intifada" in the United States. And that is exactly what the Center for Race and Gender, an official unit of U.C. Berkeley, has called for.

This, in part, is how the university describes the center's mission:"The Center for Race and Gender is an interdisciplinary research and community outreach center at the University of California Berkeley dedicated to fostering explorations of race and gender and their intersections. It is virtually unique within the academic community in its focus on both race and gender. Its aim is to foster collegial support and exchange among faculty and students throughout the university and between the university and nearby communities of color."

But what follows in this blog is the promotion of a program sponsored by the center, and hence U.C. Berkeley, which has little to do with race and gender. It is just one example of the radical left-wing crap that is being dissemintated not only at Berkely, but at most of our nation's other institutions of higher learning.

Since U.C. Berkeley receives generous amounts of federal funding, in addition to the funds provided by California's taxpayers, I and every other American taxpayer is helping to pay for this disgaceful program. Here is the kind of crap - note the frequent reference to "colonial," a term favored by Marxist professors - that we are paying for:

UC Berkeley Lecturer Hatem Bazian will speak on Islamophobia.

He has called for an intifada in the United States :

"Are you angry? [Yeah!] Are you angry? [Yeah!] Are you angry? [Yeah!] Well, we’ve been watching intifada in Palestine , we’ve been watching an uprising in Iraq , and the question is that what are we doing? How come we don’t have an intifada in this country? Because it seem[s] to me, that we are comfortable in where we are, watching CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox, and all these mainstream... giving us a window to the world while the world is being managed from Washington, from New York, from every other place in here in San Francisco: Chevron, Bechtel, [Carlyle?] Group, Halliburton; every one of those lying, cheating, stealing, deceiving individuals are in our country and we’re sitting here and watching the world pass by, people being bombed, and it’s about time that we have an intifada in this country that change[s] fundamentally the political dynamics in here. And we know every— They’re gonna say some Palestinian being too radical — well, you haven’t seen radicalism yet!"

De-Constructing Islamophobia: Immigration, Globalization and Constructing the Other

Conference/Symposium April 25 – 26, 2008 every day Barrows Hall, Lipman Room, 8th Floor

Sponsor: Center for Race and Gender

The conference on "De-Constructing Islamophobia: Globalization, Immigration, and Constructing the Other" seeks to develop a theoretical framework through which we can understand the relationship between Islamophobia as the most recently articulated structural organizing principle and its implications in the unfolding colonial present.

In today’s world, Islam and Muslims are the feared "other" and the threat they pose is already connected to every local, regional and global process. The process of "othering Islam and Muslims" is already well under way with devastating consequences and a virtual state of siege has set-in, not only in the affected communities, but also in academic circles where the subject has yet to receive a comprehensive treatment. Islamophobia, as the present structural organizing principle, is employed by the power elite in order to extend and maintain the patterns of racial, gender, colonial, ethnic and religious discrimination.

In the past, the existing methodological approaches in race and gender studies remained distant from the subject and, up to this point, have not yet adjusted to incorporate a closer examination of "othering Islam and Muslims." The conference seeks to provide an open scholarly exchange, exploring new approaches to the study of the current period, de-constructing the organizing process that gave birth to Islamophobia, and studying its interconnectedness to existing and historical otherness in the areas of race, gender and "post-colonial" studies. The conference will explore and pose a number of questions that can be the springboard for further collaborative and multidisciplinary approaches to de-constructing Islamophobia. How should we approach Islamophobia and can we think of it within the field(s) of post-colonial studies and/or Ethnic Studies? What would be Islamophobia's impact on the move from a post-colonial approach into a de-colonization, and its centrality in the development of a new paradigm? What new or modified theoretical frameworks should be employed? Are existing academic fields with their current methodologies able to de-construct Islamophobia or do we need adjustment; and if it is needed then what, where and how?"

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