Only in academia is comparing Israelis to Nazis a good thing.

Via Free Beacon:

Duke University has hired as the new director of its $3 million Islamic Studies Center a controversial Iranian-American professor whose scholarship has come under fire for anti-Israel bias and who once used a picture of dead Jews in Nazi death camps to illustrate his writing on the Palestinians.

Omid Safi, a former professor at the University of North Carolina, was installed this week by Duke as the new director of the school’s Islamic Studies Center (DISC), which was handed $3 million specifically for the directorship position.

Safi, whose writings on Islam have been criticized as faulty and “utopic” by other scholars, celebrated his new job on Facebook, writing in his “first comments in my capacity” that he seeks to produce “a knowledge that is efficacious, transformative, and above all, beneficial.”

He led these comments with the common Arabic term, “insha’allah,” or “If Allah wills.”

While Safi has received praise from some for striking a “moderate” tone in his writings, human rights leaders and pro-Israel commentators have repeatedly expressed concern about his equivalence of Israel to the Nazis and other controversial rhetoric.