The leftist love affair with Islamism continues.
Via American Thinker:
The exploitation of the University of California’s Bay Area law schools as a platform for Arab and Islamist propaganda continues. A convocation on “Litigating Palestine,” replete with extreme rhetoric against Israel, was held at Hastings Law School in San Francisco on March 25-26, 2011-without official endorsement by Hastings-and on April 20-21, an equally radical conference took place at UC Berkeley Law School. It was held in Boalt Hall and presented to the wider public via streaming video.
The Berkeley event was hosted by the University’s Center for Race and Gender (CRG) and titled, in the style of post-modern academia, “Islamophobia Production and Re-Defining Global ‘Security’ Agenda for the 21st Century.” Within CRG, the function appeared under the rubric of the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project, directed by Hatem Bazian, a senior lecturer in the department of Near Eastern studies. Conference publicity stated that the speeches “will be published in UC Berkeley’s Islamophobia Studies Journal, inaugural edition, Fall, 2011.”
CRG assembled some notable cosponsors for its presentation on “Islamophobia.” These included the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which advocates for radical ideology under color of defending Muslim civil liberties and as the flagship organization of the “Wahhabi lobby” in America, and the Islamic Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO). Although based in Rabat, Morocco, ISESCO is a branch of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), a body headquartered in Saudi Arabia and established in 1969 with the supposed aim of protecting Islamic monuments in Jerusalem from Israel. The OIC has 57 member countries.
The heaviest hitters on the speakers’ list, with regard to their widespread public activities, were CAIR executive director Nihad Awad, Hamza Yusuf, and Hatem Bazian. The three appeared on an April 21, 2011, evening panel, which dealt with “Community Partnership” and was moderated by Munir Jiwa, director of the GTU Center for Islamic Studies.
Hamza Yusuf was introduced with the fawning praise customarily granted him by his admirers, including mention of his “teacher” Abdullah Bin Bayyah, a member of the fundamentalist European Council for Fatwas and Research (ECFR) headed by the most famous radical Islamist preacher in the world, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi.
Hanson demonstrated in Berkeley that his fondness for hyperbolic idioms has changed little since the period before the atrocities of September 11, 2001. In 1995, he described Judaism as “a most racist religion.” On September 9, 2001, two days before 9/11, Hanson declared in Los Angeles, “This country [America] unfortunately has a great, a great tribulation coming to it. And much of it is already here, yet people are too illiterate to read the writing on the wall.”