"Entertaining Vietnam" Trailer

Shameless Mother-Promotion Alert! As many of my friends and some readers already know, my mother, Mara Wallis, wrote, edited, produced, and directed a documentary a few years back called "Entertaining Vietnam." She was an independent (i.e. non-USO) entertainer for the troops during the Vietnam war, as were many other young women and men from around the world, and their stories have rarely been told. There's much that's fun in the film (go-go dancers galore!) and much that's serious (not all the entertainers made it out alive) and the film offers up a real slice of history. Seeing the joy on the faces of American soldiers captured in the audience footage is one of the many moving aspects of the film. There's now a short trailer up at YouTube to whet the appetite and the DVD can be bought on Amazon. Of course I'm biased, but I truly do give it two-thumbs up!

Campus Watch (and Cinnamon) on Facebook

Campus Watch now has a Facebook page, for which I'll be acting as the administrator, so please stop by, give us a look, and if so inclined, a "like." We plan on linking to all of our new articles and blog posts, as well as posting updates on developments in the field of Middle East studies. I also have my own personal Facebook page, so feel free to stop by there as well. Here are the links:

Campus Watch on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Campus-Watch/221916871196316

Cinnamon Stillwell on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1175764167

Time to Leave Afghanistan

Venerable frontline reporter Michael Yon has come to a conclusion about Afghanistan I reached a few years ago: It's time to leave. We have no clear strategy in sight and quite simply, we're wasting blood and treasure. Our military does not exist to try and transform 7th century backwardness into modern, liberal democracies, particularly without first meting out utter defeat (a la' Japan and Germany during WWII). And if we're not addressing the ideological component at hand--Islamism--we're not truly engaged in the battle.

The Obama Administration and the Muslim Brotherhood: What Gives?

Barry Rubin has an excellent article at Yid With Lid on the Obama administration's folly in believing they can work with the "moderate Islamists" of the Muslim Brotherhood and the media's culpability in pushing this false narrative. As he puts it:

Not only is the Obama Administration, as I’ve written for the last year, favoring radical Islamist forces–despite the fact that these are anti-Western, pro-terrorism, building dictatorships, and openly antisemitic and anti-Christian–but now even the establishment media is admitting it.

One could argue that via our relationship with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, we're already allied with anti-Western, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, pro-terrorism (at least behind-the-scenes) Islamist dictatorships, and that perhaps the Obama administration considers the Muslim Brotherhood to be in the same category. One could more strongly argue that the Muslim Brotherhood--with whom we already attempted an alliance during the Cold War that had the unintended consequence of helping perpetuate Islamism throughout the West--represents a unique threat and that our relationship will end up resembling the antagonism between the U.S. and the theocratic regime in Iran. Either way, it doesn't look good.

Farewell to UCLA's Sondra Hale

The rabidly anti-Israel University of California, Los Angeles anthropology and women's studies professor Sondra Hale has retired. Her list of dubious achievements is long and, over the years, Campus Watch has chronicled a good number:

• Hale was one of the founding members of the organizing committee for the Campaign for the Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel. At the time of its inception, she touted her prominent involvement, telling the Daily Bruin in February, 2009 that, were it to go into effect, "foreign exchange and cooperative programs with Israel would cease."
• At an October, 2009 conference at the Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES)--for which she served as chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee--Hale equated the pro-Israel groups StandWithUs and the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) with "Nazis" and "McCarthyists."
• In response to widespread criticism regarding the blatantly anti-Israel and, at times, anti-Semitic nature of a January, 2009 "Human Rights and Gaza" CNES symposium, Hale penned an op-ed in the Daily Bruin, slamming UCLA student and member of Bruins for Israel, Ben Meiselman, for having the temerity to publish a piece criticizing the symposium.
• Hale was one of the signatories to a ridiculously conspiratorial 2002 open letter warning that Israel would use the Iraq war to perpetrate "ethnic cleansing" against the Palestinians.
• Shifting focus to her other specialty, Africa, Hale suggested in November, 2007 that Islamist-perpetrated genocide in Darfur could be prevented by sending in "mediation, negotiation, healing and psychotherapy . . . professionals to work with people when tensions are building up."

UCLA now has an opportunity to make amends for Hale's years of agitprop and politicization of her discipline by filling her position with someone who will pursue disinterested, rigorous scholarship.

Cross-posted from the Campus Watch blog.

Willful Blindness Toward Terrorists at UCLA a Decade After 9-11

In a Campus Watch essay published today at FrontPage Magazine, Judith Greblya reports on a recent roundtable discussion at the University of California, Los Angeles, at which Lisa Hajjar of UC-Santa Barbara and others attacked America, Israel, and the West and issued apologias for terrorists. Sadly, it's what close observers of contemporary Middle East studies have come to expect from our leading universities.

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Near Eastern Studies hosted a roundtable discussion last month titled, "After a Decade of the 'War on Terror': The Middle East, Human Rights and American Muslims." Sponsored by the UCLA School of Law Critical Race Studies Program, the event featured UCLA law professor Asli Bali, University of California, Santa Barbara sociology professor Lisa Hajjar, and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Southern California attorney Ahilan Arulanantham. The audience of approximately twenty people was comprised mostly of law and graduate students, along with a few members of the community.

According to the introduction, the speakers were to "examine this decade on the war on terror in the broader context of the international community," but the two-hour event quickly descended into a forum for America-bashing. All three speakers called the existence of Islamic terrorism into question and, what's worse, behaved as if the attacks of September 11, 2001 never occurred.

To read the rest of this essay, please click here.

Cross-posted from Winfield Myers at the Campus Watch blog.

Rashid Ghannoushi: John Esposito's Islamist in Tunis

In an article written for Campus Watch that appears at American Thinker, journalist Stephen Schwartz examines the beliefs of Tunisian political leader Rashid Ghannouchi. Although Georgetown's John Esposito has spent years whitewashing Ghannouchi's reputation, Schwartz exposes the Tunisian as a radical Islamist:

Rashid Ghannoushi (or Rachid Ghannouchi in French) is the ideological elder of Tunisia's Ennahda, or the Renaissance Party, the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. He arrived in Washington on Monday, November 28, 2011, in the halo of a skewed electoral victory by his party in the small North African country's recent elections.

In addition to being the man controlling Tunisia's main Islamist movement from behind the scenes, without an elected post and the responsibility that it would bring with it, Ghannoushi comes to America as someone who was, to a significant extent, lifted to power by the support of American Middle Eastern studies establishment. Indeed, the successful rise of Ghannoushi is symbolic of the American academic penchant for enabling and justifying radical Islam. A key advocate in this enterprise was the notorious professor John L. Esposito, director of Georgetown University's Saudi-financed Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU).

To read the rest of this article, please click here.

Cross-posted from Winfield Myers at the Campus Watch blog.