Libya and the LSE: Large Arab gifts to universities lead to ‘hostile’ teaching

H/T Infidel Guy

From The Telegraph:

The LSE is not the only university that has reason to feel ashamed, writes Stephen Pollard.

It will take the LSE quite some time to regain a seat at the table of respectability

It will take the LSE quite some time to regain a seat at the table of respectability Photo: PA
By Stephen Pollard 7:05PM GMT 03 Mar 2011320 Comments

Sir Howard Davies, the director of the London School of Economics, has at last done the honourable thing and resigned from the university’s governing council. The LSE’s shameless prostituting of its good name in return for Muammar Gaddafi’s blood money (as the Tory MP Robert Halfon has rightly called it) is as great a betrayal of the spirit of a university as there has ever been in Britain.

But while it will take the LSE quite some time to regain a seat at the table of respectability, it is not the only university that has reason to feel ashamed. The LSE is said to have received no more than £300,000 of the £1.5 million it was due from Libya.

Yet, on the most conservative estimate, other British universities have received hundreds of millions of pounds from Saudi and other Islamic sources – in the guise of philanthropic donations, but with the real intention of changing the intellectual climate of the United Kingdom.

Between 1995 and 2008, eight universities – Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, University College London, the LSE, Exeter, Dundee and City – accepted more than £233.5 million from Muslim rulers and those closely connected to them.

Much of the money has gone to Islamic study centres: the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies received £75 million from a dozen Middle Eastern rulers, including the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia; one of the current king’s nephews, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, gave £8 million each to Cambridge and Edinburgh. Then there was the LSE’s own Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, which got £9 million from the United Arab Emirates; this week, a majority of the centre’s board was revealed to be pushing for a boycott of Israel.

While figures since 2008 have yet to be collated, the scale of funding has only increased: such donations are now the largest source of external funding for universities by quite a long way. The donors claim that they want only to promote understanding of Islam – a fine goal for any university.

But the man who gathered the earlier figures, Prof Anthony Glees, argues that their real agenda is rather different: to push an extreme ideology and act as a form of propaganda for the Wahhabist strain of Islam within universities. They push, he says, “the wrong sort of education by the wrong sort of people, funded by the wrong sorts of donor”.

This is not simply scare-mongering. The management committees of the Islamic Studies centres at Cambridge and Edinburgh contained appointees hand-picked by Prince Alwaleed. Other universities have altered their study areas in line with their donors’ demands. And it works.

A study of five years of politics lectures at the Middle Eastern Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford, found that 70 per cent were “implacably hostile” to the West and Israel. A friend of mine, a former Oxford academic, felt that his time was largely spent battling a cadre of academics overwhelmingly hostile to the West, in an ambience in which students – from both Britain and abroad – were presented a world-view that was almost exclusively anti-Western.

Although much of the money is claimed to be directed towards apolitical ends, this can often be misleading. The gift by foreign governments of language books, for instance, can have a significant effect on what is taught; in one case, the gift of an art gallery was found to have had a direct impact on teaching and admissions policy.

This is all so easily done because there is no requirement for serious scrutiny of either the source of funding or its impact on research. As a report from the Centre for Social Cohesion puts it, our universities “are now effectively up for sale to the highest bidder”. If the LSE’s actions have a saving grace, is that they could help to expose the wider scandal surrounding the behaviour of UK universities.

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

8 Replies to “Libya and the LSE: Large Arab gifts to universities lead to ‘hostile’ teaching”

  1. The good thing is that the Saudis have spent all this money, and yet in one act of parliament, or even a university senate vote, all of that spend will be wiped out.

    So it is for all the mosques that have been planted as enemy forts. They too must be seen for what they are – enemy forts deep within our territory. Once this is seen, they too will be monumental disasters.

    Advice to Saudis – stop financing mosques in the West as they may be become pubs with such names as The Saracen’s Head. Its best for Saudis to take heed what is happening in their sand pit.

  2. The money that the Saudis have spent on Western universities is money very well spent on their part. Who do you think determines “the truth” about things if not university departments? When George W Bush called Islam “A religion of peace”, he was probably fresh from a meeting with John Esposito, head of Middle Eastern Studies at Georgetown University and recognized leading expert on the subject. I know people who hold degrees on the Middle East and the degree of their ignorance is staggering. There are huge, boring, color-photo-crammed text-books devoted to telling you that up is down and black is white – i’ts bloody amazing! The Arabs are willing to spend untold billions of dollars white-washing their religion; it is of utmost importance to them that we do not find out what they are up to.

  3. Traitors have always plagued the West in their fight against the Moslems, despite them we continue to win but lose many more people then we would if the traitors would stop betraying civilization.

  4. Notting new here.
    Back in the thirties en forties Britisch universities were heavely funded (secretly) by commie Moscow.
    Result?
    Spy’s like Maclean, Burgess, Philby, Hunt, Cairncross, to name a few.
    Not to mention the ones who got away.
    Times don’t change.

  5. But no one can say a word about any of this because if they do, they know they will be defeated by one little word. The most important word in the world to the Communist. And the word is “McCarthy”. All they have to do is say, “McCarthy”, and the argument is over. Nice trick! How’d they do that? Oh, yeah, by being in control of the movie business exactly like Joe said.

  6. Chris Jones you are right, and the sad thing is that the evidence that came out after the fall of the USSR is that McCarthy was right about everyone he accused. True McCarthyism is telling the truth and being demonized for it.

  7. In the book “Muslim Mafia” there is a copy of a document from CAIR that has a long listing of how they have to focus on changing the way Americans think of their religion, and one of those way is to infiltrate and activate with interns, actors, etc. Hollywood … in every way possible.
    That’s what we have been seeing, haven’t we? With so many moslem atrocities happening on a daily basis, with so much fodder for action movies based on those atrocities…. how many movies or series do you see with moslems as the bad guys ?

    Conclusion: CAIR has been able to infiltrate and take good command of Hollywood and the airheads there…. very easily.