- 15:30
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an American think tank, believes that “trusting the Americans is a bad idea.” Carnegie’s Michael Young did not qualify what he meant by “the Americans.” Did he mean the US government? Its policies? Or just all of the Americans, wholesale? Young even took a swipe at the May 17, 1983 peace agreement between Lebanon and Israel, a now defunct treaty that America facilitated. That an American think tank warns of “trusting the Americans,” and that the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has issues with peace between Lebanon and Israel, are two ideas that sound ironic and rather surreal.
The phenomenon of American institutions being used as launchpads against America, its people, and its government, must come to an end.
The writer of these lines is a freedom of expression absolutist. Short of instigating to violence, no opinion should be censored or those who uphold it punished. Yet, freedom of expression does not mean that fine American institutions lend their imprimatur to anti-Americanism.
There is a clear line between criticizing American policies, which is ok and even encouraged, and vilifying America by revising its history to depict it as an evil project built on the corpses of indigenous natives, enslaved Africans, and colonized nations.
The majority of Americans are patriots, proud of the founding principles of their nation — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — aware that their Republic is not a utopia, but an ongoing experiment that is continuously evolving and improving.
There is something wrong when American institutions, such as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, go after “the Americans.”
This problem goes beyond Carnegie and includes a host of top US colleges that have opened the door for tyrant autocracies, with deep pockets, to use the colleges’ imprimatur to bash America.
Georgetown University is the poster child of cashing big fat Qatari checks and lending Doha and its Islamists a hand in tarnishing the reputation of the American model. Georgetown Doha has hosted dozens of conferences with themes centering around supporting the Global South and its model of government while bashing the West and its principles.
Using the prestige of fine academic institutions to undermine America’s global standing has spread to American universities at home. Many US colleges today vilify America but bask in the largesse of American taxpayers. If Uncle Sam is so evil, why cash his checks?
President Trump has been right to threaten with cutting funding for universities thrashing, not his administration’s policies, but the very foundations of the republic.
Fortunately, many of these universities have stepped back, some of them have even gone in the opposite direction. A glimpse of light comes from the American University of Beirut (AUB).
The Christian mission that started in1866 became America’s earliest significant presence in the Middle East. But by the 1950s, Arab nationalism and Marxism had swept campus. The same AUB whose mission was to spread American values became the hotbed of the most notorious terrorists, the likes of the founders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) — George Habash and Wadih Haddad.
With the outbreak of the civil war, AUB wisely shut down student politics on campus — including stopping the publication of its weekly student newspaper, Outlook — and steered clear of the civil war. AUB’s neutrality continued until the late 1990s, when Lebanon had become stable and students started demanding re-politicizing their campus.
Once re-politicized, AUB became — again — a bastion of anti-Americanism. And with anti-Americanism came censorship of dissenting voices —supporters of the West and liberal values.
Then Hezbollah launched its war on Israel, whose aftermath caused a shift in Lebanon’s political tectonic plates. Over the past 12 months, AUB has visibly distanced itself from anti-Americanism, prompting Hezbollah’s daily Al-Akhbar to run hit pieces against the university and its leadership.
For standing up to Hezbollah’s bullying, AUB deserves America’s support. For vilifying “the Americans,” Carnegie Endowment must dissociate from its Middle East office. For cashing Qatari checks, Georgetown must show every cent it has made off Doha, should be shamed for it, and should lose federal grants until it corrects course.
The American people are generous in supporting friendly nations, building their government capacity, and spreading liberty, freedom and democracy. But the American people are not stupid, and know the difference between protected speech and anti-Americanism.
We, Americans, will be always happy to fund like-minded champions of liberty, freedom and democracy. But we must never fund, or franchise, those who vilify us and our values or denigrate our republic and its founding principles.
Comments