Dreams Into Lightning 2

Cinnamon Stillwell: Muslim Brotherhood Seduces Elites

Cinnamon Stillwell at Campus Watch:

Engagement with Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is the consensus among elite opinion and certainly among the ranks of North American Middle East studies academics, the "experts" tasked with informing the public and, often, policy-makers on foreign policy in the region. Since the Egyptian revolution, these academics have whitewashed the Muslim Brotherhood, downplayed its Islamist agenda, and urged U.S. cooperation—a policy suggestion the Obama administration has clearly taken to heart.

Many have been shocked by the speed with which the Obama administration has pursued this policy of outreach. The current debate within Congress about the potential influence of the Muslim Brotherhood on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the State Department—a deliberation that crosses party lines—demonstrates just how deeply the influence has spread. ...

Cinnamon Stillwell at Berkeley: Imaginary Islamophobia vs. Real Islamism

Cinnamon Stillwell at FrontPage:

The Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project (IRDP)—a program of the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender (CRG)—recently held its third annual conference, “Critical Discourses on Islamophobia: Symbols, Images, & Representations.” As in previous years, speaker after speaker decried an imaginary racist, imperialist, Orientalist Western juggernaut, while disregarding the very real predations of Islamism.

The first day of the conference brought in approximately eighty people at its peak, including a number of women in hijab (head scarf), typing furiously on laptops. Others sported keffiyehs and dreadlocks; a smattering of Arabic and French could be heard; and a scruffy, bearded fellow wandered around with what appeared to be a journal under his arm, Historicizing Anti-Semitism, that one suspects is not exactly kosher. It was just another day in Berkeley. ...

Read the rest at the link.

Veritas?

Sissy Willis:

We've been there forever, of course. As we wrote a few years back in "Bloggers are 'cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open'":

Leftists have become soft and flabby in their thinking over the last 20, 30 or more years because their fellow travelers in the mainstream media — supposed to be keeping them honest — have been giving them a free ride, even as thinkers of the right, not enjoying such reflexive support, have been honing our debating and intellectual survival skills. That leaves the left soft and lazy and the right battle ready. Enter the bloggers, stage right. ...