February 22, 2008

A 34-page report by an independent task force on anti-Semitism at University of California, Irvine (UCI), details anti-Semitic allegations. During the past few years, the Orange County campus has been the subject of news reports and protests because of the pro-Palestinian campaign of its Muslim Student Union (MSU). Anti-Israel, and at times anti-Jewish, rantings are often spewed by radical speakers these students have invited for campus events dubbed \”Zio-Nazis,\” \”The UC Intifada: How You Can Help Palestine\” and \”From Auschwitz to Gaza: The Politics of Genocide,\” the last of which was held this month.\n

Students at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) were surprised to learn last month that for the first time their professor for a course in contemporary Islam was, in fact, a Muslim. Ismail Bardhi had arrived as a refugee a few weeks before through the college\’s Scholar Rescue Fund. The former dean of the faculty of Islamic Studies in Skopje, Macedonia, Bardhi was beaten and stripped of his title because he refused to cede to the vision of Kosovar nationalists, who in rising to power were marginalizing secular Muslims and \”Islamic humanists\” like Bardhi.