Berkeley Donors Linked to Terrorists

Funders of UC Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies have links to Al-Qaeda, according to a campus Jewish newspaper.

Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz al Saud, who funds the center’s Sultan Endowment for Arab studies, is a primary defendant in the $100 trillion lawsuit filed in U.S. District court by families of victims of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the Berkeley Jewish Journal wrote Tuesday in a special investigative report.

The lawsuit charges Sultan bin Abdulaziz, the Saudi defense minister, with financing Al-Qaeda terrorists, according to Matt Levitt, a senior fellow on terrorism studies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The paper also implicates Xenel Industries, a chief donor to the center’s Al-Falah Program, which "supports better understanding of Islam, Muslim culture in the U.S. and economic development in the Islamic world," according to the Center for Middle Eastern Studies’ Web site.

Xenel’s CEO, Abdullah Alireza, has links to the Swiss bank Dar al-Maal al-Islami, which has financed Al-Qaeda through the bank’s subsidiaries, the campus paper writes. The ties are corroborated in a report by the Orlando Sentinel in its coverage of a business deal between Osceola County, Fla., and Xenel.

One of the bank’s subsidiaries is among the co-founders of a third bank called Al Shamal Islamic Bank, the Sentinel reported. That bank includes Osama bin Laden as another co-founder and was used to finance Al-Qaeda operations, the Sentinel reported, citing U.S. State Department records.

The revelation ultimately prompted Osceola County commissioners to withdraw a $100 million contract awarded to Xenel to build a new convention center, the Sentinel reported last December.

For its part, Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies rejected the Jewish Journal’s charges.

"The article in question is fundamentally erroneous and misleading on a number of levels. It is clearly polemical, giving voice only to the most extreme form of right-wing Zionism," Emily Gottlieb, the center’s vice chair, wrote JTA in response to the article. "The primary funding for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies comes from the United States Department of Education."

Endowments from Sultan bin Abdulaziz and the Al-Falah Foundation are "run by faculty committees with absolutely no obligation to, or oversight from, the donors in question," Gottlieb continued.

If the Jewish Journal had asked, she said, "they would have learned that our newest endowment, which is funded at a significantly higher level than the Sultan Program, is the Diller Family Jewish Studies and Israeli Visiting Scholars Program."

For some Jewish experts on campus affairs, however, the article underscores the potential influence of Saudi money on universities’ Middle Eastern studies departments.

Berkeley is a prime example of that influence, according to Martin Kramer, author of "Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America" (Washington Institute For Near East Policy, 2001), which posits that a pervasive pro-Arab, anti-American and anti-Israel bias has tainted research in recent decades.

"You could not do honest research [on Saudi Arabia] and expect at the same time to be a candidate for millions of dollars in Saudi largesse," Kramer told JTA

He said Berkeley and Harvard are flooded with Saudi money, which impacts their professors’ research on the country and simultaneously corrupts the integrity of other universities’ Middle East studies departments, which also want such funding.

"The Saudi issue is a subset of the bigger issue," Kramer said, referring to what he calls the pro-Arab leanings of Middle Eastern studies departments at many U.S. universities. In the field, "certain ideas are out of favor, and being pro-Israel is one of them."

Meanwhile, news of the article was just beginning to spread on the Berkeley campus Tuesday afternoon.

"They’ll find out about what we know today. It should be interesting," said managing editor David Abraham, 19, who said the Jewish Journal had not discussed the topic with university officials or with Jewish groups on campus before the issue hit newsstands.

An introduction to the article posed some tough questions for the paper’s readers.

"Should the No. 1 public university in the U.S. have a higher standard of ethics than the Business Bureau of Orlando…?" wrote Robert Enayati, the paper’s editor. "Should it accept money from those who, as you will learn, are trying to uproot Jews and Zionists from the campuses of America?"