Berkeley’s Center for Race & Gender hosts an annual Islamophobia conference, the most recent one being titled, Islamophobia: Has a tipping point been reached?  It’s not a coincidence that Saudi petro dollars are fueling this propaganda campaign. Saudi Arabia is famous for spreading radical Islamic ideas through schools in order to keep the House of Saud in power.

One of the speakers was Georgetown University’s John Esposito. Esposito is Founding Director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) and Project Director of The Bridge Initiative. ACMCU (formerly CMCU) is the same program which received a $20 million donation in 2005 through the petrodollars of the Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal. The Saudi prince also gave Harvard $20 million in 2005 for their Islamic studies program and other large sums to Cambridge, Edinburgh, and more.\

Esposito also has quite the radical past. Esposito served as President of Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and Vice Chair of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID), among many other positions. These two pro-Islamist organizations hint into Esposito’s political leanings. Stephen Schwartz from American Thinker reveals some more details about Esposito’s background:

…he [Esposito] stood up for Sami Al-Arian, who pled guilty in 2006 to a charge of providing services to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a Specially Designated Terrorist Organization according to the U.S. government. At an August 18, 2007 fundraising event in Dallas for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a leading American Islamist group, Esposito declared, “Sami Al-Arian’s a very good friend of mine.”

On the same occasion, he affirmed his solidarity with “the Holy Land Fund [sic, Holy Land Foundation], but also with CAIR.” Five principal leaders of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and the organization itself were found guilty in 2008 on 108 charges of support for Hamas. The U.S. authorities had already added HLF to the roster of Specially Designated Terrorist Organizations in 2001, but in the view of Esposito, as recorded on National Public Radio on October 22, 1994, Hamas was “a community-focused group that engages in ‘honey, cheese-making, and home-based clothing manufacture.'”

During the recent Berkeley conference Esposito criticized individuals who do not think Islamophobia exists. Referring to the Oklahoma City bombing Esposito stated the “main terrorist threat is from white, anti-government, also often Christian-identity type movements.” The facts say otherwise. A study conducted by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) reveals a different trend. Of the 452 suicide terror attacks in 2015 a staggering 450 of them were carried out by Muslims.  TheReligionofPeace.com lists in the last 30 days (as of 05/20/2016) more than 168 Islamic inspired attacks occurred in 23 countries, killing more than 1400 people.

Esposito discussed The Bridge Initiative, which comes out of the same Saudi funded Georgetown University ACMCU program. Esposito spoke of the initiative’s striving to “set up alternative narratives,” “penetrate social media,” and reach “search engine optimization.”  It does not take long when browsing the initiative’s website to realize it is a propaganda machine under the guise of scholarship.  When Esposito says that, “It’s the storytelling,” we can see that he intends for the story to be more prominent than the facts.

Some of the other sponsors of this year’s Berkeley event include Muslim Brotherhood front groups such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Student Association (MSA). Anti-American rhetoric is front and center at these conferences.  This year’s Seventh Annual International Islamophobia Conference, San Francisco State University Professor Rabab Abdulhadi declared, “Before I get started, I just wanted to say that we are meeting on stolen indigenous people’s land. That’s really important to acknowledge.”

U.S. Muslim Brotherhood groups may see this funding as a perfect opportunity to fulfill a strategic goal written in their Explanatory Memorandum about “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within,” achieving this by silencing the opposition (the “anti-Islamophobia” crowd). It’s time to expose these pseudo-academic Islamic studies programs and make colleges and universities a place where knowledge and truth prevail.