America’s Intelligentsia: How Prejudice Often Trumps Intelligence

Title: “America’s Intelligentsia: How Prejudice Often Trumps Intelligence” Date: November 14, 2013 Speaker: Michael Widlanski Affiliation: Schusterman Visiting Professor, University California Irvine; Lecturer, Bar Ilan University Location: Fordham University Convener: Dr. Charles Asher Small, Founder and Executive Director, Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) Doron Ben-Atar, Professor, Department of History, Fordham University Description: Michael Widlanski maintains that intelligence and terror are inter-connected and that terrorists seek to capture the minds of the public. Widlanski questions how the West, Western intellectuals and intelligence agencies are so often wrong about the Middle East. He says this phenomenon is the result of a number of prejudices, including Arabism, or Islamophilia, and antisemtism. He goes on to note the influence of Edward Said and Noam Chomsky on the academy and how they were the two living sources most cited on American college courses and syllabi. He notes the absurdity that Chomsky, a linguistics professor, and Said, a comparative literature professor, were given credibility regarding the Israel and Middle East and telling the world what to think regarding the complexities of the Arab-Israeli conflict.