A great amount of Saudi money has been flowing into American universities, including the University of Arkansas. Is that a good thing, or not?
In today’s Martin Center article, law professor Robert Steinbuch looks skeptically at the King Fahd Center. Does it give students true education, or is it designed to promote the Saudi point of view?
It is house to the Middle-Eastern Studies program, but, Steinbuch observes:
The recent course-offerings webpage for the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies listed 35 classes whose titles included “Arab,” “Arabic,” “Islam,” “Islamic,” or “Quran.” That seems fine until one notices that the same course-offerings page listed not even one class with the words “Jew,” “Christian,” “Hebrew,” “Torah,” or “Bible” in the title, notwithstanding that Hebrew preceded Arabic in the Middle East by millennia and remains there today; that Judaism preceded Islam in the Middle East by 2,500 years and remains there today; that Christianity preceded Islam in the Middle East by centuries and remains there today; and that the Bible preceded the Quran by thousands of years and underlies the beliefs of 2.5 billion Christians and Jews worldwide, millions of whom live in the Middle East today.
Fahd Center professors appear to harbor and spread the Saudi regime’s animosities rather than giving students a balanced, objective education, but hey — it brings in lots of students paying full tuition!