Latest / Infidels / Foreign Funding isn't Academic
Transcript
- Richard Landes: All right, so so walk us through the first of all, just the the sort of bare bones of the campaign of essentially corrupting Western information professionals with donations, loaded donations from the Arab world and in particular from the shall we say, I call them caliphators. Actually, we're calling him supremacist Muslims. charles asher: So, you know, so the work at Isgap we've been we developed the pr this project called Follow the Money, which we started in two thousand and twelve. And we started the project, you know, I I started working on this in two thousand and twelve basically by mistake. you know, we were Richard Landes: Yeah. charles asher: at we were at Yale University and Richard Landes: Right. charles asher: we closed down, as you know. And then I went Richard Landes: Right? charles asher: I got I got accepted. I was offered a position at Hoover Institute at Stanford University, so I went out there and Richard Landes: That's nice. You could hang with David Victor Davis Hansen and Neil Ferguson and the gang. charles asher: Peter Berkowitz was was there Richard Landes: Yeah. charles asher: and Fuluna Jamie was still there. It was a it was interesting. Yeah. It was a great time. And Richard Landes: Wow. Good old man. charles asher: I was late finishing a book project, so I didn't sleep for a month, you know, pulling all nighters. Submitted Richard Landes: Yeah. charles asher: the manuscript at about two in the morning. I was sitting in Palo Alto alone and I was wired because I didn't sleep properly for a month. Richard Landes: Mm. charles asher: And I started surfing the internet. I'm a hockey fan. I was looking at hockey scores and reading the sports sections. Richard Landes: I'm charles asher: Anyways, I came across an old email from one of the vice presidents at Yale who was a roommate of Rashid Khalili when they were students together at Yale. And he was Richard Landes: Okay. charles asher: a Mayflower kind of Connecticut guy who Richard Landes: Thank you. charles asher: was I don't I don't use the term lightly, who was a real anti Semite. He was really not just antagonistic to what we were doing at Yale. But really an old school antisemite. So I came across an old email of his from when he was the vice president of Yale and I Googled him. And it turned out he worked for a pharmaceutical company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So I Googled the the company, and it's a pharmaceutical company owned by the Ben Mafuz family. So I Googled Ben Mafuz. So Ben Mafuz is a Saudi businessman that was accused of supporting terrorism. And he was connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. And the Richard Landes: Uh-huh. charles asher: Clinton administration in nineteen ninety-three blew up his chemical factory in Sudan. So I started reading and doing research. Richard Landes: Right, that's the one that that's the one that Chomsky claimed killed more people than nine eleven because of the whatever, go ahead. charles asher: Yeah. So anyways, in a couple of hours I found this whole network of Muslim Brotherhood terror financing banks, foundations, money going to Harvard, money going to Yale. And I was sitting there in my apartment at four in the morning going down this rabbit hole, and I was Richard Landes: Yeah. charles asher: I was terrified and I didn't understand if I found the tip of an iceberg, which would be terrifying, or I was this was sort of my imagination. So I gave this preliminary assessment to scholars of counterterrorism and radical Islam, and they were like, Yes, Charles, we know this family, and yes, this bank has been involved in issues, and this looks like a tip of an iceberg. So from 2012 to 2019, I worked on the project with my family has a a neighbor who's a retired forensic accountant. We Richard Landes: Ooh, charles asher: had no budget. And the two of us worked on this tirelessly and we conferred with a few people who knew about the Brotherhood. And within the seven-year period, we found three billion dollars in undocumented money coming from the Muslim Brotherhood to American universities. And I was I went around Washington knocking on doors and f I finally found some people that seemed interested and understood the importance of what we did. And we were asked to present. In two thousand and nineteen our findings at a summit in Washington where the head of Homeland Security, the Director of the FBI, the Attorney General, the Head of the Department of Education, sort of top one hundred civil servants in Washington were there. And we presented our research. And from this, the Trump administration launched a federal investigation into illegal funding or undisclosed funding, foreign funding of American universities. And in a short period of time they found eighteen billion dollars and then the the elections took place and the Biden administration one of the first things they did was to end the investigation and I guess because of our success in in this research and people started to realize it was important we were able to grow our team and now Isgap has an amazing team of experts on antisemitism, radical Islam and terror financing and forensic accounting. And from this research Especially after October the seventh, we've really expanded our reports and our investigations. And basically, with our experts on antisemitism, radical Islam and Forensic Accounting, we traced the funding and we estimate that the Qataris, which I know most of your listeners will know, the Qatari regime has a bayah, a spiritual oath to the Muslim Brotherhood. So the regime of Qatar follows all the religious edicts, rulings and fatwas of the Brotherhood. And as you know, the Brotherhood is committed to destroying democracy, destroying Israel, the little Satan, and destroying America, the Great Satan. So we estimate that the Qataris are playing with up to a trillion dollars in assets, investing in Western higher education and cultural institutions, investing significant funds, even taking a loss. They're not doing it for business, they're doing it to use it as soft power. And They filled a vacuum soon after October soon after September the eleventh, two thousand and one, where the Saudis were really at the forefront of this. They were Richard Landes: Right. charles asher: leading the infiltration into the West. But after nine eleven they were kind of kicked out of the United States in the West, and the Qataris sort of filled the vacuum and kind of represent Richard Landes: And charles asher: the Brotherhood's strategic goals in the West. And yeah, we we estimate that we estimate That the Qataris, just the Qataris in the last fifteen years or so have invested up to a hundred billion dollars in American universities. We found Richard Landes: Yeah. charles asher: we found we found about twenty-six, twenty-seven billion at a few universities. So our estimate of a hundred billion is probably conservative. I would I would say it is conservative. And Richard Landes: Right. charles asher: of course they're also investing in in the media. Al Jazeera, CNN is now has you know nice arrangement with Richard Landes: Doha. Right. charles asher: Qatar. So they're in in they're infiltrating into our higher education, into K through twelve, into our cultural institutions, and they're spreading their their ideology. Richard Landes: All right, so there are two two aspects of this that I want to bring to the fore. First of all, I don't know if you know, but my father is Dav was David Landis, and he he actually left the Harvard History Department and went to the economics department because the Americanists in the Harvard Dis History Department controlled the funds. Now the funds that they controlled were like, you know, maybe a hundred thousand dollars. Maybe. And so when they c when the when the Saudis first, but when the Qataris come in with millions of dollars, you know, academics, you know, they scrape together proposals so that they can get some money to do some research, and all of a sudden All this money is free as long as you follow the rules, which are really the the rules of Dhimmitude, which is you don't criticize Islam. And in fact, if you're smart, you side with them, you take their you take their narrative and run with it. the power of this in academia is just massive. charles asher: Yeah, it is. yeah, so I I hope they're gonna they're gonna be able to edit this. I lost you somehow. I don't Richard Landes: Yeah, don't worry. They actually each different place records its own things. So what you see of me doesn't mean that that's what's recorded. charles asher: Okay, so now I can't see the screen for some reason. Richard Landes: I see you. charles asher: I know, I I know we're connected. yeah. Sorry. Richard Landes: Sorry. charles asher: I don't know what I did. Give me one second, I'm sorry. Richard Landes: No problem. Let me see if I can remember the second thing I wanted to mention in terms of charles asher: We were flow it was starting to flow and I just broke it up, sorry. Richard Landes: Right. No, don't worry about it. the other thing I wanted to say this massive funding. yeah, one of the things let's just briefly talk about the period preceding, because one of the things about your report is that you put it in the context of this hundred year war, which is halfway charles asher: Yeah. Richard Landes: through. So the f so I i is it is it reasonable good. Is it reasonable charles asher: Yeah, okay. I see that. Okay. Richard Landes: to divide This first half of the Hundred Years War into from say 1980, which is 1400 in the Muslim calendar, to 2000, and that's the period that's dominated by Saudi money that's funding Wahhabi preachers in Western mosques. And then in 2000 or 2001, as you say, the Qataris take over and their target is not radicalizing Muslims, that's already been successfully done, it's essentially castrating Western intellectuals. charles asher: Yeah. So I think every you know, all the revolutionaries throughout history know that if you can control or influence education, especially higher education, in time you're going to influence the society. This is where the future leaders are educated. This is where young Americans and w westerners living in democracies go to to learn how to be citizens, learn how to think. So if you can influence them there, it has a a real impact. This is where the future professors and journalists and leaders of industry are made, in a sense. So they their target is strategic. So the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 90s, there's you know, through the Holy Land Foundation issue, the FBI and Swiss intelligence fly find document documents from the Muslim Brotherhood outlining their strategic goal. And their goal is basically, and it's written, yeah, their goal is to to end democracy. Their goal is to destroy Israel, to move Israel away from the West, to isolate it, alienate it, and destroy it. That's the little Satan. And then to use, this is amazing, fifty years ago they're writing, to use antisemitism as a way to fragment and weaken and destroy the great Satan, the United States of America. So if we take a step back, there the implementation, the creation of this extraordinary strategic plan. And their implementation for all sorts of reasons, as we know now, is gaining tremendous traction in the West. So they've been funding our universities for 40 to 50 years. our media of record is now being influenced by you know, from the New York Times to to even you know, even Paramount, I have to say, and and other entities in the media, the New York Times, the BBC. is all being sort of infiltrated and funded by Qatar and and and Muslim Brotherhood entities. So there certainly is a strategic goal. Part of the strategic goal is to influence the way people think. And they also see the sort of the r the re so-called red-green alliance in the sort of postmodern world, as you know well, Richard, intellectually Richard Landes: Right. charles asher: in the sort of postmodernity and you know the deconstruction of Western hegemony, in a sense the r the the radical intellectual left that wants to you know weaken Western hed hegemony to free those who were who were of who were once colonized in a in a perverse way, they have this red-green alliance is sort of an alliance of mutual interest because the Islamists want to rid the Islamic world of Jews and Christians and and the and the ideas of the West. And they see this as a form of the remnants of imperialism and colonialism, so they want to, you know, cleanse the the caliphate. And the postmodern progress so-called progressive intellectuals are the useful idiots because they want to, you know, free those who are once colonized and liberate them from Western hegemony and American hegemony. But the tragedy is that in the best universities in the West. In the United States, in Canada, in the United Kingdom, in France, the postmodern intellectuals do not assess in in a critical manner the societies in which these social movements have emerged. They they don't speak about anti Semitism, they don't speak about gender issues and homophobia and the rights of moderate Muslims and the Yazdis and the Kurds. You know, the Islamic world is portrayed as kind of, you know, in a very flat you know Unsubstantiated one eventually. Yeah. Richard Landes: One dimension. Right. One dimension. It's a four dimensional West in which the criticism, the self criticism. you know, I have an interview with a fascinating guy named Benedict Beckold. Do you know him, Beckhold? charles asher: No, you were telling me about him. I I don't know if this works. Richard Landes: Right, right. So we wrote this book. It's based on Roger Scruton's coin the term oikophobia, which is the fear and loathing of one's homeland. So it's like an autoimmune disease, you know, in which you you are literally rejecting your own body. And and you've got a situation in which You have these academics and the you know, like after nine eleven, that's when we we had our conversation with Beckhild about the response after nine eleven. And even in the United States, you know, Phyllis Chessler talks about how her colleagues and her feminist colleagues would say America deserved it, right? America, the place where feminism has made more advances than any place in the world, becomes And you get this this bizarre phenomenon of a kind of, you know, accuse Israel of apartheid, accuse United States of slavery 150 years ago, but don't say a word about your allies who are trading slaves right now and who have apartheid laws and apartheid social divisions throughout their their Their social and political systems. So, you know, okay, so you're more critical of yourself than others, but doesn't at some point it kick in that this is suicidal, that you're making an alliance with people who literally hate you and your values? charles asher: It's extraordinary. And and I think this is where anti Semitism comes in, because in a way the Richard Landes: Yeah. charles asher: the anti Semitism I don't know if it's the opium of the masses or the socialism as fools is a is Richard Landes: No, it's the opiate of the elites. No, it's the opiate of the elites. charles asher: Yeah. It is. So yeah, I agree. So it it's extraordinary. You know, so for example, the British government just threatened to have sanctions against Israel. Richard Landes: Mm-hmm. charles asher: is in the spirit of a two-state solution. But this is h you know, if they have free elections with so the Palestinians the next day, the PLO the next day, or the PA again delayed elections. They after the British announced sanctions, the next day the Palestinians said they were gonna delay more. Future elections. Richard Landes: Yeah. charles asher: If there were elections tomorrow on the West Bank, there's a good chance Hamas will be elected. So the British Richard Landes: Yeah. charles asher: intellectuals are gonna have a two state solution with who? The people that just carried out a pogrom, the people that are connected, it's the Palestinian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood who want to destroy democracy. So they're blaming Israel, blaming the Jews, the anti Semitism in Britain historically, structured in their thought and their theology and their education runs deep. And now, of course, say antizionism. or anti-Israeli sentiment and anti-Jewish peoplehood, whatever you want to call it in the British context. Richard Landes: The twenty twenty first century variety of Jew hatred. charles asher: Exactly. So it it it's it's rife. And you walk in the streets of the UK, you go to the you know the intellectual spaces of Oxford and Cambridge and London, you can see the decay, the economic and social and cultural crisis. That Britain is in. And now they're they may now the Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, they're threatening to now separate from England, which is interesting. So it'll be a so so the government is pushing for a two state solution in the Middle East and they're gonna end up having a four state solution in the United Kingdom. But that's another story. But it's really sorry. Richard Landes: And a four state four state solution of four failed states. charles asher: Yeah, exactly. So blame the Jews. So blame the Zionists for for your Richard Landes: Right, right. charles asher: you know, to deflect from the from the crisis. And in a sense, and this is you know, in my personal work, I look at the the impact of neoliberalism and and that's sort of and structural adjustment that came in the nineteen eighties. And this is the thing that you know deeply concerned me as a student in the eighties and nineties. That we know that free market there there was this belief, Milton Friedman, Reagan, Thatcher believed with a neoliberal free market system there'd be more economic development, and with more economic development there'll be more sense of a a culture of of democracy and freedom. But we know from history that the state has to function. And this the state is the glue that holds society together. The state provides essential goods and services, you know, even from so-called third world countries, places like Egypt. The state provided ba basic health care and education. In a place where I grew up, let's say in Canada or in Quebec, I went to McGill University for about 200 Canadian dollars a year. Well my f you know there Richard Landes: Yeah, my daughter did too. Right. charles asher: you go. And we know despite the cleavages in Quebec society, there was nationalism and there was racism and xenophobia and antisemitism to an extent, but all Quebecers took such pride in our education and our healthcare system, the state really was the glue to hold society together. Yes, absolutely. Richard Landes: You guys were bilingual. Yeah, you charles asher: So it was a you know, it was a a social democratic, multicultural societ society. But with the free markets and and structural adjustment and f and you know global free trade and that sort of thing, the state was perceived as something that had to be diminished by neoliberalism. So that there'd be more free market access. But in doing so, states now, fast forward 30, 40, 50 years after structural adjustment, states are failing. States are not capable of defending their borders because the resources are not put into society. The fragmentation of Western democratic societies is being exacerbated. And in these conditions, you have the rise of antisemitism. We know this from history. When people live in fear and they're being disconnected from institutions that no longer function properly and deliver the goods and services and the hope of a better future, you have people living in fear. antisemitism in these conditions becomes a real possibility. The rise of totalitarianism becomes a possibility. And when our education sis I guess institutions of higher education are not funded enough in this free market system. Universities now around the world go internationally for opportunities, for funding opportunities and business opportunities. And Richard Landes: Right. And for students. charles asher: exactly. So you have students coming in paying you know major portions of the Richard Landes: Great. charles asher: tuition and the budget of universities. You have universities going to Qatar and other countries that are anti-democratic, sexist, homophobic, and antisemitic, and they're funding our universities with you know. Tens of billions of dollars. Cornell, we f we found ten billion dollars. We just found an extra one billion dollars. Richard Landes: Wow, I mean these are staggering figures. charles asher: Yeah. Georgetown, we found one billion. Texas AM, we found a billion. Brown University, we found the Choices Program. So there's this business in the history department, which you know, Omer Bot Bartov is connected to, by the way, called the Choices Program. And they were creating curriculum for over eight thousand schools across the United States of America for children, K through twelve. Children being taught that Jews and Christians are not part of the Middle East. That Israel is a colonial racist entity. American children. And you know, IsgAP, when we published the report a few weeks later, because of the pressure on the universities under the Trump administration, Brown University closed the Choices program. So we had a minor victory. And you know, Isgap, I I'm very proud of the work we do, but we're a small entity. And even though we're a small entity without tremendous reach, we started getting phone calls and emails from parents. That have children in schools in Vermont, in California, in Michigan, in Rhode Island, telling us this that they now understand why they had to take their children out of, you know, elementary schools, their seven, eight, nine-year-old children, because they were Richard Landes: Interesting. Interesting. charles asher: being indoctrinated with antisemitic curriculum. So it's Richard Landes: Right, an anti American curriculum. charles asher: anti American, anti Semitic, yes. So it's really it's pervasive. Richard Landes: So right. So one of the things that you know around two thousand and four, five, six is when I began to realize what was going on, you know, reading Melanie Phillips and Batiao and so on. And one of the things that struck me as I looked at what was happening was that, you know, in the West, because of the Holocaust. The sort of public posture was no more antisemitism. We're not antisemites. Heaven forbid we should be antisemitic. We've seen how terrible it is, and we would never go that way again. And in fact, there are, I mean, I've written about sort of the supersessionism of progressives who have their own version of we are the global moral leaders. And therefore, we hate our rivals, the Jews. what struck me about the the the Isla, the supremacist Muslim attack on the West is that they saw this unconscious antisemitism, which Westerners would not avow as the soft underbelly by which they could invade. charles asher: It's also I say it happens on so many levels. So first of all, if you get a good liberal education, you you you become educated to an extent on the role sexism plays in society, in our language and our institutions, and our you know symbols, and you know, you learn about this. You learn about racism, how you know cities are divided, or you know, there's economic and social discrimination and you learn. You have you get a good liberal education, you learn about this. And I think the failure of education in the West was we never looked at issues of antisemitism in the same way. We never saw antisemitism as structured deeply, deeply into the theology and philosophy and the ideas of the West, the idea and also the ideas of Islam, how these ideas even affected these anti-Jewish ideas affected Enlightenment and were deeply rooted in Western civilization. And we had this There was this honeymoon period where the West w after the Holocaust said we won't do this anymore. Well, you know, never again and the United Nations Richard Landes: Right. charles asher: emerged and human rights emerged and we were not gonna be anti Semitic again. And we all thought that anti Semitism died in Auschwitz, but it was the Jews who died in Auschwitz and anti Semitism is so structured Richard Landes: Ha ha ha. charles asher: it it it it's with us. So we we we had I don't think we examine antisemitism in the way we've as scholars as the way we examine issues of racism and sexism. So that's a failure of our our education. And then you're right. You're right. The Muslim Brotherhood, you know, emerges a hundred years ago in Egypt as a reactionary social movement, as a reaction to British colonialism, and they are influenced by the protocols of the Elders of Zion, the words and ideas that led to the Holocaust, as Eli Wiesel Always taught that the Holocaust didn't begin with the railroad tracks and the crematorium. It began with words and ideas. And the Brotherhood takes the very words and ideas that justified and led to the extermination of the Jewish people as the raison d'être of their social movement. It's in their covenant, it's in the Hamas covenant, in their constitution. And if you read the founding intellectuals of the Brotherhood, you have the protocols as a central element of it and the call for the annihilation of the Jewish people. as a raison debt of the Brotherhood. It's not the military wing or the extremist wing, it's their their their goals, their strategic goals. And Richard Landes: Yeah. I I call it their cognitive war or doa ring. charles asher: Yeah, exactly. And then they're also influenced by Nazism, as we know. So you have the protocols and Nazism coming, you know, informing this perversion of Islam. And then you Richard Landes: Yep. charles asher: have, and I think you have you yeah, you have in the West this sort of deeply rooted antisemitism that historically the West, you know, in a a very short time ago, it's less than two generations ago, exterminated Richard Landes: Right. charles asher: the Jewish people or tried to exterminate The entire Jewish people. So you have the this reactionary social movement influenced by Nazism and genocidal European antisemitism coming back into the West, and the West is receptive to it. Now it's a red-green alliance. Now it's not the red brown alliance, although the the right Richard Landes: Right. charles asher: wing is now re-emerging too. But so you have this red-green alliance, and you have people like Judith Butler. You know, who says that Hamas and Hezbollah ought to be perceived as part of the progressive global left. And then Richard Landes: Right. Right. And because wait, wait, wait, and because they're anti imperialists. I mean, yeah, to charles asher: Exactly. Richard Landes: call Hamas, which whose leader says we want to take over all five hundred and ten million square kilometers of the globe and it welcome them as your anti imperialist allies, it just beggars I mean, you know, it raises the question, how can people who are so intelligent be so stupid? charles asher: Yeah. So it's a yeah, it's incredible. So you yeah. So here you have you know, a feminist who is supporting a social movement that wants Richard Landes: Pacifist. charles asher: to subjugate women and murder gay people. You know, that the the the intellectual blindness of these clowns, they know nothing about Islam or political Islam. They know nothing also, by the way, about Judaism or or Jewish thought and Jewish wisdom, who we are, how we identify as a people, how we're connected to our land, none of that. And and these intellectual clowns, and they're clowns, even though they have nice institutions and letters next to their names, Richard Landes: Right. Right. charles asher: they're they're clowns. And they're clowns because they don't spend the time exploring the ideas. So the Nazis, professors of eugenics and biology and theology. Constructed the Jews as not white and poisoning the purity of the white Aryan race, which justifies the, you know, racist antisemitism that leads to the Holocaust. So less than two generations ago, the Saeeds and the Butlers and their clowns, because they don't study Jewish thought, they don't study how Jewish people perceive themselves or the other. They don't engage the the wisdom and thought of Judaism. Two generations later, these clowns now say that Jews are white. And it's not Welcome to the club, we're so terribly sorry. Richard Landes: First way. charles asher: we're the we're the Nazis and the racist and the genocidal apartheid supporters. So it's amazing. In two generations, the clowns, Richard Landes: And the supremacist. Right. charles asher: so our enemies are defining us once again. And I think this is, you know, you you spoke about replacement theology. In 1983, Edward Saeed said that he's the last remaining Jewish intellectual, that the Jewish scholars in America became scribes in the suburbs. And that he was the inheritor to the Frankfurt School of Thought. The Frankfurt School of Thought founded and developed by Holocaust survivors, Jewish intellectuals who are grappling with the aftermath of the Holocaust. So he's the last remaining Jewish intellectual. He's the inheritor to the Frankfurt School, and that the Palestinians were the Jews and the Israelis were the Nazis. This Richard Landes: Right, right. charles asher: is replacement theology. This is Christianity in its worst perversion. Think Richard Landes: Yes, yes, yes, yes. charles asher: about it. Richard Landes: Right, right. charles asher: And this is what's taken root in Western thought. He he kind of uses a cre a Christian replacement theological paradigm to cement this red-green alliance. And you know, despite thousands of years of culture and history and wisdom and our calendar and our holidays are rooted in the land, our whole world view is rooted in our indigenous land. None of that is engaged. We're defined as white. Being defined as a race empties any meaning of who we are. So Judaism Richard Landes: Yeah. charles asher: is Jews are no longer connected to the land, they're not connected to thought, you know, the Torah, the Talmud, the Mishnah, philosophy. Richard Landes: Values right. charles asher: We're white colonial settlers. And this is what's taken root in the universities that your father and you were, you know, involved in. And and Richard Landes: Yeah. charles asher: and this and then this justifies that you have these Highly educated, stupid people setting up encampments, supporting, paying $90,000 a year to go to an Ivy League university, setting up encampments, having teach-ins with their professors, funded by Qatar for decades, and before that the Saudis, coming out of their classes at Columbia and Harvard and Yale and Brown and Oxford and the Sarrebon, these progressive feminists, anti-racists are. supporting Hamas, a a a movement that just carried out a c a pogrom, a movement Richard Landes: No, a genocidal a genocidal attack. charles asher: Yeah. And this is what passes as progressive critical thought in the best universities of the Western world. And yeah, this is really a crisis, a crisis. An intellectual crisis. Richard Landes: All right. So right. So so there's one problem I'm gonna push back just a little on your argument that these people don't have any appreciation of Judaism. one of the people that I'm looking at right now is Shaul Magid. And he definitely has a deep appreciation of at least some aspects of Jewish values, spirituality, and so on and so forth. And yet he is every bit as And I don't call him useful idiots, I call him useful infidels. He's every bit the useful infidel that somebody like Judith But Judith Butler is. charles asher: Yeah, so I I I am not an expert on Magin's work, but I know he's an important scholar. there's Armo Omar Bartov. there's all these intellectuals. I I'm just reading Richard Landes: Well Bartov Bartov has nothing to do with I mean I I knew him as a graduate student and he certainly was not interested in Judaism. charles asher: No, but he's look, he he broke all ti also an Israeli, broke all ties with with Israeli intellectuals, broke his ties Richard Landes: Right. charles asher: with Yad Vashem. He won't talk to anybody in Yad Vashem despite the fact that he's a scholar of the Holocaust. So th you know, Richard Landes: Interesting. I didn't know that. charles asher: these people are I don't want to use an antisemitic term, but I I'd have to say, in a sense, court Jews. So if you want to survive and succeed in these institutions, you have Richard Landes: Right, right, right. charles asher: you can pass, you can convert, you can pass. You and as David Patterson so brilliantly argues, it's morally required now to be antizionist, to be anti-Israel. if you want to succeed in the media of record, in academia, and in in now I think even more widespread in public life, you have to show your credential credentials to to pass. And some Jews pass. Richard Landes: Right, right. And and right, and and I remember already back in two thousand and five I was in Paris talking with a really interesting guy. I won't mention him 'cause it's not a nice story, but I I said, you know, these are great ideas. We're gonna have a conference on the protocols of the elders of Zion. Would you like to give a paper? And he said, No. If I gave a paper it would be the last conference I was invited to. So, you know, I think it was Anne Hertzberg today mentioned to me that there's a I don't know if it's an argument or what, but that there are the everywhere anywhere people and the somewhere people. And the somewhere people are rooted in their communities and they basically live where they live and the anywhere people can be anywhere. They don't care. And and these are the people who are dominating our public sphere. charles asher: Yeah, look, yeah, look this is also part of, you know, I think in Reform Judaism they changed the notion of Jerusalem to be, you know, you can create Jerusalem anywhere. That was sort of the the intellectual religious Yeah. So there is this movement Richard Landes: Right. And that goes back to the nineteenth century. Right. Right. That's why they called that's why they said they weren't going to shul, they were going to temple. 'Cause that it was charles asher: Yeah. Richard Landes: the temple, right. charles asher: Yeah. So you can create Jerusalem and Chicago, you can you know, where anywhere you want. And yeah. So it's a break from Judaism in a deep sense. They wanted to integrate into Western civilization and society and assimilate and changing their perception of Jerusalem, you know, I think especially in the United States, had had an impact on on Jewish on the Jewish landscape, shall we say. But in other you know, in much of the American Jewish diaspora and certainly in diasporas and the rest in Europe and Canada, the you know, the community is is very much connected to to Israel and and Jerusalem. you know Richard Landes: All right, let's go back to the money again because one of the things that strikes me is let's say that the government were to enforce rules about transparency and in fact limit the amount of money that foreign foreign investors could contribute to American education. How Radically, do you think that would change the scene? charles asher: So, you know, we're we're involved in creating this deterrent act and working with some of your former students actually in DC on this. So the d the Richard Landes: Mm-hmm. charles asher: deterrent act would make it more there'd be more stringent oversight on foreign investment in higher education. So Richard Landes: Right. charles asher: right now, if if an entity gives two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to a university, the university is obligated to report it to the Department of Education. They haven't the but the laws are haven't been enforced, so there'd be more stringent enforcement. And instead of the threshold being $250,000, it'd be $50,000. And there's also talk of including in the in the law, in the in the in the act, that taking funds from enemy nations or foundations that are connected to enemy states would also be forbidden. Right now it's not forbidden. So we're trying to have laws that will you know have more oversight and protect American institutions of higher education from foreign influence. but so in all of our work, the thing that surprised me the most in Washington is the power of the the universities have a very strong power in Washington, a lobby in Washington, and their goal is to ensure the free flow of faculty, of students, and of funds, you know, internationally without oversight. And they're very they have a very strong lobby in Washington. Richard Landes: So all right, so what's your impression of I mean in in some fundamental way, what you've discovered is a massive scandal. I mean, a scandal on, you know, you can't think of a larger scale than universities from UCLA to Harvard and all across the country. What's been the reaction? to your findings. I mean some people are upset, but do people just shrug? charles asher: Some people shrug, but I think I think the most if if imp impactful or the most success that we've had, we so we did two things that are really important. So we found you know up to a hundred billion dollars in undocumented money coming from Qatar and Muslim Brotherhood entities. That's you know, this is our estimate. The impact on higher education, we kind of show that univ American universities that are taking foreign funding have 300% more instances of antisemitism compared to American universities that are not taking funds from them. So it's a strong correlation. Richard Landes: Wow. Wow. Right. charles asher: We also we also in the la in the last few months, this is a new revelation, we we all assumed that the Qataris and the Muslim Brotherhood were giving money to universities and it was having an impact, an influence. We knew it was, but it was very difficult to prove. There's a young woman her her name is yael kanan she's she was at Carnegie Mellon as an undergraduate i was neighbors of and friends of her parents in Connecticut and New Haven she went to Carnegie Mellon she was discriminated against them and she sued Carnegie Mellon for aga for anti Semitism. Her lawyers and her friends and family were telling her to settle she refused and she pushed the case till she got discovery We now know through discovery that the provost of Carnegie Mellon was paid completely by Qatar. And the strings attached that we assumed are beginning to be exposed at at Carnegie Mellon. Cornell, we just published a very important report, a small brief that we published a few days ago. We found an extra one billion dollars recently. So the w we found about eleven billion dollars at Cornell. I'm sure there's more. But we what now was interesting is Cornell came forward and they've admitted that the Qataris are having direct impact on hiring and on curriculum. And I believe now that all this is going to start unraveling because if the universities don't come clean, this is very serious because this could mean that universities will have to register as far as foreign entities because they're Richard Landes: Wow. charles asher: being directed by foreign governments and foreign foundations in their curriculum. So this is a major thing. So I think w this is Richard Landes: Harvard registering as far. charles asher: Well they have to come I think they're gonna have to divulge what the impact and the strings that were attached. So th this is a big development. So we've had an impact. But I think the major thing that we've achieved through all our work of looking at the connections of Qatar and the Brotherhood is that we did a major report in November of twenty twenty five, almost a year ago, on the entryism of the Muslim Brotherhood in American society. And we Richard Landes: Right. charles asher: pushed About two years ago we started to push for designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terror organization in the United States. And everybody in Washington thought we were a little bit mashiga that this will never happen, Richard Landes: Right. charles asher: that Muslim Brotherhood doesn't have an address, they don't you know, they're it's hard to define. Richard Landes: Right, and and as Hillary Clinton said, it's a moderate little mostly secular organization. charles asher: Exactly. So we did our major report. We had a big event in DC where scholars and diplomats came. Two weeks after our presentation, the Trump administration had an executive order defining the designating the Brotherhood as a terror organization, the Jordanian chapter, the Egyptian chapter, the Lebanese chapter, and the Sudanese chapter. And now any links between individuals and organizations to the United States to these entities. Will begin to expand the net of designating entities of the Brotherhood as a terror organization. So this was a major development, number one. Number two, even if we didn't succeed in that, we we helped to change the conversation. Everybody in this space knows about Qatar. Everybody's now speaking about the Muslim Brotherhood. Three years ago, it really wasn't much of an issue. So I think Richard Landes: Nothing. Right. Right. charles asher: in a way, we say the cat's out of the bag. Richard Landes: Ray. charles asher: I think now once you see something you can't look away and I think Richard Landes: Right. charles asher: now things are gonna start to change. I I hope. I'm optimistic. Richard Landes: Well listen, that that's really it's good and and to some extent, I mean the whole idea behind infidel awareness month is the idea that after September seventh October seventh, I think it was Brett Stevens who coined the term October eighth Jews, to describe how Jewish progressives who all of a sudden discovered that when Their people got raped, nobody had anything to say on behalf of them, that they were all alone in the world, and that they looked at their enemy and realized, as my daughter said to me, you were right, and we hated that you were right, but you were right about this. that there is more than just October 8th Jews. There are October, we're calling it October 8th humanity. one of our partners in this is Danny Burmawi, who was born a Muslim, converted to Christianity, and after October 7th, understood that being pro-Israel was absolutely critical. And so, you know, in some senses, what you're describing is also the impact of people who didn't speak out against the insanity on campuses. But understood that it was insane and are ready to take practical measures to do something about it. So actually, you guys you guys are giving us some optimism here. charles asher: There's a bit, yeah. And I think understanding that Israel is on the front line of a global insurrection and Israel needs to be supported because Israel understands the situation really well. And we have allies in the region who are also fighting the Brotherhood and Iran that we should not underestimate. We have good friends who understand the the problems and the history of the problems very well, and we have to inform the West of this war that's being waged against humanity. And it's a global insurrection. And think now that the you know, the first step is awareness and I think people are becoming more aware. You know, the tragedy of Octo you know, the tragedy of October the seventh, you know, maybe you know there's also I don't know, there's in every crisis and there's opportunities and I think we have Richard Landes: Right. charles asher: an opportunity to do something in their memory at the very least. Richard Landes: All right. All right. Thank you so much. And charles asher: Thank you, sir. Richard Landes: thank you for your work. Thank you for joining us. And hope we have another conversation soon. All right. charles asher: Yeah, it's nice to speak with you.