Tuesday 24 November 2009

Israel Matzav: American universities for sale

American universities for sale

The New York Post reports that American universities are for sale to Iranian money. Unsurprisingly, one of the universities that is for sale is my alma mater, Columbia Bir Zeit on the Hudson.

Anti-Israel, pro-Iran university professors are being funded by a shadowy multimillion-dollar Islamic charity based in Manhattan that the feds charge is an illegal front for the repressive Iranian regime.

The deep-pocketed Alavi Foundation has aggressively given away hundreds of thousands of dollars to Columbia University and Rutgers University for Middle Eastern and Persian studies programs that employ professors sympathetic to the Iranian dictatorship.

"We found evidence that the government of Iran really controlled everything about the foundation," said Adam Kaufmann, investigations chief at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.

Federal law-enforcement authorities are in the midst of seizing up to $650 million in assets from the Alavi Foundation, which they charge funnels money to Iran-supported Islamic schools in the United States and to a syndicate of Iranian spies based in Europe.

In one of the biggest handouts, the controversial charity donated $100,000 to Columbia University after the Ivy League school agreed to host Iranian leader and Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, according to the foundation's 2007 tax filings obtained by The Post.

Rutgers professor Hooshang Amirahmadi, former head of the school's Center for Middle Eastern Studies and president of the American-Iranian Council, a nonprofit advocacy group, unabashedly has touted Hezbollah and Hamas as legitimate organizations and not terrorists.

Between 2005 and 2007, the Alavi Foundation donated $351,600 to the Rutgers Persian language program, a spokesman for the school acknowledged. The university would not comment further.

Alavi's Web site says its mission is the "promotion of Islamic culture and Persian language."

The Obama administration will undoubtedly dismiss this as freedom of expression. Sorry, but foreigners have no right to freedom of expression in the United States, and they certainly don't have the right to act on behalf of terror organizations and governments.

Read the whole thing.

On December 19, 2008, the same day that the Alavi Foundation's President was indicted for obstruction of justice, the organization contributed between $25,000 and $50,000 to the William J. Clinton Foundation (yes, the foundation established by the Secretary of State's husband). And that wasn't the organization's first or only contribution to the former President.

There's much more about the Alavi Foundation here.

With the Alavi Foundation influencing the education of America's best and brightest through contributions to America's universities, what could go wrong?

Israel Matzav: American universities for sale

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