The truth about American Universities : Hindu-Hate ,Anti-Semitism & Cancel culture on 9/11

they're the ones who decide what is freedom of speech and what is hate speech to you and i that conference is hate speech to them it's freedom of speech because they want to honor uh the bullies so for hindus i think it's a very important point that the most important thing that we can do is raise awareness because they're not loud they're at school and i know because i went to rutgers and i know that the hindu student population is there to get a pluses they're there to build build build 20 years ago a brutal terrorist attack took place on american soil in order to distract us from the real culprits of 9 11 a group of politically motivated academics have organized a conference attacking hindus contrary to the popular claim that academic freedom is for everyone we know of examples where speakers were cancelled in places like rutgers university on the allegation that they had criticized islam even though such allegations could never be substantiated i have one such guest and she is here to tell the story of the selective canceled culture in american universities namaste this is vijaya vishwanathan for the infinity foundation channel my guest today is lisa duftari lisa davtari is an award-winning investigative journalist focusing on foreign affairs with expertise in the middle east and counter-terrorism she regularly appears on television with commentary and analysis on vital developments in the region she is frequently called upon to give briefings and expert testimony to government and private entities and has worked for a number of think tanks in the washington dc area where she has written exclusive reports for the pentagon and other us government agencies lisa holds a master's degree in broadcast journalism from the university of southern california and has completed her undergraduate degree in middle east studies spanish and vocal performance from rutgers university please join me in welcoming lisa deftary lisa namaste and welcome namaste thank you for having me oh it's a pleasure to have you here so lisa so you are an expert on the middle east in 2018 you're invited to rutgers your alma mater tell us what happened who invited you what were you going to talk about and what happened so the chancellor of the school um who was a former professor reached out to me actually in i think 2017 to try to get something in the calendar um he said i just i want you to come back to school i want you to give a talk we have a lot of alums who come back and give talks and um we finally came up with a date for october of 2018 after a few postponements for other reasons and um as for the topic uh i left it up to the school i said what do you think is a timely topic that i could talk about and they came up with um something about freedom of speech on campus ironically enough as the story unfolds um and it's very important that you ask me who invited you to campus this was not some fringe organization that is you know controversial or um you know questioned uh this was the chancellor of the actual school i have a personal relationship with him he knows me and my character and as to what happened a couple days before i was headed to fly out to new york from the west coast i got a call on my cell phone from the chancellor again we're very close he calls my cell phone uh and he said lisa we have a problem i don't know if you've seen this but if you haven't seen it you will see it soon there is now a petition circulating uh that started from one student this is a pakistani student who is um also a part of the muslim student organization um association rather and uh he started this petition calling me an islamophobe and said for that reason i should be disinvited and my my speech should be cancelled um very quickly after that um you know the chancellor was really just lost he didn't know how to to address this and the reason i say that is because again he knew my character he knew uh what i stood for who i am but he said to me these kids sound like they're really hurting and i said to him chancellor what is this based on why are they hurting you know they're privileged kids who go to university uh you know in the 21st century there's nothing hurting about these kids who have never lived in any of these hot zones by the way who have never you know felt any of these um you know age old kind of um tropes that they hear from their family members now islamophobia is a huge allegation especially against somebody who covers the middle east somebody who's invited to the united united nations to talk about women in the middle east to talk about persecution in the middle east uh human rights in the middle east and to call that that individual an islamophobe and then you know um they they went forward with canceling um and the chancellor said to me look i and i said to him why don't we have this and i invite them to come and confront me ask me questions why you know i said such and such thing or what do i stand for or what do i think about such and such conflict and he said i think it's going to get ugly and i think they're going to be aggressive and of course he's basing this on their bully approach right think about it this way the chancellor himself is saying they're going to be aggressive they're going to be perhaps violent and physical but yet he's he's you know kind of buying into the fact that they're hurting uh and that they're they have grounds for you know calling me an islamophobe um very quickly after that i got a lot of calls from the media the school paper for example and it escalated all the way to um national broadcasts like fox news and nbc and cbs and others um where i told my side of the story and one journalist out of um out of los angeles was a jewish newspaper the jewish journal he emailed me and said lisa you have to fight back he's like i'm writing this article i have you know i'm not biased but i went and dug up the quote that they are they're basing their claim of islamophobia on this quote a talk that i gave at the heritage foundation in washington dc in 2015 where i was asked a question from the audience about isis's inspiration and i said they claim to take their teachings from from the quran they claim they basically have hijacked the religion and therefore base claim that they um are taking their inspiration from islam and they took out claim and said that i say that isis is based on the quran and isis is based on islam and because this young young reporter early 20s found this little clip i mean that's when i was like oh my goodness you know they're lying um they're falsifying quotations and they are taking down my reputation you know and the school is allowing this most importantly i'll underscore that a million times here is that the school allowed for this to happen now um how many people signed this petition uh to have you cancelled lisa yeah you know that's what we kept watching you know how is this petition um you know escalating then i i don't remember the exact numbers but i do remember uh a group on campus started a counter petition to allow me to speak uh and that was one of the conservative student organizations and um they started getting a lot of of signatures as well and what they did notice is that this petition was circulated to parents and others and online they got so many other people again that the bullies called in the other bullies uh this was not just a you know petition that was signed by uh members of the student body this was you know and imagine if someone comes to you and says we're going to have some hate-filled islamophobe come to campus and talk about a lot of you know hateful things of course you know if you're the average student who doesn't have much knowledge about the nuances of these topics perhaps you perhaps you'd listen and say well sure i'll sign on to stopping hatred on campus you know um so very ironically my talk that was supposed to be about freedom of speech was shut down and i did not have the freedom of speech to go back to my alma mater to give that talk that i was invited to give so they claimed that it was cancelled uh or was it possible or was it postponed right so what exactly was it and that's uh that's an important point here when i spoke to the chancellor myself he said you know let's just agree to mutually um cancel it but you know we we we can talk about having something else in the future i don't know right now let's just their goal was completely public relations related their goal was to not make the school look bad but at the same time to cower into these bullies and what they wanted uh and when i was interviewed by these media organizations i told them exactly what happened i said they were these bullies they came to the chancellor and the chancellor you know they canceled the talk now there's no at that point there was no talk of a second date there was no talk of postponement and there was no talk of me going back at any point then once this negative publicity came out i got an email by the same chancellor and said oh lisa there must have been a misunderstanding we would love for you to come back and here are some dates that you you can come back uh and i very eloquently um had a way of saying you know too little too late this is really a stain on my reputation um you know if you google my name those articles come up and obviously people who know my work know that it's not true but i'm sure that it has had and will continue to have repercussions in my career so you are an expert on the middle east uh region and counterterrorism so tell us about the term islamophobia what constitutes islamophobia in today's context yeah it's an interesting question like everything else right so um the actual term of islamophobia is any phobia is fear of right of of islam or you know judging or marginalizing anyone because of their religion of islam or looking at the religion in a negative context and of course there is some islamophobia in the world it was particularly after you know 2014-15 we saw isis and other um groups and after i should say 9 11 initially uh when we saw you know the taking down of of the twin towers and other places in washington dc by uh islamic terrorists and of course that was uh the first taste that americans got in our modern history of a large-scale terror attack like that and of course it was uh launched by a terror organization and that's when we started um our you know collective understanding of what is extremism what is jihadism what is this extreme version of islam that inspires these individuals to radicalize and to carry out these attacks and because of that of course there's going to be a segment of the population because that's how people react right if i tell you that there is someone who's running through the neighborhood with blue hair that's robbing homes and you know holding people up uh for for their wallets you're gonna look out for people with blue hair right so that's a natural reaction for people to over react and to become overly sensitized to a certain threat that became that threat of extremism it didn't mean that the person next to you who was muslim who had the muslim faith is anything of an extremist and i think many people including myself went out of their way to differentiate not only differentiate but to look at those moderate muslims and american muslims as partners in calling out the radicalism because they don't want it either uh and you know in this country we get to a point where you know in this generation everyone is hypersensitive and they take advantage of the social justice movements that we have uh and everyone has you know an issue with everyone else and instead of really facing or confronting difference of opinion or tolerating difference of opinion we shut down different opinions and we silence different voices and we don't let them speak and the first place where this hatred is born whether it is islamophobia or this bullying that happened is in the universities because they don't allow for freedom of speech they don't really they don't allow and the teachers themselves they don't allow for diversity of opinion they don't allow students who have you know maybe a their one percent of the the minority of of students but let them speak let others be enlightened if that's a microcosm of the world in which they're going to enter after they graduate college let them express themselves regardless of how popular that opinion is but we don't hear it we hear more of indoctrination it used to be that you go to college to learn how to think not to be told what to think and that's what we are seeing in colleges today they're being told they're being trained and and molded to one narrative only and that narrative um of course is not open to any questioning or any criticism so there's this this alliance between muslim groups and the leftists in and it's kind of strange and hard to comprehend because an honest leftist critique of islam would have um would have trouble reconciling islam's position on women's issues lgbtq issues etc now islam somehow seems to be above any and all criticisms and that's not how the left is supposed to be and that's certainly not how academia is supposed to be how did this happen this partnership and islam being above criticism yeah it's it's one word it's hypocrisy uh right now is a great example of what's going on in afghanistan and you don't hear anything out of the left regarding the way that women are being treated they're being told to stay home from school they're being told to stay home from their jobs the young girls are being pulled aside by the morality police to get whipped why because their their toes were showing through sandals underneath their burqas they don't hear these stories they can but they can condemn for example israel that has a gay pride parade every year the only country in the middle east where jews and muslims and christians can live side by side in peace the only country in the middle east where the christian population small minority population has actually increased in the last decade rather than dwindles they don't look at any of the facts they just hop on to these causes that they believe are the underdog but now there is only one lens by which the left looks at every single issue like i said it is a prescribed way of living and unfortunately it is you know it takes place on campus but it has a certain narrative it is pro-islamic and it is anti-jewish for example it is anti-uh it's anti-gop it's anti-half of this country uh and unfortunately if if anybody has diverse thoughts and opinions about any one of these things as most of us do when we have a nuanced position on many things you know from abortion to gay rights to how we should deal with afghanistan to how we should enter not enter into the iran nuclear deal into how we should treat our kids into how we should deal with covet on the shutdowns these are all nuanced topics but the way that we are treating well i should say the way the media is treating the american public and then the way in which the children are being taught in universities and in schools is complete indoctrination we are not raising a generation of nuanced thinkers we're raising a generation of cloned you know um leftist social justice seeking but hypocritical uh students who are not told are not not encouraged to think for themselves see while uh criticism of islam is handled with kid gloves uh by academia not many people know the kind of atrocity literature that the south asian studies department spew out on hinduism hinduism is considered to be inherently very oppressive hindu phobic translations and interpretations abound in this body of literature there are vulgar depictions of hindu deities for example the hindu god ganesha is is a elephant-headed god and his trunk is considered a representation of a limp phallus even the grammar of sanskrit the ancient classical language is considered to be inherently oppressive in its in its structure now this has gone on for decades and the hindus are not sort of the ones that that go and protest and complain but this is how hinduism is treated by academia on the other side but now it's 9 11 like you mentioned 20 years after the worst terror attack attacks on american soil and some of the south asian studies professors have gotten together in partnership with marxist activists in india to have a conference called dismantling global hindutva so hindutva is hinduness so disma a provocative title dismantling global hindutva on 9 11 which essentially distracts from the real culprits of 9 11. so do you think academia is very soft on islamic terror and if so why yeah absolutely wow you you hit upon so many so many important points uh and i'll go through them as i as i remember them but you know these teachers never never give up an opportunity to connect with communists with marxists with socialists with anybody who is willing to dismantle that word is so so uh it's it's poignant it's extremely strong in its statement because that's what they aim to do you don't hear about communists and marxists and professors and that leftist um you know leftist um ideology you don't hear them using words like build or strengthen or fortify and you only hear those coming from the right these days dismantle dismantle that's all they want to do dismantle the country dismantle our foreign policy dismantle the constitution dismantle the uh the the hierarchy of academia where these kids go into school to learn to process in a certain way they want to dismantle all of that so of course that academia goes soft on on on extremist islam for fear of being islamophobic so they always do the extreme right so who's bad the white christian male who's bad the jews who's bad the hindus why because they're strong in their character they're not victims if you see this is a culture of raising the victim regardless of whether or not the victim is the true victim it's the one who identifies as the victim that is supported what do they do they get people elected into congress like ilhan omar and rashida talei they get you know with spokeswoman like linda sarsour who is the most hateful vile extremist uh who is running the uh women's march in in new york who only uses her platform to spew hatred and these are the people that the left aligns themselves with these are the people that the professors tell students to worship and to emulate these are the people they want to be like so for hindus i think it's a very important point that the most important thing that we can do is raise awareness because they're not loud they're at school and i know because i went to rutgers and i know that the the hindu student population is there to get a pluses they're there to build build build not dismantle they're there to get the degrees and to move and go on to medical school or pharmacy school or engineering school and that's a wonderful thing because that those are the values of which i was raised as well that that many indian students are raised with but these other students they go to college they even in their family the culture is not to build and grow the culture is to act like a victim and you see this all throughout the world in places where this extremism rises why does extremism rise in gaza but not in tel aviv why does extremism rise in in a place like pakistan but not in a place like india because those individuals that i'm generalizing there are pockets of extremism everywhere the reason i'm generalizing is to make the point that there has to be a culture of building and growing and raising awareness versus a culture of dismantling and destroying and and negating everything with which we have been taught and raised i think that's the issue i think hindu students they're not going to become that bully student who canceled my talk but they do need to understand that they need to reunite they need to raise awareness and to stand in front and to expose that's the best word i can use for this to expose what the other side is doing excellent i mean i i love the points that you made what do you think the reaction would have been if there was a conference with a provocative title like dismantling global islam right exactly that way it wouldn't have even made it to the print shop uh that flyer you know it wouldn't it wouldn't have because those are the the sensitive buzzwords of today right um you know just like we we have you know outrage about you know african-american getting killed in a certain way but we won't have that same outrage if you know a hispanic or a white or an irish or an indian or a persian and i can go on and on uh it's not to say that that black life isn't worthy it that black life absolutely everyone is worthy but i'm just referring to the sensitivities of our culture today and the hypocrisy of our culture today if our goal is to make the children of the next generation or even the general public more sensitive more aware more cognizant of human rights why do we pick and choose as to who deserves those rights if a certain word or title is not good for the muslim students and that's that word and title shouldn't be good for the jewish students or the hindu students and that's where you don't see those students the jewish students the hindu students those type that that population they're not protesting on college campuses they're quiet uh and for that reason you know rutgers a few months ago during the conflict between israel and gaza if you remember there was a lot of violence in the united states and in canada and elsewhere against jews who were just sitting at a restaurant here in los angeles and in new york city these thugs would walk up to people who are dining in a restaurant and say are you jewish and they would continue to beep them up or to threaten them what does that have to do with what's going on in the middle east i mean try to tell me that that has to do with their you know the land or that has to do with history or that has to do with anything that that has to do with what's going on in the middle east no that has to do with anti-semitism and rutgers decided to finally put out a statement and say we stand against anti-semitism it was as simple as that the police stood up and said uh uh why did you issue such a statement now if if someone came to you and said why did you issue a statement you know about the sky being blue what would you say well the sky is blue you have to defend the fact that this is a very very um natural necessary and um rightful uh statement to be made by the university they took it back they sent out a statement saying we're sorry we didn't understand that our our statement against anti-semitism was insensitive towards other populations of the school i mean i read this and i said i'm done i'm done with my alma mater i'm done with rutgers i don't even want to talk about him because i can't even make sense of this they didn't say we are you know against anti-semitism but we're for you know islamophobia or that we're choosing sides in the war in the middle east all they said was we stand against anti-semitism on our campus and elsewhere so basically by taking back their statement they're saying we're really not against anti-semitism so if jewish students are being beaten up on campus so be it and you know when you when you see things like that i mean what can you say what can you say we have come so far that we just have to have you know our our our relatives and our children choose better schools or become more aware um i don't know if the answer is not to go to these schools where you know this is but to become more aware you know i do what i do because i went to rutgers because there was this very loud and obnoxious um population of middle eastern students who did not know the history they did not know the context and in the classes there would be huge debates as to the history of the region and all they would do is make threats and get angry and bang on the table but they had no facts at their fingertips they didn't even know the history and this comes from their families you know to maintain that victimhood to maintain that hateful spite against the other and that carries into all of their opinions they just can't hear you know an opinion that goes against their own and now you have teachers professors the chancellor of the school echoing this sentiment doubling down on it and so you have you know why what this is why we're at where we're at it's unfortunate rutgers has over 5000 indian students most of them hindu and so they protested this conference in fact one of the key organizers of this dismantling global hindutva conference is rutgers professor so when these hindu students protested uh rudger said we believe in academic freedom and although we don't support the conference now can you see the duplicity and the double standards that rutgers uses academic freedom in your case for silence because right because there would be because there would be further protests because there would be violence because there would be altercations and they know that the jewish students the hindu students the the conservative students any one of these groups would not be out on the streets protesting and rioting that's just the way it goes we see it in our own world and we see it on campus a microcosm of what's going on in the world they know their audience they know that the hindu students can take a an intellectual answer and walk away with it perhaps they're not happy with the outcome but they'll walk away with it and say okay we tried but this is the outcome and they're going to support academic freedom or freedom of speech or whatever it is in my case they were afraid that those bullies would storm into the into the talk and uh dismantle it physically if they have to because that's all they know that they are programmed to ruin their program to protest their programs to just break things down and for that reason it's uh it's very difficult to combat them on a level of formality in terms of the school in terms of legal recourse in terms of words it's very difficult to see eye to eye and again that's why we have such a divide in our country because you know you have one side that wants to use their um you know emotions to fight and that's that's the way they they just shut down the other side they're not even looking to to see the other talking points to see perhaps i can learn a thing or two from the other side or perhaps it can come to a happy medium where i can criticize you and you can say okay i can see then you can criticize me and i say all right i see your points but they're not open to any of that and that's um it's unfortunate and it's unfortunate what happened to these hindu students because i think you know um it's uh the the first you know such i think grand scale event where they thought let's mobilize and uh it was met with you know this um blockage where they continued on but we're all for freedom of uh freedom of speech academic freedom generally hindu students are all for it but what happens is there is academic dishonesty so while we stand for freedom of expression speech academic freedom how does one call out academic dishonesty when they when the academic you know the department is a cartel of sorts um even scholars with the dissenting voice uh uh you know they are blacklisted and their careers essentially they can kiss it goodbye so the university system has become so polarized that if and and academics have become people with ideologies and anyone with a dissenting voice is silenced be silenced because they are the self-appointed gatekeepers of uh free speech right they're the ones who decide what is freedom of speech and what is hate speech to you and i that conference is hate speech to them it's freedom of speech because they want to honor uh the bullies uh to them i was hate speech and to to you know then then the bullies were honored in that case it just goes to say my first word to describe all of this hypocrisy so like you said those students perhaps they are for academic honesty and they are for academic integrity and they do want to have the freedom of speech to hear the other side when that is not matched with rest it's not reciprocated by the other side then you only hear one narrative on campus so then you have mary smith who doesn't know anything about hindus doesn't know anything about islam is walking past you know the uh apparatus that they build on so many of these campuses for example during israel apartheid week i've visited so many campuses that have this she doesn't know anything about either side but she's walking on campus and all she hears is this one narrative israel's bad israel is bad hindus are bad hindus are bad israel is bad you know the gop is bad republicans are bad uh this is what they flood their minds with so to them they're being they're giving freedom of speech but only to their own side only to their own narrative and so that's what we have so mainstream media the journalists have become activists academia we see scholars becoming activists this is there's a selective cancel culture and i say selective um and that seems pervasive in in the university system so where is all this stemming from is there hope what can students do uh lisa yeah i think you know the cancer culture is pervasive meaning they students like the one that canceled my talk for example he gets that taste in his mouth right so this student goes on he was a senior he goes on to the workplace and all of a sudden he goes to hr as soon as he hears something he doesn't like it's all about cancer culture they don't if someone says something on a news show or tv show that person gets fired again selective uh so this cancel culture has given them a tool by which they can use the system in order to silence the voices that they don't agree with what can we do it's it's pretty pervasive right and when you see it in the universities that means thousands upon thousands of students every single year that are graduating and coming into the workforce or you know joining you know adult becoming adults and coming into their own are you know fueled with this type of emotional um these talking points that just you know are are intolerant and they take this with them and they want to be babied and handled with kid gloves as you said i like that term um then you know how do they go into the workplace how do they you know open their eyes to uh difference of opinion how do they vote uh that's you know that's really the issue and what to do about it well i think that the other students have to join forces regardless of background so it's not just the hindus it could be the hindus with the conservatives it could be the hindus with the libertarians it could be the hindus and the jews it could be the hindus and the iranians who want you know this islamic republic to be out of their country there are so many people that can join forces against this common bully uh that these are the the unlikely allies that need to join forces and i think it's a wonderful opportunity uh they may have the the bully power but i think we have the mind power and i think that it's a good way for you know these different groups to come together and on the global scale i'll give you an example uh things have been awful in the middle east for moderate countries and for israel for many many years it was iran running the show and perhaps you know then we saw isis coming to syria and iraq and of course we've had all this instability in afghanistan uh and elsewhere but during this awful time we saw a flower come out of the weeds and that was the abraham accords that was when israel together with moderate arab nations like the uae and bahrain and sudan and morocco uh signed a an accord where it's not just a piece of paper but it's an actual relationship built on agreements and disagreements against other things but agreements that they can focus on prosperity and growth and building not dismantling in the middle east and i think that this example can be taken into our universities into the media into anywhere else uh that we'd like to find allies and people who are like-minded to help us in our causes and i think it's it's a wonderful opportunity to give it you know a silver lining here in the world of foreign affairs and middle eastern politics the abraham accords has been a wonderful thing it has proved to be a wonderful relationship between israel and these uh moderate arab nations and i think that on campuses we can see a very similar accord of sorts of these different groups coming together oh so with that uh lisa thank you so much uh we will focus on building we're going to air this episode on 9 11 and let's focus on building wherever we are we build the community the society around us so thank you so much for sharing your story and i'm sure our viewers will find it motivational and namaste to you and best wishes to you for all the things that you do thank you namaste to you thank you for your work the foundation's work and uh the best to to you and all your viewers thank you [Music] you

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Length: 35min 7sec (2107 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021