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The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Here’s an interesting briefing on developments in Gaza.

(2) And here’s a DeSantis speech that’s worth watching.

(3) Erdogan does some saber-rattling.

(4) As predicted, the Democrats go after Mike Johnson. Blah blah blah.

(5) One Israeli hostage freed by the IDF. Good.

(6) The Arabs have given tons of money over the years to the Ivies to set up propagandist Middle East programs. Not a surprise.

Comments

Roundup — 27 Comments

  1. It is long past time to kick Turkey out of NATO. That should have been done after Operation Iraqi Freedom, when Turkey refused to allow the 4th ID to stage in Turkey for an advance into Iraq.

    Curiously, before Erdogan Turkey and Israel were on good terms.

    If Turkey does go to war with Israel, NATO — not to mention the U.S. — will have some decisions to make.

  2. IrishOtter:

    However, as the old saying goes, maybe you’d rather have them inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.

  3. (4) As predicted, the Democrats go after Mike Johnson. Blah blah blah.

    One of the more ironic things I heard from last week when I was going through the radio. I heard one of the local NPR hosts who is a complete democrat shill complaining about this.(No mention of how the dems triggered this and were behind this, they literally all voted in favor to do this.)

  4. On the other hand, as Lincoln said, “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

    Or as Jesus said, “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste; and no city or house divided against itself will stand.”

    By which I do worry that it might indeed be better to have Turkey on the outside pissing in, rather than sabotaging NATO support for Israel. Or even worse, leading NATO to take a stand against Israel, without which NATO might remain neutral.

  5. Bill K:

    Agreed that it might be better to have Turkey outside NATO, but I simply don’t know. I don’t think it’s going to happen, anyway.

  6. when turkey was a secular state, pre erdogan, it might have had some use, it was a frontline state with iran, and against the Soviets, but now, after the ergonokon dual purges

  8. maybe you’d rather have [Turkey] inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.

    I’d rather kick his dick before he can get started.

  9. Re Kennan’s warning:

    What, did he think refraining from expanding NATO would persuade Russia to change their aggressive belligerent bullying expansionist ways? Is that what you think?

  10. Just watched what seemed to be a pretty straightforward news story on CNN about the surge of antisemitism, and outright violence against Jews around the world, and particularly on college campuses. All with no equivocation or insinuations that Israeli actions had something to do with it. Progress maybe?

  11. WRT Arab money setting up Middle East centers, or whatever they may be called; is there money left over?
    If it takes a million a year to run the center–hypo here–and the oil money is a million a year, the uni gets no free cash.
    If the uni were going to have a Middle East center anyway, now they have one for free.
    Do they need a Middle East center? Unless there is a diploma for Middle Eastern Studies, guys from other schools or departments who know the territory can put together an interdisciplinary selection of courses.

    So, does the hypothetical Middle East center, costing a million a year, come with a bonus of another million a year for….non-instructional Middle East stuff, like smearing Israel?

  12. Richard Aubrey:

    My understanding of how it works – and I am by no means an expert on this – is that most universities have long had centers for Mideastern study, or at least departments. The extra money allows them to expand such centers and hire more people, usually of the fashionable woke and/or pro-Palestinian variety. I don’t know if there’s money left over, but it certainly saves the university money that might otherwise be used for their Middle Eastern departments.

  13. Excellent speech by DeSantis. He made good points about the history of Gaza and the Palestinians.

    I hate to see anyone die needlessly, but the Palestinians have arguably made some very bad decisions since 2005. Now they’re reaping the effects of those decisions. It’s awful, but they had other options.

    Douglas Murray has written a book, “The War on the West.”

    “It is now in vogue to celebrate non-Western cultures and disparage Western ones. Some of this is a much-needed reckoning, but much of it fatally undermines the very things that created the greatest, most humane civilization in the world.”

    Judeo-Christian values are under attack. The Islamists are in the vanguard of those on the attack. Obviously, we’ve been infiltrated by a fifth column of Islamist propagandists. And we have a cohort of college students who were not yet born on 9/11. They have been indoctrinated not educated. It’s time for us to wake up and smell the cordite.

  14. in re (1) – at about 8:40 in the video, the narrator briefly mentions the situation inside Israel regarding Arab & Palestinian citizens, presumably Muslims, saying that they had been mostly quiet, although “there were initial fears that um we would see recurrences of the violence um that we saw in May 2021 um where the large part of the Israeli Arab population rose up”

    I had already wondered about that, as I hadn’t seen any news reports with that focus, and went looking.
    There has not been total quiet, but certainly nothing like previous riots in support of Hamas attacks on Israel (those are easily found on-line), and that seems to be because the Israeli police and government are in no mood to allow them this time.

    People openly supporting Hamas and Gaza are being doxxed and harassed; no surprise that a lot of them are students, and that they all seem to be responding with indignation that they can’t feed at the Israelis’ table and insult their hosts at the same time.

    This is actually a Washington Post story, so the faux-impartial spin is baked in.
    The authors also seem to be, ahem, “unaware” that “Israel’s far-right government” is now a coalition of all the major parties, including the WaPo’s usually-favorite leftists.

    Please note that “checked and denied” is not the same as disproven, although that might be true; false allegations are legion on all sides of any altercation.

    Also (as I suspected), Palestinian-Israeli leaders are urging calm, probably because they realize that pro-Hamas actions now would be throwing gasoline into a gunpowder warehouse and lighting a fuse.

    It’s a long excerpt (sorry huxley!) because of the almost eerie parallels to the stories of Jewish students, especially in America, being — doxxed, harassed, and “not sure if they will ever feel comfortable” in their schools again.

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/an-angry-mob-at-an-israeli-university-stirs-fears-of-jewish-arab-violence/ar-AA1j6R2v

    It allegedly started with two eggs thrown at a synagogue. By nightfall, Palestinian students were barricaded in their dormitories as hundreds of furious protesters gathered outside, kicking at doors and trying to break in.

    “Death to Arabs!” they chanted. “Go back to Gaza.”

    “I really felt like they wanted to kill me,” said Yasmine, a 21-year-old who was among about 50 students trapped inside the building at Netanya Academic College before being evacuated by the city.
    …
    Israel has largely avoided the kind of inter-communal strife that shook the country during the last conflict between Israel and Hamas in 2021. But the scene on Saturday night in Netanya, 20 miles north of Tel Aviv, was a frightening glimpse of what could be coming.

    Traumatized and enraged by the brutal Hamas-led assault on Oct. 7 that left more than 1,400 people dead and 230 kidnapped, some in Israel have begun to turn on the nation’s Palestinian citizens — long portrayed by the far right here as an enemy within.
    …
    In recent weeks, some Israelis have pored through the social media posts of their Arab neighbors and classmates, seeking out anything that could be deemed as sympathetic to Hamas or to the Palestinian cause more broadly. Telegram groups are “doxxing” Palestinian Israelis viewed as having split loyalties, posting their phone numbers and addresses online.

    “What happened in Netanya is a very, very dangerous signal,” said Hassan Jabareen, the founder of Adalah, an Israeli nongovernmental organization focused on the rights of Palestinian citizens. The group is following the cases of about 100 students facing disciplinary action for social media posts. “It sends a message to the Arabs that you are not safe,” he said.

    On Sunday, the Netanya college campus was largely deserted. There was little sign of the previous night’s chaos aside from cracked glass on a door to one of the dorms.

    “We are wounded, we are bloody … and still they rub salt in our wounds?” said Gabi Dayan, a 50-year-old Jewish resident who was part of the angry crowd. After Oct. 7, he said, emotions are still raw. “Where is the solidarity? Whoever is here that is not a loyal citizen, you have to expel them.”

    He accused the students, who live above the entrance to a synagogue in the majority-Jewish city, of throwing eggs at worshipers. Some residents said they came from a balcony, and others said they were lobbed from a moving car. The students denied any involvement.

    Following the accusations, “agitated calls were circulated on social media for a demonstration against the students who live in the dormitories on the grounds that they hung Palestinian flags, provoked and played loud music — information that was checked and denied,” Netanya police said.

    In 2021, during the last conflict in Gaza, Palestinian citizens of Israel took to the streets to protest the Israeli air assault. In mixed cities such as Lod, the demonstrations descended into communal violence. Synagogues and mosques were burned. Armed vigilantes patrolled the streets.

    After Oct. 7, community leaders urged calm. Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian member of the Israel Knesset, said he categorically condemned “calls for Israeli Arabs to join the fighting against Israel.” Senior rabbis issued a joint letter denouncing the harassment of Arab municipal workers in Jerusalem.

    Israel’s far-right government, by contrast, has responded with an unprecedented crackdown on free speech and demonstrations.

    Israel’s chief of police, Kobi Shabtai, has said there will be “zero tolerance” for protests in solidarity with Gaza. “Anyone who wants to identify with Gaza is welcome — I’ll put them on buses that will send them there,” he said after a rally in Haifa was forcibly dispersed by police on Oct. 18.

    National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has handed out weapons at political events and has proposed abolishing restrictions on police using live fire on demonstrators.

    At least 30 people have been indicted in connection with social media posts deemed supportive of Hamas. Actress Maisa Abd Elhadi is being prosecuted for identifying with a terror organization and incitement to terror. Among her flagged posts was a picture of a bulldozer plowing through the Gaza border fence, with the caption “Let’s go Berlin style!”

    “We’ve never really seen this before,” said Sawsan Zaher, a Haifa-based lawyer who has clients that have lost their jobs over social media posts. “What’s changed in this war is the high casualty numbers among Israelis, which has led to aggressive persecution.”

    In Netanya on Saturday, “we came to demonstrate and ask that they return to us our security,” said Agmar, a reservist who deployed to Kibbutz Be’eri, the scene of some of the worst brutality on Oct. 7. More than 100 people were killed there.

    The bodies are still being found in this battle-scarred Israeli kibbutz
    “After those sights, I question if we didn’t make a mistake in our whole concept” of Arabs and Israelis living side by side, he said.

    Netanya is a predominantly Jewish city, but about a third of the 3,500 students who study at the college are Palestinian Israelis.

    When the crowd called for the students to be banished, the city complied. Netanya’s mayor, Miriam Fierberg-Ikar, arrived to address the demonstrators: “There’s a decision to vacate the dorms and house evacuees from the south there,” she announced to cheers.

    “The Arabs should get out now!” a member of the crowd yelled. When the students were escorted out of a back door to vehicles organized by Palestinian Israeli politicians, it felt more like an escape than an evacuation, a 20-year-old law student told The Washington Post. “We ran away, just with the clothes on our backs,” he said.

    Miriam, 19, a Jewish psychology student at the university, said she supported the move. She has spent time with friends in recent weeks trawling though the social media pages of her Palestinian classmates, as well as other Arab professionals in the community. “We are reporting them: nurses, doctors, professors,” she said.

    “There was someone in my class that posted something about Hamas,” she said, pulling out her phone to show the post — a picture of jubilant Palestinians riding on a captured Israeli military vehicle.

    “An unforgettable picture for history,” the caption read, with two Palestinian flags.

    “She got expelled,” Miriam said. The university confirmed that a student had been “removed from her studies” following “inflammatory posts.”

    “Students from any side who express themselves in a way that explicitly or implicitly supports terrorism or Israel’s enemies … will be immediately suspended from their studies pending a disciplinary investigation,” the university said.

    Following Oct. 7, Miriam said, she is scared to go back to the classroom. “I don’t know whether they want my death,” she said.

    The Palestinian Israelis who hid in the dormitories aren’t sure if they will ever feel comfortable returning.

    Most of this next article consists of individual stories intended to elicit sympathy for the “victims,” although they ought to have some semblance of decency (or at least discretion for their own safety) in this situation, but few people do anymore.
    Note that The Guardian itself is on the side if Hamas, based on their choices of focus and language.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/20/israeli-arabs-reprisals-online-solidarity-gaza

    Israeli Arabs or Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem have been targeted with arrest, sacking and dismissal over social media posts expressing solidarity with the people of Gaza.

    Israeli Arabs, many of whom identify as Palestinian citizens of Israel, have expressed solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza amid Israel’s aerial bombing campaign that has so far killed more than 4,000 people in the impoverished territory, the majority civilians, according to the health ministry in the Strip.

    The bombardment comes in response to the Hamas attacks on 7 October that killed 1,400 people, mostly civilians.
    …
    Students and workers inside Israel have been subject to dismissals and legal prosecution, Haaretz wrote in an editorial Wednesday.

    The state of emergency currently imposed in Israel “constitutes fertile ground for violation of individual rights, and especially freedom of expression”, the editorial said.

    “Arab citizens expressing opinions diverging from the general trend have been fired,” it added.

    Jaafar Farah, the director of the Musawah rights organisation, said “since the beginning of the war, almost 150 (Arab) workers have been fired and about 200 students from various universities and educational institutions have been dismissed” for expressing solidarity with Gaza on social media.

    Heads of Israeli universities on Wednesday published a letter to the education minister, Yoav Kisch, in which they said “they play their role in holding accountable the few who express solidarity with terrorist organisations”.

    And an Arab teacher in a secondary school in the city of Tiberias was suspended until further notice for liking the page “Eye on Palestine” on Instagram, according to a group of lawyers following the case.

    The acting mayor of Tiberias, Boaz Yosef, said: “If she wants to teach, let her go teach in Gaza.”

    I stand with the acting mayor of Tiberias.
    Does the Guardian ever wonder what happens to Palestinians in Gaza “expressing opinions diverging from the general trend” — I suspect that they don’t just get fired.

    Contra to the above stories about the sad plight of the pro-Hamas Israeli-Arabs, is this story before about an Israeli-Muslim paramedic killed by Hamas while treating victims at the desert music festival; it did not make any difference to him, his family, or the mourners at his funeral what his religion was.
    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/arab-israeli-medic-stayed-to-help-wounded-at-festival-massacre-then-was-shot-dead-by-hamas/ar-AA1iLuN7

    Kazim said his family panicked when they could not get through to Awad by phone but saw a video shared on Hamas social media networks showing his ambulance being driven into Gaza.

    Awad was a paramedic and the driver for the Yossi ambulance service “so we thought Hamas took him to Gaza,” Kazim added.

    In desperation, Kazim searched hospitals for his cousin and found a man who had also been at the festival. “I showed him a photo of Awad and asked if he’d seen him. The man’s face dropped down. I begged him to tell me what he knew. He said that saw Awad but unfortunately Hamas shot him twice – he saw it with his eyes.”

    Kazim waited until it was officially confirmed, two days later, before telling Awad’s mother.

    He said he has been horrified by the response from the Arab world that has not condemned the horrific violence of 7 October.

    “My cousin was one of many Arabs killed by Hamas, one of 40 I think, Hamas didn’t care. They are not the real Islam, I am a real Muslim, my cousin Awad was.”

    “No country is perfect and of course we argue politically like most other countries but I am tired of people telling us how they think Arabs are treated in Israel.”

    Thousands of Israelis, Arab, Jews, Druze and Christians poured onto the streets to honour Awad at his funeral.

    “I didn’t know whether to cry or be happy. But I want the world to remember my cousin Awad.”

    NYT (paywalled) also notes that many of the victims of the massacre were not Jewish. To Hamas, they are guilty by association — and indistinguishable from Jews by the barbaric violence used by the killers.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/world/middleeast/arab-israeli-hamas-attacks.html

    Arab Citizens of Israel Were Not Spared in the Hamas-Led Massacres
    About two million of Israel’s citizens are Arab.

  15. It’s a whole lot simpler:
    They smell blood.

    (For those who may have forgotten, or never saw it, see the masses of protesters—whipped up by Nasser and other Arab leaders in the days and weeks leading up to the Six-Day War, in late May, early June, 1967. They are NOT exactly shy. No, not at all.)

  16. My contributions to the round-up:
    (a) The most complete story about the Dagestan pogrom, excuse me, peaceful protest about Jews on an airplane.
    https://www.thefp.com/p/dagestan-airport-antisemitic-mob-jews

    What Happens When There Aren’t Enough Jews to Lynch?
    Ask the mob in Dagestan, Russia.

    By Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt

    October 30, 2023

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    There are about eight hundred Jewish families left in the southern Russian republic of Dagestan. So the antisemites who live there have faced a supply-demand issue in recent days: a mob of salivating Jew-haters without sufficient Jews to lynch.

    On October 28, the Flamingo Hotel in Khasavyurt, Dagestan, was stormed by a group of men looking for Jews. On October 29, the Jewish community center in Nalchik was set on fire—along with an inscription on one of its walls: ??“Death to the Jews.” In Cherkessk, on Russian Telegram, videos circulate of locals calling for Jews to leave the country.

    So you can imagine the excitement when the people of Dagestan heard that a flight from Tel Aviv was landing on Sunday evening at the airport in the city of Makhachkala.
    …
    Scan the region’s Telegram channels, and Putin’s war on Ukraine barely exists. But the hatred of Jews, largely inspired by propaganda imported from abroad, runs rampant. In Utro Dagestan, a Telegram channel with 65,000 subscribers that called for the riot at the airport, messages encouraging the destruction of Zionists are constant. One post this morning read: “We initially asked not to make a pogrom. But since this is how it worked out, then we in any case support every person who was in the airport!!! [to protest] the crimes against humanity that the Jews are doing in Palestine.”

    Few of these people, if any, could tell you that the Jews first came to Dagestan via Persia in the fifth century CE; the community has a tradition that they descended from the first exiles of Jews from Jerusalem.
    …
    My father-in-law, Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, was the chief rabbi of Moscow for the past three decades. But he, too, left last year, after refusing to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—which religious leaders are expected to do in modern Russia. He has repeatedly urged his community members to emigrate to Israel, where he now lives. He continues to do so, even with Israel under bombardment.

    “When we look back over Russian history, whenever the political system was in danger you saw the government trying to redirect the anger and discontent of the masses toward the Jewish community,” he told The Guardian in December. “We’re seeing rising antisemitism while Russia is going back to a new kind of Soviet Union, and step by step the iron curtain is coming down again. This is why I believe the best option for Russian Jews is to leave.”

    As for Dagestan, the reports in the paper would have you believe that the mob gathered in a kind of organic frenzy. But this is a country where nothing happens without state-level approval, whether proactive or passive.
    …
    Note that the airport pogrom occurred three weeks after President Putin’s all-too-evenhanded comments on the Hamas massacre of October 7. It came after Russia’s U.N. Security Council resolution last week, which avoided mention of Hamas, and days after Moscow welcomed a delegation from Hamas, led by official Moussa Abu Marzouk. Marzouk insisted there would be no hostage exchange until Israel agrees to a cease-fire, and Hamas later thanked Putin for his “position regarding the ongoing Zionist aggression against our people.” This is not long after a Moscow-based crypto exchange, Garantex, transferred $93 million to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which took part in the attacks on October 7.

    Today, in the wake of the airport mob, Russian press Secretary Dmitry Peskov has wasted no time in redirecting the blame and declaring that the airport attack was “Western meddling” intended to “divide Russia.”

    But the Makhachkala airport scene was no backwater dream of a pogrom in some far-off republic. It is a whisper of something else, something far more sinister. That is, Russia’s attempt to direct its starved and war-devastated masses to blow off steam about the zhyd as in times of old. It is the oldest trick in the book: let them focus on the Jew, not on the falling ruble and the rising cost of food, not on the failing war that has ravaged their sons. It is the Jew that is the problem.

  17. The Free Press on Substack has reams of important stories, but today I will stay focused on the Israel-Hamas war. Most of the FP’s posts are written by “liberals mugged by reality,” which gives an interesting insight into the deepening chasm between Left and Right (caveat that conservatives are mostly opposed to extremist groups that are lumped with them on the right, but liberal/progressives have supported most of the extremists on the left).

    This post is about individuals learning that their friends, colleagues in all their great progressive causes, are standing with Hamas rather than Israel, and suddenly finding that Jews are only welcome provisionally in the inclusive Left.

    (b)https://www.thefp.com/p/the-great-betrayal

    The left’s reaction to the massacre in Israel has many progressive Jews in the West rethinking their past activism, political affiliations, and friendships.
    By Suzy Weiss and Francesca Block October 30, 2023
    …
    The Jewish progressives The Free Press spoke to said they no longer believe in a left that sees their own people’s plight. They feel torn: they don’t want to give up on the progressive causes they’ve marched for and believe in. But groups like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and Jewish Voice for Peace don’t speak for them, and they don’t feel kinship with Israel’s allies on the right—like evangelical Christians and social conservatives.

    “When you look at the political right you see a group that seems very comfortable with Jews in Israel and very uncomfortable with Jews at home. And when you look at the political left, you see a group that seems very comfortable with Jews at home and very uncomfortable with Jews in Israel,” Clark said.
    …
    As for Rose, she says her party registration isn’t shifting quite yet, though her media habits are.

    “My friends and I are like, ‘My God, we find ourselves watching clips on Fox News.’?”

  19. (d) Another mugged liberal, who didn’t have the sense to keep his eyes open walking down the dark streets. Glenn Reynolds justifiably says, “I told you so.” (h/t Powerline)
    https://instapundit.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-party-pal

    (e) A clear-eyed conservative, who taps a deep knowledge of the history of dark streets to explain why Israel’s choices now are very limited; see the comment by “Jim Reynolds” as well. (also via Powerline today).
    https://victorhanson.com/a-therapeutic-middle-east-versus-a-tragic-one/

  20. (f) Going straight to the root of the matter, Steven Hayward cites David Horowitz the archetypical Changer from Left to Right.
    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/10/the-issue-is-not-the-issue.php

    Ever since David Horowitz broke from the radical left back in the 1980s, he has been trying to warn conservatives that they don’t really understand the core principle of the left, and the depths of the left’s power-mad depravity. Conservatives too often think that the Israel-Palestine conflict, or civil rights, crime, income inequality, transgender ideology, climate change, etc, etc., are discrete issues to be argued against the left with reason and facts. To which Horowitz replies: The issue is not the issue—the issue is revolution! (And a key corollary is: the more violent, the better. Hence the approval and celebration of Hamas on October 7.)

    The aftermath of October 7 ought to have revealed this truth more vividly than any event of the last 50 years. October 7 provided the spark for massive pro-Hamas demonstrations throughout the world and especially on college campuses. It is legitimized and brought out of the shadows the anti-Semitism long latent on the left, just waiting for a catalyst to organize spontaneously to vent their rage and hate. But it represents more than this.

  21. Related:
    David Harsanyi….
    “Liberal Jews Have No Reason To Be Surprised By Progressive Antisemitism”—
    https://thefederalist.com/2023/10/30/liberal-jews-have-no-reason-to-be-surprised-by-progressive-antisemitism/
    H/T Instapundit.
    Opening and closing grafs:
    ‘In the Los Angeles Times, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law School, tells us “nothing” has prepared him for the prevalence of antisemitism on campus.
    ‘ Nothing?….’
    ‘ …Maybe, just maybe, giving unfettered loyalty to a president who played footsie with likes of Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright and who was good friends with former PLO spokesperson and agitprop Rashid Khalidi was a clue that this kind of thinking would be normalized on the mainstream left. Of course, not only did Obama (and, to a similar extent, Biden) bolster the Islamists in Iran — an effort to blunt Israel’s regional power — but he also reached out to Hamas and pumped millions into Gaza and Hamas.
    ‘ Our elite schools and protest movements where philanthropic Jews drop millions every year sign petitions defending baby killers? Intersectionality. Decolonization. They’re all intertwined with identitarianism and antisemitism. Berkeley, like most campuses, is teeming Jew-baiting race-hustlers and pseudointellectuals who function in closed-minded havens for extremists. Sooner or later, those extremists are going to be emboldened. Sooner or later, they were going to be in positions of power.
    ‘ Sooner is now. ‘

  22. Oops. I see that that an article similar to Harsanyi’s was already linked to by AF…
    Apologies…

  23. Re Turkey – I’m not sure how much faith I have in our European allies vis-a-vis Israel. Turkey plus Europeans could put is in an interesting spot if we get drawn into war in the middle east.

  27. Neo.
    I think the question might be whether the/any university would have a Middle East Center if they had to pay for it themselves.
    When I was at Enormous State University going on sixty years ago, you could aim your non-major required classes in various directions. I chose SubSaharan Africa. History, anthropology, econ, geography. There were profs in each of these fields who were specialists in the continent and between them coordinated an interdisciplinary course selection.
    That took away from their more mainstream teaching hours, so additional instructors had to be found. That, as far as I know was the only added expense. No “Center” pushing issues outside the classroom.

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