Brandeis: School for Terrorists? by H. Peter Metzger, Ph.D.
Snatching a loaded M4 carbine, the diminutive mother of three fired on her FBI questioners, and was swiftly injured by return fire. She is now in federal court awaiting charges of attempted murder. The FBI had placed her near the top of its most wanted list of fugitive terror subjects. A CIA spokesman said, “I don’t think we’ve captured anybody more important and well connected as she since 2003.”
Her name is Aafia Siddiqui, and she is charged with being an important Al-Qaeda ”fixer,” a person who coordinates terror plots between various other terrorists within this very secret organization. In 2004, the FBI called her an “Al-Qaeda operative and facilitator who posed a clear and present danger to America.” When arrested in August just before the shoot-out, she was carrying plans to bomb various U.S. landmarks and to kill former Presidents Carter, Bush and Clinton.
But nowhere in the extensive news coverage of this event was her tie to Brandeis University explored, and that she was only the latest in a long series of terrorists coming out of that university. Now, I don’t mean kids protesting the Vietnam War either, which was common in the 1970’s, I mean real terrorists.
So what? You might ask. As a long ago graduate of that place, I remembered when terrorists coming out of a Brandeis education was not such an extraordinary event. In fact, Brandeis, a university of less than 5,000 students, has always provided a sanctuary for the most extreme radical thinking and action of any other university in America.
From its earliest days, Brandeis attracted not only leftist liberals, but many very far-left radicals too. Most of the people I cite below were arrested and spent time in prison for violent crimes which were all done in the name of far-left extremist politics.
It all began around 1970, when Brandeis saw three of its women students posted to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List (Angela Davis, Susan Saxe and Katherine Power), no small feat since only seven women were ever put on that FBI list in all of its history.
Those Brandeis girls were all famous leftist revolutionary America-haters, but they were only the "stars" of the then Hate-America movement. There were many other lesser lights. For example, another Brandeis student was Jennifer Casolo, a revolutionary who was found to have an arsenal of weapons and explosives buried in her backyard-- “tons” of the stuff according to White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater. Then there were other minor players like Brandeis students Laura Whitehorn and Naomi Jaffe. Curiously, all of these violence-prone misfits were women.
So what has Brandeis been hosting up there anyway? Well, It would appear that Brandeis has been providing a friendly intellectual climate for kids wanting to become violent domestic revolutionaries, all under the guise of elevating “social consciousness.” For example, several of the so-called Brandeis terrorists trace their intellectual development back to classes taught there by Marxist professors like Herbert Marcuse and other America haters.
Not surprisingly, as domestic terrorism finally fell out of fashion and international terrorism took over, Brandeis changed too, and it now provides a sanctuary for Islamic Jihadism.
What? A Jewish university teaching Muslim-based Jew-killing? That's right, and it wouldn't be the first time that under the guise of "scholarship" Jews themselves have supported causes that harm them first; Soviet history springs to mind. So it shouldn’t be surprising that Brandeis kept right up with the times and is now a big-time enabler of international Palestinian terror organizations. Here’s how:
Today Brandeis hosts the influential pro-Palestinian "Crown Center for Middle East Studies," run by a Jew (who else?). The Crown Center recently hired Arab scholar, Khalil Shikaki. Testimony from a trial which convicted another Arab professor, Al-Arian from the University of South Florida, shows that Shikaki, while no terrorist himself, was a key distributor of funds and information between terrorists in Palestine and other Arab professors here in America who themselves were raising money for the Palestine Islamic Jihad. So at the very least, Shikaki is simply another “fixer.”
Additionally, Khalil Shikaki's own brother was the founder of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad itself. The Brandeis professor has recently been linked to even more notorious terrorist groups such as the Islamic Committee for Palestine and the World & Islam Studies Institute, both claimed by government investigators to be front organizations for the more radical Islamic Jihad.
Another Brandeis professor who has acted as an apologist for Jihadists is Natana DeLong Bas, defender of the 9/11 suicide squads and other Arab extremist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, just before it was fused into Al-Qaeda. Funded by Saudi money, she is best known today for producing the definitive text, “Wahhabi Islam: From Revival to Global Jihad,” an impassioned defense of the Saudi sect of Islam which serves as the religious basis for most Islamic terrorists today.
So it should come as no surprise that Aafia Siddiqui, the latest “poster woman” for the extremism that flourishes at Brandeis, is a terrorist and Jihadist. She is in custody right now for attempted murder and she made one of the FBI's “Most Wanted Lists” too.
Seen in this light, it looks like Aafia Siddiqui is no exception, but merely the latest in a 40-year-long tradition. More importantly, Brandeis can’t claim that it was all accidental and that these terrorists could have come from any college. The fact is that on a per capita basis, Brandeis has had far more than its share of terrorists and that political extremists find an unusually sympathetic and protective administration there protected by the umbrella of academic freedom and “social consciousness.”
In all of the above, I have concentrated only on the influence of the professors upon the students, which caused this remarkable cadre of young terrorists to appear out of nowhere. What I did not explain yet is the influence that the students had on other students, because Brandeis certainly seems to have gone well out of its way to recruit students who were already radicalized.
The most outrageous example of choosing students who were already in accord with a hidden and radical political agenda was when Brandeis recruited convicted felons to join the student body. This action shows how it was Brandeis’s administrative policy that produced the climate for a terrorist factory.
This Brandeis idea was based upon one of the most harebrained schemes in American history, known in Massachusetts as the Student Tutor Education Program (STEP). It was claimed that if lower class people were exposed to the presumably higher-class people in a university, then the lower class people would rise to the same level as the higher-class people. No one ever worried that the process could work in reverse, which of course it did.
Convicted felon and stick-up man Stanley Bond was picked to be thus elevated by STEP and so he got a "get out of jail free" card (literally) from the authorities and went straight to Brandeis. Five years older than the average student, he was soon sexually involved with Brandeis student Irish-Catholic Kathy Power and Susan Saxe, and then got involved in radical campus politics. So it wasn't long before the harebrained Brandeis STEP scheme began to work its special wonders.
The formerly non-political ex-con Bond "rose" and learned how to be a student radical from the girls, while the girls in their turn "sank" and learned how to be stick-up thugs from Bond.
Bond decided that the Black Panthers needed money so the Bond-Power-Saxe trio torched an armory to get weapons, and then robbed a bank. In the bank holdup, they shot a Boston policeman in the back. The Brandeis students were all convicted and sent to prison and the Brandeis professors all went back to their drawing boards to dream up another road to Utopia. Of course, the policeman’s wife and his nine children were simply forgotten.
This all happened more than 20 years after I arrived at Brandeis to put in my four years there. But even then, I learned a lot of pro-communist lies, such as the Rosenberg's were innocent and their atom-spy trial was simply thinly disguised anti-Semitism. Also, that the Korean War was solely the result of America's provocation, and that Alger Hiss was not a communist nor did he transmit secret data to the USSR, when in fact he was guilty of both. It took me 10 years of “attitude adjustment” to unlearn all the lies I learned at Brandeis.
How could Brandeis have so utterly departed from the original intention of its founders? It wasn’t supposed to turn out the way it did at all. Brandeis was founded in 1948 by prominent Jews concerned that many Jewish students were unfairly barred from elite universities by a widely enforced quota system, like today’s "Affirmative Action" but in reverse. To make up for this, Brandeis would offer a first-class education and select its students based upon merit alone and not quotas, and certainly not politics. In 1948, this was still an unusual policy.
Now those "prominent Jews" were self-made men who felt that they owed a great personal debt to America and that it was largely due to American freedoms that they succeeded. Like so many other successful Americans, they believed in “giving something back”, a phrase I heard often in those days. They believed that creating Brandeis was one way of giving something back. So it was quite natural for them to not tolerate even a hint of anti-Americanism.
For example, in seeking to give the nascent college a high profile, the founders enlisted Albert Einstein, but he soon parted ways. A major point of conflict: Einstein wanted to offer the presidency of the school to the far-left Harold Laski. But the most prominent of Brandeis' founders, George Alpert, refused, explaining that Laski was "a man utterly alien to American principles of democracy and tarred with the Communist brush... I can compromise on any subject but one: that one is Americanism."
But by the next generation, the children of those self-made men felt no such debt to America and indeed, even became attracted to the idea of changing America by revolutionary force.
That’s because Brandeis got caught up in the Intellectual fashion of the day which held that the Cold War was not due to Soviet aggression, but was really because of provocations by America. In 1947, the Truman Doctrine was created to contain Soviet expansionism and it was seen by the American Left as the biggest obstacle to world peace, and not about to change. Leftist feelings against American anti-communism increased and solidified worldwide during those years, including Brandeis.
Student radicals all across America demanded change and demonstrations against American foreign policy became the norm. Brandeis had its share of non-violent protests as students occupied an administration building and renamed Brandeis, “Malcolm X University”, but that wasn’t enough for some.
In yearning for political change, some radicals at Brandeis adopted the idea that robbery was a political act, and therefore excusable. Even violence became romantic as Kathy Power once invited a friend to go on a “commando raid” with her, just before the bank job. And so, over a very few years, some students got used to the idea that revolutionary change wasn’t so wrong after all, and was even necessary at times.
This all came about because in the years leading up to the violence done by the Brandeis student radicals, love of country was out and hate-America was in, and Brandeis turned into a platform for extremists, a very far cry from the Brandeis envisioned by its founders in 1948.
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Bio of the author:
"Dr. H. Peter Metzger graduated from Brandeis University in 1953, as part of its second graduating class. He received his doctorate in Biochemistry from Columbia University in 1965. In addition to scientific papers, he is the author of "The Coercive Utopians: Their Hidden Agenda" (Simon & Schuster) and wrote a weekly column for the New York Times Syndicate and later for the NEA called "Edge of Science," which examined the places where science and politics meet. He has also written several widely circulated pamphlets dedicated to exposing how certain complex laws designed to regulate technology are really hidden agendas for extremist politics. He has been retired since 1996".
