Brown Creates School of International and Public Affairs
Same old, same old as to Israel/Palestinians?
On May 29 Brown announced the creation of a “School of International and Public Affairs”, effective July 1, 2025. According to President Paxson, the new school “will provide graduates with deep knowledge of policy and highly developed analytical skills that will enable them to serve their communities, the nation and the world”. Provost Doyle, with reference to Brown’s 2014 strategic plan, added that the new school is “in keeping with a charge in the plan to invest in scholarship that promotes peaceful, just and prosperous societies”. The announcement also quoted current Watson Institute Dean Edward Steinfeld on “rising geopolitical tensions” as one of the reasons Brown created the school.
As demonstrated in posts I have been writing since August of 2021, scholarship, much less “scholarship that promotes peaceful, just and prosperous societies” is completely absent from Brown’s Center for Middle East Studies (“CMES”). It is an anti-intellectual program dedicated to precisely the opposite - advancing Palestinian agitprop without regard to anything remotely resembling “scholarship”. In fact, CMES fuels the “rising geopolitical tensions” about which Brown is supposedly concerned.
One undeniable cause of “rising geopolitical tensions” is the October 7 Hamas-initiated war against Israel. A related cause is the demonstrably false claim that Israel is engaging in “genocide” in the exercise of its right to defend itself against the expressly-stated genocidal intent of the rapists, murderers of children and the elderly, beheaders and hostage takers of the Islamonazis of Hamas blindly supported by so many brainwashed Brown students, faculty and administrators.
I have a naive hope that at some point someone at Brown might muster sufficient intellectual curiosity to try to begin to understand what “genocide” means before mindlessly tossing the word around. Accordingly, also coincidentally on May 29, I wrote Steinfeld and Professor Wendy Schiller, who will serve as interim director of the Watson Institute beginning July 1, as follows:
“Subject: Proposing Eli Rosenbaum as Watson Institute Speaker
Eli Rosenbaum, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (B.S. and MBA) and Harvard Law School, devoted nearly 40 years to the investigation and prosecution of war criminals and violators of human rights. He led the US Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations from 1995 to 2010 when it was merged into DOJ’s Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section. After the merger, he was named Director of Human Rights Enforcement Strategy and Policy. In his various prosecutorial positions, he investigated and successfully tried Nazi war criminals and other human rights violators and oversaw investigations and trials conducted by others. In June of 2022, Attorney General Garland appointed him to serve as DOJ’s Counselor for War Crimes Accountability and to investigate possible war crimes committed by the Russians in the Ukraine. His biography is attached below.
Given Mr. Rosenbaum’s uniquely extensive experience with such legal concepts as the laws of war and genocide, I believe there is no person in the US, perhaps the world, better able to address these and related issues in the context of the current Hamas-initiated war against Israel. Accordingly, I asked Mr. Rosenbaum whether he would be willing to give a presentation, or to participate in a debate, about such issues at Brown this coming fall. He advised that he would be pleased to do so.
Also attached below for your reference is the keynote speech Mr. Rosenbaum gave earlier this month to the ‘2024 Nuremberg Project Lawyers Luncheon’ entitled “International Criminal Law: Its Use and Abuse from Nuremberg to the Present”.
I have copied Mr. Rosenbaum on this communication. I hope that in light of both Brown’s educational mission and the Watson Institute’s commitment to public service that the University will promptly take him up on his willingness to appear at Brown.”
Rosenbaum’s biography notes that he has received numerous awards honoring his commitment to human rights. His 1993 book - “Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up” - recounted the investigation he led that resulted in the exposure of Nazi criminal and former UN Secretary General Waldheim. The book was selected by the San Francisco Chronicle for “Best Books of 1993” and by the New York Times for “Notable Books of 1993”. He has appeared on CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, and BBC as well as on NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered”.
In his Nuremberg Project speech, Rosenbaum noted that “grotesque accusations of ‘genocide’ have been leveled against Israel on college campuses”. He also makes the obvious point, familiar to anyone with the slightest degree of familiarity with applicable law, that defining genocide is not merely the brain-dead numbers game played by the press and students and faculty at Brown.
But even if defining “genocide” was a simple-minded numbers game, and leaving aside Hamas’ decision to gleefully sacrifice its own men, women and children for PR purposes, the blithely accepted Hamas numbers are often pure fiction. Hamas itself, as well as the UN and the Associated Press, have now conceded as much; Abraham Wyner, a statistics professor at Penn, arrived at that conclusion months ago.
A related PR fiction cooked up by Hamas, and therefore reflexively bought by the press and far too many Brown students and faculty, is that of “innocent civilians”, a fiction made clear in connection with Israel’s rescue of four hostages several days ago. How many of those “innocent civilians” were armed and shooting at IDF soldiers?; was “journalist” Abdallah Aljamani, a reporter for “Palestine Chronicle” who reportedly kept three of the four rescued hostages in his home and was killed in the rescue, an “innocent civilian”? No sentient person could possibly believe that. (Of course Aljamani’s conduct calls into question who is, and isn’t, a “journalist” for purposes of statistics often used by Hamas for PR purposes and its acolytes in the press.)
Brown Professors Omer Bartov, Glenn Loury, Nadje Al-Ali and Beshara Doumani were copied on my communication to Steinfeld and Schiller. I copied Bartov, a Holocaust historian, because a mere five or six weeks after October 7 he had already come come to the stunning and indefensible conclusion that Israel was likely engaging in war crimes; I copied Loury because last December he, in effect, analogized Gaza to Hiroshima thereby evidencing a profound level of ignorance as to both, as well as the laws of war. If either Bartov or Loury has the courage of his respective convictions, each would welcome the opportunity to have a discussion or debate with Rosenbaum. And if the leadership of Brown’s Watson Institute, the precursor to the university’s newly announced School of International and Public Affairs effective July, 2025, is even remotely serious about “scholarship that promotes peaceful, just and prosperous societies”, Watson leadership would not just welcome such a debate but insist upon it. (I copied Al-Ali and Doumani just for the record. Al-Ali is the Director of CMES with a long history of anti-Semitic comments well-documented by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (“CAMERA”) including before being hired by Brown. Doumani holds an endowed chair at Brown funded, in part, by the “Palestinian Territories”. They are both Palestinian/Hamas apologists so wedded to peddling anti-Zionist/anti-Semitic narratives that they are not competent to engage in any worthwhile, much less scholarly, discussion with Rosenbaum, or anybody else, interested in rationally addressing the relevant issues.)
Another proclaimed, self-congratulatory approach of Brown’s new School of International and Public Affairs is to advance knowledge “through joint appointments with a wide range of [Brown’s] academic departments”. In the abstract, that sounds like a good idea. But given Brown’s blinkered faculty, especially when it comes to Israel/Palestinians, it borders on the frightening.
A subscriber to these Substack posts, a Brown graduate of the 1970s, wrote to me to point out that narrow mindedness and academic bias is by no means limited to CMES:
“I recently heard Larry Summers speak about how the elite universities in the US have lost their way by diminishing the traditional values that many of us view as core to a university education (excellence, the pursuit of truth, integrity and equality of opportunity). Summers argues that these are now at best secondary values and the universities have come to make primary the values of social justice, identity, the veneration of feeling over the rational, and the subjective over the objective. He argues that this transformation has caused a major schism between the universities and the US public at large…
I decided to test Summers' views by looking at the Brown University course catalogue focusing on my former area of concentration in history. It's an interesting exercise and I invite you to do the same in your prior area of concentration. While I took many courses in different disciplines under what was then called the New Curriculum, but is no longer new and now called the Open Curriculum, I majored in history and learned much from the many history courses I took. I think it is fair to say that those courses were formative in developing my analytical and writing skills and to some extent the way in which I viewed the world.
I looked at the current History Department offerings and compared them to the many courses I took five decades ago. The courses I took back then are no longer offered and the courses offered today were not available to me. But perhaps more significantly, I looked at the courses offered today as described in the course catalogue and tested Summer's argument that they focus on the values of social justice, identity, feeling and the subjective over the objective. Since the descriptions are a short paragraph, it may be insufficient to reach any definitive conclusions, but surely the evidence available in the course descriptions supports Summers' views. At a high level here is what I found:
There are no courses on the founding of our Republic, the Founding Fathers and the Constitution and other core documents. There is one course by Seth Rockman entitledThe Early Republic of the United States. However, his speciality is slavery and capitalism.
I looked in vain for courses on the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Rise of Nations in Europe, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
There is a course on Empires in America to 1890, with the following description:In this class, we’ll consider some of the forms of empire-building by various groups of indigenous and colonizing peoples in what is now the United States in order to understand the development of imperial U.S. power in both domestic and international contexts. Rather than resting upon a foregone conclusion of European settler colonial “success,” the course explores the contingent and incomplete nature of empire-building even within unbalanced power relationships.
I could find no courses on 20th Century European History so the First and Second World Wars, the rise of totalitarianism , the Great Depression and the post World War II Cold War period are no longer taught, although they may be subsumed in other courses in some way. Hard to be sure.
There is a course entitled Understanding the Palestinians with the following description: Palestinians are largely absent in histories of Palestine/Israel. This course introduces new scholarship that draws on local sources, oral history, ethnographic research to help us explore three fundamental questions: Who are the Palestinians? What do they want? And why has the Palestinian question become a central issue in global debates about the making of the modern world and its potential futures? The course covers the modern period (1750 to the present) and engages larger themes of capitalist transformation, imperialism, settler-colonialism, nationalism, and indigeneity.
There is no comparable course on the founding of Israel or the rise of Zionism.
There are a number of courses on African Experiences, Ecology, the struggles of Palestinians, Irish, Kurds, Kashmiris, Tamils, and Indigenous Americans as depicted in film, slavery, sexuality in Medieval times --but no courses focused on teaching the centrality of Western civilization from Medieval times through the 20th Century…
[Y]ou have appropriately focused in your Substack on Brown's Middle Eastern Study Department and made a compelling showing of the propagandistic and one sided views in that one Department. My cursory look at the History Department suggests that the problems go beyond any single department at Brown. I invite you to look beyond it to your former area of concentration. The transformation in values Larry Summers speaks about has gone far beyond one Department at Brown.”
As one of the three CAMERA Reports - all three of which continue to be ignored by Brown - has pointed out, “nearly one in three faculty members of [CMES] are supporters of the BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanction] Movement Against Israel. Moreover, according to the AMCHA Initiative whose “mission is to document, investigate and combat antisemitism on U.S. college campuses” cited by CAMERA: “the presence and number of of faculty who expressed support for an academic boycott of Israel prior to the onset of the [2021] Israel-Hamas war were strongly and reliably associated with every measure of faculty and student-perpetrated antisemitic activity” and “Brown University has one of the highest numbers of faculty BDS supporters, comparable to Harvard University which has three times as many total faculty”.
In short, the idea that multiple faculty departments at Brown might be involved in addressing issues, e.g., related to Israel/Palestinians, especially together with the propagandizing political hacks of CMES, is cause for extreme concern, to put it mildly.
Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that Brown will either shut down CMES or neuter its malign influence, e.g., by hiring and promotion freezes, funding request denials, and/or by severing any and all connections, direct or indirect, with Hamas-stronghold Birzeit University. That said, with the creation of its School of International and Political Affairs, Brown now has a real opportunity. It can do the right thing by promptly inviting Eli Rosenbaum to campus this coming fall, and many others, whose views on Israel/Palestinians are thoughtful and well-informed, and rationally and fairly expressed, so as to “create a nexus for the campus-wide pursuit of global knowledge, educational leadership and applicable societal solutions” in the words of Provost Doyle. Alternatively, Brown can continue to enable the hackneyed, destructive, anti-Semitic course charted for the last ten plus years by the “educators” of CMES with their mindless, going nowhere sloganeering which stands in stark contradiction to what Brown purports to achieve with its new school, i.e., “to expand and strengthen research and teaching on the world’s most pressing economic, political, social and policy challenges.” The ball is in Brown’s court.
Willis J. Goldsmith, Brown Class of 1969