On March 29, the New York Post published an “Opinion” written by Ricki Hollander, Senior Researcher at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (“CAMERA”) addressing, among other things, Brown’s Choices program for high school students. Her article is entitled “How Brown University spreads antisemitism even to high schoolers”.
On March 30, Cass Cliatt, Brown’s Senior Vice President for Communications, wrote to the Post “seeking an immediate correction of two blatant errors of fact” in Hollander’s piece. Cliatt claimed first that ‘there is no identifiable source for the false claim that there was ever federal data of $11million received by Brown by (sic) the Palestinian Territories, as the article claims”. The second supposed blatant error of fact in Hollander’s opinion piece according to Cliatt was that “curriculum resources on the Middle East ‘are used by 1 million students across the United States and in 200 international schools. There is no basis for this number.” A copy of Cliatt’s letter of March 30 is attached below.
On March 31, Brown Provost Francis J. Doyle, III wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Post, asserting that in Hollander’s opinion piece, “through deliberate omissions, selective excerpts , and partial quotations, we see an effort to misrepresent an expansive and multi-faceted curriculum that is designed to be taught in its totality-not used for biased purposes, as reflected in the article.” He goes on to note supposedly “false claims about how academic programs are funded”. Like Cliatt he claims “there is no credible source for the fabricated claims [about funding] in [Hollander’s] article.” A copy of Doyle’s letter is attached below as well.
It appears that the New York Post has (a) refused to make “an immediate correction” of either of the two points noted by Cliatt and (b) so far refused to publish Doyle’s letter to the editor. In this regard, the newspaper did Brown a service by not exposing the carelessness, shoddy analysis and smug dismissals of fact by two senior members of the Brown administration.
(1) The Cliatt letter:
According to Cliatt, “there is no identifiable source” for Hollander’s assertions about the funding of the Choices program. Apparently Cliatt (and Doyle), incredibly enough, somehow managed to miss the following sentence in Hollander’s opinion article:
“Notably, per a review of federal data by GoLocal, Brown University received over $11 million in funding from the “Palestinian territories” which includes money for an endowment of the professorship Doumani holds”.
The November 29, 2023 GoLocalProv goes into great detail on Brown’s funding by the Palestinians. So far as I am able to determine, Brown never contested - until now - the $11mm number. Apparently the 500,000+ circulation of the New York Post caught Brown’s attention.
If Brown had or has a problem with how, over four months ago, GoLocalProv described Palestinian funding of Brown, the university should have gone/be going to GoLocalProv, not CAMERA or the New York Post. But for two very high ranking Brown administrators to say there was no “identifiable source (Cliatt) or “credible source” (Doyle) for what Hollander wrote about such funding is a pathetic commentary on the quality of the work product Brown submitted in response to the Hollander article.
What Cliatt conceded in her letter about funding is as troubling as what she and Doyle missed. Specifically she admitted that Brown received “a single gift of $643,000 from the Palestinian Territories” in 2020. Why were the supposedly perpetually impoverished Palestinians giving Brown any money at all, much less that much money? What did the Palestinians want from Brown - or get from Brown - in return? One good guess would be continued support for Beshara Doumani and the anti-Zionism/anti-Semitism he peddles. (Neither Cliatt nor Doyle complained of Hollander’s references to the promotion of the Choices curriculum by the Qatar Fund International.)
Cliatt’s letter seeking a correction as to the scope of the Choices program is jaw-dropping. First, the CAMERA statement that Choices is used by “1 million students across the United States and in 200 international schools” comes from the Choices website. To be sure, there is no way to determine from the website exactly how many high school students across the country and around the world access the mendacious and blatantly anti-Zionist/anti-Semitic Middle East component of Choices. But the university helpfully provides some guidance. According to the Cliatt letter, “The number of students using the Middle East curriculum is a small fraction of the 1 million that is quoted in the piece, estimated at less (sic) than 80,000.”
That somewhere around 80,000 young minds are being poisoned on the Middle East by Choices, contrary to what Cliatt implied, is no small matter. Moreover, Brown provides no further detail on the approximately 80,000 students. It may well be more than 80,000 of course but was it 80,000 in 2023? What is the estimate for 2024? If the best defense Brown can muster for the scope of the Choices program on the Middle East is that it is not a big deal because only around 80,000 high schoolers were exposed to it, it is no defense at all.
(2) The Doyle Letter:
Doyle employs the usual platitudes in defending what goes on in Middle East Studies at Brown: “Universities bear a responsibility for interrogating widely varying - and sometimes highly debated - perspectives and viewpoints” even though the evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary as I and others have been pointing out for years. There are no “widely varying” perspectives brought to bear in Brown’s Center for Middle East Studies (“CMES”). It is an echo chamber of anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism that is nothing more than a platform for pushing false narratives in support of the Hamas/Palestinian agenda.
He also falls back on the usual dodges: the Hollander piece contains, e.g. “deliberate omissions, selective excerpts and partial quotations”. Yet never once does Doyle provide a single example, a single piece of evidence justifying any of his comments. The reason is obvious. He cannot show that anything reported on by CAMERA is false. If he wants to debate the specifics of what CAMERA has reported on, which he absolutely is free to do, let him deny that, for example, even one of the many cited professors did not say what CAMERA reported him/her to have said. He won’t, and the university won’t, because it cannot be done.
Doyle also cites “the Illinois Holocaust Museum near Chicago, and numerous Holocaust and genocide centers [provide] school materials”. Whatever the details of such arrangements may be, that Brown wraps itself in such organizations (and otherwise puts Jewish anti-Zionists/anti-Semites out front on a regular basis is not merely highly offensive. It is part and parcel of, e.g., the Holocaust Inversion theory that CMES sells. That is, for example, the notion that what is going on in Gaza as a result of the Hamas-initiated war against Israel is somehow analogous to the Holocaust. That is a preposterous notion on too many levels to enumerate.
The Cliatt and Doyle letters to the New York Post are further evidence of Brown’s refusal to deal with what goes on in CMES. The university so often and so confidently purports to know the difference between right and wrong on so many issues. What goes on in CMES is clearly wrong. If any Brown faculty member or any Brown academic department trafficked in the lies and hate speech that predominate in CMES, that faculty member (tenured or not) and that department would be dealt with severely. That CMES gets a complete pass, even praise, is a stain on Brown that one day will hopefully be erased.
Willis J. Goldsmith, Brown Class of 1969