As a psychologist, I can only conclude that the Western academy currently functions like a cult. Academics have been brainwashed and in turn view their teaching jobs as a way to indoctrinate rather than educate. Our universities do not function as institutions in which independent and diverse ideas are welcome.
Brainwashed people are usually not amenable to facts or to multiple and competing interpretations of those facts. Those academics who don’t want to hear about why anti-Americanism is wrong and self-destructive generally do not attend lectures that might set the record straight.
(If and when these academics do attend lectures, they usually come en masse to object and attack. The debate is uncivilized and often characterized by interruptions, accusations, curses, intimidation, threats, and group walkouts.)
Billions of people, including our own children and grandchildren, have been brainwashed against America, against Israel, against Jews and, paradoxically, against women – at least against those who live under Islamic domination. We have a serious fifth column in our midst, one that has been leading the culture war against the West.
Given that this is so, I believe there are certain things that we must do and keep doing in order to win the culture war.
First, those in possession of family fortunes they wish to donate to universities should think twice about doing so. At this point in history, it might be wiser to invest in conservative think tanks so that they might begin to offer courses for credit at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Second, we need to fund – seriously fund – a collective effort to combat the vulgar lies and vilification that have brainwashed so many. We need a War Room effort to counter the Big Lies. We need international radio and television channels to educate people both here and abroad. Thus, we must support the work that individuals such as Bat Ye’or, Andy Bostom, David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, Nidra Poller, Robert Spencer, this writer and others are doing to challenge the propaganda.
Third, we absolutely must defeat jihad. We must preempt Iran’s nuclear capacity. We must combat the hate propaganda against America, Israel, and women that characterizes so much of the Arab and Muslim world today. This is a very long educational and cultural process. And we must peg every peace and trade treaty with a Muslim country to the status of women in that country.
Parents must now understand that their children will probably be brainwashed against both America and Israel in their college classrooms. And that if students challenge this one-sided view of both history and contemporary reality, they risk being ostracized by other students and penalized by their professors.
It is therefore very important for parents to teach their children, both boys and girls, how to stand up to bullies; how to live with being “unpopular;” how to survive and flourish as an honorable minority. It is also important to learn how to present and interpret facts in a reason-driven way and how not to succumb to unreason and extreme emotion.
We must rescue language. It must bear some relationship to truth and morality. Everything is not relative. We must take back the campuses and allow intellectual diversity and truth-telling to flourish.
We must not allow our media or academics to continue to insist that Islam is not the problem. We must teach the history of jihad against infidels, and the history of how infidels (Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians) were treated under Islam. We must insist that criticism of America and Israel be balanced, not pathological, obsessive, cult-like. We must insist on civility in public discourse. We must model it for the coming generations.