In June 2019, in response to an allegation by Rep. George Holding (R-N.C.) that the Duke-University of North Carolina Consortium for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) hosted a conference, “Conflict Over Gaza,” with “anti-Israel bias and anti-Semitic rhetoric,” Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos ordered an investigation of the program. On August 29, the Department of Education threatened to terminate its grant to the Consortium because some of its courses and activities did not satisfy the legal requirement (under Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965) to “support the development of foreign language and international expertise for the benefit of U.S. national security and economic stability.”
While CMES programs place “considerable emphasis” on positive aspects of Islam, Robert King, Assistant Secretary of the DOE declared, “there is an absolute absence of any similar focus on the positive aspects of Christianity, Judaism, or any other religion or belief system in the Middle East” or on discrimination faced by Christians, Jews, and others. Pandering, perhaps, to cultural warriors who judge books by their covers, King maintained as well that a conference on “Love and Desire in Modern Iran” and academic papers on “Performance, Gender-Bending and Subversion in Early Modern Ottoman Intellectual History” and on “Radical Love: Teachings from Islamic Mystical Tradition” were not relevant to the objectives of the grant.
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