DePaul gets hit hard again by Frontpage Magazine

We're familiar with Thomas Ryan, who wrote eloquently about the PC battle that faced Southern Illinois University history professor Jonathan Bean last month.

This time Ryan fires away at DePaul, and surprisingly, there is not so much about Thomas Klocek in the article.

Here is an excerpt, and a pretty frightening one, too. The entire article, Teaching and Terror at DePaul, is here.

DePaul University, the largest Catholic university in the nation, has recently taken strides in embracing the anti-Israel fringe that has infiltrated its faculty and student body. In September of 2004, professor Thomas Klocek, after 14 years of service to the school, was suspended for verbally engaging members of the pro-Palestinian extremist group Students for Justice in Palestine, a group whose 2002 national conference was sponsored by the Islamic Association for Palestine, an organization that raises money for the families of suicide bombers. In September of 2003, DePaul hired notorious Holocaust Denier and Hezbollah defender Norman Finkelstein as a full-time assistant professor in its political science department. Now DePaul has made a strategic decision to become one of the leading universities in the country for Islamic Studies, filling the program’s faculty with professors resolved to spreading the word of anti-Israel zealots.

In September of 2004, DePaul launched its Islamic World Studies Program, offering students of the University both a major and minor in the subject of Islamic religion and culture. The program notes that “the core course work in Islam, language study, fieldwork, as well as opportunities for study abroad, and service learning would afford students an opportunity to develop an understanding of the Islamic world from local as well as international perspectives. This approach to the study of Islam is currently unmatched anywhere else in the United States and perhaps the world.” What the program’s boilerplate doesn’t mention to prospective students is its overt pro-Palestinian slant, which encompasses both the faculty and course material.

Serving as the Director of the Islamic World Studies Program is Aminah Beverly McCloud, a follower of Louis Farrakhan who helped DePaul launch the department in response to what she believes is mass ignorance among Americans about the general Islamic world. McCloud has contended “that Islam was the core of civilization and a worldwide religion is absent from undergraduate study. The only thing talked about worldwide is Muslim terrorists.” Although McCloud insists that she seeks to teach students about facets of Islam removed from fundamentalist militancy, McCloud’s connections to, and use of books in favor of, Islamic extremism prove otherwise.