It wasn t quite as headline-grabbing as the Sex Workers Art Show that cost William & Mary president Gene Nichols his job Tuesday, but two of the Washington region s best-known Catholic universities also found themselves embroiled in controversy this past week for reasons that have raised serious questions about their religious charters and academic freedom. Georgetown University came under fire for accepting $20 million from the Saudis, who actively persecute Christians in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Catholic University of America administrators raised hackles by abruptly canceling a lecture series after a liberal advocacy group claimed two of the scheduled speakers were anti-Semitic. Georgetown: See no evil On Thursday, Rep. Frank Wolf, R-VA, sent a letter to Georgetown president John DeGioia, questioning the university s acceptance of a $20 million donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal for the university s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. The school trains many U.S. Foreign Service officers, and the congressman wants to know if any Saudi funds are being used for that purpose. Wolf, himself a G town Law grad, also wants to know if any of the Center s studies or publications have ever focused on the inconsistencies of [Saudi Arabia s] policies with U.S. priorities and values, particularly in the fields of human rights, religious freedom, women s and minority rights, due process, protection of foreign workers and the rule of law. He also asked Dr. DeGioia if the Center has produced any critical analysis of Saudi links to Islamic terrorists, or its use of controversial textbooks cited by the State Dept. and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom as contributing to the rise of violence and anti-Americanism. Good questions. Wolf s press secretary promised to get back to me when they got some answers. G town is a private university, so it can accept contributions from whomever it chooses. But when the money comes from a representative of a regime that actively persecutes Catholics for practicing their faith, their motives must be questioned. $20 million apparently buys a lot of look-the-other-way. Catholic U: Hear no evil Across town, Catholic University abruptly cancelled a lecture series after the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) alerted university officials to the raging anti-Semitism of two scheduled speakers. Organizer Tim Ehlman said the goal of the 11-part lecture series originally sponsored by CUA s School of Architecture was to discover how to design a Catholic community, and the role of religious communities in creating alternatives to suburban sprawl. The two controversial panelists were former Navy Lt. Cmdr. John Sharpe and Dr. E. Michael Jones, editor of the Indiana-based Culture Wars magazine. Jones was scheduled to speak Monday on the nature of community, and Sharpe s presentation on property ownership was scheduled for April 23. The SPLC s Mark Potokcharacterized both men as raging anti- Semites& not Latin Mass traditionalists, but really out there.” Potok said the goal of contacting the university was “not to chase them all over town from hotel to hotel,” but rather to notify the university of their true identity. In a one-line response to SPLC s inquiries, Victor Nakas, CUA s associate provost for public affairs, said: We have cancelled the lecture series. The individuals you reference below will not be speaking on our campus. The rest of the lectures will tentatively be held at the Catholic Information Center in downtown Washington, D.C. As of Wednesday, the center had not been contacted by anyone objecting to the event. Kevin Jones, the center s events coordinator, told Examiner intern Ben Newell, a CUA student, that “we are hosting it as a last-minute venue.” Potok is the editor of The Intelligence Report, which published a major piece in Jan. 2007 entitled The New Crusaders. He told me that SPLC did not call to complain or even try to force CUA to cancel the lectures, just to make them aware who these people were. But the article by SPLC s director of research, Heidi Beirich, which is very critical of what it calls radical traditionalist Catholics, contains just one line about Sharpe: John Sharpe, head of the anti-Semitic Legion of St. Louis, attended the 2006 conference of American Renaissance, a racist publication that specializes in race and intelligence. A quick check of the Legion of St. Louis website did not reveal any obvious raging anti-Semitic remarks, so I asked Potok to email me specific examples. I m still waiting. Several books published by IHS Press, a publishing venture Sharpe started, were criticized by SLPC as containing articles by racists and anti-Semites. But in a letter defending their son, Sharpe s parents pointed out that they also contain articles by well-known Jewish authors Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Paul Gottfried, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Jeff Steinberg. E. Michael Jones was named as one of SPLC s Dirty Dozen for supposedly being increasingly focused on the alleged evils of the Jews. But Jones called the anti-Semitic charges against him outrageous. Everything I have said is totally consistent with the teachings of the Catholic Church…We were Catholics talking to other Catholics about community, he told The Washington Times. Beirich accused Jones of all the usual anti-Semitic canards — the ideas that Jewish media elites run the country, that Jews are major players in pornography, and that Jews are behind Masonry and the French Revolution again without citing specific examples. So I Googled Jones. In an Oct. 2006 article, The Conversion of the Revolutionary Jew, he wrote: Anti-Semitism now has an entirely different meaning. An anti-Semite used to be someone who didn t like Jews. Now it is someone whom the Jews don t like. No Christian can in good conscience be an anti-Semite, but every Christian, insofar as he is a Christian, must be anti-Jewish. The article then goes on to list 12 views considered by the State Dept. as anti-Semitic, including strong anti-Israel sentiment. Jones believes in converting Jews to Christianity, a highly politically-incorrect view also held by Pope Benedict XVI. But in the same article he says: The Church is not and cannot possibly be anti-Semitic, because the term refers primarily to race and racial hatred. The Church cannot promote racial hatred of any group, certainly not of the Jews because its founder was a member of that racial group…. Anti-Semitism, if by that term we mean hatred of the Jews because of immutable and ineradicable racial characteristics, is wrong. Jones categorically denies being anti-Semitic. That s not true. I wrote a theological book on the Jews ( The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit ) that Mr. Potok doesn t like, he told me. The dean (at CUA) didn t bother to call anybody before pulling the rug totally out from under us. To make things even more confusing, an article published in the 2004 Jewish Quarterly entitled Triple Exthnics: Jews in the American porn industry by author Nathan Abrams raises one of the same points Beirich accuses Jones of making. Does that mean that Abrams is a raging anti-Semitic too? Then there s this: In David Horowitz Frontpage Magazine, former Boston Herald writer Don Feder says he was slimed by the SPLC, and that the radical group makes the Anti-Defamation League and the ACLU seem nuanced, objective and calm by comparison. And a 2000 article in Harper’s Magazine by Ken Silverstein is entitled: How the Southern Poverty Law Center profits from intolerance. Bottom line: Are Jones and Sharpe raging anti-Semites who should not be allowed to speak on any Catholic campus, even on a topic that has nothing whatsoever to do with Jews? If they are, the SPLC hasn t proved it beyond a reasonable doubt. All of the citations the group provided were SPLC s interpretation of what the two men supposedly espouse, not their own words. Accusing somebody of being a raging anti-Semite is a very serious charge; those who make it should be required to provide irrefutable proof. So far, SPLC hasn t, so it s impossible for an objective observer to tell whether the accusations against the two are true or whether SPLC is just using them as fodder for its next direct mail broadside. That being the case, shouldn t the benefit of the doubt be in favor of free speech? I tried to ask CUA officials this question, but they didn t return my call. University administrators are supposed to be defenders of academic freedom, which by definition is the right to pursue even highly unpopular topics, because if everybody agreed with everybody else, protecting speech would not be necessary. By kicking the lecture series on Catholic communities off campus without irrefutable proofthese two panelists are guilty as charged, CUA officials betrayed not only them, but their own educational mission as well.
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