U.S. Orders Duke and U.N.C. to Recast Tone in Mideast Studies
The Education Department has ordered Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to remake the Middle East studies program run jointly by the two schools after concluding that it was offering students a biased curriculum that, among other complaints, did not present enough “positive” imagery of Judaism and Christianity in the region.
In a rare instance of federal intervention in college course content, the department asserted that the universities’ Middle East program violated the standards of a federal program that awards funding to international studies and foreign language programs. The inquiry was part of a far-reaching investigation into the program by the department, which under Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, has become increasingly aggressive in going after perceived anti-Israel bias in higher education.
I’m with Gore Vidal: The Abrahamic monotheisms are the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity. I’ll add that only if you live inside the bubble of Judaism or Christianity can you believe that they are uniquely virtuous and Islam uniquely evil; all are an engine of human misery.
It probably seems hard to believe nowadays, but religious violence was not always a staple of life. As Jonathan Kirsch shows convincingly in God Against the Gods, it is very much the case that religious warfare was all but unknown in the pagan world. After all, if you liked to eat rutabagas, and your neighbor had a god that helped to grow rutabagas, you were more likely to borrow that god than kill your neighbor.