patrick.net

Why are Harvard and MIT selling out to the Saudis?
Harvard and MIT will sell anything to anybody, regardless of the national interest

It’s all relative with Saudi Arabia. Everyone who matters is related to everyone else. Even relative to the degraded standards of Afro-kleptocracy and Arab dictatorship, the Saudi state is nothing more than the al-Saud family business, plus its clerical and military appendages. And relatively speaking, the Saudis are hypocrites even by the low standards of Arab governance. They have always divided the world into those with whom they are prepared admit economic relations, and those with whom they claim not to have relations of any kind, but secretly do.

The former include Saudi Arabia’s slave class of imported servants and construction workers, oil-hungry governments. and the Western oil companies who have enriched themselves and Saudi Arabia, albeit to the inconvenience of anyone wishing to get on a plane, enter a high building, or attend a Christmas market. The latter category includes the State of Israel, the CIA, the army of Wahhabist bigots now preaching hate and murder at a Saudi-funded mosque near you, and, perhaps not coincidentally, the army of prostitutes and drug dealers who cater to the Saudi summer exodus to London.

On vacation as in everything else, Saudi Arabia is a society on the down-low. The 9/11 attacks blew the door off the closet. The whole world now knows that the Saudis have lived a double life. The pious custodians of the Two Holy Mosques have funded terrorism against the West and spread sectarian hatred. Still, they have dodged much of their liability. Apparently, we need them for our War on the Terror that they did so much to create. ...

Harvard and MIT are two of the most politically-correct institutions on the planet. Both are in Cambridge, MA, whose only competitor for the title of most politically-correct city in the world is Berkeley, CA. Harvard and Cambridge also produced Facebook. While Americans pondered the abuse of privacy by social media, Mohammed Bin Salman was touring IBM’s Cambridge research facility. This, Peterson and Katz wrote, ‘recently partnered with MIT to form an artificial intelligence research laboratory in exchange for a $240m commitment to the university’. Bin Salman also observed a ‘demonstration’ by Boston Dynamics, an ‘MIT partner that builds robots for the US military’.

The Saudis, Petersen and Katz wrote, are conducting a ‘PR campaign’ in the US, with consultants like McKinsey rebranding Bin Salman as a ‘reformer’. ...

I was going to ask Harvard’s president, the ironically named Drew Faust, how she can reconcile this pandering to Saudi money with the university’s stated commitments to equality, freedom, ’social justice’, the environment and all the other stuff about speaking truth to power. But then I remembered that her testimony is only worth half that of a man’s, and though it best that her opinion, like her face, should remain veiled.