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Yale Establishes Islamic Law Center Thanks to $10M From Saudi-Sharia Banker, Alleged Bin Laden Financer

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Saleh-Abdullah-Kamel-Reuters-640x480Saleh Abdullah Kamel, a Saudi banker who is now worth billions of dollars thanks to his success with Sharia-compliant financing, has donated $10 million to Yale University as part of a successful effort to build an Islamic Law Center at the Ivy League school.

“Mr. Kamel’s extraordinary generosity will open up exciting new opportunities for Yale Law School and for the entire university, said Yale President Peter Salovey. “The Abdullah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization will enhance research opportunities for our students and other scholars and enable us to disseminate knowledge and insights for the benefit of scholars and leaders all over the world.”

Professor Anthony Kronman, a new co-director of the Islamic Law Center, said of the school’s new addition:

“The contemporary challenges of Islamic law are broadly relevant to political events throughout the entire Islamic world and those are developments that are watched by a much larger audience of people who in many cases have not much knowledge at all of the history and traditions of Islamic law.”

“It’s the responsibility of universities to teach and instruct and that obligation applies with particular force where an issue or a subject tends to be viewed in an incomplete or inadequate or even caricatured way. There the responsibility to teach and enlighten is even stronger,” he added. (Read more from “Yale Establishes Islamic Law Center Thanks to $10M From Saudi-Sharia Banker, Alleged Bin Laden Financer” HERE)

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Yale University “Beyond Human Personhood” Symposium: Christian Worldview is “Abominable”

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Photo Credit: LifeSite News

Photo Credit: LifeSite News

I am here at Yale University for the last day of the “Beyond Human Personhood” Symposium. As National Field Director for Personhood USA, I was asked by my superiors to attend to see if I could garner any insight in how a leftist worldview approaches the effort of convincing our culture to accept personhood for non-human actors such as: elephants, dolphins, great apes, artificial intelligences and extra-terrestrials.

I was a little surprised to find a modicum of common ground as I observed their intense passion to promote their worldview. I can admire their sacrifice and commitment to what they hold as the true nature of things. But I was wholly unprepared for the moral revulsion I felt as they described their overall agenda. They openly admitted that their goal is to “animalize” mankind as just another animal in the zoo we call earth. Their godless evolutionary pre-suppositions demand this. “Speciesism” was mentioned quite often—rightly accusing the Christian worldview of elevating all mankind as being “created in the image of God” and setting man apart from the other creatures of earth by placing all of God’s creation under mankind to act as steward “over the garden”.

Countless speakers decried human exceptionalism and Christianity’s role in promoting a worldview that demoted animals to a status under man’s “dominion.” As I mentioned earlier, I was struck by the sheer number of references to the early church fathers and various quotes from Christian theologians. This was a crowd who knew their church history and had made a conscious decision to reject the good news of Christ’s incarnation, death and resurrection for our soul’s sakes. And yes … there was a discussion on ensoulment and the fact that Christians denied ensoulment to non-humans. Again, I want to emphasize how unprepared I was to encounter such a high level of theological content, not to mention that it was all directed at me.

At first I thought that surely there were those in the audience that might question some of the presuppositions that were being openly proclaimed, perhaps a philosophy student with an inquiring mind who could connect the dots—particularly in the area of relegating man to the same level as other animals, thereby denigrating human life and dignity. Sadly, I didn’t find a single individual in a crowd of a 100 who spoke out against the obvious policy implications that these ideas have.

Read more from this story HERE.

Gunman Scare at Yale Believed to Be a Hoax

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Photo Credit: stepnoutYale University began the day Monday with a campus lockdown and swarms of law enforcement officials, but ended it with sighs of relief as reports of a gunman appeared to be a hoax.

Around 9:50 a.m. a call lasting a few seconds came into 911 from a pay phone off campus saying matter of factly that the caller’s roommate “was heading toward campus with a gun” to shoot people, said Officer David Hartman, a spokesman for the New Haven police. Half an hour later, the university broadcast an alert via text message, on Twitter and through blue security phones stationed around the campus and inside buildings. One Twitter post around 10:45 a.m. read: “Unconfirmed report of a person on campus w/ a gun. Please stay indoors.” Twenty-one minutes later the report was listed as confirmed.

“This is NOT a test,” Yale’s emergency management website said.

The campus, all but empty at the start of Thanksgiving break, was locked down, streets were immobilized, and local business was brought to a halt over the course of the day. Representatives of campus, city and state police departments, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, federal homeland security, Connecticut homeland security, as well as the F.B.I. and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives coordinated their efforts during a search of Yale’s Old Campus, where many freshmen live. Students still on hand watched through their windows as police officers, some in camouflage and helmets, spread out with their weapons.

Several people reported seeing a man with a gun, Officer Hartman said. “There is a fairly well-confirmed report of somebody on campus with a long gun,” he said a couple of hours after the search began. The police also were checking surveillance videos from the area.

Read more from this story HERE.

Ludicrous Federal Study Spends Hundreds of Thousands Examining Duck’s Private Parts

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Photo Credit: US Wildlife Service

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $384,949 grant to Yale University for a study on “Sexual Conflict, Social Behavior and the Evolution of Waterfowl Genitalia”, according to the recovery.gov website.

The grant description says,“The project examines how reproductive morphology covaries with season, age, and social environment in a diverse sample of duck species that differ in ecology, territoriality and breeding system.”

The grant was made available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the stimulus package.

The project has been receiving money from the NSF since 2009 and is slated for funding through July of this year.

“In the last quarter, we have prepared a manuscript for submission on the results of the first two years of experiments on social phenotypic plasticity in duck penis length in Lesser Scaup and Ruddy Duck. Experiments continued on genital social phenotypic plasticity in Mandarin Duck and Laysan Teal,” a 2010 fourth quarter recovery.gov update on the study says.

Read more from this story HERE.

Yale Hosts Workshop Teaching Sensitivity To Bestiality

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Photo Credit: Campus ReformOn Saturday afternoon, Yale hosted a “sensitivity training” in which students were asked to consider topics such as bestiality, incest, and accepting money for sex.

During the workshop, entitled, “Sex: Am I Normal,” students anonymously asked and answered questions about sex using their cell phones, and viewed the responses in real time in the form of bar charts.

The session was hosted by “sexologist” Dr. Jill McDevitt, who owns a sex store called Feminique in West Chester, Pa.

Survey responses revealed that nine percent of attendees had been paid for sex, 3 percent had engaged in bestiality, and 52 percent had participated in “consensual pain” during sex, according to an article published in the Yale Daily News on Monday.

Event director Giuliana Berry ’14 told Campus Reform in an interview on Monday that the workshop was brought to campus to teach students not to automatically judge people who may have engaged in these sorts of activities, but rather to respond with “understanding” and “compassion.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Harvard, Yale Deny Connection To Controversial Democratic Donor Under Scrutiny

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Photo Credit: APA controversial donor with ties to prominent Democrats who is under investigation by the FBI may not have the qualifications he claims.

The resume of Dr. Salomon Melgen, a Florida-based ophthalmologist and controversial Democratic donor, boasts medical education and experience at Harvard University, Yale University, and the University of Missouri.

But none of those schools says it can find any record of Melgen, who claims to be a Harvard alumnus, the former chief resident of the University of Missouri’s ophthalmology department, and a former Yale intern.

Melgen is at the center of a Senate panel probing potential ethics violations by Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), who may have used his official position to benefit Melgen, a major campaign contributor.

Menendez is also under scrutiny for failing to disclose his use of Melgen’s private jet to take trips to the Dominican Republic in 2010. Menendez denied wrongdoing but in January of this year wrote Melgen a personal check for $58,500 to cover the cost of the flights.

Read more from this story HERE.