At the invitation of the Student body, Professor Walid Phares, director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies gave a lecture on “Jihadi Terrorism and US Public education” at the Patrick Henry College in Virginia. In his remarks, Phares said  that “winning the conflict is possible only if the public is educated and informed”. Drawing examples from his books Future Jihad and The War of Ideas, Phares argued that “the present younger generation of American students should be able to do better than the previous generations in understanding the Jihadi terror threat, simply because they have had an opportunity to learn from NGOs, think tanks, and instructors who are not conditioned by the power of Oil producing regimes.”

Phares said: “for decades, Oil powers have inserted millions of dollars in our educational systems, in the West and particularly in America so that they can affect the teaching of Middle East Studies, Islamic Studies and International relations in a way that would promote their interests and the dominance of the apologist agenda. Jihad was equated with yoga and Terror was justified as a tool of the weak. While reality, Jihadism is a full fledged ideology of dominance and Terror has been used as a weapon in the name of the weak but to establish regimes to crush civil societies.” Phares, who taught at Florida Atlantic University for 12 years and is now teaching at National Defense University said “affecting the American classroom has affected the American News Room, for graduates from colleges have been denied a basic knowledge of the main conflicts in the Middle East and instead conditioned to read the entire tensions in the region as result of one conflict: The Arab Israeli one. Human Rights abuses and genocides have been hidden from the curriculum for years until the public pressed its own politicians and media to finally acknowledge that a genocide was taking place in Darfur, Lebanon was occupied by Syria, the Kurds were gassed, the Shia of Iraq persecuted, women in Afghanistan brutalized and students in Iran oppressed.”      

Phares invited students to challenge the previous academic agenda in the domain of social science and conduct their research in a way to develop a better Middle East and Foreign Policy programs. “Already we are witnessing the rise of new Middle East Studies with the formation of ASMEA (Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa) and the development of national security studies across the nation, unhindered by the Petro dollars offered by Wahabi circles to our top universities. This generation of American students can do much better in countering the Petro dollars influence, and help the nation countering the global threat of Jihadism,” said Phares.