The foreign assault on western intellectual assets and channels hardly looks an assault: it arrives with money, lots of it, and funds primary academic and media jobs that in turn boost portions of the economies of the open democracies.  Although in the United States that spending may look like Washington-business-as-usual, the yellow flags are going up.  Mainstream journalists and conservative intellectuals have found cause to revisit foreign state interests and related facilities and research grant funding only superficially intended to foster greater depth with integrity in the key policy analyses by the hires that benefit from those paychecks.

Related excerpts follow with the post capped by a 25-minute talk by Mitchel Bard on his findings related to influence from the middle east.

More than a dozen prominent Washington research groups have received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donors’ priorities, an investigation by The New York Times has found.

The money is increasingly transforming the once-staid think-tank world into a muscular arm of foreign governments’ lobbying in Washington. And it has set off troubling questions about intellectual freedom: Some scholars say they have been pressured to reach conclusions friendly to the government financing the research.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/us/politics/foreign-powers-buy-influence-at-think-tanks.html – 9/6/2014.

Let Brookings take Qatar’s money—or Russia’s, or China’s, or Burma’s, or Saudi Arabia’s—if it wants. But make them own it. Make them disclose it.

http://freebeacon.com/columns/this-is-not-what-democracy-looks-like/ – 9/19/2014

The Times article exposed — astonishingly — the corruption of liberal establishments such as the Brookings Institution, the Center for American Progress, and the National Democratic Institute. How honest, honorable, and unexpected from a newspaper that has become the nation’s billboard for unthinking liberal bromides. Conversely, the exposé found not a penny going to conservative institutions such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Hudson Institute.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/387939/think-tanks-sale-or-rent-daniel-pipes – 9/15/2014.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Act

Bard, Mitchel.  The Arab Lobby.  Broadside Books, 2011.

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