The Boston Globe reports:
A Saudi Arabian prince who is one of the world's richest people is giving $20 million to Harvard to establish a university-wide program in Islamic studies, Harvard officials said yesterday.
Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, whose net worth was estimated by Forbes magazine this year as $23.7 billion, is also donating $20 million to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., to promote Muslim-Christian dialogue and understanding.
The Harvard gift, which officials said was one of the 25 largest in the university's history, will pay for four new senior professors, one of whom will hold an endowed chair named for Prince Alwaleed. It will also provide start-up funding for a project to preserve and digitize significant Islamic documents that are in Harvard's possession and make them available on the Internet.
''We are very grateful to Prince Alwaleed for his generous gift to Harvard," university president Lawrence H. Summers said in a statement announcing the gift. ''This program will enable us to recruit additional faculty of the highest caliber, adding to our strong team of professors who are focusing on this important area of scholarship."
No word yet on whether the Sociology department or the Women's Studies department at Harvard will protest for better treatment of women and homosexuals in Saudi Arabia.Remember this is the same Prince Alwaleed who
Mayor Giuliani:
would not accept a $10 million donation for disaster relief from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a nephew of Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd, after the Prince suggested U.S. policies in the Middle East contributed to the September 11 attacks.
The Prince said he came to visit ‘Ground Zero’ to offer condolences to families of victims of the attack.
“At times like these, we must address some of the issues that led to such a criminal attack,” bin Talal said. “Our Palestinian brethren continue to be slaughtered at the hands of Israelis while the world turns the other cheek. Arabs believe that if the U.S. government wanted, it could play a pivotal role in pushing Israel to sign and fully implement a comprehensive peace treaty.” The Prince, however, does not speak officially for the Saudi Arabian government.
“I entirely reject that statement,” Giuliani said. “There is no moral equivalent for this [terrorist] act. There is no justification for it. The people who did it lost any right to ask for justification for it when they slaughtered 4,000 or 5,000 innocent people.”
Harvard doesn't worry about things like "moral equilavence" they'll take money from U.S. taxpayers,the Bin Laden family,and now the Prince.
