Ideas do indeed have consequences and the ideas that flow from University-based Middle East Studies Centers often have strong pro-Arab, anti-Israeli influence in policy-making sectors of the State Department and the White House itself.  According to Martin Kramer, one of the few Israeli policy scholars who has ever served in such institutions – always as a visitor funded by extra-university sources – this is true over all the western world but particularly in the United States.For many years head of strategic studies at Tel Aviv University and now President of Shalem College in Jerusalem, he joined us together with Charles Lipson of the University of Chicago for a discussion of the connection between Muslim jihadist extremism and the views expressed within this sector of American academia, up to and definitely including the new decapitation-prone “Islamic State.”