By Mike Gonzalez It’s bad enough to see anti-Semitism stalking our universities again; it’s even worse to discover that your tax dollars are paying for it. Government-funded anti-Semitism doesn’t stalk American campuses with pitchforks and torches. Rather, it comes clothed in the autumn tweeds of the faculty lounge or the dungarees of human rights campaigners. We’re talking about the activities of “area studies centers” housed at universities across the country and partly funded by Title VI of the Higher Education Act. For decades now they have simply ignored their mandate to provide instruction in the national interest. In fact, the centers often work to thwart American foreign policy goals. The centers have strayed so far from their original intent that a paper I wrote last month for The Heritage Foundation called for the outright elimination of Title VI. All the centers—regardless of their “academic” specialties—exhibit the rigid and intolerant adherence to leftist causes that afflicts faculties across the country. And one of the most deeply affected areas is that of Middle Eastern Studies. The depth of the problem was revealed in a damning joint statement released yesterday by 10 Jewish groups. They put the Middle Eastern Studies centers under a microscope and found rampant anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli animus at America’s “best” campuses, where we send our sons and daughters to prepare them to lead the country one day. One study, by a group called the AMCHA Initiative, found for example that 84 percent of the speakers at UCLA’s Gustav E. von Grunebaum Center for Near East Studies had engaged in anti-Semitic activity, with some even condoning terrorism. AMCHA scrupulously adhered to definitions of anti-Semitic activities used by our own U.S. Department of State. Title VI pays for this extremism by funding 10 programs that provide instruction in languages and regional studies that could potentially become key to the national interest. Most of the $97.5 million that taxpayers spent on Title VI programs in 2010 went to 125 National Resource Centers at U.S. universities and to Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS). Most of the FLAS money ends up being spent in the centers. From the beginning in 1958, the title’s remit was to “insure trained manpower of sufficient quality and quantity to meet the national defense needs of the United States.” As late as 2008, Congress made clear that studies at these centers were meant to address “national needs.” No matter. Scholar Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, one of the 10 groups, said “American taxpayers should not fund programs that aim to weaken resolve and thwart policies.” We couldn’t agree more at Heritage. The groups do not go as far as we did in calling for outright elimination of Title VI and redirecting all or part of the money to the National Security Education Program. All they do is call for Congress to exercise adult supervision and make sure that anti-Semitic and anti-U.S. “scholarship” will no longer be funded. We have given up hope that this can be achieved. Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, is the author of the book “A Race for the Future: How Conservatives Can Break the Liberal Monopoly on Hispanic Americans.”