<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Richard Cravatts</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/author/richard-cravatts/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 07:56:08 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en-US</language>
		<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
		<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
	
	<item>
		<title>It’s Jew-Hatred, Stupid</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-cravatts/its-jew-hatred-stupid/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=its-jew-hatred-stupid</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-cravatts/its-jew-hatred-stupid/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 27 Jun 2014 04:28:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kerry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[peace plan]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234862</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why Kerry’s peace negotiations were always doomed to fail.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/john-kerry1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234981" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/john-kerry1-450x303.jpg" alt="john-kerry" width="275" height="185" /></a>The disheartening, though not entirely surprising, breakdown of talks between Israel and the Palestinians marked yet another failure by the two sides to come closer to an agreement that would usher the way for a Palestinian state. Yet, no sooner had the talks collapsed than blame was being assigned by both Secretary of State John Kerry and chief U.S. negotiator Martin Indyk—and naturally it was Israel that bore the brunt of their criticism. Echoing the sentiments of Palestinian leadership itself, Kerry and Indyk pointed to the dreaded settlements as the principal sticking point of the talks, with Indyk suggesting that Israel’s approval of new housing units in the Gilo neighborhood Jerusalem would, as he put it, “drive Israel into an irreversible binational reality.”</p>
<p>Secretary Kerry had the same complaint, insisting that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s refusal to release the final third of Palestinian prisoners, coupled with the provocative new building plans, were the Israeli actions that blew up the nine months of negotiations.</p>
<p>On one development even the State Department was less than enthusiastic: the reconciliation agreement reached by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, announced at the end of April, which State’s spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, deemed “disappointing” and the timing “troubling.” Even diplomats have to face certain truths, and Ms. Psaki had to begrudgingly admit that, in her words uttered with breathtaking understatement, “It’s hard to see how Israel can be expected to negotiate with a government that does not believe in its right to exist.”</p>
<p>Diplomacy involving Israel and the Palestinians invariably reaches this point—the thorny and slippery intersection of the politically possible and the diplomatically desired, with the inevitable result being that it is Israel made to be seen as the guilty party in having talks collapse, regardless of the actual events leading up to such a failure. Without even the barest amount of self awareness of how the inability to hold the Palestinians responsible for any major acts of concessions for strategic negotiation, U.S. diplomacy is continually based on the assumption that it is Israel—and only Israel—that is going to make negotiation move forward, and that it is Israel, and only Israel, that has the will and ability to make changes in policy and any concessions necessary to satisfy the Palestinian’s maximalist demands.</p>
<p>As a result, and as the Palestinians have cleverly figured out, Israel is made to release terrorist prisoners, agreed to land swaps, or to deliver any number of other painful concessions, just to further engage the Palestinians and keep them at the bargaining table.</p>
<p>While it may be comforting and diplomatically expedient for Secretary Kerry to insist that it is Israel’s fault when things go awry, or that Israel alone has the ability to do things and make concessions for peace, the idea that it is the settlements, or the number of murderers released to the Palestinians, or any other of the various issues of which Israel is always accused that is actually causing the logjam in the peace talks is simply naive and overlooks some far more lethal, pernicious, and ideologically-driven, far more intractable issues underlying negotiations between the Jewish state and its Palestinian foes.</p>
<p>What any honest observer of the history of conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors knows well, the Palestinians have been strident and inflexible in their maximalist demands, not to mention their intractability on such non-starters as the so-called “right of return,” the division of Jerusalem, and the proclaimed requirement that the Palestinian state will be judenrein, that, as Mahmoud Abbas himself has repeated, not one Jew will be allowed to live in the new Palestinian state.</p>
<p>But the unity pact between Fatah and Hamas brings to the surface a far more pernicious aspect, something that neither Prime Minister Netanyahu, Secretary Kerry, nor any other diplomat is likely to finesse in negotiations in Jerusalem, Ramallah, or Washington. While the State Department is quick to condemn the building of new apartments in Gilo, or hector the Israelis for not releasing Arab murderers in exchange for the possibility of continued talks, its seems to have been wilfully blind in not recognizing that the foundational document by which Hamas was established—the 1988 Hamas Charter—is animated with genocidal Jew-hatred, replete with a global strategy to extirpate Israel and murderous tactics based on millennial dreams of apocalyptic jihad.</p>
<p>There is, tellingly, no discussion in the Hamas Charter about the location of future borders or peaceful co-existence between a Jewish state and a new Palestinian one. There is certainly no recognition by Hamas of Israel being a legitimate state, or one that will prevail, let alone one that is a sovereign power on what is thought to be now and forever holy Muslim land. In the first place, according to Hamas, the circumstances through which the “Zionist regime” was hoisted on the world through the perfidy of the treacherous Jews is, in the honor/shame culture of the Middle East, an open wound on the Islamic world, a situation which demands jihad to restore the sanctity of Islamic land and rid the world of the festering sore that is Israel. “[T]he land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [Islamic religious endowment] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day,” the Charter proclaims. “The day that enemies usurp part of Moslem land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem,” stipulating that jihad is not only a tactical choice for ridding Palestine of the Zionist interloper, it is seen as a religious duty; in fact, it is demanded of true believers. Article 8 of the Charter contains the virulent, but clear, language of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood which has become the Hamas slogan: “Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its Constitution; Jihad is its path, and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.”</p>
<p>What should be more troubling to diplomats embroiled in this particular debate is the Charter’s Article 13, which is extremely clear—in a way that the more disingenuous Mr. Abbas is <em>not</em> when speaking to Western audiences—in stating its objection to any solution <em>other</em> than jihad. The division of what is perceived to be Muslim land is totally unacceptable; in fact, it is a violation of Allah’s will. Thus, for Hamas, peace talks and negotiating for borders or land swaps are completely inconceivable concessions. Jihad to eliminate the Zionist presence is the only acceptable tactic. “Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement,” the Article states. “Abusing any part of Palestine is abuse against part of religion. Nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its religion . . . There is no solution to the Palestinian question except by Jihad. All initiatives, proposals, and International Conferences are a waste of time and vain endeavors.”</p>
<p>Mr. Netanyahu has been goading the Palestinian leadership for some time to state that they recognize Israel as a Jewish state, a recognition that has heretofore not been forthcoming. But both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have obviously already recognized that Israel is Jewish state—and therein lies the very reason for the annihilationist hatred they have for it. What they have not, and will not, acknowledge is the <em>legitimacy </em>of a Jewish state, even if they are aware of its actual existence—something they have had to confront for over 60 years. In fact, the existence of a sovereign Jewish entity in the beating heart of the Islamic ummah is doubly intolerable: first, for being a non-Muslim, dhimmi state with political autonomy and military strength, and second, more significantly, for being what is perceived to be a murderous, immoral, illegitimate regime existing for the benefit of and providing temporary nationhood to the most hated of beings—the Jews.</p>
<p>The Charter’s Article 7, specifically, contains the oft-cited hadith which exhorts Muslims to seek out and murder Jews specifically as a sacred obligation. Islamic teaching depicts Jews as the descendants of “monkeys and pigs,” treacherous deceivers, manipulative barbarians and thieves who attempted to murder the prophets, and who are satanic, murderous, unlawful occupiers of holy Muslim land whose elimination is sacralized in Koranic and hadithic precepts.  “. . . The Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to realize the promise of Allah, no matter how long it takes,” Article 7 reads. “The Prophet, Allah&#8217;s prayer and peace be upon him, says: ‘The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: “Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,” except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews.’”</p>
<p>The same genocidal Jew-hatred embedded in the Hamas Charter lives on and animates the public broadcasts and speeches of Hamas leadership. In 2010, for example, Mahmoud al-Zahar, Hamas Foreign Minister, informed the Jews of Israel that “[they] have no future among the nations of the world. [They] are headed for annihilation.” Appearing on Hamas-sponsored TV, Yunis al-Astal, a Hamas member of the Palestinian legislature, informed his rapt viewers that “all the dangerous predators, all the birds of prey, all the dangerous reptiles and insects, and all the lethal bacteria are far less dangerous than the Jews. In just a few years, all the Zionists . . . will realize that their arrival in Palestine was for the purpose of the great massacre, by means of which Allah wants to relieve humanity of their evil.”</p>
<p>In a February 2010 statement, Abdallah Jarbu, a member of the Hamas government, suggested that “the Jews are thieves and aggressors. They are a foreign bacteria—a microbe unparalleled in the world. May He [Allah] annihilate this filthy people. I condemn whoever believes that they are human beings. They are not human beings. They are not people.”</p>
<p>It is no surprise that in a culture marinated in Jew-hatred, where Jews are debased, portrayed as a subhuman species, bacteria, a disease, fomenters of wars and strife—in fact, the enemies of God and mankind—the annihilation of Jews would therefore become not only a reasonable goal but a desired outcome. Who would <em>not</em> exterminate Jews if they pose such threats to mankind and Islam specifically? Who would ever make peace with the eternal enemies of Allah, let alone negotiate a peace and borders for a new Arab state with them? And would not those jihadis who immolate themselves to murder Jews in the name of Allah be celebrated as <em>shahids</em>, martyrs, and have town squares and summer camps named for them and their bravery, exactly as they are in the West Bank by Palestinian leadership now?</p>
<p>Honoring those who murder Jews continues unabated, even within the newly-formed unity government formed by Palestinian Authority and Hamas “technocrats.” In May, the PA and Hamas jointly lauded Izz Al-Din Al-Masri, the homicidal maniac who, in 2001, immolated himself in a Jerusalem Sbarro pizza shop, murdering 15 Jews (seven of them children) and wounding many others. When Al-Masri’s body was recently returned by Israel to the PA, Hamas and the PA used the occasion to shower honor and praise on someone who was successful in deliberately exterminating Jews. In fact, the event symbolized the new relationship between the two Palestinian factions, united in genocidal hatred of Jews. “The popular gathering around the blood of Izz Al-Din Al-Masri is an honest and true expression of our people’s yearning for national unity [between Fatah and Hamas],” the groups proclaimed, seemingly without embarrassment for their mental disorder, “and unity of action.”</p>
<p>Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV broadcast the symbolic meaning of the martyrdom of this murderer of Jews, reporting that, “Izz Al-Din Al-Masri ascended to Paradise in a Martyrdom-seeking operation he carried out in the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem, where he gave the Zionists a taste of humiliation after killing 19 [sic] Zionists and wounding dozens . . . The citizens expressed their pride in Izz Al-Din’s heroism, along with the thousands who gathered to accompany him on his final journey, and they did not forget all those who played a role in this operation.”</p>
<p>If Jews are the most wretched of humans, and the “liberation” of all of Palestine—including present-day Israel—is considered a sacred duty and religious obligation, then the murder of Jews must, and will continue in this millennial apocalyptic struggle in which Hamas sees itself playing a central role. At a ceremony marking the twenty-fourth anniversary of the founding of Hamasthe head of the organization, Ismail Haniyeh,for example,asserted“that the armed resistance and the armed struggle are the path and the strategic choice for liberating the Palestinian land, from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [Jordan] river, and for the expulsion of the invaders and usurpers [Israel] from the blessed land of Palestine. The Hamas movement will lead Intifada after Intifada until we liberate Palestine—all of Palestine, Allah willing.”The creation of a Palestinian state is not even of central importance in this holy war against the enemies of Islam—primary among the kafirs, unbelievers, the Jews. A Palestinian unity government that is comprised of a faction with a foundational, sacralized hatred for and impulse to annihilate Jews can never, obviously, sit at a negotiating table with Israel to outline the borders of a new Palestinian state.</p>
<p>In 2006, weeks after Hamas was overwhelmingly voted into office and became influential in Palestinian politics, a grisly video was posted on its web site by a soon-to-be homicide bomber, revealing the morally-depraved ideology that jihad has wrought and suggesting that a peaceful settlement is not even a likely prospect. “My message to the loathed Jews is that there is no god but Allah, we will chase you everywhere! We are a nation that drinks blood, and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews. We will not leave you alone until we have quenched our thirst with your blood, and our children’s thirst with your blood.”</p>
<p>If Secretary Kerry wonders why the negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis suddenly went “poof,” as he put it, it might be useful for him to consider whether the problem lies with the building of some apartments for Jews in the capital of the Jewish state or with a genocidal ideology which is already intent on inculcating a new generation of <em>shahids</em> dedicated to slaughtering the residents of those new apartments simply because they are, in fact, Jews.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <em>The Glazov Gang</em>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.</strong></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-cravatts/its-jew-hatred-stupid/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>71</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Stealth Jew-Hate in Middle School</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-cravatts/stealth-jew-hate-in-middle-school/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=stealth-jew-hate-in-middle-school</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-cravatts/stealth-jew-hate-in-middle-school/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 19 May 2014 04:40:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Common Core]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[holocaust denial]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jewish]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=225599</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why exactly are our children now given Holocaust-Denial writing assignments?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Holocaust-Denial.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-225606" alt="Holocaust-Denial" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Holocaust-Denial.jpg" width="284" height="160" /></a>By this week, the Rialto Unified School District school board outside of Los Angeles was in full damage control, fending off universal opprobrium over a third-quarter English Language Arts argumentative writing/research project given to 2,000 eighth-graders. The breathtakingly ill-conceived assignment asked students to “read and discuss multiple, credible articles on this issue, and write an argumentative essay, based on cited textual evidence, in which you explain whether or not you believe [the Holocaust] was an actual event in history, or merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain wealth.”</p>
<p>Most critics denounced the assignment as absurd on its face, since it asked middle school students, after reading a only handful of brief research essays, to convince a reader that the Holocaust, one of the most documented historical events in modern human history, either happened or did not happen. Even more egregious than the notion that the Shoah might not have even occurred was the statement that, as the instructions for the assignment read, “some people claim the Holocaust is not an actual event, but instead is a propaganda tool.”</p>
<p>Given that even American high school students cannot identify, as random examples, the half century during which the U.S. Civil War was fought, name a single Supreme Court justice, identify the intent of the Bill of Rights, or identify Britain on a map of the world, the notion that eighth graders could coherently disprove something that is an historical fact, not an opinion, is obviously a useless intellectual exercise. And critics of the assignment were appalled that students were even exposed to the idea that the Holocaust was a myth in the first place, a notion which only those on the lunatic fringe embrace.</p>
<p>While the shell-shocked spokesperson for Rialto school district, Syeda Jafri, assured the media that no complaint about the assignment had been forthcoming from within the district system, either from teachers or parents, the larger question is how the committee of eighth–grade teachers which conceived the critical thinking exercise in the first place had not anticipated the calamitous reaction to their choice for the essay topic. Presumably, every member of that committee had attended college; some, perhaps, even possess advanced degrees. In an education culture suffused with political correctness—and especially on college campuses where the educators studied for their profession—an enormous amount of attention is paid to who may say what about whom, and what is acceptable thought and speech on campuses where “victim” groups vie for rights and accommodations.</p>
<p>One of the groups that does <i>not</i> fare well on campuses these days, however, is Jews, particularly in the context of the debate over Israel and the Palestinians. In fact, the same careless sentiments that accuse Jewish students of being inherently racist for supporting the “apartheid” state of Israel seem to have been present in the committee room when ideas for this year’s assignment were being tossed about for consideration. Consider how classically anti-Semitic the language of the assignment itself is, suggesting in the same paragraph—not once, but twice—that the Holocaust “is a propaganda tool that was used for political and monetary gain,” and “merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain.” Who is seeking monetary gain? Who schemed to extort the West? Who has global influence over public opinion? Who seeks undeserved profit? For anti-Semites, the answer has always been the same: Jews.</p>
<p>And that is the very clear message transmitted in the essay assignment, that if one accepts the notion of a fabricated Holocaust, he or she also must hold Jews responsible for that vast, self-serving conspiracy. Professor Robert S. Wistrich, one of the world’s leading authorities on anti-Semitism, has noted that Holocaust denial by definition libels Jews, “that, by accusing Jews . . . of inventing the Shoah to extract billions of dollars and blackmail Germany or the West, the deniers add a peculiarly vile conspiracy theory to the arsenal of millennial anti-Semitism and transform the victims into superlatively cunning, fraudulent, and despicable perpetrators,” precisely what the assumption would be of any student who completed the assignment with the thesis that the Holocaust was a fraud, a “scheme,” or a “propaganda tool.”</p>
<p>For educators seeped in a contemporary cultural of political correctness, it is nearly unbelievable that not one person in that committee room failed to see the moral lethality of the assignment’s language. No one has accused anyone involved with the assignment of being anti-Semitic, but in the highly unlikely event that had anyone on the committee had even proposed a topic that touched upon any other intellectually or culturally incendiary topic, it would have been instantly suppressed and never would have made it out the room, let alone on the assignment of 2000 eighth-graders.</p>
<p>The assignment was meant to promote critical thinking, and there are certainly a wide range of contemporary, relevant, though controversial, topics that might have provided a rich source intellectual wrestling for those middle school minds—topics which would not require that students contradict historical fact, and which are still open to actual debate and investigation. For instance, they could debate whether African Americans are socially and culturally inferior to white people in America, a topic for which there is undoubtedly much opinion on both sides of the argument. They could, as Lawrence Summers did before he was forced to resign as president of Harvard University for having done so, question whether the reason that women fail to excel in math and the sciences, and do not therefore fill faculty slots in those fields, is due to a genetic superiority in men, a controversial but oft-debated theory. There are other relevant and current debates in the marketplace of ideas that certainly are open to opinions from both sides, such as whether when a woman undergoes an abortion she is murdering a child, or if homosexuality is mental disorder and lifestyle choice as opposed to a physiological condition predetermined at birth. If the committee wished for students to evaluate politics and theology, they might have asked if Islam is actually “the religion of peace” or instead is actually an intolerant cult that rejects modernity, requires submission by its adherents, represses women, and has a long history of terror, aggression, and jihad against the infidel world.</p>
<p>All of these topics differ from the one actually chosen by the committee in that none of them can be proven absolutely, and all can be vigorously argued from differing points of view—exactly what the assignment in question was meant to inspire. But, obviously, none of them was chosen, and the reason is just as obvious: had anyone on the committee even dared to have articulated any of the examples above, the other committee members would be apoplectic at the very thought of questioning prevailing orthodoxies or offending members of the groups involved.</p>
<p>In the rarified atmosphere of multi-cultural America culture, and particularly on campuses, where certain topics are off limits and the behavior of certain victim groups can never be questioned, the idea that abortion is wrong, or that women are inferior to men or blacks to whites, or that being gay is somehow defective, or that Islam is theologically malignant—all of these notions are essentially unmentionable, proscribed, too intellectually and emotionally volatile to ever discuss openly or debate, and especially as the basis for a homework assignment. None of these topics would ever be considered for use as a critical thinking assignment precisely because, unfortunately, every educator in that committee room would intuitively, and accurately, realize that members of the groups targeted might feel maligned, insulted, libeled, or intimidated by the ensuing discussion.</p>
<div>
<p>But when Jews, and the central horror of Jewish history, were the topic, that moral sensitivity was strangely absent, and the lesson of this incident is to be found just there: that anti-Semitism infected the student assignment completely and no one even knew it had entered the room.</p>
</div>
<p><i>Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, is president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.</i></p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss this week&#8217;s <em><strong>Gang Gang</strong></em> episode in which the guests discussed the Rialto Unified School District&#8217;s Holocaust-Denial assignment in its special feature on <em><strong>The Cancer of Common Core:</strong></em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/5UPp3QP6_Pw" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-cravatts/stealth-jew-hate-in-middle-school/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>46</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>No Free Speech for Exposers of Campus Anti-Semitism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/richard-cravatts/no-free-speech-for-exposers-of-campus-anti-semitism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=no-free-speech-for-exposers-of-campus-anti-semitism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/richard-cravatts/no-free-speech-for-exposers-of-campus-anti-semitism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 06 Jun 2013 04:09:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hate Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tammi Rossman-Benjamin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[uc santa cruz]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=192282</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How Palestinian activists are manipulating campus culture to silence their opponents. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/3671.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-192360" alt="3671" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/3671-450x296.jpg" width="270" height="178" /></a>In her controversial book, <i>From Time Immemorial,</i> which examined the false narrative concerning the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Joan Peters referred to something she identified as “turnspeak,” “twisted rhetoric artfully aimed at the hearts and minds of the West, originated by the Arabs, and rivaling the Soviets, who are veterans of ‘semantic infiltration’ and the word war. Just as, in their lexicon, totalitarianism translates into ‘democracy,’ and degradation becomes ‘freedom,’ so has the flawed but democratic Israel been branded ‘Zionist imperialist’ and ‘racist.’” First used in 1939 to describe German propaganda after its invasion of Czechoslovakia, “turnspeak” in that instance was used to invert truth, enabling Germany to blame the Czechs for the aggression and belligerency they themselves were perpetrating.</p>
<p>On campuses today, turnspeak is still alive and well, the latest instance of its use being the case of Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a lecturer at UC Santa Cruz and co-founder of the AMCHA Initiative, an organization that investigates, documents, educates about, and combats anti-Semitism at institutions of higher education in the U.S.</p>
<p>Rossman-Benjamin has been tirelessly campaigning for years against what she describes as “an advanced anti- Israel and pro-Palestinian discourse [that] has really dominated the campus square for over a decade, negatively affecting perceptions of literally hundreds of thousands of California university students,” and, more specific to this discussion, creating a hostile environment on California campuses for Jewish students and others who support Israel, or are assumed to, based on their Jewishness.</p>
<p>And those same activist student groups who have been spreading virulent anti-Israelism, often morphing into anti-Semitism, throughout the California public university system – and who have done so obsessively and without sanction – are now exhibiting turnspeak of their own by accusing Rossman-Benjamin of being a racist, not for attacking their beliefs or pro-Palestinian cause, but for her efforts to reveal the presence of anti-Semitism at her own university and elsewhere. She is now being branded a purveyor of hate speech and Islamophobia because she revealed the corrosive speech and behavior of pro-Palestinian campus activists.</p>
<p>Critics specifically pointed to a June 2012 speech which Rossman-Benjamin delivered at the Ahavath Torah Congregation in Stoughton, Massachusetts, during which she described anti-Semitic incidents at the University of California, and attributed some responsibility for contemporary campus anti-Semitism to two organizations, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the Muslim Students Association (MSA). Rossman-Benjamin also conveyed widely-published reports indicating ties between the MSA and terrorist organizations.</p>
<p>In response, in April the student senate at UC Berkeley passed a resolution condemning Rossman-Benjamin’s “Islamophobic hate speech” by claiming that she “has been responsible for inciting racist and Islamophobic rhetoric,” that her comments and views are “hateful and inflammatory,” and that University of California President Mark Yudof should be called upon  “to condemn these inflammatory, hateful, and racist assumptions by  . . . Rossman-Benjamin against Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian students, and Palestinian rights activists.”</p>
<p>Campus radicals who promote the Palestinian cause may purport to be guided by “political ideals of equality and respect for universal human rights,” but it will come as a surprise to no one that they are less than willing to extend those same rights and ideals of equality for Israelis or Jews, and for anyone on North American campuses—Jewish or not—who wishes to articulate his or her own support for the Middle East’s only democracy. This is precisely why they responded so viciously to Rossman-Benjamin’s evaluation of their behavior and why riotous Muslim, pro-Palestinian students at UC Irvine, to cite another particularly egregious example, shouted down Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren and prevented him from speaking at all when he came to that campus in 2010.</p>
<p>The moral uprightness that anti-Israel activists feel in denouncing what they perceive to be Israel’s racist, apartheid character, combined with its role as the illegal occupier of stolen Muslim land, has manifested itself in paroxysms of ideological assaults against Zionism, Israel, and, by extension, Jews in general. A central part of that cognitive war against Israel and Jews involves the speech and behavior that Rossman-Benjamin sought to address, namely, the demonization and venomous intellectual attacks on the character, moral standing, legality, and social and military behavior of Israel, and its perceived role as colonial occupier, and racist and apartheid state. Where that anti-Israel speech and behavior has seemingly crossed the line of civil discourse, and why Rossman-Benjamin initiated her own campaign in the first place, is in those frequently, and ever increasing, instances when what is described by activists as merely “criticism of Israel” has devolved into speech, representations, and tropes that can be considered raw anti-Semitism, not the political discourse or academic inquiry it is said to be by those who perpetrate it.</p>
<p>In her assessment of the presence of anti-Semitism on campuses, Rossman-Benjamin relied on “working definitions” of anti-Semitism used by, among others, the U.S. Department of State, Britain’s All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism, and the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, which observe “that in context certain language or behavior demonizes and delegitimizes Israel or attacks Israel with classic anti-Semitic stereotypes, such as denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, applying double standards by requiring of Israel a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation, drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli police to that of the Nazis, and accusing the Jewish people, or Israel, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust”—exactly the type of expressed attitudes and accusations regularly seen in the events, speech, and publications of Muslim student groups and other pro-Palestinian activists, prevalent in such events as “Holocaust in the Holy Land,” “Israel: The Fourth Reich,” “Israel: The Politics of Genocide,” not to mention the yearly Israel Apartheid Weeks that have sprouted up on campuses world-wide.</p>
<p>The Berkeley resolution against Rossman-Benjamin also asserted that her “attempts to <i>mischaracterize and chill Palestinian activism </i>[emphasis added] . . . on Berkeley’s own campus, with a lawsuit [she] filed [contained] extremely Islamophobic and anti-Arab rhetoric referring to Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslims Students Association as ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘pro-terrorist.’” But this view of the darker side of pro-Palestinian activism, channeled through Muslim Student Associations, is not merely conjecture on Rossman-Benjamin’s part; in fact, there is considerable evidence that there was, and remains, a sinister and dangerous side to anti-Israel activism on college campuses.</p>
<p>In October 2009, for example, the U.S. Justice Department initiated an investigation into possible illegal fundraising on behalf of Hamas participated in by UC Irvine’s Muslim Student Union. Based on a formal complaint by the Zionist Organization of America, the investigation would look into allegations that the far-Left, Israel-hating British MP George Galloway had raised funds at UC Irvine for his Viva Palestina project, a “philanthropy” with the purported purpose of providing humanitarian need to Palestinians blockaded in Gaza, but which has been revealed as a funding device to provide cash directly to Hamas—designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the U.S. State Department, Canada, and the EU.</p>
<p>Galloway, who has referred to members of Hamas “as heroes [who] are opening the eyes of the world to the siege in the Strip,” had attended a May 2009 event on the Irvine campus sponsored by the University’s Muslim Student Union, and used the opportunity not only to condemn Israel for its many alleged transgressions, but also to raise money to assist its enemies in arming themselves to further their ambition of extirpating the Jewish state.  His real intention, and the spurious purpose of Viva Palestina’s fundraising, was on full display later that year when Galloway presented a satchel of cash to Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.</p>
<p>The Muslim Student Association is actually an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical, terroristic group founded in Egypt in 1963 with the express purpose of destabilizing democratic movements and imposing Islamism on the Middle East. And while the purported intent of MSA chapters is to provide Muslim students with some social interaction, discussion of religious practices, and programs for interfaith understanding, a look at a strategy memo from the Muslim Brotherhood reveals a far more sinister and pernicious tactical purpose for the creation of the MSA. During the 2007 trial by the Justice Department against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), which was accused of being a front used to channel funds to Hamas and other terrorist organizations, an interesting 1991 document was offered as evidence. In it, the true intent of the Brotherhood was exposed as being a subtle, gradual process of subversion, and members were advised of an overarching strategic objective to their movement: they “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”</p>
<p>The way that would be accomplished would be to establish, through “charities” and other social organizations, ideological beachheads in America—in mosques, in clubs, and, not insignificantly, on university campuses.</p>
<p>And the record of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is hardly pristine, either. Paralleling the moral incoherence of anti-Israel activists demonstrating elsewhere in American and European cities, SJP members from Northeastern University in Boston sponsored a November 15th rally in support of Gaza and, presumably, its genocidal thugocracy, Hamas. The members of SJP who attended that demonstration in Copley Square, only blocks away from where the Boston Marathon terror attacks were to occur in April, apparently were not sufficiently concerned when some 12,000 rockets and mortars were launched almost daily into southern Israeli towns from Gaza by Hamas over the past seven years, aimed at civilian targets for no other reason than the intended victims were Jews.</p>
<p>What was also particularly revealing, and chilling, about the Boston rally was the virulence of the chants and messages on the placards, much of it seeming to suggest that more sinister hatreds and feelings—over and above concern for the current military operations—were simmering slightly below the surface. Several of the morally self-righteous protestors, for instance, shrieked out, to the accompaniment of drumbeats, “Long live Intifada,” a grotesque and murderous reference to the Second Intifada, during which Arab terrorists murdered some 1000 Israelis and wounded more than 14,000 others.</p>
<p>Another deadly chorus emanated from protestors during the rally: “When people are occupied, resistance is justified.” That is an oft repeated, but disingenuous and false notion that stateless terrorists have some recognized human right to murder civilians whose government has purportedly occupied their territory. When pro-Palestinian activists and critics of Israel repeat the claim that Palestinians somehow have an internationally-recognized legal “right” to resist occupation through violent means, they are both legitimizing that terror and helping to insure that its lethal use by Israel’s enemies will continue unabated, and this is the point made by Rossman-Benjamin in her speech.</p>
<p>The core issue at hand is not that Rossman-Benjamin, or anyone else for that matter, wishes to stifle or, as it is normally described by the supposed victims of such efforts, “chill” the speech of pro-Palestinian activists, or anyone else on campus, for that matter. The issue is that just as the activists have the right under the umbrella of academic free speech to express their views—no matter how factually inaccurate, vitriolic, or repellant they may be—those on campus with opposing views also have the right under the same precepts of free expression to question the activists’ views, and to call them anti-Semitic, or racist, or genocidal, or merely historically inaccurate or incorrect if, in fact, that is the case.</p>
<p>The pro-Palestinian activists who are currently vilifying Rossman-Benjamin may, of course, believe that they are entitled to express themselves and to have their point of view accepted without reservation because they are morally committed to it and feel that there is a special righteousness to their cause. But every proponent of every cause feels the same way and should not presume that they can reasonably be inoculated from critique of their ideas merely because they feel that their ideas are morally and ideologically superior to all others.</p>
<p>The concept of academic free speech, and the reason that the university is supposed to be a place where unfettered speech and a free exchange of ideas can take place, is based on the notion that vigorous debate will result in strong ideas emerging from weaker ones. The fact that pro-Palestinian activists do not like someone critiquing their tactics or their ideology is beside the point. And it is naïve of them to think that they can enjoy the protection of academic free speech themselves and not have others enjoy the same freedom, as well, to critique and evaluate what they do and say, that it would ever be reasonable or equitable that one group could claim “free speech for me, but not for thee.”</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/richard-cravatts/no-free-speech-for-exposers-of-campus-anti-semitism/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>15</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Campuses of Repression &#8211; by Richard L. Cravatts</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/richard-cravatts/when-politically-correct-censors-attack-by-richard-l-cravatts/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=when-politically-correct-censors-attack-by-richard-l-cravatts</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/richard-cravatts/when-politically-correct-censors-attack-by-richard-l-cravatts/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:13:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=28789</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[St. Louis University allows Norman Finklestein but bans David Horowitz.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-28993" title="Columbia Speaker Horowitz" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/610x2.jpg" alt="Columbia Speaker Horowitz" width="488" height="273" /></p>
<p>As yet more evidence that American campuses have become, in Abigail Thernstrom’s apt description, “islands of repression in a sea of freedom,” St. Louis University has demonstrated that that free speech on campuses begins and ends according to how well that speech conforms to existing political orthodoxies. The University’s College Republicans and Young America’s Foundation had invited conservative author David Horowitz  to deliver a speech entitled, “An Evening with David Horowitz: Islamo-Fascism Awareness and Civil Rights,” and university administrators, once again choosing to avoid a close examination of radical Islam, cancelled Horowitz’s planned appearance.</p>
<p>What St. Louis University’s administration has done here is essentially to exercise the “heckler’s veto,” shutting down speech with which it does not agree, or which is feels is too controversial for certain protected minorities on campus; but ominously, and in seeming contradiction to the school’s own stated policy “to promote the free and open exchange of ideas and viewpoints, even if that exchange proves to be offensive, distasteful, disturbing or denigrating to some,” this particular speech was suppressed <em>in advance of the event, </em>based on a belief that the speaker’s words would possibly insult Muslim students and inflame their sensibilities.</p>
<p>Their decision seems to belie the University’s own feckless contention, in its “Policy Statement on Demonstrations &amp; Disruption,” that it “encourages students, faculty and staff to be bold, independent, and creative thinkers,” and that “fundamental to this process is the creation of an environment that respects the rights of all members of the University community to explore and to discuss questions which interest them, to express opinions and debate issues energetically and publicly, and to demonstrate their concern by orderly means.”</p>
<p>There are troubling issues here, putting aside the basic question of fairness of denying certain students, with certain political beliefs, the opportunity to invite speakers to campus to share their views. Horowitz’s speech was cancelled (and he has appeared, by his own account, on more than 400 campuses in the past), not because it might contain speech that was demonstrably false or even incendiary, but because some individuals might be ‘offended’ or ‘intimidated’ by speech that they were perfectly free never to hear. Students have a right to be offended by the speech—even hate speech—of their fellow students or invited speakers and speak back to that speech with speech of their own, but their fellow students and invited guests also have a Constitutionally-protected right to be offensive, contentious, even controversial, provided their speech and conduct is within the bounds of the law.</p>
<p>“For me, it was … the content,” explained the university’s dean of students, Scott Smith, in rationalizing the decision to rescind Horowitz’s invitation to speak, “particularly, the blanketed use of the term Islamo-Fascism.” The school was also concerned that the speech would be seen as “attacking another faith and seeking to cause derision on campus.”<strong> </strong>But where does a college administration, whose own institution claims to value speech that is even “offensive, distasteful, disturbing or denigrating to some,” decide that this particular topic—radical Islam—cannot and should not be spoken about? Is this not a relevant discussion in a world where, since 9/11, over 12,000 acts of terror have been committed by murderous radicals in Islam’s name? Does not an ideology which has as its aim the subjugation of other faiths and a world-wide caliphate under sharia law, and is fueled by billions in petro dollars, deserve, and, in fact, require, some critique and evaluation? And Mr. Horowitz’s context for delivering his speech is also relevant; his view is that the current jihad against Israel on campuses in America and Canada is a symptom of the West’s accommodation to radical Islam, and part of a wider problem caused by the Left’s excuses for, and embrace of, totalitarian movements.</p>
<p>Horowitz always emphasizes in his speeches that when he is critiquing Islamo-fascism, he is not indicting all of Islam, or all Muslims, only those who use the religion as a justification for jihad. That is clearly the point of his message, and any honest listener to his speeches would think that it was. So St. Louis University’s notion that it had to preemptively protect the sensibilities of its Muslim students is at best condescending and at worst another way that unwritten speech codes are constructed, according to attorney and free speech expert Harvey Silverglate, to “protect ideologically or politically favored groups, and, what is more important, insulate these groups&#8217; self-appointed spokesmen and spokeswomen from criticism and even from the need to participate in debate.”</p>
<p>This obscurantism where radical Islam is being discussed—or not discussed, as the case may be—has much wider implications outside the relatively protected campus community, as Anne Bayefsky, from Eye on the UN.com, for instance, recently observed. Led by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the morally-incoherent UN Human Rights Council has passed a new resolution, Bayefsky says, apparently embraced by the Obama administration, that “emphasizes that ‘the exercise of the right to freedom of expression carries with it special duties and responsibilities . . .’ which include taking action against anything meeting the description of ‘negative racial and religious stereotyping.’”  Tellingly, and ominously, the resolution was passed to protect one religion and only one—Islam—and had as its main intention to criminalize blasphemy and essentially exculpate radical Islam by inoculating an entire religion from inspection, criticism, or condemnation.</p>
<p>Most disingenuous is how institutions of higher education like St. Louis University, while horrified by the prospect of a David Horowitz visit, use their claims of academic free speech as a cover for regularly bringing outrageous, anti-American, anti-Israel, out-of-the-mainstream views to campuses—either in student-run organizations, in course materials and teaching philosophies, in the sponsorship of festivals and cultural events, or in the person of controversial speakers and artists. For example, the concern over offending certain student groups suddenly did not have the same sense of urgency when speakers, with views certainly as controversial as Horowitz’s, were enthusiastically invited to the Washington University campus, notable among them Norman Finkelstein, who spoke in 2007 as part of “Palestine Awareness Week,” sponsored by Saint Louis University Solidarity with Palestine.</p>
<p>Finkelstein has loudly and notoriously pronounced his extreme views on the Middle East for years, not to mention his loathing of what he has called the Holocaust “industry,” something he has called an “outright extortion racket;” in fact, he blames Jews themselves for anti-Semitism.  Writing in <em>Beyond Chutzpah:</em><em> On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History</em>, his off-handed, sardonic response to Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz’s own book, <em>Chutzpah</em>, Finkelstein accuses Jewish leadership, a group he defines as a “repellent gang of plutocrats, hoodlums, and hucksters,” of creating a “combination of economic and political power,” from which “has sprung, unsurprisingly, a mindset of Jewish superiority.” What is more, he continues, “from this lethal brew of formidable power, chauvinistic arrogance, feigned (or imagined) victimhood, and Holocaust-immunity to criticism has sprung a terrifying recklessness and ruthlessness on the part of American Jewish elites. Alongside Israel, they are the main fomenters of anti-Semitism in the world today.”</p>
<p>Finkelstein’s best known work, <em>The Holocaust Industry: Reflections On The Exploitation of Jewish Suffering</em>, cruelly minimizes the magnitude of the Holocaust while simultaneously making the perverse accusation that it is used by Zionists to extract sympathy from the world community and to justify the oppression and subjugation of the Palestinians by Israelis. Despite its popularity with anti-Semites, Islamists, and neo-Nazis worldwide, one critic, Brown University genocide expert Omer Bartov, described the book in a <em>New York Times</em> review as &#8220;a novel variation on the anti-Semitic forgery, &#8216;The Protocols of the Elders of Zion&#8217; . . . brimming with indifference to historical facts, inner contradictions, strident politics . . . indecent . . . juvenile, self-righteous, arrogant and stupid.” Historian David Greenberg was similarly critical of the level of scholarship in <em>The Holocaust Industry, </em>calling it “a hate-filled screed” filled with “pseudo-scholarship, extreme anti-Israel ideology and—there is no way around it—anti-Semitism. And it stinks.”</p>
<p>Finkelstein, who was recently denied tenure at DePaul and then fired (his fourth such experience at a university), has now also adopted the position that this professional set-back is the direct result for being bold enough to speak up against Zionism and Israel, and he has been punished into silence accordingly, even while he regularly visits college campuses nationwide, usually at the invitation of the Muslim Students Association, where, as he is demonizing Israel and America, he coddles homicidal Palestinians and defends the terror of Hezbollah with such admissions as: &#8220;I did make a point of publicly honoring the heroic resistance of Hezbollah to foreign occupation . . . Their historic contributions are . . . undeniable.”</p>
<p>So it is telling that when this academic charlatan, this morally-imbecilic Holocaust denier, appeared on the St. Louis campus as part of a multi-day hate-fest against Israel and Jews, no one on the administration thought that the content of Finkelstein’s speech might offend or defame any of its students. Might not Jewish students feel intimidated, offended, or otherwise uncomfortable on their campuses when they witness speakers cheering for terrorist groups whose oft-stated goal is the murder of Jews everywhere? When they see the Star of David painted as equivalent to a swastika? When the Jewish state is regularly described as an apartheid regime, a brutal occupier committing ‘genocide’ against the Palestinians, and the main obstacle to world peace? When academics claim that that Israel is not morally worthy of U.S. support and only enjoys it as a result of a pernicious, cabal-like “Israel lobby” working against America’s best interests? Of course Jewish students are damaged by this prevalent and unrelenting activity on their campuses; but mendacious administrators apparently feel that Jews―like Christians, white people, and capitalists―do not require, or do not deserve, protection from being offended or insulted by speech.</p>
<p>Liberal-leaning academics at St. Louis University and on other American campuses seemingly hold the notion that free speech is only good when it articulates politically correct, ideologically-acceptable views of protected victim or minority groups. But true intellectual diversity—the ideal that is often bandied about but rarely achieved—must be dedicated to the protection of unfettered speech, representing opposing viewpoints, where the best ideas become clear through the utterance of weaker ones. For Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, for instance, the protection of free expression for all views was essential, not only to allow discourse of popular topics, but, even more importantly, in instances where unpopular or currently-controversial speech is deemed offensive and unworthy of being heard. “If there is any principal of the Constitution,” he observed, “that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principal of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/richard-cravatts/when-politically-correct-censors-attack-by-richard-l-cravatts/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>22</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

<!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/

Object Caching 494/525 objects using disk
Content Delivery Network via cdn.frontpagemag.com

 Served from: www.frontpagemag.com @ 2014-12-31 07:29:10 by W3 Total Cache -->