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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Academia</title>
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		<title>Cuban Intelligence Targets Academia</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/cuban-intelligence-targets-academia/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=cuban-intelligence-targets-academia</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Sep 2014 04:05:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Intelligence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[universities]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241056</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The alliance between university leftists and communist spies. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/fidel-castro.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-241060" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/fidel-castro.jpg" alt="fidel-castro" width="300" height="250" /></a>“Academia has been and remains a key target of foreign intelligence services, including the [Cuban intelligence service],” says an FBI report from Sept. 2<sup>nd</sup>.</p>
<p>“One recruitment method used by the <i>Cubans is to appeal to American leftists’ ideology.</i> “For instance, someone who is allied with communist or leftist ideology may assist the [Cuban intelligence service] because of his/her personal beliefs.”</p>
<p>Not that any of the above should come as earth-shaking news to anyone who:</p>
<p>A: Attended a typical college and suffered through typical Liberal Arts courses.</p>
<p>B. Knows anything at all about the history of Cuban spying in the U.S.</p>
<p>Let’s face it: FBI agents tasked with ferreting out Cuban spies in the U.S face a daunting task. Just think of how many Liberal Arts college professors match the potential Cuban-spy profile—ideology-wise that is, competence at sleuth-work is a different matter.)  Just how many Liberal Arts college professors actually eschew “leftist ideology?”</p>
<p>Indeed, of the most recently convicted Cuban spies&#8211;Ana Montes, Walter Kendall Meyers and Carlos and Elsa Alvarez, three were recruited by Castro’s agents from academia&#8211; John Hopkins, for Montes and Florida International University for the Alvarez couple.</p>
<p>Cuba’s Intelligence services “will actively exploit visitors to the island” continues the report. “Intelligence officers will come into contact with the academic travelers (from the U.S.) They will stay in the same accommodations and participate in the activities arranged for the travelers. This clearly provides an opportunity to identify targets….Castro’s intelligence aggressively targets U.S. universities under the assumption that a percentage of students will eventually move on to positions within the U.S. government that can provide access to information of use to the [Cuban intelligence service,”] continues the FBI report.</p>
<p>“A preferred target are ‘study abroad’ programs (in Cuba,)” adds  America’s top Cuban spycatcher  Chris Simmons, recently retired from the Defense Intelligence Agency, “as participating students (from the U.S.) are assessed as inherently <a href="http://cubaconfidential.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/fbi-cuban-intelligence-aggressively-recruiting-leftist-american-academics-as-spies-influence-agents/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">sympathetic to the Cuban revolution.”</span></a></p>
<p>It’s not customary for U.S. administrations to increase the size of an enemy spy agency’s “preferred spy-recruitment target,” but we’re talking the Obama Administration here, amigos. To wit:  Academic and cultural exchanges along with various types of legalized “people-to-people travel” between the U.S. and terror-sponsoring Cuba now allow hundreds of thousands of people to visit Cuba annually from the U.S. —over half a million visited just last year.</p>
<p>By the way that‘s DOUBLE the number who visited Cuba from the U.S. in 1958, when Cuba was a “tourist playground” for Americans. Surely, you remember that from Godfather II?</p>
<p>Let’s stand back for a second and ponder this issue: When Cuba was a “U.S. tourist playground” 263,000 people visited Cuba from the U.S.</p>
<p>But now that Cuba suffers from a beastly “blockade” or “embargo” (as the media calls it) by the U.S. 599,426 people visited Cuba from the U.S. 102.396 of these, by the way, went under “educational and cultural exchanges” approved by the Obama State Department.</p>
<p>In brief, Obama has greatly simplified matters for Castro’s Intelligence. Used to be that for recruiting U.S. spies, Castro relied on Obama’s Chicago ‘neighbors, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.</p>
<p>You read right. You see during the late 60’s and early 70’s the terrorist offshoot from the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) known as The Weathermen and staffed most famously by Barack Obama’s future “neighbors” Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn served as the Cuban DGI’s <i>(Directorio General de Intelligencia)</i> top U.S. recruitment officers. They accomplished this recruitment primarily through their sponsorship of the then famous <i>Venceremos </i>Brigades.</p>
<p>During that  heady Age of Aquarius hundreds of starry-eyed college kids were volunteering to “help build Cuban Socialism” and “fight U.S. Imperialism,” mostly by joining these<i> Venceremos</i> Brigades (many via the Weathermen,) making their way to Cuba and joyfully cutting Cuban sugar cane.</p>
<p>&#8220;The ultimate objective of the DGI’s participation in the setting up of the <i>Venceremos</i> Brigades,” says an FBI report declassified in 1976 “was the recruitment of individuals who are politically oriented and who someday may obtain a position, elective or appointive, somewhere in the U.S. Government, which would provide the Cuban <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longest-Romance-Mainstream-Media-Castro/dp/1594036675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376276049&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+longest+romance+humberto+fontova"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Government with access to political, economic and military intelligence</span></a></p>
<p>Sure sounds like what the very recently de-classified FBI report claims about <i>current </i>recruitment objectives by Cuba’s intelligence, except now the Cubans have tens of thousands more spy candidates to choose from!</p>
<p>In brief: nowadays instead of relying on terrorist groups as an employment agency to screen their spy recruits, the Castro regime&#8211;thanks to &#8220;People-to-People&#8221; &#8220;academic exchanges, etc.&#8211; relies on the massive apparatus of academic “Cuban Studies Programs” and their U.S. government facilitators!</p>
<p>“So what?” some readers might rebut. “So what’s the big deal? So what kind of threat does tiny, impoverished Cuba present to the U.S.?”</p>
<p>&#8220;Cuba is intelligence trafficker to the world,&#8221; reveals U.S. spycatcher Christopher Simmons. Among many others, the U.S. military secrets stolen by Castro’s spies have been sold to former regimes in Iraq, Panama and Grenada, alerting these dictatorships to U.S. military plans <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longest-Romance-Mainstream-Media-Castro/dp/1594036675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376276049&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+longest+romance+humberto+fontova"><span style="color: #0433ff;">against them and costing untold American lives.</span></a></p>
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		<title>Harvard&#8217;s Rebel Without a Clue</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/harvards-rebel-without-a-clue/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=harvards-rebel-without-a-clue</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Feb 2014 05:35:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[College]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sandra Y.L. Korn]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219378</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Meet Sandra Korn.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Sandra_Korn.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219390" alt="Sandra_Korn" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Sandra_Korn.jpg" width="339" height="265" /></a>It reads like parody, but it&#8217;s not. Appearing the other day in the <i>Harvard Crimson, </i>the <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/column/the-red-line/article/2014/2/18/academic-freedom-justice/?page=single">article</a> was headlined “The Doctrine of Academic Freedom: Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice.” Its author, a Harvard undergraduate named Sandra Y.L. Korn, argued that the concept of academic freedom should be replaced by one of academic justice. “When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression,” she proposed, “it should ensure that this research does not continue.” To a large extent, of course, the American academy is already under the thumb of the left-wing Thought Police; Ms. Korn only wants to complete the job. She&#8217;d like to see an academy in which, she explains, somebody like Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield – a conservative who would never be hired nowadays, but whose job is secure thanks to tenure – would be given the boot, the better to purify the sweet air of Harvard Yard.</p>
<p>Who is Sandra Y.L. Korn? The contributor&#8217;s note identifies her as a member of the class of 2014, a <i>Crimson </i>editorial writer and columnist, and “a joint history of science and studies of women, gender and sexuality concentrator in Eliot House.” “Concentrator” is apparently Harvardese for “major.” Ms. Korn&#8217;s college education consists, then, of courses in Women&#8217;s Studies and in “History of Science,” which, according to Harvard&#8217;s website, “offers students the possibility of studying the history and social relations of science” but “does not require students to take science courses.” (Which, of course, is ridiculous: how can you begin to understand what science is without actually studying a science?) Ms. Korn, I also discovered, is working on a thesis about “how biologists have tried over and over again to explain gender difference by invoking &#8216;science.&#8217;” In other words, she&#8217;s learned about science – without really learning any science – in order to discredit “science,” a word she puts in scare quotes. (Her project is, note well, entirely consistent with Women&#8217;s Studies dogma, which teaches that science is “masculinist.”)</p>
<p>Ms. Korn, I further discovered, is not only a prolific columnist – writing regularly for both the <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/writer/1206810/SANDRA%20_Y.L.%20_KORN/# ">Crimson</a> and the <a href="http://harvardpolitics.com/author/sandra-korn/">Harvard Political Review</a> – but an active member of Occupy Harvard, the Progressive Jewish Allliance, the Student Labor Action Movement, and BAGELS, “Harvard&#8217;s group for bisexual, gay, lesbian, and transgendered Jews.” In her columns, she&#8217;s paid <a href="http://harvardpolitics.com/features/memoirs-project/the-politics-of-power-this-side-of-glory-and-the-black-panther-party/">tribute</a> to the Black Panthers, <a href="http://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/occupation-with-no-end/">celebrated</a> the Occupy movement, and <a href="http://harvardpolitics.com/world/kim-jong-ils-death/">chided</a> those who cheered Kim Jong-Il&#8217;s death. She&#8217;s <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/5/6/rotc-policy-students-harvard/">opposed</a> allowing ROTC back onto the Harvard campus, one reason being that “[i]nternational students&#8230;from countries not allied with the United States” might object to their presence. She&#8217;s <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/column/the-red-line/article/2013/4/9/ed-ex-not-democratic/">criticized</a> Harvard&#8217;s plans to distribute lecture courses on the Internet as the latest development in “a long history of imperialism in which U.S. elites have told an increasingly globalized world that what they thought was best.” She&#8217;s <a href="http://harvardpolitics.com/world/when-people-are-occupied-2/">written</a> that “[w]hile violent resistance through Hamas is not right,” it&#8217;s “not incomprehensible,” given that “non-violent resistance cannot make the international community pay attention to the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza.” And she&#8217;s <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/2/1/antisemitism-false-accusations/">dismissed</a> as “Islamophobia” any statement of the objective fact that anti-Semitism is a core element of contemporary Palestinian identity.</p>
<p>Speaking of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, summer before last Ms. Korn went on a free ten-day trip to Israel courtesy of Taglit-Birthright Israel, then wrote a column <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/7/6/israel-trip-sylk/">savaging</a> the “right-wing rhetoric” she was fed – by which she meant that, for example, her tour guides displayed an unapologetic pride in Israel and were honest about the systematic inculcation of anti-Semitism in Palestinian schools. While in Israel, she wrote an <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/7/16/harvard-postcard-jaffa/%20">article</a> lamenting that the country – which some of her family members admired half a century or so ago as “a workers’ nation, a socialist utopia” – has now “adopted capitalism with fervor,” an action which she plainly deplores.  She is, indeed, no fan of capitalism. More than once, she&#8217;s <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/2/4/harvard-students-investment-graduates/">ranted</a> about the fact that many Harvard graduates get jobs in finance. In one <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/165724/harvard-wall-street-recruiting-ivies# ">column</a> (reprinted by <i>The Nation, </i>where she was an intern) she savaged Harvard’s Office of Career Services for steering students toward Wall Street, and wondered aloud whether they do so in order “to guarantee wealthy alumni donors.” She concluded her piece by underscoring the need to “destroy&#8230;the well-paved road between the Ivy League schools and Wall Street.” When she went to England last summer to do “research” at Trinity Colllege, Cambridge, she found stuff to <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/series/summer-postcards-2013/article/2013/8/14/Korn-postcard-the-high-table/">complain</a> about there, too: “Why do the fellows here dine in the same hall as undergraduates but on a raised platform apart from them?”</p>
<p>In the wake of the 2011 Mumbai bombings, Ms. Korn was outraged – not at the terrorists, but at <a href="http://harvardpolitics.com/harvard/swamys-freedom-of-speech/">Subramanian Swamy</a>, an Indian politician and Harvard economics lecturer who responded to the atrocities with an article about how “Muslims of India are being programmed by a slow reactive process to become radical and thus slide into suicide against Hindus.” Ms. Korn and some of her confederates jumped into action, agitating for Harvard to – as she put it – “discontinue its association with an offensive figure.” The action succeeded; Swamy was banished. A month later, Ms. Korn and a fellow Women&#8217;s Studies major <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/9/16/911-global-afghanistan-harvard/%20">slammed</a> President Obama&#8217;s speech on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 as too America-centric. “As an international student from a Muslim country and an American student from a suburb of New York,” they wrote, “we believe that discussions and events commemorating 9/11&#8230;must place the attacks within a global context.” Why remember the 3,000 people killed in the Twin Towers, they asked, and not “the nearly 250,000 deaths which followed”? And why no tribute to the Muslim victims of “bias crimes” in the U.S. since 9/11?  “[B]y urging all Americans to take emotional ownership over the event,” Korn and her co-author argued, “we cast a U.S.-centric and nationalist stance on 9/11 that dehumanizes and delegitimizes the perceived &#8216;other&#8217;—and allows us to emotionally detach from wars taking place abroad.”</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, Ms. Korn was also <a href="http://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/on-the-celebration-of-death/">displeased</a> by the patriotic displays after bin Laden&#8217;s death. That night, “hundreds of excited Harvard students gathered outside my window in Matthews. Chanting &#8216;U-S-A! U-S-A!&#8217; and singing &#8216;God Bless America&#8217; and &#8216;Ten Thousand Men of Harvard,&#8217; these joyous, debatably sober, vuvuzela-carrying Harvard students celebrated the death of America’s most-hated enemy: Osama bin Laden.” Ms. Korn said that while she “dislike[s] attacks on American soil just as much as the next person,” she “hesitate[s] to label humans as &#8216;evil.&#8217;” Beside, celebrations of bin Laden&#8217;s death only “reaffirm negative prejudices about Americans held by those involved with terrorist groups,” “confirm that Americans are unfeeling and inconsiderate,” and do “nothing to earn America the respect of the Afghani people.”</p>
<p>Who, then, is this fierce critic of American empire, this enemy of capitalism, this scourge of Wall Street? Well, as it turns out, she&#8217;s <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/pub/sandra-korn/19/561/">from</a> the affluent suburb of Basking Ridge, New Jersey, where she grew up in a house at 61 Darren Drive that was <a href="http://www.bergendispatch.com/property/somerset/property.aspx?id=1802%7C11702%7C10">purchased</a> in 1998 for $800,000. (If you check it out on Google Maps, it looks like the very image of the American dream: a peaceful paradise of large, pretty houses separated from the quiet street by broad, manicured lawns dotted with shade trees.) Her parents are Elizabeth A. Korn, a pediatric endocrinologist, and William D. Korn, whose own Harvard degrees are in economics and business administration and whose <a href="http://www.kornintellect.com/experience.html%20">website</a> describes him – the father of this proud 99-percenter – as follows:</p>
<blockquote><p>Bill Korn is a veteran technology executive with more than 30 years of experience managing fast growth businesses. As Chief Financial Officer for seven companies he has raised over $250 million of capital, including debt and equity financing. Bill has completed seven acquisitions, including negotiating terms, arranging financing, performing due diligence and integrating teams. He has successfully created many successful partnerships and joint ventures.</p></blockquote>
<p>The bio goes on for several more paragraphs, providing details of his years at IBM and other corporations and his involvement in the National Association of Corporate Directors and the New Jersey Economic Growth Council.</p>
<p>Sandra Korn is, then, the child of two parents who, taken together – to judge by their CVs – personify pretty much everything she&#8217;s rebelling against. She&#8217;s a product of precisely the kind of upper-class American suburban life for which she has professed an ardent class contempt. And she&#8217;s about to collect an immensely valuable diploma after utterly squandering a magnificent, world-class opportunity to actually learn something. Instead of grasping this opportunity, she&#8217;s spent the last four years marinating in her own ideology by writing articles, participating in activism, and taking “courses” that are about nothing more than Being Ideologues Together. There&#8217;s no sign that she&#8217;s been educated at all, in any sense of the term – no sign that she&#8217;s learned anything of significance about, say, history or economics, no sign that she&#8217;s developed any understanding of the way the world works, no sign that she grasps the concept of challenging one&#8217;s own assumptions by taking in unfamiliar facts and grappling with ideas different from one&#8217;s own. She mentions her professors in her columns only to upbraid them. (Several of her profs, for example, have urged her to work on not saying “you know” and “like” in every sentence – which she <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/column/the-red-line/article/2013/4/23/harvard-lean-in/">rejects</a> as an effort to make her speech patterns more masculinist.) She gives every indication, in fact, of having arrived at Harvard believing that she already knew everything she needed to know and of having viewed her presence on campus as a chance not to obtain a first-rate education but to roil the waters in a very big pond.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t mean to come down like a ton of bricks on one lone college kid. I focus on Ms. Korn because she&#8217;s one of the most prominent voices at what is by far America&#8217;s most prominent university, and because she&#8217;s a highly representative figure whose views are standard issue for a great many privileged young Americans today. And at the very heart of what makes her representative is the fact that she hasn&#8217;t got an original thought in her head – and doesn&#8217;t even realize it. She&#8217;s swallowed an ideology whole and learned to spit it back. Her unoriginality, her predictability, are matched only by her colossal self-assurance; she&#8217;s clearly never entertained any serious doubt that she belongs to her generation&#8217;s intellectual <i>crème de la crème. </i>For all her rage against America&#8217;s cruel classism, she never questions, in any of her many articles, the elite status she herself enjoys, perhaps only because her father is a well-to-do Harvard alum.</p>
<p>To the extent that this young woman represents the next generation of the American elite, America is doomed – period. The one sign of hope that stands out in her articles is the anecdote about hundreds of students congregating under her dorm window to sing “God Bless America.” Were there really hundreds? If so, hurrah. I wouldn&#8217;t have dared hope there were more than a handful of Harvard students who had it in them to put on such a display; given the way things work at such universities nowadays, I would&#8217;ve imagined that the admissions office did a far more effective job of screening out applicants capable of such behavior. But even though Harvard students like this do apparently exist, perhaps even in the hundreds, the fact remains that it&#8217;s the Sandra Korns – with their contempt for freedom, their love of totalitarian-style “social justice,” and their determination to purge the ideologically impure – who define such institutions in our time, and who, simply because the word “Harvard” or “Yale” or “Princeton” is printed on their diplomas, are almost certainly destined for highly influential careers in America&#8217;s corridors of power. Yes, the singers of “God Bless America” may go on to Wall Street and make millions, but the Sandra Korns will go on to places like the <i>New York Times </i>and proceed to bend the culture to their will. And if that&#8217;s not terribly depressing news, what is?</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>
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		<title>The Reality Behind the ASA Boycott of Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-puder/the-reality-behind-the-asa-boycott-of-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-reality-behind-the-asa-boycott-of-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2014 05:10:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[asa]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boycott]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=215124</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why Israel is the only country in the world to be singled out. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/boycott.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214606" alt="boycott" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/boycott.jpg" width="368" height="230" /></a>The American Studies Association (ASA) voted last month to boycott Israeli institutions of higher education for alleged violations of the human rights of Palestinians. The ASA declared that the boycott was in “<a title="http://www.theasa.net/from_the_editors/item/council_statement_on_the_academic_boycott_of_israel_resolution/" href="http://www.theasa.net/from_the_editors/item/council_statement_on_the_academic_boycott_of_israel_resolution/" target="_blank">solidarity</a> with scholars and students deprived of their academic freedom and an aspiration to enlarge the freedom for all, including Palestinians.” Not only is the statement false, since Palestinians are not deprived of attending schools, but Israel is the only country in the world to be singled out by the ASA for a boycott.</p>
<p>Larry Summers, the former President of Harvard University, observed that “the ASA boycott was possibly <a title="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Why-is-the-ASA-shocked-336899" href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Why-is-the-ASA-shocked-336899" target="_blank">anti-Semitic</a> if not in intent, then in effect.” Perhaps closer to the truth is that the ASA boycotters and many of today’s campus BDS activists harbor a deep anti-Israel animus; an outgrowth of the anti-western milieu created by radical leftist intellectuals who defend the Palestinian cause, as a symbol of anti-colonialism. It may not be anti-Semitism in its traditional form, which was historically rooted in the extreme political right. This is a leftist permutation.</p>
<p>The ASA boycott reflects more than anything else the left’s dominance of the culture, specifically, the western culture. Its main vehicle of attack has been the perceived western exploitation of the Third World and thus the need for western atonement. Since the radical left was unable to transform the “bourgeoisie” values of the American working class, or impact the American political process, it channeled its energies into transforming the popular culture by making inroads into academia, the media, and Hollywood.</p>
<p>The left transformed America and Europe with its advocacy of multi-culturalism. It imposed “speech police” &#8211; better known as political-correctness &#8211; and has chosen for us the good and the bad actors in the global arena. White, rich European and American “imperialists” and “colonialists” have been identified as guilty and evil. The Third World is instinctively identified as the victim and therefore good – irrespective of facts. Islam was posited as the religion of the oppressed, the exploited Third World and therefore always a victim, never a victimizer. It follows from this that the Palestinian Muslims must always be right, while the other side, Israeli Jews, are always the victimizers, and automatically guilty, regardless of the facts or context. This logic has perverted the thinking of the ASA boycotters, the BDS activists, and their mentors in academia.</p>
<p>This becomes particularly apparent on college campuses. The alliance of radical leftist professors and Muslims, constructed on an anti-Israel narrative, controls the conversation on campus. Theirs is the “in” culture, and to be accepted, one has to conform to its dictates. Pro-Israel Jewish and non-Jewish students seeking to defend Israel with facts are confronted with hostility from radical leftist professors and are subjected to physical threats from fellow leftist and Muslim students.</p>
<p>Leftist professors prevail upon the minds of naïve and idealistic students that their capitalist country accumulated its wealth by the exploitation of the weak. Weak-minded students, lacking a counter-argument, and intimidated by their professors, fall prey to their teachings and succumb to narrative. They end up resenting their parents’ middle-class existence, and see it as tainted by greed and unfairness towards the people of the Third World. These simplistic notions professed by their professors spill over to the “persecuted Palestinians” engendering justification for their indiscriminate terror, and their unwillingness to find accommodation with the Jewish State.</p>
<p>The ever present post-colonial guilt embedded in the worldview of the ASA boycotters led them to ignore historical facts, political realities and misreading of the law. A similar attitude prevails on campus, where alleged “underdogs” are chosen from among the Third World, regardless of facts, truth, or reason while ignoring the plight of the real underdogs in the Middle East, and Africa, faced with the effects of Sharia law.</p>
<p>Edward Beck, founder and president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) explained that “It has become academically fashionable to <a title="http://jcpa.org/article/fighting-anti-israelism-and-anti-semitism-on-the-american-university-campus-faculty-grassroots-efforts/?print=1" href="http://jcpa.org/article/fighting-anti-israelism-and-anti-semitism-on-the-american-university-campus-faculty-grassroots-efforts/?print=1" target="_blank">criticize</a> Israel’s legitimate right to exist. This is part of an argument which says that Israel is a manifestation of a post-Colonial period, destined to fail with the imposing of a seemingly non-indigenous people to a region with the modern creation of the state of Israel. This of course, flies in the face of archeology, history and reality.” Beck asserted that pro-Israel advocacy on the campus has become politically incorrect.</p>
<p>One is unlikely to find a college professor these days who will question why Arafat, in spite of Israel’s maximalist concessions made at Camp David and witnessed by President Bill Clinton, refused to “end the conflict” with Israel, and chose instead to wage a bloody Intifada against Israeli civilians. Or, why an Arab-Muslim world with vast empty territories (<a title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_world" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_world" target="_blank">5,148,048</a> sq. miles) could not accommodate the Palestinian refugees, while the tiny Jewish State (<a title="http://www.iris.org.il/sizemaps/new_jersey.htm" href="http://www.iris.org.il/sizemaps/new_jersey.htm" target="_blank">8,019</a> sq. miles) was able to absorb a far greater number of Jewish refugees from the Arab world. Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza should have put the “occupation” claim to rest. But the Leftist/Palestinian “occupation” mantra, upon scrutiny, reveals that much of the land that legally constitutes the State of Israel is what is deemed to be “occupied.”</p>
<p>Arab and Palestinian campaigns of war and terror against Israel existed long before Israel won the West Bank and Gaza from Jordan and Egypt respectively in a defensive war. Neither Jordan nor Egypt held these territories legally. And the Palestinians did not exist as a recognized polity, nor is Palestine a recognized state today. These inconvenient facts are immaterial to the anti-Western, and anti-Israel, radical leftist professors and their duped students.</p>
<p>Pascal Bruckner, a prize-winning French novelist, philosopher and essayist wrote in his 2010 book <i>The Tyranny of Guilt</i>: <i>An Essay on Western Masochism</i>, that “To the Left Wing intellectuals, who no longer know how to understand the world and whose Communist gods have all died, there is no more hope. Their current focus now is the devil incarnate &#8211; the US and its pariah Israel.” Bruckner added, “There is a <a title="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-tyranny-of-guilt-an-essay-on-western-masochism-by-pascal-bruckner-trans-by-steven-rendall-1951335.html" href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-tyranny-of-guilt-an-essay-on-western-masochism-by-pascal-bruckner-trans-by-steven-rendall-1951335.html" target="_blank">convergence</a> of views between the European (and American, JP) Left, and the Iranian mullahs. In their world, the Jew has become the Nazi, the Palestinian the Jew, and radical Islam is now the victim of Western democracy and not its executioner.” Bruckner suggested, moreover, that those people supporting the Palestinian cause “are not so much engaged in inquiring into a specific antagonism – a real estate dispute involving two equally legitimate owners – as in settling accounts with Western culture.”<b> </b></p>
<p>Obscene portrayal of “Israeli Jews as Nazis,” depicted in the European media in particular, has trickled down to college students throughout the West. Yet, there is a sharp disconnect between the average American sentiment towards Israel, which is generally positive, and the anti-Israel feelings so pervasive on many US campuses.</p>
<p>Students on US campuses who have bought into the anti-Israel teaching of their professors and hold the view that “My mind is made up, don’t confuse me with facts…” must be made to understand that the need to feel morally righteous must not blind them into supporting Palestinian terror or Islamist intolerance. Their moral compass should be focused on supporting the truly oppressed and threatened in the Middle East: Christians, women, gays, and yes, the Jews of Israel. Hopefully, the anti-Israel bias of the ASA boycotters will awaken the students and faculty members alike to the realization that Israel is a victim of an age old prejudice, unwarranted in modern society. A singled-out Israel among the nations bespeaks volumes about the reality behind the ASA boycott.</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>
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		<title>Black Professor Reprimanded for Targeting White Males as Racist</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/sara-dogan/black-professor-reprimanded-for-targeting-white-males-as-racist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=black-professor-reprimanded-for-targeting-white-males-as-racist</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/sara-dogan/black-professor-reprimanded-for-targeting-white-males-as-racist/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 09 Dec 2013 05:05:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sara Dogan]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Campus Roundup]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Minneapolis Community and Technical College]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Professor Shannon Gibney]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Racism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212690</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Professor Shannon Gibney claims that the white students took her lecture "personally." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/shannon-gibney_edited-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-212692" alt="shannon-gibney_edited-1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/shannon-gibney_edited-1-257x350.jpg" width="257" height="350" /></a><i>A regular column dedicated to reporting on the slanted teaching, mis-administration and sheer insanity of our nation’s colleges and universities.</i></p>
<p><b><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Top Stories:</span></b></p>
<ul>
<li>Minneapolis Community and Technical College has <a href="http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=5276">issued a formal reprimand</a> to African-American professor Shannon Gibney charging that her comments in class “single[d] out white male students” and thereby “created a hostile learning environment” for these pupils. Gibney claims that the students took her lecture on “structural racism” personally and filed a racial discrimination complaint after she challenged them to do so. In a letter appended to Gibney’s file, the College’s Vice President of Academic Affairs held that it is “troubling that the manner in which you led a discussion on the very important topic of structural racism alienated two students who may have been most in need of learning about this subject.” This latest charge is Gibney’s second formal reprimand for racial discrimination against white students. In 2009, MCTC issued an earlier reprimand after Gibney was accused of targeting white male students on the campus newspaper staff for not working hard enough to eliminate racial bias from the paper. Gibney is currently suing MCTC in a class action lawsuit joined by six other faculty members.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>A pro-life exhibit organized by the Central Michigan University chapter of Students for Life was <a href="http://collegeinsurrection.com/2013/11/pro-life-display-vandalized-at-central-michigan-university/">dismantled and stolen</a>.  The exhibit featured infant clothing hanging on a clothesline. Every fourth item was tagged with a red “X” to indicate the 25% of pregnancies in America that end in abortion. Students for Life was forced to wait for two months for campus administrators to give permission for the display. The installation was up for only two days before it was stolen.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Duquesne University, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has <a href="http://thefire.org/torch/#16536">forced a conservative student to remove</a> a political poster which she had posted in her campus dorm on the grounds that it is “too upsetting.”  The poster contains an image of human bones accompanied by the headline “Leftist Ideas: Progressing Towards Tyranny.”  It also contains a list of “Murders by ‘Progressive Social Movements’” along with the number of people who perished in these mass genocides. ““I am upset about the censorship,” commented the student, Bridget Seelinger. “I understand if it was racist or included death threats, but something like that is virtually harmless. I don’t understand why anyone had a problem with it, and why skulls are so scary.”</li>
</ul>
<p><b><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Further News from the Campuses:</span></b></p>
<p><strong>College IT Professional Convicted in Child Porn Case Continues to Draw $48K Salary from Public University [Campus Reform]</strong></p>
<p>An IT professional who was placed on administrative leave over federal child pornography charges, continues to receive his full salary at Green River Community College, in Auburn, Washington.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=5264">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>State Official Slams University of Kansas for Allowing Prof Suspended over NRA Tweet to be Back at Work [Fox News]</strong></p>
<p>A state official from Kansas criticized the University of Kansas’ decision to allow the professor suspended over a tweet that targeted the National Rifle Association after the Navy Yard shooting to be allowed to return the school.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/10/26/state-official-slams-university-kansas-for-allowing-prof-suspended-over-nra/">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>University Forbids Poster That Takes A Stand Against Communism [The College Fix]</strong></p>
<p>A poster meant to illustrate the number of individuals who have been murdered by collectivist governments was deemed too harsh by officials at Duquesne University, which disallowed the image from hanging on campus.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/15406/">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>Black Female Professor Reprimanded for Pointing Out Existence of Structural Racism to White Male Students [RawStory.com]</strong></p>
<p>A faculty member at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, Shannon Gibney, received a formal reprimand for her handling of a discussion about structural racism in her Introduction to Mass Communication course.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/02/black-female-professor-reprimanded-for-pointing-out-existence-of-structural-racism-to-white-male-students/">Read more</a></p>
<p><b>University of Kansas Students and Administrators Embarrassed Following Al Jazeera Expose on College Partying and Sexual Assault</b> <strong>[University Herald]</strong></p>
<p>Students and administrators at the University of Kansas (KU) are embarrassed and ashamed of the contents of a recent Al Jazeera America investigative piece on the relation between college partying culture and sexual assault.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.universityherald.com/articles/5668/20131119/university-of-kansas-students-and-administrators-embarrassed-following-al-jazeera-expose-on-college-partying-and-sexual-assault.htm#rP3xph60T8kcO6P5.99">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich is Racist, Says Portland School Official [The College Fix]</strong></p>
<p>Did you know that eating or even talking about a peanut butter and jelly sandwich could be considered racist?</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/15414/">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>‘Nava-Ho’ Party was Ignorant, Investigation is No Better [Mustang News]</strong></p>
<p>The organizations that held a “Colonial Bros and Nava-hos”-themed party earlier this month need to reevaluate of their judgment and sensitivity. Those who hosted the party need to own up to their mistake to everyone on campus, not just send their public relations director to apologize after being called out at a campus forum.</p>
<p>But Cal Poly also needs a reminder in its duties as part of the state government; free speech cannot fall by the wayside, even when students engage in ideas that are as insensitive as the fraternity party.</p>
<p><a href="http://mustangnews.net/nava-ho-party-was-ignorant-investigation-is-no-better/">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>Kan. School Reportedly Prohibits Student from Posting Fliers with Bible Verses [FoxNews.com]</strong></p>
<p>An Arizona group has filed a federal lawsuit accusing a suburban Kansas City middle school of violating a student&#8217;s First Amendment rights by prohibiting the student from handing out fliers promoting a prayer event.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/12/03/kan-school-reportedly-prohibits-student-from-posting-poster-with-bible-verses/">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong> Indiana University Removes ‘Misguided’ Black Santa Display [FoxNews.com]</strong></p>
<p>A bulletin board meant to provoke discussions of racial stereotypes has been removed Monday night from an Indiana University residence hall after generating outrage on social media.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/12/04/indiana-university-removes-misguided-black-santa-display/">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>Why Speech Codes Endure [PopeCenter.org]</strong></p>
<p>At Modesto Junior College on September 17, 2013, an ordinary thing happened on what, by all accounts, is an ordinary college campus. A student, Robert Van Tuinen, was <a title="http://thefire.org/article/16246.html" href="http://thefire.org/article/16246.html" target="_blank">told to stop handing out literature</a> on campus in violation of campus rules.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=2936">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong><a href="http://thefire.org/article/16545.html">Student Government at U. of Washington Unanimously Passes Free Speech Resolution </a> [TheFire.org]</strong></p>
<p>On November 26, all 100 members of the Associated Students of the University of Washington (ASUW), the university’s student government, voted for the passage of a resolution supporting students’ right of free speech.</p>
<p><a href="http://thefire.org/torch/#16545">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>Professor: Obama Should Be Allowed to Run for a Third Term [The College Fix]</strong></p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/end-presidential-term-limits/2013/11/28/50876456-561e-11e3-ba82-16ed03681809_story.html"><em>The Washington Post</em></a>, Jonathan Zimmerman, a history professor from NYU, has written an article claiming that all of America’s problems would be soloved–GET THIS–if only we would allow Barack Obama to run for a third term!</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/15481/">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>Suppressing Free Speech is Reinharz’s Legacy, Not Fundraising [TheJustice.org]</strong></p>
<p>A recent Boston Globe article has rightfully ignited a firestorm regarding the compensation of former University President Jehuda Reinharz. It is shocking that Reinharz received over $600,000 in 2011 for helping the University transition to a new president—even though Reinharz was on sabbatical throughout the year.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thejustice.org/forum/suppressing-free-speech-is-reinharz-s-legacy-not-fundraising-1.3124765#.Up9ceSfWvgz">Read more</a></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>
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		<title>The Dutch Academy vs. The Heretic</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/the-dutch-academy-vs-the-heretic/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-dutch-academy-vs-the-heretic</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/the-dutch-academy-vs-the-heretic/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Dec 2013 05:30:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ayn rand]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[netherlands]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[universities]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Yernaz Ramautarsing]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212344</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[One student's courageous fight against the socialist establishment. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Yernaz.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-212349" alt="Yernaz" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Yernaz-424x350.jpg" width="254" height="210" /></a>The leftward tilt of American universities is a nightmare. But at least American college students have places to turn to – groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and websites like Minding the Campus – when things get blatantly unjust or just plain unbearable.</p>
<p>But what can college students in a country like the Netherlands do when they want to push back against professorial PC?</p>
<p>Meet Yernaz Ramautarsing. Born in the former Dutch colony of Surinam in 1987, he was raised in Amsterdam – and grew up into a political junkie and a solid left-winger. “I was terribly left-wing,” he told me the other day. “Intoxicated by the Cuban Revolution. I always said I wanted to be president of Surinam.”</p>
<p>In his late teens, he spent nine months in Surinam. During that time his brother, who didn&#8217;t share his leftist politics, sent him an English-language paperback of Ayn Rand&#8217;s <i>Atlas Shrugged. </i>Yernaz read it.  “Everything I thought was blown away,” he said. Rand became his heroine.</p>
<p>That was seven years ago.</p>
<p>When the time came to go to college, Yernaz studied government and political science at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) – where, as he discovered, one wall featured a framed picture of Karl Marx and professors routinely described the United States as a backward country. Yernaz has since called UvA “a safe environment for the establishment&#8217;s shoeshine boys.” In a recent interview with a student paper, he complained that at UvA “the premise of lectures is always leftist,” as a result of which students lacking in strong political foundations can easily be lead down the garden path to Marxism. (A UvA spokesperson called the charge “nonsense.”)</p>
<p>At UvA, Yernaz&#8217;s forthrightly pro-capitalist, pro-American views – as rare as a sunny Amsterdam day in December – made him a visible figure. Last February, he publicly debated Hans Achterhuis, one of the Netherlands&#8217; most respected philosophers and the author of an anti-capitalist book, <i>The Utopia of the Free Market, </i>in which Ayn Rand figures as the Devil Incarnate. By all accounts, Yernaz, a mere undergraduate, did a smash-up job of defending Rand against Achterhuis. Then, in April, a friend of his texted him about something one of her professors had said in class: that he hoped opponents of the European Union would die soon. Yernaz decided it was time to do something about such ideological bullying by people who were being paid to teach, not brainwash. So he did exactly what any other member of his generation with a strong conviction would do: he started a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Linkse-indoctrinatie-op-mijn-universiteit/317329701730105">Facebook page</a>.</p>
<p>The page is called “Links indoctrinatie op mijn universiteit” – “Left-wing indoctrination at my university.” Dutch students are invited to report outrageous statements made by their professors. Yernaz has drawn criticism for his initiative: a writer at the website of VU University in Amsterdam <a href="http://www.advalvas.vu.nl/nieuws/linkse-docent-voor-de-collegezaal-geef-hem-aan">called</a> him a “new Joe McCarthy.” But he&#8217;s also amassed a fine little collection of testimonies. A veteran foreign-policy bigwig asked students at Radboud University in Nijmegen: “Why did the Russians win World War II? Because they had completely planned production&#8230;.That&#8217;s what a planned economy is good for.” A professor of jurisprudence at UvA described supporters of Geert Wilders&#8217;s Freedom Party as <i>tokkies</i> – a pejorative term along the lines of “lowlife” or “white trash.” A professor of international relations in Utrecht mocked the idea of allowing his ordinary, man-in-the-street inferiors to vote in referendums, saying: “Do we really want to know what the people think of immigration?” A UvA history prof made anti-Israel comments and when a student demurred, the prof said: “You have to realize that UvA is a left-wing progressive university.” And a prof in Nijmegen, after stating that Germany didn&#8217;t have a party like Wilders&#8217;s, corrected himself: “Well, the Nazis.”</p>
<p>Contributions have also come in from secondary-school students. A girl at St. Ignatiusgymnasium in Amsterdam was told by her biology teacher: “You&#8217;re too intelligent to be a right-winger. You really should check out a Green Party convention.” Another secondary-school student asked a philosophy teacher why all the French thinkers they were discussing in class were leftists. The teacher&#8217;s reply: “Because they&#8217;re right.”</p>
<p>Last week was a big one for Yernaz and his Facebook page. After <i>De Volkskrant </i>ran a piece about it on Thursday, Yernaz was invited to appear that evening on a popular national TV discussion <a href="http://pauwenwitteman.vara.nl/media/305146">program</a>. He ended up making a fool out of a fellow guest, legendary Dutch entertainer Freek de Jonge – a smug lefty of a certain age who is used to having his opinions applauded, not challenged. (Think Barbra Streisand.) De Jonge, who oozed confidence at the outset of the exchange, plainly thought he could dismiss Yernaz with a couple of snotty putdowns; instead, he ended up being handily dispatched by the young upstart. Indeed, De Jonge revealed himself – or, rather, Yernaz revealed De Jonge – to be one of those proudly outspoken lockstep leftists who are so accustomed to being agreed with that, when actually challenged, they prove utterly incapable of defending their views.</p>
<p>Anyway, it was a remarkable spectacle – David slaying Goliath. Overnight, Yernaz became a hero to a whole big swath of politically incorrect Dutchmen. Fan mail poured in. The Facebook page jumped overnight from around 400 likes to over 2000.</p>
<p>Yernaz&#8217;s triumph over de Jonge may have stunned people who thought he was just some guy with a gimmick – a cheesy Facebook page that would give him fifteen minutes of fame. But to those who&#8217;d read his essays for the conservative website <a href="http://www.dagelijksestandaard.nl/author/yernaz-ramautarsing?page=1"><i>Dagelijkse Standaard</i></a><i>, </i>his sharp TV performance doubtless came as no surprise. This is a fellow who, back in August, published an article entitled &#8220;Ramadan doesn&#8217;t deserve respect, but contempt.&#8221; Noting that Muslims can use their smartphones to find out when they can break fast during Ramadan, Yernaz pinpointed the contrast between the creativity and profit motive that made the smartphone possible and the ideology of obedience and submission that underlies Ramadan. Addressing Muslims, he said: &#8220;You literally hold the choice between modernity and pre-modernity in the palm of your hand.&#8221;</p>
<p>Yernaz is now expanding his Facebook page to cover the Dutch-speaking half of Belgium, too. He wants it to gain enough influence that teachers will be afraid of it – so afraid that maybe they&#8217;ll even put a non-socialist writer or two on their course syllabi. And who knows? Maybe the site can even help push the Dutch Parliament to investigate the radical partiality of university curricula. (The overwhelming majority of Dutch universities are public.)</p>
<p>As for his future beyond UvA, from which he&#8217;ll graduate next July, Yernaz would love to be in politics – but none of the major Dutch parties are pro-capitalist enough for him. “One of the parties will have to move toward me, or I&#8217;ll have to start my own,” he told me with a laugh. What about the Freedom Party? Well, he said, Geert Wilders is an amazing politician, and is strong on Islam and the EU, “but his economic policy is way too left-wing&#8230;.I think Wilders is afraid that if he goes too far to the right on economics he&#8217;ll lose his base.” If a political career doesn&#8217;t seem viable, he may start a think tank. In any case, he&#8217;ll definitely keep writing. Whichever direction he ends up taking, though, one thing&#8217;s for sure: he&#8217;s only begun to show how much difference one gutsy, dissenting voice for freedom can make.</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>
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		<title>The Moral Incoherence of the Israeli Scholars Boycott Movement</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/richard-l-cravatts/moral-incoherence-in-the-call-for-academic-boycotts-against-israeli-scholars/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=moral-incoherence-in-the-call-for-academic-boycotts-against-israeli-scholars</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 21 Oct 2013 04:32:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boycott]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Campus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Scholars]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=207978</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A long campaign of historical distortion and outright lies. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ib.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-208004" alt="ib" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ib.gif" width="263" height="170" /></a>This month, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the most largest and most significant organization of academic faculty members in the United States, with over 47,000 members dedicated an entire issue of their online <i>Journal of Academic Freedom</i> to examine the feasibility and appropriateness of an academic boycott of Israel.</p>
<p>Given the AAUP’s former stated policy not to support academic boycotts generally or a boycott of Israel specifically, the question that arises from this recent tendentious exercise in moral incoherence, is: why argue the case for academic boycotts specifically targeting Israeli scholars and academic institutions?   Reciting the list of Israel’s perceived ongoing human rights abuses against the long-suffering Palestinians is, of course, a favorite pastime of the academic Left, in the U.S., Britain, and Ireland (not to mention, ironically, inside of Israel’s own universities), so it is no surprise that the litany of complaints lodged on behalf the victim group of the moment show themselves here as justification for the shunning of Israel scholars from campuses worldwide. The problem, however, is that this view of Israel is the result of a long campaign of historical distortion, outright lies, and propaganda on the part of the Arab world and their apologists and same-thinking colleagues on campuses in the United States.</p>
<p>That academics so carelessly throw about politically-loaded, and inaccurate, terms when discussing Israel and sanctifying the Palestinian cause—words like “apartheid,” “occupation,” and “racism”— indicates exactly why a boycott that seeks to make absolute moral judgments is bound to be perilous—especially for academics who give the pretense of standing for values of academic freedom, scholarly inquiry, a respect for history and law, and open debate over a complex geopolitical problem.</p>
<p>A boycott barring all Israeli academics from participating in academic endeavors with scholars from other nations is also defective because it necessarily must assume that all Israeli scholars—regardless of their political orientation and social values—are painted with the same moral brush and deserve to be condemned and excluded merely because of the perceived political sins of the nation in which they live.</p>
<p>If those calling for an academic boycott take the outrageous first step of denying Israeli academics any discourse at all in what is usually called “the academic marketplace of ideas,” of banishing them from the world of dialogue, research, and learning, have not they already struck a fatal blow to the core guiding principle of the academy? Since when has it been the responsibility of the university to control the actions of the state, or for its members to share culpability for the political decisions of a nation? “By its nature a boycott is not a precise instrument,” wrote Howard Jacobson, British author and commentator, “so no distinction is drawn between Israeli academics who actively support their government, those who speak vociferously against it, or those who just go quietly about their . . . researches. . . All are guilty by association with the heinous ideology of their country, that is to say, guilty by simple virtue of being Israelis.”</p>
<p>And if some in the AAUP in fact feel that academics shape and influence national policy and political behavior, their choice of the Palestinians, with their legacy of homicidal aggression against Israel, seems a bit troublesome. What should not be lost on observers is that in the  decision to condemn and boycott Israeli academics, boycott supporters therefore affirm the perceived ideological superiority of the Palestinian side of the moral equation. They have embraced ‘Palestinianism’ completely as their choice of a cause to defend—with the genocidal terrorism, rabid anti-Semitism, political truculence, internecine violence, and general cultural self-destruction that has defined the Palestinian cause since it was minted in the 1960s as a political tool against Israel.</p>
<p>More troubling with calls for an academic boycott against Israel, as Anthony Julius, British attorney and scholar of anti-Semitism, observed is that it reveals an obsessive inclination to demonize Israel, not to mention a breathtaking double standard in applying moral yardsticks to Israel not used to measure the political or social behavior of any other country—including those with far more dismal records of human rights abuses, racism, genocide, terrorism, and gender apartheid, among many other national pathologies. And in making a moral exception when Israel is the target of this collective moral opprobrium, those calling for a boycott against Israel are also not only violating some of the fundamental precepts of academia, but are repeating the impulses that have historically served to marginalize, demonize, and expel Jews from society—what Julius believes to be anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>“The academic boycott,” Julius wrote, “[does] not derive from any criteria capable of being applied universally; it [is] but in the latest in a millennial series of campaigns to isolate Jewish communities—in this case, the Jewish community living in Israel; it [is] inconsistent with the general academic and political principles the boycotters [profess] to espouse; it [punishes] indiscriminately—Israeli nationality [is] the only criterion; Jews [will] suffer disproportionately; it [is] not directed towards the achieving of any specific goals.”</p>
<p>An academic boycott,” Julius concludes, is “unfair, it [is] intellectually and morally frivolous, and it [is] continuous with historical anti-Semitic discourse and practice.”</p>
<p>Concern for the long-suffering Palestinians may be a commendable effort, but the isolation and demonization of Israeli scholars as a tool for seeking social justice for that one group, the very result that would be achieved if the academic boycott outlined by the AAUP is implemented, “represents a profound betrayal of the cardinal principle of intellectual endeavour,” observed Melanie Phillips of an earlier boycott call, “which is freedom of speech and debate,” something universities should never stop diligently defending.</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>
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		<title>English Studies, R.I.P.</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/janice-fiamengo/the-death-of-english-studies/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-death-of-english-studies</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 03 Oct 2013 04:20:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Gilmour]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[English Studies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Feminism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=206057</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Controversy over an instructor's remarks at the University of Toronto reveals the intellectual bankruptcy of academia.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/rollins-gilmour1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-206059" alt="Rollins.Gilmour1.jpg" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/rollins-gilmour1-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>The small world that is Canadian literary-academic culture underwent convulsions last week when a novelist named David Gilmour, a part-time English instructor at the University of Toronto, announced in an <a href="http://www.randomhouse.ca/hazlitt/blog/gilmour-transcript">interview</a> that he doesn’t love women and Chinese writers enough to teach them in his fiction course, and that he prefers books by “very serious heterosexual guys.” He listed as his favourite “guy guys” Elmore Leonard, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy, Henry Miller, and Philip Roth. The one exception was Virginia Woolf, but he didn’t teach her because of poor student response.</p>
<p>The furor over his words was predictable, and right on cue. Various outraged students and faculty members at the University of Toronto came forward to denounce Gilmour’s putative bigotry (in the world of the politically correct, “not loving” is little different from “hating”). An <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/university-of-toronto-students-protest-david-gilmour-1.1869668">anti-Gilmour protest</a> was held September 27<sup>th</sup> on the university grounds next to the statue of a former principal of U of T’s Victoria College, literary critic Northrop Frye; Frye’s statue was dressed up in a pink boa and tiara to demonstrate the gender daring of the protestors. The progressivist <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/09/27/david_gilmour_protest_and_angry_academics_at_u_of_t.html"><i>Toronto Star</i></a> newspaper wrote to Angela Esterhammer, current principal of Vic, asking “what action, if any, the college would take” against Gilmour, and reported as significant the fact that he would not be fired. The Twitter world burst with sizzling insights, with <a href="https://twitter.com/NatalieZed">Natalie Zed</a>, for instance, reminding her friends that “David Gilmour said this shit aloud. How many more just think and do what he does quietly?” A bookstore and library in Waterloo <a href="http://www.therecord.com/news-story/4130721-gilmour-event-in-waterloo-cancelled-after-controversial-remarks/">cancelled</a> their invitation to Gilmour for a speaking event, claiming that his “remarkably impolitic” statement was not one they could “afford to be associated with.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/09/27/david_gilmour_protest_and_angry_academics_at_u_of_t.html">President Esterhammer</a>, too, wasted no time in distancing herself from Gilmour, affirming that he “expressed his views about teaching literature in a careless and offensive manner,” stressing that he was not typical of Victoria College, which is widely lauded for the “range and diversity” of its course offerings, and pointing out that “Faculty members, students, alumni, and the administration of Victoria College have made clear that they do not share [his] views about novels by women or about other groups of literary works.” It’s good to know that no one is standing out from the assembly of the just. A friend of mine has suggested that Gilmour may have been deliberately inflammatory and attention-seeking rather than “careless” in the interview, though if so, he is certainly regretting his flamboyance now. But whether or not the bad-boy remarks were designed to bring Gilmour’s name into the spotlight, his colleagues have certainly stepped up with alacrity to play their mortified and righteous roles—and their theatrics show all too clearly what a farce the study of English has generally become, even (or especially) at one of Canada’s most prestigious universities.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most self-dramatizing hyperbole came from the acting head of the University of Toronto’s English department, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/09/26/david_gilmours_comments_reflect_sexism_in_literature_critics.html">Paul Stevens</a>, who wrote in a staff memo that he was “appalled and deeply upset” by Gilmour’s comments, which “constitute[d] a travesty of all we stand for.” Obviously unembarrassed by the overstatement, he also claimed to be “pursuing the matter further today”—whether to have Gilmour forced into gender sensitivity training or some other blasphemy sanction is not clear. His outrage was nearly matched by that of <a href="http://arts.nationalpost.com/2013/09/26/david-gilmour-is-not-my-colleague-university-of-toronto-english-professor-takes-aim-at-giller-nominated-author/">Holger Syme</a>, Chair of the Department of English and Drama at U of T’s Mississauga campus, who wrote a <a href="http://www.dispositio.net/archives/1688">blog post</a> casting Gilmour out of the charmed circle of the intellectual elect: Gilmour “does not talk or think like a professor of literature,” he sniffed indignantly, because “Good teaching requires empathy—an effort to understand things, ideas, and people totally unlike you.” Leaving aside the question of whether some “effort to understand” might be required to appreciate nineteenth-century Russian and French writers, one wonders whether Syme would have delivered himself of the same caustic putdown of a Canadian aboriginal scholar teaching only other Canadian aboriginal authors or a gay black man teaching only gay blacks.</p>
<p>Many other concerned U of T citizens joined the fray. <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/09/26/david_gilmours_comments_reflect_sexism_in_literature_critics.html">Gillian Jerome</a>, co-founder of Canadian Women in the Literary Arts, asserted that Gilmour represents Canada’s “deeply sexist and racist culture.” <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/09/26/david_gilmours_comments_reflect_sexism_in_literature_critics.html">Anne Thériault</a> found it “almost exciting” that such blatant sexism had been expressed so that a discussion on academic misogyny could be pursued. A PhD student in the department, <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/university-of-toronto-students-protest-david-gilmour-1.1869668">Miriam Novick</a>, called for Victoria College to “seriously reconsider [Gilmour’s] continued employment.” Associate Chair of the English Department <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/09/26/david_gilmours_comments_reflect_sexism_in_literature_critics.html">Nick Mount</a> opined that it was “not fair to students” to advertise a course on “a variety of international authors” and then to present only “dead white guys.”</p>
<p>So what exactly are the feminists howling about? When such literary masters as Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, and Anton Chekhov are dismissed by a professor of English as “dead white guys,” it’s clear that a blanket anti-male animus—of the sort only a feminist could love—has overtaken the ivory tower. Contrary to the self-righteous huffing and puffing of the advocates of gender justice, Gilmour’s off-hand statements highlighted not misogynist tyranny but the lockdown by academic feminism on even the most flippant and marginal deviations from the correct line. As <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/david-gilmour-an-agent-of-the-patriarchy-oh-please/article14570359/">Margaret Wente</a> remarked in the Saturday <i>Globe</i>, “… only in a world where people are manufacturing oppression would a middle-aged professor who happens to prefer Henry Miller to Alice Munro … be vilified as an agent of the patriarchy.” Merely to note the glaring contradiction in the condemnations is to see their hypocrisy: on any campus across North America, one can find courses galore that focus exclusively on women writers, Aboriginal writers, lesbian writers, and so on—with nary a white heterosexual male in sight; and no one censures them for lack of “range and diversity.” Whole programs such as Women’s Studies are devoted, in fact, to slandering white men, and almost no one in the university community raises an objection.</p>
<p>What the fracas does clearly reveal—through the uniformity of response to Gilmour and the intellectual shallowness of reactions—are the dying gasps of a once magnificent, now morally bankrupt and pusillanimous, academic enterprise.</p>
<p>The study of literature—which was, let it be said right away, largely the study of literature by white male authors—once saw itself as part of the search for universal truths through reflection on the masterworks of great authors. Though undoubtedly at times stuffy and hidebound, it was also serious and intellectually substantial, attracting great thinkers such as Lionel Trilling, F.R. Leavis, William Empson, Edmund Wilson, and University of Toronto’s Northrop Frye himself. Today’s academics seem, in comparison, of vastly diminished moral and mental stature, fussing in chorus about “diversity” as if it were the only possible value to be gained from reading, and exhibiting in their own remarks no significant diversity at all. It is remarkable that not a single one of these academics, despite the protection of tenure, came forward to defend Gilmour or at least to rebut his more hysterical detractors. Is there not one with courage and common sense?</p>
<p>And of all those so eager to damn him, not one could be bothered to rebut his statements on their own, <i>literary</i>, terms: to show why the male authors that he preferred were not, actually, better than the women authors he slighted; to offer counter-judgements about literary value; to confirm, in short, that great literature matters to literary scholars (only journalist <a href="http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/09/26/barbara-kay-david-gilmour-has-a-point/">Barbara Kay</a>—and, to a different end, <a href="http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/09/28/rex-murphy-imagination-has-no-gender-language-has-no-sex/">Rex Murphy</a>—dared to reflect on the gender of literary genius). It’s not only that academic cowardice and self-interest remain at an all-time high but also that interest in literature as literature, apart from its sociological import, long ago ceased to have any place in departments supposedly dedicated to its study. The titan <a href="http://northropfrye-thebushgarden.blogspot.ca/2009/02/conclusion-to-literary-history-of.html">Northrop Frye</a>—he of the statue decorated with a feather boa by the protestors, few of whom likely know his (now largely untaught) works—defined major writers by the capacity for their readers to “grow up inside their work without ever being aware of a circumference.” It’s unlikely that such an idea would get a serious hearing at the University of Toronto today. Having lost faith in the discipline they are (over) paid to teach, literature instructors have enthusiastically embraced their roles as the guardians of progressive pieties about women and the Chinese.</p>
<p>This is not to suggest that Gilmour himself is any kind of resistance hero. He has long since apologized for his remarks and will almost certainly never make any such again.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Anti-Zionism Arrives, in Disguise, at Indiana U.</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/edward-alexander/anti-zionism-arrives-in-disguise-at-indiana-u/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=anti-zionism-arrives-in-disguise-at-indiana-u</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 01 Oct 2013 04:42:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Edward Alexander]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hatred]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Indiana U.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jew-Hate]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=205724</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When hatred passes as "critique."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/anti-semitism.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-205730" alt="anti-semitism" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/anti-semitism-450x304.jpg" width="315" height="213" /></a>Competition for the most licentious definition of the term “criticism of Israel” conceived by the mind of man has for many years been intense.  Given the number of academic scribblers with febrile imaginations who are profoundly troubled by having to share the globe with the state of Israel, this should come as no surprise.</p>
<p><em>Intifada II</em>, during which Palestinian Arab suicide bombers, pogromists, and lynch mobs slaughtered over a thousand people (most of them Israeli Jews) and wounded thousands more, was euphemistically described (in <i>Judaism </i>Magazine, no less) by a Vassar professor of Jewish Studies as “a critique of Zionism.”</p>
<p>A Panglossian sociologist writing in the <i>Chronicle of Higher Education </i>assured readers that “calls to destroy Israel, or to throw it into the Mediterranean Sea…are not evidence of hatred of Jews,” but merely “reflect a quarrel with the State of Israel.”</p>
<p>When questions were raised in November 2003 about the indecency of Harvard and Columbia honoring and playing host to Oxford poetaster Tom Paulin after he had urged that Jews living in Judea/Samaria “should be shot dead” and announced that he “never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all,” his apologists in Cambridge and Morningside Heights defended his right “to criticize Israeli policy.”</p>
<p>The learned Swedish Chancellor of Justice (Goran Lambertz) in 2006 ruled that repeated calls from the Grand Mosque of Stockholm to “kill the Jews” by dispatching suicide bombers to Israel were not unlawful racial incitement to murder. Rather, ruled this Swedish Solomon, they</p>
<blockquote><p>should be judged differently and therefore be regarded as permissible because, although highly critical of the Jews, they were used by one side in an ongoing…conflict where calls to arms and insults are part of the everyday climate in the rhetoric that surrounds it.</p></blockquote>
<p>But Shaul Magid of Indiana University has beaten all these redefiners of “criticism” to mean the advocacy of politicide (for Israel): he is ahead of the pack, and has no second in this race for obfuscation. Here is the official description of a course that  this “chaired” professor of Jewish Studies and Religion is at the moment planning  to offer in Bloomington. In happier times this great university was called “the Athens of Monroe County”;  if  Magid, a tribune of “post-Judaism,” makes further headway there, it may be renamed New Chelm:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>Jewish Critics of Zionism (3 cr.)<br />
Shaul Magid</i></p>
<p><i>REL-A 430 Topics in the History of Judaism / REL-R 541 Studies in Jewish Tradition MW 5:30-7:30 2nd 8 weeks</i></p>
<p><i>In the past fifty years, Zionism has risen to become a central component of Judaism and anti-Zionism has been relegated to those considered the enemy of the State of Israel. Many do not know that some of the most vehement critiques of Zionism came not from the enemies of the state but from Zionists themselves. In this course we will read and examine the Jewish critics of Zionism from the early twentieth century to the present. We will read from the works of Kaufmann Kohler, rector of Hebrew Union College, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Bernard Lazare, Hans Kohn, Simon Rawidowicz, The American Council of [sic]  Judaism, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Jacqueline Rose, Peter Beinart, and Judith Butler. We will also read some of the recent Israeli post-Zionist debates. This course is intended to give the student a much more complex and multifaceted view of Zionism as an idea and as an ostensible solution to the Jewish question.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>The description is so gross, flagrant, and blatant  in its willful deception as to be shocking even in these dark times. First of all, like his predecessors in this sordid enterprise, Magid forgets that “criticism” means (in Matthew Arnold’s classic definition) “the attempt to see the object as in itself it really is” and not to destroy the object. But he goes beyond them in identifying people who openly advocate politicide (and even genocide) where Israel is concerned not only as “Jewish critics of Zionism” but as “Zionists themselves.”</p>
<p>Indiscriminately lumped together are people like Scholem, Buber, Kohn, who were cultural more than political Zionists and favored bi-nationalism, but discovered the Arabs had no interest in co-existence; Arendt, who grudgingly acknowledged, in 1951, that Zionism was “the only political answer Jews have ever found to antisemitism,”  but harbored what Marie Syrkin called “blinding animus” toward  those vulgar Israelis and vast ignorance of their country;  Lazare, who briefly associated with formal Zionism in reaction to the Dreyfus affair; Leibowitz, who said Yehuda Halevi, Israel&#8217;s national poet, was a “racist” and contributed the Israeli-Nazi analogy (which made redundant the declaration that Israel has “no right to exist”) to Europe’s semi-educated intellectuals whose predecessors had already resolved to their satisfaction the question of whether Jews had “the right to live&#8221;; the stridently anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism; that worldwide industry called “Peter Beinart,” the highly-publicized prophet of  Zionists against Israel;  and (culminating the outrage) Rose and Butler, whose hatred of Zionism as well as of  Israel borders on the pathological.</p>
<p>Jacqueline Rose aspires to be the psychoanalyst of Zionism. This star in Magid’s galaxy of “critical” Jewish Zionists is so eager to “expose”  Zionism’s birth in sin as the new Nazism that, in her book <i>The Question of Zion</i> (a title emulating  Edward Said’s <i>The Question of Palestine</i>) she actually conjures up a scene in which Theodor Herzl and Adolf Hitler find themselves seated at the same Parisian performance of Wagner. “According to one story,” she excitedly reports, “it was the same performance of Wagner…that inspired Herzl to write <i>Der Judenstaat</i> [<i>The Jewish State</i>] and Hitler <i>Mein Kampf.” </i> (Apparently Princeton University Press, which published her book, cannot afford to hire readers who know that Hitler did not arrive in Paris until 1940, and that Herzl died in 1904.)</p>
<p>In the same book, much of it a regurgitation of the phobias of the late Tony Judt, Rose declared that “Jewish nationalism will come into being only if it abolishes itself.” She is “appalled at what the Israel nation perpetrated in my name” and, wishing to live “in a world in which we did not have to be ashamed of shame,” hopes to cure her shame-sickness by destroying its cause: Israel and Zionism.</p>
<p>Judith Butler, a literary theorist famous for prose of stupefying opacity, was, prior to the autumn of 2003, somebody who defined her “Jewishness” (not exactly Judaism) in opposition to the state of Israel. A very busy signer of petitions harshly attacking Israel, she was one of 3700 American Jews opposed to “occupation” who signed an Open Letter urging the American government to cut off financial aid to Israel. Later  (<i>London Review of Books</i>, August 21, 2003) she expressed misgiving about having signed that particular petition because  it “was not nearly strong enough…it did not call for the end of Zionism.” (A strange remark to come from one of Magid’s contemporary “Zionists themselves.”) She looked into the history of Zionism and discovered that there had been “debates among Jews throughout the 19<sup>th</sup> and early 20<sup>th</sup> centuries about whether Zionism ought to become the basis of a state.”</p>
<p>From this abstruse research she swiftly concluded that demanding an end to Zionism in 2003, i.e., calling for politicide (and the massive bloodshed it would entail), was no different from taking a debater’s position against Zionism decades before the state was born. She played an important role in the campaign to hound Lawrence Summers out of the presidency of Harvard after he labeled as antisemitic the movement (for which she played the trumpet) “to single out,” in Summers’ words, “Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of [Harvard’s] endowment to be invested.” She has become a matinee idol in Europe, where she helps to encourage the burgeoning feeling that the Holocaust gave antisemitism a bad name.  “Butler’s unspoken assumption,” Cynthia Ozick observes,  “is that consonance, or collusion, with those who would wish away the Jewish state will earn one a standing in the European, if not the global, anti-Zionist world club.”</p>
<p>It goes without saying that Magid’s course description also implies that there is no difference between articulating, 80 or 100 years ago, a Zionism that was cultural rather than political, or advocating a binational state, or even espousing “Jewish” anti-Zionism, and today’s agitprop of those calling for the erasure of a living society. Israel’s current population of eight million, including six million Jews, live under constant threat of nuclear destruction by the genocidal fanatics of Iran and unrelenting siege by Iran’s proxies: Hizbollah to the north and Hamas to the south.</p>
<p>I would not wish to suggest that people like Beinart, Butler, Rose and scores like them have no strong connection to Zionism. On the contrary, without Israel most of them would no longer be Jews. In “The Sermon,” a famous Hebrew short story of 1942 by Haim Hazaz, a character named Yudka declares that “[w]hen a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes a Zionist”; nowadays, it would be truer to say that “when a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes an anti-Zionist.”</p>
<p>One wonders whether, in the course of feeding his students such generous helpings from the works of non-Zionist, anti-Zionist, and post-Zionist Jews bent upon the end of Zionism and often of Israel itself, Magid poses this question: Do the Beinarts and Butlers and Roses ever pause, in their frenzied, apocalyptic demonization of  the Jewish state, to consider the old Yiddish saying &#8211;</p>
<div>
<p>“<i>Come for your inheritance, and you may have to pay for the funeral.” </i></p>
<p><b>Edward Alexander’s most recent book is <i>The State of the Jews: A Critical Appraisal </i>(Transaction Publishers,  2012).</b></p>
</div>
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		<title>Campus Roundup: Supporting Daddy Dearest</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/sara-dogan/campus-roundup-supporting-daddy-dearest/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=campus-roundup-supporting-daddy-dearest</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 19 Aug 2013 04:25:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sara Dogan]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Campus Roundup]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[killed family]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Millikin University]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Professor James St. James]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=200963</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Millikin University stands behind professor despite revelation that he slaughtered his family.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/jk.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-201016" alt="jk" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/jk-285x350.jpg" width="285" height="350" /></a><i>A regular column dedicated to reporting on the slanted teaching, mis-administration and sheer insanity of our nation’s colleges and universities.</i></p>
<p><b>Top Stories:</b></p>
<ul>
<li>Upon learning the startling and disturbing news that award-winning Professor James St. James, the head of their Department of Behavioral Sciences at Millikin University in Illinois, <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/08/10/illinois-university-standing-behind-professor-who-murdered-family-in-167/#ixzz2biWXejvh">gunned down his entire family</a> as a teenager and spent years in a mental institution, the University has refused to take action against the professor.  St. James was found not guilty of his crimes by reason of insanity and later changed his name after being released from psychiatric care. The revelations about his criminal past came to light only last month.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The left-wing media seized on a story <a href="http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/opinion/2013/08/08/on-how-discredited-mcdonald-statistic-fueled-leftist-media/#ixzz2biZofW1Z">purportedly proving</a> that McDonalds could double wages for all its workers by raising the cost of its menu items only 17%.  The Huffington Post, which first ran the story, was <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/29/mcdonalds-salaries_n_3672006.html">forced to retract</a> it when further investigation revealed that the “study” it was based on was written by Arnobio Morelix, an undergraduate at the University of Kansas who falsely identified himself as a researcher for the school and cited the work of another student as a “research assistant.” Despite these revelations, some media outlets still refused to retract or correct their coverage.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Lizarda Urena, a mother of students at Concord High School in New Hampshire, has been told that <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/08/11/new-hampshire-district-tells-mom-can-no-longer-pray-on-school-steps/#ixzz2bik4sns7">she will no longer be able to recite Bible passages</a> on the steps of the school as she has been doing since February. Urena’s prayers on the steps were inspired by reports that bullets were found in one of the school’s toilets. She prays for the safety of the students at the school.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>George Mason University’s campus chapter of “Students Against Israeli Apartheid” <a href="http://www.campusreform.org/blog/?ID=4970">hosted a “Day of Anger”</a> outside of the headquarters of the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) in Washington, DC. Dozens of students attended. One George Mason student participating claimed that “Jews have had their golden age under Muslim rule,”  and said that he did not support “the continuation” of Israel “because of what it means for my people and the perpetuation of the cruelty they have had for my people.”</li>
</ul>
<p><b><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Further News from the Campuses:</span></b></p>
<p><b>The Left’s Attack on Hillsdale College</b> [NewsMax.com]</p>
<p>Liberals hate Michigan’s Hillsdale College, which not only celebrates a decidedly conservative point of view, but also galls them by refusing to take government funding — which means they have no way of threatening Hillsdale and trying to force it to fall in line.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.newsmax.com/HermanCain/Hillsdale-College-Arnn-President/2013/08/05/id/518727#ixzz2bifD5b00">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>University of Pennsylvania Professor: &#8216;God is a White Racist&#8217; [Examiner.com]</strong></p>
<p>In the wake of the not guilty verdict against George Zimmerman some decry personal racism by the jury members, others blame institutional racism in the American judicial system, while at least one university professor blames The Almighty for being &#8220;a white racist god&#8221; as reported by the <a href="http://www.bizpacreview.com/2013/07/15/university-professor-says-god-is-a-white-racist-79744" target="_blank">BizPac Review</a> on July 15, 2013.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.examiner.com/article/university-of-pennsylvania-professor-god-is-a-white-racist">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>‘Jews Had Their Golden Age Under Muslim Rule’ Says Anti-Israel Student Protester [Campus Reform]</strong></p>
<p>Dozens of students decried the state of Israel at a “Day of Anger” rally outside the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) headquarters in Washington D.C., on Thursday.</p>
<p>“Jews have had their golden age under Muslim rule,”  said Mohammad Abou-Ghazala, a student from nearby George Mason University, who identified as a Muslim.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.campusreform.org/blog/?ID=4970">Read more</a></p>
<p><b>School District To Launch ‘Trayvon Martin Dialogues’</b> <strong>[The College Fix]</strong></p>
<p>“Trayvon Martin dialogues” are slated to launch at middle and high schools across San Diego, with elected officials of the 132,000-student public school district saying they hope the talks give students a chance to vent their frustrations into something positive.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/14223/">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>Public University Students Unable to Answer Questions from Test Designed for 8th Graders [Campus Reform]</strong></p>
<p>Students at Denver’s Metropolitan State University were unable to answer questions taken from a basic knowledge test administered to 8th graders in 1912, which was reprinted by Smithsonian Magazine earlier this month.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.campusreform.org/blog/?ID=4903">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>New Hampshire District Tells Mom She Can No Longer Pray on School&#8217;s Steps [Associated Press]</strong></p>
<p>CONCORD, N.H. –  The longstanding argument over school prayer is being tested in New Hampshire, where a school district has told a mother she can no longer pray on the steps of her children&#8217;s high school.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/08/11/new-hampshire-district-tells-mom-can-no-longer-pray-on-school-steps/#ixzz2biTIvpod">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>Ark. Attorney General Says School Must Name Teachers in Gun Program [Associated Press]</strong></p>
<p>LITTLE ROCK, Ark. –  An Arkansas school district that trained more than 20 teachers and staff to carry concealed handguns on campus through a program that faces questions over its legality was wrong to make secret the names of the employees, the state&#8217;s top attorney said Monday.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/08/06/ark-ag-school-must-name-teachers-in-gun-program/#ixzz2biUgEdyP">Read more</a></p>
<p><b>Fat-Shaming Professor Faces Censure From University</b><strong> [InsideHigherEd.com]</strong></p>
<p>Geoffrey Miller, a psychology professor, has been censured by the University of New Mexico, two months after he sent out a <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/06/04/outrage-over-professors-twitter-post-obese-students" target="_blank">fat-shaming Twitter post</a> that caused an angry Internet uproar.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/08/07/fat-shaming-professor-faces-censure-university#ixzz2biiwM0VK">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>Illinois University Backs Psych Professor Even After Learning He Murdered Family in 1967 [FoxNews.com]</strong></p>
<p>An Illinois university is standing behind an award-winning psychology professor, despite the new revelation he gunned down his parents and sister when he was a teenager, spent time in a mental institution and changed his name.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/08/10/illinois-university-standing-behind-professor-who-murdered-family-in-167/#ixzz2biW5dXe0">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>What It&#8217;s Like to be a Conservative on a Liberal College Campus [Townhall.com]</strong></p>
<p>Usually a website with a bit of a liberal bias, <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/what-its-like-being-conservative-on-a-liberal-campus">Buzzfeed</a>, came out with an article of memes expressing what it feels like to be a conservative college student on a liberal campus. They actually got this one right! Only being a few years out of college myself and having attended a very liberal school, Buzzfeed definitely is spot on with this story.</p>
<p><a href="http://townhall.com/tipsheet/heatherginsberg/2013/07/16/fun-what-its-like-to-be-a-conservative-on-a-liberal-college-campus-n1642074">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>Top 20 Schools With the Most Conservative Student Bodies in the U.S. [Red Alert Politics]</strong></p>
<p>Students headed to these 20 schools this fall might want to make sure to pack their National Rifle Association membership cards, as according to <a href="http://www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings.aspx" target="_blank">The Princeton Review</a> these are among the most conservative universities in the nation.</p>
<p><a href="http://redalertpolitics.com/2013/08/09/top-20-schools-with-the-most-conservative-student-bodies-in-the-u-s/">Read more</a></p>
<p><b>Moving to the Taft Mansion, a Yale Conservative Group Seeks a National Presence </b>[NY Times]</p>
<p>NEW HAVEN — <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/williamhowardtaft">William Howard Taft</a> was not born there; he did not live or even die there. But for a few years, the 27th president did own the house at 111 Whitney Avenue in New Haven, and that association has conferred on the structure a certain historical gravitas.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/12/nyregion/moving-to-the-taft-mansion-a-yale-conservative-group-seeks-a-national-presence.html?_r=1&amp;">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>How Multiculturalism Transformed My College</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/paul-gottfried/how-multiculturalism-transformed-my-college/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-multiculturalism-transformed-my-college</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 12 Aug 2013 04:05:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Gottfried]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christian]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Diversity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Multiculturalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Racism]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[University]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=200147</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A case study in the destruction of American higher education. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Students-on-Campus-6.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-200148" alt="Students on Campus 6" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Students-on-Campus-6-450x330.jpg" width="270" height="198" /></a>Reprinted from the <a href="http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=2885">John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy</a>.</strong></p>
<p>The historian Polybius famously observed that empires deteriorate either internally or from without.  In some cases, however, they fall apart in both ways. This latter situation applies to American higher education, which has succumbed to numerous corrupting influences all at the same time.</p>
<p>To make my point, I’ll discuss the transformation that befell the college where I was employed between 1989 and 2011. Elizabethtown College, located in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, was for most of its history a sleepy Anabaptist college, affiliated with the Church of the Brethren. When the college offered me a position as a full professor, I accepted, welcoming the opportunity to live in a charming setting and to teach at a socially traditional college.</p>
<p>I also imagined that I would be able to converse with a scholarly community, but my teaching experience at Elizabethtown, with a few notable exceptions, was far from stimulating. Most of the students didn’t seem eager to learn and when given the chance, were happy to disparage me and other equally demanding professors on the compulsory “evals.” Worse than the hostility of the disengaged students was the reaction of antiwar faculty colleagues who disliked my philosophy, despite my own reservations about a militantly interventionist foreign policy. Attempts at civil debate with them proved futile.</p>
<p>A new administration took over in 1996. It was headed by<strong> </strong>a sociologist of religion with Lutheran theological training. He pushed the college in an unmistakably ideological direction from which it would never turn back.</p>
<p>The new president enjoyed going to conferences with other college presidents and schmoozing with the Middle States accreditation agency that the college uses to validate its degrees.  Each time he attended such meetings, he would come back with a new diversity program to implement, or he would decide to increase the responsibilities of the college’s diversity dean in fighting for “tolerance.”</p>
<p>This typically took the form of being more “welcoming” to our modest number of non-Christian, non-white students. For awhile, any mention of Christmas by the faculty and staff was frowned on; and even a “Yule Bowl” celebration was awkwardly renamed Holiday Bowl at the last moment, in case a non-Christian student might take offense at a gathering associated with a Christian holiday.</p>
<p>My wife, who was a bookstore employee, brought up certain facts in a letter to the college newspaper: Yule festivals were a pre-Christian Germanic thing and it was ridiculous for a Protestant college to try to obliterate its specifically Christian roots.</p>
<p>My black student assistant (one of the few non-whites on campus) found it strange that the entire school was celebrating Kwanzaa as a “black religious festival,” when his Baptist family in New Jersey cared only about Christmas. I explained to him that his parents were not politically correct blacks, unlike the white administration at the college.</p>
<p>From my conversations with the president, I found nothing to suggest that he believed any of the multicultural doctrines he so energetically pushed. He was just taking his lead from the presidents of other colleges, and undoubtedly trying to make the increasingly leftist faculty like him.</p>
<p>And the faculty seemed delighted with his initiatives. When the administration came forth with an extensive program to integrate multiculturalism into the curriculum, there was enthusiastic faculty approval.</p>
<p>The multicultural pedagogy would furnish the principles for the orientation of new students, inspire the list of guest speakers who would be invited to campus to edify us, and justify the stress on diversity and social justice that went into the college’s new mission statement.  Even without injecting the righteous odor of PC into every core course, the entire college would emit its fragrance.</p>
<p>In its effort to get the faculty to vote to make diversity the overriding goal of the institution, the administration, aided by the social work and religion faculties, relied upon the supposed need to fight “hate crime.”<strong>  </strong>We were confronted by events that never occurred, but which were said to throw a pall over the college. The administration spoke as if there were torrential outbursts of hate against Hindu, Muslim and Jewish students, based solely on the assertion by one Catholic faculty member who had converted to Hinduism that some students looked at him in a “bigoted way.” (Those looks were better explained by the fact that he wore a pony tail.)</p>
<p>And though the president proposed a solution (recruiting more minorities from inner cities) that had nothing to do with the alleged offenses, that didn’t matter. One after the other, faculty members stood up to proclaim, “It’s time we make a statement.”</p>
<p>To make matters worse, there was a low endowment at Elizabethtown, and the tuition-driven college became heavily dependent on certain cash cows. These were primary education, communications, and social work, which all served as vehicles of leftist indoctrination.</p>
<p>The students and faculty who were associated with those majors hardly distinguished between leftwing activism and traditional college study. They were expected to assume certain political attitudes and to act on the basis of them as part of their college education. Students in certain majors were expected to hear all of the politically correct speakers (such as education radical Jonathan Kozol) who were brought to campus and to write papers on what they learned from the speeches.</p>
<p>Even staying in the dorms required getting along with a dean of students, who imposed her political values on recalcitrant residents. Students of mine were dressed down by this dean and the provost for not being sufficiently sensitive to uncorroborated “hate crimes.” In more than one case, honor students (from the political science department) were threatened with expulsion for disputing the diversity dogma that had been proclaimed for the “college community.”</p>
<p>Note that there was an aspect of the college’s Brethren heritage that worked against maintaining college standards. The school claims to “be educating for service,” and one frequently heard students emphasize the joys of being “hands on.” In primary education, one could be “hands on” by joining the National Education Association and by demonstrating with its members. One had an especially good opportunity to be “hands on” by attending the speech by black communist activist Angela Davis last fall, which was sponsored by the college.</p>
<p>Equally significant were the multiple “hires” that took place during this time. Most of the younger people who came on board have better credentials than the older generation of faculty. Unfortunately, they are not much interested in serious scholarship, but delight in complaining about any hints of sexism and racism they claim to have spotted on campus. The primary effect of the younger faculty has been to radicalize the institution beyond recognition.</p>
<p>Elizabethtown’s pitiable transformation corresponds to a widespread degradation of learning. What bothers me about such glib generalizing, however, is the unwillingness of those of my generation to acknowledge that what they are deploring <em>happened on their watch.</em></p>
<p>This process of change took place in different places and varied contexts, and so when I hear from those who lament what has befallen our college that “it’s really the same all over” I get intensely annoyed. I have no doubt that at Elizabethtown something could have been done to make things less crazy if fewer professors had hidden their heads in the sand. There was rarely a vote on any issue that radicalized the school in which the “nays” could not have won or at least held their own. The critics were just too cowardly or self-centered to let their opposition be known at the appropriate time.</p>
<p>Although this passage from Burke may now be overworked, it seems particularly apt looking back at my college experience: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”</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>
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		<title>Campus Roundup: Mandatory Reading of Sexually-Explicit Graphic Novel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/sara-dogan/campus-roundup-mandatory-reading-of-sexually-explicit-graphic-novel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=campus-roundup-mandatory-reading-of-sexually-explicit-graphic-novel</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 05 Aug 2013 04:21:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sara Dogan]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Campus Roundup]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Campus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lesbianism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mandatory Reading]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sexuality]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=199270</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What $40K of university funds will be devoted to in Charleston.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/College_Campus_Walk_H.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-199318" alt="College_Campus_Walk_H" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/College_Campus_Walk_H.jpg" width="332" height="241" /></a><i>A regular column dedicated to reporting on the slanted teaching, mis-administration and sheer insanity of our nation’s colleges and universities.</i></p>
<p><b>Top Stories:</b></p>
<ul>
<li>The state-funded College of Charleston, located in Charleston, South Carolina, <a href="http://www.campusreform.org/blog/?ID=4895">has assigned all its incoming freshmen</a> to read “Fun Home” by Alison Bechdel, a graphic novel which contains pictorial images of lesbian sex, commentary on masturbation, and accounts of pedophilia. In total, the College has spent $39,000 for the distribution of this book to freshmen and will pay another $13,000 for a speech by the author this fall. Participation in the summer reading program is mandatory.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Terri Bennett, a nursing student at Pima Community College in Arizona, was <a href="http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2013/07/26/nursing-student-suspended-after-complaining-about-spanish-speakers/#ixzz2aabYeS7Q">suspended from classes and labeled a bigot</a> after she complained that her fellow students’ failure to speak English in the classroom was making it difficult for her to learn. Bennett is now suing the College claiming that its actions violated her First Amendment right to free speech.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Amherst College in Massachusetts, long known as one of the most left-leaning liberal arts campuses in the nation, added several &#8220;diversity seats&#8221; to their Student Senate, which are reserved for groups that have been &#8220;historically silenced.&#8221; But when conservative student Ted Hertzberg applied for one of the seats citing the fact that only 2 out of 160 professors at the school are registered Republicans, <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/2002/11/22/student-senate-diversity-seats-exclude-conservatives/#ixzz2aadp9nDl">he was rejected</a>. The other four applicants for the seats— an international student, a gay student, a Latino student and an Asian student—were all accepted.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The Freedom Center’s <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/sara-dogan/freedom-center-protests-of-uc-student-regent-candidate-bring-campus-anti-semitism-to-light/">public opposition to Sadia Saiffudin</a>, an extreme anti-Israel candidate for UC Student Regent, has sparked a national discussion on how Saiffudin’s views may disqualify her from her new position and the growing problem of anti-Semitism on college campuses.</li>
</ul>
<p><b><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Further news from the campuses:</span></b></p>
<p><strong>Dozens of Purdue Faculty Chide Mitch Daniels, but He Stands His Ground [TheCollegeFix.com]</strong></p>
<p>Dozens of faculty members at Purdue University have chided campus President Mitch Daniels, former governor of Indiana, for what they contend is his lack of support for academic freedom.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/14111/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+isi%2Fgxaj+%28CN+Newslink%29&amp;utm_content=FeedBurner">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>Student Suspended After Complaining About Spanish-Speaking Classmates [FoxNews.com]</strong></p>
<p>Diversity is widely regarded as an important goal in higher education. But, according to one student, a commitment to diversify conflicted with her learning.</p>
<p><a href="http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2013/07/26/nursing-student-suspended-after-complaining-about-spanish-speakers/#ixzz2aaN3FUct">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>&#8216;Meese v. Keene&#8217; Sheds Light on Danger of the &#8216;Blueprint&#8217; [TheFire.org]</strong></p>
<p>In the <a href="http://thefire.org/article/16050.html">continuing debate</a> over the new federal <a href="http://thefire.org/article/15835.html">“blueprint”</a> for university sexual harassment policies, some have argued that broadly defining sexual harassment as “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature”—including “verbal conduct”—is unproblematic because the definition is supposedly “only” for campus reporting purposes.</p>
<p><a href="http://thefire.org/article/16066.html">Read more</a></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center Brings Campus Anti-Semitism to Light</b></p>
<p>The David Horowitz Freedom Center’s public opposition to an extreme anti-Israel candidate for UC Student Regent has helped to trigger a national conversation about the growing problem of anti-Semitism on college campuses.</p>
<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/sara-dogan/freedom-center-protests-of-uc-student-regent-candidate-bring-campus-anti-semitism-to-light/">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>Majority of Americans Oppose the Use of Affirmative Action in College Admissions [RedAlertPolitics.com]</strong></p>
<p>Americans largely believe that students should be accepted to college based on their merits, and not their racial or ethnic heritage.</p>
<p><a href="http://redalertpolitics.com/2013/05/31/majority-of-americans-oppose-the-practice-of-affirmative-action-in-college-admissions/">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>Student Senate &#8216;Diversity Seats&#8217; Exclude Conservatives [FoxNews.com]</strong></p>
<p>BOSTON –  These days, defining diversity seems to be the big issue on campus.</p>
<p>But at Amherst College in Massachusetts, they&#8217;re doing more than talking about it. They&#8217;re adding &#8220;diversity seats&#8221; to the 32-member Student Senate for groups that have been &#8220;historically silenced.&#8221;</p>
<p><a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/2002/11/22/student-senate-diversity-seats-exclude-conservatives/#ixzz2aaNa6O7R">Read more</a></p>
<p><b>Cedarville University Under Federal Investigation For Possible Title IX Violations </b>[HuffingtonPost.com]<b></b></p>
<p>Cedarville University, a Christian institution in southwest Ohio, revealed late last week it is under review by the U.S. Department of Education&#8217;s Office for Civil Rights.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/29/cedarville-university-investigation_n_3665361.html?ir=College">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>You Won’t Believe What Teachers Plan to Tell Kids about Trayvon Martin [Daily Caller]</strong></p>
<p>In the wake of the verdict in the Trayvon Martin shooting, several teachers said they would invoke mob justice, vigilantism and the idea that Florida law allows people to hunt and kill black kids when discussing the case with their students.</p>
<p><a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/22/you-wont-believe-what-teachers-plan-to-tell-kids-about-trayvon-martin/#ixzz2aaRcY33E">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>Public College Assigns Comic Book on Lesbian Sex, Child Molestation as Mandatory Freshman Reading [CampusReform.org]</strong></p>
<p>Faculty and administrators at the College of Charleston (CofC) have assigned all freshman students a graphic sex memoir as part of their mandatory 2013 summer reading.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.campusreform.org/blog/?ID=4895">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>Former Purdue Student Defends Daniels In Wake Of Scandal [The College Fix]</strong></p>
<p>Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, currently president of Purdue University, has been verbally flogged by some over the news that, during his time in office, <a href="http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/14005/" target="_blank">he worked to scale back leftist propaganda in the classroom.</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/14065/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+isi%2Fgxaj+%28CN+Newslink%29&amp;utm_content=FeedBurner">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>Book Shows Radical Teachers How to Mix Traditional Math with ‘Social Justice’ Political Lessons [EAGNews.com]</strong></p>
<p>MILWAUKEE – It’s said that misery loves company. Perhaps that’s one reason a group of gloomy, radical teachers is trying so hard to poison the minds of the nation’s K-12 students with their anti-American, anti-free market ideas.</p>
<p><a href="http://eagnews.org/new-book-shows-teachers-how-to-mix-traditional-math-with-social-justice-political-lessons/">Read more</a></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Academia’s Love Letter to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/cinnamon-stillwell/academias-love-letter-to-egypts-muslim-brotherhood/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=academias-love-letter-to-egypts-muslim-brotherhood</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Jul 2013 04:16:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[accuracy in academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hatem bazian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muslim brotherhood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[professors]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=197618</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Sorrow, nostalgia and conspiracy theories.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/hatem.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-197643" alt="hatem" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/hatem.gif" width="263" height="202" /></a>Now that Egyptians have <a href="http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/07/10/the-nile-of-democracy-will-flood-egypts-jihadists/">overthrown</a> the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) government of former president Mohammed Morsi, how have scholars of the Middle East responded? With encomia, nostalgia, and conspiracy theories. (Click <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/13309">here</a> for a full collection of quotes).</p>
<p>Instead of acknowledging the ineptitude and dictatorial behavior that led to the Muslim Brotherhood’s ouster, some alluded to shadowy conspiracies involving the U.S. This despite the Obama administration’s open support for the Brotherhood and its push for MB participation in a new democratic political process, much to the <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=anti+obama+signs+in+egypt&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&amp;tbm=isch&amp;tbo=u&amp;source=univ&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=umzgUeGDMYLWyQHHsoG4Dg&amp;ved=0CEUQsAQ&amp;biw=1600&amp;bih=702">consternation</a> of the Egyptian street, not to mention many Americans.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.tariqramadan.com/spip.php?article12927&amp;lang=en">Tariq Ramadan</a>, professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University and grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna, claimed that “the decision to overthrow President Mohamed Morsi had been made well before June 30.” The Egyptian people, he alleged, “have been unwitting participants in a media-military operation of the highest order,” and, he concluded ominously, “The silence of Western governments tells us all we need to know.”</p>
<p>Similarly, <a href="http://www.contracostatimes.com/opinion/ci_23643420/blow-democracy-middle-east?source=email">Amer Araim</a> of Diablo Valley College claimed that, “The Egyptian military authorities . . . could not have staged the coup without a nod from Washington,” while <a href="http://whiterosereader.org/2013/07/12/the-coup-in-egypt-a-conversation-with-abdullah-al-arian/">Abdullah Al-Arian</a> of Wayne State University, the son of former professor and North American head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=671">Sami Al-Arian</a>, maintained that, “The U.S. likely gave some kind of endorsement, or at least did not object to removing the democratically elected president.”</p>
<p>Taking it a step further, <a href="http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2013/07/conspiracy-theory-about-egypt.html">As&#8217;ad AbuKhalil</a>, a political scientist at California State University, Stanislaus, posted the following at his “Angry Arab” blog: “[I]nteresting that while Obama was in deep trouble over the NSA spy scandal suddenly a revolution in Egypt bursts out . . . wiping out or at least putting lower on the front page news about the NSA spy scandal.”</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/HatemBazian/status/352945654563213312">Hatem Bazian</a>, who lectures in Near Eastern studies and directs the Islamophobia Research &amp; Documentation Project at the University of California, Berkeley, tweeted, “The ME, it’s [sic] oil, and wealth are far too valuable to be left to the Egyptians on the street to determine are the words said behind doors.”</p>
<p>Other scholars, reiterating their <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/blog/2012/07/professors-and-politicos-fooled-by-the-muslim">long-standing</a> affection for so-called “moderate Islamist” parties across the region, from the <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/11330">MB in Egypt</a> to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey and Ennahda in Tunisa, continued to hold out hope for Islamist rule.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/07/201378985916781.html">Khaled Abou El Fadl</a>, who teaches Islamic law and chairs the Islamic Studies Interdepartmental Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, lamented that, “What has been dealt a deathblow after the Egyptian coup is moderate Islamism.” The Muslim Brotherhood, he claimed, “believed in the political process and tried to practice it. . . . They believed that democracy and Islamism are reconcilable.”</p>
<p>Exhibiting a similarly wistful tone, <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/07/201374115114452703.html">Abdullah Al-Arian</a>, who wrote <a href="http://acmcu.georgetown.edu/227737.html">his dissertation</a> on <a href="http://www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/events/showevent.asp?eventid=9860">the MB</a> at Georgetown University, imagined the Islamist party’s disappointment at not losing power via an election: “One of the many tragedies of these latest events is that we have lost . . . the opportunity to witness the Muslim Brotherhood humbled through its preferred method of political contestation.”</p>
<p>Comparing the MB to Tunisia’s ruling Islamist party Ennahda, <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-05/don-t-blame-islam-for-the-failure-of-egypt-s-democracy.html">Noah Feldman</a> of Harvard Law preposterously and incoherently opined:</p>
<blockquote><p>Both parties believe in combining Islamic values with democratic practice. Both accept a political role for women and equal citizenship for non-Muslims, even if in practice they are both socially conservative and seek the gradual, voluntary Islamization of society.</p></blockquote>
<p>Meanwhile, Michigan’s <a href="http://www.juancole.com/2013/07/egypts-revocouption-democracy.html">Juan Cole</a>, having previously downplayed the <a href="http://www.juancole.com/2012/06/fox-smears-mursi-with-jerusalem-capital-lie-murphy.html">MB’s extremism</a>, pointed to Turkey’s ruling Islamist party as a role model for the Brotherhood (this despite the recent massive <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/16/us-turkey-protests-idUSBRE96F0MH20130716">protests</a> in Turkey and the AKP’s heavy handed response):</p>
<blockquote><p>[I]t depends on whether the Muslim Brotherhood is wise and mature enough to roll with this punch and to reform itself . . . If they take this course, they have a chance of emulating Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and one day coming back to power.</p></blockquote>
<p>Whether invoking conspiracy theories or advocating “moderate Islamism” as a solution to the region’s ills, these scholars do little to instill confidence in America’s Middle East studies establishment. Time and time again the field is proven wrong, making it an unreliable guide for students, government, business, the media, and the wider public. When next the “experts” purport to explain events in the Middle East, be afraid, be very afraid.</p>
<p><i>Cinnamon Stillwell is the West Coast Representative for</i> <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/"><i>Campus Watch</i></a><i>, a project of the</i> <a href="http://www.meforum.org/"><i>Middle East Forum</i></a><i>. She can be reached at</i> <a href="mailto:stillwell@meforum.org"><i>stillwell@meforum.org</i></a><i>.</i></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Campus Roundup: George Mason University to Offer Course on Trayvon Martin</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/sara-dogan/campus-roundup-george-mason-university-to-offer-course-on-trayvon-martin/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=campus-roundup-george-mason-university-to-offer-course-on-trayvon-martin</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Jul 2013 04:12:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sara Dogan]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Campus Roundup]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Taryvon Martin]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=197604</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Even before the Trayvon Martin verdict was announced, the university planned to offer an academic course on Martin’s life and death in the context of racial politics. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/College_Campus.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-197606" alt="College_Campus" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/College_Campus.jpg" width="266" height="193" /></a><i>A regular column dedicated to reporting on the slanted teaching, mis-administration and sheer insanity of our nation’s colleges and universities.</i></p>
<p><b>Top Stories:</b></p>
<ul>
<li>Even before the Trayvon Martin verdict was announced on July 13, George Mason University, located in Fairfax, VA, announced that it planned to <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/353275/university-offer-class-trayvon-martin-dimitrios-halikias">offer an academic course</a> on Martin’s life and death in the context of racial politics. The course, titled “Race and Politics, Trayvon Martin,” will be taught by Prof. Rutledge M. Dennis, who teaches in the African-American Studies, Sociology and Anthropology departments. According to the <a href="http://soan.gmu.edu/courses/1844/course_sections/13174">course description</a>, the class “will examine how racial and cultural politics were driving forces in the public debates and controversies surrounding such cases as the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama, Robert Williams in North Carolina, Emmett Till in Mississippi, Medgar Evers in Mississippi, Martin Luther King in Georgia, Angela Davis in California, O.J. Simpson in California, Rodney King in California, and currently, Trayvon Martin in Florida.”</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Audrey Jarvis, a student at Sonoma State University in California, was working at freshman orientation on June 27<sup>th</sup> when an employee of the University’s Associated Students Productions <a href="http://www.sonomastatestar.com/online-exclusive/cross-necklace-controversy-sweeps-ssu-campus-1.3048038#.UeQiUaxt42B">asked her to remove her crucifix necklace</a> claiming that it might offend or intimidate the freshmen they were recruiting. The employee, Erik Dickson, told Jarvis that he had received a letter from the chancellor of California State University stating a policy against wearing religious items.  Five days after Jarvis was asked to remove her cross, SSU President Ruben Armiñana denied the existence of such a policy and issued an apology stating “Somebody made a mistake…you are free to display whatever religious instrument you wish.”</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Asked by a reporter whether he supported the Republican plan to lower interest rates on student loans, a <a href="http://www.campusreform.org/blog/?ID=4836">Georgetown student responded</a> “I don’t think I support anything the Republicans do. I think all of them should probably be put to death.” The response was caught on video.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Tulane University political science professor Melissa Harris-Perry who made headlines several months ago for her statement that “We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents” reacted to George Zimmerman’s acquittal by stating publicly that the verdict <a href="http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/13992/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+isi%2Fgxaj+%28CN+Newslink%29&amp;utm_content=FeedBurner">made her wish she didn’t have sons</a>: “Last night, I thought, I live in a country that makes me wish my sons away. Wish that they don’t exist, because it’s not safe.”</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>UC-Berkeley Law Professor Jonathan Simon <a href="http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2013/07/15/race-and-reasonable-doubt-notes-from-the-sanford-fla-verdict/">reacted to the Zimmerman verdict</a> by declaring that the jury suffered from racial prejudice, even if they might not be aware of it: “Imagine that Trayvon was a 17 year old female, a 54 year old white male, or even a 17 year old white male. In all of those cases the prosecutors would have had an easier job convincing the jury that Zimmerman acted recklessly in firing his gun… In convincing the jury that George Zimmerman was reasonable in fearing for his life, the defense had a wind at its back that would not have been there had Trayvon been female or white.”</li>
</ul>
<p><b><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Further News From the Campuses:</span></b></p>
<p><a href="http://www.campusreform.org/blog/?ID=4836"><b>Georgetown student says all Republicans should be ‘put to death’</b></a> [CampusReporm.org]<b></b></p>
<p>A Georgetown student advocated for the extermination of all Republicans on Tuesday when asked if he supported the GOP’s plan to reduce student loan interest rates.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.campusreform.org/blog/?ID=4836">Read More</a></p>
<p><strong>University of Alabama at center of free speech debate [TuscaloosaNews.com]</strong></p>
<p>TUSCALOOSA | A pro-abortion rights student organization at the University of Alabama and a civil liberties group have asked the university to re-evaluate its grounds-use policy, arguing that it is contradictory and unconstitutional.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20130711/news/130719960">Read More</a></p>
<p><strong><a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/353275/university-offer-class-trayvon-martin-dimitrios-halikias">University to Offer Class on Trayvon Martin</a> [NationalReview.com]</strong></p>
<p>The Trayvon Martin case is already making its way into the classroom. This fall, George Mason University in Virginia <a href="http://soan.gmu.edu/courses/1844/course_sections/13174">will offer</a> a sociology class called “Race and Politics, Trayvon Martin.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/353275/university-offer-class-trayvon-martin-dimitrios-halikias">Read More</a></p>
<p><b>Looking for Bias [InsideHigherEd.com]</b></p>
<p>Does the University of Colorado need to do a survey to determine that many at the Boulder campus are liberal? And does a liberal-leaning faculty and student body mean that anything is wrong there? Those are among the questions raised by last week&#8217;s Board of Regents vote to look into political diversity at the system&#8217;s flagship at Boulder and its three other campuses.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/06/27/university-colorado-plan-survey-political-climate-draws-mixed-reactions#ixzz2Yr8gEfIf">Read More</a></p>
<p><strong>Cross Necklace Controversy Sweeps SSU Campus [Sonoma State Star]</strong></p>
<p>Sonoma State made national headlines earlier this week in response to an Associated Students Productions employee’s request for Audrey Jarvis, a junior working freshman orientation, to remove her cross necklace. Jarvis is now working with Liberty Institute, a nonprofit legal organization defending religious liberty, to seek a religious accommodation from SSU.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.sonomastatestar.com/online-exclusive/cross-necklace-controversy-sweeps-ssu-campus-1.3048038#.UeBG76xt42A">Read More</a></p>
<p><strong>Faculty Report on Academic Freedom in FAU &#8220;Step on Jesus&#8221; Controversy: &#8220;Senior Administrators Dismally Failed&#8221; [New Times Blog]</strong></p>
<p>The FAU faculty senate&#8217;s academic freedom committee has released its first report on the school&#8217;s &#8220;Step on Jesus&#8221; controversy of last spring. Meticulous and detailed, its conclusions are a blistering indictment of the administration of former school President Mary Jane Saunders.</p>
<p><a href="http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/pulp/2013/07/fau_faculty_report_step_on_jesus_deandre_poole.php">Read More</a></p>
<p><strong><a href="http://thefire.org/article/16028.html">University of Central Arkansas Reviews &#8216;Speech Code of the Month,&#8217; Promises to Revise Policy</a> [TheFire.org]</strong></p>
<p>In a victory for free speech on campus, the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) has promised to eliminate a speech code that FIRE identified as our “Speech Code of the Month” for July 2013.</p>
<p><a href="http://thefire.org/article/16028.html">Read More</a></p>
<p><b>Learn About Trayvon Martin on Your Own Damn Dime [CampusReform.org]</b></p>
<p>Campus Reform learned last week that George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax, VA plans to offer a class on Trayvon Martin this fall. Given GMU’s reputation <a href="http://www.campusreform.org/blog/?ID=4796"><strong>as bastion for leftist thought</strong></a><strong>, </strong>this class will no doubt be used to canonize the slain Florida youth while demonizing the now acquitted George Zimmerman. No doubt<a href="http://soan.gmu.edu/people/rdenni1"> <strong>Professor Rutledge Dennis</strong></a> of the Sociology and Anthropology Department plans to tear apart the verdict, arrived at by 6-person jury, and press upon the way he understands the narrative from his perch in the ivory tower in Fairfax Station.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.campusreform.org/blog/?ID=4844">Read More</a></p>
<p><strong>It Takes a Collectivist [Townhall.com]</strong></p>
<p>Months ago, in my <a href="http://thisiscommonsense.com/2013/04/12/it-takes-a-collectivist/">Common Sense e-letter</a>, I took issue with Tulane University Professor Melissa Harris-Perry — who hosts an eponymous MSNBC weekend show — for declaring, in one promotional ad, that “we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”</p>
<p><a href="http://townhall.com/columnists/pauljacob/2013/07/07/it-takes-a-collectivist-n1635336">Read More</a></p>
<p><strong>Prof ‘Wishes Sons Away’ In Wake of Zimmerman Verdict [The College Fix]</strong></p>
<p>Tulane University political science professor Melissa Harris-Perry, who hosts a show on MSNBC, said after the George Zimmerman not-guilty verdict that she wished she didn’t have sons because they’re not safe in America, an apparent long-held belief of hers.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/13992/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+isi%2Fgxaj+%28CN+Newslink%29&amp;utm_content=FeedBurner">Read More</a></p>
<p><strong>California Schools Will Train Kids to Sell Obamacare [The College Fix]</strong></p>
<p>There’s something disturbingly Orwellian about this, when the state comes directly at your kids in order to “educate” them in support of a left-wing political agenda.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/13930/">Read More</a></p>
<p><strong>Ball State Sparks Controversy For Hiring Guillermo Gonzalez, Intelligent Design Proponent [HuffingtonPost.com]</strong></p>
<p>SOUTH BEND, Ind. &#8212; Ball State University in Indiana is facing scrutiny for hiring a science professor who wrote a book on intelligent design, a move that comes after another professor at the state college was accused of teaching creationism.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/10/ball-state-guillermo-gonzalez_n_3573972.html?utm_hp_ref=college">Read More</a></p>
<p><b>Canned for Speaking Out? [InsideHigherEd.com]</b></p>
<p>It&#8217;s not unheard-of for a college to tell a faculty member partway through a probationary period before tenure that things just aren&#8217;t working out. And that may well be why Weber State University failed to rehire Jared Lisonbee, a professor of child and family studies. But the timing of his termination – after he and his wife spoke out against plans to name a new family program after a Mormon leader who has expressed controversial views on gays, women and intellectuals – has raised suspicion about what motivated the decision.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/07/15/professors-termination-raises-questions-about-free-speech-weber-state#ixzz2ZApjMkWK">Read More</a></p>
<p><b>Sentence First, Verdict Afterwards [Commentary]</b></p>
<p>Perhaps the Obama administration was not expecting a great public outcry this spring when it unveiled a “blueprint” for how campuses across the nation will henceforth need to handle complaints of sexual misconduct. Under the scheme as announced on May 9, colleges must crack down on a wide array of sexually oriented conduct defined as “unwelcome” to one or more persons, including many instances of what the feds quaintly term “verbal conduct,” better known as “speech.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/sentence-first-verdict-afterward/">Read More</a></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Academics or Agitprop Artists?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/fjordman/academics-or-agitprop-artists/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=academics-or-agitprop-artists</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/fjordman/academics-or-agitprop-artists/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Apr 2013 04:20:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Fjordman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Daniel Pipes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamophobia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rights]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[robert spencer]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=184709</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When "scientists" smear human rights promoters as "fascists." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/fjordman/academics-or-agitprop-artists/razieh20100831063916560-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-184735"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-184735" title="razieh20100831063916560" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/razieh20100831063916560.jpg" alt="" width="294" height="208" /></a>In late 2012, the academics Øystein Sørensen, Bernt Hagtvet and Bjørn Arne Steine, among others, published a work in Norway called <em>Høyreekstremisme. Ideer og bevegelser i Europa</em> (“Right-wing extremism. Ideas and Movements in Europe”) I figure prominently in this <a href="http://www.abforlag.no/index.php?ID=Bok&amp;counter=271">book</a>, which in my view symbolizes the decay and intellectual dishonesty in modern academia.</p>
<p>Co-editors Bernt Hagtvet and Øystein Sørensen, both of them professors at the University of Oslo, <a href="http://www.frifagbevegelse.no/politikk_ff/article6377695.ece">suggest</a> that my ideology is anti-democratic and dangerous and will lead to oppressive and authoritarian societies. It is unclear how this could be the case, since I want to move power away from unelected supranational organizations such as the EU, and back to the people, and reduce state interference in the lives of individual citizens. I must be the first alleged “Fascist” in history who wants <em>less</em> state power over the lives of individual citizens.</p>
<p>The chapter written by Vidar Enebakk on “Fjordman’s radicalization” is particularly incompetent and ridiculously politicized. For example, he refers totally uncritically to <a href="http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/religion/report/2011/08/26/10165/fear-inc/">the report</a> “Fear, Inc. The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America” from 2011, which was published by the left-wing organization The Center for American Progress, with several Muslim collaborators.</p>
<p>This report was clearly intended to smear people in North America and other Western countries who oppose Islamization and sharia law in any significant way. It also tied Breivik’s terror attacks directly to the emergence of so-called “organized Islamophobia.”</p>
<p>Yet Enebakk claims without a single critical remark on page 63 that the authors of this report mapped and identified “a small network of experts on disinformation, who have largely defined the anti-Muslim hate rhetoric in the USA in the wake of September 11<sup>th</sup> 2001.”</p>
<p>Knowledgeable individuals such as the Harvard-educated Daniel Pipes are dismissed without further evidence or explanation as “experts on disinformation,” while the words of those who warn against the dangers of Islamic global expansionism and Jihadist aggression are smeared unfairly with the label “hate rhetoric.” If anything, they are warning <em>against</em> hate.</p>
<p>Mr. Enebakk and too many others like him in this manner take the partisan ideological statements of decidedly left-wing organizations at face value and treat them as the Gospel Truth. At the same time, they casually dismiss conservative viewpoints simply as unfounded and irrational “hate.” Enebakk has done virtually nothing to check if some of the statements made by these “Islamophobes” are actually correct, a behavior that violates the most fundamental principles of genuine research and critical investigation.</p>
<p>What we see here is classic <em>agitprop</em>, or agitation propaganda directed against ideological opponents. This kind of aggressive character assassination unfortunately has long traditions among left-wing activists, dating back at least to the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>Science is a method, not a title. Vidar Enebakk likes to wrap himself in the mantle of “science” and pretends to be a scientist, but he does not behave like one, and is therefore unworthy of the title.</p>
<p>Among those allegedly engaged in “systematically spreading Islamophobia in the USA,” Enebakk names Robert Spencer, Frank Gaffney, Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz. He claims that not only do they spread propaganda and disinformation in the darkest corners of the Internet, they also operate a “well-organized and interconnected network that has systematically financed, produced and disseminated rhetoric of hate and Islamophobia in the United States.”</p>
<p>Notice how hopelessly unscientific this is statement is, written by a person who is supposed to have had scientific training. This is politics, not science. Enebakk describes “rhetoric of hate” (<em>hatretorikk</em>) and “Islamophobia” as being virtually the same thing. He has repeatedly accused me falsely, but very aggressively, of encouraging violence. I have written that I support both the First and the Second Amendment to the US Constitution; that is, freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. I stand by this statement and see nothing wrong with it.</p>
<p>Enebakk does not explicitly blame me for Breivik’s terror attacks, but he goes very far towards blaming me personally for shaping the killer’s mindset, thereby portraying me as a de facto indirect accomplice in the worst mass murder in recent Scandinavian history. This claim that I have a moral, if not legal, co-responsibility for the murder of 77 people has been suggested by a number of writers in Norway, among them the left-wing activist Eivind Trædal.</p>
<p>The defense lawyer Geir Lippestad has stated that Breivik had become radicalized already at the age of <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2011/10/18/nyheter/innenriks/terror/18672278/">21</a>, around the year 2000, although his actual terror plans developed later. The exact date remains disputed, but Breivik apparently had already written comments online in June 2003 warning about the possibility of future civil wars due to Muslim immigration.</p>
<p>At this time I was working in the Middle East, in Israel and the Palestinian territories in a (not terribly effective) observer mission called TIPH in the city of Hebron. At that point I had not published a single essay about Islam under any name, although I was extensively reading critical websites and books about Islam, by Ali Sina, Ibn Warraq and other ex-Muslims.</p>
<p>It is thus well documented, and admitted by Breivik himself, that he had become “radicalized” and had started on his so-called manifesto before he had read a single word I had ever written.</p>
<p>Enebakk further notes – correctly this time – that I have argued that the current immigration policies could lead to serious ethnic conflicts in some Western countries. I still fear that this could indeed be the tragic outcome at some point if the current policies are not changed, but I warn against this. I certainly don’t “recommend” civil war, as some of my critics have perversely accused me of doing. Who in their right mind would do such a thing, anyway?</p>
<p>It is striking to notice how aggressive many left-wing self-proclaimed intellectuals can be in demonizing those who question their beliefs. Apparently, if conservative writers point out the negative consequences of policies supported by left-wing ideologues, then conservative writers are to blame for the existence of these problems. As such, those who point out real problems related to Muslim mass immigration to Europe and the Western world are accused of spreading “hate,” whereas many groups who have supported and promoted this mass immigration while suppressing any real discussion of its consequences largely go free.</p>
<p>By following this logic, Vidar Enebakk devotes very little space to discussing real problems caused by mass immigration, yet enthusiastically smears anyone who disagrees with his views. In my case, he is engaged in what can only be labeled a systematic attempt at character assassination.</p>
<p>I have briefly engaged him in direct discussions online, but soon found these efforts to be fruitless due to his chronic lack of honesty. For instance, I noted that while he loves to wear the mantle of a scientist, he does not always follow the most basic scientific principles, such as basing his statements on demonstrable facts. He has earlier made <a href="http://www.verdidebatt.no/debatt/cat1/subcat11/thread170730/">public claims</a> that “Fjordman” is really a name used by an entire group of people, and that I have not actually written all of the essays I claim to have written. This conspiracy theory is, of course, totally without basis in reality.</p>
<p>Yet when I pointed this out to him, Enebakk did not apologize for having made baseless accusations against my person but instead immediately made another false accusation against me, namely “<a href="http://snaphanen.dk/2012/11/21/pressens-morke-side/">plagiarism</a>”. He has a background in studies of the history of science and has previously been a Visiting Scholar at the <a href="http://no.linkedin.com/pub/vidar-enebakk/3/858/b25">University of Cambridge</a> in England. He earlier evaluated some of my quite extensive writings on the history of science and found them to be “scarily good.” Yet later on, he suggested that they were not as impressive after all, since I had simply engaged in “plagiarism”.</p>
<p>In the common understanding of the term, <a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plagiarize">Plagiarism</a> implies that one outright steals the work of other people without giving proper credit, and pretends it is his own work. This practice is not just immoral, but can in some cases be illegal. Enebakk thus publicly and falsely accused me of engaging in potentially illegal activities, without providing the tiniest shred of evidence to support it — since none exists.</p>
<p>As a matter of fact, one of my essays that is reproduced in full in Breivik’s so-called manifesto or compendium deals with medieval science in Europe vs. the Islamic world. In <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2008/08/fjordman-on-science-and-religion.html">this 2008 essay</a> I praised the work of scholars David C. Lindberg, Toby E. Huff and Edward Grant, leading authorities on science during the Middle Ages. I have never had any contact with Mr. Grant and bought his book <em>Science and Religion </em>with my own money. I thereafter publicly praised his work in very positive terms and recommended that other buy his book, giving full credit to the author and providing page references to the quotes from it that I used in my essay.</p>
<p>I have openly cited leading international authorities in this particular field, praised them by name and recommended that others buy their books. I did all of this entirely for free, simply because I respect their work.</p>
<p>Yet instead of applauding me for doing this, Enebakk responded by accusing me of engaging in shady and possibly illegal activities. Clearly, this is a person who is <em>not</em> interested in honest debate.</p>
<p>Vidar Enebakk is engaged in systematic character assassination, not research. His obsessive preoccupation with me gives Mr. Enebakk a profile resembling that of a cyber-stalker — a bit like Anders Behring Breivik once was.</p>
<p>He is a living symbol of the decline of modern academia.</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>
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		<title>An Anatomy of Indoctrination</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/an-anatomy-of-indoctrination/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=an-anatomy-of-indoctrination</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Apr 2013 04:20:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barry Mills]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bowdoin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Campus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Indoctrination]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=184849</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new NAS study neatly dissects campus leftism.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/an-anatomy-of-indoctrination/olympus-digital-camera-8/" rel="attachment wp-att-184883"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-184883" title="OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Bowdoin.jpg" alt="" width="251" height="188" /></a><strong>To order David Horowitz&#8217;s book, <em>Reforming Our Universities: The Campaign For An Academic Bill Of Rights</em>, <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productattribute.html?productId=5122">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>If you&#8217;re on the lookout for first-class ideological indoctrination in America today, there&#8217;s plenty of it to be found, of course, at such sprawling, internationally famous universities as Harvard, Columbia, and Berkeley. As a rule, however, these places are so big that there&#8217;s room for pockets of dissent. They&#8217;re so big that they <em>can&#8217;t</em> totally cut themselves off from the real world, as much as they might want to; many of them, in fact are located in or very close to major cities, whose authentic diversity only underscores the factitiousness of the kind of “diversity” promoted on those campuses. Plus they&#8217;ve got departments of physics and engineering and so on, staffed by brilliant, serious people who deal not in dogma but in rigorous analysis and demonstrable scientific fact and whose work has valuable and important real-world consequences.</p>
<p>No, if you want to see ideological lockstep and rinse-and-repeat brainwashing in their very purest form, it&#8217;s best to look to the small, elite liberal-arts colleges – preferably those that are located out in the middle of nowhere or in adorable little college towns where the colleges themselves set the local tone. Case in point: Bowdoin, the alma mater of Hawthorne and Longfellow, no less, which was founded in 1794, is located in Brunswick, Maine, has just under 1800 students, and (as it happens) is the subject of a new report by Peter Wood and Michael Toscano of the National Association of Scholars. <a href="http://www.nas.org/images/documents/What_Does_Bowdoin_Teach.pdf"><em>What Does Bowdoin Teach?: How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students</em></a><em> </em>not only offers a comprehensive anatomy of Bowdoin&#8217;s curriculum but also implicitly invites the students, alumni, and trustees of similar liberal-arts colleges, from Williams and Carleton to Amherst and Haverford, to ponder the extent to which their own institutions suffer from the same failings as Bowdoin.</p>
<p>Many of these institutions, after all, have a good deal in common, from tuition costs that are upwards of $40,000 a year to undergraduates who&#8217;ve been congratulated so often on being admitted to them that they make Harvard students look as if they have inferiority complexes. (Wood and Toscano quote one Bowdoin kid&#8217;s statement that “our student body represents some of the most intelligent youth of the world. Bowdoin&#8217;s worst student is by far and away [sic] much more astute than the vast majority of humans.”) These places are also, very often, worlds unto themselves – to their credit, the folks at Bowdoin openly acknowledge the existence of something they call “the Bowdoin bubble” – where students are encouraged to see the college itself as something of a city on a hill: a small-scale model of the better, more progressive world they should strive to help establish after they graduate.</p>
<p>A <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324100904578404502145771288.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop"><em>Wall Street Journal </em>article</a> about the report details its origins: after NAS board member Tom Klingenstein chided Bowdoin president Barry Mills on a golf course about his college&#8217;s ideological uniformity, Mills (without mentioning Klingenstein&#8217;s name) cited the comment condescendingly in a convocation address, implying that his golf partner was some racist, right-wing plutocrat who didn&#8217;t cotton to Bowdoin&#8217;s magnificent diversity – when, in fact, Klingenstein had been criticizing the college precisely for its lack of <em>real</em> diversity, namely diversity of opinion. After Kingenstein got wind of Mills&#8217;s speech, he wrote a piece explaining what he&#8217;d really said on the links and ended up funding this study. Wood and Toscano underscore a crucial fact about this story: namely, that no one who listened to Mills&#8217;s speech is on record as having noticed its utter self-contradiction – namely, Mills&#8217;s implicit definition of diversity as the exclusion of the kind of views held by people like Klingenstein.</p>
<p>If no one at Bowdoin noticed this self-contradiction, it&#8217;s because this kind of self-contradiction is the woof and warp of contemporary academic orthodoxy – an orthodoxy whose goal, note well, is not to teach young people to think rigorously and analytically about all types of ideas, and thus enable them to recognize such logical lapses, but rather to endlessly reinforce the iron grip of leftist ideology on their minds, which is far easier to carry out if their critical skills remain as lax and lazy as possible. So it is that when such kids, in later life, are challenged by persons who don&#8217;t share their views, they rarely have anything to offer in response other than name-calling, personal attacks, and accusations of “racism” and the like (and most of the time they don&#8217;t even <em>realize </em>they&#8217;re not actually engaging in intellectual discourse).</p>
<p>At Bowdoin, as at other such colleges, diversity in the contemporary academic sense – meaning a fixation with group identity – is at the root of academic life today. “Bowdoin,”  Mills told students in a speech, “is truly a place of real diversity in the broadest sense as compared to the communities [in which] you may now choose to live.” So diversity-minded is Bowdoin, in this sense, that identity-studies programs constitute no less than 18 percent of the curriculum. While Bowdoin doesn&#8217;t demand that students take <em>any</em> courses in “English, philosophy, foreign languages, European history, American history, world history, government, religion, psychology, or sociology,” and doesn&#8217;t even require history majors to take so much as one course in U.S. history, it&#8217;s compulsory for history majors to take a certain number of courses in <em>non-Western </em>history. Not to mention that there&#8217;s a proliferation of student clubs based on group identity. Long lost is the idea that it should be an objective, when bringing together kids from a wide variety of backgrounds to be educated, to transcend such categories; on the contrary, the idea is to produce young adults for whom class, race, and gender labels are the very pillars of self-knowledge.</p>
<p>While it&#8217;s just not done, at a place like Bowdoin, to praise America and American values, absolutely no superlatives about the college and <em>its </em>values are considered too hyperbolic. When Mills gave a speech immediately after 9/11, he had nothing whatsoever to say about America, choosing instead to take the opportunity to celebrate <em>Bowdoin&#8217;s </em>values: “<em>we at Bowdoin </em>above all stand for what is just and right.” Such absurd parochialism is typical of these colleges. So, Wood and Toscano point out, is the inculcation of “knowingness” – a trait that they describe as “the antithesis of humility,” “the enemy of education,” and “the formula for intellectual complacency.” These aren&#8217;t, in other words, ignorant students who are starving – and striving – for knowledge; they&#8217;re ignorant students who have been trained to be smug and self-satisfied, to think that they&#8217;ve already got all the answers and that they themselves are the solution to the world&#8217;s problems. Why, after all, should they be eager to learn? Academic ideology has already answered all the important questions. Besides, it&#8217;s been made clear to them that there&#8217;s nothing in particular they <em>need </em>to learn. All of life is an elective. Course content is irrelevant; what matters is that you approach every topic with a reflexive, unquestioning belief in social construction, “social justice,” and “global citizenship.”</p>
<p>Wood and Toscano have provided a magnificent, and alarming, anatomy of the curricular crisis at Bowdoin. But they&#8217;ve gone further, taking on such topics as campus drinking and sex. I wish they hadn&#8217;t. This shift of focus muddies the waters, risks leaving the impression that they view these age-old aspects of college life as somehow linked to left-wing academic orthodoxy, and invites critics to dismiss them as reactionary fuddy-duddies. In fact, the triumph of ideology so effectively delineated in their report should be of the deepest concern to all conservatives <em>and </em>genuine liberals (as opposed to leftist ideologues) who understand just how vital the preservation of classical liberal education is to America&#8217;s future.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Video: Former Radical Feminist Confronts &#8220;Women&#8217;s Studies&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/video-former-radical-feminist-confronts-womens-studies/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=video-former-radical-feminist-confronts-womens-studies</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/video-former-radical-feminist-confronts-womens-studies/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 21 Mar 2013 04:02:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[Dr. Janice Fiamengo]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Dr. Janice Fiamengo unveils the sinister totalitarian agenda of "academic feminism."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Dr. Janice Fiamengo unveils the sinister totalitarian agenda of &#8220;academic feminism&#8221;:</p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/BomcF5XF_YQ" frameborder="0" width="425" height="325"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Inside the Iron Tower: The Life of Conservatives in Academia</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jack-kerwick/inside-the-iron-tower-the-life-of-conservatives-in-academia/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=inside-the-iron-tower-the-life-of-conservatives-in-academia</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Mar 2013 04:40:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=180422</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Diagnosing the creed oppressing free thought on campuses. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jack-kerwick/inside-the-iron-tower-the-life-of-conservatives-in-academia/1131949144_0730-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-180440"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-180440" title="1131949144_0730" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/1131949144_07301.jpg" alt="" width="255" height="186" /></a>Last week, the president of Emory University, James W. Wagner, was censured by faculty members, and may even be forced to resign when faculty reconvene later this month to decide his fate.</p>
<p>Wagner’s great sin, you see, is that in an article in his school’s magazine, he cited “the three-fifths compromise over slavery” as a paradigmatic illustration of the art of political comprise.</p>
<p>In response to the backlash against this act of his, Wagner issued the obligatory mea culpa and deplored the “clumsiness and insensitivity” of his piece.</p>
<p>Still, the enlightened professoriate at Emory has thus far withheld its mercy.</p>
<p>This week, Kurt Schlichter published an article that appeared at Townhall.com.  It had the catchy title: “Let’s Help Academia Destroy Itself.”  In addition to arguing that the contemporary university is a parasite on society—a “liberal tick,” is how he describes it—Schlichter welcomes the demise of academia on the grounds that it is a tax-payer subsidized “reservoir of leftism” that produces little except for an endless supply of unemployed and underemployed Democratic voters.</p>
<p>This episode at Emory is not at all atypical of life behind the iron tower.  And while Schlichter is guilty of oversimplifying matters here and there, the essence of his analysis is spot on.  As an academic who also happens to be a conservative, it brings me no joy to assure the reader that I know that of which I speak.</p>
<p>Another person who is just as painfully aware of the grim realities of the contemporary university setting is Mary Grabar.</p>
<p>Hot off of the presses is Grabar’s &#8220;Exiled: Stories from Conservative and Moderate Professors Who Have Been Ridiculed, Ostracized, Marginalized, Demonized, and Frozen Out.&#8221; Grabar and six other academics, including yours truly, contributed to this anthology of insiders’ accounts of daily existence in the academic world.  Short, readable, and inexpensive, it is the ideal primer for parents preparing to march their children off for four or more years of college.</p>
<p>Since I participated in this project, I will not review it.  I would, however, like to elaborate upon some of the themes that I sounded in my essay (and elsewhere).</p>
<p>The treasure that parents of college students and/or the students themselves can plan on pledging to the academic institution of their choice promises to be staggering enough.  At least as costly, though, is the intellectual toll that academia is guaranteed to extract from them.</p>
<p>To put it simply, as things stand at present, the ideal of a free marketplace of ideas to which academia is ostensibly committed to promoting is a fiction. Between this ideal and the current reality, there exists a chasm that is as unbridgeable as it is glaring.  Only the self-delusional, the ignorant, and the deceitful can say otherwise.  For the rest of us, it requires spending all but five minutes in any given liberal arts or humanities department in the country to grasp the painful, ugly truth.</p>
<p>And the truth is that for many academics, not only is there no such thing as “the disinterested pursuit of truth.”  There is no such thing as truth.  I’m not kidding.  Truth, along with such related concepts as “reason,” “fact,” “logic,” and “objectivity,” are routinely treated as Eurocentric social constructions by which white men have traditionally oppressed women, non-whites, homosexuals, non-Christians, and the environment.</p>
<p>World famous “post-modernist” philosophers, like Jacques Derrida, make it their task in life to “deconstruct” Western civilization so as to convict it of “logocentrism”—its faith in reason to access reality.</p>
<p>Far from challenging the prevailing status quo for no other reason but that it is the status quo, the average academic is an avowed apologist for it.  Yet even this way of characterizing matters grossly understates the extent to which academia suffers from a poverty of vision.</p>
<p>It is more accurate to think of academia as a quasi-religious cult of a sort.  This is no hyperbole. Intellectual life in the university has been constrained by the straightjacket of the creed.</p>
<p>Formally, of course, there is no such thing.  But, in practice, the creed is almost everywhere affirmed.  If it had to be summed up, it boils down to contempt—contempt for Western civilization generally, and America in particular.</p>
<p>More specifically, the creed demands that the entire history of the West be viewed through the narrowest—and most cartoonish—of lens: white, heterosexual, Christian men are villains, and everyone—and everything—else are their victims.  It isn’t just racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and any and every other conceivable crime against humanity for which Western civilization stands condemned.  Western (white) Man is also convicted by academics of specieism, bias against non-humans, and homocentrism, bias against the environment.</p>
<p>To be clear, the widely held belief among academia’s critics on the right that the university is a bastion of “moral relativism” is wide off the mark.  There are no real relativists among academics.  The latter are absolutists of the worst sort, crusaders or jihadists forever vigilant against deviations from the creed.  And those who style themselves as relativists tend to be the most committed of its guardians.</p>
<p>The creed is more or less pronounced, depending on the institution. But aspiring college students and their parents should know that, with all too few exceptions, regardless of where they are in the academic world, the creed is impossible to avoid.</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>
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		<title>America the Racist, Sexist, and Classist</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/america-the-racist-sexist-and-classist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=america-the-racist-sexist-and-classist</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 21 Jan 2013 04:45:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=174101</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new report shows how college profs are “recasting history.”]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/america-the-racist-sexist-and-classist/rh-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-174105"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-174105" title="rh" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/rh1-450x240.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="144" /></a>Not to make this personal or anything, but since the publication a couple of months ago of my book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Victims-Revolution-Identity-Studies/dp/0061807370/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0">The Victims&#8217; Revolution</a><em> – </em>which is, essentially, a critique of the way American universities teach the humanities nowadays – academics have chosen either to ignore the book or to dismiss it by claiming that the humanities aren&#8217;t anywhere near as preoccupied as I claim with the ideological holy trinity of race, class, and gender. One or two of them have added that, well, maybe the humanities <em>were </em>kind of preoccupied with such things a while back, but all that stuff (they insist) is on its way out. Now along comes a <a href="http://www.nas.org/images/documents/Recasting_History.pdf%20">study</a> from the National Association of Scholars that makes me feel that, if anything, (a) I understated the problem, and (b) far from being on its way out, it&#8217;s going from bad to worse.</p>
<p>Entitled <em>Recasting History, </em>the NAS study – the product of a collaboration between the NAS&#8217;s Center for the Study of the Curriculum and the Texas Association of Scholars – takes a close look at history courses at two major Lone Star State institutions: the University of Texas at Austin and A&amp;M University at College Station. Specifically, the researchers examined the assigned readings for every single Fall 2010 section (85 in all) of every lower-division course at either university that satisfied its U.S. history requirement. The study&#8217;s main finding: that the history courses at both UT and A&amp;M place so much emphasis on race, class, and gender – or, as the report handily puts it, “RCG” – that other aspects of history get short shrift.</p>
<p>The consequence, as the researchers themselves put it, is that students are presented with “a less-than-comprehensive picture of U.S. history.” Or, even worse, “a constrained version of the past.” Or, worse still – and this really says it – “a narrowing conception of our nation” in which “<strong>t</strong>he elevation of racial, class, and sexual identity into the central story of America” causes “individual rights, entrepreneurship, industrialization, self-reliance, religion, war, science,” and a multitude of other important aspects of U.S. history to “fade into the margins along with the persons and events associated with them.” The study&#8217;s authors should perhaps be commended for resisting the temptation to use terms like <em>twisted, slanted, distorted, </em>and <em>perverted,</em> even though every one of these words is entirely appropriate to the occasion.</p>
<p>Interestingly, the obsession with RCG is even higher at UT than is it at A&amp;M, which, given that UT is generally considered slightly better than A&amp;M (UT is <a href="http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/page+5">rated # 46</a> by <em>U.S. News and World Report</em> , with A&amp;M at #65), confirms my growing, if highly counterintuitive, suspicion that people who want their kids to get the best possible education in the humanities are usually better off sending them to second-tier rather than first-tier colleges – the point being that the fancier the college, the higher the B.S. quotient in these matters is likely to be. One interesting finding in the report is that professors&#8217; own research interests influence their tendency to assign RCG readings considerably less than what the report refers to as the university&#8217;s or department&#8217;s “culture” – which is a nice way of saying that humanities teachers in higher education nowadays, despite their view of themselves as fearless revolutionary pedagogues in the mold of Paulo Freire and Frantz Fanon, tend to be terrified of being seen as anything other than team players.</p>
<p>One of the NAS&#8217;s findings is that there&#8217;s “no common core of readings” in the Introduction to U.S. History courses at either institution. Seventy-nine percent of those who taught Fall 2010 intro courses in U.S. history at UT and A&amp;M eschewed anthologies, instead assigning readings that they&#8217;d handpicked – and that, the report notes, are “much more heavily tilted to race, class, and gender themes than those drawn from anthologies.” The most frequently assigned work was Thomas Paine&#8217;s <em>Common Sense, </em>which seven out of thirty-three teachers put on their reading lists. But other equally or more important texts weren&#8217;t read in <em>any</em> of the introductory classes. The report emphasizes students&#8217; lack of exposure to primary documents:</p>
<blockquote><p>Classic historical memoirs or autobiographies were rarely assigned. The six assigned anthologies were not helpful in providing access to primary source documents. Only one anthology assigned by only two faculty members <em>(Reading the American Past) </em>gave students reading assignments that included George Washington’s Farewell Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Gettysburg Address. Only one faculty member assigned the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Of the 33 faculty members who taught survey courses, only four assigned even portions of the <em>Notes on the State of Virginia</em> by Thomas Jefferson and only one assigned <em>Democracy in America</em> by Alexis de Tocqueville&#8230;.Classic political documents such as the Mayflower Compact and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address were not assigned by any faculty members.</p></blockquote>
<p>What <em>did </em>the students read? The study includes a list of all forty-nine books that appeared on one or more of the various professors&#8217; reading lists, and while many of these books – as the researchers are quick to point out – may be of value, the overall bias is clear. Here are all the titles that start with the letters A through C: <em>Abigail Adams: A Revolutionary American Woman; American Negro Slavery; American Slavery: 1619-1877; Apostles of Disunion; Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776; Black Boy; Black Like Me; Bonds of Womanhood: Woman’s Sphere in New England, 1780-1835; Cesar Chavez and La Causa; Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England; </em>and <em>Coming of Age in Mississippi.</em></p>
<p>In order to come up with a reasonably objective take on just how – well – twisted, slanted, distorted, and perverted these profs&#8217; lists of assigned readings were, the NAS&#8217;s researchers compared them to the National Archives and Records Administration&#8217;s list of 100 “milestone documents” of U.S. history from 1776 to 1965 – documents that, according to the NARA, “have helped shape the national character, and they reflect our diversity, our unity, and our commitment as a nation to continue our work toward forming ‘a more perfect union.’” The list begins with such texts as the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, and <em>Federalist Papers</em>, includes such items as the Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg Address, and concludes with JFK&#8217;s Inaugural Address. Only 23 of the NARA&#8217;s 100 documents were assigned by any history instructor at UT or A&amp;M, and – get this – a full 89 percent of the teachers didn&#8217;t assign <em>a single one </em>of the 100 key documents. Indeed, “77% of the documents went totally unassigned.” In other words, as the NAS report flatly puts it: “Most students taking U.S. history courses&#8230;did not have exposure to any of these key works of American history.”</p>
<p>In addition to the history survey courses, the NAS study looked at “special topics” courses in history. While A&amp;M offered one such course – on the unquestionably important and serious topic “American Sea Power” – UT had six such courses. They were on the following topics: “History of Mexican Americans in the U.S.,” “Introduction to American Studies,” “The Black Power Movement,” “Mexican American Women, 1910-Present,” “Race and Revolution,” and “The United States and Africa.” The readings in these UT course were even more, um – twisted? slanted? – than those for the intro courses, with more than half of the texts focusing on “RCG topics.” Here&#8217;s the A-through-C rundown: <em>Africanisms in American Culture; Assata: An Autobiography; Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child; Becoming Mexican-American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1940-1945; Chicana Feminist Thought; Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas, Mexican Workers and Job Politics;</em> and, once again, <em>Coming of Age in Mississippi. </em></p>
<p>What to say about all this? At UT, in-state tuition and fees amount to $9,792 a year; out-of-state tuition and fees, $33,060 a year. Imagine coughing up that kind of dough so that your kid can come away with the kind of picture of America and its history that is inevitably created by these readings – and by the lectures and classroom discussions that go with them.</p>
<p>Is all this nonsense, as <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/books/review/the-victims-revolution-by-bruce-bawer.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0">Andrew Delbanco</a> and others claim, on its way out? To judge by the NAS study&#8217;s findings, no. On the contrary, as older faculty members retire, the problem is just getting worse and worse. Only among the older cohort at UT and A&amp;M do you find a significant number of professors whose research is focused on such areas as political, diplomatic, and military history; the “research” by their younger colleagues, by and large, is focused on RCG – and much of it, unless the junior history faculty at UT and A&amp;M are radically different from their counterparts elsewhere around the country, doesn&#8217;t deserve to be described as research at all, but rather as an endless recycling of now-familiar academic clichés about group power and oppression.</p>
<p>“A history department too narrow or monolithic in its course offerings or views,” observe the NAS researchers with (again) admirable restraint, “can intellectually shortchange its students and faculty.” I would go just a teensy bit further: to use the materials named in this report to “teach” American history is to deliberately <em>reject </em>the job of informing and educating students. It is to stunt their intellects – to deliberately deny them important knowledge and insights. It is, indeed, to stuff their heads with propaganda, in much the way that the Maoists did in their re-education camps during the Cultural Revolution. All of which is to say that the curricula outlined in the NAS&#8217;s sobering report are not about history, but about ideology; not about education, but about indoctrination. America&#8217;s kids – and America&#8217;s future – deserve better.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Fighting for Marxist Indoctrination on Campus</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/steven-plaut/fighting-for-marxist-indoctrination-on-campus/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=fighting-for-marxist-indoctrination-on-campus</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Oct 2012 04:10:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Steven Plaut]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The Left's campaign to preserve Ben Gurion University’s Center for Radical Indoctrination.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/steven-plaut/fighting-for-marxist-indoctrination-on-campus/classroom-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-148603"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-148603" title="classroom" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/classroom.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="219" /></a>There is a species of radical Leftist that believes that it is the main purpose of taxpayer-funded universities to engage in indoctrination of students into radical left-wing ideology.  Such people believe that the only legitimate form of scholarly research and teaching is to force upon students the ideas and agendas of the radical Left, because <em>only these</em> represent correct thinking.</p>
<p>For such people, the highest form of academic inquiry is to engage in one-sided advocacy.  They believe that faculty members at universities should be hired mainly, if not exclusively, on the basis of their devotion to radical leftist ideology.   They believe that classrooms should be arenas in which students are immersed into leftist NewThink.  They believe that student grades should reflect the extent to which the student toes the ideological line of the radical Left.  They believe academic conferences and research forums should be restricted to those who advocate the Left’s political agenda, while non-leftist dissident thought should be suppressed and barred.  Most importantly of all, they believe that those who dare to criticize the radical tenured Left should be silenced and demonized.</p>
<p>The totalitarian Left believes that taxpayers are morally obligated to fund the teaching of extremist ideology in the classroom, including by people advocating the demise of those same taxpayers and of their country.  It is the job of citizens to sit back passively and pay for the far Left to operate propaganda centers, while the radicals collect their cushy salaries as payment for advocating their anti-Israel agenda.  It is the job of universities to criticize (actually to demonize) the state of Israel, the tenured Left insists, just as long as no one is permitted to criticize those critics of Israel.</p>
<p>Nowhere is this ideological extremism so clearly on display as in the Department of Politics at Ben Gurion University (BGU), a pseudo-academic propaganda and indoctrination center disguised as an academic department.  It is not the only such department in Israel nor at BGU, but it may well be the worst.</p>
<p>Last year an international panel of experts appointed by the Israeli Council of Higher Education (which oversees and funds universities) called for shutting down this BGU department altogether, due to the abysmally low quality of its work and due to its having replaced serious scholarly research with one-sided “advocacy.”    The Israeli academic Left had tried to stack the panel in favor of the department.  It attempted to include on the panel <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2010/steven-plaut/collaborators-in-the-war-against-the-jews-ian-lustick-by-steven-plaut">Ian Lustick</a>, an anti-Israel and anti-American radical leftist from the University of Pennsylvania, who would naturally defend any leftist pseudo-academic advocacy department.  Lustick is a close crony of Norman Finkelstein and attempted to prevent DePaul University from firing Finkelstein in a similar manner.  The Council, however, was on to the Left and rejected Lustick’s membership.  It did allow the far-left Prof. Galia <a href="http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/other%20-%20Interdisciplinary%20Center%20-%20Galia%20Golan%20-%20Gynocentric%20Campaign%20against%20Israel.htm">Golan</a> to be included.  A <a href="http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/other%20-%20Interdisciplinary%20Center%20-%20Galia%20Golan%20-%20New%20History%20Revisionism.htm">founder of the far-leftist “Peace Now</a>,” she submitted a “minority position paper” defending the BGU department.</p>
<p>The far-leftist faculty members in the department denounce Israel in unison, and some – including the Israeli Norman Finkelstein, Neve Gordon &#8211; call for world boycotts of Israel.  In response to the CHE criticism of the departmental obsession with one-side advocacy, BGU hired three new politics faculty members in order to generate diversity and pluralism; but the three new ones are <em>also</em> far-leftist anti-Israel radicals.</p>
<p>Students in political science at BGU who dare to express pro-Israel opinions tell of being penalized and harassed by the faculty.  The single non-leftist faculty member who taught in the department was fired a few years back for incorrect thinking.   Diversity and pluralism in the department consist of people of various ethnicities, genders, heights and weights all advocating Far Leftist and Marxist “ideas.”  Diversity of thought is suppressed mercilessly, and serious academic standards are trashed.</p>
<p>In recent weeks, the totalitarian Left has been circling its wagons in solidarity with the Department of Politics at BGU.  Leftist-dominated academic associations are flooding the press and the CHE with angry demands to <em>defend the right</em> of the Department of Politics at BGU to engage in “advocacy” and leftist indoctrination.  Recruited by the members of BGU’s politics department, foreign members of the academic Left and Israeli tenured radicals, even some notorious members of the communist party, have been leading the campaign to defend the BGU propagandists.</p>
<p>The campaigners demand that the right of BGU leftists to indoctrinate and propagandize at taxpayer expense be defended against CHE criticism and interference.  The defenders of the department insist that “positivism,” meaning actual scholarly research, is only one legitimate strand of academic activity in political science, meaning they really want ideological indoctrination to be the “alternative” function of academics.  A recent one-sided “conference” devoted to advocating political advocacy as the calling for academia was held at Ben Gurion University.  Participants in the “conference” were greeted by BGU President Rivka Carmi, who regularly insists she is not aware of any one-sided advocacy or indoctrination activities held at BGU.  This is the same Carmi whose belief in pluralism was manifested in her firing Prof. Yeruham Leavitt because he had dared to express a politically incorrect opinion about children being raised by homosexual couples.</p>
<p>And so the Orwellian inversions continue.  Under the campaign to defend the right of BGU radicals to indoctrinate students into anti-Israel ideology, pluralism and diversity are achieved by maintaining a department in which only far leftists may teach.  Academic freedom is achieved by suppressing the right to criticize anti-Israel extremists.  The highest form of scholarly research is the promulgation of hate propaganda and anti-Zionist advocacy.  Diversity of ideas is achieved by suppressing all non-leftist thought.  And the highest form of public responsibility and accountability is when taxpayers are coerced into paying for the inculcation of extremist ideas, those which the taxpayers themselves reject and abhor.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Profs. on Mideast Turmoil: Blame America, Israel, and Free Speech</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/cinnamon-stillwell/profs-on-mideast-turmoil-blame-america-israel-and-free-speech/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=profs-on-mideast-turmoil-blame-america-israel-and-free-speech</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Oct 2012 04:38:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[blasphemy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Joe Wilson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Esposito]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[professors]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=146872</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Free speech? Not according to these professors.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/John-Esposito.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-146982" title="John Esposito" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/John-Esposito.jpg" alt="" width="420" height="280" /></a>In the wake of the al-Qaeda attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11, 2012, the seizure of the American embassy in Cairo, Egypt, and the ensuing anti-American protests and riots throughout the Middle East—the latter ostensibly over an anti-Islam YouTube <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAiOEV0v2RM">film trailer</a> that originated in the U.S. months earlier—what do Middle East scholars have to say about the turmoil in the region?</p>
<p>As self-styled supporters of “academic freedom,” are they rushing to defend First Amendment rights instead of kowtowing to Muslim religious sensibilities? Are they denouncing the prospect of self-censorship rather than pushing YouTube to pull the “offending” video by claiming that it constitutes “hate speech?” Are they standing up for religious freedom instead of encouraging Americans to adhere to Sharia law-driven prohibitions on blasphemy? Are they putting aside their anti-Western biases and laying blame where it belongs instead of on America and Israel?</p>
<p>If the following quotes from Middle East studies academics are any indication, the answer to all those questions would be a resounding <em>No!</em></p>
<p>Let’s take a look at what these “experts” have to say.</p>
<p><strong>On First Amendment rights:</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/6417/rage_or_courage%3A_youtube_terrorism_take_two">Bruce Lawrence</a>, professor emeritus of religion and member of the Islamic Studies Center’s advisory board, Duke University:</p>
<blockquote><p>But what about hate speech? Is hate speech not a category that impinges on, and limits, the practice of free speech?</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.religionnews.com/blogs/omid-safi/12-essential-points-about-the-offensive-film-on-the-prophet-muhammad-and-th">Omid Safi</a>, professor of Islamic studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:</p>
<blockquote><p>In reality, pieces like the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ [sic] so-called film are best classified as ‘hate speech,’ as they seem to be of the same genre as anti-Semitic films of the 1930’s or <em>Birth of the</em> [sic] <em>Nation</em> KKK movies.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://gulfnews.com/opinions/columnists/an-appeal-to-contemporary-muslim-conscience-1.1077670">Tariq Ramadan</a>, professor of contemporary Islamic studies, Oxford University:</p>
<blockquote><p>[B]ehind the celebration of freedom of speech hides the arrogance of ideologists and well-fed racists who feed off the multiform humiliation of Muslims and to demonstrate the clear ‘superiority’ of their civilisation or the validity of their resistance to the ‘cancer’ of retrograde Islam.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://blog.georgetownvoice.com/2012/09/25/professors-discuss-effects-of-anti-islam-video-the-innocence-of-muslims/">John Brown</a>, adjunct professor of liberal studies, Georgetown University:</p>
<blockquote><p>Every culture or group of cultures has its own red lines. They might be legal red lines, but they are cultural red lines. There are taboos there are things people cannot say in public. In my experience, you just don’t speak badly of the Prophet Muhammad. It just does not happen.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.npr.org/2012/09/13/161082308/understanding-muslim-anger-over-insulting-film">John Esposito</a>, director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University:</p>
<blockquote><p>Indeed, it’s important to remember that, for Muslims, Mohammed is the ideal Muslim, as it was. He’s the living Quran. You know, he’s the model, you know. And so to go after him, OK, is to be the ultimate form, you know, the ultimate form of disrespect. It would be the ultimate blasphemy. . . . I think there’s a recognition of the freedom of speech, but you know, you still get into freedom of speech and then what are the consequences of it? . . . And so what you really have is a situation where this belongs to the genre of Islam-aphobia, which is just like [sic] anti-Semitic.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2012/09/to-american-politicians-do-you-think.html">As&#8217;ad AbuKhalil</a>, professor of political science, California State University, Stanislaus:</p>
<blockquote><p>U.S. officials have been really insulting my intelligence all week with talk of the ‘freedom of speech’ that we have here in the U.S. that Muslims don’t understand. . . . They understand that the U.S. government has made it illegal for anyone to express support for Hamas and Hizbullah in the U.S.  Muslim[s] do understand that the U.S. has banned TV channels [Hezbollah’s Al-Manar and Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV] from the U.S. because they deemed them offensive to Israel. . . . We remember that the Bush administration asked all U.S. news media after Sept. 11 to refrain from airing any Bin Laden tapes.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/12/reaction-to-anti-islam-film-fuels-debate-on-free-speech-versus-hate-speech/">Omid Safi</a>, professor of Islamic studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:</p>
<blockquote><p>Freedom of speech falls alongside other freedoms to live and be free from bombs falling on people’s heads and to be free from occupations . . . I will take free speech comments seriously when others take people’s freedom of life and dignity and to be free from occupation just as seriously.</p></blockquote>
<p><strong>On why YouTube should pull the video, “Innocence of Muslims”: </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.kqed.org/news/story/2012/09/14/107715/youtubes_video_decision_sparks_controversy?category=bay+area">Hatem Bazian</a>, Near Eastern studies senior lecturer, University of California, Berkeley:</p>
<blockquote><p>Take the ethical high ground and say, ‘yes, I understand that I have the legal right to do it. But ethically, I need to actually say no to it, because it does not represent the best of our values.’ I would say even to put it in the recycling bin would be an insult to the recycling bin.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://blog.georgetownvoice.com/2012/09/25/professors-discuss-effects-of-anti-islam-video-the-innocence-of-muslims/#more-41208">John Brown</a>, adjunct professor of liberal studies, Georgetown University:</p>
<blockquote><p>This movie reached new depths . . . I find it difficult that the most insulting thing ever made about the Prophet Muhammad in the history of Western civilization, as far as I know, doesn’t violate usage [Youtube usage] policy.<br />
<strong></strong></p></blockquote>
<p><strong>On blaming America, and Israel, and the West:<br />
</strong><br />
<a href="http://www.eurasiareview.com/19092012-embassy-protests-and-middle-east-unrest-in-context-oped/">Stephen Zunes</a>, professor of politics and international studies and director of the Middle East studies program, University of San Francisco:</p>
<blockquote><p>It is extremely unlikely that such vitriolic anti-American protests would have taken place were it not for decades of U.S. support, during both Republican and Democratic administrations, of allied dictatorships and the Israeli occupation, not to mention the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the ongoing military strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/201291510539957566.html">John Esposito</a>, director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University:</p>
<blockquote><p>The terrorist attack on the US consulate in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three embassy staff, and the Cairo riots seem similar but share in common the incitement and exploitation of popular outrage among many Muslims, as we have witnessed during the Salman Rushdie and Danish cartoons affairs. They exploit deep seated popular anti-American sentiment, based on decades of resentment over US and European foreign policies in the Middle East.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.juancole.com/2012/09/muslims-are-no-different-or-why-bill-mahers-blood-libel-is-bigotry.html">Juan Cole</a>, Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History, University of Michigan:</p>
<blockquote><p>The touchiness of Muslims about assaults on the Prophet Muhammad is in part rooted in centuries of Western colonialism and neo-colonialism during which their religion was routinely denounced as barbaric by the people ruling and lording it over them.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/201291391347458863.html">Mark LeVine</a>, professor of history, University of California, Irvine:</p>
<blockquote><p>Muslims in Egypt, Libya and around the world equally look at American actions, from sanctions against and then an invasion of Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and sent the country back to the Stone Age, to unflinching support for Israel and all the Arab authoritarian regimes (secular and royal alike) and drone strikes that always seem to kill unintended civilians ‘by mistake,’ and wonder with equal bewilderment how ‘we’ can be so barbaric and uncivilized.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/201292063638169981.html">Hamid Dabashi</a>, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University:</p>
<blockquote><p>Sam Bacile [the pseudonym for the alleged filmmaker, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula] is integral to a pattern, an Islamophobic streak of racism that runs deep into American culture.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.juancole.com/2012/09/why-they-hate-us-romney-secretly-plots-to-screw-palestinians-over-again.html">Juan Cole</a>, Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History, University of Michigan:</p>
<blockquote><p>From the 9/11 attacks to the embassy burnings of this past week, the U.S. pays the price for supporting the subjection of the Palestinians in widespread hatred for it from the Muslim world.</p></blockquote>
<p><strong>On downplaying the violent reaction of the Muslim world: </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/09/muslim-world.html">Dalia Mogahed</a>, Executive Director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, co-author, with Georgetown University’s John Esposito, of <em>Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think, </em>and nonresident senior public policy scholar at the American University of Beirut:</p>
<blockquote><p>So I think it would just be too much of a generalization to say Muslims react violently when they’re offended, whereas everyone else reacts peacefully. I think that riots and protests turn violent all over the world.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.npr.org/2012/09/21/161545499/a-look-at-islam-and-free-speech">Also</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>The other thing to keep in mind is that, sometimes, when there are offensive materials here in this country, people do protest against them and I think that that’s also part of freedom of speech that we have to look at and respect.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.juancole.com/2012/09/muslims-are-no-different-or-why-bill-mahers-blood-libel-is-bigotry.html">Juan Cole</a>, Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History, University of Michigan:</p>
<blockquote><p>[D]efending the Prophet and defending the post-colonial nation are for the most part indistinguishable, and being touchy over slights to national identity (and yes, Muslimness is a kind of national identity in today’s world) is hardly confined to Muslims.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/6417/rage_or_courage%3A_youtube_terrorism_take_two">Bruce Lawrence</a>, emeritus professor of religion and member of the Islamic Studies Center’s advisory board, Duke University:</p>
<blockquote><p>Should Muslim sensitivities be viewed any differently from their Jewish or Christian counterparts? Muslims do monitor their prophet. His legacy has been challenged within Islam at many levels, but his basic character has not been besmirched with the degree of ill will, bordering on savagery, that has been seen in the past 12 years.</p></blockquote>
<p>Whether it be John Esposito <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/11697">toeing the line</a> of his Wahhabi funders; Omid Safi <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/11861">engaging in</a> irresponsible, inflammatory rhetoric; Stephen Zunes <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/12069">blaming</a> the U.S. and Israel for all that’s wrong with the world; Dalia Mogahed <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/8558">whitewashing</a> Islamism; As&#8217;ad AbuKhalil <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/11925">justifying</a> violence; Mark LeVine <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/8536">exhibiting</a> contempt for America; or Juan Cole displaying the same disregard for the First Amendment he showed when <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/2524">he called</a> for the U.S. government to shut down Fox News these are the ideologues to whom the Western media turns for insight into the Middle East. Anyone hoping to understand the turmoil in the region as the consequences of the “Arab Spring” continue to unfold should look elsewhere.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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