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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Berkeley</title>
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		<title>Trouble in Berkeley, Missouri</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/trouble-in-berkeley-missouri/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=trouble-in-berkeley-missouri</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/trouble-in-berkeley-missouri/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Dec 2014 05:27:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berkeley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ferguson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protests]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[shooting]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[surveillance camera]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248132</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Protestors fight police after another shooting. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/berkeley12.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248135" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/berkeley12-450x253.jpg" alt="berkeley12" width="244" height="137" /></a>Another seemingly justified police shooting near Ferguson, MO briefly followed a sadly predictable script. In nearby Berkeley, a white police officer, aged 34, fired three shots, killing black American Antonio Martin, aged 18. The officer was responding to a report of stealing at a Mobil on the Run gas station. Martin allegedly pulled a 9mm handgun on the six-year veteran, who stumbled backwards as he fired, striking Martin once. &#8220;He will carry the weight of this for the rest of his life, certainly for the rest of his career,&#8221; said St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar, referring to the unidentified officer. &#8220;There are no winners here.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, there were plenty of losers. Despite the efforts of Mayor Theodore Hoskins, who <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/missouri-police-officer-shoots-dead-man-who-pulled-gun-1419412121?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories">explained</a> the shooting had been captured on a surveillance camera and a weapon was recovered on the scene, between 200 and 300 protesters <a href="http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/berkeley-officer-fatally-shoots-teenager/article_d45db16a-7422-5307-b81d-b45dbdc896ba.html">gathered</a> there and began fighting with police officers. One of three explosive devices (possible fireworks) tossed near gas pumps sent one officer to the hospital with injuries to his leg, while another sustained facial lacerations as a result of bricks thrown at the officers by the mob. Several police cars were also damaged by rocks protesters brought to the area. Four people were arrested for assault.</p>
<p>Belmar said he understood why a crowd would gather, but he noted that &#8220;to come there armed with explosive devices is certainly something that is not safe for our community, is not safe for our businesses and is certainly not safe for our officers.” He also addressed questions from the crowd as to why the officer couldn’t have used pepper spray or a Taser to subdue the victim. He characterized that response as “unreasonable.” &#8220;We had somebody who was pointing a gun at a police officer,” he explained. &#8220;With not a lot of time, I would imagine that most of us would feel like we were in imminent danger of losing our lives at that point. And I think the officer responded with what he thought was commensurate force at the time.”</p>
<p>&#8220;I understand the emotions and I understand these young people are looking for something, but I think we have to understand the context of what happens down there with these kinds of situations,” he added.</p>
<p>The incident occurred at approximately 11:15 p.m. Tuesday night.  The officer encountered two men at the parking lot in the 6800 block of North Hanley Road and began talking to them. Belmar said one of the men approached the drivers side of the police vehicle. According to the police officer&#8217;s attorney, Brian Millikan, the other man kept wandering away despite the officer’s commands to remain close by.</p>
<p>One of the two men &#8220;produced a pistol with his arm straight out, pointing it straight at the officer kind of from across the hood,&#8221; Belmar said, further noting the police officer had a flashlight in his left hand and was near his driver’s side door while the armed man stood near the headlights on the passenger side of the vehicle. The officer proceeded to get his handgun &#8220;and fired what we think is three shots,” Belmar said. One struck Martin, one struck a tire on the police car, and the third shot remains unaccounted for.</p>
<p>After the shooting the officer was placed on administrative leave. Belmar <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/12/24/protesters-near-ferguson-injure-cops-with-bricks-explosives-after-officer-kills-armed-18-yr-old/">revealed</a> the suspect’s “defaced” 9 mm gun “had five rounds in the chamber and one round in the magazine.” He further revealed Martin had a criminal record that included three assault charges, as well as charges for armed robbery, armed criminal action and  multiple unlawful uses of a weapon.</p>
<p>Millikan recounted further details provided to him by the officer hours after the shooting &#8220;The other guy was doing the talking, and as the cop starts talking, the suspect starts walking away again,&#8221; Millikan said. &#8220;At that point, the cop says, &#8216;Hey, come back here,&#8217; and he turns around, pulls a gun from his left pant pocket. He&#8217;s trying to process all of this, and the suspect raises it, points it at him. The cop pulls his weapon and starts backpedaling and fired three or four shots. It happened that quickly. He doesn&#8217;t understand why the suspect&#8217;s gun didn&#8217;t fire. I&#8217;m not sure if he tried to pull the trigger and it jammed,” he added.</p>
<p>Millikan who further characterized the behavior of the two suspects as “bizarre” speculated that his client might have been set up for an ambush because the suspects remained at the scene after store employees called 911. &#8220;Their behavior is certainly bizarre, and it wouldn&#8217;t surprise me at all, in the environment we are in, that&#8217;s for sure,” he contended.</p>
<p>Belmar noted the officer dropped his flashlight when he stumbled while backpedaling, with Mayor Hoskins characterizing that as a blessing in disguise that may have saved the officer’s life. The officer had been given a body camera at the beginning of his shift, but wasn’t wearing it. Belmar said the officer was doing something else when it was handed out and simply forgot to put it on. The police car’s dashboard camera was also inoperative at the time because the car&#8217;s emergency lights were not on, Belmar explained.</p>
<p>All three men were relieved the incident was captured by surveillance cameras. Only the part prior to the shooting has been released so far. &#8220;The video goes on; there’s no reason for the family of this young man to have to see the rest of the video,” Belmar said, adding the department would be distributing more video from the scene, including footage of the officer retreating, to provide transparency.</p>
<p>According to Belmar, the officer was involved in a similar incident in 2011 or 2012, during which he and a suspect struggled for the officer’s gun. To prevent the suspect from using it, the officer purposefully dropped the magazine out of the weapon and fired the chambered round into the floor.</p>
<p>Martin’s family, who couldn’t be located initially, finally emerged. And while his mother admitted he had problems, it &#8220;doesn&#8217;t make any sense for them to kill my son like this,&#8221; Toni Martin-Green <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/12/24/372903198/son-s-death-doesn-t-make-any-sense-say-antonio-martin-s-parents">contended</a>.</p>
<p>Belmar expressed condolence for both families. &#8220;These are nothing but tragedies,&#8221; he said. &#8220;This is a family right now that, regardless of the decisions that this individual made, are without a family member this Christmas season. This is also a tragedy for the police officer. He will carry the weight of this for the rest of his life, certainly for the rest of his career. This really underscores the task that our police officers across the nation have to deal with day in and day out as they answer these calls in our community,&#8221; he added.</p>
<p>Belmar also praised Berkeley Police Chief Frank McCall for helping to calm the protests that dissipated by 3 a.m., noting he had ordered his commanders to “let this emotion vent. Let this happen.” Hoskins was also adamant, &#8220;You can&#8217;t compare this to Ferguson or the Garner case in New York,” he said emphasizing the videotape showed Martin pointing a gun at the officer. Nonetheless, he promised an investigation would be conducted in addition to the one by the St. Louis County Police.</p>
<p>The Mayor also illuminated the racial breakdown of the department. Out of 31 officers, 17 or 18 are African-American, and approximately 75 percent of the command staff are black, along with the the mayor, police chief and other city officials. The community itself is just over 9,000 residents, 80 percent of whom are black American.</p>
<p>Hoskins made one stumble. &#8220;At this point, our review indicates that the police did not initiate this, like Ferguson,” he stated. Considering the Ferguson grand jury&#8217;s findings, that statement is disingenuous at best, and self-serving at worst. However, the Mayor did stand strong when his press conference was interrupted by black Baptist minister Jason Keith Coleman, who characterized the shooting as another act of aggression by “trigger happy” police officers. &#8220;Everybody don&#8217;t die the same,&#8221; Hoskins snapped back. &#8220;Some people die because they initiate it, and at this point, our review suggests police did not initiate it.”</p>
<p>Earlier that evening Belmar addressed equally spurious assertions, noting that he had &#8220;already seen through social media that this officer stopped (Martin), questioned him, frisked him and then killed him in cold blood — well, that&#8217;s not what you&#8217;re going to see when you see the video.”</p>
<p>Considering what has, and continues to transpire in New York and other hotspots around the nation, one might be forgiven for wondering whether it matters. Despite the successful efforts of local officials, a leftist agenda, replete with false narratives, continues to widen the divide between police and the communities they serve. It is driven by those for whom police officers will forever be “ trigger happy,” irrespective of evidence, because a divided America, along with the eternal victimization of black Americans, is the only thing that separates the racial arsonists from the irrelevance they so richly deserve. That includes our feckless president, who chooses to remain on the golf course in Hawaii while Vice President Joe Biden has been <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/joe-biden-attend-funeral-slain-nypd-officer-rafael-ramos-n274016">dispatched</a> to attend the one of the two funerals of the two <em>minority</em> officers slain in New York City.</p>
<p>President Obama could have sent a powerful message with his attendance. Instead, he sends an equally powerful message with his absence. There is no political mileage to be gained by standing with police officers, even as his ideological fellow travelers stand against them, all of their protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. Like his execrable Attorney General Eric Holder, Obama prefers the company of uber race-baiter Al Sharpton. It is this trio of men, along with New York’s equally feckless Mayor, Bill de Blasio, who have cultivated the &#8220;us against them”mentality they see as a vehicle for the &#8220;fundamental transformation&#8221; of America.</p>
<p>Ultimately, Berkeley, MO may prove that such a transformation is far from inevitable. We are a far better nation than the American left would have us believe, and the bet here is most Americans are finally beginning to realize it, one in their face, over the top, cop-bashing—and killing—moment after another.</p>
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		<item>
		<title>Ten Reasons Why I Am No Longer a Leftist</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/danusha-v-goska/ten-reasons-why-i-am-no-longer-a-leftist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ten-reasons-why-i-am-no-longer-a-leftist</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/danusha-v-goska/ten-reasons-why-i-am-no-longer-a-leftist/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 05 Nov 2014 05:06:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Danusha V. Goska]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berkeley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[HATE]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[journey out]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244520</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An account of the milestones in my journey out of the political faith.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Break-Chains.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244528" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Break-Chains-450x337.jpg" alt="Break-Chains" width="310" height="232" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="www.americanthinker.com">The American Thinker</a>.</strong></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace Corps volunteer and I have a degree from UC Berkeley. So far left that my Teamster mother used to tell anyone who would listen that she voted for Gus Hall, Communist Party chairman, for president. I wore a button saying &#8220;Eat the Rich.&#8221; To me it wasn&#8217;t a metaphor.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I voted Republican in the last presidential election.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Below are the top ten reasons I am no longer a leftist. This is not a rigorous comparison of theories. This list is idiosyncratic, impressionistic, and intuitive. It&#8217;s an accounting of the milestones on my herky-jerky journey.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;"><strong>10) Huffiness</strong>.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">In the late 1990s I was reading <em>Anatomy of the Spirit</em>, a then recent bestseller by Caroline Myss.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Myss described having lunch with a woman named Mary. A man approached Mary and asked her if she were free to do a favor for him on June 8th. No, Mary replied, I absolutely cannot do anything on June 8th because June 8th is my incest survivors&#8217; meeting and we never let each other down! They have suffered so much already! I would never betray incest survivors!</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Myss was flabbergasted. Mary could have simply said &#8220;Yes&#8221; or &#8220;No.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Reading this anecdote, I felt that I was confronting the signature essence of my social life among leftists. We rushed to cast everyone in one of three roles: victim, victimizer, or champion of the oppressed. We lived our lives in a constant state of outraged indignation. I did not want to live that way anymore. I wanted to cultivate a disposition of gratitude. I wanted to see others, not as victims or victimizers, but as potential friends, as loved creations of God. I wanted to understand the point of view of people with whom I disagreed without immediately demonizing them as enemy oppressors.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I recently attended a training session for professors on a college campus. The presenter was a new hire in a tenure-track position. He opened his talk by telling us that he had received an invitation to share a festive meal with the president of the university. I found this to be an enviable occurrence and I did not understand why he appeared dramatically aggrieved. The invitation had been addressed to &#8220;Mr. and Mrs. X.&#8221; Professor X was a bachelor. He felt slighted. Perhaps the person who had addressed his envelope had disrespected him because he is a member of a minority group.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Rolling his eyes, Prof. X went on to say that he was wary of accepting a position on this lowly commuter campus, with its working-class student body. The disconnect between leftists&#8217; announced value of championing the poor and the leftist practice of expressing snobbery for them stung me. Already vulnerable students would be taught by a professor who regarded association with them as a burden, a failure, and a stigma.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Barack Obama is president. Kim and Kanye and Brad and Angelina are members of multiracial households. One might think that professors finally have cause to teach their students to be proud of America for overcoming racism. Not so fast, Professor X warned.  His talk was on microaggression, defined as slights that prove that America is still racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist, that is, discriminatory against handicapped people.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Professor X projected a series of photographs onto a large screen. In one, commuters in business suits, carrying briefcases, mounted a flight of stairs. This photo was an act of microaggression. After all, Professor X reminded us, handicapped people can&#8217;t climb stairs.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I appreciate Professor X&#8217;s desire to champion the downtrodden, but identifying a photograph of commuters on stairs as an act of microaggression and evidence that America is still an oppressive hegemon struck me as someone going out of his way to live his life in a state of high dudgeon. On the other hand, Prof. X could have chosen to speak of his own working-class students with more respect.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Yes, there is a time and a place when it is absolutely necessary for a person to cultivate awareness of his own pain, or of others&#8217; pain. Doctors instruct patients to do this &#8212; &#8220;Locate the pain exactly; calculate where the pain falls on a scale of one to ten; assess whether the pain is sharp, dull, fleeting, or constant.&#8221; But doctors do this for a reason. They want the patient to heal, and to move beyond the pain. In the left, I found a desire to be in pain constantly, so as always to have something to protest, from one&#8217;s history of incest to the inability of handicapped people to mount flights of stairs.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;"><strong>9) Selective Outrage</strong></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I was a graduate student. Female genital mutilation came up in class. I stated, without ornamentation, that it is wrong.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">A fellow graduate student, one who was fully funded and is now a comfortably tenured professor, sneered at me. &#8220;You are so intolerant. Clitoredectomy is just another culture&#8217;s rite of passage. You Catholics have confirmation.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">When Mitt Romney was the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, he mentioned that, as Massachusetts governor, he proactively sought out female candidates for top jobs. He had, he said, &#8220;binders full of women.&#8221; He meant, of course, that he stored resumes of promising female job candidates in three-ring binders.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Op-ed pieces, Jon Stewart&#8217;s &#8220;Daily Show,&#8221; Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon posts erupted in a feeding frenzy, savaging Romney and the Republican Party for their &#8220;war on women.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I was an active leftist for decades. I never witnessed significant leftist outrage over clitoredectomy, child marriage, honor killing, sharia-inspired rape laws, stoning, or acid attacks. Nothing. Zip. Crickets. I&#8217;m not saying that that outrage does not exist. I&#8217;m saying I never saw it.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">The left&#8217;s selective outrage convinced me that much canonical, left-wing feminism is not so much support for women, as it is a protest against Western, heterosexual men. It&#8217;s an &#8220;I hate&#8221; phenomenon, rather than an &#8220;I love&#8221; phenomenon.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: times new roman,times,serif;"><strong>8.) It&#8217;s the thought that counts</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">My favorite bumper sticker in ultra-liberal Berkeley, California: &#8220;Think Globally; Screw up Locally.&#8221; In other words, &#8220;Love Humanity but Hate People.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">It was past midnight, back in the 1980s, in Kathmandu, Nepal. A group of Peace Corps volunteers were drinking moonshine at the Momo Cave. A pretty girl with long blond hair took out her guitar and sang these lyrics, which I remember by heart from that night:</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">&#8220;If you want your dream to be,</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Build it slow and surely.</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Small beginnings greater ends.</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Heartfelt work grows purely.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I just googled these lyrics, thirty years later, and discovered that they are Donovan&#8217;s San Damiano song, inspired by the life of St. Francis.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Listening to this song that night in the Momo Cave, I thought, that&#8217;s what we leftists do wrong. That&#8217;s what we&#8217;ve got to get right.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">We focused so hard on our good intentions. Before our deployment overseas, Peace Corps vetted us for our idealism and &#8220;tolerance,&#8221; not for our competence or accomplishments. We all wanted to save the world. What depressingly little we did accomplish was often erased with the next drought, landslide, or insurrection.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Peace Corps did not focus on the &#8220;small beginnings&#8221; necessary to accomplish its grandiose goals. Schools rarely ran, girls and low caste children did not attend, and widespread corruption guaranteed that all students received passing grades. Those students who did learn had no jobs where they could apply their skills, and if they rose above their station, the hereditary big men would sabotage them. Thanks to cultural relativism, we were forbidden to object to rampant sexism or the caste system. &#8220;Only intolerant oppressors judge others&#8217; cultures.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I volunteered with the Sisters of Charity. For them, I pumped cold water from a well and washed lice out of homeless people&#8217;s clothing. The sisters did not want to save the world. Someone already had. The sisters focused on the small things, as their founder, Mother Teresa, advised, &#8220;Don&#8217;t look for big things, just do small things with great love.&#8221; Delousing homeless people&#8217;s clothing was one of my few concrete accomplishments.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Back in 1975, after Hillary Rodham had followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, she helped create the state&#8217;s first rape crisis hotline. She had her eye on the big picture. What was Hillary like in her one-on-one encounters?</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Hillary served as the attorney to a 41-year-old, one of two men accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. The girl, a virgin before the assault, was in a coma for five days afterward. She was injured so badly she was told she&#8217;d never have children. In 2014, she is 52 years old, and she has never had children, nor has she married. She reports that she was afraid of men after the rape.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">A taped interview with Clinton has recently emerged; on it Clinton makes clear that she thought her client was guilty, and she chuckles when reporting that she was able to set him free.  In a recent interview, the victim said that Hillary Clinton &#8220;took me through Hell&#8221; and &#8220;lied like a dog.&#8221; &#8220;I think she wants to be a role model… but I don’t think she’s a role model at all,&#8221; the woman said. &#8220;If she had have been, she would have helped me at the time, being a 12-year-old girl who was raped by two guys.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Hillary had her eye on the all-caps resume bullet point: FOUNDS RAPE HOTLINE.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Hillary&#8217;s chuckles when reminiscing about her legal victory suggest that, in her assessment, her contribution to the ruination of the life of a rape victim is of relatively negligible import.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;"><strong>7) Leftists hate my people</strong>.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I&#8217;m a working-class Bohunk. A hundred years ago, leftists loved us. We worked lousy jobs, company thugs shot us when we went on strike, and leftists saw our discontent as fuel for their fire.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Karl Marx promised the workers&#8217; paradise through an inevitable revolution of the proletariat. The proletariat is an industrial working class &#8212; think blue-collar people working in mines, mills, and factories: exactly what immigrants like my parents were doing.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Polish-Americans participated significantly in a great victory, Flint, Michigan&#8217;s 1937 sit-down strike. Italian-Americans produced Sacco and Vanzetti. Gus Hall was a son of Finnish immigrants.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">In the end, though, we didn&#8217;t show up for the Marxist happily ever after. We believed in God and we were often devout Catholics. Leftists wanted us to slough off our ethnic identities and join in the international proletarian brotherhood &#8212; &#8220;Workers of the world, unite!&#8221; But we clung to ethnic distinctiveness. Future generations lost their ancestral ties, but they didn&#8217;t adopt the IWW flag; they flew the stars and stripes. &#8220;Property is theft&#8221; is a communist motto, but no one is more house-proud than a first generation Pole who has escaped landless peasantry and secured his suburban nest.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Leftists felt that we jilted them at the altar. Leftists turned on us. This isn&#8217;t just ancient history. In 2004, <em>What&#8217;s the Matter with Kansas?</em> spent eighteen weeks on the bestseller lists. The premise of the book: working people are too stupid to know what&#8217;s good for them, and so they vote conservative when they should be voting left. In England, the book was titled, <em>What&#8217;s the Matter with America?</em></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">We became the left&#8217;s boogeyman: Joe Six-pack, Joe Hardhat. Though we&#8217;d been in the U.S. for a few short decades when the demonization began, leftists, in the academy, in media, and in casual speech, blamed working-class ethnics for American crimes, including racism and the &#8220;imperialist&#8221; war in Vietnam. See films like <em>The Deer Hunter</em>. Watch Archie Bunker on &#8220;All in the Family.&#8221; Listen to a few of the Polack jokes that elitists pelted me with whenever I introduced myself at UC Berkeley.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Leftists freely label poor whites as &#8220;redneck,&#8221; &#8220;white trash,&#8221; &#8220;trailer trash,&#8221; and &#8220;hillbilly.&#8221; At the same time that leftists toss around these racist and classist slurs, they are so sanctimonious they forbid anyone to pronounce the N word when reading Mark Twain aloud. President Bill Clinton&#8217;s advisor James Carville succinctly summed up leftist contempt for poor whites in his memorable quote, &#8220;Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you&#8217;ll find.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">The left&#8217;s visceral hatred of poor whites overflowed like a broken sewer when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate in 2008. It would be impossible, and disturbing, to attempt to identify the single most offensive comment that leftists lobbed at Palin. One can report that attacks on Palin were so egregious that leftists themselves publicly begged that they cease; after all, they gave the left a bad name. The Reclusive Leftist blogged in 2009 that it was a &#8220;major shock&#8221; to discover &#8220;the extent to which so many self-described liberals actually despise working people.&#8221; The Reclusive Leftist focuses on <em>Vanity Fair </em>journalist Henry Rollins. Rollins recommends that leftists &#8220;hate-fuck conservative women&#8221; and denounces Palin as a &#8220;small town hickoid&#8221; who can be bought off with a coupon to a meal at a chain restaurant.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Smearing us is not enough. Liberal policies sabotage us. Affirmative action benefits recipients by color, not by income. Even this limited focus fails. In his 2004 Yale University Press study, Thomas Sowell insists that affirmative action helps only wealthier African Americans. Poor blacks do not benefit. In 2009, Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford demonstrated that poor, white Christians are underrepresented on elite college campuses. Leftists add insult to injury. A blue-collar white kid, who feels lost and friendless on the alien terrain of a university campus, a campus he has to leave immediately after class so he can get to his fulltime job at MacDonald&#8217;s, must accept that he is a recipient of &#8220;white privilege&#8221; – if he wants to get good grades in mandatory classes on racism.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">The left is still looking for its proletariat. It supports mass immigration for this reason. Harvard&#8217;s George Borjas, himself a Cuban immigrant, has been called &#8220;America’s leading immigration economist.&#8221; Borjas points out that mass immigration from Latin America has sabotaged America&#8217;s working poor.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">It&#8217;s more than a little bit weird that leftists, who describe themselves as the voice of the worker, select workers as their hated other of choice, and targets of their failed social engineering.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;"><strong>6) I believe in God.</strong></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Read Marx and discover a mythology that is irreconcilable with any other narrative, including the Bible. Hang out in leftist internet environments, and you will discover a toxic bath of irrational hatred for the Judeo-Christian tradition. You will discover an alternate vocabulary in which Jesus is a &#8220;dead Jew on a stick&#8221; or a &#8220;zombie&#8221; and any belief is an arbitrary sham, the equivalent of a recently invented &#8220;flying spaghetti monster.&#8221; You will discover historical revisionism that posits Nazism as a Christian denomination. You will discover a rejection of the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western Civilization and American concepts of individual rights and law. You will discover a nihilist void, the kind of vacuum of meaning that nature abhors and that, all too often, history fills with the worst totalitarian nightmares, the rough beast that slouches toward Bethlehem.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;"><strong>5 &amp; 4) Straw men and &#8220;In order to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs.&#8221;</strong></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">It astounds me now to reflect on it, but never, in all my years of leftist activism, did I ever hear anyone articulate accurately the position of anyone to our right. In fact, I did not even know those positions when I was a leftist.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">&#8220;Truth is that which serves the party.&#8221; The capital-R revolution was such a good, it could eliminate all that was bad, that manipulating facts was not even a venial sin; it was a good. If you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. One of those eggs was objective truth.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Ron Kuby is a left-wing radio talk show host on New York&#8217;s WABC. He plays the straw man card hourly. If someone phones in to question affirmative action – shouldn&#8217;t such programs benefit recipients by income, rather than by skin color? – Kuby opens the fire hydrant. He is shrill. He is bombastic. He accuses the caller of being a member of the KKK. He paints graphic word pictures of the horrors of lynching and the death of Emmett Till and asks, &#8220;And <em>you</em> support <em>that</em>?&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Well of course THE CALLER did not support <em>that</em>, but it is easier to orchestrate a mob in a familiar rendition of righteous rage against a sensationalized straw man than it is to produce a reasoned argument against a reasonable opponent.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">On June 16, 2014, Washington <em>Post</em> columnist Dana Milbank published a column alleging that a peaceful Muslim was nearly verbally lynched by violent Islamophobes at a Heritage Foundation-hosted panel. What Milbank described was despicable. Unfortunately for Milbank and the Washington<em> Post</em>&#8216;s credibility, someone filmed the event and posted the film on YouTube. Panel discussants, including Frank Gaffney and Brigitte Gabriel, made important points in a courteous manner. Saba Ahmed, the peaceful Muslim, is a &#8220;family friend&#8221; of a bombing plotter who expressed a specific desire to murder children. It soon became clear that Milbank was, as one blogger put it, &#8220;making stuff up.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Milbank slanders anyone who might attempt analysis of jihad, a force that is currently cited in the murder of innocents &#8212; including Muslims &#8212; from Nigeria to the Philippines. The leftist strategy of slandering those who speak uncomfortable facts suppresses discourse and has a devastating impact on confrontations with truth in journalism and on college campuses.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;"><strong>2 &amp; 3) It doesn&#8217;t work.  Other approaches work better</strong>.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I went to hear David Horowitz speak in 2004. My intention was to heckle him. Horowitz said something that interrupted my flow of thought. He pointed out that Camden, Paterson, and Newark had decades of Democratic leadership.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Ouch.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I grew up among &#8220;Greatest Generation&#8221; Americans who had helped build these cities. One older woman told me, &#8220;As soon as I got my weekly paycheck, I rushed to Main Ave in Paterson, and my entire paycheck ended up on my back, in a new outfit.&#8221; In the 1950s and 60s, my parents and my friends&#8217; parents fled deadly violence in Newark and Paterson.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Within a few short decades, Paterson, Camden, and Newark devolved into unlivable slums, with shooting deaths, drug deals, and garbage-strewn streets. The pain that New Jerseyans express about these failed cities is our state&#8217;s open wound.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I live in Paterson. I teach its young. My students are hogtied by ignorance. I find myself speaking to young people born in the U.S. in a truncated pidgin I would use with a train station chai wallah in Calcutta.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Many of my students lack awareness of a lot more than vocabulary. They don&#8217;t know about believing in themselves, or stick-to-itiveness. They don&#8217;t realize that the people who exercise power over them have faced and overcome obstacles. I know they don&#8217;t know these things because they tell me. One student confessed that when she realized that one of her teachers had overcome setbacks it changed her own life.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">My students do know &#8212; because they have been taught this &#8212; that America is run by all-powerful racists who will never let them win. My students know &#8212; because they have been drilled in this &#8212; that the only way they can get ahead is to locate and cultivate those few white liberals who will pity them and scatter crumbs on their supplicant, bowed heads and into their outstretched palms. My students have learned to focus on the worst thing that ever happened to them, assume that it happened because America is unjust, and to recite that story, dirge-like, to whomever is in charge, from the welfare board to college professors, and to await receipt of largesse.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">As Shelby Steele so brilliantly points out in his book <em>White Guilt</em>, the star of the sob story my students tell in exchange for favors is very much not the black aid recipient. The star of this story, still, just as before the Civil Rights Movement that was meant to change who got to take the lead in American productions, was the white man. The generous white liberal still gets top billing.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">In Dominque La Pierre&#8217;s 1985 novel <em>City of Joy</em>, a young American doctor, Max Loeb, confesses that serving the poor in a slum has changed his mind forever about what might actually improve their lot. &#8220;In a slum an exploiter is better than a Santa Claus… An exploiter forces you to react, whereas a Santa Claus demobilizes you.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">That one stray comment from David Horowitz, a man I regarded as the enemy, sparked the slow but steady realization that my ideals, the ideals I had lived by all my life, were poisoning my students and Paterson, my city.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">After I realized that our approaches don&#8217;t work, I started reading about other approaches. I had another Aha! moment while listening to a two minute twenty-three second YouTube video of Milton Friedman responding to Phil Donahue&#8217;s castigation of greed. The only rational response to Friedman is &#8220;My God, he&#8217;s right.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;"><strong>1) Hate.</strong></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">If hate were the only reason, I&#8217;d stop being a leftist for this reason alone.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Almost twenty years ago, when I could not conceive of ever being anything but a leftist, I joined a left-wing online discussion forum.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Before that I&#8217;d had twenty years of face-to-face participation in leftist politics: marching, organizing, socializing.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">In this online forum, suddenly my only contact with others was the words those others typed onto a screen. That limited and focused means of contact revealed something.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">If you took all the words typed into the forum every day and arranged them according to what part of speech they were, you&#8217;d quickly notice that nouns expressing the emotions of anger, aggression, and disgust, and verbs speaking of destruction, punishing, and wreaking vengeance, outnumbered any other class of words.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">One topic thread was entitled &#8220;What do you view as disgusting about modern America?&#8221; The thread was begun in 2002. Almost eight thousand posts later, the thread was still going strong in June, 2014.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Those posting messages in this left-wing forumpublicly announced that they did what they did every day, from voting to attending a rally to planning a life, because they wanted to destroy something, and because they hated someone, rather than because they wanted to build something, or because they loved someone. You went to an anti-war rally because you hated Bush, not because you loved peace. Thus, when Obama bombed, you didn&#8217;t hold any anti-war rally, because you didn&#8217;t hate Obama.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I experienced powerful cognitive dissonance when I recognized the hate. The rightest of my right-wing acquaintances &#8212; I had no right-wing friends &#8212; expressed nothing like this. My right-wing acquaintances talked about loving: God, their family, their community. I&#8217;m not saying that the right-wingers I knew were better people; I don&#8217;t know that they were. I&#8217;m speaking here, merely, about language.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">In 1995 I developed a crippling illness. I couldn&#8217;t work, lost my life savings, and traveled through three states, from surgery to surgery.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">A left-wing friend, Pete, sent me emails raging against Republicans like George Bush, whom he referred to as &#8220;Bushitler.&#8221; The Republicans were to blame because they opposed socialized medicine. In fact it&#8217;s not at all certain that socialized medicine would have helped; the condition I had is not common and there was no guaranteed treatment.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I visited online discussion forums for others with the same affliction. One of my fellow sufferers, who identified himself as a successful corporate executive in New Jersey, publicly announced that the symptoms were so hideous, and his helpless slide into poverty was so much not what his wife had bargained for when she married him, that he planned to take his own life. He stopped posting after that announcement, though I responded to his post and requested a reply. It is possible that he committed suicide, exactly as he said he would &#8212; car exhaust in the garage. I suddenly realized that my &#8220;eat the rich&#8221; lapel button was a sin premised on a lie.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">In any case, at the time I was diagnosed, Bush wasn&#8217;t president; Clinton was. And, as I pointed out to Pete, his unceasing and vehement expressions of hatred against Republicans did nothing for me.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I had a friend, a nun, Mary Montgomery, one of the Sisters of Providence, who took me out to lunch every six months or so, and gave me twenty-dollar Target gift cards on Christmas. Her gestures to support someone, rather than expressions of hate against someone &#8212; even though these gestures were miniscule and did nothing to restore me to health &#8212; meant a great deal to me.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Recently, I was trying to explain this aspect of why I stopped being a leftist to a left-wing friend, Julie. She replied, &#8220;No, I&#8217;m not an unpleasant person. I try to be nice to everybody.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">&#8220;Julie,&#8221; I said, &#8220;You are an active member of the Occupy Movement. You could spend your days teaching children to read, or visiting the elderly in nursing homes, or organizing cleanup crews in a garbage-strewn slum. You don&#8217;t. You spend your time protestingand trying to destroy something &#8212; capitalism.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">&#8220;Yes, but I&#8217;m very nice about it,&#8221; she insisted. &#8220;I always protest with a smile.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Pete is now a Facebook friend and his feed overflows with the anger that I&#8217;m sure he assesses as righteous. He protests against homophobic Christians, American imperialists, and Monsanto. I don&#8217;t know if Pete ever donates to an organization he believes in, or a person suffering from a disease, or if he ever says comforting things to afflicted intimates. I know he hates.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I do have right-wing friends now and they do get angry and they do express that anger. But when I encounter unhinged, stratospheric vituperation, when I encounter detailed revenge fantasies in scatological and sadistic language, I know I&#8217;ve stumbled upon a left-wing website.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Given that the left prides itself on being the liberator of women, homosexuals, and on being &#8220;sex positive,&#8221; one of the weirder and most obvious aspects of left-wing hate is how often, and how virulently, it is expressed in terms that are misogynist, homophobic, and in the distinctive anti-sex voice of a sexually frustrated high-school misfit. Haters are aware enough of how uncool it would be to use a slur like &#8220;fag,&#8221; so they sprinkle their discourse with terms indicating anal rape like &#8220;butt hurt.&#8221; Leftists taunt right-wingers as &#8220;tea baggers.&#8221; The implication is that the target of their slur is either a woman or a gay man being orally penetrated by a man, and is, therefore, inferior, and despicable.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Misogynist speech has a long tradition on the left. In 1964, Stokely Carmichael said that the only position for women in the Civil Rights Movement was &#8220;prone.&#8221; Carmichael&#8217;s misogyny is all the more outrageous given the very real role of women like Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, and Fannie Lou Hamer.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">In 2012 atheist bloggers Jennifer McCreight and Natalie Reed exposed the degree to which misogyny dominates the New Atheist movement. McCreight quoted a prominent atheist&#8217;s reply to a woman critic. &#8220;I will make you a rape victim if you don&#8217;t fuck off&#8230; I think we should give the guy who raped you a medal. I hope you fucking drown in rape semen, you ugly, mean-spirited cow… Is that kind of like the way that rapists dick went in your pussy? Or did he use your asshole… I&#8217;m going to rape you with my fist.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">A high-profile example of leftist invective was delivered by MSNBC&#8217;s Martin Bashir in late 2013. Bashir said, on air and in a rehearsed performance, not as part of a moment&#8217;s loss of control, something so vile about Sarah Palin that I won&#8217;t repeat it here. Extreme as it is, Bashir&#8217;s comment is fairly representative of a good percentage of what I read on left-wing websites.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I could say as much about a truly frightening phenomenon, left-wing anti-Semitism, but I&#8217;ll leave the topic to others better qualified. I can say that when I first encountered it, at a PLO fundraising party in Marin County, I felt as if I had time-traveled to pre-war Berlin.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I needed to leave the left, I realized, when I decided that I wanted to spend time with people building, cultivating, and establishing, something that they loved.</span></span></p>
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		<title>Berkeley&#8217;s Jihad Against Bill Maher</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/berkeleys-jihad-against-bill-maher/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=berkeleys-jihad-against-bill-maher</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 29 Oct 2014 04:58:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The latest neo-fascist effort to destroy free speech and stifle debate about Islamic supremacism.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Maher-726.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244001" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Maher-726-450x335.jpg" alt="Maher 726" width="361" height="269" /></a>This whole Bill Maher controversy is as illuminating as it is entertaining. Bill Maher was a darling of the Left when he was criticizing Christianity, but now that he has turned his gimlet eye to Islamic supremacism, the foes of free speech have turned against him with venom. Maher is scheduled to give the fall commencement address at the University of California-Berkeley, but Muslim students there have begun a petition drive to get him canceled.</p>
<p><span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://www.dailycal.org/2014/10/26/students-spring-opposition-bill-maher-announced-keynote-speaker/">The Daily Californian</a></span> reported Sunday that</p>
<blockquote><p>the Change.org petition was authored by ASUC Senator Marium Navid, who is backed by the Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian Coalition, or MEMSA, and Khwaja Ahmed, an active MEMSA member. The petition, which urges students to boycott the decision and asks the campus to stop him from speaking, has already gathered more than 1,400 signatures as of Sunday.</p></blockquote>
<p>Anticipating that this petition would be outed as the fascist endeavor it is, Navid explained:</p>
<blockquote><p>“It’s not an issue of freedom of speech, it’s a matter of campus climate. The First Amendment gives him the right to speak his mind, but it doesn’t give him the right to speak at such an elevated platform as the commencement. That’s a privilege his racist and bigoted remarks don’t give him.”</p></blockquote>
<p>The campaign against Maher is called “Free Speech, Not Hate Speech.”</p>
<p>“Free Speech, Not Hate Speech”: this is the mechanism that today’s Leftist and Islamic supremacist authoritarians are using to shut down any free and open discussion of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and oppression. This slogan was thrown at me last May when I spoke at Cal Poly; I responded (as you can see toward the end of <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/05/cal-poly-free-speech-under-attack-in-academia"><span style="color: #0433ff;">this video</span></a>) by pointing out that “hate speech” is in the eye of the beholder, and the one who is granted the power to determine what is or isn’t “hate speech” has been given extraordinary control over the public discourse, such that any opinions disliked by the ruling elite can be stigmatized and ruled out of bounds by means of this label.</p>
<p>Anyway, this was predictable: now that Bill Maher, despite his impeccable Leftist credentials, has dared to criticize Islam, he is “racist and bigoted,” and must be denied a platform. The reality is that anyone and everyone, no matter who they are and what they have done, is targeted in exactly the same way by Islamic supremacists and Leftists. They are determined that there be no genuine public debate about Islam and violence (and Islamic violence). They are determined to tar those who deviate from the “Islam is a religion of peace” line with smear labels that will make the broadly uninformed majority shun them and be intimidated into thinking that it is wrong to question the mainstream line.</p>
<p>There is no free speech, no free debate, no honest discussion about these issues in American academia today, or in the mainstream media. Maher is so prominent that he has shaken the Left’s stranglehold preventing public discussion of these issues, but they are circling the wagons now, and either Maher will be driven out of the circles of the enlightened elites, or will stop talking about this altogether. My money is on the latter.</p>
<p>There is, however, just a small chance that this targeting of Maher will bring mainstream attention to this neo-fascist effort to destroy the freedom of speech altogether and stifle public debate about jihad and Islamic supremacism.</p>
<p>Certainly the controversy itself has drawn mainstream attention: <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/10/28/cair-spokesman-compares-bill-maher-to-grand-dragon-of-the-kkk-video/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">MSNBC</span></a> had Ibrahim Hooper of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations on to discuss whether Berkeley should cancel Maher, and Hooper promptly likened Maher to “the grand dragon of the KKK.”</p>
<p>The way that Leftists and Islamic supremacists operate in order to demonize and destroy anyone who dares speak the truth about Islam and jihad is on full display during Hooper’s MSNBC appearance: first, they claim that someone who points out that Islam has doctrines encouraging violence and supremacism is “calling all Muslims terrorists” and charge him or her with racism and bigotry. Then they proceed as if those charges are already established as true, and demand that the truth-teller be denied a platform, canceled from speaking engagements, etc., because of this racism and bigotry.</p>
<p>The next step, if the Islamic supremacist campaign to get Maher disinvited from Berkeley succeeds, will be to use their victory as evidence of the correctness of their claims, when in fact it is only evidence that many event organizers and public officials don’t like controversy and will make whatever concessions they need to make so as to avoid it. If the campaign succeeds, then a few months from now, when Hamas-linked CAIR is trying to get Maher canceled from some other event, “Honest Ibe” Hooper will say, “The University of California at Berkeley was so disgusted with Maher’s bigotry that they canceled his planned appearance as their fall commencement speaker…”</p>
<p>Then a few more cancellations, and it will look as if all decent folk are shunning Maher out of disgust with his “hatred,” when all that is really going on is the victory of Hamas-linked CAIR’s intimidation and smear tactics.</p>
<p>Now what is needed is a public discussion of how Hamas-linked CAIR and other Islamic supremacists are trying to stifle free discussion of the jihad threat, and smear and destroy everyone who dares discuss that threat honestly. How about it, MSNBC?</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Robert Spencer</strong> on <strong>The Glazov Gang</strong> discussing<span id="productTitle" class="a-size-large"><strong> The Fog of Jihad-Denial</strong>:</span></em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/S8kxWhX0S50" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>Backgrounder: The Students for Justice in Palestine</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lee-kaplan/backgrounder-the-students-for-justice-in-palestine/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=backgrounder-the-students-for-justice-in-palestine</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lee-kaplan/backgrounder-the-students-for-justice-in-palestine/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 17 Jul 2014 04:35:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lee Kaplan]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[students for justice in Palestine]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=236263</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Making Jew-hate fashionable on campuses.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sjp.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236463" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sjp.png" alt="sjp" width="228" height="195" /></a>The Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) today exists as a consortium of campus “clubs” throughout the American and Canadian college systems which work to oppose the existence of Israel and to promote Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against the Jewish state. There are at least 80 chapters of these clubs on campuses throughout the US and Canada. The SJP goes under other assorted names on some campuses. Names such as Palestine Solidarity Committee or Students for Palestinian Equal Rights are also common.  In Canada, some SJP chapters have adopted the name Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA), or Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR), while others use similar sounding names but advocate for the Palestinian “revolution”or resistance against the Israeli and US governments when they are perceived as allies together against “Palestinian” irredentist goals. The SJP could be said to operate on the campuses in a classic Rico Statute style of infiltration as a method of promoting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement throughout the USA and Canada via a “grass roots movement.”</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed1.jpg"><img class="alignright size-full wp-image-236422" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed1.jpg" alt="unnamed" width="225" height="224" /></a>The SJP actually grew on these campuses, thanks to Hatem Bazian, out of another organization, the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) that was first founded on the San Francisco State University campus in 1973. The GUPS is actually an old pro-terrorist student organization officially begun in Egypt in 1959. It claimed at one point to have had as many as 150 chapters across Europe and the Middle East, and currently has a chapter in Gaza. Early GUPS members or leaders have included Yasser Arafat, Hanan Ashwari, Faisal Husseini and Saeb Erekat among several other well-known Palestinian politicians, writers, journalists and militants who ultimately were involved in terrorism or worldwide political influence from the Middle East. The GUPS is in existence today at San Francisco State University where it wields considerable political influence and has been accused of promoting an atmosphere of anti-Semitism on the Bay Area campus. The GUPS at SFSU could be said to be another differently named affiliate of the SJP, even though it predates the founding of the SJP.</p>
<div id="attachment_236424" style="width: 110px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed11.jpg"><img class="wp-image-236424 size-full" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed11.jpg" alt="unnamed1" width="100" height="141" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Hatem Bazian</p></div>
<p>The actual campus organization Students for Justice in Palestine was started at UC Berkeley in the year 2000 by a former undergraduate GUPS member at SFSU named Hatem Bazian, who founded the first UC Berkeley chapter of the GUPS, retitled Students for Justice in Palestine, as he pursued his graduate studies toward a PhD. Bazian was head of the Muslim Students Association on the UC Berkeley campus at the time that openly supports Hamas, and he called for an Intifada in America at one rally, though he claimed he was speaking only figuratively. Nevertheless, he <a href="http://www.academia.org/berkeley-intifada/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">has</span><span style="color: #1e497d;"> </span><span style="color: #0170c0;">praised</span><span style="color: #0433ff;"> terrorist groups</span></a> and <a href="http://counterjihadreport.com/tag/hatem-bazian/"><span style="color: #0170c0;">accused Jews </span><span style="color: #0433ff;">of running the University</span></a>.</p>
<div id="attachment_236425" style="width: 165px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed2.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-236425" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed2.jpg" alt="Jess Ghannam" width="155" height="196" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Jess Ghannam</p></div>
<p>Both the SFSU and Berkeley campus organizations received support and guidance from Prof. Jess Ghannam, a Professor of Psychiatry at UC Medical Center in San Francisco. Ghannam is a leader of the American Arab-Anti-Discrimination Committee (<a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/printgroupProfile.asp?grpid=6173"><span style="color: #0433ff;">ADC</span></a>) that he helped to co-found. Ghannam also co-founded <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/alawdaprof.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Al Awda, </span><span style="color: #0433ff;">the Palestine Right to Return Coalition</span><span style="color: #0433ff;"> </span></a> which also played roles in organizing the GUPS and SJP and continues to provide logisitical support to the SJP. Al Awda advocates for the unconditional return of all Arabs inside Israel whose ancestors allegedly lost property there in 1948 and endorses violence to do so. Ghannam , in association with the ADC, helped to found the International Solidarity Movement (<a href="http://www.stoptheism.com/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">ISM</span></a>) in Northern California also, which SJP is an integral part of, recruiting Arab students and American radicals to go to the Occupied Territories in the Middle East to act as human shields for Palestinian terrorist groups. Ghannam worked his way onto the faculty at SFSU as an adjunct professor of Ethnic Studies where he promoted the Palestinian narrative. The ADC provided the early pro-revolutionary reading material for potential ISM volunteers to read during “training” and the SJP helped recruit volunteers and engage in anti-Israel propaganda on campus at Berkeley. Early demonstrations on both campuses, according to the University of California Berkeley campus police department, entailed busloads of demonstrators being brought from the two campuses  to each other to increase their numbers at demonstrations.</p>
<div id="attachment_236444" style="width: 227px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed3.jpg"><img class="wp-image-236444" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed3.jpg" alt="unnamed3" width="217" height="150" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Manzar Foroohar</p></div>
<p>Ghannam was also a co-founding member of the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel along with <a href="http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/hist_foroohar.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Professor Manzar Foroohar</span></a> of <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/12755"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Cal Poly</span></a> San Luis Obispo <a href="http://www.meforum.org/2924/manzar-foroohar-california-faculty-association"><span style="color: #0433ff;">to promote divestment in colleges and libraries worldwide.</span></a><span style="color: #0433ff;"> </span>Foroohar  is a frequent <span style="color: #0433ff;">guest </span>of SJP <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/12755"><span style="color: #0433ff;">clubs</span></a> on other campuses as a speaker or to bring roadshows to attack Israel that are dubbed as “conferences”</p>
<p>It should be noted that the Muslim Students Association was also operating on American college campuses longer than the GUPS, but today also interchanges its members with SJP on the campuses as occurred with Hatem Bazian’s graduate activities.  The principal difference is that MSA students are primarily solely Muslim in their outlook and reasons for opposing Israel, whereas the earlier SJP/ISM members were mostly Christian  Arabs who were Marxist in outlook. mostly pan-Arabists who rejected a Jewish presence in the Middle East for nationalistic reasons. Being pro-Marxist, they followed Stalin’s edict that “Zionism is racism” and found unity with their Muslim counterparts since both factions had an abiding hatred of Jews and Israel. A key difference is that being Marxists, the ISM could also recruit any disaffected Jews who were Marxist in their outlooks to oppose Israel to convince audiences that the SJP is not really anti-Semitic, just critical of Israel.  This method was actually in use already by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) which claims to want a secular democratic state dominated by Arabs in place of Israel which will be communist. Today, to expand their ranks, the SJP is a conglomeration of ISM activist types, former or secular Jews, mostly Muslim Arabs, but some Christians and radically socialist communists. The MSA still operates separately but works in a close alliance with the SJP for demonstrations and anti-Israel activities on campuses, at times completely interchangeably.</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed5.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236445" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed5.jpg" alt="unnamed5" width="170" height="248" /></a>At UC Berkeley, a large number of SJP members were Mexican-American radicals from La Raza with affiliations to La Voz De Aztlan. This group is highly anti-Semitic and believes the Western United States should be given back to Mexico <a href="http://archive.adl.org/learn/aztlan/anti_sz.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">or even a separate nation, </span><span style="color: #0170c0;">Aztlan</span></a>, be made from it. These people like to call themselves America’s Palestinians. According to interviews with intelligence officers in the UC Berkeley campus and city police, keffiyah-clad demonstrators on the UC Berkeley campus are in many cases Chicanos posing as Palestinians.</p>
<p>Several events were staged on campus by the SJP at UC Berkeley, such as trying to <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2004/02/my-disrupted-talk-at-uc-berkeley"><span style="color: #0433ff;">disrupt </span><span style="color: #0433ff;">a speech</span></a> given by Middle East Scholar Daniel Pipes that was led by Ehud Appel, former SJP leader, and a violent demonstration to stop Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu from speaking nearby off campus at a private theater that conjoined SJP with several off-campus anti-Israel organizations. Additional coordination between SJP chapters elsewhere in the U.S. and Canada prevented Netanyahu from speaking at those venues also.</p>
<div id="attachment_236446" style="width: 202px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed6.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-236446" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed6.jpg" alt="Abdul Malik Ali" width="192" height="192" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Abdul Malik Ali</p></div>
<p>The GUPS at SFSU also came to power on the coattails of another ethnic radical group, the Black Panthers, that through months of  rioting on the campus forced the University to create an <a href="http://docstalk.blogspot.com/2013/08/identity-politics-pursuit-of-social.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Ethnic Studies Department</span></a> that was more attuned to activism than academia. The Palestinian movement on the SFSU campus became a part of the Ethnic Studies Department passing themselves off as victims of white oppression. A Black Muslim leader, Abdul Malik Ali, former student body president at SFSU and virulently anti-Semitic, who lectures frequently at SJP functions on California campuses, led that movement at SFSU. The GUPS eventually took over control of the Student Union Building and wielded the most influence on campus, even attacking Jewish students at a pro-Israel rally requiring the San Francisco city police to be brought in from off campus to escort the Jewish students safely off campus. Malik Ali is a frequent guest lecturer of SJP chapters on California campuses where <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35204"><span style="color: #0433ff;">he rails against the Jews</span></a>.</p>
<p>The ISM relies on revolutionary tactics and in particular those used by <a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1060898.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Lech Walesa</span></a> and his Solidarity Movement in Poland as well as by anti-French revolutionaries in Algeria. These tactics include creating cells sometimes of various different names in an “octopus” fashion. If one arm of the octopus is cut off by the government or shown to be doing something illegal, the other arms can claim that cell does not speak for them and can continue on. The myriad chapters of the SJP across the US are many of the arms of the octopus.</p>
<p>Hatem Bazian, after leaving SFSU as an undergrad, started the UC Berkeley SJP chapter in year 2000 while pursuing his PhD at UC Berkeley. He later became a lecturer in the Center for Middle East Studies (CMES) at the Berkeley campus.  CMES was originally set up by the Saudis through Prince Bandar and promoted the Palestinian narrative. A Jewish philanthropist, Sanford Diller, did not like the one-sided approach of the department and donated $5 million dollars to set up a Jewish Studies department at CMES but the pro-Saudi head of the department, an Arab professor, took the money and hired and promoted only anti-Zionist Jews to run it. Today many of these anti-Zionist Jews have clear connections to Israel and/or Judaism (one, Daniel Boyarin is a Talmudic scholar; another, <a href="http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/Editorial%20-%20Lee%20Kaplan%20-%20UC%20Berkeley%20-%20Rutie%20Adler%20-%20urges%20boycott.htm"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Rutie Adler</span></a><span style="color: #0433ff;">,</span> a Hebrew instructor; another, <a href="http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/Editorial%20-%20Anne%20Horowitz%20-%20Disloyalty%20Pledge.htm"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Oren Yfchatel</span></a>, a visiting professor from Israel), so all provide a point of view that enables the SJP to increase its “Jewish” ranks among the membership on campus.  <a href="http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/Editorial%20-%20Lee%20Kaplan%20-%20Daniel%20Boyarin.htm"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Daniel Boyarin</span></a> led a demonstration against Ehud Barak speaking on campus which had many SJP members involved since he served as their advisor once , even defending an Arab professor who told his students the <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=16885"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion</span></a> were real.</p>
<div id="attachment_236460" style="width: 220px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamedb.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-236460" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamedb.jpg" alt="Tom Pessah" width="210" height="157" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Tom Pessah</p></div>
<p>SJP Jewish student leaders have included Ehud Appel, Tom Pessah, Emiliano Huet-Vaughan and Yaman Salahi. Pessah appears to be a professional student from Israel who is very active with the SJP and works with Bazian frequently even to this day. He never graduates and coordinates SJP activities as “proof” the SJP are not anti-Semitic.  Huet-Vaughan, an American whose mother was a well-known socialist radical, has been under scrutiny by law enforcement because he worked as a recruiter and trainer for the ISM in Israel, then left for the London School of Economics where his function was to get that school to boycott and divest from Israel. Once that was accomplished, he transferred to UC Berkeley and was instrumental in getting the student body government there to divest from Israel too. Arab student activists also populated the SJP at Berkeley such as Shireen Qaru who would go to the occupied territories every summer and receive training to conduct anti-Israel propaganda on campus. Salahi and Qaru have since graduated to practicing law but still keep contact with Berkeley SJP.</p>
<div id="attachment_236462" style="width: 140px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamedc.jpg"><img class="wp-image-236462 " src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamedc.jpg" alt="unnamedc" width="130" height="168" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Shireen Qaru</p></div>
<p>SJP was responsible for staging continuous demonstrations against Israel, accusing the Jewish state of racism and genocide on Sproul Plaza in the center of campus with student activists frequently brought in from other local campuses. The PR firm Hill and Knowlton, which did PR for Saudi Arabia in Washington, D.C. by attacking Jewish “settlements” in the West Bank and Gaza, lent aid from its San Francisco office by providing large displays and professional staff to promote the events.</p>
<p>The SJP at UC Berkeley at first garnered major media attention through two actions:  It co-sponsored with other pro-Palestinian groups like Al Awda the first <a href="https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2002/02/10/1159281.php"><span style="color: #0433ff;">National Palestine Solidarity Movement (PSM)</span><span style="color: #0433ff;"> </span><span style="color: #0433ff;">conference </span><span style="color: #0433ff;">ever held in the USA on the SF Bay campus February 16-18, 2002</span></a>. The purpose of the event was to train attendees in how to boycott Israel and arrange protests on their respective campuses against the Jewish state. The event modeled its purpose in line with the first conference in Durban, South Africa against racism held by the UN which promoted the idea that Israel was an apartheid state along the lines of South Africa in the 1980’s and should be boycotted because “Zionism is racism.” Regarding terrorism, the organizers stated after adopting a resolution expressing  an unreserved support for the Intifada that &#8220;We, the national student movement for solidarity with Palestine, declare our solidarity with the popular resistance to Israeli occupation, colonization, and apartheid,&#8221; then, on the issue of Palestinian violence, the resolution also stated that &#8220;As a solidarity movement, it is not our place to dictate the strategies or tactics adopted by the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation.&#8221; The Boycott was actually an extension of the Arab League Boycott restarted in 1950 by the Arab League. The conference held revolving seminars and meetings where strategies were discussed on how to reach the goal of de-legitimizing Israel in the family of nations to hasten the right of return. The right of return held that any Arab who had relatives who resided in pre-1948 Palestine, but left or was driven out by the Jews, had the unconditional right to return to the very same spot where his ancestors had previously lived, classifying such individuals as “refugees.” This is the position of Al Awda that held considerable sway at the event and it was <a href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/psm.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">sponsored</span></a> by Jess Ghannam and his American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. The local Jewish Federation that attended the event mentioned that anti-Semitic remarks and accusation of genocide by Jews against the Palestinian people were common during the event.</p>
<p>The second action by the SJP was a demonstration to memorialize the Deir Yassin “Massacre” which was purposely timed to take place the same day that the Hillel and Jewish students on campus were to hold an event memorializing the Holocaust, also in 2001. Deir Yassin had been a village that was lost by the Arab side in the 1948 War of Independence. Although history has proven no massacre occurred there, the SJP event claimed there was one and a noisy demonstration with signs and radical speakers was held in front of Sproul Plaza on campus. Large loud speakers were brought in to purposely drown out the Yahrtzeit service (reading of the names of the dead from the Holocaust) that was being held just a few feet away and was originally scheduled to be in the same location. Later that same day, students from the SJP <a href="https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2002/04/09/1215081.php"><span style="color: #0433ff;">stormed nearby Wheeler Hall</span></a> on campus in order to disrupt when they learned Jewish students were also meeting there as part of the Holocaust Memorial Day event. The building was also being used by nonrelated courses so students could take final examinations, but the SJP invaded and took over the entire building threatening violence “against the Jews,” even attacking UC Berkeley campus police officers who had told them to leave when one officer was bitten on the hand. The police ultimately prevailed in clearing the building, and the administration banned SJP for one year for their action. The suspension was lifted in less than a year however as the Arab and Muslim communities on campus continually protested that they were being unfairly treated.</p>
<p>Other chapters of the SJP sprung up quickly within the UC college system, organized by Arab-American students or faculty sympathetic to a campaign against Israel. Campus chapters were started at UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, UC San Diego, UC Riverside, San Diego State as well as private colleges such as USC.  In the eastern United States similar campus clubs sprang up at the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, Ohio State, New York University and Columbia University and associated colleges, UPenn, Florida State and Atlantic and many others. These were done through promotions from the International Solidarity Movement led by Huwaida Arraf and Adam Shapiro.</p>
<div id="attachment_236447" style="width: 223px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed7.jpg"><img class="wp-image-236447 " src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed7.jpg" alt="unnamed7" width="213" height="153" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Huwaida Arraf and Adam Shapiro</p></div>
<p><span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=12370">Huwaida Arraf and Adam Shapiro</a></span> frequently guest lecture at SJP events. Arraf also is involved with the SJP chapter at Bard College in New York, known as Bard ISM. She was very active in recruiting among SJP chapters for people to go on the Gaza flotilla boats.</p>
<p><b>State Department Connections?</b></p>
<p>Arraf and Shapiro were both low-level state department employees &#8212; camp counselors for a State Department sponsored camp called Seeds for Peace in New England and in Jerusalem.  In 2002, when Ariel Sharon had Yasser Arafat and 200 terrorists trapped in the Mukata after the Passover Massacre, Arraf and Shapiro showed up at the gates of the compound asking to be admitted with an ambulance. The IDF refused and some nebulous phone calls were made. Then after four hours the two were let inside with Arafat. Arafat allegedly gave one million dollars to Shapiro to start the ISM. Arraf and Shapiro then embarked on a cross-country U.S. campaign speaking at SJP and MSU events against Israel and helping to set up what today is the SJP network via Palestinian Solidarity conferences. Besides being co-sponsored by SJP chapters, these events also were used to promote BDS. National conferences held with the SJP listed as part of the movement were extremely sophisticated and done along the lines of Fortune 500 companies training conferences. Sometimes guest speakers with connections to terrorist groups were brought in to lecture. Was the State Department involved in this to try and promote a pro-Palestinian mindset in the U.S. to hasten a Palestinian state? We may never know. Paul LaRudee, the man who started the ISM in Northern California in partnership with Jess Ghannam, also had been a state department employee at one time. and was recruiting people at local colleges along with Jess Ghannam when he first started.</p>
<div id="attachment_236461" style="width: 165px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/appel.png"><img class="wp-image-236461 " src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/appel.png" alt="appel" width="155" height="150" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Ehud Appel</p></div>
<p>Jess Ghannam organized with the GUPS at <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=3187"><span style="color: #0433ff;">an Al Awda conference </span><span style="color: #0433ff;">at San Francisco State</span></a><b> </b>that took place in the Student Union building on campus and featured speakers from the local Arab and Muslim community along with Al Awda leadership. Again, courses  were  presented in a rotating hourly seminar series where training and propaganda methods were discussed. Presenters tried to screen a video in support of Hamas and against Jews, but stopped it when they were notified there were some “Zionist” Jews present. Other activists such as Greta Berlin of the organization Women in Black and the ISM from Los Angeles also attended. The campus student seminar was attended by only Arab-American students but was led by Ehud Appel, from UC Berkeley SJP, a Jewish student allegedly with family in Israel. Appel directed the proceeding. The guest of honor at this seminar was Professor Abu Sitta, a Palestinian intellectual from London who explained to those in attendance that the Right of Return was non-negotiable. That is, even if an individual Palestinian rejected it or was paid money as compensation, he had no right to do so allowing the war on Israel to go on. Ehud Appel also discussed “actions” that could be taken to promote the boycott and divestment from Israel.</p>
<div id="attachment_236448" style="width: 211px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed8.png"><img class="wp-image-236448 " src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed8.png" alt="unnamed8" width="201" height="198" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Fadi Kiblawi</p></div>
<p>A year after the first National Palestine Solidarity Movement conference at UC Berkeley, another was held at the University of Michigan in 2002. Again, seminars and discussion groups from across the country met to devise strategy on how to de-legitimize and boycott the Jewish state. Chants of “Death to the Jews” were shouted during the event. Francis Boyle, a law professor at the University of Chicago who had been the PLO’s lawyer in the United States, had formulated a strategy of boycott and divestment that was to be followed on all the college campuses and the SJP would play a role in implementing it along with other anti-Israel groups. Controversy developed about the Michigan event because openly anti-Semitic remarks had been voiced, something the organizers repeatedly denied, citing their Jewish members of SJP partly as “proof” they were not anti-Semitic. However, a legal affidavit was provided by one member of the Jewish community attesting to the anti-Semitic slurs calling for violence, Fadi Kiblawi, one of the SJP student leaders at Michigan, voiced a wish in writing that he could strap on a suicide bomb belt to kill some Jews.  Other radical groups such as the American Indian Movement, La Raza and the International Socialist Organization all joined with the SJP to strategize and aid a campaign to destroy Israel, all of these movements advocating revolutionary violence to meet their goals.</p>
<div id="attachment_236449" style="width: 160px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/charlotte150.jpg"><img class="wp-image-236449 size-full" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/charlotte150.jpg" alt="charlotte150" width="150" height="150" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Charlotte Kates</p></div>
<p>A year later, in November of 2003, the <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=15272"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Third National Palestine Solidarity Conference</span></a> was held at Ohio State University. It was originally scheduled to be at Rutgers University but a rift developed between certain members with New Jersey Solidarity (The SJP’s name) and the general membership over an endorsement of terrorism. Charlotte Kates, an SJP leader, had called Israeli children killed by terrorism “fair game” and not worthy of criticism. the Rutgers community did not encourage the event which was then moved to Ohio State. Of note, when some attendees at Ohio State tried to get a resolution passed rejecting terrorism, it was voted down and this news was greeted with a standing ovation on the final day of the event. At Ohio State,  drawing on experiences with the previous two conferences, airport style metal detectors were placed at every entrance to prevent cameras and recorders from being brought into the building where the revolving seminars were held. Organizers claimed it was to not give away their strategy to the public-at-large rather than conceal anti-Semitic remarks and pro-terrorist messages.</p>
<p>Alison Weir of If Americans Knew, an anti-Semitic and anti-Israel one woman non-profit, handed out literature claiming that the Jews did the Holocaust to themselves to justify stealing Israel. Weir testifies frequently at SJP events across the country, accusing Israel of genocide and murdering children where she cites frequently made up statistics. Other seminars at Ohio State included a Skill Share Workshop where students were taught how to counter negative publicity from suicide bombings which were epidemic in Israel at that time and lectures discussed on how to infiltrate Hillel and take over student governments. There was no condemnation of terrorism that was termed as “legitimate resistance.” One Palestinian speaker was Mohammed Abed from the University of Wisconsin who spoke to students about how to deconstruct the Israeli narrative in the United States and how to “take over” their campuses to control the discussion. Although the campus group at Wisconsin was another chapter of the SJP like the GUPS at SFSU, the Wisconsin group called itself the Alternative Palestinian Agenda (<a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2088"><span style="color: #0433ff;">APA</span></a>).</p>
<div id="attachment_236450" style="width: 245px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed4.jpg"><img class="wp-image-236450" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed4.jpg" alt="unnamed4" width="235" height="160" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Mohammed Abed</p></div>
<p>Today Abed is a dean at the University of Wisconsin where he oversees the Palestinian groups on campus. At Ohio State, He taught that since America was deemed the support system for Israel against overwhelming odds in the Middle East, and since the Jewish community also was solidly behind Israel, he reasoned it would become necessary to find a way to drive a wedge between American Jews and Israel. SJP chapters were encouraged to involve themselves with Hillel student centers on their campuses by suggesting mutual cooperation but to stage events against Israel  particularly against the settlements in the West bank and Gaza. The main leader and organizer at the Ohio State event was also a member of the Wisconsin SJP contingent, Fayyad Sbhaiat, a sophomore student back then who Israeli intelligence said his entire family were PFLP members back in the West Bank.</p>
<div id="attachment_236451" style="width: 186px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed9.jpg"><img class="wp-image-236451 size-full" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed9.jpg" alt="unnamed9" width="176" height="147" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Fayyad Sbhaiat</p></div>
<p>One year later, the <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=10792"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Fourth National Palestine Solidarity Conference</span></a> was held at Duke University in North Carolina. <a href="https://www.facebook.com/DukeSJP"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Duke SJP activists</span></a> were there in full force along with assorted other racial leftist groups such as the International Socialist Organization that calls for the violent overthrow of the US government. Once again, airport style metal detectors were set up to prevent cameras and recorders from being brought inside and the press was restricted from attending the training seminars. Abe Greenhouse, an affiliate of the Rutgers SJP at the time (known as NJ Solidarity) held a seminar where he identified every Jewish organization and Jewish leader in the United States with instructions on volunteering to work for them to get inside and change the message to be against Israel. Greenhouse also taught a seminar on anarchism where he explained the rioting carried out every week in the West Bank is training for anarchists so they can eventually bring the same tactics to the U.S.- Mexican</p>
<div id="attachment_236453" style="width: 103px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed111.jpg"><img class="wp-image-236453 size-full" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed111.jpg" alt="Rann Bar-On" width="93" height="80" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Rann Bar-On</p></div>
<p>border. Greenhouse rose to fame in the SJP/ISM movement by smashing a pie in the face of Natan Sharansky when he spoke at the Rutgers campus. Rann Bar-On, an Israeli anarchist leftist also attended the event. A news reporter at Duke asked Bar-On if he condemned terrorism to which Bar-On replied, “As a solidarity movement it is not our right to tell the Palestinian people how to resist.” In short, he would not condemn terrorism.</p>
<div id="attachment_236452" style="width: 174px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed10.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-236452" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed10-350x350.jpg" alt="Abe Greenhouse" width="164" height="164" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Abe Greenhouse</p></div>
<p>A year after that came the National Divestment Conference, this time held at <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=5159"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Georgetown University</span></a> that was hosted by that campus’s equivalent of the SJP. SJP and other students against Israel were openly recruited to go to the West Bank and participate in the rioting and briefed on tactics they could use to promote BDS against Israel on their campuses. Huwaida Arraf led the recruiting and a Fatah handler named <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ali.a.omar"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Ali Omar</span></a> supervised.  Omar <a href="http://kaplanwatch.blogspot.com/2007/10/terrorist-amongst-us.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">was studying US security procedures </span></a>at Tufts University where he was a leader of the SJP group there.</p>
<div id="attachment_236454" style="width: 170px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed12.jpg"><img class="wp-image-236454 size-full" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnamed12.jpg" alt="unnamed12" width="160" height="160" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Ali Omar</p></div>
<p>It should be noted that Hatem Bazian also established in about 2005 at UC Berkeley the Law Students for Justice in Palestine (<a href="http://calsjp.org/?page_id=483"><span style="color: #0433ff;">LSJP</span></a>) at Boalt Law School, though he was not even a full professor. The mission statement and purpose of the LSJP was two-fold: 1) To provide free legal help to the SJP undergrad club whenever it developed legal problems with the campus such as the Wheeler Hall riots and 2) To have an office set up in the law school at California taxpayer expense that was totally dedicated to proving that Israel was an illegal state and had no legal right to exist by international law (despite its  having been set up by international law through the UN in 1948). Bazian also managed by 2005 to have himself appointed an adjunct professor of Islamic Law to lecture in the law school, a position he held until 2007. His position was eliminated after that without explanation, possibly it was through budget cuts or the fact that Bazian was not an imam and lacked any proof of any expertise in Islamic law. Nevertheless, Bazian has held considerable sway with the law school, hosting most anti-Israel events for the SJP at the law school on campus including two conferences on “Islamophobia.” Law School chapters of the SJP are now at all major campuses in the U.S.</p>
<p>After dwindling numbers of attendees at Georgetown, in 2011 a new revived National Palestine Solidarity Conference <a href="http://columbiasjp.org/2011/08/29/2011-national-students-for-justice-in-palestine-conference/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">was held at Columbia</span></a> and City College New York. Stanford also hosted an <span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/1411064189107457/">SJP National Planning Conference</a> </span>over the last two years where some Jews were discriminated against and not allowed admission. The Stanford administration saw nothing wrong with such discrimination, despite objections from the Jewish community that the campus should be an open forum.</p>
<p><b>Violence and Intimidation</b></p>
<p>Although almost from its inception at UC Berkeley, the SJP has been involved in promoting anti-Semitism and in some cases direct violence on US campuses. Despite some Jewish members claiming they are not anti-Semitic, SJP chapters usually promote anti-Semitic media or tell students tales of blood libels against Jews. A film, “Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land” is frequently screened on campuses by SJP chapters and their faculty advisors. The film suggests that Jews are not loyal Americans and the “Israel lobby” is controlling America.  Atrocities are alleged in the film and most of the spokespeople are “Jewish” radicals who support ending the Jewish state.  Support for terrorist groups (as designated by the US State Department) such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the PFLP and Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades has been common at SJP chapters across the country and some chapters repeat commemorations every year for Hassan Al-Bannah, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and precursor to Hamas.</p>
<div id="attachment_236455" style="width: 197px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/MAXGELLER.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-236455" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/MAXGELLER.jpg" alt="Max Geller" width="187" height="222" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Max Geller</p></div>
<p>Other violent or intimidating events have occurred across the country: At UC Berkeley, Nonie Darwish, a former Muslim who converted to Christianity, was hounded off the stage before she could finish speaking by members of the SJP. When Middle East Professor Daniel Pipes came to Berkeley, SJP students led by Ehud Appel nearly rioted to prevent his speaking. At SFSU, and later at UC Irvine, Michael Oren was disrupted continually in planned attacks coordinated through social media by SJP chapters.  At SFSU, Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren was actually physically assaulted by a GUPS woman from the crowd while on the dais causing police to cancel the event. At Northeastern University, one of the leaders of the SJP, Max Geller, who is of Jewish descent, was shown to have been photographed with a machine gun as he visited terrorists in the West Bank and was spotted wearing a T-Shirt supporting Hezbollah.</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Husam-Zakharia.jpg"><img class="alignright  wp-image-236456" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Husam-Zakharia.jpg" alt="Husam Zakharia" width="139" height="174" /></a>Again at UC Berkeley, Jessica Felber, a Jewish student with the pro-Israel group on campus <a href="http://www.berkeleyside.com/2011/03/07/jewish-student-sues-uc-berkeley-over-assault-by-palestine-supporter/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">was physically struck </span><span style="color: #0433ff;">with a shopping cart and injured</span></a> by the head of the SJP, Husam Zakharia, who came from Gaza. Although Zakharia was only technically a UC Berkeley student because he took just one extension course, he was on campus demonstrating against Israel almost every day that included his trampling an Israeli flag underfoot. Seemingly a professional agitator, he only had to take the one extension course off campus to “qualify” as leader of the SJP at Berkeley.  Questions arose later if he wasn’t sent to UC Berkeley by Hamas for such activities since he left the University after legal proceedings were taken against him. Unfortunately, the judge threw the case out and Zakharia ran back to Gaza afterwards.</p>
<div id="attachment_236459" style="width: 179px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnameda.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-236459" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/unnameda.jpg" alt="Yaman Salahi" width="169" height="168" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Yaman Salahi</p></div>
<p>In another incident, in 2008, SJP students physically attacked Jewish students in the Eshelman Hall Student Union building that resulted in a fistfight and arrests. Zakharia was involved in that incident also before he left the University for good. Jewish students were physically attacked when they sought to remove a Palestinian flag draped over a balcony behind a band playing music at a pro-Israel campus event. Yaman Salahi, the new SJP leader sought to blame the Jewish students for the brawl.  Salahi was sued by this writer in 2008 for launching a website on the Internet using social media for defamation that included placing this writer’s head on bodies in pictures of homosexual porn and getting SJP members to do the same thing all over the Internet.  This was done along with Ehud Appel. <a href="http://www.dmlp.org/threats/kaplan-v-salahi"><span style="color: #0433ff;">A judgment</span></a> was rendered against Salahi for $8,000 for defamation that he had to pay and the website was taken down. The University refused to intervene in all the above incidents to stop the harassment or violence. Salahi has an uncle or cousin who is the head  of the Muslim Brotherhood, or <i>Ikwhan</i>, in London.</p>
<p>Other tactics have included setting up mock checkpoints not just at UC Berkeley, but on all campuses where students are harassed, then told this practice is common in Israel for non-Jews, and the staging of street theater where students dressed as Israeli soldiers rape or kill pregnant women. At Florida State University, Columbia, and Northeastern  the SJP passed out fake eviction notices on the doors of Jewish students with the campus’s official student activities stamp on them. “Apartheid” wall displays are frequently trucked in that contain images and stories claiming genocide against innocent Arabs by Israeli Jews.</p>
<p>In a nationally coordinated effort, SJP chapters in the U.S. and Canada stage an Israeli Apartheid Week every year where they set up mock walls and combine many of the tactics above. Another yearly event is Deir Yassin Remembered where a memorial is created for the village of Deir Yassin in 1948, lost in a battle with Israel where it is falsely claimed a massacre and genocide of innocent Arabs occurred. Other events include Nakba commemorations, Nakba being the word for catastrophe in Arabic and referring to the founding of the state of Israel by Jews. A week does not go by without at least one campus in the U.S promoting divestment from Israel. Other events are created to justify new events such as “Palestine Liberation Week” “Palestine Awareness Week,” etc.</p>
<p>More and more coordination exists for these SJP activities on an intercampus basis. Taking a practice from the MSA that created an MSA-West where various groups from western US campuses could compare notes and actions, the SJP started an <a href="http://sjpwest.org/2012/11/23/press-release-uc-irvine-students-pass-histori/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">SJP-West</span></a> in California and subsequently a National SJP group. This came about in part after the disruption  of  the speech by Michael Oren at UC Irvine. While that action was done by the MSU at Irvine, SJP members from surrounding campuses were said to have participated or at least supported it.  SJP activists from San Diego State and other campuses like Cal State Northridge  <a href="http://www.pacbi.com/cms/rougesgallery.php?pid=22&amp;id=159"><span style="color: #0433ff;">met together to plan strategy</span></a> to make it impossible for any pro-Israel speakers to speak on behalf of Israel on any University of California campus and, hopefully later, the entire U.S. Jess Ghannam , co-founder of Al Awda, spoke at the event and read with joy about how Michael Oren’s speech at UC Irvine was ruined. This program was led and further promoted by Lina Othman of the San Diego State SJP chapter who <a href="http://www.stanforddaily.com/2010/05/07/petition-potential-assu-bill-spark-divestment-debate/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">has appeared at other SJP chapters around the state</span></a>. When word of this <a href="http://www.pacbi.com/cms/rougesgallery.php?pid=22&amp;id=159"><span style="color: #0433ff;">leaked out</span></a>, the Orange County district attorney <a href="http://omdurman.org/ISM/complaint_msu.pdf"><span style="color: #0433ff;">prosecuted the SJP students</span></a> at Irvine for conspiracy and got a conviction. Such violence and intimidation has been growing worse and worse on U.S. campuses and administrators are reluctant to take action to stop it. At the La Mesa, California event, Othman spoke of SJP and MSU chapters plotting actions like the Irvine 11 and taking over student governments to promote divestment on all the campuses. “I’m not sure we should be discussing our plans here in public as we’ve been doing,” she said.</p>
<p><b>The Strange Case of Emiliano Huet-Vaughn</b></p>
<div id="attachment_236457" style="width: 234px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/VaughanCafe.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-236457" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/VaughanCafe.jpg" alt="Emiliano Huet-Vaughan (left) at a café in Israel." width="224" height="148" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Emiliano Huet-Vaughan (left) at a café in Israel.</p></div>
<p>Huet-Vaughn led the divestment charge at UC Berkeley that ultimately got divestment passed by the student government. Huet-Vaughan is the son a woman very involved in radical socialist activities such as practiced by the International Socialist Organization that call for violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Vaughan has come under the radar of law enforcement because he was working as a recruiter for the ISM in Israel and linked to ISM trainers over there who were caught dressing as Jewish settlers and waving machine guns in the presence of an Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade terrorist.  After being exposed in the article The <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=2601"><span style="color: #0433ff;">ISM Terror Connection</span></a>, Huet-Vaughan went to the London School of Economics where he devoted full time to getting the school’s student government there to divest from Israel. Once he was successful he <a href="http://wakeupfromyourslumber.com/news/berkeley-slammed-bigoted-illegal-vote-divestment"><span style="color: #0433ff;">then showed up at UC Berkeley</span><span style="color: #0433ff;"> doing the same</span></a> thing. Huet-Vaughan is still an active member of the SJP at Berkeley and would appear also to be a professional agitator.</p>
<div id="attachment_236458" style="width: 410px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Vaughancolleagues.jpg"><img class="wp-image-236458 size-full" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Vaughancolleagues.jpg" alt="Vaughancolleagues" width="400" height="235" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Huet-Vaughan’s colleagues and roommates in Israel.</p></div>
<p><b>Funding Sources of SJP and Outside Connections </b></p>
<p>Most colleges have student activities offices that are run by deans or campus administrators. To avoid conflicts of interest, outside money for student clubs is prohibited. Almost all colleges charge student activity fees that are then disbursed usually through the student government via a mock congress or committee. At larger campuses like UC Berkeley or UCLA, this means clubs like the SJP can be funded as much as $30,000 for events they wish to produce. SJP chapters usually run student members or sympathizers for the campus governing boards and once they get in, they rubber stamp approval to fund SJP “events.” Most of the student bodies do not take an interest in such elections, so a minority of students can easily take an election if they devote a lot of energy to one.  Once elected to the student Senate or governing board, they push for funds to promote divestment and anti-Israel events. At Concordia University in Canada, the SJP at one point got $50,000 for divestment and other anti-Israel actions on campus. This was part of the strategy behind Mohammed Abed‘s teaching at the Ohio State conference since now as a dean he has power to override denials of funding.</p>
<p>Since openly outside funding is not allowed, other means of funding SJP activities exist which may not be traceable. For example, when Hill and Knowlton in the early 2000s was handling wall displays from San Francisco (and they may still do so) it was doubtful the campus administration counted the cost of those efforts as “funding.” Likewise, printing costs and PR can be “donated.” As mentioned, Al Awda and the ADC, at least in California, provide reading and printing materials that are fungible for goods like flyers. Wealthy Arab-Americans who belong to the ADC also may provide for expenses that cannot be seen such as cash donations under the table. The ADC and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) pay to bring anti-Israel and boycott promoting speakers like Jeff Halper or Ilan Pappe to campuses for the SJP who sponsor these events. This becomes another fungible method of funding and some SJP chapters may even charge an admittance fee to such events.</p>
<p>Hatem Bazian started another anti-Israel group that terrorism experts have claimed is another front for Hamas called American Muslims for Palestine (<a href="http://www.investigativeproject.org/3313/sjp-dialogue-goes-nowhere"><span style="color: #0433ff;">AMP</span></a>). AMP is a connection for SJP to work more closely with Hamas’s goals while AMP is seeming to work as a strictly American NGO. AMP has sent letters to college administrators and law enforcement excusing any violent actions by the SJP. For example, <a href="http://www.ampalestine.org/index.php/newsroom/statements/411-amp-others-send-letter-to-university-of-california-president-mark-yudoffamp-others-send-letter-to-university-of-california-president-advising-him-of-need-to-protect-pro-palestinian-speech-on-campus"><span style="color: #0433ff;">AMP sent letters</span></a><span style="color: #0433ff;"> t</span>o government officials calling for the release of the Irvine 11 and for SJP groups that were suspended for fake eviction notices. AMP wrote administrators calling for the students to not be punished. and complaining about “free speech” of Palestinian students being denied.</p>
<p>The SJP (like the Muslim Students Association) is enjoying a Rico Statute-like system of invading American society through US colleges and enjoying its funding from the unaware US taxpayer. While Rico has been used to curb gambling, liquor and prostitution, the same tactic is employed by the SJP as such illicit “businesses” use to serve the interests of overseas Palestinian irredentist terrorist groups. The Ba’ath Party and Muslim Brotherhood all had their starts in the colleges in the Middle East. The US and Canadian college system provides a huge market of a young upcoming generation to indoctrinate toward their goals, as well as the financial assistance to do so. Today’s SJP member goes on to  graduate and become a newspaper editor, a congressman, a principal, a teacher or even a professor like Hatem Bazian, any one of whom wields influence in our society, possibly even one day being the President of the United States. The Ba’athists and Muslim Brotherhood later expanded their Middle East control through trade unions and more and more SJP/ISM events are inviting trade unionists to attend and join them in their anti-Israel crusade. SJP is also doing outreach in churches, and some former SJP leaders lecture for CAIR on graduation or promote anti-Semitism to Christian audiences through an ISM arm called Sabeel Ecumenical Society. The Sierra Club and environmental movement have allied with the Palestinian cause by finding common ground of fighting “oppression,” and even taxi drivers in Boston support the Boycott of Israel as a sign of “unity” against “oppression” of workers.  The SJP already has done long reaching damage in our educational system, but stands to do much more damage in the future.</p>
<p><em>This report was commissioned by the Middle East Forum. </em></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>Welfare Weed: Berkeley Enacts Marijuana Redistribution for the Homeless</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/welfare-weed-berkeley-enacts-marijuana-redistribution-for-the-homeless/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=welfare-weed-berkeley-enacts-marijuana-redistribution-for-the-homeless</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/welfare-weed-berkeley-enacts-marijuana-redistribution-for-the-homeless/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 05 Jul 2014 14:10:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berkeley]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235634</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[From each according to his ability, to each according to his high.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Obama-pot.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-235635" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Obama-pot-450x296.jpg" alt="Obama-pot" width="450" height="296" /></a></p>
<p>If there&#8217;s anything the homeless need, it&#8217;s free pot.  <a href="http://iowntheworld.com/blog/?p=242081">The welfare state is providing so much</a>. It was bound to do some cannabis social justice since the plant is where it gets most of its ideas.</p>
<blockquote><p> The city of Berkeley will require medical marijuana dispensaries to give away two percent of the amount of cannabis they sell each year free to low-income patients.</p></blockquote>
<p>From each according to his ability, to each according to his high.</p>
<blockquote><p>“Basically, the city council wants to make sure that low-income, homeless, indigent folks have access to their medical marijuana, their medicine,” said Berkeley City Councilmember Darryl Moore.</p></blockquote>
<p>Free pot for the homeless. It&#8217;s a plan so great that it can&#8217;t possibly go wrong.</p>
<blockquote><p>“We think this is the responsible thing to do for those less fortunate in our community,” said Moore.</p></blockquote>
<p>It&#8217;s the most responsible thing to do since the free switchblades for the homeless and the free crack pipes for the homeless.</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8230; and it must be the same quality that’s dispensed to regular paying customers.</p></blockquote>
<p>Obviously. Give them the good Canadian stuff. You don&#8217;t want them getting paranoid.</p>
<blockquote><p>The measure also revisits definitions for cannabis collectives and dispensaries, patients and caregivers, on top of setting new rules for hours of operation and the methods for testing cannabis and edibles.</p></blockquote>
<p>This is what legalization means. No wonder the cartels aren&#8217;t going anywhere.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>‘Islamophobia’ Thought Crimes at Berkeley, Part II</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/islamophobia-thought-crimes-at-berkeley-part-ii/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=islamophobia-thought-crimes-at-berkeley-part-ii</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/islamophobia-thought-crimes-at-berkeley-part-ii/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Jun 2014 04:33:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berkeley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Center for Race & Gender]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamophobia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233280</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Coming soon to a university near you. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/islamophobe.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233289" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/islamophobe-450x253.jpg" alt="islamophobe" width="298" height="168" /></a><strong>[To order David Horowitz and Robert Spencer&#8217;s pamphlet <em>Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future</em>, <a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenterstore.org/collections/pamplets/products/islamophobia-thought-crime-of-the-totalitarian-future">click here</a>.]</strong></p>
<p><strong>To read Part I, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/islamophobia-thought-crimes-at-berkeley/">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>The <a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobiaconf2014">second day</a> of the University of California, Berkeley’s Fifth Annual International Islamophobia Conference—organized by the Center for Race &amp; Gender’s Islamophobia Research &amp; Documentation Project (IRDP)—featured as much hysteria, victimhood, and anti-Western rhetoric as the first (which we reported on yesterday).</p>
<p>Viewing the second day’s antics via live stream, two commercials ran repeatedly: one featuring sexy Latina actress Sofia Vergara selling shampoo for her long, flowing, decidedly unveiled locks, and the other seeking recruits for the U.S. Marines. This led one disgruntled online viewer, expecting an anti-American atmosphere to prevail in the virtual world as well as at the conference, to ask in the comments section, “What’s up with these super wack commercials killing Arab, African brown people?,” which elicited an apology from the organizers, who assured him they had no hand in picking the commercials.</p>
<p>During the afternoon, Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, an assistant professor of religion at the University of Vermont, spoke on, “Muslim Subjects and Citizens: Discursive Ties, Lingering Orientalism, and Islamophobias.” She attempted to draw parallels between the era of British colonialism and modern-day America, claiming that Muslims were seen, then and now, as “traitors,” “fanatics,” and as having “suspect, dual allegiances.” She described this phenomenon as the “insidiousness of Orientalism,” before reaching the ahistorical conclusion, “We find the same thing over 200 years later in America.”</p>
<p>She next asserted that the “rhetoric after 9/11 was similar to the British Raj,” including seeing “Muslims as agents of sinister forces.” In a thinly veiled allusion to Sharia (Islamic) law, Fuerst condemned what she called “anti-foreign law legislation” and chalked it and other efforts to combat Islamism up to being part of an “extended, insidious Orientalist discourse” rather than to the obvious desire of Americans to retain their constitutional liberties.</p>
<p>Deepa Kumar, an associate professor of media studies and Middle Eastern studies at Rutgers University, presented, “Islamophobia in the Obama Era: Liberalism and the National Security State.” Kumar proved to be one of the funnier, more engaging speakers of the day; in lieu of dry academic subject matter, she focused on popular culture, interspersing her talk with clips from movies and television shows such as “Homeland.” Yet her lively humor couldn’t hide her stale political correctness.</p>
<p>Referencing the films <em>Black Sunday</em> (1977) and <em>True Lies</em> (1994), she noted that even before the Islamic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, “Americans were convinced that terrorism comes with brown, male, Arab bodies.” She continued:</p>
<blockquote><p>9/11 cements the imagination. It was no longer necessary to keep demonizing brown people, but to justify a massive national security state.</p></blockquote>
<p>Shifting to the “post-racial era” of the presidency of Barack Obama, Kumar noted that:</p>
<blockquote><p>The language of liberalism and multiculturalism comes to be used to strengthen the national security state. Obama has done this quite effectively, picking up where [President George W.] Bush left off.</p></blockquote>
<p>To illustrate her point, she played clips from a Department of Homeland Security <a href="http://www.dhs.gov/if-you-see-something-say-something%E2%84%A2-campaign">video</a> DHS intended to “raise public awareness about terrorism” called, “If You See Something, Say Something,” the purpose of which she summed up as follows: “We are being recruited to become agents of a surveillance state.” Kumar argued that the filmmakers went out of their way to cast white actors as the suspected terrorists and a multi-ethnic group of actors as the good citizens who report them to the authorities. Despite its basis in reality, she mocked the film’s portrayal of “unattended luggage and backpacks” as threats, claiming that they, too, were merely stand-ins for “the brown terrorist.”</p>
<p>Instead of chalking up these decisions to liberal political correctness, she called them another form of “Islamophobia,” adding “This is how latent racism works: unconsciously.” By this logic, both portraying Muslims as terrorists in the pre-9/11 era and avoiding doing so in the Obama era are examples of “Islamophobia.” The question for Kumar is: what isn’t?</p>
<p>Arun Kundnani, who holds adjunct appointments at New York University, Queens College, and John Jay College (where he teaches terrorism studies), rounded out the panel with the presentation, “Racialization and Radicalization: Islamophobia and the Surveillance of Muslims in the U.S.”</p>
<p>Kundnani lamented the “legalistic, technical” tone of the debate on mass surveillance by the National Security Administration in the wake of Edward Snowden’s <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/edward-snowden">revelations</a>, which he claimed leaves out “the interlinking of race and surveillance” so that, “the last thing anyone wants to talk about is the experience of the targeted population.” He dismissed Snowden’s references to George Orwell’s <em>1984</em> and the idea that “digital surveillance is a new form of Big Brother” and claimed that “no one minds” that “surveillance works by targeting specific groups.” This surely dismisses valid concerns among Americans of all backgrounds over the potential loss of privacy to everyone, not just Muslims. Instead, Kundnani claimed we live in a “panoptical racist society,” in which “different races are policed differently.” Addressing the fact that Islam is a religion, not a race, he insisted that there are “racial signifiers in the discussions about Muslims,” which he compared to anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>Kundnani then likened U.S. authorities to the Stasi, the secret police in communist East Germany, but maintained that “using current data, we’re worse.” He associated Muslim-Americans with the “East German population,” alleging, absurdly, that the “everyday life of Muslims comports with classic accounts of totalitarianism.” Repeating his previous mischaracterizations, he concluded that “the minority is subjected to secret police because the majority doesn’t experience that.” Either Kundnani hasn’t properly understood the ongoing discussion about the scope of counterterrorism surveillance in the U.S., or he misrepresented it to suit his purposes, as the issue goes far beyond allegations of “Islamophobia.”</p>
<p>Ahmet Temel, a graduate student in religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, opened the next panel by speaking on, “Shariaphobia, A Recurring Obsession: Sharia as a Means to Justify Islamophobia.” Adding to the long list of supposed hatreds indicating a clinical diagnosis of “phobia,” “Shariaphobia” is used to smear opponents of the implementation of draconian Sharia (Islamic) law in the West.</p>
<p>Temel alleged that the “misrepresentation” of Sharia as “inherently brutal” and consists of only “three rubrics: punishment, the treatment of women, and fatwas,” which leads to “racism towards Muslims.” The “media creates an image of Sharia” that is “meant to make Muslims look archaic” and makes them “targets of Islamophobic attacks.” Moreover, “media reporting on Sharia shows images of stonings, veiled women, and bearded men,” which eventually leads to “physical attacks.” Yet Temel didn’t deny that stonings occur (he couldn’t given the numerous honor killings of veiled women by bearded men) and simply asserted that criticism of Sharia is nothing more than “a sophisticated way of attacking Islam as irrational, backwards, [and] violent.” He even bemoaned the “anti-Sharia, anti-Islamic agenda in the history” of his native Turkey.</p>
<p>The dissembling continued with Nancy A. Khalil, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Harvard University, who spoke on, “Jihad: American Media and Muslim Theology.” Disassociating jihad from its historic meaning, holy war, Khalil claimed that of the “different meanings of jihad . . . jihad against yourself is the most important one.” Similarly, she alleged that the word “Islam means both submit and peace.” She praised the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) “My Jihad” campaign, launched in response to activist Pamela Geller’s counter-jihad advertising series, as “reclaiming this appropriation of jihad from the association with violence” and “taking back jihad one hashtag at a time.”</p>
<p>IRDP’s is succeeding in its goal to instill the specter of “Islamophobia” into the West. In addition to the aforementioned December, 2014 conference in <a href="http://islamophobiaconparis.weebly.com/">Paris</a>, its expanded agenda includes upcoming conferences in both <a href="http://www.soas.ac.uk/csp/muslimstrustdialogue/07jun2014-beyond-islamophobia.html">London</a> and <a href="http://www.irdproject.com/salzburg-conference.html">Salzburg</a>. Last year, Bazian and other North American Middle East studies specialists participated in an international Islamophobia <a href="http://www.meforum.org/3621/islamophobia-conference">conference</a> in Turkey, while the Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies Chair at Indiana University-Bloomington organized its <a href="http://islamophobiaconference.blogspot.com/">own conference</a>. Bazian is fulfilling his pledge to create the new field of “Islamophobia studies” As there is no shortage of academics invested in pushing this agenda, look for its widespread use by those seeking to censor critics of Islam.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>‘Islamophobia’ Thought Crimes at Berkeley</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/islamophobia-thought-crimes-at-berkeley/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=islamophobia-thought-crimes-at-berkeley</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/islamophobia-thought-crimes-at-berkeley/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 04 Jun 2014 04:39:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berkeley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hatem bazian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamophobia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[thought crimes]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233267</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Coming soon to a university near you. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/sd1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233283" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/sd1-381x350.jpg" alt="sd" width="283" height="260" /></a><strong>[To order David Horowitz and Robert Spencer&#8217;s pamphlet <em>Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future</em>, <a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenterstore.org/collections/pamplets/products/islamophobia-thought-crime-of-the-totalitarian-future">click here</a>.]</strong></p>
<p>What’s an “Islamophobia”-promoting academic to do when there simply <a href="http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2012/topic-pages/victims/victims_final">aren’t</a> enough <a href="http://www.islamist-watch.org/12057/hate-crime-stats-deflate-islamophobia-myth">hate crimes</a> to sustain the mythical narrative that Muslim-Americans are persecuted for their religion? The Islamophobia Research &amp; Documentation Project (IRDP) at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Race &amp; Gender came up with a brilliant idea for <a href="http://www.islamophobiacon.com/">this spring’s</a> Fifth Annual International Islamophobia Conference: they invented a thought crime called “latent Islamophobia.”</p>
<p>According to the conference <a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobiaconf2014">description</a> and “inspired by [the late Columbia professor] Edward Said’s work on <em>Orientalism</em>,” “Islamophobia” can be broken into two categories: latent and manifest:</p>
<blockquote><p>Latent Islamophobia is founded upon an unquestionable certitude that Muslims trend “towards despotism and away from progress.” They are constructed and “judged in terms of, and in comparison to, the West, so it is always the Other, the conquerable, and the inferior.” Manifest Islamophobia “is what is spoken and acted upon.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Near Eastern studies lecturer, IRDP director, and conference convener <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/search.php?cx=015692155655874064424%3A-cjrsa07xqe&amp;cof=FORID%3A9&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=hatem+bazian&amp;sa=Search">Hatem Bazian</a> supported this <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/04/latent-manifest-islamophobia-a-2014414124948207223.html">blatant effort</a> to condemn thought, as he promised in his opening remarks that this effort would eventually be a “field [and] a distinct area of study” called “Islamophobia studies.”</p>
<p>This is no idle threat. In addition to <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/12786">producing</a> annual UC Berkeley conferences and the <em>Islamophobia Journal</em>, Bazian said IRDP’s plans include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Publishing papers for the Second International Islamophobia Conference to be held in <a href="http://islamophobiaconparis.weebly.com/">Paris</a> this December.</li>
<li>“Down the line, [to] provide funding for graduate students and fellowships” at IRDP.</li>
<li>Establish “partnerships with other research institutes, in the U.S. and globally,” to build “a global faculty network.”</li>
</ul>
<p>The audience—much of which consisted of women wearing hijabs (headscarves)—of sixty to eighty people on the first day, was swallowed by the spacious Booth Auditorium housed in the Berkeley School of Law. In between panels, a bevy of academics and graduate students, many of them speakers, greeted each other and gabbed, while the few attendees outside the fold looked on. Bazian <a href="http://www.dailycal.org/2014/04/17/conference-illuminates-problem-islamophobia-todays-society/">boasted</a> that 6,000 people watched the conference online last year via the live stream and that this year, Duke University would be “carrying our live feed.”</p>
<p>Saeed Khan, a lecturer in history and Near East and Asian studies at Wayne State University, spoke on the second panel about “Islamophobia, the Conservative Movement, and the Creation of the Muslim Menace.” Khan is also a fellow at the Detroit-based Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, which co-commissioned a flawed May, 2013 <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/13364">study</a> alleging “Islamophobia” in the San Francisco Bay Area, of all places, that was co-authored by Bazian. He critiqued what he called “the conventional wisdom among Tea Party conservatives and other Islamophobes” that “Muslims are infiltrating every aspect of American society, particularly education” by quoting a <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/5229">2008 article</a> on the unconstitutional insertion of Islamic curriculum into American public education written by this author. He then made a nonsensical comparison:</p>
<blockquote><p>Cinnamon Stillwell, from here in the Bay Area. . . . She definitely takes the line that in spite of the “soft jihad” that is taking place, a soft crusade about the Christianity of the Founding Fathers is perfectly acceptable in public schools in a construct that is supposed to have separation of church and state.</p></blockquote>
<p>Khan’s alleged concern for separation of church and state would be more convincing were he to apply it to the very real threat outlined in the article in question, not to a nonexistent Christian “soft crusade” that its author did not reference.</p>
<p>He later complained about efforts in “Texas and Florida” to combat the use of biased textbooks in K-12 education, mischaracterizing valid concerns over the whitewashing and falsifying of Islamic history as opposition to inclusion and objectivity:</p>
<blockquote><p>A world history text is being reviewed to extricate Islam from the curriculum, or at the very least, to try and remove any reference to Islam that would be seen as objective or—in their estimation, the same thing—biased toward Islam.</p></blockquote>
<p>During the question and answer period, Khan actually complained that the “backlash” against Muslims after the 2013 Boston bombing that was predicted by speakers at last year’s Islamophobia <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/13168">conference</a> never happened. Referencing a <em>Boston Globe</em> <a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/04/16/muslim-america-shadow-marathon-bombings/JaSN4qicDX21KbGpQrviLJ/story.html">article</a> titled, “Inclusive Spirit Reassures Muslims After Bombings,” he concluded:</p>
<blockquote><p>This portrays Muslims being unnecessarily and unreasonably paranoid. It showcases the magnanimity and largesse of an American society that didn’t cause a backlash.</p></blockquote>
<p>We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.</p>
<p>The next panel, which boasted the Orwellian title, “Gender, Sexuality, Class and Colonialism in Transnational Latent and Manifest Islamophobia,” dished out a great heaping of academic jargon from the realms of queer, gender, and women’s studies.</p>
<p>Paola Bacchetta, an associate professor of gender and women’s studies at UC Berkeley, introduced her incomprehensible presentation with the even more perplexing sentence, “Muslims as enemy Others as queerphilia xenophobia.” She was just warming up:</p>
<blockquote><p>By that, I mean in which their queerphobia is displaced onto the enemy Others, who they now claim are the queerphobic ones. . . . Queers are now shifted to this position which under colonialism belonged to women: that is, queers are constructed as either silent self-hating collaborators with the presumed straight and queerphobic collective enemy Other camp, or imagined as enemy Other’s victims requiring dominant saviors.</p></blockquote>
<p>Bacchetta included “the Israeli state” in her “neo-colonial” enemies list for its supposed “pink-washing,” claiming that:</p>
<blockquote><p>[T]he idea that Palestinian queers are being saved by Israel . . . ignores the occupation and the many years of solid work done by Palestinian queers such as Palestinian Queers for BDS [boycott, divestment, sanctions].</p></blockquote>
<p>It’s hard to imagine that groups like Palestinian Queers for BDS are succeeding in helping their gay compatriots so much as engaging in self-preservation by attacking the preferred enemy, Israel.</p>
<p>Huma Dar, a Ph.D. candidate in South East Asian studies at UC Berkeley, compared “Israeli occupation” to “Indian Occupation” in her jargon-ridden presentation, “Latent and Manifest Islamophobia in Indian Occupied Kashmir: Queerphilic Imperialism and Hindu-homonationalism.” Echoing anti-Israel rhetoric, she denied that Islamism has any relevance to either conflict:</p>
<blockquote><p>Akin to the Palestinian situation, the struggle for Kashmiri independence is not a religious or theological matter, but a political one of indigenous people’s rights to territory and sovereignty. India, like Israel, has attempted to frame it as a fight against Kashmiri Muslims . . . riding on the coattails of a wave of global Islamophobia.</p></blockquote>
<p>Dar accused India of engaging in “queerphilic imperialism” by “projecting queerphobia onto the Kashmiri Muslims” and of “pinkwashing the Indian occupation akin to the Israeli occupation.” With all these “occupations” allegedly engaging in “pink-washing,” one would think that gays in the Muslim world were safe, when in fact persecution and capital punishment are common.</p>
<p>The day’s final panel included Zahra Billoo, executive director for the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (<a href="http://www.meforum.org/916/cair-islamists-fooling-the-establishment">CAIR</a>), which has been <a href="http://www.nysun.com/national/islamic-groups-named-in-hamas-funding-case/55778/">linked by the United States government to Hamas</a> and the <a href="http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/423.pdf#page=5">Muslim Brotherhood</a>. Her presentation, “California Muslim Youth Experiences with Bullying, Harassment and Religious Accommodation in Schools,” was based on CAIR’s own “statewide survey,” yet she was unable to report on any widespread persecution. Despite citing isolated instances of “bullying” in schools, her own data forced her to acknowledge that the “complaints are <em>not </em>coming,” leading her to lament that:</p>
<blockquote><p>It troubled some of our partners and allies, who said, “well, these bully figures are not as high as we think they should be.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Instead, they found that “the figures in the LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] community are far higher.” “At the federal level these complaints are handled by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights,” Billoo added, before launching into a gratuitous tirade against pro-Israel activists concerned for the safety of Jewish students on campus:</p>
<blockquote><p>And as a side note, this office is used by pro-apartheid Israel activists attempting to silence human rights activists on campus calling attention to that nation state’s racism and violent policies—but that’s a separate conversation.</p></blockquote>
<p>Apparently, bullying is only a concern when Muslim students are on the receiving end.</p>
<p>It turns out pushing “Islamophobia” trumps addressing myriad human rights challenges afflicting the Muslim world. More on this tomorrow.</p>
<p><strong><em>Part Two of this article will appear in our next issue.<br />
</em></strong></p>
<p>*</p>
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		<title>Freedom Center Brings Campus Anti-Semitism to Light</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/sara-dogan/freedom-center-protests-of-uc-student-regent-candidate-bring-campus-anti-semitism-to-light/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=freedom-center-protests-of-uc-student-regent-candidate-bring-campus-anti-semitism-to-light</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 01 Aug 2013 04:54:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sara Dogan]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berkeley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[freedom-center]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[How our protest against an anti-Israel extremist for UC Student Regent sparked a national conversation.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/student_uc_regent.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-199033" alt="student_uc_regent" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/student_uc_regent.jpg" width="270" height="218" /></a>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.</span></b></p>
<p>UC Berkeley student Sadia Saifuddin was recently appointed student regent-designate for the University of California over protests by the Freedom Center and a few others who opposed her nomination on the grounds that her extreme anti-Israel views and activism with organizations known for their anti-Semitism make her unfit to represent all students in the UC system. The controversy sparked by the Freedom Center’s opposition has become national news.</p>
<p>During her years at Berkeley, Saifuddin was a leader in two Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations, the Muslim Students Association and Students for Justice in Palestine, which regularly invite anti-Semitic speakers to UC campuses and sponsor an annual hate-week known as “Israeli Apartheid Week.” She was also an active participant in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement which calls for the destruction of the Jewish state and led vicious attacks on Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a lecturer at UC Santa Cruz who has dedicated herself to protecting Jewish students from anti-Semitism on UC campuses.</p>
<p>In an open letter sent to the University of California Board of Regents, the Freedom Center’s chairman, David Horowitz, and director of campus campaigns, Jeffrey Wienir, urged the Board to reconsider their selection: “Appointing Sadia Saifuddin to the Board of Regents would be an offense to the ‘Principles of Community’ for UC Berkeley which are supposed to be core values in the UC system, and which call on UC students to ‘respect the differences as well as the commonalities that bring us together and call for civility and respect in our personal interactions,’’ the letter stated. “How is it respectful for the organizations that Sadia Saifuddin represents to sponsor ‘Israeli Apartheid Weeks’ which support terrorist organizations like Hamas and call for the destruction of the Jewish state?”</p>
<p>Despite the regents’ failure to reconsider their nomination of Saifuddin, the Freedom Center’s protests garnered widespread press coverage of Saifuddin’s questionable ties to anti-Semitic organizations and helped to raise awareness of the often-threatening environment confronting Jewish students on UC campuses.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/uc-regents-confirm-muslim-student-board-19691331">covering the story</a>, the Associated Press framed their coverage in light of the Freedom Center’s objections: “The University of California&#8217;s governing board confirmed its first Muslim student member Wednesday, despite some Jewish groups&#8217; claims that she marginalized Jewish students and promoted an anti-Israel agenda.” The AP story about Saifuddin’s controversial nomination was picked up by dozens of other newspapers and websites.</p>
<p>Numerous other publications and websites including <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/education/article/UC-regents-back-outspoken-Muslim-student-4671413.php"><i>The San Francisco Chronicle</i></a>, <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-regents-uc-student-representative-sadia-saif-20130718%2C0%2C7402394.story"><i>The Los Angeles Times</i></a>, <a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_23688198/muslim-uc-regent-sadia-saifuddins-confirmation-is-heartening"><i>The San Jose Mercury News</i>,</a> <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/170061#.UfXThaxt42A">IsraelNationalNews.com</a>, <a href="http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/69053/u.c.-regents-name-bds-proponent-to-student-spot/">JWeekly.com</a> and <a href="http://www.universityherald.com/articles/3921/20130718/uc-appoints-muslim-american-woman-board-jewish-groups-oppose-decision.htm"><i>The University Herald</i></a> picked up the story that Saifuddin’s confirmation was controversial because of her anti-Israel leanings and associations, with many directly citing the Freedom Center’s stance.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-regents-uc-student-representative-sadia-saif-20130718%2C0%2C7402394.story">an editorial</a> in the <i>Los Angeles Times</i>, the editors offered their congratulations to Saifuddin but noted that the “one glitch” in her resume is her outspoken criticism of Israel which the editors labeled “the third rail of UC politics.” The <i>Times</i> editorial went on to quote David Horowitz’s statement in his open letter that &#8220;If [Saifuddin] were confirmed, it would set a dangerous precedent to encourage anti-Semitism on campus, which is already a big problem in the UC system.&#8221;</p>
<p>We may have lost the battle against Saifuddin’s confirmation as UC Regent. But by sparking a national conversation about how her anti-Israel activism and leadership in organizations known for their anti-Semitism should disqualify her for such a position, we are a step closer to winning the war.</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>Berkeley Profs: ‘Islamophobia’ Greater Threat  Than Islamic Terrorism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/cinnamon-stillwell-and-rima-greene/berkeley-profs-islamophobia-greater-threat-than-islamic-terrorism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=berkeley-profs-islamophobia-greater-threat-than-islamic-terrorism</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 27 May 2013 04:45:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[America’s Middle East studies establishment]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[hatem bazian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[America’s Middle East studies establishment continues to nurture our surrender to Jihad. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Hatem_bazian.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-190929" alt="Hatem_bazian" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Hatem_bazian.jpg" width="320" height="404" /></a>The false narrative that “Islamophobia” is a growing threat received a boost at the “Fourth Annual International Conference on the Study of Islamophobia: From Theorizing to Systematic Documentation,” which <a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia-conference-2013">took place</a> at the University of California, Berkeley on April 19 and 20, 2013 under the chairmanship of its foremost conceptual proponent, <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/search.php?cx=015692155655874064424%3A-cjrsa07xqe&amp;cof=FORID%3A9&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=hatem+bazian&amp;sa=Search">Hatem Bazian</a>. A senior lecturer in UC Berkeley’s department of Near Eastern studies, Bazian directs the <a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia">Islamophobia Research &amp; Documentation Project</a> (IRDP), a program of the school’s Center for Race &amp; Gender, and sits on the editorial board for the <a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia/islamophobia-studies-journal"><i>Islamophobia Studies Journal</i></a><i>.</i> The IRDP is heavily invested in <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/12786">promoting</a> the belief that “Islamophobia” is on the rise globally and its annual conferences (click <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/12392">here</a> and <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/11269">here</a> to read about previous years) never fail to ratchet up the hysteria.</p>
<p>The conference opened just as a massive manhunt was launched in Boston for the two Islamic terrorists, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who bombed the Boston Marathon earlier in the week. Predictable anticipations of a coming “backlash” against Muslims—which never developed—were repeated throughout the event. Ironically, actual violence against Muslims came at the hands of Turks against <a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/syrian-refugees-victim-of-reyhanli-bombs-too.aspx?pageID=238&amp;nID=46962&amp;NewsCatID=341">Syrian refugees</a> after a car bombing killed 52 people in Reyhanli, Turkey on May 11, 2013.</p>
<p>An audience of approximately sixty-five students, many of them women in hijab (head scarf), attended the second day of the conference, eager to <a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia-conference-2013">learn about</a> the “‘Othering’ of Islam,” the “racialization of Muslims,” and <a href="http://www.islamophobiacon.com/">the definition</a> of “Islamophobia”:</p>
<blockquote><p>A contrived fear or prejudice fomented by the existing Eurocentric and Orientalist global power structure, which rationalizes the necessity to deploy violence as a tool to achieve ‘civilizational rehab’ of the target communities (Muslim or otherwise).</p></blockquote>
<p>In other words, it was a day of mind-numbing jargon delivered by academics bent on creating the very panic and division they claim to decry.</p>
<p>During the “Islamophobia, Law and Public Discourses” panel, <a href="http://ethnicstudies.berkeley.edu/faculty/profile.php?person=5">Keith Feldman</a>, an assistant professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, gave a presentation titled, “How (Anti)Terrorism Went Viral.” He focused on the likening in public discourse of terrorism to a virus or a disease that’s contagious, without boundaries, and to which no country is immune. Feldman’s evidence included comments by <a href="http://www.westernjournalism.com/gingrich-obama-not-dealing-with-terrorist-virus/">Newt Gingrich</a> and former George H. W. Bush special assistant <a href="http://2001-2009.state.gov/s/p/rem/5505.htm">Richard N. Haass</a>, and the <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/International_Terrorism_Challenge_and_Re.html?id=s8Pm37gg5JkC">1979 Jerusalem Conference</a> on International Terrorism (an <a href="http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1979/eirv06n28-19790717/eirv06n28-19790717_063-facts_behind_terrorism_jerusalem.pdf">obsession</a> of conspiracy theorists).</p>
<p>“In addressing the particular question of anti-Muslim racism,” Feldman concluded, such language is used to secure “the homeland against a medicalized threat in its capacity to pathologize subject populations”—a claim undermined by the unacknowledged fact that only the word “terrorism,” not “Muslim,” was used by those he cited to describe this metaphorical infection.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.clas.wayne.edu/faculty/khan">Saeed Khan</a>, a history professor and lecturer in Near East and Asian studies at Wayne State University, began his lecture, “Islamophobia and Other Anti-Progressive Campaigns in the Midst of Americas Demographic Shift,” by alluding to:</p>
<blockquote><p>[W]hat has transpired over the last several days in Boston and the unfortunate inevitable reaction I think many in the room are expecting will happen vis-a-vis Islamophobia in its various manifestations.</p></blockquote>
<p>Noting that some estimates put minorities in the majority in the U.S. by 2043, Khan predicted “an age of multiple moral panics because of this demographic shift” among whites and in particular, white Republicans. “I am situating . . . Islamophobia within this meta-panic,” he added, before devoting the bulk of his talk to the six “anti-progressive” issues he attributed to various Republican legislators:</p>
<blockquote><p>Voter ID and voter suppression efforts, immigration ‘reform,’ those efforts targeting the LGBT community, reproductive and contraceptive rights, collective bargaining rights at work, along with anti-Sharia, anti-mosque initiatives. . . . By some strange coincidence, a single political party is behind all these efforts: the same politicians targeting all groups. Muslim groups are part of a bigger ‘Other.’</p></blockquote>
<p>Khan didn’t explain how opposing the implementation of Sharia law in the U.S. dovetails with issues such as gay and women’s rights. Instead, he detailed his plans to conduct a “study, hopefully ready in time for the mid-term election season in 2014,” which “will be looking at all fifty states and DC, locating Islamophobia within these six groups as targets of a coordinated effort.” He left no doubt that this “coordinated effort” would include targeting the Republican legislators in question for defeat.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.wlu.ca/homepage.php?grp_id=1529&amp;f_id=35">Jasmin Zine</a>, an associate professor of sociology at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, spoke on “Constructing the ‘Enemies Within’: Muslim Youth, Islamophobia, and the Racial Politics of Canada’s ‘Home Grown’ War on Terror,” as part of the “Islamophobia in the Age of War” panel. Having based her research on interviews with young Canadian Muslims, Zine asked rhetorically how she could guarantee the confidentiality of her subjects under the “politics of empire” in “Canada’s war on terror.” As she put it:</p>
<blockquote><p>I am a well known activist, but . . . what if my data can be confiscated, because of a ‘person of interest’ label? . . . How do we do our research because of this context of Islamophobia?</p></blockquote>
<p>Lamenting “Canadian images of the home grown,” she complained that the “terrible tragedy in Boston has evoked this home grown terrorist . . . before the facts of the case were known.” The fact that the perpetrators of the Boston bombing were Islamic terrorists or that a <a href="http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/05/09/fbi-arrested-third-suspect-related-to-alleged-via-rail-terror-plot/">thwarted plot</a> to derail a passenger train traveling from New York to Toronto the following week involved three Islamic terrorists rather undermined her comments.</p>
<p>Noting that her interview subjects had expressed hesitation at playing paintball or “violent video games in public concourse at the university” for fear of looking like terrorists, Zine added, “I call this the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon">Panopticon</a> of self-surveillance; internalizing the gaze.” She described how she and her nineteen-year-old son also suffer from this alleged malady:</p>
<blockquote><p>We go to Muslim youth events. We play a game: Spot the agent. The guy with the beard, the curious white woman—who? We know someone is there watching; we are very aware of it.</p></blockquote>
<p>Beyond her paranoia and narcissism, Zine seemed unaware that these “hardships” weren’t exactly heartrending during a week when a number of Americans were killed and maimed by the very Islamic terrorists she deemed imaginary.</p>
<p>On the same panel, <a href="http://sas.lau.edu.lb/social-sciences/people/tamirace-fakhoury.php">Tamirace Fakhoury</a>, a political science and international relations professor at Lebanese American University in Beirut who was a visiting postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies in 2011, spoke about “Debunking Islamophobia?: the Discourse of Arab and Muslim Student Associations at UC Berkeley.” Her presentation explored the level of activism the “non-state actors” and “transnational contesters” in these student associations devote to countering “Islamophobia.” Her jargon-filled, stream of consciousness digressions were opaque:</p>
<blockquote><p>Colonialist and Orientalist perceptions generating counter-narratives; disentangling the Palestinian issue from Islamophobic connotations; recasting as a civil rights narrative . . . Transnational associations recasting discussion of Islamophobia . . . analytical framework, which consists of structural context and the discursive strategies of actions.</p></blockquote>
<p>In time, Fakhoury shifted course and suddenly stated, “The question here is whether these international associations of students matter.” Answering in the affirmative, assuming that “resistance” is their primary goal, she provided a list of helpful suggestions, including improving access to resources and fellowships, checking the ethnicity box on student applications “so that they could separate themselves with other Arabs,” and asking for courses that challenge the “Orientalist colonial narrative.” She urged students to invite speakers to campus to “show how and why Islamophobia is a policy construct of the United States” and to take advantage of “Berkeley’s opportunity structure” to further their “global commitment to morality social justice coalition building.”</p>
<p>Fakhoury concluded that students’ most significant objective should be to introduce resolutions at various campuses condemning “Islamophobic hate speech,” including the assertion that Islam is “inherently dictocratic.” She never mentioned the importance of free speech, an apolitical education, or the cultivation of an identity separate from one’s ethnicity or religion.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/05/uc-berkeley-islamophobia-prof-hatem-bazian-equates-boston-jihad-bombings-with-islamophobia.html">Hatem Bazian</a> concluded the day by examining Twitter activity surrounding the conference. A PowerPoint presentation featured the faces of the scholar of Islam Robert Spencer, blogger and activist Pamela Geller, and television/radio host Glenn Beck. Claiming that Spencer had issued an “Islamophobic tweet,” the contents of which he didn’t reveal, he warned the audience that, “The Islamophobes are there,” before adding jauntily:</p>
<blockquote><p>I always say thanks. There’s no such thing as bad publicity; it’s what you do with it, so once again we want to . . . thank them for engaging us in this material.</p></blockquote>
<p>He then invited conference participants to submit papers for the next issue of the <a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia/islamophobia-studies-journal"><i>Islamophobia Studies Journal</i></a> before summing up the hyper-politicized atmosphere of the conference by claiming that, “education is about social justice.”</p>
<p>When an audience member who identified herself as being from Cambridge, MA, asked, “What would you do if you were mayor of Boston?,” no one on the panel answered. Another audience member finally blurted out, “Stay calm, I’d say,” to which Mahan Mirza, the panel’s moderator and a teacher at Zaytuna College, Berkeley’s “<a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/10165">Islamic university</a>” and a cosponsor of the conference, responded: “I would be a radical mayor and advise the populace not to believe mainstream media reports.” The awkward silence that followed was broken only when someone asked about the previous talk, at which point the audience exhaled a collective sigh of relief.</p>
<p>The brutal terrorist attack on Boston and the then-growing awareness that the perpetrators were Caucasian Muslims did not fit the artificial “racialized” narrative of an academic enterprise devoted to battling “Islamophobia,” demonizing critics, silencing dissent, and politicizing higher education. Ideology and willful blindness to inconvenient facts are poor substitutes for honest examinations and rigorous debate about Islamist terrorism in the U.S. and beyond. As long as America’s Middle East studies establishment <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/13112">refuses to admit</a> the obvious, taking them seriously about the most vital issues of our day is a fool’s errand.</p>
<p><i>Berkeley resident Rima Greene co-wrote this article with Cinnamon Stillwell, 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><b>Readers may contact UC-Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and Center for Race &amp; Gender Director <strong>Evelyn Nakano Glenn </strong>to express their objection to the highly politicized Islamophobia Research &amp; Documentation Project:</b></p>
<p><b>Chancellor </b><a href="http://chancellor.berkeley.edu/">Robert Birgeneau</a><br />
<i>Office of the Chancellor</i><br />
200 California Hall # 1500<br />
Berkeley, CA 94720-1500<br />
Phone (510) 642-7464<br />
Fax (510) 643-5499<br />
<a href="mailto:chancellor@berkeley.edu">chancellor@berkeley.edu</a></p>
<p><a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/crg-staff">CRG</a><b> Director </b><a href="http://ethnicstudies.berkeley.edu/faculty/profile.php?person=6">Evelyn Nakano Glenn</a><br />
<i>Center for Race &amp; Gender</i><br />
638 Barrows Hall #1074<br />
Berkeley, CA 94720-1074<br />
<i>Phone:</i> (510) 643-8488<br />
<i>Fax:</i> (510) 642-9810<br />
<i>Email:</i> <a href="mailto:englenn@berkeley.edu">englenn@berkeley.edu</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>Berkeley Councilman Proposes Taxing Email to Fund Post Office</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/berkeley-councilman-proposes-taxing-email-to-fund-post-office/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=berkeley-councilman-proposes-taxing-email-to-fund-post-office</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/berkeley-councilman-proposes-taxing-email-to-fund-post-office/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Mar 2013 22:21:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berkeley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=180599</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A 1 cent per megabyte tax would mean that today you would be paying a 60 cent tax to watch a movie and 14 cents to watch a YouTube video.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="attachment_180600" style="width: 460px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/berkeley-councilman-proposes-taxing-email-to-fund-post-office/628x471-5/" rel="attachment wp-att-180600"><img class="size-medium wp-image-180600" title="628x471" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/628x471-450x300.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="300" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">OCCUPY your email</p></div>
<p>Unsurprisingly he&#8217;s a Democrat. Even more unsurprisingly, he&#8217;s a former Grad student. Wozniak is not too bad by Berkeley standards. He took a common sense position that would have prevented the Code Pink protests and called for ending Berkeley&#8217;s ban on nuclear power investments.</p>
<p>But <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/email-tax-floated-save-snail-mail-article-1.1282453">Berkeley is still Berkeley</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>Wozniak told the council: “There should be something like a bit tax. I mean a bit tax could be a cent per gigabit and they would still make, probably, billions of dollars a year… And there should be, also, a very tiny tax on email,” perhaps one-hundredth of a cent. He said this would discourage spam and not have much impact on the typical Internet user.</p>
<p>Wozniak went on to suggest a sales tax on internet transactions that could help, in part, fund “vital functions that the post office serves.”</p></blockquote>
<p>If the Post Office needs to be funded by taxing email, then it&#8217;s an open question whether we need the Post Office. And since email is already partly subsidized through the Universal Service Fund, this whole thing is that much more senseless. It&#8217;s like taxing the phone to keep the telegraph going.</p>
<p>But it&#8217;s not a wacky idea that Wozniak made up.  The email surcharge free idea has been floating around for a while, sometimes as urban legend, sometimes as reality.</p>
<p>Some dot.com companies proposed the 1/100 surcharge as a spam fighting measure, which is where Wozniak got the idea, but the real core source of this appears to be the place where all good ideas come from&#8230; especially in Berkeley&#8230; the United Nations.</p>
<blockquote><p>The United Nations Development Program examined such a tax in its 1999 Human Development Report, Globalization With a Human Face, as a way to fund “the global communications revolution.” UNDP calculated that in 1996, such a tax would have raised $70 billion globally.</p></blockquote>
<p>Technically speaking the UNDP was not proposing to tax emails. That would have been nuts. Instead the UN <a href="http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_1999_EN.pdf">was proposing to tax kilobytes</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>There is an urgent need to find the resources to fund the global communications revolution—to ensure that it is truly global. One proposal is a “bit tax”—a very small tax on the amount of data sent through the Internet.</p>
<p>The costs for users would be negligible: sending 100 emails a day, each containing a 10-kilobyte document (a very long one), would raise a tax of just 1 cent. Yet with email booming worldwide, the total would be substantial. In Belgium in 1998, such a tax would have yielded $10 billion. Globally in 1996, it would have yielded $70 billion—more than total official development assistance that year</p></blockquote>
<p>A 1 cent per megabyte tax would mean that today you would be paying a 60 cent tax to watch a movie and 14 cents to watch a YouTube video.</p>
<p>Want to upload 40 photos from your iPhone to Instagram? That will be 40 cents. Each song would carry a 2-3 cent tax. Downloading a game? Get ready to pay 4 bucks tax.</p>
<p>The troubling thing is that it is feasible. Unlike Gordon Wozniak&#8217;s proposal, coming from a man who got on Twitter once in 2010 and hasn&#8217;t used it since, it could work. It would also be quite creepy and totalitarian.</p>
<p>One more reason that America needs to be a UN-Free Zone.</p>
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		<title>Manufacturing ‘Islamophobia’ at UC Berkeley</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/cinnamon-stillwell/manufacturing-islamophobia-at-uc-berkeley/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=manufacturing-islamophobia-at-uc-berkeley</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/cinnamon-stillwell/manufacturing-islamophobia-at-uc-berkeley/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 25 Jan 2013 04:20:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berkeley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CAIR]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamophobia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East Studies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[university of california]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=174706</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Unmasking the university's new witch-hunt studies program. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/cinnamon-stillwell/manufacturing-islamophobia-at-uc-berkeley/razieh20100831063916560/" rel="attachment wp-att-174731"><img class=" wp-image-174731 alignleft" title="razieh20100831063916560" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/razieh20100831063916560.jpg" alt="" width="254" height="177" /></a>Scholars of the Middle East would do well to follow the lead of the <em>Associated Press </em>(AP), which last year struck the political term “Islamophobia” from the new edition of its widely used Stylebook, <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/11/ap-nixes-homophobia-ethnic-cleansing-150315.html">explaining</a> that “‘-phobia,’ an irrational, uncontrollable fear, often a form of mental illness should not be used in political or social contexts, including ‘homophobia’ and ‘Islamophobia.’” Given that the word was <a href="http://www.investigativeproject.org/2217/moderate-muslim-speak-out-on-capitol-hill">invented</a> in the early 1990s by a Muslim Brotherhood <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/printgroupProfile.asp?grpid=6180">front organization</a>, the Northern Virginia-based International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), in order <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=777">to silence</a> critics of Islamism by branding them as irrational racists and hate-mongers—according to former IIIT member Abdur-Rahman Muhammad who was present at the time—AP made a wise decision.</p>
<p>In contrast, the field of Middle East studies—in <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/search.php?cx=015692155655874064424%3A-cjrsa07xqe&amp;cof=FORID%3A9&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=cair&amp;sa=Search">partnership</a> with organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an <a href="http://www.meforum.org/916/cair-islamists-fooling-the-establishment">Islamist outfit</a> linked by the United States government to <a href="http://www.nysun.com/national/islamic-groups-named-in-hamas-funding-case/55778/">Hamas</a> and the <a href="http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/423.pdf#page=5">Muslim Brotherhood</a> posing as a defender of civil rights—has become one of the key proponents of the myth that “Islamophobia” is sweeping the nation. Professors of Middle East studies regularly use the phrase in both <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/11248">public lectures</a> and the <a href="http://classes.colgate.edu/osafi/islam_and_Modernity.htm">classroom</a>, while producing <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/12429">books</a>, <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/9984">op-eds</a>, <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/correction/89">reports</a>, and <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/11774">programs</a> devoted to the promulgation of this deliberately misleading term.</p>
<p>At the forefront of this effort is the <a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia">Islamophobia Research &amp; Documentation Project</a> (IRDP), a program of the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender directed by Near Eastern studies senior lecturer and <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/11116">notorious</a> anti-Israel activist <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/search.php?cx=015692155655874064424%3A-cjrsa07xqe&amp;cof=FORID%3A9&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=hatem+bazian&amp;sa=Search">Hatem Bazian</a>. Bazian, co-founder of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), has links to <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2011/dgreenfield/islamic-hate-goes-to-school/2/">Hamas</a> through his work with <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/printgroupProfile.asp?grpid=6368">KindHearts</a> and through SJP&#8217;s sister organization, the <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7391">Muslim Students Association</a>. In addition to annual conferences devoted to the subject beginning in 2010 (information is available <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/11269">here</a> and <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/12392">here</a>), the IRDP produced the inaugural edition of its <a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia/islamophobia-studies-journal"><em>Islamophobia Studies Journal</em></a> in late 2012.</p>
<p>As with IRDP conferences, the journal was fashioned in collusion with CAIR and Berkeley’s “<a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/10165">Islamic University</a>,” Zaytuna College. <a href="http://www.investigativeproject.org/3730/cair-next-generation-radical">Zahra Billoo,</a> executive director of CAIR’s San Francisco Bay Area chapter, and <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/search.php?cx=015692155655874064424%3A-cjrsa07xqe&amp;cof=FORID%3A9&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=zaid+shakir&amp;sa=Search">Zaid Shakir</a>, Zaytuna College cofounder and senior faculty member, serve on its advisory board, along with controversial Oxford University Islamic studies professor <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/search.php?cx=015692155655874064424%3A-cjrsa07xqe&amp;cof=FORID%3A9&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=tariq+ramadan&amp;sa=Search">Tariq Ramadan</a> and University of California, Davis anthropology and women’s studies professor <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/9619">Suad Joseph</a>. Editorial board members include <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/9711">Rabab Abdulhadi</a>, San Francisco State University associate professor of ethnic studies and race and resistance studies, and a senior scholar in the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative;  <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/12392">Munir Jiwa</a>, founding director and assistant professor of the Center for Islamic Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley; and <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/9732">Hatem Bazian</a>. All share the dubious achievement of furthering the politicization of Middle East studies.</p>
<p>In keeping with the postcolonial, postmodern, racialist language that characterizes UC Berkeley’s <a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/">Center for Race &amp; Gender</a>, the <em>Islamophobia Studies Journal</em> is filled with the sort of ideological jargon that radical academics habitually substitute for reasoned debate. In the table of contents and the editorial statement alone, terms such “Otherness,” “social justice,” “speak truth to power,” “racial formations,” “the Muslim Other,” “the ‘inferior’ global other,” and “Western epistemic racisms” numb the mind and deaden the senses. Ahistorical and culturally relativistic <a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Meer-Modood.pdf">comparisons</a> to the Jewish experience serve to comfort those inclined to view all “Others” in the same light. Bazian’s <a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Bazian.pdf">contribution</a>, “Muslims &#8211; Enemies of the State: The New Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO),” paints Muslim-Americans as victims of a persecutory fervor he likens to anti-communism—a trope he has been hawking furiously since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.</p>
<p>While academic journals of this sort may have a limited audience, the IRDP has been involved with more populist ventures over the years. In 2011, CAIR and the Center for Race &amp; Gender held a joint news conference on Capitol Hill in order to <a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia-report-0910">unveil</a> a 68-page report titled, “<a href="http://crg.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/islamophobiareport2009-2010.pdf">Same Hate, New Target</a>: Islamophobia and Its Impact in the United States.” It falsely charged a number of public figures with contributing to the scourge of “Islamophobia,” including Middle East Forum founder and president Daniel Pipes. Both Pipes and <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/">Campus Watch</a> were blatantly <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/correction/87">mischaracterized</a>, while the report <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/11560">stretched credulity</a> to portray a country in which Muslims live in fear. The <em>Islamophobia Studies Journal</em> carries on this tradition.</p>
<p>The entire enterprise rests on a falsehood for, in fact, “Islamophobia” as a phenomenon that results in physical harm to Muslim-Americans is practically nonexistent. According to the latest FBI hate crime <a href="http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2008/index.html">statistics</a>, the majority of religiously motivated hate crimes in the U.S. are committed against Jews. A <a href="http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/p18663.xml">study </a>conducted by the Center for Security Policy, “<em>Religious Bias Crimes against Muslim, Jewish and Christian Victims: American Trends from 2000-2009</em>,”<em> </em>shows that hate crimes against Muslim-Americans have remained relatively low and have trended downward since 2001. David Rusin, a research fellow at <a href="http://www.islamist-watch.org/">Islamist Watch</a>, covered the subject extensively in a <a href="http://www.islamist-watch.org/12057/hate-crime-stats-deflate-islamophobia-myth">recent article</a>, noting that:</p>
<blockquote><p>A detailed analysis of FBI statistics covering ten full calendar years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks reveals that, on a per capita basis, American Muslims, contrary to spin, have been subjected to hate crimes less often than other prominent minorities.</p></blockquote>
<p>Why then are the number of academic programs, reports, and journals devoted to combating “Islamophobia” <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/search.php?cx=015692155655874064424%3A-cjrsa07xqe&amp;cof=FORID%3A9&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=islamophobia&amp;sa=Search">on the rise</a>? Simply put, it’s in the interest of Islamists to paint a picture of Muslim victimization in order to silence legitimate voices of criticism. In the latest evidence of its years-long decline into politicized scholarship and teaching, the field of Middle East studies has become a principal vehicle for this endeavor.</p>
<p>UC Berkeley and the IRDP are willing accomplices. The latter’s 2011 annual conference was titled, “Islamophobia Production and Re-Defining Global ‘Security’ Agenda for the 21<sup>st</sup> Century,” an apt name as “Islamophobia production” is precisely what the IRDP has done since its inception. Brainwashing students, obscuring the true picture of life for Muslims in America and sowing the seeds of division are the inevitable result—just as the Islamists intended. Academe should demonstrate the same level of intellectual integrity as the AP and dispense with the manufactured, discredited term “Islamophobia.”</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>Hostile Environment For Jewish Students at U.C. Berkeley</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/hostile-environment-for-jewish-students-at-u-c-berkeley/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hostile-environment-for-jewish-students-at-u-c-berkeley</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/hostile-environment-for-jewish-students-at-u-c-berkeley/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 23 Jul 2012 04:18:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berkeley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jessica Felber]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sher]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Title VI]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=138105</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Lawyers file complaint with the Justice and Education Departments alleging violations of Title VI by the university.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/berkeley-protest.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-138109" title="berkeley-protest" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/berkeley-protest.jpg" alt="" width="302" height="235" /></a>Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Neal Sher, an attorney practicing in New York City. He was the Director the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which investigated and prosecuted Nazi criminals in the U.S.  In that capacity, he was responsible for bringing many dozens of prosecutions and for barring former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim from coming to this country. He also served as the National Executive Director of AIPAC and was the President of the American Section of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Neal Sher, welcome to Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p>I would like to talk to you today about why you and your colleague Joel Siegal filed a complaint with the Justice and Education Departments alleging violations of Title VI by U.C. Berkeley.</p>
<p>But first, as a bit of background for our readers, tell us about the federal court case that was brought by <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2011/jamie-glazov/berkeley-on-trial-over-jewish-students-assault/">Berkeley students Jessica Felber</a> and Brian Maissy. How was it resolved?</p>
<p><strong>Sher: </strong>Thanks Jamie.</p>
<p>The original complaint in federal district court was a first of its kind federal civil rights case filed against the University of California at Berkeley, the Regents of the University of California and their ranking officials, by a Jewish student, Jessica Felber, who had <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2011/jamie-glazov/berkeley-on-trial-over-jewish-students-assault/">been assaulted on campus</a> last year by a leader of a Muslim student organization during a pro-Israel event. Later, Brian Maissy joined as a plaintiff.</p>
<p>On March 5, 2010, Ms.Felber, a twenty year old Jewish student at Berkeley, was attacked and injured on campus because of her Jewish ancestry and religious affiliation. At the time she was holding a sign stating “Israel wants Peace.” Her assailant, Husam Zakharia, also a UC Berkeley student, was the leader of Students for Justice in Palestine (“SJP”) at Berkeley.</p>
<p>University officials were fully aware that Zakharia, the SJP and similar student groups had been involved in other incidents on campus to incite violence against and intimidate Jewish and other students. Nevertheless, in clear dereliction of their legal responsibilities, Defendants took no reasonable steps to protect Ms. Felber and others.</p>
<p>The Complaint further laid out how the SJP conspires and coordinates with the Muslim Student Association (“MSA”), which has a publicly documented history of affiliation with and support of organizations deemed “terror organizations” by the United States Department of State. That they have resorted to intimidation and harassment is evidenced most recently by the fact that the District Attorney of Orange County, California, has indicted eleven students from these groups for inciting and disrupting a speech given by the Israeli Ambassador to the United States at the University of California, Irvine.</p>
<p>The Complaint charges that the assault was the result of the university having:  (1) fostered  and encouraged campus terrorist incitements by the SJP and the MSA) ; (2) turned a blind eye to the perpetrators of illegal activities; (3) failed to effectively discipline the MSA and SJP for their pro-terrorist programs, goals and conduct; despite having ample notice that such violence was foreseeable;  and (4) failed to provide adequate security to prevent the violence, harassment and intimidation which occurred on March 5, 2010.</p>
<p>Ignoring complaints from students about the poisonous climate on campus, defendants condoned, allowed and enabled groups such as the MSA and the SJP to threaten, harass and intimidate Jewish students and to endanger their health and safety. Their tolerance of the growing cancer of a dangerous anti-Semitic climate on its campuses, and their failure to take adequate measures to quell it, violated the rights of Ms. Felber’s and other students to enjoy a peaceful campus environment free from threats and intimidation.</p>
<p>There was genuine fear by Ms. Felber, Mr. Maissy and other students of Jewish ancestry on campuses throughout the University of California system that the tragic lessons of history have not yet been learned by these defendants. They fear that the University of California campuses are no longer places of hope and dignity, of academic and personal freedom, or of peaceful life and personal safety.</p>
<p>Since Maissy and Felber have graduated, we no longer had standing to obtain the full redress to deal with the overall hostile environment on campus. In resolving the case, Berkeley has agreed to promulgate regulations dealing with the improper use on campus of fake but realistic weapons and to ensure that students are able to pass into and out of campus during demonstrations. These were issues central to the case.</p>
<p>Now, with Felber and Maissy no longer at Berkeley, we have called upon the Justice and Education Departments to investigate the hostile environment facing Jews at Berkeley. They have full authority to do so and we have provided voluminous evidence establishing that a hostile environment does indeed exist. Justice has investigated a racist atmosphere on the campus of U.C. San Diego and reached a resolution imposing upon the school strong monitoring and reporting requirements. As similar result is certainly warranted at Berkeley.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Ok, thank you, so tell us the details about the complaint you and your colleague Joel Siegal filed with the Justice and Education Departments alleging violations of Title VI by U.C. Berkeley?</p>
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		<title>Occupy Berkeley!</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/steven-plaut/occupy-berkeley/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=occupy-berkeley</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/steven-plaut/occupy-berkeley/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Oct 2011 04:02:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Steven Plaut]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[99%]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berkeley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[occupy wall street]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[university of california]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=108147</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The alternative mass movement to "Occupy Wall Street."
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/berk.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-108151" title="Cal Day 2005 Crowds pass through Sather Gate" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/berk.jpg" alt="" width="390" height="259" /></a></p>
<p>The focus of the country has lately been on the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, or &#8220;OWS.&#8221;  You know, the people who claim to speak for the 99% of Americans who are not wealthy capitalists and who think they can create social justice and equality by marching around the New York Stock Exchange and other centers of capitalism, like Greenwich  Village.</p>
<p>Here is how the leaders of the leaderless OWS describe themselves on their Web site:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.”</p></blockquote>
<p>They go on to promise: “We are growing.  Block by block – city by city.  We will see change in this country, in this world.  It will happen sooner than you can imagine.”</p>
<p>Now it occurs to me that there is only one appropriate and sensible response to the “Occupy Wall Street” anarchists and street urchins.  And that is to create a competing grassroots mass movement that will challenge the attention OWS is receiving in the media, while offering a rational and constructive alternative agenda for real social change.</p>
<p>I propose that the alternative mass movement be called “Occupy Berkeley.”</p>
<p>OB will be a mass movement holding protests and street demonstrations in Berkeley, California.  Its first order of business will be to occupy Telegraph   Avenue.  The slogan of OB should be, “We are the other 99.999999%,” referring to the fact that people who despise Berkeley street hippies and “anarchists” represent exactly that proportion of the general population.</p>
<p>OB will specialize in civil disobedience and street theater.  Among its initiatives will be a mass roundup of Berkeley hippies who will be conducted to the central facilities of OB, where they will all be given free baths.  A special re-education campus will be set up in Orange County, California, where all Bay Area communists and drug users will be sent to learn about the disadvantages of communism.</p>
<p>OB will also rid Berkeley of those asking passersby for spare change.  Instead, OB will promote entrepreneurship for panhandlers and for homeless youths.  Anyone in the Bay area stopping passersby and asking for spare change will be ordered to do pushups, where the first 40 are unpaid but after that, payment will be made to the panhandlers at the rate of 20 cents per pushup.  Tax free.  Pregnant panhandlers and those over 70 will be permitted to do their pushups from the knees.</p>
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		<title>Tutu&#8217;s Crusade Against Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/john-perazzo/desmond-tutus-crusade-against-israels-%e2%80%9capartheid%e2%80%9d/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=desmond-tutus-crusade-against-israels-%25e2%2580%259capartheid%25e2%2580%259d</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 19 May 2010 04:07:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Perazzo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Alison Weir]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Amin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amir-Abdel Malik-Ali]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=60344</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The former South African archbishop embraces the anti-Semitic message on the American campus.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/tutu.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-60345" title="tutu" alt="" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/tutu.jpg" width="375" height="270" /></a></p>
<p>At first blush, the suggestion that a <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6979">Nobel Peace Prize</a> winner would have anything in common with a pack of unabashed, poison-tongued Jew-haters seems preposterous. But Desmond Tutu, the former archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, who in 1984 won the coveted Nobel award for his campaign against apartheid in that country, is today one of the most celebrated supporters of the “Divest from Israel” movement. Particularly widespread on university campuses across America, this movement routinely offers a high-visibility propaganda forum for some of the most rabid, combative anti-Semites of our time.</p>
<p>At its heart, the campus divestment movement aims to cripple Israel&#8217;s economy by compelling universities to withdraw whatever funds they may have invested in Israeli-based or -affiliated corporations. These efforts are founded on the premise that Israel is guilty of practicing apartheid and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people. According to the divestment movement&#8217;s leaders, the human rights violations perpetrated by Israel are on par with those of the former apartheid regime in Desmond Tutu&#8217;s South Africa; many critics go so far as to liken modern Israel to Nazi Germany. When the Associated Students of UC Berkeley recently expressed their wish to have the university divest its money from Israel, Tutu praised their “principled stand” against the “injustice of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and violation of Palestinian human rights.” “[I]t is always an inspiration when young people lead the way and speak truth to power,” said Tutu.</p>
<p>The philosophy underlying the divestment movement has been displayed in stark relief recently at a number of University of California campuses, where Muslim student groups sponsored events under the banner of “Israeli Apartheid Week: A Call to Boycott, Divest, and Sanction Israel.” At a <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=250">Muslim Students Association</a> (MSA) event at UC San Diego, for instance, one MSA member <a href="http://www.campusreform.org/blog/david-horowitz-exposes-genocidal-student-activists">explicitly affirmed</a> that she supported <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6256">Hezbollah</a> leader <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1257">Hassan Nasrallah</a>&#8216;s <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0CEEDB1F3CF930A15756C0A9629C8B63&amp;sec=&amp;spon=&amp;pagewanted=2">assertion that </a>“if Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us [jihadists] the trouble of going after them worldwide.” Meanwhile, UC Irvine&#8217;s <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7382">Muslim Student Union</a> promoted its own “Israeli Apartheid Week” festivities by featuring, as <a href="http://www.msuuci.com/?p=2098%20">guest speakers</a>, such luminaries as <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2204">Norman Finkelstein</a> (who asserts  that the Holocaust has been exaggerated and exploited by Jews to justify Israeli human-rights violations and crimes against humanity); <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2096">Hedy Epstein</a> (who contends that the only “lesson” Jews “learned from the Holocaust” was how to “become the persecutors” of vulnerable people like the Palestinians); <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2173">Hatem Bazian</a> (who, at an <a>American Muslim Alliance</a> conference promoting the creation of an Islamic State of Palestine, approvingly quoted a <a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hadith">hadith</a> calling on Muslims to “come and kill” the Jews); <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1599">Alison Weir</a> (who characterizes the Israeli-Arab conflict as nothing more complex than a battle between “the brutalizer and the brutalized”); and <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2102">Amir Abdel Malik-Ali</a> (an open supporter of <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6204">Hamas</a> and Hezbollah who has warned that he and his fellow Muslims “will fight” the Jews “until we are either martyred or until we are victorious”). (Note: the Alison Weir referred to here is not to be confused with the British historian and author <a href="http://alisonweir.org.uk/">Alison Weir</a>)</p>
<p>Such are the worldviews and sentiments of the leading lights in today&#8217;s “Divest from Israel” movement. By no means, however, is it surprising that Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu would support such bellicose rhetoric, given his own long history of condemning and smearing Israel and the Jews. Noting that divestment campaigns helped bring about the end of apartheid in South Africa, a development he calls “one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century,” Tutu is delighted that a “similar movement” now aims to put “an end to the Israeli occupation” in the Middle East. Notably, Tutu makes no call for divestment from any other Middle Eastern nation &#8211; though the political oppression, human rights abuses, and barbaric atrocities characterizing life throughout much of that region dwarf anything that the Palestinians have ever suffered in Israel, to which Tutu refers as America’s “client state.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/apr/29/comment%20">Tutu informs us</a> that his heart breaks whenever he sees “the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks,” and he explains that their evident “suffering” evokes memories of what South African blacks once experienced “when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.” Asserting that “Israel is like Hitler and apartheid,” Tutu has urged Americans to oppose Israeli “injustices” as fervently as they once opposed Nazism and South Africa’s system of racial separation. Putting his contempt for the Jewish state in still fuller context, he once said: “The [South African] apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, <a>Stalin</a>, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.”</p>
<p>In an October 2007 <a href="http://www.zoa.org/sitedocuments/pressrelease_view.asp?pressreleaseID=208%20">op-ed piece</a>, Tutu lamented that because of unnecessarily restrictive Israeli policies, the Palestinian people “cannot move freely from one place to another”; that “a wall separates them from their families and from their incomes”; and that “they are arbitrarily demeaned at checkpoints and unnecessarily beleaguered by capricious applications of bureaucratic red tape.” These things, said Tutu, were reminiscent of “the yoke of oppression that was once our burden in South Africa.” Absent from his lamentations was any recognition that Israel&#8217;s checkpoints and security barrier had been established in direct response to the Palestinians&#8217; relentless campaign of genocidal terrorism. Instead, Tutu reminded his readers that “God’s dream begins with this mutual recognition – we are not strangers, we are kin.” But there again, he had nothing to say about the wholesale rejection of so-called “kinship” by Hamas, the terrorist group whose <a href="http://www.mideastweb.org/hamas.htm">founding charter</a> explicitly calls <em>jihad </em>“an individual duty [that is] binding on every Muslim man and woman,” while it condemns “the Nazism of the Jews” and calls for their extermination.</p>
<p>Tutu&#8217;s morally inverted worldview is not confined solely to matters involving Israel. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, for instance, he described America&#8217;s retaliatory military campaign (against the Taliban and <a>al-Qaeda</a>) as an “utterly reprehensible” exercise in “vengeance” rather than justice. He explained that the hijackers had been “willing to pilot a plane and go to their deaths” because they were making a desperate plea for relief from the “poverty, hunger, and disease” that plagued the people of their homelands. Condemning America&#8217;s greed and self-absorption, Tutu suggested that “a minute fraction of [U.S.] defense budgets would ensure that God’s children everywhere would have clean water, enough to eat, a decent home, a proper education, and accessible and affordable health care.” The terrorists, in other words, were trying to strike a blow for charity and social justice, not Islamic <em>jihad</em>.</p>
<p>While Tutu has been relentless in ridiculing Israel and the United States, he has been far more forgiving of Winnie Mandela, South Africa&#8217;s so-called “Mother of the Nation,” whom the former archbishop professes to love “very deeply.” Prominent in the Soviet-sponsored African National Congress (ANC), which was closely aligned with the South African Communist Party, Mrs. Mandela used her notorious bodyguards in a protracted reign of terror, torture, and murder during the 1980s. The ANC committed innumerable atrocities in the name of liberation, prompting a 1988 Pentagon Report to list it as one of the world&#8217;s “more notorious terrorist groups.” Many ANC victims were physically pummeled and brutalized to death – some of them on the direct orders of Mrs. Mandela. Among the ANC’s preferred methods of torturing suspected political opponents was “necklacing” – a barbaric practice where automobile tires were tied around the necks of victims, filled with gasoline and lit on fire. It is estimated that some 1,000 people were set ablaze in this manner. “With tires and matches we will liberate this country,” crowed the celebrated “Mother” of Tutu&#8217;s nation.</p>
<p>To recap: Desmond Tutu “loves” Winnie Mandela “deeply”; he blames the United States for provoking the 9/11 attacks; and he supports worldwide divestment from a purportedly “Nazi”-like nation that gives its Arab citizens more rights and freedoms than they would be able to enjoy anywhere in the Arab world. These views prove conclusively that honorific titles and prestigious awards do not necessarily correlate with sound moral judgment in their recipients.</p>
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		<title>Treason of the Academics</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/isi-leibler/treason-of-the-academics/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=treason-of-the-academics</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 19 May 2010 04:01:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Isi Leibler]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academic Freedom]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Marc Tanenbaum]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=60597</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Degenerate Israeli professors on the rampage.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/academic.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-60599" title="academic" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/academic.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="375" /></a><strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>This article is reprinted from <a href="http://wordfromjerusalem.com/">WordFromJerusalem.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p>In the politically correct world of infantile leftism, words like sedition and disloyalty have effectively been erased from the political lexicon. Indeed, those daring to employ such terms are automatically smeared as “McCarthyite” or fascist.</p>
<p>But despite Israel being surrounded by Moslem nations whose primary objective is to eliminate Jewish sovereignty from the region, a growing minority of Israeli academics, funded by Israeli taxpayers and Diaspora Zionist philanthropists, exploit their universities as launching pads to undermine and delegitimize their own country. Some even promote global boycott, divestment and sanctions of the very institutions which provide their salaries. They teach their students that the state in which they live was born in sin, that Israelis behave like Nazis and morally justify the campaigns by our enemies to demonize and delegitimize us.</p>
<p>What magnifies this obscenity is that university administrators feel obliged to maintain the continued tenure of such immoral and anti-social degenerates on the grounds of academic freedom. Can one conceivably visualize any other institution providing salaries to employees actively working towards its destruction?</p>
<p>The issue came to a head at the recent meeting of the Board of Governors of Tel Aviv University when Marc Tanenbaum, a long-standing American donor and supporter, submitted a resolution calling on the University Senate to review conditions governing the status of academics indulging in “inappropriate behavior” such as promoting academic boycotts of Israeli universities, and recommending that academics be prohibited from listing their affiliation or academic titles whilst engaged in domestic or international forums of a political nature.</p>
<p>The president, Professor Joseph Klaffter, intervened. Grasping the microphone from Tannenbaum, he railed against the resolution and proclaimed that under his watch such a resolution would never be carried and demanded that it be withdrawn. When the initiators called for a vote, he refused to submit the resolution and adjourned the meeting &#8211; ironically, on the spurious grounds of academic freedom. Tannenbaum resigned and pledged to mount a campaign to highlight the undemocratic manner in which the university authorities were protecting those who were actively undermining the university and the State.</p>
<p>Regrettably, the TAU scenario represents a microcosm of how the loony left have imposed a regime of madness in this country. It is noteworthy that Anat Kam, who exulted in stealing classified IDF military information in the name of freedom of expression and attempted to present herself as a heroic figure, was educated at TAU, in a  philosophy department in which professors called for a global boycott against Israel.</p>
<p>Examples of unacceptable behavior abound: the Chair of the Philosophy Department, Professor Anat Biletzki, is a close supporter of Asmi Bishari ,the Arab MK calling for the dismantling of Israel; Biletzki also gathered signatures for a high school student petition justifying  the right to refuse to serve in the army; Anat Matar, another lecturer at the philosophy department, initiated an (unsuccessful) campaign to deny the right of Col. Pnina Sharvit-Baruch, who headed the international IDF law division during the Gaza war, to lecture at its law school on the grounds that she would “justify the killing of civilians, including hundreds of children”; the Law School convened a conference on the subject of the alleged mistreatment of “political prisoners” at which one of the principal speakers was a former terrorist who had been sentenced to 27 years for throwing a bomb at Jews on a bus; Professor Adi Ophir campaigned to lobby   embassies in Tel Aviv to impose sanctions against Israel to prevent atrocities in Gaza; TAU academics were prominent signatories in a petition backing the US Berkeley  boycott against Israel; two professors, Anat Matar (who earlier participated in a London conference promoting a general and academic boycott of Israel) and Rachel Giora recently signed a petition denouncing The Boston Museum of Art for sponsoring an exhibit of Israeli medical and high tech achievements; etc etc.</p>
<p>Freedom of expression is a treasured feature of democracy but the dividing line must be drawn between academic freedom and breaching the law or indulging in subversive activity. Some liberals like Alan Dershowitz believe that students have “the right not to be propagandized by the classroom by teachers who seek to impose their ideology” and oppose the exploitation of universities by academics as anti-Israeli launching pads, but still insist that lecturers should never be limited even if they promote false narratives which poison the minds of the students and encourage them to hate their own country. Dershowitz believes that the danger of limiting such activity exceeds the damage that can be inflicted and is confident that ultimately truth will prevail.</p>
<p>But that does not justify those who delegitimize and demonize their country being provided tenure of employment. Setting aside the fact that in most societies under siege such behavior would be defined as subversive, I question whether for example such an approach would apply to an academic telling his students that Arabs are racially inferior or that Hitler’s genocidal policies were justified. Or for that matter would academics insisting that the world is flat still be assured tenure in the name of academic freedom? I vouch that such people would soon be out of their jobs and justifiably so.</p>
<p>But in this crazy environment it is only the mad left which claims to be victimized when their unconscionable behavior is exposed. For example, in a petition signed by over 80 TAU faculty members, Alan Dershowitz was denounced for indulging in “incitement” for having described as “hypocritical Stalinists”, academics like Rachel Giora and Anat Matar who support boycotts of Israel. Professor Hannah Wirth-Nesher went so far as to accuse Dershowitz of seeking to impose Teheran standards on Tel Aviv. Hebrew University Professor Shlomo Avineri observed that “the attempt to ‘protect’ those who belong to the left whilst employing McCarthy like methods against those associated with the right is nothing but hypocrisy, which has no place in academia”.</p>
<p>Regrettably the State has failed to act in this area because it has become intimidated by the term academic freedom. Likewise out of fear of being labeled McCarthyites or fascists, the Knesset has also been loath to do anything.</p>
<p>I have no doubt that opinion polls would confirm that the overwhelming majority of Israelis would vehemently agree that there are red lines beyond which academic freedom should not be permitted to justify antisocial or subversive behavior such as calling for the boycott of the state.</p>
<p>Universities are the incubators in which future leaders of society are nurtured. It is surely elementary common sense to ensure that such institutions lead the way for constructive participation in civil life. Academics should not be above the law or permitted to engage in anti-social activities on the grounds of academic freedom.</p>
<p>It is a disgrace that we have reached such a deplorable state of affairs under successive governments. Such activities would never have been tolerated under the social democratic Mapai hegemony and I have no doubt that our founding Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, a genuine Labor Zionist, would have turned the country upside down to bring an end to such outrageous behavior.</p>
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		<title>A Judeo-Muslim Civilization?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/rima-greene/a-judeo-muslim-civilization/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-judeo-muslim-civilization</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 14 May 2010 04:03:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rima Greene]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A UC Berkeley conference reimagines Muslim-Jewish relations -- and fails. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/here.jpg.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-60231" title="here.jpg" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/here.jpg.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="274" /></a></p>
<p>A conference at the University of California, Berkeley, on April 28-29, 2010 (and continued <a href="http://dhi.ucdavis.edu/?p=3398">at UC Davis</a> on April 30), “<a href="http://events.berkeley.edu/?event_ID=25980">Muslims and Jews Together: Seeing From Without; Seeing From Within</a>,” was billed as a major international symposium for “the inauguration of the Program for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relations at UC Berkeley and the establishment of a UC-wide and West Coast working group for the study of Muslim-Jewish relations .”</p>
<p>The conference was a collaborative effort between the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at UC Berkeley and the Jewish Studies Program at UC Davis. Its stated purpose was to use the frameworks of traditional Middle  East studies and Jewish studies to develop a new academic field focused on the historical interaction between Muslims and the Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews who once lived among them. Most of the participants were historians or anthropologists specializing in North African Jewry, particularly Morocco.</p>
<p>CMES chair Nezar AlSayyad introduced the conference with a discussion about “building bridges” by re-framing the term, “Jews of Islam,” into something that could be equated with Judeo-Christian civilization: something he called “Judeo-Muslim civilization.” CMES vice-chair and conference organizer Emily Gottreich echoed AlSayyed’s comments in her introduction to the first panel, describing the “Jews of Islam” as “an awkward and unfortunate” construction and seconding the notion of “Judeo-Muslim civilization.”</p>
<p>The emphasis throughout this first panel, which was titled “Framing,” was on synthesis, symbiosis, and challenging “the dichotomy.”  How does one teach about Jews in a Muslim country and teach about Muslims in a Jewish country? The first part of the question, however, cannot be answered, because very few Jews remain in the same Muslim countries where, prior to 1948, there were large, ancient communities. The reason for this exodus—the forced removal of Jews in response to Israel’s founding that year—went unexamined by panelists.</p>
<p>Oren Kosansky, an anthropology professor at Lewis   &amp; Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and the first speaker on this panel, brought up the concept of the <em>dhimmi</em>: the historical subservient, second class citizenship of Jews and other minorities in Muslim lands. Although <em>dhimmi</em> legal status entailed a whole series of humiliations and penalties for Arab Jews, Kosansky did not elaborate on the details. He claimed that the research on <em>dhimmi</em> status was “overstated” and that an “overly dyadic picture has been drawn, and relationships in daily life have been under-emphasized.” Religious identity was not the only identity, he continued, as there was also economic, gender, regional, and class identities. In what seemed to me a Western-centric omission, he left out clan or tribal identity. Kosansky then claimed that the “emergence of Zionism exaggerated the differences” between Moroccan Jews and Muslims. In fact, the function of Zionism was to rescue these Jews from intolerable environments.</p>
<p>During the discussion period for this panel, Lital Levy, assistant professor of comparative literature at Princeton  University and a panelist at the UC Davis “Muslim-Jewish” conference, contradicted Kosansky. She disagreed that Zionism had resulted in an exaggeration of differences, and she pointed out that Jews who had converted to Islam were still considered Jews. It was, she maintained, an identity, a specificity that stuck to the individual in the Middle  East over many centuries. She asked for a comment, but none of the panelists were willing to respond.</p>
<p>Daniel Tsadik, an assistant professor of Sephardic and Iranian Studies at Yeshiva  University in New   York and a visiting assistant professor at the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism, spoke next on the first panel. He claimed that the emphasis on religion blurs other, more significant, factors, and said he wished scholars would focus more on the reality of Jews and Muslims living together in a given place and as members of one society, rather than as majorities or minorities.</p>
<p>Tsadik questioned whether the framework of “Jews in Muslim lands” focuses on a true common denominator. He lamented the alleged political agenda of Jewish scholars attempting to “know the enemy,” as well as the dependence on written texts, which, he worried, could create unbalanced data. As an example, he brought up the edicts of the Iranian <em>ulema</em> (Muslim legal scholars), which record all the <em>fatwas</em> against Jews, thereby providing written evidence of a bleak fate. However, this “bleak fate” isn’t too far from the truth.</p>
<p>The major theme the following morning at the second panel, “Problematizing,” was to get beyond the Arab-Israeli conflict, or what participants described simply as “the Conflict.” Almost uniformly, speakers reiterated that “the Conflict” was not the eternal metaphor or model for the 1,400 year history of Muslim-Jewish relations; rather, it was a distorting mirror.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, there were plenty of distortions of “the Conflict” on this panel. Joel Beinin, Stanford  University history professor and <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/1472">well-known</a> <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/7478">anti-Zionist</a>, claimed that Iraqi Jews fled to Israel in 1950-51 due to “collusion between the Israeli state and the Iraqi government of the time.” He offered no explanation or historical record of this alleged “collusion.”</p>
<p>It should be noted that Beinin was one of the signatories to a statement from California faculty members (posted <a href="http://usacbi.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/statement-from-california-faculty-members-in-support-of-sb118/">at the website</a> for the “U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel”) urging the UC Berkeley student senate to vote “yes” on a divestment bill. Fellow signatory, UC Berkeley Jewish studies professor Daniel Boyarin, chaired the second panel.</p>
<p>Matthias Lehmann, associate professor of history and Jewish studies at Indiana University, lamented that the conflict is always perceived as religious when it’s actually—according to his view and that espoused regularly by anti-Israel propagandists—between two nationalisms. To consider it a religious conflict, he continued, is “anachronistic, ahistorical, and irrelevant.” He said nothing about the role of radical Islam in furthering strife. Extending this theme, Sami Shalom Chetrit, a <a href="http://www.meforum.org/707/post-zionism-and-the-sephardi-question">Mizrahi professor</a> at Hebrew University who recited his poetry at the conference, said that calling it a religious conflict was “the big tragedy.”</p>
<p>During the roundtable portion of the second panel, Lehmann did question the lack of commentary—in a discussion by UC Irvine history professor Marc Baer on Jewish to Muslim conversions that conveniently left out the concept of <em>dhimmi</em>— on power differentials. Panel chair Daniel Boyarin softly interjected that power differentials depended upon whether the location was “<em>Dar al-Harb</em>” (house of war) or “<em>Dar al-Islam</em>” (house of Islam), to which the audience laughed knowingly. No one pointed out that <em>Dar al-Harb</em> and <em>Dar al-Islam</em> are religious concepts that just might relate to the supposedly non-religious conflict.</p>
<p>Considering the downplaying of such important concepts, one has to wonder if future students in the Program for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relations will be able to ask questions pertaining to apostasy, infidels, honor killings, Jews as “apes and pigs,” or global jihad?  In addition, will the program offer an equal number of scholars to represent both Jews and Muslims?</p>
<p>The makeup of the conference certainly did not inspire confidence. The brochure stated that “scholars of Middle Eastern Studies have returned—after a long hiatus—to re-discover the importance of non-Muslims within Muslim societies,” leading one to expect an inter-faith dialog. Yet, the panels consisted mostly of Jewish academics—a pattern that predominates at Muslim-Jewish inter-faith conferences.</p>
<p>During the reception, I pointed this out to Susan Miller, UC Davis history professor and one of the conference organizers,  and she replied that it was “not an inter-faith conference, but an academic conference, and that is who is here. It is irrelevant who they are; what matters is what they say.” In other words, she skirted the issue.</p>
<p>There was only one Muslim panelist on the two panels I attended: Mohammed Kenbib, a specialist in Moroccan Jewish history at Mohammed  V University in Rabat, Morocco. At the reception I raised this omission to him directly by stating that “there should be more Muslims here.” To my surprise, he responded by leaning towards me and lightly kissing me on the forehead. “This is quite a warm, fuzzy event,” I said, smiling. His response was profound: “We are very far from the Middle  East here.”</p>
<p>Indeed, and so too is the Program for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relations.</p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p><strong><em>Rima Greene wrote this article for </em><a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/">Campus Watch</a><em>, a project of the </em><a href="http://www.meforum.org/">Middle East Forum</a><em>.</em></strong></p>
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		<title>Poor Michael Lerner’s Petunias</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/steven-plaut/poor-michael-lerner%e2%80%99s-petunias/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=poor-michael-lerner%25e2%2580%2599s-petunias</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 07 May 2010 04:02:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Steven Plaut]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The leftist "Rabbi" whines about being the victim of “Rightwing Zionist violence.”]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Michael-Lerner.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-59735" title="Michael-Lerner" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Michael-Lerner.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="396" /></a></p>
<p>Michael Lerner’s home vandalized!</p>
<p>Lerner’s own organization’s website has the scare headline:  “<a title="Permanent Link to A Right-Wing Zionist Threat: Vandals Strike Tikkun Editor’s Home" href="http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2010/05/03/right-wing-zionist-threat/">A Right-Wing Zionist Threat: Vandals Strike Tikkun Editor’s Home</a>.” Leftist bloggers have been even less restrained.  The Zionists are violent thugs and hoodlums, <a href="http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/05/04/judeofascists-attack-home-of-progressive-rabbi-michael-lerner">Judeofascists, vandalizing</a> the home of <em>Tikkun’</em>s editor and and threatening him.  The “attack” on Lerner’s house in the upscale Berkeley Hills was a direct consequence of criticism from Alan Dershowitz&#8211;more proof that foolishly allowing non-leftists to exercise freedom of speech results in violence and hooliganism!</p>
<p>So just what exactly happened?</p>
<p>Lerner, a leading collaborator in leftists’ wars against the Jews, is anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian.  He calls himself “Rabbi,” although he never graduated from any rabbinic seminary and has no rabbinic ordination recognized by any branch of Judiasm. His <em>Tikkun Magazine</em>, publishes every Jewish anti-Israel crackpot and crank on the planet and many a non-Jewish anti-Semite.  In recent weeks, Lerner made the news for organizing a petition of anti-Israel leftists to <a href="http://www.daylife.com/topic/Michael_Lerner">support Judge Richard Goldstone</a> and even offered to grant him an award.  Goldstone had headed the UN commission that smeared Israel for “war crimes” when it was forced to go to war against Hamas to stop its rocket attacks.  Since issuing his libelous report, Goldstone has been shunned by the Jewish communities all over the world, including in his own native South Africa, where some members of a synagogue where Goldstone’s grandson was having a Bar Mitzvah declared him persona non grata.</p>
<p>At that point, <a href="http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/dershowitz/entry/it_is_goldstone_who_is">Prof. Alan Dershowitz, who considers Goldstone an anti Semite, denounced</a> Lerner for his <a href="http://mondoweiss.net/2010/04/rabbinic-letter-to-goldstone-your-report-is-a-clarion-call-to-israel-and-the-jewish-people-to-awaken-from-the-slumber-of-denial-and-return-to-the-path-of-peace.html">toadying to the jurist and</a> denounced the petition circulated by Lerner as coming from “Rabbis for Hamas”:</p>
<blockquote><p>“They have no shame and no credibility. They exploit their rabbinical status to support any conclusion that undercuts self defense Israeli actions without regard to the evidence and without regard to the truth.  Not surprisingly, the worst of these rabbis (and that&#8217;s saying a lot), Michael Lerner, after attempting to politicize the bar mitzvah by offering his anti-Israel synagogue for the event, has decided to honor Richard Goldstone with <em>Tikkun Magazine</em>&#8216;s ‘Ethics Award.’ I guess all it takes to be honored by <em>Tikkun</em> is to pass Lerner&#8217;s litmus test of lying about Israel. That&#8217;s Lerner&#8217;s definition of ‘ethics.’”</p></blockquote>
<p>A few days ago, some anonymous people, evidently Jewish students at the University  of California at Berkeley, paid a visit to Lerner’s home up in Berkeley Hills.  (Just how Lerner came up with the cash to live with the capitalist class in one of the ritziest locations in the Bay Area is something about which his magazine readers might be wondering.)  The visitors taped up four stickers or leaflets around his home   Here is <a href="http://www.tikkun.org/article.php?story=vandalism">the Tikkun version</a> of the story:</p>
<blockquote><p>“They posted a printed bumper sticker saying ‘fight terror &#8212; support Israel’&#8221; next to a caricature of Judge Goldstone whose UN report on Israel&#8217;s human rights violations in its attack on Gaza last year has been denounced as anti-Semitic and pro-terror by right wingers in Israel and the U.S.  The caricature has Goldstone talking about his being kept from his grandson&#8217;s bar mitzvah, and the caricature of Rabbi Lerner responds by saying ‘any enemy of Israel is a friend of mine.’”</p></blockquote>
<p>Lerner of course called in the cops.  You know &#8211; those civil servants whom he used to refer to as The Pigs when he was a leader of the Seattle Liberation Front (SLF), a 60s group which participated in numerous violent anti-war protests and riots along side the Black Student Union (BSU) and the ultra-violent  <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6808">Weatherman</a> terror group.  When the cops arrived they found a victimless non crime.  The leaflet hangers did not assault Lerner, and in fact never met or spoke with him.  They did  not so much as trample on the petunias in his yard.</p>
<p>But Lerner and his supporters are having trouble containing their rage.  The perps of the leaflet hangings are Zionist terrorists, thugs, vandals!  Some political observers in the Bay Area are expressing skepticism.  At least two local pro-Israel activists told me they suspect Lerner himself put up the leaflets in order to play martyr and get himself publicity.  Lerner has a track history of what might be called strategic misrepresentation when it comes to getting himself attention.  A few years back <a href="http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/5319/">he got caught inventing pseudonymous imaginary letters</a> to the editor printed in Tikkun Magazine agreeing with Lerner’s own writings there. (One wag claimed he should have signed them Ichael-May Erner-Lay.)</p>
<p>Lerner’s whining about being the victim of “Rightwing Zionist violence” is also a bit beyond hilarious.  Lerner himself has a long track record of organizing and participating in violence.  While he was in Seattle, Washington state attorney (and later Senator) Slade Gorton <a href="http://www.conservativetruth.org/opinionet/archives2/ccsp/2002/ccsp52.htm">described</a> the tactics of Lerner’s Liberation Front as “totally indistinguishable from fascism and Nazism.”   Lerner himself was one of the so-called “Seattle Seven,” charged in a federal trial with “conspiracy to incite a riot.”  He spent several months in prison.</p>
<p>In those days <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=632">Lerner’s two passions</a>, by his own admission, were LSD and Marxism.  Later he moved more into goofy pseudo-Jewish liberation theology and hatred of Israel.  He considers the rebirth of international anti-Semitism to be the fault of the Jews themselves for being so cussedly evil and racist.</p>
<p>He launched the bizarre magazine he called <em>Tikku</em>n in 1986 and has devoted it to radical politics, bashing Israel, and denouncing America, along with a monthly dollop of New Age touchy-feely recreational &#8220;compassion&#8221; and peace posturing.</p>
<p>Around the same time that he launched his magazine Lerner started telling people that he was an Orthodox Rabbi.  In fact he is neither a Rabbi nor Orthodox.   He says he was “ordained” when three hippy “rabbis,” one of whom claims in fact to be a Buddhist, put their hands on his head and proclaimed him rabbi.  A few years back I emailed him an inquiry as to whether he would submit to a small quiz of his knowledge of the Bible and the Talmud; he indignantly refused.  He claims his rabbinic status is recognized because he is a member of the California Board of Rabbis.  But membership in the Board does not mean anyone has acknowledged one’s rabbinic credentials as <em>bona fide</em>; it just means one pays annual dues.</p>
<p>While insisting that all he wants is peace and justice in the Middle East, Lerner&#8217;s prescription for achieving this is essentially the same as that of the Hamas.  He demands that Israel return to its 1949 borders, forego all forms of self-defense, and allow itself to be drowned by an influx of  Palestinian “refugees.”  Lerner has never seen an act of Arab terrorism that he does not rationalize, nor an act of Jewish self-defense he is willing to justify.  Lerner <a href="http://www.beyttikkun.org/article.php/20090929072148570">recently hosted Alice Walker</a> on Yom Kippur, who devoted her talk to denouncing Israel for raping Arab women.</p>
<p>Besides Israel bashing, Lerner may be best known for sharing his “politics of meaning” (his nonsense term for disguising leftist politics under a thin veneer of theology) with a credulous Hillary Clinton when she was First Lady.  After 9-11 he demanded that Americans “feel the pain” of the al-Qaeda terrorists.  While claiming to be a rabbi <a href="http://www.wernercohn.com/Resources/Reflections%20on%20Apostasy.pdf">he has also issued calls</a> to “Smash the Synagogue.”   When Professor Edward Alexander from the University of Washington wrote an expose of Lerner, the latter sent threatening letters to numerous Jewish newspapers and magazines, warning they would be sued by him if they printed the piece.  Professor Alexander has described Lerner as &#8220;a kipah (skullcap)-wearing, rotund beard-plucker of vaguely &#8216;rabbinic&#8217; appearance who could always be relied on to blame Israel and not the Arabs for the absence of peace, and to liken Israeli defense against Palestinian Arab violence to medieval Christian mobs . . . organizing pogroms against the whole Jewish community.&#8221;</p>
<p>A few years back Lerner demanded that all Jews devote their traditional Passover Seder to bemoaning the oppression of the Palestinians by the Zionist &#8220;Pharaoh.&#8221;  The same Palestinians used the occasion that year to murder 29 people at a Seder in Netanya,  Israel.   He has long supported sanctions and boycotts against Israel to force it to capitulate to the Arabs.  He considers Arab terrorists to be the &#8220;New Maccabis,&#8221; and his writings are routinely carried by the publications and distribution lists of Islamic fundamentalists &#8211; the sorts of people who support car bombs in Times  Square.</p>
<p>This is the man victimized by the merciless violent “terrorist vandalism attack” by Rightwing Zionist thugs against his home in Berkeley that spared even his petunias.</p>
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		<title>Surviving the Sixties (Not)</title>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 31 Mar 2010 04:09:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Who tells the truth about the '60s? Gitlin and Judt or Collier and Horowitz?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/ayers_dohrn.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-56709" title="ayers_dohrn" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/ayers_dohrn.jpg" alt="" width="376" height="354" /></a></p>
<p>In 1695, the Puritan divine Timothy Cruso, after whom Defoe may have titled his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Surprising-Adventures-Robinson-Crusoe-Mariner/dp/1434622894/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268581986&amp;sr=1-5">famous novel</a>, <a href="http://www.librarything.com/work/5633298">wrote</a>: “The days wherein we live are extremely evil, but we have yet a sad and doleful prospect of the next age becoming worse…We see such crowds and swarms of young ones continually posting down to hell, and bringing up so much of hell in the midst of us…we cannot but use some Christian endeavors to open the eyes of these <em>mad prodigals</em>, and to fetch them home.”</p>
<p>Christian endeavors aside, such fears and imprecations are fashionable in every age and testify as much to the unavoidable incompatibility of the generations as to the progressive regression of history. Nevertheless, I sometimes wonder if a time does not eventually come in which the apocalyptic cliché manifests as ineluctable fact, in which the fears of troubled parents are ultimately realized in their refractory offspring.</p>
<p>This was certainly how it was during the student revolution of the 1960s, when university campuses were turned into raucous boot camps for a new generation of political radicals, utopian socialists and psychedelic epicureans—an incoherent “rainbow coalition” that did some good (the Civil Rights Movement) and much harm (rampant drug addiction, anarchic turmoil and rioting, neo-Marxist blueprints for a “better world.”) This sense of entitlement ballooned into the intrusive policies of the welfare state.</p>
<p>Some observers feel that the ideological residue of these “mad prodigals” was on the whole beneficial. Morris Dickstein, for instance, in a beautifully written memoir, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gates-Eden-American-Culture-Sixties/dp/0674341554/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268600251&amp;sr=1-1">Gates of Eden</a></em>, feels that “the culture of the sixties had a liberating effect on many of our lives.” True, he cautions that “while we need to remain free, we don’t need to be perpetually liberated,” but, in the final analysis,  concludes that “Utopian hopes may be disappointed but can rarely be forgotten.” Todd Gitlin goes even further in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sixties-Years-Hope-Days-Rage/dp/0553372122/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268668934&amp;sr=1-1">The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage</a></em>, which is not nearly as temperate as Dickstein’s book. The late Canadian historian and broadcaster Pierre Berton, in his <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/1967-Canadas-Turning-Pierre-Berton/dp/0770427766/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268914989&amp;sr=1-2">1967: A Chronicle of Canada’s Centennial Year</a></em>, comments that we “were all high in 1967, like somebody who had just won the lottery,” and asks rhetorically, “Without that great adventure, what kind of people would we be now?”<em> </em></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>Peter Collier and David Horowitz, however, are not so sanguine. In<em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Destructive-Generation-Second-Thoughts-Sixties/dp/1594030820/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268600363&amp;sr=1-1">Destructive Generation</a></em>,<em> </em>they meticulously chart the disruptive legacy of the period. The generation of the Sixties are now in their sixties. They no longer live in communes but occupy positions of influence in the media, the universities and government, instructing their epigones to continue the struggle to consolidate a political religion built on the “luminous” precepts of equality, fraternity and “social justice.” This is the platform of the New Left, which has issued in the disorder of multicultural relativity in which we are now immersed, the malign dogma of political correctness, the globalizing of resentment, the “unholy alliance” with Islamic extremism, and the postmodern dismantling of the concept of discoverable truth.</p>
<p>It also engendered a social activism that has infiltrated the judiciary, sponsored the uninformed and sanctimonious meddling of the swarming NGOs and polluted the writing of history, transforming it, à la Howard Zinn, William Blum and Noam Chomsky, into a species of disinformation and overt propaganda. <em>Destructive Generation</em> reminds us of “the ability of the Left to wage a culture war after its international commitments [i.e., its advocacy for Communism] had been revealed to be bankrupt. The Sixties created the victim groups that now tear at the fabric of the American enterprise.”</p>
<p>These strictures and insights resonate with me. I was at UC Berkeley at around the same time as Horowitz, participated in the student takeover of Sproul Hall, and fellow-traveled with the leaders of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement">Free Speech Movement</a>. We reveled in our self-proclaimed status as rebels with a cause, who would remake America and the West in our own bearded image. Of course, not everyone in the revolutionary cadres was <em>politically</em> committed to the dismemberment of society as we knew it. Many came along for the jubilant sex, the acid trips and the music, as did the Woodstock hordes and the plankton-like, free-floating hippies who were content to “let it all hang out.” Visiting Belgrade in the late Sixties, I recall keeping company with a group of young Serbian drop-outs, one of whom spent hours every day listening to British shortwave and taping Beatles and Rolling Stone songs. When I asked him about the political situation in Yugoslavia and his sentiments regarding Marshal Tito, he replied, “Politics is for old men.” But back in Berkeley, and especially in <a href="http://www.marxists.org/history/france/may-1968/">Paris in May 1968</a>, this was definitely not the case.</p>
<p>For, apart from the hangers-on and hangers-out, we saw ourselves as the new <a href="http://www.exlibris.org/nonconform/engdis/fifthmonarchists.html">Fifth Monarchy Men</a>, a <a href="http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/new_model_army.htm">New Model Army</a> of youthful saints marching toward the dawning millennium, chasing our quixotic dream that conflict, hatred, inequality and injustice could be abolished once and for all and replaced by an idyllic world in which the economy would be regulated by an enlightened class of sages and benefactors, poverty would cease to exist, racial prejudice and social disparities would be a thing of the benighted past, everyone over thirty would be put out to pasture, and we would all make love, not war.</p>
<p>Greil Marcus in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lipstick-Traces-History-Twentieth-Century/dp/0674535812/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268600188&amp;sr=1-1">Lipstick Traces: A Secret history of the Twentieth Century</a></em> remembers those days fondly. “In the fall of 1964, in Berkeley,” he writes, “I was, day after day, for months, part of the crowd that made up the Free Speech Movement…It was a period of doubt, chaos, anger, hesitation, confusion, and finally joy—that’s the word…This event formed a standard against which I’ve judged the present and the past ever since.” Facing the disappointment of a movement fragmenting into dead ends, into “situations without a future” (a quote from French philosopher Guy Debord), Marcus subsequently found an anticlimactic reminiscence and justification of “this public life in punk,” in Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols. What a comedown! More importantly, I believe Marcus was wrong in his premature obsequies. As Collier and Horowitz attest, the future of the 1960s is all around us in the present of the 2000s.</p>
<p>The “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Confederacy-Dunces-John-Kennedy-Toole/dp/0802130208/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268673365&amp;sr=1-1">confederacy of dunces</a>” that we were did incalculable damage to that future. A patchwork collection of Marxists, socialists, Ayers-type guerillas, professional demonstrators, street warriors, Black Panthers and Pantherettes, erotic hedonists, druggies, neo-Rosicrucians, pseudo-<a href="http://www.maharishi.org/">Maharishis</a> and, to make a very long story short, utter narcissists, gave us the inchoate and largely brain-dead Western world we now call home. The belief in the redistribution of income and the leveling of hierarchical structures of rank and privilege energized us in the Berkeley and Paris days. At the same time, particularly among the politically engaged core, we embraced the conviction that society’s ills could be cured by the wise rule of a patrician caste of far-seeing legislators and philosopher-kings—namely, us. That these two axioms were in blatant contradiction with one another escaped our sagacity entirely. We were, as the French say, <em>mi-figue mi-raisin</em>, half fig half raisin. In effect, ideological blivets.</p>
<p>What were we reading then? Aside from the pap productions of the Beats—mainly Jack Kerouac’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Road-Penguin-Great-Books-Century/dp/0140283293/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268755423&amp;sr=1-1">On the Road</a></em> and Alan Ginsberg’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Other-Poems-Lights-Pocket-Poets/dp/0872860175/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268755199&amp;sr=1-1">Howl</a></em>, as well as Henry Miller’s printed wet dreams, J.D. Salinger’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Catcher-Rye-J-D-Salinger/dp/0316769177/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268755766&amp;sr=1-1">The Catcher in The Rye</a></em>, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/TIBETAN-Natural-Liberation-Through-Understanding/dp/0553370901/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268756516&amp;sr=1-1">The Tibetan Book of the Dead</a></em>, Carlos Castaneda’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Teachings-Don-Juan-Yaqui-Knowledge/dp/0520256387/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1269290629&amp;sr=1-1">The Teachings of Don Juan</a></em> and Timothy Leary’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Politics-Ecstasy-Leary-Timothy/dp/1579510310/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268755996&amp;sr=1-6">The Politics of Ecstasy</a></em>, all <em>de rigueur</em>—our hallowed texts were Plato’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Plato-Republic/dp/0872201368/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268746357&amp;sr=1-1">Republic</a></em> and <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Plato/dp/1605125296/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268746405&amp;sr=1-1">Laws</a></em>, Hegel’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_5?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&amp;field-keywords=hegel+phenomenology+of+spirit&amp;sprefix=hegel">Phenomenology of Spirit</a></em>, Marx and Engel’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/German-Ideology-including-Feuerbach-Philosophy/dp/1573922587/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268745407&amp;sr=1-1">The German Ideology</a></em> and <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Communist-Manifesto-Complete-Published-Prefaces/dp/1599869950/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268746285&amp;sr=1-1">The Communist Manifesto</a></em>, and, of course, our beloved guru Herbert Marcuse’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/One-Dimensional-Man-Ideology-Advanced-Industrial/dp/0807014176/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268745889&amp;sr=1-1">One-Dimensional Man</a></em> and his seminal essay “<a href="http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/65repressivetolerance.htm">Repressive Tolerance</a>.”</p>
<p>The more popular and less onerous bibliography inspired us during our vedic moments, of which there were many. From our revered philosophical ancestors, we drank the heady potion of social revolution, dialectical materialism and the imperative to restructure our world to consort with our political delusions, which, as I’ve suggested, were both pyramidical and egalitarian. From Marcuse, who taught at UC San Diego, we learned the value of epistemic subversion, which meant imposing a moratorium on conservative thought and instead teaching leftist and socialist doctrines to the exclusion of all others. The current Academy with its panoply of culturally destabilizing and intellectually frivolous “studies” programs is the lineal heir of that ostensibly “liberating” but patently oppressive ideology, as is the statist political establishment in most Western countries today.</p>
<p>The more serious curriculum we undertook obviously demanded a certain kind of specialized intelligence which did not prevent a certain kind of generalized stupidity from taking hold of our minds. Though in one sense we were all different from each other, at any rate in terms of the maquillage we sported, in another sense we were all the same, practicing what Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Leftism-Sade-Marx-Hitler-Marcuse/dp/0870001434/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268829801&amp;sr=1-5">Leftism: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse</a></em><strong> </strong>called “identitarian” politics, as we all moved massively to the Left. Tony Judt in his just-released <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ill-Fares-Land-Tony-Judt/dp/1594202761/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1269305234&amp;sr=1-1">Ill Fares the Land</a></em> gets it wrong, as he does most things, when he dismisses the collectivist impulse of the Sixties radicals, whom he believes were concerned only with their individual “needs and rights.” As I indicated above, one can be a narcissist and a communitarian at the same time without registering the contradiction. One elevates one’s sense of self-importance by identifying with the masses and speaking on their behalf while magnanimously assuming the burden of leadership. The real problem was that we understood Hegel and Marx—or at least thought we did—but had absolutely no comprehension of the empirical world and of how politics and economics actually work. We were blinded by our vision.</p>
<p>No less distressing, it was as if we had suffered what I’ve elsewhere called a <em>chronosectomy</em>, a temporal amputation, released from the concrete dynamic of history and oblivious of what had come before. We did not believe in the substance of past time, which we regarded as an undifferentiated fantasy or macabre nightmare from which we had suddenly awakened, but invested our faith in the flux of the present and the halcyon future that must inevitably emerge from it. The past was not something to pore over and profit from but to ignore or even expunge from the record, except insofar as it conformed to the theoretical armature of thesis-antithesis-synthesis we had imbibed from Hegel and Marx. In short, we were the generation that sprang from the forehead of Zeus, without parents, without an archive, befuddled by theory and living wholly in present time. We then proceeded to make a holy mess of things.</p>
<p>Some Sixtiers were lucky enough or smart enough to escape the great dumbing-down: Morris Dickstein, for example, for all his nostalgia, takes a measured look back, David Horowitz experienced an intellectual metamorphosis, as he recounts in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/dp/0684840057/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268674123&amp;sr=1-1">Radical Son</a></em>, and others have, early or belatedly, managed to pull themselves out of the mental quicksand that swallowed an entire generation and its descendants. The erstwhile “good” communist Milovan Djilas’ prerequisite book, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/New-Class-Analysis-Communist-Harvest/dp/015665489X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268748446&amp;sr=1-3">The New Class</a></em>, provided a much-needed corrective, showing how leftist thinking had created a realm of autocratic “managers” and powerful bureaucrats that led to the corruption and overthrow of democratic principles. At one point considered Tito’s successor, he was in a position to know. In the light of what is happening all around us at this very instant, Djilas’ book, for which he spent many years in prison, makes indispensable reading.</p>
<p>Though we are still capable of various exploits—technological innovation and expertise, administrative complexity, the circulation of grievances, the planning of agendas—the lamentable fact is that we have become a society of adroit manipulators locked inside an obsolete world-view, “posting down to hell, and bringing up so much of hell in the midst of us.” Barring a miracle, I see no satisfactory solution to the quandary we are in. Perhaps George Steiner is right when he <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bluebeards-Castle-Towards-Redefinition-Culture/dp/0300017103/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268599777&amp;sr=1-8">places his hope</a> in small, monastic flares of intellectual light dotted here and there across the cultural landscape, reviving Max Weber’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Weber-Political-Writings-Cambridge-History/dp/0521397197/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268599681&amp;sr=1-7">notion</a> of frail enclaves of enlightenment as the last resort of a civilization sinking into darkness. One thinks, too, no doubt a tad melodramatically, of Walter M. Miller Jr.’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Canticle-Leibowitz-Walter-Miller-Jr/dp/0060892994/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268601156&amp;sr=1-1">A Canticle for Leibowitz</a></em> with its obscure abbey in the Utah desert where historical knowledge is kept alive in a blighted world, even if it’s only a sacred shopping list. But is this a feasible scenario? For as Barry Lopez says in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Arctic-Dreams-Barry-Lopez/dp/0375727485/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268599638&amp;sr=1-1">Arctic Dreams</a></em>, “The good minds still do not find each other often enough.”</p>
<p>It may be necessary to start looking harder.</p>
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		<title>Defending Gitmo&#8217;s Lawyers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/defending-gitmos-lawyers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=defending-gitmos-lawyers</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Mar 2010 05:35:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The Left tries to squelch debate about the “Al-Qaeda Seven.”]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/87988721-920f-4334-85a4-22236adf8b0f.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54497" title="Guantanamo Protest" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/87988721-920f-4334-85a4-22236adf8b0f.jpg" alt="" width="512" height="327" /></a></p>
<p>Joe McCarthy lives, and his name is Liz Cheney. Such has been the overreaction of the Left, and much of the establishment media, to the now-famous “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIxg7LmlEQg">al-Qaeda seven</a>” internet ad aired by Keep America Safe, the political group which the former vice president’s daughter co-chairs.</p>
<p>Despite being denounced as a McCarthyite smear job, the ad’s content was relatively tame. It called on Attorney General <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2357">Eric Holder</a> to reveal the identities of seven of the nine Justice Department lawyers who represented or advocated for the Guantanamo Bay detainees while in private practice. (Holder already has named two of them.)</p>
<p>Just as notable – yet not nearly as noted – is what the ad did not say. At no point did it call for the DOJ attorneys to be fired for supplying legal counsel to terrorist detainees. In that respect, it was very different from the Left’s campaign to criminally prosecute attorneys in the Bush administration’s Justice Department who wrote memos justifying the use of harsh interrogation on Guantanamo detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6162">National Lawyer’s Guild</a>, the premier left-wing legal group, has even <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2008/04/09/nationals-lawyers-guild-calls-for-yoos-disbarment/">called</a> for one of those attorneys, John Yoo, to be disbarred, fired from his job as a professor at Berkeley law school, and tried as a war criminal. Nothing in the Keep America Safe ad even approaches that level of politically motivated sabotage.</p>
<p>That distinction has not deterred the ad’s left-wing critics from waxing indignant about the injustice supposedly done to the seven anonymous DOJ attorneys. For the Left, the DOJ lawyers who represented Guantanamo detainees follow in the proud American tradition of providing counsel to unpopular clients. Liberal columnist Eugene Robinson recently <a href="http://www.kansascity.com/2010/03/13/1810564/liz-cheneys-group-puts-politics.html#ixzz0iChzYFXO">scolded</a> that the lawyers targeted in the ad</p>
<blockquote><p>“…did what lawyers are supposed to do in this country: Ensure that even the most unpopular defendants have adequate legal representation and that the government obeys the law.”</p></blockquote>
<p>But that analogy is specious. Guantanamo’s al-Qaeda detainees aren’t unpopular criminals. They are enemy combatants and, as such, have no constitutional right to legal counsel – a legal tradition recognized by the Supreme Court since World War II. As Andrew McCarthy <a href="http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2010/03/opposing-view-no-right-to-counsel.html">points out</a>:</p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<blockquote><p>“The al-Qaeda detainees at issue are not accused defendants. They are plaintiffs filing offensive lawsuits (habeas corpus claims) against the American people during wartime. Unpopular American inmates must represent themselves in such suits because there is no right to counsel.”</p></blockquote>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>With the legal precedent decidedly not in their favor, the ad’s foes on the Left have resorted to shrill cries of “McCarthyism.” <em>Nation</em> contributor and long-time anti-Guantanamo activist David Cole recently raged that Liz Cheney “challenged the loyalty and patriotism” of the lawyers who had represented the Guantanamo detainees. Whether or not one agrees with that description, it’s peculiar that Cole should take issue with this approach. After all, left-wing activists have long claimed that Bush attorneys like John Yoo should be tried for “<a href="http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/38067#comment-222161">treason</a>” for supposedly singing off on “torture” – a passion for questioning patriotism that Cole, the author <em>The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable, </em>has done much to fuel.<em> </em></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>Even granting Cole’s premise that the ad questioned the patriotism of the DOJ lawyers, the logical response is: So what? Why should it be off-limits to question the motives of lawyers who volunteered their services to America’s terrorist enemies? Especially when those services could have jeopardized the war on terror – and endangered American soldiers – by securing the release of terrorist combatants?</p>
<p>In fairness, even some on the Right have objected to the ad’s implication that the DOJ lawyers harbored pro-terrorist sympathies. (&#8220;Whose values do they share?&#8221; the narration portentously asks.) That may have overstated the case, but the fact remains that while the Guantanamo lawyers are not themselves jihadists they have aided the jihadists’ cause. Some went further than others: As Debra Burlingame and Thomas Joscelyn detail in the <em><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704131404575117611125872740.html">Wall Street Journal</a></em><strong> </strong>today, lawyers for the detainees occasionally defined zealous representation to mean inciting the detainees; distributing anti-American propaganda; encouraging the detainees to claim they were abused and tortured; and even endangering Guantanamo’s guards by handing out a map of the detention camp’s layout, including the guard towers.</p>
<p>No one has suggested that the seven unnamed DOJ lawyers were involved in those cases or used those tactics. But then that was Keep America Safe’s point in its ad: to establish which of the Guantanamo lawyers is serving in the Justice Department and to determine what influence, if any, they may have over national security policy generally and Guantanamo Bay in particular.</p>
<p>That disclosure may be in the administration’s interest, and not only because Obama was elected on a promise of unparalleled transparency. Although the administration has largely maintained the Bush administration’s detention policies – from rendition and indefinite detention to military tribunals – it blundered badly when it proposed a civilian trial in New York for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. A bipartisan backlash seems to have convinced the administration to abandon that plan. It’s impossible to know if that move came on the advice of any of the Guantanamo lawyers. But if so, the scrutiny brought on by the ad the Left loves to hate may be the perfect opportunity to reshuffle the DOJ ranks in the interest of better legal counsel.</p>
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		<title>How the Campuses Helped Ruin California&#8217;s Economy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/john-ellis/how-the-campuses-helped-ruin-californias-economy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-the-campuses-helped-ruin-californias-economy</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Mar 2010 05:00:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Ellis]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Brain-dead demonstrations. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/demo.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54163" title="demo" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/demo.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="300" /></a></p>
<p><strong>[This article is reprinted from <a href="http://www.mindingthecampus.com">MindingtheCampus.com</a>.]</strong></p>
<p>All across the country there were demonstrations on March 4 by students (and some faculty) against cuts in higher education funding, but inevitably attention focused on California, where the modern genre originated in 1964. I joined the University of California faculty in 1966 and so have watched a good many of them, but have never seen one less impressive that this year&#8217;s. In 1964 there was focus and clarity. This one was brain-dead. The former idealism and sense of purpose had degenerated into a self-serving demand for more money at a time when both state and university are broke, and one in eight California workers is unemployed. The elite intellectuals of the university community might have been expected to offer us insight into how this problem arose, and realistic measures for dealing with it. But all that was on offer was this: get more money and give it to us. Californians witnessing this must have wondered whether the money they were already providing was well spent where there was so little evidence of productive thought.</p>
<p>The content vacuum with filled with the standby language of past demonstrations, and so there was much talk of &#8220;the struggle,&#8221; and of &#8220;oppression,&#8221; and&#8212;of course&#8212;of racism. &#8220;We are all students of color now&#8221; said Berkeley&#8217;s Professor Ananya Roy, and a student proclaimed that this crisis represented &#8220;structural racism.&#8221; (Why not global warming too?) Berkeley&#8217;s Chancellor Birgeneau called the demonstrations &#8220;the best of our tradition of effective civil action.&#8221; Neither Chancellors nor demonstrations are what they used to be. The nostalgia for the good old days surfaced again in efforts to shut the campus down by blocking the entrance of UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. It didn&#8217;t seem to occur to anyone that the old &#8220;shut it down&#8221; cry was somewhat misplaced when keeping it fully open was what the present demonstration was about, but then this was not an occasion when anyone seemed to have any idea of what they were trying to achieve.</p>
<p>One group at UCLA stumbled into the truth, though it was a truth they did not understand. At Bruin Plaza a crowd chanted &#8220;Who&#8217;s got the power? We&#8217;ve got the power.&#8221; In its context this was just another slogan of a mindless day, but the reality is that those people do indeed have the power, and routinely use it in a way that makes them the author of their own troubles. Let me explain.</p>
<p>Unemployment in California is still rising. It just went up from 12.3 to 12.5%, nearly three points above an already bad national average. This horrendous figure is the source of California&#8217;s budget problem. The huge loss of tax revenue is compounded by greatly increased unemployment outlays. If we look at the few other states that have unemployment figures well above the national average, there are obvious explanations. Michigan is at 14.6 because employment in its major industry (automobiles) has collapsed. Nevada, at 13.0, is dependent on discretionary cash at a time when there isn&#8217;t any. But California is too big to be dominated by one industry, and its plight can only be explained by the state&#8217;s having grossly mismanaged its affairs.</p>
<p>In 2007 Raymond Keating formulated a Small Business Survival Index, which is a composite of various aspects of the climate for business in a particular state: business and personal taxes, regulations, mandates, and so on. In that index California ranked 49 among the 50 states. Rhode Island ranked just above California, and its unemployment rate is 12.7. At the bottom of the Index is D.C., and its unemployment rate is 12.1.</p>
<p>In the component parts of the SBSI index, California ranks worst of 51 (including D.C.) on top personal tax rates, worst on top capital gains tax rates, 42 on corporate taxes, 43 on health insurance mandates, 46 on electric utility costs, 47 on workman&#8217;s compensation costs, rock bottom again on state gas taxes, 45 on state and local government five year spending trends, and 47 on state and local per capita government spending. It also ranks 49 among the states on the US Economic freedom index, and it has the highest state sales tax rate too: where some states have an income tax but no sales tax, and others have a sales tax but no income tax, California has both, AND it has the highest rates in both.</p>
<p>In short, California is a disaster for business. The state has piled up so many taxes, regulations and mandates that businesses are leaving the state. Just this week I learned that a spare part order for my Lennox fireplace is delayed because Lennox is moving this division of its business to Tennessee. Wealthy individuals are also fleeing the state to avoid the country&#8217;s highest tax bracket. When both wealth and wealth creation leave the state, tax revenues leave with them.</p>
<p>How has this happened? As everyone knows by now, California has a dysfunctional legislature. Already in 2003&#8212;well before the current national crisis, and when the national unemployment rate was only 5.9%&#8212;California was bankrupt, and spending was so out of control that a Governor was recalled. The legislature enacts every politically correct whim that comes into its head, loading on one mandate and regulation after another. Cap and Trade could not pass nationally, but the California legislature proudly passed its job-killing global warming bill.</p>
<p>That is why the state now has a budget crisis of staggering proportions, and why university students are seeing those large fee hikes. But why is the California legislature so irresponsible, not to say goofy? Well, California is extremely rich in state university campuses: the UC and CSUC systems alone amount to 33 campuses, about a third of them mega-campuses of 30-35 thousand students, with another 10 around 20,000. The mega-campuses completely dominate the Assembly districts they are in, and their large concentrations of students and faculty skew the district electorate not just to the left, but to the devoutly politically correct but hopelessly unrealistic left. Virtually all of them routinely send Democrats to Sacramento. College towns with more modest sized campuses play their part too, but mega-campuses make their districts so one-sided that in the last election UC Berkeley&#8217;s Assembly seat had no election even though it was vacant: the Democratic nominee still ran unopposed. Where there is real competition between the parties the two sides keep each other honest and realistic, but when Assembly seats are so inevitably left that there is no contest, there is nothing to stop the side that has automatic electability from sliding into fantasy. Those districts provide the margin that allows an immature leftism that has lost contact with reality to control the state legislature and ruin the business climate of the state.</p>
<p>The irony here really cries out for attention: a large state university system needs a free market economy that hums along in top gear so that the revenue needed to support it can be generated. But California&#8217;s two unusually well developed state university systems provide enormous local voting power in many Assembly districts for a bitterly anti-capitalist ideology that sabotages the California economy. The campuses are shooting themselves in the foot. The power that those students and faculty chanted about is indeed theirs, and if they used it to elect sensible assemblymen and state senators their problems would be solved by the healthy business climate that would result. The votes that they actually cast are the source of their troubles.</p>
<p>Only one idea for solving the funding crisis was floated on March 4. It was to repeal the state&#8217;s requirement that taxes can only be raised by a two thirds vote, so that taxes can be raised yet again and more money made available to the campuses. In other words, let&#8217;s make the funding crisis even worse, by driving out of California even more wealth and wealth creating capacity, and raising the unemployment level even more. &#8220;California is not a tax-heavy state,&#8221; said Assemblyman Joe Coto, whose office is right next door to San Jose State University, which enrolls 31,000 students. And that raises the question: how much longer will the California citizenry want to support a system of higher education that keeps its legislature stuck on stupid? It&#8217;s not a question for this state alone.</p>
<p><em>John Ellis is President of the California Association of Scholars, and a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz</em></p>
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