Gay Jamaican Immigrant Defends Israel; Students for Justice in Palestine Come After Him Socialists and Islamists demand safe space for themselves — and racial sensitivity training for black professor.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273555/gay-jamaican-immigrant-defends-israel-students-daniel-greenfield
In 1985, a twenty-year old Jamaican immigrant came to this country with $120 in his pocket. Thirteen years later, he had a PhD. Two years later, he had begun his career teaching at DePaul University.
In 2019, a coalition of lefties, Islamists and anti-Semites at DePaul are demanding a safe space from him.
Dr. Jason Hill (pictured above) is a gay Jamaican immigrant who teaches philosophy and lectures about civil rights. But after defending Israel, DePaul student organizations, including Students for Justice in Palestine, a notorious anti-Semitic nationwide hate group whose members have praised Hitler and called for another Holocaust, United Muslims Moving Ahead (UMMA), an Islamist campus group, which invited a Muslim cleric who rationalized the murder of gay people, DePaul Socialists, and College Democrats, are demanding that a black gay professor undergo “racial sensitivity training”.
Also joining the local production of outrage theater is the Lambda Theta Phi fraternity.
The coalition of Hispanic frat boys, socialists and Islamists claimed that Dr. Hill’s defense of Israel and condemnation of Islamic anti-Semitism created “unsafe and uncomfortable spaces for everyone, especially Palestinian and Muslim students.”
How did Dr. Hill create an “unsafe and uncomfortable” space at DePaul? He used words. He expressed ideas. He wrote an article with arguments that the coalition doesn’t want to counter with its own ideas.
Meanwhile UMMA featured a lecture by Shaykh Abdullah bin Hamid Ali who had written in ‘The Homosexual Challenge to Muslim Ethics’ that, “Religions, like Islam, have attempted to outlaw the practice by prescribing punishments like, flogging and stoning, for people who either confess to or are caught committing acts of sodomy”, but that, “Attitudes have changed very much today in both the West and the East perhaps due to neocolonial hegemonic pressures.”
In another essay, the Zaytuna cleric defended the Islamic institution of slavery.
DePaul Socialists and the College Democrats don’t believe that UMMA inviting a cleric from Zaytuna College, a notorious hub of Islamist hatred, who implied that if it weren’t for “neocolonial hegemonic pressures”, gay people could still be safely killed in Muslim countries, is a safe space issue.
But a gay professor who voices opposition to Islamic violence against minorities must be condemned.
Does “everyone” at DePaul really need a safe space after a gay black professor celebrated “Jewish exceptionalism” and condemned Muslim anti-Semitism? Jewish students don’t seem to have signed on to this. But apparently, unlike “Palestinian and Muslim students”, they don’t matter.
“We are not only seeking censure, but for Professor Hill to commit to racial sensitivity training and to release a public apology for his immoral conduct,” the coalition demanded.
Not only does this coalition want a black professor to undergo racial sensitivity training, even though neither Muslims nor Palestinians are a race, but it claims that it is “immoral” to disagree with them.
Dr. Hill however has laid out the morality behind his reasoning. His hateful opponents have not.
In, “The Moral Case For Israel Annexing The West Bank—And Beyond”, Dr. Hill offered an Objectivist critique of Israel’s failed effort to bring about peace by manufacturing a “Palestinian” state. He accurately pointed out that Israel had the moral and political right to treat the colonial Muslim population of the defeated invaders as “war settlers” or “illegal occupants”. And that Israel, instead, chose to pursue a liberal approach even though it had no actual moral obligation to do so.
“The proper response from Israel should have been to immediately annex the land and make the people there the responsibility of their original political homeland: Jordan,” Dr. Hill argued. Instead, Israel provided civil rights to the Muslim settler population, which they lost in the “Palestinian” state.
“The PA has destroyed the freedom Palestinians enjoyed under Israeli rule and their economy through kleptocracy, corruption, nepotism, and authoritarian forms of governance subject to none of the checks and balances that characterize Israel’s Knesset,” he wrote.
Someone else might have been accused of colonialism, but Dr. Hill’s grandfather was Frank Hill, a key figure in Jamaican independence. And Dr. Hill insists that it’s not a reflexive separatism based on victimhood that justifies nationhood, but the values and ideals of a nation that endow it with rights.
These are the principles that underlie the Declaration of Independence, but have since been abandoned in a haze of moral relativism that defines national rights negatively against some construct, colonialism, imperialism, rather than positively, for its ideas and its respect for the individual rights of its people.
Dr. Hill argued that “Not all cultures are indeed equal”, that while “Jewish civilization is an international treasure trove that must be protected”, but the ‘Palestinians’ “have never come into their own as a people largely because they have never explicitly held a philosophy that can support freedom, the basic liberal principles of individual rights, and a free market economy.”
The argument against Israel and for Palestine depends on viewing individual rights as irrelevant in the face of group rights and performative victimhood. And nowhere in America are individual rights as thoroughly overwhelmed by performative group victimhood as the modern college campus.
And so DePaul’s Islamist supremacists and socialist anti-Semites are claiming to have been traumatized.
This isn’t the first time the campus hate coalition has come after Dr. Hill looking for a safe space. He ought to be everything that lefties embrace. But instead they have been fighting to force him out.
It’s not hard to see why.
A politically correct philosophy professor wouldn’t appear regularly on FOX News. Or declare on his site that his mission is “Defending the American Dream” and “Fighting for the American People.”
The respected philosophy professor has delivered lectures on such topics as, “Biological Collectivism and The Politics of Racial Identity”, “When We Should Not Get Along: Cosmopolitan Values in a Multicultural World”, and “Hiding From Humanity: The Burka and the Obliteration of Human Identity.”
That last one was delivered at the City College of London.
Despite appearing to some to be the embodiment of identity politics, Dr. Hill has instead challenged it. And, like all minorities who question the very political system that exploits them as the justification for its power, he has received a disproportionate share of outrage and fury from that political system.
This isn’t the first time that a DePaul professor was targeted for supporting Israel.
Over a decade has passed since DePaul’s shameful purge of Thomas Klocek, a respected academic, after he confronted UMMA and SJP hate on campus. Klocek was suspended without a hearing for arguing with the anti-Semitic bigots of UMMA and SJP. “The students’ perspective was dishonored and their freedom demeaned. Individuals were deeply insulted,” a DePaul dean wrote.
“Our college acted immediately by removing the instructor from the classroom.”
This was what academic freedom in the face of anti-Semitism looked like at DePaul then. Dr. Hill’s case will provide a test of what academic freedom in the face of anti-Semitism looks like at DePaul now.
DePaul can stand with Dr. Hill. Or it can stand with the anti-Semites of SJP, who rationalize the murder of Jews, and UMMA, which invited a cleric who rationalizes the murder of gay people.
But whatever it does, it should remember that Americans and the Trump administration are watching.
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