RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/twisted-world-craig-considine-bruce-bawer/

Craig Considine, a lecturer in sociology at Rice University in Houston, is full of love – or so he would have us believe. Love, that is, for Islam, its prophet, and its holy book. It’s a love that Considine – a self-declared Christian – can’t stop affirming. On January 9, for example, he tweeted: “I ️ the Qur’an because it emphasizes humanity.” On January 10, he tweeted: “Why is Prophet Muhammad ️’d by Christians like me? Because he confirms the veracity of the Bible & encourages positive dialogue w/ Jews/Christians.” On January 11, he tweeted: “’The difference between us & you is no bigger than this line,’ said the Christian King of Abyssinia to Muslim refugees from Mecca, who had just explained the Qur’an’s position on Jesus & Mary.” And on January 12, he tweeted: “I ️ the Qur’an because it celebrates diversity.”  

Whereas Considine’s love of Islam would appear to be absolute and unqualified, however, his attitude toward Judaism and Israel is something else again. As David Gerstman noted in a January 9 article for Middle East Forum, Considine “recently appeared on a Twitter video wearing a kufiyah and touting the organization PaliRoots, which claims to promote Palestinian culture and identity. He could barely contain his enthusiasm about Palestine’s ‘beautiful culture.’” What’s PaliRoots? At its blog, Gerstman encountered a systematic “denial of Jewish history and Israel’s existence.” In other words, it’s another one of those toxic groups that insist, either ignorantly or dishonestly, that the Palestinians, as we know them today, have been around for centuries. According to PaliRoots, the Palestinians even turn up in “numerous hieroglyphs in Egyptian documents.” The name of Palestine derives from the Hebrew; PaliRoots describes it as Greek in origin. Moreover, observed Gerstman, PaliRoots ignores the fact that the Roman Empire, “in an attempt to erase any Jewish connection to the land,” changed Judea’s name to Syria Palaestina. In short, to quote Gerstman, PaliRoots is a purveyor of “ahistorical claims” that amount to “anti-Israel, anti-Jewish propaganda,” and “Considine’s proclamation of its trustworthiness further exposes him as a hack.”

https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/11/why-its-delusional-to-think

Consider a thought experiment. Imagine we live in a reverse universe in which the population is overwhelmingly center-left on the major cultural and socioeconomic issues, and the institutional power in media and higher education is in the hands of the right wing.

In that universe, university applications are overwhelmingly meritocratic, admissions metrics include only academic qualification and aptitude and nothing else, the flow of knowledge is outright cut-throat, and if you fail, you perish. The system is Vulcan and absolutely hierarchic, and only the best of the best excel.

There’s no campus bureaucracy, no university “mental health counselors” for any fragile flower whose cat died, no campus sexual assault “courts” where the accused is already guilty, no university student unions led by outsider thugs, no federal loans for anyone willing to spend a few hundred thousand on a master’s degree about the connection between Maori tribal weaving patterns and post-colonial feminist movements. Most importantly, in this alternate reality, there is no forced push for the sameness known as equality.

Albeit this is an extreme scenario, it is not difficult to imagine what the left’s reaction would be. This system would not be allowed to continue.

Of course, it’s the exact reverse of our current reality. In two broadly center-right countries, the United Kingdom and the United States, cultural institutions are not just dominated by the left, they are increasingly becoming off-limits to conservatives. Consider the news from just last week: The Western Art History course at Yale was canceled, the 1619 Project was incorporated into public school curricula at Buffalo, military presence was banned at the Cambridge University freshers’ fair because it could be “triggering” for students who are “mentally unwell,” and a centuries-old student club was banned at Oxford for failing an identity politics quota.