RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/muslim-prof-claims-islamic-scholars-have-placed-andrew-harrod/

Islamic scholars historically have placed “too much emphasis on jihad as basically a violent” rather than nonviolent doctrine, stated Mount Holyoke College international relations professor Sohail Hashmi in an April 11 webinar. Hosted by the Muslim group Critical Connections in Hashmi’s Pioneer Valley region of Massachusetts, his lucid lecture on “Jihad vs Just War: A Comparative Analysis” provided detailed, disturbing insight into Islamic doctrines of jihad warfare.

As in a previously analyzed webinar, Critical Connections founder Mehlaqa Samdani moderated and worried in her introduction about “Islamophobic groups” dominating discussion of hot-button issues like jihad. Her “Islamophobia” reference ironically recalled the religiously repressive nature of the terrorism-sponsoring Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the home of her co-moderator, Karachi University student Rutaba Tariq. She represented Pakistan’s branch of the Model Organization of Islamic Cooperation (MOIC), a student affiliate of the OIC, whose fifty-seven member states (including “Palestine”) have long sought to ban “Islamophobic” criticism of Islam worldwide. While Hashmi took no critical notice of the OIC, she encouraged viewers to join MOIC; additionally, Georgetown University professor John L. Esposito, an apologist for these efforts and all things Islamist, made a brief cameo appearance.

Yet Hashmi’s presentation did not deny that serious concerns about jihad are well-founded, not irrational, even as he claimed that Christian just war and Islamic jihad doctrines are “extremely alike.” He argued that Jesus’ teachings in the New Testament are “very heavily biased in the pacifist direction,” such that Christian thinkers developed just war theory largely on the basis of self-defense in natural law. More disturbingly, although “jihad is a very broad concept,” which “means simply to struggle,” in the eighth-ninth centuries Islam’s “classical jurists spent most of their time talking about what we could call an expansionist or an offensive jihad.”

This was a “jihad to expand the Islamic empire, to expand the realm of Dar al-Islam,” Hashmi noted. The “fundamental aspect of Dar al-Islam is that this is the territory where Islamic law is supreme” and “Muslims are not necessarily the majority.” Thus Muslim-conquered areas like Mesopotamia and Egypt “remained primarily non-Muslim for centuries,” he explained.

This “imperialist jihad” in the classical view, Hashmi explained, would supposedly benefit non-Muslim “benighted peoples.” “Once non-Muslims had lived under the benefits of this divine law, of this Islamic law, they would of their own accord realize the merits of Islam, the religion, and they would of their own accord, of their own free will, convert to Islam,” he said. He later specified how the modern Islamic Republic of Iran’s constitution advocates the “spread of an Islamic community of nations.”

https://www.jns.org/opinion/anti-semitism-at-rutgers-isnt-all-academic/

(June 1, 2021 / JNS) It’s a little hard to combat a phenomenon by kowtowing to its promoters, but leave it to academia to make a feeble attempt at doing so. Having spent the past few decades favoring sophistry over the imparting of knowledge, American institutions of higher learning are well-versed in double-speak.
Imagine their surprise, then, when even their best efforts at intellectual manipulation are met with derision by the very “woke” bullies whom they aim to please. Take the latest brouhaha at New Jersey-based Rutgers University as a case in point.

It all began on May 26, when the school’s chancellor, Christopher Molloy, and its provost, Francine Conway, issued a joint statement “against acts of anti-Semitism.”
In an e-mail addressed to the “Rutgers-New Brunswick Community,” Molloy and Conway wrote: “We are saddened by and greatly concerned about the sharp rise in hostile sentiments and anti-Semitic violence in the United States. Recent incidents of hate directed toward Jewish members of our community again remind us of what history has to teach us. Tragically, in the last century alone, acts of prejudice and hatred left unaddressed have served as the foundation for many atrocities against targeted groups around the world.”
Taking care to eliminate the particularity of anti-Semitism—a no-no in intersectional circles that consider the Jews to be born of “white privilege”—the two Rutgers honchos hastily turned their attention to George Floyd. His “murder” last year, they asserted, “brought into sharp focus the racial injustices that continue to plague our country, and over the past year there has [sic] been attacks on our Asian American Pacific Islander citizens, the spaces of Indigenous peoples defiled, and targeted oppression and other assaults against Hindus and Muslims.”
Patting themselves on the back for having paid required homage to any and all victims of “racial injustices,” they didn’t bother with something as banal as proofreading, but at least felt safe enough to return to their original subject.
“Although it has been nearly two decades since the U.S. Congress approved the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act, the upward trend of anti-Semitism continues,” they stated. This was right before going on to equate the Jewish state with the terrorists bent on its annihilation.
“We have also been witnesses to the increasing violence between Israeli forces and Hamas in the Middle East leading to the deaths of children and adults and mass displacement of citizens in the Gaza region and the loss of lives in Israel,” they wrote.
They continued by mentioning the general, rather than specific, “death, destruction and ethnic strife” caused by the “ravages of the pandemic and proliferation of global conflict,” boasting that “the university stands as a beacon of hope for our community … a model for institutions that respect and value the dignity of every human being.”
You get the gist, which is that the Rutgers administration wanted to stress its denunciation of “acts of hate and prejudice against members of the Jewish community and any other targeted and oppressed groups on our campus and in our community.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/05/29/moms-learn-lengths-a-wa-school-board-will-go-to-silence-complaints-on-crt-and-masks-youll-want-to-sit-down-for-this-n1450563

It’s hard to single out the most absurd part of the story of what happened to three moms who signed up to speak about critical race theory (CRT) and mask mandates at the school board meeting in a small southwest Washington town.

Was it when board members picked on one of the parents and then blamed a “disruption” on her?

Was it when the parents were locked out of the meeting?

Or was it when the cops were called?

It’s such a target-rich environment of outrage that it’s hard to know where to start. But let’s give it a go.

The three moms, Tatyana Stepanyuk, Patricia Bellamy and Melissa Mcilwain, signed up to speak at the Washougal, Wash., school board meeting on May 11. The town sits on the Columbia River just across from Portland.

The three signed up to address mask mandates at the schools and critical race theory being added to the curriculum under orders from Governor Jay Inslee.

But they never got to speak.

The sparsely attended in-person meeting, which was also broadcast online, barely got off the ground before the school superintendent and her underling insisted that the one person in the room without a mask should put one on. Stepanyuk invoked the governor’s words that she wasn’t required to wear one due to medical and religious exemptions. She noted that everyone else had a mask on so they were protected, no problem. Yet, the masked officials spent their valuable meeting time pedantically explaining to the woman how she needed to comply. But for the actions of Superintendent Mary Templeton and the board disrupting the meeting it would have progressed as normal. But that was not to be. Instead their superintendent and board caused a cluster storm of reaction from which the district may not soon recover.

Stepanyuk’s friends, Bellamy and Mcilwain, wore masks but told the superintendent that they had no problem with her not wearing one, assuming that transmitting the COVID virus was the school official’s concern.

It wasn’t.

For more than 20 minutes, the superintendent, assistant superintendent, and a board member took turns standing over the woman and lecturing her. Stepanyuk took video of the last eight minutes of the lecture, calmly recited the law, and remarked about how she was sorry that these educators hadn’t educated themselves about the mask law.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/another_teacher_stands_up_against_wokeness_in_louisiana.html

The Family Research Council (FRC) published an article, “Unequally Woked: One Teacher’s Stand to Stop the Left” that warns there is a stealth woke indoctrination process hidden within a BrainPOP animated teaching aid intended for K–12 schools.  However, the hundreds of BrainPOP video titles on their webpage BrainPOP that I quickly scanned appeared mostly harmless.  The one sample video that was available last Friday for viewing explained the origins of Memorial Day.  It was in a short, simplistically animated format similar to those produced by PragerU.  I found it both accurate and informative.

However, Jonathan Koeppel, a young, courageous teacher in the Saint Tammany Parish school district in Louisiana, where the use of BrainPOP videos had been approved, “knew something in his classrooms was wrong — and if he didn’t say anything, he worried no one else would.”  “When I found out that kids in my community were being exposed to this wokeism — woke curriculum and woke education — I said somebody needs to expose it.  Somebody needs to let the public know what’s going on,” he explained.  “I just happened to be the guy to do it.”

According to the FRC article, “When Jonathan stood up in the school board meeting last month, his goal was to warn local parents.  Thanks to his powerful message that caught fire online and was picked up by Fox News and Newsmax, he said a lot more.  “A man cannot menstruate,” he argued when it was his turn for public comment.  “A man cannot lactate and breastfeed a child.  You cannot give birth if you’re a man.  If you want to be an adult and do whatever you want with your life, I’m okay with that.  Don’t push this ideology on children.  I’m not going to work in a district that’s okay with that[.] … Parents are already pulling their kids out of public school[.] …  Their going online is going to increase as this liberal ideology comes into our schools.  This isn’t a political indoctrination camp, okay?  It’s public education.  We want to teach education, not left-wing ideas that aren’t backed up by facts or science.”

The Biden administration is pushing divisive Critical Race Theory ideology, the lies in the discredited 1619 Project, and gender madness to indoctrinate our school kids in wokeness nationwide, so it should be no surprise that an otherwise fine resource like BrainPOP would be used to assist with the fundamental transformation process.  I fear that thanks to the radical left’s domination of our MSM, Hollywood, universities and even Big Business, most newly minted educators (including many school board members) are likely to have been fully indoctrinated with woke ideology and eager to share it.  Therefore, it will be difficult to protect our kids from exposure.  However, it will be impossible to stop the process if parents or courageous teachers like Jonathan Koeppel remain silent despite knowing there will be a price to pay in our cancel culture.

One recent example of the sort of educator resulting from the left’s indoctrination process is clearly demonstrated here.  This young white female Oregon teacher put it like this to her colleagues: 

If you’re not evolving into an anti-racist educator, you’re making yourself obsolete. … Our district is only getting browner and browner [with respect to students]. … Obviously, you can’t change your melanin, all right? But you can change your mind so that you can actually function in a district that is full of BIPOC [black, indigenous, and people of color] children. So if you’re being resistant, I understand that. But you’re gonna have to eventually come to the light.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/should-public-schools-ban-critical?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxNDc5

If you want to understand how Critical Race Theory functions you can’t do much better than watching this recently leaked clip of a teachers’ meeting in Portland, Oregon. Here, an eighth grade teacher (pronouns: “she, her, we and us”) tells her colleagues that “you can’t change your melanin, alright, but you can change your mind.” She compares teachers that don’t adopt “antiracism” to to sex offenders and warns them: “If you’re going to keep with those old views of colonialism it’s going to lead to being fired.”

Is it fair to call this an example of Critical Race Theory? Academics would say absolutely not. They will point out that CRT is, exactly as the name suggests, a theory — one developed in the 1970s by legal scholars to expose the way racism was baked into the structures and systems of American life. 

But the reason that moms and dads across the country are discussing Critical Race Theory at their dinner tables is not because they’ve all just discovered critical theorists like Derrick Bell. It’s because that academic idea — or worldview, really — has captured schools across the country. It’s because it is affecting what their children are taught about America and about themselves.

If you’re new here — welcome! — let me catch you up on a few flashpoints that will give you a sense of what I mean:

An elementary school in Cupertino, California, instructed third graders to rank themselves based on their power and their privilege. 

The San Diego Unified School District told white teachers that they are guilty of “spirit murdering” black children. 

California’s Department of Education is proposing to eliminate opportunities for accelerated math in the name of “equity.” That means discouraging algebra for eighth graders and calculus for high schoolers. 

Most recently, the University of California system decided to scrap the SAT and the ACT on the argument that the tests themselves are biased against low-income applicants of color.

Those are just a handful of examples from California, where I’m currently living. I could pull similar headlines from other public school systems in other states. And this is to say nothing of the country’s private schools: The more elite the school, the more in thrall they are to this ideology, for reasons I explain in depth here.

If you are reading this, I suspect you are disturbed by an ideology that segregates people by race; that insists on a racial hierarchy in which entire racial groups are monolithically good or bad; that does away with race-blind tests in the name of progress; and that insists that any inequality of outcome is evidence of systemic discrimination.

Those are bad ideas at odds with our most foundational American values. On Friday, Andrew Sullivan published an essay arguing that CRT removes the “bedrock of liberalism.” I agree.

The question is: What should be done about it?

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/29/ignoring-the-albino-dhimmi-elephant-in-the-room/

Prior to being shot in the head this week by four brothers in a melee at a wild party, Sasha Johnson, of the British chapter of Black Lives Matter, had big plans for whites. 

Johnson had been “calling for a ‘racial offenders register’ that would see those guilty of ‘microaggressions’ banned from living in multicultural communities and prevented from working in certain industries.”

“If you live in a majority-colored neighborhood you shouldn’t reside there because you’re a risk to those people—just like if a sex offender lived next to a school he would be a risk to those children,” she fulminated.

Johnson’s call for a “racial offenders register” for whites is a perfectly pragmatic application of the critical race theory rot. 

And while critical race theory (CRT) was made-in-America—it has, like many a destructive American creed, been energetically exported around the world. British agitators are certainly improving upon the plans hatched for whites by their brothers-in-arms stateside.  

To wit, Johnson had once pinned a tweet to her profile which read, “The white man will not be our equal, but our slave. History is changing. No justice, no peace #BLM.” 

Believe Johnson and her ilk, for they are deadly serious—and deadly. 

Stateside, there have been some gains in working to outlaw the CRT poison percolating throughout American schools. Tennessee has led the way. Other states have introduced measures to ban or curb anti-white propaganda peddled by the nation’s eager pedagogues. 

Alas, the intellectual means of production remain firmly under the control of progressives. As part of the lucrative “racial-industrial-complex” (a Jack Kerwick coinage), critical race theory enjoys muscular advocates.

Its adversaries, however, are weak and flaccid.

I’ve watched scores on Fox News “argue” against the critical race theory agitprop in education. There’s nothing but humbug from the channel’s holy men and women. Their arguments against the CRT scourge are characterized by a white-out of whites.

Nobody will utter the words “anti-white,” or articulate the “anti-white” essence of critical race theory. CRT is always euphemized as things other than a hatred of whites and a resolve to blacken them. Always.

Weatherize the Kids from Anti-Whiteness

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/princeton-removes-greek-latin-requirement-for-classics-majors-to-combat-systemic-racism/

Classics majors at Princeton University will no longer be required to learn Greek or Latin in a push to create a more inclusive and equitable program, an effort that was given “new urgency” by the “events around race that occurred last summer.”

Last month, faculty members approved changes to the Classics department, including eliminating the “classics” track, which required an intermediate proficiency in Greek or Latin to enter the concentration, according to Princeton Alumni Weekly. The requirement for students to take Greek or Latin was also removed.

Josh Billings, director of undergraduate studies and professor of classics, said the changes, which were approved by faculty last month, will give students more opportunities to major in classics.  

Billings said the changes had been floated before university president Christopher Eisgruber called for addressing systemic racism at the university, but the curriculum shift resurfaced as a priority after the president’s call to action and the “events around race that occurred last summer.”

“We think that having new perspectives in the field will make the field better,” he said. “Having people who come in who might not have studied classics in high school and might not have had a previous exposure to Greek and Latin, we think that having those students in the department will make it a more vibrant intellectual community.” 

Billings said students will still be encouraged to take either language if it is relevant to their interests in the department and that the course offerings remain the same.

A diversity and equity statement on the department’s site says that the “history of our own department bears witness to the place of Classics in the long arc of systemic racism.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/05/30/the_civic-education_battles_145849.html

Civic education has emerged as a major front in the bitter clash spilling over into many domains between left and right in America. Since the civic-education battles revolve around the nation’s core principles and fundamental character, they may prove the decisive front.

Education in general and civic education in particular shape students’ understandings of themselves, fellow citizens, the nation, and other nations and peoples. Consequently, the outcome of the raging debate about the content and goal of civic education is bound to have a major effect on America’s ability to secure freedom and protect equality under law, provide economic opportunity and spur growth, revitalize civil society, and defend the free and open international order against antidemocratic and unfree regimes’ ambitions to bend it toward authoritarianism.

Civic education is an old idea. According to the classical tradition rooted in Plato and Aristotle, the whole of education should aim at forming the soul by cultivating the virtues. Education, in this view, involves both the training of the body through disciplined physical exertion and the formation of the mind through study of science and the humanities — not least the principles of one’s own nation’s political order. For the classical tradition, education is civic education.

To a significant extent, the modern tradition of freedom agreed, with the crucial proviso that education’s principal goal was to prepare students for the rights and responsibilities of freedom. Accordingly, liberal education puts study of the principles of a free society at the core of the curriculum. At the same time, liberal education places a good deal more emphasis than did classical education on introducing students to the diversity of views on the great moral, economic, legal, political, philosophical, and religious questions, and on equipping students to think for themselves. Such study — concentrating on great works of literature, history, philosophy, and theology — is part and parcel of civic education well understood because it cultivates the virtues of reasoned inquiry, tolerance, and civility, all of which contribute to good citizenship in a liberal democracy.

Civic education as Americans tend to think of it today involves telltale innovations. Contemporary American educators treat civic education as a specialized undertaking, walling it off from other subjects. They increasingly ascribe to it a participatory component, believing correctly that engagement in political affairs and the life of the community is an important part of citizenship in a free and democratic society while supposing dubiously that schools are well-suited to direct outside-the-classroom action. And for some time now, a large swath of American educators has treated the proposition that the United States is “systemically racist” as civic education’s indisputable premise.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/yale-universitys-war-against-alumni-and-accountability/

Fearful of transparency and change, Yale’s governing body has resorted to procedural tactics to keep alumni from joining that wouldn’t be out of place in a dictatorship.

Back in March 2020, I signed up to gather the 4,394 signatures required to become a petition candidate for the Yale Corporation. In a four-month period, I gathered over 7,200 signatures and won a place on the ballot for the Yale Corporation (which is the governing body of Yale University). It hires the president, grants tenure, adopts the annual budget and sets policy on whatever it wants to affect.

I ran because, as a Yale alumnus, I was tired of getting two names each year of persons I did not know, with no information on why they were running provided. All we got was a bio, and now a video lacking any comments from candidates on issues facing Yale. In my campaign, I also emphasized openness, and my opposition both to expensive administrative growth and to rising tuition during the pandemic.

While the 2021 election, for which I was a candidate, was transpiring from April 14 to May 23, the Yale Corporation, chaired by President Peter Salovey but guided by Catherine Bond Hill, former Vassar president, moved to abolish this system and give total control to the existing 19 members on filling vacancies. Regulations permit two to five candidates. A special unannounced meeting of the corporation was held May 18. Two members, the governor and lieutenant governor of Connecticut, were not notified or informed of the agenda of the meeting. Why? I realize I’m a biased party, but it seems hard not to conclude that Yale, frightened by my efforts and by the possibility that either I or — since I did not, ultimately, win under the old procedures — some other committed individual might shake things up, moved quickly to secure power. Such a step is unbecoming of Yale University.

The board-selection process is distant and unfriendly. But it has existed since 1927. It produced the first Jewish member of the corporation in William Horowitz in 1965. It produced the first women to serve on the corporation in the 1970s. Now that process has been abolished, and the 160,407 Yale alumni will be able to vote for only the hand-picked choices from the Yale Alumni Association’s 14-member nominating committee in future years. This is similar to what mainland China has imposed on Hong Kong in its future “elections.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/rutgers-university-new-brunswick-chancellor-issues-apology-for-message-condemning-anti-semitic-attacks/

The chancellor of Rutgers University-New Brunswick issued an apology to the university’s Palestinian community on Thursday for sending a university-wide announcement condemning the recent surge in anti-Semitic hate crimes across the country.

The university’s chancellor, Christopher Molloy, and provost and executive vice chancellor for research and academic affairs, Francine Conway, sent a message to students on Wednesday that brought attention to the recent rise in hate crimes against Jews.

“Recent incidents of hate directed toward Jewish members of our community again remind us of what history has to teach us. Tragically, in the last century alone, acts of prejudice and hatred left unaddressed have served as the foundation for many atrocities against targeted groups around the world,” the email said.

“If you have been adversely impacted by anti-Semitic or any other discriminatory incidents in our community, please do not hesitate to reach out to our counseling and other support services on campus. Our behavioral health team stands ready to support you through these challenging times,” the email said.

While the email also mentioned the recent hostilities between Israel and Hamas, the administrators did not take a position on the conflict.

“We have also been witnesses to the increasing violence between Israeli forces and Hamas in the Middle East leading to the deaths of children and adults and mass displacement of citizens in the Gaza region and the loss of lives in Israel” it read.

Just one day later, Molloy and Conway sent students a follow up email titled “An Apology.”

The administrators apologized to the university’s Palestinian Community members and said that the first message “fell short” of their intention to be a “place where all identities can feel validated and supported.”