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EDUCATION

CUNY’s Systemic Jew-Hatred No university would tolerate a white supremacist student group for the kind of behavior SJP gets away with. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/cunys-systemic-jew-hatred-richard-l-cravatts/

When a provocative Tiktok video uploaded by Nerdeen Kiswani, a second-year student at CUNY law school, went public recently, the anti-Israel sentiment of the clip came as no surprise to those who were aware of Ms. Kiswani’s long record of toxic activism. In the video, Kiswani is seen attempting to light on fire an IDF-emblazoned sweatshirt worn by an individual sitting with her, expressing her hatred for the IDF and the nation it defends—a loathing that apparently animates Ms. Kiswani’s life, since she is fully engaged as the former vice president and president of the virulent student group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Hunter College and at the College of Staten Island (CSI), City of New York University (CUNY).

And, as evidenced by the video clip, Kiswani (pictured above) is perfectly willing to use and celebrate violence against Israeli Jews. In fact, when in 2017 Palestinian terrorists killed four people and injured 17 others by ramming them with a vehicle on a Jerusalem promenade, Kiswani lauded and encouraged celebration of the murders, ghoulishly noting that “Palestinians in Palestine are giving out sweets in celebration. I will not hide from this. I will not be ashamed or embarrassed by this. These celebratory actions are what keep the resistance moving forward, they are what keep it alive.”

Needless to say, this type of murderous activism can poison the climate of a university campus, exactly what took place at CUNY for another law student there, Rafaella Gunz. Gunz, a Jewish journalist who studies LGBT and feminist issues, herself became a target of pro-Palestinian students, including Kiswani, and eventually dropped out of the law school this year after she was relentlessly targeted by anti-Israel activists. “It came to my attention that there was this petition,” Gunz wrote. “It was inspired by me, it doesn’t say anything by name, that it’s me, but it says ‘a certain subset of Zionist activists.’ And that’s just me. I’m clearly outnumbered on this campus, right?”

“All the student groups signed it, professors signed it, a bunch of my classmates signed it, so it’s basically saying that if you are anything less than unequivocally supportive of the Palestinian groups, you shouldn’t be at this school,” Gunz wrote. “And then I was accused of ‘Zionist violence.’ I don’t know how my words are violent, but there it is.”

Indoctrifornia While California’s ethnic studies mandate for k-12ers is dead for now, there is still much in the works to be concerned about. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/10/indoctrifornia/

California governor Gavin Newsom is a force of nature. He leads a state which has record homelessness, rising crime and exploding pension debt. But wait, there is so much more! Ruling more like dictator than an elected official, Newsom ordered a draconian lockdown in March to stem the spread of COVID-19. But more than anything, his autocratic move unnecessarily killed many businesses and livelihoods. Then in September, Newsom ordered a ban on gas-powered cars starting in 2035 because California is facing “a climate damn emergency.” For good measure, he then happily signed off on a bill that mandates the “study and development of proposals for reparations for blacks who live in the Golden State.” Newson insisted in a Tweet that our past is “one of slavery, racism, and injustice.” Could he not know that California was not part of the Confederacy?

But then he went against form. In a major surprise, he vetoed Assembly Bill 331 on Sept. 30th. This wretched legislation would have made taking an ethnic studies class a requirement to graduate high school in the state. “There is much uncertainty about the appropriate K-12 model curriculum for ethnic studies,” Newsom wrote in his veto statement. “The latest draft, which is currently out for review, still needs revision.”

Revision? Mercy killing is more apt. Bills like this invariably come replete with a strong political agenda, and more than anything promote victimology and anger, as well as providing a future army for the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. As I wrote two weeks ago, the model curriculum approves of classes that stress “modern day movements and intersectional struggles for social justice like the Immigrant Rights Movement, the Black Lives Matter Movement, the Environmental Justice Movements, Feminist Movements, LGBTQIA Queer Movements, and others.”

DOJ Sues Yale University Over Race-Based Admissions Policies By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/10/09/doj-sues-yale-university-over-race-based-admissions-policies-n1027040

After complaints from Asian-American groups, the U.S. Department of Justice is suing Yale University for discriminating against applicants based on race.

The suit alleges that Yale violated federal civil rights laws for the last 50 years. The suit also says the university uses an “oversized, standardless, intentional use of race” to favor black and Hispanic students over whites and Asians.

The Hill:

DOJ alleges that Yale University’s practices place “undue and unlawful penalties on racially-disfavored applicants, including in particular most Asian and White applicants,” according to a press release.

“Instead of using race in a narrow, time-limited, and targeted manner to achieve specific and defined educational goals, Yale has institutionalized its use of racial preferences as a permanent feature of its admissions process and decisions,” the complaint said.

There are hundreds of schools that give a wink and a nod in the law’s direction in order to favor black and Hispanic candidates for admissions. They don’t use race as the sole determinant in choosing students, they say. Indeed, as long as their policies conform to the statutes, they believe they’re in the clear.

Pulitzer Board Must Revoke Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Prize Peter Wood

https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/pulitzer-board-must-revoke-nikole-hannah-jones-prize

The National Association of Scholars has agreed to host this public letter to the Pulitzer Prize Board. The letter calls on the Board to rescind the prize it awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones earlier this year. I am one of the 21 signatories.  A hard copy has been mailed to the Pulitzer Committee as well as a digital copy.

—Peter Wood, President, National Association of Scholars

We call on the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the 2020 Prize for Commentary awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones for her lead essay in “The 1619 Project.” That essay was entitled, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.” But it turns out the article itself was false when written, making a large claim that protecting the institution of slavery was a primary motive for the American Revolution, a claim for which there is simply no evidence.

We call on the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the 2020 Prize for Commentary awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones for her lead essay in “The 1619 Project.”

When the Board announced the prize on May 4, 2020, it praised Hannah-Jones for “a sweeping, deeply reported and personal essay for the ground-breaking 1619 Project, which seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America’s story, prompting public conversation about the nation’s founding and evolution.” Note well the last five words. Clearly the award was meant not merely to honor this one isolated essay, but the Project as a whole, with its framing contention that the year 1619, the date when some twenty Africans arrived at Jamestown, ought to be regarded as the nation’s “true founding,” supplanting the long-honored date of July 4, 1776, which marked the emergence of the United States as an independent nation.

Black Law Students Demand Racism ‘Thought Police’ at the University of San Diego They understand the totalitarian power of their “victim” status. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/black-law-students-demand-racism-thought-police-richard-l-cravatts/

In George Orwell’s dystopian view of the totalitarian state in his novel 1984, freedom of speech and expression is controlled completely, and if the individual seeks to articulate his views openly it is considered to be something called “thoughtcrime,” “the essential crime that contained all others in itself.” And in that repressive future, the enforcers of intellectual conformity, using the mandatory relinquishing of individual thought and imagination, were the Thought Police, who forced “the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.”

Now, in an effort to filter out any visible or invisible racism in their law school classrooms, the Black Law Students Association of University of San Diego’s Law School have proposed creating their own version of Orwell’s ThinkPol.

“As Black law students we are privileged with the opportunity to pursue a legal education and seek membership to the legal profession, however, we are not immune to the oppression that is inextricably linked to our Blackness,” the group whined in a six-page letter to USD law school faculty and students in the wake of the George Floyd death. And in order to create a brave new anti-racist world at USD, the BLSA letter presents a long list of specific demands, including the predictable ones which appear regularly in lists of anti-racist demands at other schools, such as: mandatory diversity and inclusion courses, access to complete biographies of law faculty, presumably so students can avoid taking courses from professors with unacceptable views, more scholarships for black students and students of color, and a call to hire more minority professors.

Stripping Jews of their Self-Defense is What the U Illinois at Champagne-Urbana Divestment Vote is About The dark side of the BDS intersectionality agenda. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/stripping-jews-their-self-defense-what-u-illinois-richard-l-cravatts/

Led by the virulent anti-Israel, often anti-Semitic group Students for Justice in Palestine, the student government at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently passed a resolution calling on the university to oppose anti-black racism and also to divest from Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Company, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar Inc. and Elbit Systems Ltd., firms, the activists allege, that are “involved in human-rights violations and violations of international law, including the confiscation and destruction of Palestinian lands, criminalization of immigrants and communities of color, and other human rights violations,” offenses that would “make UIUC complicit in these crimes.”

Although this was the third time in four years the toxic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign has appeared on this campus, this permutation included, predictably, language on anti-black racism and police brutality. In fact, the anti-Israel portion of the resolution was furtively obscured by the language of racial equity, defunding law enforcement, and emptying prisons—even the absurd idea to defund the University’s own police department.

Conflating the alleged oppression of the Palestinians by the IDF with the oppression and racist treatment blacks in the United States purportedly experience at the hands of police officers, the resolution garnered support from those currently energized by the Black Lives Matter movement as well as those anti-Israel campus activists who promiscuously malign, slander, and libel the Jewish state.

The Top Ten America-Hating Professors “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo and cop-hater Joshua Clover made the list. Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/top-ten-america-hating-professors-sara-dogan/

#1: Nicholas De Genova, University of Houston

#2: Joshua Clover, University of California-Davis

#3. Seif Da’na, University of Wisconsin-Parkside

#4: Angela Davis, University of California-Santa Cruz

#5: Robin DiAngelo, University of Washington-Seattle

#6. Ibram X. Kendi, Boston University

#7: Christine Fair, Georgetown University

#8: Cornel West, Princeton University

#9. James M. Thomas, University of Mississippi

#10. Russell Rickford, Cornell University

The ivory tower has long been a refuge for those who hate our country. For decades past, students have been forced to endure scholarly lectures on the evils of American hegemony, imperialist dominance, Western civilization and festering racism. But never before in our history has the very concept of our nation—founded on our inalienable rights to life, liberty and property, equality before the law, freedom of speech, press and association, and control of individual destiny—been so trampled by the institutions that exist to educate our next generation.

Why San Francisco State University Embraced a Failed Hijacker By Lawrence J. Haas

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-san-francisco-state-university-embraced-failed-hijacker-169602

Fifty years ago, a quick-thinking El Al pilot refused the demands of two hijackers to open his cockpit and, instead, sent his plane into a sudden nosedive to knock the hijackers off their feet. After he leveled out the plane, a sky marshal on board fatally shot the male hijacker and arrested the female, who had tried to blow up the plane with a grenade that, fortunately, did not explode.

That female, Leila Khaled, was no stranger to hijackings by then. A prominent member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) – a terrorist group that seeks Israel’s destruction – she was one of two PFLP members who, in 1969, hijacked a plane that had left Rome for Tel Aviv, directing it to Amman, Jordan. The group then blew up the plane but spared the passengers.

Her attempted El Al hijacking came a year later, in September of 1970. Shortly after her arrest for it, she was released in exchange for hostages from other PFLP hijackings of that same day. Now seventy-six, Khaled lives in Amman and sits on the Palestine National Council, a parliamentary body that oversees the Palestine Liberation Organization. She remains unrepentant, insisting she is “a victim of oppression and occupation” and Palestinians have the right to “resist by any means.”

So, why did San Francisco State University give Khaled a platform last week to speak on a webinar entitled, “Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice & Resistance: A Conversation with Leila Khaled.”

College No Place for Free Speech Fans, Rankings Show By J. Peder Zane

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/09/29/college_no_place_for_free_speech_fans_rankings_show_.html

When it comes to protecting free speech, America’s colleges and universities are earning a failing grade. That’s the upshot of a comprehensive new study that asked almost 20,000 students at 55 schools how tolerant and open to controversial ideas their campuses are.

The University of Chicago received the highest score – just 64.2 points out of a total of 100; DePauw University was at the bottom, with 44.2 points. The University of Arkansas, the University of Minnesota, UC-Berkeley and Princeton were bunched in the middle with about 53 points.

Even accounting for grade inflation, that still smells like an F.

The College Free Speech Rankings generated by the survey – which was commissioned by RealClearEducation (RCE) in partnership with The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) – are significant because they offer the first-ever national ranking of free speech based on student perceptions.

RCE and FIRE, which ranked the schools, based  80% percent of each school’s  score on a series of questions that measured two key aspects of free speech: tolerance for allowing controversial speakers on campus and students’ responses when asked how free they feel to hold open conversations about controversial topics such as abortion, transgender rights, and racial justice. The remaining 20% of the score was based on the freedom students feel to express their opinions, their perception of the administration’s support for free speech and FIRE’s rating of each school’s official policies toward free speech.

The Molotov Diploma The radicalization we see in the streets of American cities and the radicalization of American college students may look like two separate things. But they are not. By Peter W. Wood *****

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/26/the-molotov-diploma/

This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at the White House Conference on American History at the National Archives, September 17, 2020.

Just before Halloween in 2015, Erika Christakis, a lecturer at Yale and associate master of one of Yale’s residential colleges, sent an email advising students to “ignore or reject things that trouble you,” rather than throw fits of rage. She was referring to Halloween costumes, which had suddenly become a major issue to supposedly mature Yale students and some Yale deans who had cautioned the students to avoid culturally insensitive garb. Christakis wrote as a specialist in child development and was counseling what most of us would consider common sense.

Yet some students at Yale erupted in overwhelming fury. In a now-famous video, a mob of students surrounded Erika’s husband, Professor Nicholas Christakis, and taunted him for over 30 minutes. Shortly after that, finding themselves lacking any public support from faculty colleagues or the Yale administration, Erika and Nicholas resigned. 

This incident marked a turning point in America’s campus culture. But it was not the only one. Barely a week later, Melissa Click, a professor at the University of Missouri, was caught on video summoning brute force (“We need some muscle over here!”) to prevent a student journalist from photographing a protest in which she was participating. 

Across the country in colleges large and small, a new race-themed grievance movement sprang to life after the August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. That movement had a shallow premise. The officer who shot Brown in self-defense, Darren Wilson, was acquitted, and the stories about Brown having surrendered (“Hands up! Don’t shoot”) were revealed as fabrications. But out of these sparse materials, a group calling itself Black Lives Matter was able to spread its narrative far and wide.