RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/284319/let-them-speak

Several Jewish students at the University of Massachusetts, UMass, have filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts state court seeking to block the school from hosting a May 4 panel that includes Linda Sarsour, Marc Lamont Hill, The Nation sportswriter Dave Zirin, and British singer Roger Waters. The students are right to draw attention to the noxious views of the speakers and the support for anti-Israel extremism within their school’s own administration. But they are wrong, and perhaps dangerously so, to mount a legal case that relies on shutting down speech by equating it to a form of intimidation. That stance not only pits them against the deep, and mainstream, American tradition of defending free expression, but it also legitimates a set of ideas that will be used against Jewish groups who, as a minority on campus, are especially reliant on the First Amendment.

An organization called Not Backing Down had invited the quartet, and two UMass academic departments—Communication, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies—found the Sarsour-Hill-Waters message significant enough to co-sponsor the event.

News of the panel has generated widespread condemnation from local and national Jewish organizations. The ADL’s regional director, for instance, wrote to the UMass chancellor to express concerns about the program “featuring speakers who engage in rhetoric that demonizes the State of Israel and seeks to marginalize its supporters,” raising “significant consternation among Jewish students and many others on campus and in the community.” Dozens of pro-Israel organizations added their concerns, though they made clear they were “not asking that this event be shut down.”

https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch/58387/sharia-truth-and-the-progressive-m

As a “Muslim feminist scholar,” Williams College Assistant Professor of Religion Saadia Yacoob has a “very complicated relationship” with her Islamic faith, as her Duke University dissertation explains. This research, the basis for an April 3 presentation at Georgetown University’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), reveals the chasm between her “progressivism” and historic Islamic orthodoxy.

The leftist Jewish publication The Forward wrote over 15 years ago that Yacoob is a founder of the Progressive Muslims Network, whose members “appear to be working toward a new Islam.” She was a “heterosexual ally of Al-Fatiha,” a now defunct “national organization of gay Muslims.” Recently she has helped found the Feminist Islamic Troublemakers of North America (FITNA).

These biographical facts reflect the personal faith conflicts of Yacoob, a Pakistani-born woman who grew up in America, as noted in her dissertation:

As a Muslim woman raised in a devout and religious family that cultivated in me the love for my religious heritage as well as independence and confidence as a woman, I found certain aspects of that tradition oppressive as a woman, creating a sense of alienation.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273637/epidemic-jew-hatred-campus-top-ten-neo-nazi-sara-dogan

Editor’s note: The following report documents horrifying instances of anti-Semitism on ten prestigious American campuses and exposes the pivotal role that the Hamas-funded Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel plays in provoking these hate crimes. In a stealth campaign conducted on Monday, 1000 copies of a printed newspaper containing this report were distributed to public locations on the UCLA campus, one of the schools named in the report. The newspapers also contained a poster highlighting the links between the BDS movement and Adolf Hitler’s “final solution.”

A fast and rapidly growing epidemic of global anti-Semitism is now threatening Jews worldwide. Many discount incidents of Jew hatred and neo-Nazi rhetoric as the actions of a fringe minority, or mistakenly believe it is a problem endemic to conservatism, rather than a facet of the radical Left.  The blatantly anti-Semitic statements of recently elected congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and the leaders of the Women’s March—and the Democratic Party’s failure to strongly disclaim them—prove that Jew Hatred has become part of mainstream Leftist dogma.

Our nation’s campuses, dens of radical politics that they are, have long been a precursor to this wider epidemic. Now that Jew Hatred has become mainstream, neo-Nazi incidents on campus have only grown in their violence and magnitude, as the campus adherents of Adolf Hitler become increasingly emboldened by their success at infusing Jew hatred into the national conversation.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/04/29/qatars-propaganda-efforts-find-allies-at-georgetown-university/

Qatar’s Foreign Affairs Ministry spokeswoman Lolwah Rashid Al-Khater used intellectual relativism to assuage fears of Islamic absolutism while speaking last month at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS). “There are always narratives and counter-narratives” and “multiple versions of the truth. That’s why we have different religions,” she proclaimed, in a clever bid to mask Qatar’s role as a Muslim Brotherhood (MB) bastion.

Packed into a conference room, the mostly student audience of about 50 people included John Duke Anthony, the Hamas-apologist founder of the National Council on US-Arab Relations, and Yahya Hendi, a Georgetown Muslim chaplain and former CCAS professor. CCAS Director Rochelle Davis, who supports an academic boycott of Israel, introduced Al-Khater’s lecture on “Defining the Narrative: Media and Politics in the Middle East.” Davis pointed out that Al-Khater is a board member at the Institute for Palestine Studies, an anti-Israel outfit based in Washington, DC.

Al-Khater’s talk resembled a Western academic’s analysis of the modern media — a sad commentary on contemporary academia. Discussing the “public sphere” theories of German sociologist Jürgen Habermas, she noted that modern technology, such as smartphones, allows for “excessive access to information” and means that “all of us can be producers of knowledge.” But “who verifies; who does the fact-checking?” she asked, although she warned not to make combating “hate speech” a trade-off between preserving free speech and fighting prejudice.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-charter-school-principal-wont-go-to-prison-11556663629

When Ben Chavis became principal of the American Indian Public Charter School in 2000, it was among the worst middle schools in Oakland, Calif. The building was a mess. There were broken windows and holes in the walls. The gymnasium was carpeted and cluttered with garbage, while food wrappers, cigarette butts and empty beer bottles lined the curb outside.

Truancy was rampant at AIPCS, and the students who did show up spent more time in the corridors than in class. They had sex in the bathrooms and underneath stairwells and got high in a nearby toolshed. Fights broke out regularly, and it wasn’t uncommon for students to sneak out of school midday and then return to class drunk.

AIPCS was founded in 1996 with the goal of promoting Native American culture and improving the academic performance of American Indians, who had the highest dropout rate and lowest attendance and graduation rates of any ethnic group in the city. But as Mr. Chavis explains in his 2009 memoir, “Crazy Like a Fox,” by 2000 it was clear that the school was “a failed social experiment in multiculturalism and touchy-feely educational practices.”

https://quillette.com/2019/04/28/like-the-campus-thought-police/

Smith College police chief Daniel Hect was put on administrative leave after becoming an object of campus hate. Chief Hect’s crime was ‘liking’ (not writing) tweets that fall outside of academia’s ever shrinking zone of toleration. Behold the offending tweets:

“Stay the course Pres. Trump”

“BUILD THAT WALL!!”

“The National Rifle Association wishes you and your family a very Merry Christmas!”

The tweets express opinions that most Trump voters would likely support. And the chief stands accused not of originating these tweets, but of merely liking them on his own personal Twitter account. If you are not familiar with Twitter, know that liking doesn’t always imply support.

The official reason given for Chief Hect’s suspension was, as Smith’s President wrote, because “members of our campus community have voiced a lack of trust” in him. Given the protests, “lack of trust” is quite the understatement. Interpreted in the most favorable light, the students might be worried about the chief’s views on immigration.

Smith College is devoted to the spirit of the sanctuary campus movement within “the limits of federal law” meaning that if anyone in the Smith community determines that a student is in the U.S. illegally we should not tell the immigration authorities unless required to by law.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/30/depaul-students-demand-professors-censure-as-racist-for-supporting-israel-in-the-federalist/

Campus administrators are trying to calm down students after a week of outrage over DePaul University professor Jason Hill writing in The Federalist to support Israel’s right to create defensible borders and repel Islamist attempts at genocide.

“Jason Hill, you can’t hide, we know you want genocide!” shouted students throwing papers over bannisters during a protest last week. The protesting students demanded that the university formally censure Hill, require him to take “racial sensitivity training,” and him to publicly apologize for writing that Israel has a “moral right” to annex the West Bank because it is territory it won during a war initiated by enemies who believe Israel and Israelis should be wiped from the earth.

Several student groups have denounced Hill’s praise for Jewish and Western civilization’s achievements as “racist, anti-Palestinian, xenophobic, sexist and Islamophobic,” characterizing his criticisms of Sharia law as “uncivilized,” “barbaric,” and “primitive.” More than 3,000 have signed an online petition denouncing him.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/segregation-by-design-on-campus-11556564318

Mr. Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars. Mr. Pierre is a research associate at the association and primary author of its new report, “Separate But Equal, Again: Neo-Segregation in Higher Education.”

In his inaugural address in January 1963, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama thundered: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.” About “tomorrow,” Wallace was right. More than half a century later, racial segregation comes as easy as breathing to many American colleges and universities.

Wallace had in mind the exclusion of blacks from white-only institutions. Today’s racial segregation, by contrast, consists of ethnic groups walling themselves off within institutions. In the past two years the National Association of Scholars surveyed 173 colleges and universities, public and private, in all 50 states. We found 46% of schools segregate student orientation programs, 43% segregate residential arrangements, and 72% segregate graduation ceremonies. Though these arrangements are ostensibly voluntary, students can’t easily opt out. The social pressure to conform is overwhelming.

This kind of racial separatism on campus isn’t new. We pursued case studies of Yale, Wesleyan and Brown universities, where we found that black students began to organize exclusive groups with separatist agendas as early as the 1960s.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/matt-fridys-alabama-campus-free-speech-act/

Alabama state representative Matt Friday has just introduced HB498, the Alabama Campus Free Speech Act, into the Alabama State House. Fridy is a lawyer who specializes in constitutional law, and is a strong and effective conservative voice in the Alabama State Legislature. His bill draws on model campus free-speech legislation published by Arizona’s Goldwater Institute. (Along with Jim Manley and Jonathan Butcher, I co-authored that model.) This means that in addition to barring restrictive speech codes and so-called free-speech zones, Fridy’s bill also covers discipline for shout-downs and establishes an effective oversight system as well.
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Although it’s sometimes argued that the campus free speech crisis affects only deep-dyed blue states like California and Massachusetts, the problem is national. An Alabama university currently holds the dubious honor of being FIRE’s Speech Code of the Month award winner. And while it was not a full-on shout-down, the recent heckling of CIA director Gina Haspel at Auburn University is a reminder that more serious speaker disruptions could easily occur down the road. It’s only prudent to prepare for that eventuality. There have been other free speech problems at Alabama universities as well, so protection against such abuses is clearly called for.