RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Aren’t you tired of writing your stupid articles?”

I recall Georgetown University’s Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization, Jonathan A. C. Brown, saying that to me on February 7 at Herndon, Virginia’s International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). Brown’s brief angry remarks quickly led to my expulsion from his imminent lecture, “Islam and the Problem of Slavery”: an indication of how he and his fellow Islamism apologists handle opposing views.

I had entered IIIT’s conference room in a small office complex anxious to hear Brown, the director of Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU). Shortly before the lecture’s evening beginning, he and IIIT Director of Research and Academic Programs Ermin Sinanovićwere preparing at a speaker’s podium before empty chair rows while two veiled IIIT assistants readied for the lecture. After I had taken a seat in the back row, Brown became visibly irritated upon noticing this writer, who has covered his previous appearances.

Before reiterating his previously tweeted disgust at my “stupid” articles, Brown began by asking if I intended to enjoy the IIIT’s food, after my appetite had impressed him at several Georgetown events (the IIIT lecture offered no refreshments). He then mused whether he should photograph me while visiting an Islamist, Muslim Brotherhood (MB)-affiliated institution, observations that most certainly came to him from my reporting on a previous IIIT lecture hosted by Sinanović. Brown then indicated a willingness to speak before most anyone, but felt incensed by my presence at IIIT after my having supposedly “insulted” this institution, whereupon Sinanović asked me to leave.

Given Brown’s background, I was particularly interested in hearing him address the contentious topics of Islam and slavery. A Washington, DC, area native, Brown, like me, is from an Anglican background, but converted to Islam under the strong influence of a Muslim professor his freshman year at Georgetown, as he explained in a2010 interview. She impressed him with “things that I had believed my whole life; the nature of God, the idea of reason, the idea that reason and religion are supposed to be compatible, religion should enhance your life, not make it difficult and not make you suffer.”

Brown’s admiration for Islam’s prophet Muhammad, who “was both idealistic and effective,” is puzzling to many non-Muslims. He

was the best person in every situation….Jesus is always kind and forgiving. But sometimes you can’t be forgiving. You shouldn’t be; sometimes you have to soft and sweet and sometimes you have to be direct and harsh; sometimes you have to be patient and at other times you have to act quickly. There isn’t always one rule that you can apply to your life that will tell you how to act. You have to be able to read the situation and act in the best way. The Prophet knew how to do that; that is inspirational.

What passes for education at many American public schools is too often closer to indoctrination. Consider the seminar day that New Trier High School, in Winnetka, Ill., on Chicago’s affluent North Shore, is planning for Feb. 28.

The title for the all-school seminar is “Understanding Today’s Struggle for Racial Civil Rights.” That very term, “racial civil rights,” is misleading, since civil rights protect Americans’ freedoms regardless of their race. Judging from the roster of scheduled events, the seminar might be more accurately titled “Inculcating a Progressive View of Social Justice.”

Here are a few of the offerings scheduled for presentation to New Trier’s roughly 4,000 students: “SPENT: A Simulation to See How Long You Can Survive on Minimum Wage”—which touches on race at best tangentially. “Developing a Positive, Accountable White Activism for Racial Civil Rights”—which promotes a divisive view of race as a primordial fact, the essence of identity, a bright line between oppressed and oppressor. “One Person One Vote: Can the Voting Rights Act Be Saved?”—which absurdly suggests that the Voting Rights Act is at risk of being repealed.

There are plenty of sessions on the connections that music, art and culture have with civil rights. Very little programming, however, is devoted to actually explaining to students what civil rights are and what their place is in this country’s political tradition.

Yet the continuing quest to fulfill America’s founding promise is unintelligible without a grasp of how civil rights are grounded in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Or without an understanding of the often-heroic struggle for civil rights over the course of American history—the abolition movement, the Civil War, the great Reconstruction constitutional amendments, the grievous setback of Jim Crow, the modern civil-rights movement, the landmark Supreme Court cases like Brown v. Board of Education.

Instead of teaching, the school’s aim seems to be hammering home to students that racism plagues America and will persist until white people admit their unjust privilege, renounce their unearned power, and make amends for the entrenched oppression from which they continue to profit handsomely. This despite the school board’s written policy to provide a “balanced view” on “controversial issues,” and the seminar’s stated purpose “not to promote the philosophy of one political party or another.”

On Monday a group of concerned New Trier parents will make a final attempt to persuade the school board to alter the seminar’s programming to include a diversity of views about race and rights in America. The parents have proposed, for example, inviting black conservative intellectuals—such as my Hoover Institution colleague Shelby Steele and this newspaper’s Jason Riley—or people like Pastor Corey Brooks, the director of Project Hood, which seeks to end violence and build communities on Chicago’s South Side. CONTINUE AT SITE

An elite Upper East Side private school’s annual ice-skating party at Trump Wollman Rink in Central Park had to be canceled after parents refused to send their kids in protest of the president, sources said.

The Parents Association at The Dalton School sent a letter Thursday announcing the “Dalton on Ice” event was scrapped, saying “it would not be financially prudent” because of “significantly lower attendance.”

Dalton’s PA president, LaMae DeJongh, declined to comment — but sources said the low attendance was due to rampant anti-Trump sentiment at the elite prep school, which boasts alumni such as CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

“I think it is completely insane,” said one Dalton parent who disagrees with the protest. “Like him or not, it feels like a strange place for New Yorkers to protest. And sad that kids now have no skating party.”

Trump renovated the rink in 1986 after the city fumbled the job for six years.

Another Dalton parent said a clique of Upper East Side “liberal moms” upset with Trump pressured the headmaster to call off the event, a source said.

Trump Wollman Rink had no immediate comment, and Headmaster ­Ellen Stein could not be reached for comment.

He arrived at the party wearing a blazer over a black T-shirt. He sported one of those fancy, new-age haircuts and wore jeans that revealed nearly half his legs. I instantly knew what I was looking at, a campus archetype more than an individual: The ripped-jeans revolutionary.

His name was Sam, and as I soon discovered, Sam was a Communist — a Maoist, he quickly added, presumably worried that I might mistake him for one of those sellout Trotskyists. At 18 years of age, studying English at Stanford University, Sam wanted to assure me that he was on the Right Side of History.

I had encountered leftists like Sam before — there are usually one or two in every large humanities class — so I knew how to proceed. Let him talk and keep a running mental tab of his most hilarious quotes.

“You can’t deny the industrial achievements of the USSR,” he remarked. Or better, name-dropping three philosophers in one sentence: “Zizek, though he understood Hegel much better than he understood Lacan, makes a good point.” There was the curious: “Doesn’t Judaism make so much more sense without God?” And my personal favorite: “Do you really think our wage-slavery is any better?”

Ah yes, I had forgotten: Who are we to judge the Soviet gulag system?

One is tempted to shake such people, like an old television that has stopped working. It might bring him to his senses. But there is no need. Does this teenager really have a thoughtful objection to Zizek’s reading of Lacan? Does he have the requisite knowledge to assure me, as he did, that “everything would have been fine” if Lenin had lived a little longer? Of course not. He probably just gets a thrill from the shocked looks he generates upon informing his peers that “Bernie would have won if he wasn’t so moderate.”

Roll your eyes and move on.