RUTHFULLY YOURS

Rashid Khalidi is unapologetic. The longtime Columbia University professor last month said repeatedly that supporters of Israel would “infest” the Trump administration — language that evokes the imagery and metaphors of the Nazis. But for all the on-campus sensitivity seminars and trigger warnings that dominate our age, don’t expect an apology in this case. Apparently, no language, even if it is dehumanizing and deeply rooted in historic anti-Semitism, is out of line in condemning Israel.

Professor Khalidi is well known as Columbia University’s professor of modern Arab studies. January 17, in a lengthy radio interview on WBEZ Chicago’s “Worldview,” Khalidi warned that this infestation would begin under the new president. Describing Israel supporters in terms that evoke vermin was not a momentary lapse or slip of the tongue. He used “infest” three times, saying “these people infest” the Trump transition team and will soon “infest” the government.

Who are “these people?” In his view, they’re a bit crazy but also scheming. Khalidi explains:

There are a group of people, a lot of them in Israel and some of them in the United States, who live in a world of their own. That is to say, they think that whatever they want, and whatever cockamamie schemes they can cook up, can be substituted for reality.

Free speech is a blessed thing, and hypersensitivity to offensive language is a curse on college campuses. I have no desire to stifle discussion, but it’s fair to ask: What’s become of “reasonable people can differ”? What’s become of civil discourse? What’s become of the golden rule? One has to suppose that Khalidi would take offense if someone analogized Palestinians, rather than Jews, to rats or cockroaches.

His remarks may not be the ugliest comment along these lines that ever emerged from the Middle East–studies faculty at Columbia. Professor Hamid Dabashi once described the soul of an Israeli Jew as containing a “vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture.” But the “infestation” theme is nasty enough to warrant special notice.

What makes it especially nasty is its historical resonance. To be sure, not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism and not all anti-Semitism is Nazism. But there’s no getting around the fact that in his memoir, Mein Kampf, Hitler over and over again described the Jews as an infestation of vermin. That was one of the book’s main metaphors. And that’s why Nazi officials made a point of saying their Jewish policy aimed not to “kill” but to “exterminate” (vernichten), a word more appropriate for bugs or lice than human beings.

Two Rhode Island School of Design students were kicked out of Brown University’s gym for wearing midriff-baring gear, and now they’re insisting that the dress code is sexist — even though the rules are exactly the same for men as they are for women.

RISD student Elizabeth Dimitroff claims that she was told to either cover herself or leave while she was working out at Brown’s Nelson Fitness Center in a “sports bra with high-waisted leggings” last spring, according to the Brown Daily Herald. And another RISD student, Chloe Karayiannis, said that an employee at the gym told her that her bare stomach might make other people at the gym uncomfortable while she was working out there over winter break.

The Herald reports that although both women consider the policy to be “sexist and discriminatory towards women,” school officials have insisted that that’s not the case. In fact, Nelson Fitness Center manager Jason Bishoff told the publication that if an employee really did tell Karayiannis that the reason she had to cover up was to avoid making other people uncomfortable, then that employee simply did not understand the real reason for the rule — which he said is “to reduce skin contact with workout equipment.”

“We don’t want anybody to feel that this is targeted at them,” Bishoff said. “These rules apply to all genders, all ages, all populations.”

That’s right: According to Bishoff, the reason behind the rules is not to maximize the power of the patriarchy, but to minimize the amount of sweaty, germ-covered skin that will be touching the equipment. Still, both Dimitroff and Karayiannis insist that — gender-neutral or not — the rules are clearly rooted in a misogynistic desire to police women’s bodies

Dimitroff told the Herald that the policy “place[s] the blame on women and the way women dress,” and “blames women for something that men need to change about how they view women’s bodies.” And Karayiannis said that “it doesn’t matter whether or not it applies to men as well because it’s sending the message that what I’m wearing is not respectable and associates what I’m wearing with respect.”

But here’s the thing, Karayiannis — it actually does matter “whether or not it applies to men as well.” The definition of “discriminatory” is “making or showing an unfair or prejudicial distinction between different categories of people,” therefore, a policy that shows no distinction between categories would not qualify. In fact, it would be the opposite.

Last year Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos launched his “Dangerous Faggot Tour” on campuses across the United States. As it turned out, the tour did prove dangerous for Yiannopoulos and all supporters of free speech.

At Rutgers, where Yiannopoulos titled his lecture “How the Progressive Left Is Destroying American Education,” protesters smeared themselves with fake blood. “What they’ve demonstrated,” Yiannopoulos said, “is that they are incapable of being exposed to new ideas.”

At DePaul University, Black Lives Matter literally took over the event. Enraged activists harassed Yiannopoulos on stage and chanting “black lives matter,” “dump that Trump” and “build a wall.”

South Florida Gay News reported that “Florida Atlantic University is too dangerous for a ‘dangerous faggot.’” Student organizers “threatened to bring firearms to the talk or blow up the venue. Threats were also made to FAU students.” So Yiannopoulos was unable to deliver his speech about “How Feminism Hurts Women.”

Protesters issued similar threats at many colleges and the violence mounted a surge when Yiannopoulos brought his tour to California campuses. Those have long served as a sanctuary for political correctness, with official approval.

University of California President Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, is former Arizona Governor and Obama’s Department of Homeland Security boss. Napolitano considers statements such as “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” to be unacceptable “microagressions.” In that climate, UC students don’t want to hear different points of view from allegedly “controversial” speakers.

Under the politically correct regime, the default position is that such speakers should not be heard at all. So no surprise that soi disant progressives would deploy mindless violence against Yiannopoulos, who is on record that the campus “rape culture” is a myth. He is also critical of Islam, and the University of California maintains a Center for Race and Gender that includes “Islamophobia Studies.”

When the dangerous faggot tour showed up at UCLA, protesters blocked both entrances and taped up banners reading “Bruins Against Hate.” Other students duct-taped their mouths shut and paraded around with feminist signs. Inside protesters chanted “Build that wall.” As Ari Lieberman noted, radicals clashed with the police and a bomb threat forced evacuation of the building.

Undaunted, Milo Yiannopoulos continued the tour north to the University of California at Davis. Before he showed up, the Sacramento Bee called him and former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli, “two of the past year’s most divisive public figures.” Yiannopolous was identified as “gay” and aligned with “the ultra-conservative ‘alt-right’ movement.” He was on a “crusade” against “social justice warriors” and “has already ignited violent protests on multiple college campuses.” Actually, as across the nation, it was the leftist protesters who ignited the violence.

According to a Washington Post report, protesters threatened the lives of police and students alike, and menaced UC Davis property as well. Protesters shrouded their faces in bandanas and yelled “Get the fuck out of here! Stay the fuck out!” and even “You faggots!” Another yelled “Get these fascists out of here.”

The event did not come off, but Yiannopolous denied reports that the campus Republicans had made the call. As the videos confirm, the old-line establishment media failed to convey the extent of the violence.

Campus Republicans also invited Yiannopoulos to the University of Washington, the last stop on the Dangerous Faggot Tour. On January 20, inauguration day for president Donald Trump, the UW campus hosted the tour’s most bizarre event.

“One man was shot and wounded, several people were hit with paint and officers avoided flying bricks” the Seattle Times reported on January 20, when “Breitbart News editor and provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos addressed a crowd.” An unnamed shooter reportedly turned himself in and the victim was initially unidentified.

The election of Donald J. Trump to the office of the Presidency of the United States came as a body blow to leftists. Actually, such was their arrogance—their certitude that their candidate couldn’t lose—that President Trump’s victory hit them more like a sucker punch.

Students and their professors at colleges and universities from around the country participated in “cry-ins,” entered “safe spaces,” cancelled classes and examinations, and organized demonstrations.

While the rest of the country looked incredulously upon this spectacle of presumably educated adults protesting the legitimate election of America’s 45th President, those of us who know a thing or two about the contemporary academic world were not in the least surprised by it.

And those academics who belong to the National Association of Scholars (NAS) know more than most.

The NAS recently released a report on the latest wave of anti-intellectualism to sweep the world of “higher education.” In “Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics,” the NAS explains what it refers to as “the New Civics.” The latter “redefines civics as progressive political activism.”

While the New Civics styles itself “as an up-to-date version of volunteerism and good works,” the reality is that it stems from “the radical program of the 1960’s New Left [.]” Its “soft rhetoric” is designed to conceal its architects’ ultimate goals. First, they want to “repurpose higher education.” Secondly, adherents of the New Left want nothing more than to make students into joint enterprisers in “‘fundamentally transforming’ America.”

This dream of fundamental transformation that the left wants for students to make into a reality is fairly comprehensive. For starters, it involves “de-carbonizing the economy [.]” Yet it also involves “massively redistributing wealth, intensifying identity group grievance, curtailing the free market, expanding government bureaucracy, elevating international ‘norms’ over American Constitutional law, and disparaging our common history and ideals.”

Although leftist academics disagree amongst themselves as to how to prioritize the items on this agenda, they are of one mind that “America must be transformed by ‘systemic change’ from an unjust, oppressive society to a society that embodies social justice.”

The NAS report discloses how the New Civics plans to achieve its goals. It “hopes to accomplish” all of “this by teaching students that a good citizen is a radical activist….”

The New Civics “puts political activism at the center of everything that students do in college, including academic study, extra-curricular pursuits, and off-campus ventures.”

Flyers have popped up around the University of Kansas campus warning students that “neo-nazis and hate groups will use coded language to avoid being called what they are” — and that “Make America Great Again” is an example of this language.

The flyers, which were obtained by Campus Reform, allege that “there has been a disturbing presence of neo-nazi and hate group recruitment taking place on campus.”

“Given the violent and dangerous nature of groups such as this, it’s imperative that we do not allow their presence to become normative,” the flyer states.

The flyer also encourages students to photograph, “remove,” and report any materials that they see from one of these “hate” groups around campus.

Now, I’m not ignorant of the fact that some of the people who voted for Trump did do so because they’re racist, but that doesn’t represent all of the people who did — or even most of them. Some did it because they’re pro-life. Some people did it because they felt that workers in the manufacturing sector have been ignored. All kinds of people voted for Donald Trump for all kinds of reasons, and to spread the idea that when you hear someone say “Make America Great Again,” they’re really saying “Pssssst! I’m a Nazi!” is completely insane.

What’s more, the content of these flyers actually works against what the people who posted them are trying to accomplish. First of all, absurd, haphazard “Nazi!” accusations only distract from the very real examples of racism and intolerance that do exist in our society. Second, a lot of people who voted for Trump did so because they were sick of an overly “PC” culture, sick of seeing people hurl accusations of racism and sexism at others over every little thing — and the kind of stuff that’s on these flyers will only encourage them to vote for him again.

According to Campus Reform, it’s not clear who is responsible for posting the flyers.