RUTHFULLY YOURS

Two graduate students and two undergraduates recalled personally experiencing the July 15, 2016 coup attempt against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government at a December 7, 2016, Georgetown University panel, before a youthful audience of about fifty. As crews from Turkey’s TRT Haber television network and Anadolu Agency (AA) filmed/recorded, the panelists praised the coup’s popular foiling as a democratic victory, irrespective of Erdogan’s dangerous Islamist policies.

Such willful blindness mirrors that of other American-educated Middle East studies scholars whose actions and pronouncements lend a veneer of legitimacy to Erdogan’s dictatorial policies, including mass purges and arrests of academics and teachers throughout Turkey. Erdogan’s personal spokesman is Ibrahim Kalin, a George Washington University Ph.D. who serves as a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. He joined Juan Cole of Michigan, Cemil Aydin of UNC Chapel Hill (Harvard Ph.D.) at an October 2016 conference in Istanbul even as innocent educators languished in prison or faced academic ruin.

Islamism certainly colored the experiences of the panel’s two graduate students, Harvard University Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations doctoral student Rushain Abbasi and his wife Safia Latif, who were in Istanbul during the attempted coup. Abbasi is a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB)-affiliated Muslim Students Association and a former teacher at the Boston Islamic Seminary, an affiliate of another MB group, the Muslim American Society. His previous writing stereotypically attributed Islamist violence to the “histories of colonialism, imperialism, and economic exploitation that still plague the non-Western world,” maintaining, “[i]t is not the texts of Islam . . . that are in need of reform.”

Latif, a Boston University doctoral student in religious studies who earned an M.A. in Middle East studies from the University of Texas, was like-minded. She previously participated in a conference chaired by the notorious Islamist and UC-Berkeley lecturer Hatem Bazian at California’s Zaytuna College. Having witnessed Egyptians in 2013 overthrowing the Muslim Brotherhood-led government of President Mohamed Morsi, she despaired of the same thing happening in Turkey. “To see another democratically elected government with an ostensible Islamist president fall was almost too much to bear. My first reaction was a religious one; I took to the prayer mat and I began praying for the Turkish people.”

As Inauguration Day nears, “Post-Traumatic Trump Disorder” is ubiquitous. Many of the president-elect’s supporters “suffer” from excessive jubilance, bordering on ecstasy, while many of his detractors are wallowing in angst, panic, and rage, and the latter, PTTD group is making life miserable for children across the country. Los Angeles may be ground zero for the disorder.

The United Teachers of Los Angeles — or, more aptly, the United Trump-Loathers Association — led by its radical, agenda-driven president, Alex Caputo-Pearl, is planning a major demonstration before school on January 19, the day before the new president is sworn in. The demonstrators are being instructed to launch a tweetstorm to Trump (#schooltrump) and hold symbolic shields at school sites, to show that “educators are united with our students and our communities against Trump’s racially charged and anti-immigrant proposals and that we will continue to fight attempts to privatize public education.” The union is urging the public to join “tens of thousands of students, parents, educators, school staff, and community members . . . to shield our public schools from the Trump/DeVos/Broad agenda.” (Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick for education secretary, is a voucher proponent, while billionaire Eli Broad has donated millions to charter schools. Union involvement in both private and charter schools is minimal.)

Nothing like an early-morning dose of union-led political indoctrination for the kids to digest along with their Froot Loops.

Actually, the early-morning festivities on the 19th are just a kick-off for what Caputo-Pearl sees as a two-year offensive. (“Offensive” in both senses of the word.) The issues that are paramount to the union boss are “green spaces on a campus” and “a plan to achieve strike readiness by February 2018,” as well as fighting charter co-location (in which charter schools occupy space in public-school buildings) and getting union-friendly school-board members elected in March of this year.

The pre–Inauguration Day merrymaking is not limited to Los Angeles, or even California. The Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, a national network composed mostly of teachers’ unions and groups they fund, is planning a “National Day of Action” on the 19th. AROS insists that the “best way to ensure each and every child has the opportunity to pursue a rich and productive life is through a system of publicly funded, equitable and democratically controlled public schools.” In fact, one of their demands is “billions of dollars for public schools in black and brown communities.” I guess the $670 billion we currently spend nationally on “democratically controlled public schools” isn’t enough for the AROS crowd.

As the teachers’ union goes off the deep end, how have Los Angeles Unified School District officials responded to Trump’s election? Clearly suffering from advanced PTTD, the school board also is in a state of sheer panic. The mandarins who rule over the massive school district have set up a hotline to deal with students’ concerns, which, of course, have been exacerbated by the education establishment’s regnant hysteria. While Trump has indeed made some questionable comments about immigration, certain educators and a compliant mainstream media have blown things way out of proportion and worried many children needlessly. So school-board members should not be the ones counseling frightened children; let their parents do that, please.

The school-board members also spent time at a recent meeting passing resolutions as a hedge against actions that they expect the Trump administration to carry out. Consulting “social-emotional learning experts” and declaring its schools “safe zones” are of paramount importance to the board these days. Actually, if anyone needs a “safe zone” at this time, it’s students who dare to wear “Make America Great Again” hats.

Maybe instead of playing psychologist and engaging in dubious policymaking, the school board should focus on its mandate, which is to educate children and, at the same time, be judicious in spending taxpayers’ money.

As for the education component, LAUSD, not to put too fine a point on it, is doing a rotten job. While California students did not fare well on the recent standardized tests, L.A. kids’ scores were in the toilet. In fact, 56 percent of the district’s 85 ranked middle schools were assigned the lowest overall ranking of 1, based on the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, a test taken by students this past spring. The “good news” is that just 20 percent of the district’s elementary schools received the lowest rank, as did 31 percent of its high schools. (The latter number would be higher, but many poor-performing eleventh-graders drop out of school before the test is given.)

Fiscally, LAUSD is also failing. As explained in LA School Report earlier this month, the district may not be able to meet its financial obligations in the future because it faces a cumulative deficit of $1.46 billion through the 2018–19 school year. But LAUSD chief financial officer Megan Reilly, maintaining a smiley face, assures us that with just the right combination of smoke and mirrors, the district may be able to winnow the deficit down to a mere $252 million. Don’t bet the mortgage on that, however.

The University of Maryland has a new lecture series coming up that makes the claim that Donald Trump won the White House not because his policies spoke to people better, or that his strategy understood the Electoral College better than Hillary Clinton’s did, or that he was running against an arrogant, corrupt, and dismissive candidate. No, the series seeks to illustrate that Donald Trump won because of racism.

I can’t make this crap up, folks:

The University of Maryland is hosting a series of post-election lectures on how a “commitment to white supremacy” fueled the Trump train, blaming “white America’s spiritual depravity” for his unexpected victory.

One talk scheduled for the February 13 “Understanding Race and Class in the 2016 Election” event, set to be delivered by Professor Paula Ioanide from Ithaca College, will apparently discuss the “spiritual degradation of white America in the age of Trump,” during which Ioanide will elaborate on the “spiritual depravity, deadening, and social alienation” of America’s working class.
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“I argue that these collective symptoms are fundamentally rooted in white Americans’ investments in gendered racism, which teaches whites not only to deaden themselves to the suffering of others but to their own humanity,” her abstract for the lecture notes, suggesting that “white America will either reckon with and remedy its collective spiritual degradation, or the chickens will come home to roost.”

Sigh.

She couldn’t give Trump better advertising if he was paying her. Sure looks like something is coming home to roost.

A primary problem with this line of thinking is that it doesn’t require those who buy into it to actually listen to their opponents. Those who stand against the leftist forces at work in this country offer arguments regarding the Constitution, economics, and individual liberty, yet those who think like this just scream racism, cutting themselves off from reality and making dialogue impossible.

The “civic engagement” movement has taken over American college-level civics education and turned it into progressive political training, concludes a new report by the National Association of Scholars (NAS).

NAS’s major new study, Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics, documents how the term “civic” has been stolen by left-wing activists who smuggle their agenda into colleges under the pretext of wholesome teaching.

These activists’ version of civics—the New Civics—trains students to be protesters instead of teaching them the foundations of government—the Old Civics.

Making Citizens documents how this came to be. It also provides four case studies: University of Colorado, Boulder; Colorado State University; University of Northern Colorado; and University of Wyoming.

The National Association of Scholars has researched the New Civics since 2012, when the Department of Education under President Obama called on all colleges and universities to make “civic learning” a “pervasive” priority.

“The devil is in the details,” said NAS president Peter Wood. “Now ‘civic learning’ doesn’t mean what you would expect – straightforward things such as understanding the Bill of Rights, the three branches of government, and the Electoral College. Instead, this New Civics is all about ‘diversity,’ environmentalism, the LGBT movement, ‘global’ citizenship, and other liberal causes.”

David Randall, NAS director of communications and author of the report, said, “Civic engagement diverts at least $40 billion a year and 1.5 million hours of student labor toward progressive organizations. In the meantime, colleges are failing to teach students how their government actually works.”

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is starting its six-week “Men’s Project,” a program designed to brainwash young men to not act like men because men are awful:

“The program operates on a transformative model of social justice allyship,” explains a news release from UW-Madison. “First, facilitators ask students to consider how the students’ opinions about masculinity affect their own perceptions every day. Second, they consider how those opinions affect the people around them.”

One goal of the project, said Sam Johnson, a violence prevention specialist at the University Health Services, is to “prevent future violence” by analyzing “unhealthy interactions” caused by traditional perceptions of masculinity and their role in gender-based violence, alcohol, and relationships.

The Men’s Project, which is in its second year of operation, begins with a weekend retreat and then continues with six weekly meetings lasting two hours each.

According to past participants of the program, the Project helped them become more vulnerable and make masculinity a “choice” rather than the default option.

Wait — if being masculine is simply making a bad “choice,” then won’t women who make the choice to put motherhood ahead of career also get blasted for not stepping in line with modern feminist thought?
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Yup.

In reality, virtually all men — because of their masculinity — are both disgusted by the abuse of women and feel duty-bound to put themselves in physical risk to stop it when they see it.

Both of these nasty ideas about how men and women must behave spawn from modern feminism, which seems to want no less than total control over how other people live their lives. Imagine the outrage if a university men’s movement tried to shame women for being “too feminine.”

To make life more confusing for the men who have gone down the vulnerability path this program recommends, they later find themselves being “shamed” by the women in their life for having done so. A number of women actually want strong, masculine men, not the whiny beta males the University of Wisconsin-Madison seems determined to crank out. CONTINUE AT SITE