RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://worldisraelnews.com/california-university-offers-extra-credit-for-marching-against-israel

Controversy erupted when a teacher at UC Berkeley offered her students extra credit for participating in anti-Israel activities in support of terrorist-run Gaza.

The University of California Berkeley is under fire after the school approved an instructor’s plan to offer extra credit to students who participate in an anti-Israel march or watch an anti-Israel documentary.

Graduate student Victoria Huynh, who is pursuing her Ph.D. in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, sent an email to students enrolled in her course, “Asian American Communities and Race Relations,” about the anti-Israel extra-credit options.

The email promoted an event called the “National walkout against genocide, settler-colonialism, and the siege of Gaza,” and informed students that they had the option to participate in the national student walkout or watch a short documentary on Palestine and contact their local California representatives.

This participation would count as either a field trip or an extra five points in the field trip category of their course grade.

After students posted a screenshot of the assignment on social media, the school faced heavy backlash, including with a diversity and inclusion organization that Huynh had previously worked for, Model Expand.

The post about the assignment received more than 1.9 million views in less than a day.

UC Berkeley received extensive criticism on social media, with concerns raised about the safety of Jewish students on campus and the broader implications of such actions by a teacher.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/10/jewish_students_studying_in_cooper_union_library_barricaded_and_threatened_by_hamas_activists.html

What kind of barbarism in academia is this?

According to the New York Post:

A handful of Cooper Union’s Jewish students barricaded inside the university’s library Wednesday when pro-Palestinian protesters blew past security and aggressively pounded on the building’s doors.

A Jewish senior at the East Village institution recounted the terrifying moment she watched the demonstrators slam anti-Zionist posters against the window and shout “anti-Semitic rhetoric” just a few feet away.

“When they started banging on the door, my heart started pounding. I was crying. I think if the doors weren’t locked — I don’t know what would have happened,” the student, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Post.

“I don’t want to speculate what would’ve happened. It just makes me too nervous. I was absolutely terrified in that moment.”

So you’re a Jewish kid. Maybe you are Orthodox and wear a yarmulke. You get into a good school. You study hard in a library, sometimes with your friends, because you know that schooling is important and you want to graduate. You aren’t out partying. You are doing the right thing.

And suddenly, a gang of goons from somewhere out on the streets, wielding Palestinian flags, takes a pivot from their plan to get to the president’s office, after seeing you, and then barricades you in and pounds on the doors, threatening you and flashing anti-Semitic signs through the library windows and bellowing about something happening several thousand miles away, blaming you for all of it, all because you are Jewish.

Obviously, this isn’t about Zionism, or the Israel government, or anything the Palestinian apologists claim. This is straight, naked Jew-hate. 

Worse still, it’s not thugs on the street doing thuggish anti-Semitic acts, it’s the university establishment condoning it from other thugs. The story says the protestors busted through the security guards who tried to block them. The kids called the cops. The cops got there but stood by twiddling their thumbs because the university told them not to get involved and they actully honored that, despite what they were seeing going on.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/universities-celebrate-the-mass-murder-of-jews/

Since Hamas initiated a brutal and barbaric terrorist attack against Israel and the Jewish people on October 7th, many Americans—Jewish and not—have mourned alongside the world’s only Jewish state and have understood the necessity of a swift and decisive military counterattack. But in the green quads and ivory towers of American academia, a very different reaction has been brewing. For the past two decades, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has shone a rare spotlight on the genocidal Jew hatred emanating from our college campuses. Student organizations like the Hamas-funded and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Students for Justice in Palestine have infiltrated our universities and turned them training grounds for the next generation of jihadists. In the wake of Hamas’s barbarism, its slaughter and mutilation of innocent Jews, its campaign of rape and torture and beheading, we can now bear witness to the effects that two decades of Jew-hating pro-terror propaganda have wrought in our institutions of higher learning.

At Harvard, arguably America’s most prestigious university, over 30 student organizations signed onto a statement declaring that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

Not to be outdone by Harvard, the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Brown University released its own statement (co-signed by the Graduate Labor Organization and Teaching Assistant Labor Organization, as well as 25 additional organizations) stating that: “We, the undersigned, hold the Israeli regime and its allies unequivocally responsible for all suffering and loss of life, Palestinian or Israeli.”

At Cornell University, SJP held a rally to “Stop Israel’s Annihilation of Gaza.” History Professor Russell Rickford who spoke at the rally declared Hamas’s barbaric attack which included the rape of women, the beheading of babies, and the deaths of entire families as “exhilarating.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-do-so-many-young-people-support-hamas/

The monthly Harvard/Harris survey conducted in the wake of the Hamas-perpetrated massacre of over 1,400 Israelis on October 7 has good news and bad news for those who look upon this act of mass murder of Jews with horror and contempt. In the good news column, the overwhelming majority of respondents believe the U.S. is justified in branding Hamas a “terrorist group,” believe it is correct to call the attack “genocidal,” do not think the slaughter was justified, and side with Israel in its war against Hamas. The bad news is, however, impossible to dismiss as inconsequential.

Younger Americans, aged 18 to 24, disagree with their elders. This demographic is split almost down the middle when asked if the slaughter of senior citizens, the rape of young women, the murder of children, and the immolation of whole families in their homes was justified. Indeed, a slight majority of respondents in this age group said the butchery could be “justified by the grievance of Palestinians.” What’s more, only a bare majority of this demographic backs Israel in this conflict. Forty-eight percent said they side not with Palestinians but explicitly with “Hamas” in this war.

The first order of business is to heap scorn on a generation that has adopted this morally bankrupt perspective and the older adults in their lives who have so maliciously led them astray. The second task at hand is for us to understand what convinced the younger generation to sacrifice their humanity upon the altar of an intellectual fad. The answer can be found, at least in part, in one odious word that has claimed the benignity of this generation and so many before them: “framework.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/23/the-sickness-of-our-universities-and-the-cure/

The sheer madness that has gripped many elite universities since October 7 and the butchery, rape, torture, and mutilation of some 1,000 Israeli civilians by Hamas murderers have shocked the public at large.

Campus craziness is, of course, nothing new. But quite novel for campuses was the sudden jettisoning of prior campus pretenses. Universities have brazenly dropped their careful two-faced gymnastics to reveal at last–unapologetically, proudly, and defiantly–the moral decay that now characterizes American higher education.

Recent news stories have exposed this rot to the world, and will have grave repercussions for higher education in the next few years.

The Nazis once desecrated the tombstones of dead Jews. Our campuses have updated that hatred. Students now tear down pictures of Jewish captives kidnapped or murdered by Hamas. University presidents do not condemn the hate-filled rallies supporting the killing of Jews in Israel, even though, according to their own safety-first ideology and prior proclamations about systemic hatred, these rallies instill a “climate of fear” in some students.

An instructor at Stanford separated Jewish students from their belongings, ordered them to stand in the corner, boasted about denying the Holocaust, and singled them out for unhinged rantings. Screaming campus activists and professors openly support Hamas even after its brutal killing of hundreds of Israeli women, children, and infants. That for more than two weeks thousands of rockets—barrages initially designed to enhance the surprise mass murdering of October 7—daily continue to shower down upon Israeli cities is of zero concern to loud campus activists.

An even bolder Cornell history faculty member bragged that he was “exhilarated” on news that Jews were butchered on October 7. A UC Davis professor threatened to go after the children of “Zionist journalists.” “Savages”, “excrement” and “pigs” are the adjective and nouns one professor at the Art Institute of Chicago posted to describe Israelis.

At rallies and protests, hundreds shout about eliminating Israel altogether; students, faculty, and throngs in general occasionally wear masks or wrap their faces in keffiyehs, as if conceding that most would find anyone identifiably mouthing such advocacy despicable. In some sense, such campus haters have become the equivalent of anti-Semitic sheet-wearing Klansmen.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-campus-peril-to-western-civilization
When I interviewed in 2022 for the job of Dean of Intellectual Foundations at the just-founded University of Austin (UATX), Pano Kanelos, the university’s founding president, asked me what I thought the new institution’s mission was. “To save civilization,” I said. “And here I thought the mission was to save American higher education,” he replied.

Informed observers have known for some time that our universities are broken. But the cheerleading on American campuses for terrorists who unleashed a pogrom of a magnitude and viciousness not seen since the Holocaust has made it clear that the collapse of higher education imperils Western civilization itself. Without real higher education, we would forget the past and stumble blindly into the future. Without universities worthy of the name, there would be no civilization.

Higher education exists to preserve, transmit, and extend knowledge, including the sound judgment and knowledge of the whole we call wisdom. Universities stand at the threshold between past and future, self and society, the eternal verities above and the flow of time below. Their job is to join what would otherwise fall apart: to remember the past, fructify the present, and incubate the future. At their best, they are modern temples of Janus, the two-faced Roman god who looks backward and forward, inward and outward—a symbol of wakeful, vigilant minds that receive tradition with gratitude, seek knowledge with grace, and face challenges with grit.

But in the United States, universities have never been worse than they are today. Barbarians have invaded the temples of teaching and learning, ransacked the sanctuaries, and defiled the sacred scrolls. For decades, students have been steeped in a postmodern intellectual culture of repudiation, relativism, and reductivism. They’ve been taught to “deconstruct” the great books and noble ideals of the West; to regard morality, and even the criteria of scientific truth, as social constructions; and to understand politics and society as “discourses of power” illuminated by the doctrines of “critical theory” and “intersectionality.” Bereft of precious civilizational compasses and maps, they have learned to regard fundamental social relationships as zero-sum games of domination and servitude.

https://lawliberty.org/the-demons-weve-made/

The supporters of Hamas in the West are the products of a postmodern education.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel Demons is, at its core, a story of fathers and sons, a story of two generations typified by Stepan, the father, and Pyotr, the son. Stepan is a composite stand-in character for the Russian intelligentsia of the 1840s, who looked to fashionable Western theory and socialism as the needed tonic to cure an ailing Russia. Pyotr, on the other hand, represents the chickens coming home to roost—a nihilistic fanatic par excellence who, born in the moral and ideological morass prepared for him by his father and those of his father’s generation, endeavors for nothing less than the total overthrow of society—“quick resolution by means of a hundred million heads.”

I couldn’t help but reflect on Dostoevsky’s Demons this past week as I observed so many little “demons” descend on college campuses across the country, marching and chanting in pro-Palestine cum pro-Hamas rallies, praising the most sickening and depraved atrocities imaginable. Unfortunately, as we all know, these atrocities were not works of fiction, but all too real pogroms carried out by the fanatical terrorist group Hamas.

The national group Students for Justice in Palestine hailed the terrorist attack in Israel on October 7 that claimed the lives of more than 1,300 people and saw the kidnapping of more than 199 more “a historic win for the Palestinian people.” The group later called for a “Day of Resistance,” claiming “the Zionist entity is fragile, and Palestinian resistance is alive.” Hamas butchers are featured prominently in the promotional material of this group. At my own institution, Purdue University, the local SJP chapter hailed the massacre of Israeli civilians—the worst anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust—by celebrating “the recent uprisings in occupied Palestine” (Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005) and by encouraging the campus community to not “equate the violence of the oppressor” with that of “the oppressed.”

Purdue’s SJP decried “Western allies of the Zionist regime” for denouncing the massacre of innocents and claimed it as just deserts for “the decades of settler colonialism, genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, forceful dispossession, military occupation, and many more atrocities happening to Palestinians on their land.” The rape of women and children before the eyes of their fathers, the decapitation of babies, the burning alive of whole families in their homes—these unspeakable acts were, in the eyes of Purdue’s SJP—nothing less than the “uprising by Palestinian freedom fighters in a direct response to the ongoing violence against innocent Palestinians.” This and other recent posts by Purdue’s SJP were “liked” on Instagram by many student groups in the Purdue community, including the Purdue Disabled Student Union, Purdue’s Latinx Student Union, the Young Democratic Socialists, and Purdue Immigrant Allies. Truly, the glories of intersectionality at work.

How is it, asks The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis, that so many “flunked the Hamas Test”? That erstwhile “Students for Palestine” turned into “Students for Pogroms in Israel,” in the words of Conor Friedersdorf?