RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/at-harvard-facts-are-for-losers?token=

There is no one writing more lucidly today on the subject of Jews and Jew-hatred than Dara Horn.

I find myself constantly recommending her essays—especially this one, called The Cool Kids—and her recent book, People Love Dead Jews. As I wrote my own book about antisemitism, these two sentences from Dara helped me frame my own thinking: “Since ancient times, in every place they have ever lived, Jews have represented the frightening prospect of freedom. As long as Jews existed in any society, there was evidence that it in fact wasn’t necessary to believe what everyone else believed, that those who disagreed with their neighbors could survive and even flourish against all odds.”

In other words, where liberty thrives, Jews thrive. But where liberty is under siege, Jews will inevitably be, too.

I find myself constantly returning to that theme as I am bombarded by news of historically high antisemitism here in America, and as I read, last week, of the Harvard Crimson’s decision to endorse the boycott movement against Israel. That’s the subject of Dara’s essay today, which we are thrilled to publish. — BW

“…Twenty-five years later, I still remember the theatrics involved with becoming an editor at the Harvard Crimson, the newspaper produced by Harvard undergraduates every day for the past century and a half. The newspaper’s office had a room upstairs called the Sanctum, so named because only those who had jumped through the paper’s prescribed journalistic hoops were allowed to enter—and then only for Sunday night editorial meetings, at which the coming week’s worth of unsigned editorials were debated and approved under strict secrecy. Newly minted editors were welcomed into the room with the question, “What are your politics?” One’s answer determined the side of the room where one would sit for these debates.

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/65000-fake-students-enrolled-in-the?s=w

Every few days, Professor Kim Rich looks through new student registrations for the Los Angeles Community College District, including at Pierce College where she teaches criminal justice, and sees hundreds of newly created fake student enrollments.

In our conversations with Rich, she told us that It’s been going on for months.

Hackers enroll the fake students and collect up to $900 million in financial aid and Covid-19 aid each semester. However, no one seems to know for sure the sheer scale of the fraud.

These fake students, usually created by bots, open new accounts using easy-to-spot fake names like Barack Obama, Donald Trump or duplicate first names — Clifford Clifford, Jordan Jordan, Sidney Sidney, Kamara All of the above and fivethousandonehundredseven — names with questions marks or names with numbers.

New fake accounts are created, the fake students enroll in classes, taking seats away from actual students hoping to enroll in those classes. The fake accounts also “qualify” for financial aid.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/03/dc-school-gives-anti-racism-fistbook-to-4-year-olds-asks-them-to-out-racist-family-members/

At a public elementary school in Washington D.C., teachers and other staff members forced “anti-racism” curriculum on students as young as four years old, and even went so far as to ask the children to out allegedly racist family members.

As reported by Fox News, a letter signed by Danielle Singh, principal of Janney Elementary School, and dated from November 30th confirms that students were forced to participate in an “Anti-Racism Fight Club.” The event was hosted by a speaker named Doyin Richards.

“As part of this work, each student has a fist book to help continue the dialogue at school and home,” Singh confirmed in the letter, with a link to Richards’ presentation. “We recognize that any time we engage topics such as race and equity, we may experience a variety of emotions. This is a normal part of the learning and growing process. As a school community we want to continue the dialogue with our students and understand this is just the beginning.”

Richards’ book, the “Anti-Racism Fight Club Fistbook for Kids,” declares that “White people are a part of a society that benefits them in almost every instance,” and that “it’s as if White people walk around with an invisible force field because they hold all of the power in America.”

“If you are a White person, White privilege is something you were born with and it simply means that your life is not more difficult due to the color of your skin,” Richards says in the book. “Put differently, it’s not your fault for having White privilege, but it is your fault if you choose to ignore it.” The book also says that “anti-racism” involves being “loud, uncomfortable, confrontational and visible to ensure change is made.”

The book then demands that the students ask them to find racism in themselves, then asks about family members.

“Just because someone is older than you doesn’t mean that they’re right all of the time,” the book continues. “Parents need to stop making excuses for that behavior if they truly believe in anti-racism. Who in your family has racist beliefs? Do you think you can change their ways? What is your strategy for dealing with them?”

Parents have already taken to the district’s online forums to complain about the material, with one anonymous commenter claiming that their child was traumatized by the unknown contents of the lesson.

“Anyone else’s Kindergarten kid freaked out by an anti-racism assembly today? My kid needed to sleep with a light on and the door open tonight,” said the comment. “Anyone know what specifically was talked about? My kid couldn’t relay much except that she was scared.”

In a statement responding to the leaked reports, DC Public Schools claimed that the “fistbook” was never shared with students.

“DC Public Schools provides joyful and rigorous academic experiences for our students and is committed to advancing educational equity,” the district’s statement said. “In December, a resource link with this content was shared in a parent newsletter at one of our schools. It is not part of our DCPS curriculum and was not shared with students.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/open-letter-editorial-board-harvard-crimson-richard-l-cravatts/

“In short, you have given credence to Bertrand Russell’s observation that “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

On April 29th, in a breathtaking display of tendentiousness and a misreading of history and fact, you published an editorial in the Harvard Crimson entitled, “In Support of Boycott, Divest, Sanction and a Free Palestine,” an outrageous column replete with slanders against the Jewish state that called for the Harvard community to commit itself to the corrosive BDS campaign against Israel.

You suggested that the editorial was inspired by the April demonstrations and programming of the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee (HCPSC) which, as part of Israeli Apartheid Week, “installed a colorful, multi-panel ‘Wall of Resistance’ in favor of Palestinian freedom and sovereignty.” Additionally, you heaped praise on the childish mock wall and suggested that “art is a potent form of resistance” and that you were “humbled by our peers’ passion and skill” in creating such an activist masterpiece.

Even more importantly, you contended, fallaciously, “The admittedly controversial panels dare the viewer to contend with well-established, if rarely stated, facts [emphasis added].” What are examples of those “well-established facts” you alluded to? One panel announced in capital letters, for example, that “Zionism is: Racism – Settler Colonialism – White Supremacy – Apartheid,” mendacious slurs that echo the UN’s notorious 1975 Resolution 3379 that proclaimed that Zionism is racism.

Framing the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as a matter of race, as this foolish display did, and accusing Israel of maintaining a system of apartheid, is something that Israel-haters are fond of doing, even when the charge is patently false. The accusation of apartheid was given even more support last year with the publication of reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, both obsessive, perennial critics of Israel, that redefined apartheid in a way that it could be used to slander Israel—reports that you, in fact, alluded to in your editorial. The puerile accusation of white supremacy against Israel is as grotesque and unhinged as is the oft-repeated claim that Israelis are the new Nazis, committing genocide against the Palestinians, and both are not only counter-factual but are also forms of anti-Semitic expression described in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism.

Of course, your claim that the “facts” on the HCPSC mock wall are “well-established” is only true inasmuch as these are facts that live in the minds of progressives and anti-Semites who promiscuously and carelessly throw around words without attention to their actual meaning and import. Progressive thought, such as is apparent in this editorial, involves allowing emotions to define things instead of facts.

https://www.nysun.com/article/antisemitism-comes-to-harvard-in-both-intent-and-effect?utm_content=The%20Evening%20Sun

During my presidency of Harvard 20 years ago I warned that “serious and thoughtful people are advocating measures that would be antisemitic in their effect if not their intent.” 

In light of the recent exhibition by the Palestinian Solidarity Committee in Harvard Yard and the resounding endorsement of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions by the Harvard Crimson, it is clear to me that antisemitism is being practiced in both intent and effect.

To be clear at the outset, free expression must be sacrosanct in an academic community. The PSC and the Crimson have every right to express their view no matter how upsetting it may be to others. Academic freedom, though, does not mean freedom from criticism or the right to have contemptible views treated with respect. It is no shield against moral bankruptcy.  

This has long been recognized at Harvard as, say, when Drew Faust was president and deemed a student-led Black Mass — a ritual performed by satanic cults to parody the Catholic Church — to be abhorrent and a fundamental affront to academic values of inclusion even as she ruled out any suggestion that event be banned. 

Likewise when controversial conservative scholar Charles Murray was invited to speak at Harvard, a variety of communications were sent to students labeling him a practitioner of racist pseudoscience.

So there is nothing “anti-First Amendment” about calling out antisemitism. Indeed not identifying and attacking antisemitism in our midst would be a major moral failing, especially when it comes in conjunction with proposals to instrumentalize the university by having it engage in antisemitism.

The question that remains is whether the BDS agenda enthusiastically embraced by the PSC and the Crimson is in fact antisemitic. The Crimson and other BDS proponents ​​condemn antisemitism and note that there are people of Jewish descent who support BDS. That is true.

It’s also true that President Trump asserts firmly that he is not racist and can point to prominent African-American supporters and to having received more than a million votes from African Americans. At Harvard we don’t consider such assertions “arguments.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/academic-diversity-quotas-are-real/

Who should be the custodians of science? For centuries, scientists themselves have been. Now, their custodianship is under threat.

Science has long operated as a sort of guild, with the guild managing its own practice and traditions. This holds for the guild’s continuity: admission of aspiring members to the guild is controlled by the guild itself. For the sciences, aspiring members must clear a competitive series of hurdles: apprenticeship (graduate school), journeyman (post-doctoral fellow and assistant professor), then full membership (tenured professor).

For the past few decades, science’s stewardship has been shifting into the hands of an arriviste managerial class with no idea what science is or any real respect for it. Their aim is to seize control over the hiring of new faculty. No longer will admission to the science guild be based on assessed merit and mastery, but on de facto hiring quotas based upon race, gender, and sexual proclivity.

The new quota system is being implemented through the “diversity statement,” which demands an applicant express fealty, not to the guild, but to the new managerial class. The guild’s standards for admission — once a sign of mastery — are thereby subordinated.

https://americanmind.org/features/inclusive-exclusion/the-black-student-body/

This is a response to an excerpt from A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education, edited by Gail Heriot & Maimon Schwarzschild.

As Peter Wood observes, the notion of academic and cultural “inclusion” was presented as a response to performance disparities between blacks and whites in the 1980s. It has, however, morphed into codified cultural essentialism. “Inclusion” now means assuming a monolithic view of black culture, and judging black students by black standards only.

In accepting the idea that “blacks” as a whole have a distinct and separate culture which must be protected from the incursions of mainstream American values, universities effectively declared that blacks must separate themselves from the prevailing mainstream culture in order to escape racism. What has followed is a distinct pattern of racial self-segregation across America in pedigree universities and even smaller liberal arts colleges.

This neo-segregation has only become more institutionalized since the ’80s. This year, New York University opened negotiations with students to create black resident floors on campus. A group called “Black Violets NYU” has complained that the overwhelming presence of white students makes it difficult for black students “to connect.” Black Violets therefore wants a “themed engagement floor” for black students, as well as more black professors in NYU’s politics department and a black student lounge on campus.

In June of last year, students at Rice University demanded that the University fund a “non-residential Black House” on campus. They also wanted a statue of the university’s founder removed. Other demands included that new black students be able to request and receive black roommates, and that course descriptions have tags indicating which race and ethnic groups are involved in the course material.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/georgetown_universitys_free_speech_double_standard.html

On April 26, Georgetown University histed a talk by Mohammed El-Kurd, who has said that Jews have an “unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood,” and other viciously antisemitic statements. World Israel News reports:

Mohammed El-Kurd, a media personality who has repeatedly accused Israel of harvesting and trafficking organs from Palestinians and described Zionists as “sadistic, barbaric Neo-Nazi pigs” was invited by Georgetown Law’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

News of El-Kurd’s talk sparked a response from the NGOs StopAntisemitism and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which urged the university to intervene and disinvite him.

“Administrations like Georgetown’s state they’re against antisemitism yet allow Jew haters like Mohammed El-Kurd to freely spread hatred against Jews on their campuses,” StopAntisemitism wrote on its twitter account on Monday. “Enough is enough — cancel El-Kurd’s speech ASAP!”

“Mohammed El-Kurd has a long, ugly history of antisemitic incitement & conspiratorial rhetoric that goes far beyond reasoned criticism of Israel,” the ADL’s CEO Jonathan Greenblat tweeted. “Outrageous & indefensible that @GeorgetownLaw invited him to bring his hate to their campus.”

The University brushed aside these concerns, claiming to to be on the side of free speech.

During a meeting with Jewish students concerned about El-Kurd’s campus appearance, Georgetown Law’s dean said that the university prioritizes free speech.

“We allow a huge amount of latitude even where speech is deeply offensive to some members of the community, some or even many,” Dean Mitch Bailin is heard saying in an audio recording of the meeting obtained by the National Review.

“Those are things that we think are important to educational values, to promoting free speech, to promoting a free discussion of ideas, even if those ideas are deeply, deeply offensive.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-claims-school-children-dont-belong-to-parents-when-theyre-in-the-classroom/

At the 2022 Teacher of the Year ceremony hosted by the White House on Wednesday, President Biden claimed that school children don’t belong to parents “when they’re in the classroom.”

“They’re all our children. And the reason you’re the teachers of the year is because you recognize that. They’re not somebody else’s children. They’re like yours when they’re in the classroom,” he said.

Later in the speech, Biden targeted Republicans and the parent movements in local school districts that have fought to remove from libraries and curricula books that promote radical gender and racial ideologies.

“There are too many politicians trying to score political points trying to ban books, even math books. Did you ever think when you’d be teaching you’re going to be worried about book burnings and banning books all because it doesn’t fit somebody’s political agenda?” Biden said.

The comments struck a similar tone to that of former Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, when he made his now infamous remark last year that parents should not be involved in K–12 public education. On the campaign trail, he declared at a debate: “I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions. I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”