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Megadonors Should Fund New Universities By Robert Weissberg

Posted By on October 27th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/megadonors_should_fund_new_universities.html

The size and vitriol of the anti-Israel/pro-Hamas rallies on campus has been a game changer. Yes, everyone knew that college students tend to be ill-informed politically, but the seething hatred of Jews and the misinformation — labeling Israel an apartheid society — was beyond belief. Obviously, something is terribly wrong with American higher education.

What can be done? Though many prominent donors threaten to close their checkbooks, and top school administrators offer lukewarm apologies, the answer is, sadly: not much. The only solution is to create educational alternatives, a long-term strategy where today’s elite schools fade into obscurity and join the ranks of Transylvania University, a once prestigious university that still exists but is now more closely associated with Dracula than higher education,

The good news is that this mission can be accomplished and all the ingredients — mainly brains, organizational skill, and money — exist in abundance. This strategy will not produce overnight change, but it is the only alternative.

The necessary reform is impossible. The hatred of Western Civilization that encourages woke kids to champion homophobic, misogynist militant Islam has entered American higher education’s DNA. And this is in addition to all the nonsense about gender fluidity and Critical Race Theory. No school can screen applicants for gullibility nor impose a litmus test for prospective faculty. Nor would champions of Western Civilization demand schools to return to an era when universities were church-run sanctuaries for doctrinal orthodoxy. Yes, these donations from angry billionaires are large, but funding is also fungible so Middle East billionaires or radical foundations can easily replace the likes of Leslie Wexner or Ron Lauder.

Hope starts by recognizing that many contemporary elite schools began as educational nonentities. The world-famous California Institute of Technology was founded  in 1891 as an Throop College, an obscure vocational school, and did not began its march to excellence until later. Throop College shed its name in 1910 and became Cal-Tech in 1920 thanks to the efforts of leading scientists on the faculty, notably Robert A. Millikan and George E. Hale. Only in 1934 it officially joined the ranks of other major American universities.

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Biden and Islamophobia By Eileen F. Toplansky

Posted By on October 27th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/biden_and_islamophobia.html

I was hoping against hope that Joe Biden would totally and irrevocably expose the evil of radical Islam in speaking of the dastardly Hamas attacks.

But once he asserted that “we must also, without equivocation, denounce Islamophobia” in bis October 2020 speech to the nation, it was patently clear that he had fallen into the clutches of those who would demand utter capitulation to Islamists and thus destroy free speech, and independent thinking.

Islamists would assert that “Islamophobia is “an allegedly irrational fear of losing life or liberty to Islamic rule merely because the laws, sacred texts, and traditional practices of Islam demand the submission of culture, politics, religion and social expression. But, in the real world, it is a product of rational observation.”

After all “[a]n ideology that has as its stated goal to put the entire world under its eternal rule, by force if necessary, and to kill those who stand in its way, criticize it or leave it, is genuinely dangerous. Having some healthy doses of fear and skepticism of such a force is perfectly rational.”

As thereligionofpeace.com explains that:

To obscure the fact that the same problems and reactions follow Islam into every country, no matter how tolerant, a word has been invented to suppress any assessment or criticism of Islam. 

Consider that Hinduism is different in almost every way from every other major world religion, but no one is accused of having Hinduphobia. 

In fact, Islam is the only religion that requires a pretend word to protect against critical inquiry.  The sole purpose of ‘Islamophobia’ is to conflate ideological truth with anti-Muslim bigotry.  The irony is that of all religions, the tenets of Islam are the least tolerant and most hostile toward the others.

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MY SAY: ON THE HAMAS YOUTH MOVEMENT

Posted By on October 27th, 2023

Who are the parents of Hamas-supporting students? By Ruth King

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

After the anti-Vietnam War turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Midge Decter wrote an outstanding book called Liberal Parents, Radical Children detailing a generation gap between young militants demanding an end to the Vietnam War  with a quasi-Utopian challenge to the “establishment” and their standard-issue liberal, mostly Democrat parents who did not call American troops “war criminals” nor did they blame America first for every ill in the universe.

When the war and the draft ended, the protests subsided and even stalwarts of the protests like Senator Eugene McCarthy and David Horowitz, editor of the radical magazine Ramparts and now editor of the conservative FrontPage, announced their support for Ronald Reagan.

Other protesters then turned their sights on community organizations and councils, the academy, and the media, but nothing has prepared parents and the general public for the present outpouring of support for Hamas terrorists and hatred for Israel among students.

As Victor Davis Hanson has stated: 

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 — unapologetic, proudly, and defiantly — the moral decay that now characterizes American higher education.

Noah Rothman adds: 

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.

But why blame only the media and the academies? Who are the parents?

That’s a rhetorical question. I know the parents. They are smug hypocrites who vociferously defend affirmative action but pay expensive tutors to give their own kids a leg up. They parrot trendy views on gender, cancel culture, trigger words, pronouns, and perceived offenses. They favor open borders, defunding police, bail reform across the board, and sanction the violence and arson occasioned by the death of George Floyd. They’ve ignored the drumbeat of rising anti-Semitism and support overtly racist organizations like Black Lives Matter. They ignore the turpitude of those who pervert truth and history by denying American exceptionalism and vie with their offspring on all liberal cant and demand for “flexible” history, science, and biology.

The Jews among them are called self-hating but that does not fit. They are self-loving with their preening. They see themselves as an aggrieved minority which rises above others with their empathy for both sides of every conflict and every issue. They curb all debate and dissent in their loathing of Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu while ignoring racist genocides throughout the world. They are mildly troubled by anti-Semitic leftist legislators and commentators because they “know where they are coming from.”  But now that the rising tide of global antisemitism is lapping at their toes, they are alarmed but blaming conservatives. Zero insight.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Anti-Semitic Academia Finally Getting Punched in the Wallet By Stephen Kruiser

Posted By on October 27th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2023/10/26/anti-semitic-academia-finally-getting-punched-in-the-wallet-n1737961

Ever since the terrorist murderers in Hamas attacked Israel almost three weeks ago, we’ve been witnessing the disgusting spectacle of American college students very vocally condemning Israel, some of which the esteemed VodkaPundit recently chronicled.

For being attacked.

Yes, parents, this is what a small fortune gets you when you send your kids off to have their minds polluted by the leftist filth that controls Academia.

These kids didn’t come out of the womb being virulently anti-Semitic, they had to be conditioned. To be sure, the American public education indoctrination mill helped get them there, but it’s the lunatics in Academia’s ivory towers who are responsible for the finished product. As I said in a recent podcast, the students are only working with the facts that their professors presented to them.

A handful of college presidents and boards of regents have issued statements condemning anti-Semitism and Hamas, but that can all be filed under “Too Little, Too Late.” The damage to young minds has already been done.

Wholesale changes in American public education and academia are long past overdue, but it’s been considered sacrilege — mostly by the left — to disparage the sainted teachers or institutions of higher learning. Eyes are being opened now, however. The corrupt agenda of the teachers’ unions that run K-12 public schools was revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic and got parents involved in curricula decisions in great numbers.

The behavior of the rabidly pro-Palestinian/Hamas students at many elite universities has shocked a lot of people who aren’t online and consuming news for most of their waking hours.

There is, of course, BIG money in academia. It takes a lot to keep the hegemonic brain-washing apparatus humming. Obviously, the best way to fight it is to hit them where it hurts the most — in the bank accounts.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

October 7 Coming to America? Don’t fool yourself. by Bruce Bawer

Posted By on October 27th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/october-7-coming-to-america/

During the last 20 years I’ve written extensively about two things. One is the dangerous rise of Islam in the West. The other is the ideological destruction of the American academy. The aftermath of the Hamas atrocities of October 7 has brought both of these concerns to the fore. In the wake of the most horrific attack on Jews since the Holocaust, there were massive rallies across the country in sympathy with the terrorist perpetrators, and the participants in these demonstrations belonged largely to two groups: (1) college students and (2) Muslims.

If the jihadist butchery of October 7 was monstrous, the spectacle of huge crowds applauding it was appalling. It shocked many people. It shouldn’t have. Many of us have spent years writing endlessly about the ugliness of Islamic ideology – notably the murderous hatred of Jews that is enshrined in the Koran, taught in the madrassas, and preached in the mosques – only to feel that our words were falling on deaf ears. Similarly, many of us have been writing for a long time about the far-left professors, especially at our so-called elite colleges, who teach their students that America, the West, Christians, Jews, and white people are always the oppressors and aggressors and that people of color, especially Muslims, are always victims. The public displays of solidarity with Hamas are at once a dramatic illustration of both of these phenomena and the strongest argument yet for major action on both of these fronts.

First, something drastic needs to be done about American higher education. The ideological depredation wrought by far-left faculty and administrators at private colleges needs to be addressed by responsible-minded trustees, alumni, and donors. Speaking of donors, something needs to be done about them, as well: as Eli Lake reported on October 25, not a few U.S. colleges have accepted fortunes from Muslim countries and have built whole campuses in those countries – with the syllabi tailored, of course, to local requirements. That repulsive intellectual compromise needs to be quashed. Then there’s the matter of administrative bloat: as the College Fix website noted on October 24, Harvard has over 1.3 administrators per student. Most of these people are superfluous at best and mischief-makers at worst – DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) bureaucrats who strive to protect students from “microaggression” but who shrug indifferently at cries of “kill the Jews.”

As for public universities, responsible state and municipal leaders could do worse than to emulate Florida Governor Ron de Santis, who appointed anti-ideology crusader Christopher Rufo as a trustee at Sarasota’s New College and – in an October 24 order – banned chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, a student organization that provides support to Hamas, from Sunshine State campuses.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Fred Bauer Reaping the Whirlwind The anti-Semitism now on display on college campuses has one of its origins in the erosion of public order during the summer 2020 “racial reckoning.”

Posted By on October 27th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/anti-semitism-at-the-cooper-union

Last night, a small cluster of Jewish students barricaded themselves in the library of Cooper Union, while a crowd outside banged on the doors chanting: “Free Palestine.”

Scenes like this have become familiar on college campuses. Radical activists have spent years devising strategies to drown out and, in some cases, physically threaten undesirable voices. In March 2017, masked activists at Middlebury College mobbed the social scientist Charles Murray, chasing him and others into a car. They shoved and pulled the hair of the faculty moderator for the event (who said that she disagreed with Murray about many issues). These tactics of revolutionary exception are now being used to target Jewish people on campuses and in cities across the United States.

The ugly displays of anti-Semitism that have erupted across the United States over the past month are at once the extension of the racial “reckoning” of the summer of 2020 and a profound challenge to the legitimacy of this supposed reckoning. One of the reckoning’s premises was that the urgency of injustice demanded the suspension of civic order and the norms of a liberal society. Rioters were thus permitted to torch public buildings, loot businesses, and tear down statues of “problematic” figures from the past. When the New York Times ran an op-ed by Arkansas senator Tom Cotton calling for the military to help put down violent riots, the newsroom dissolved into a struggle session that ended in the departure of multiple staffers, including editorial page editor James Bennet. In workplaces across the United States at that time, an inopportune comment on Zoom could mean defenestration. For defenders of the reckoning, confronting the history of racism demanded such consequences.

Despite years of warnings about the importance of democratic norms and liberal democracy, the American establishment mostly blessed these efforts. Foundations poured hundreds of millions of dollars into identity-politics activist groups. Major public institutions adopted the creed of the reckoning. Even mild criticisms of ideological purges—such as the Harper’s “Letter on Justice and Open Debate”—were treated as reactionary screeds. Terrified of right-populism, part of the political establishment might have seen the reckoning as a weapon to be used against Donald Trump-supporting “deplorables”; or maybe anti-Trump coalitional politics simply demanded silence in the face of these excesses.

Now the promissory note of the reckoning has come due. In habituating people to the idea that righteousness justifies the abrogation of individual dignity and dismissal of political pluralism, the reckoning taught lessons deeply at odds with the functioning of American democracy.

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Johnson begins House speakership with focus on debt, inflation, ‘border catastrophe’ as top issues By Nicholas Ballasy

Posted By on October 27th, 2023

https://justthenews.com/government/congress/johnson-begins-house-speakership-focus-debt-inflation-and-border-catastrophe#google_vignette

Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., the newly elected Speaker of the House of Representatives kicked off his leadership role on Wednesday with a commitment to establish a fiscal commission dedicated to rolling back excessive government spending as a way to reduce inflation. He also called on the Senate and White House to stop ignoring the “catastrophe” at the southern border.

Johnson described the nation’s rising $33 trillion national debt as the greatest threat to national security and connected it to the level of inflation that America’s families have been grappling with the last few years.

“The greatest threat to our national security is our nation’s debt and while we’ve been sitting in this room – that’s right – the debt has crossed almost $33.6 trillion and in time it’s going to take me to deliver this speech, we will go up $20 million in debt. It’s unsustainable,” Johnson said on the House floor to a standing ovation from Republicans and a handful of Democrats seated in the chamber.

“We have to get the country back on track. We know this isn’t going to be an easy task and tough decisions will have to be made but the consequences if we don’t act now are unbearable. We have a duty to the American people to explain this to them so they understand it well and we’re going to establish a bipartisan debt commission to begin working on this crisis immediately,” he added after formally taking the gavel.

At this point, Congress has until Nov. 17 to pass a federal budget to avoid a government shutdown. The White House and congressional leaders will soon be negotiating on an agreed upon level of federal spending, which will be the first major test of Johnson’s speakership.

Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., a member of the House Budget Committee, told Just the News on Wednesday that the GOP-led House might pass a temporary spending bill or “Continuing Resolution” through January.

“I don’t like CRs. I definitely don’t like omnibuses being crammed, you know, during the Thanksgiving or the Christmas holidays has got to end,” he said. “But he’ll [Johnson] have some leeway on that. He’s talking about January and we’ll see what the overall numbers look like and then go from there.”

The House has been working on passing single subject appropriations bills to fund each cabinet agency separately, which conservatives argue is a way to reduce wasteful spending. The House lost time in that process given that votes were frozen while the GOP conference searched for a speaker after McCarthy’s ousting. 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

California university offers extra credit for marching against Israel By Mindy Rubenstein, World Israel News

Posted By on October 27th, 2023

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.

ANTI-SEMITISM, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Michael Oren: A War Against the Jews Hatred of Israel cannot be distinguished from hatred of the Jewish people. Incontestably now, anti-Zionism is antisemitism. By Michael Oren

Posted By on October 27th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/this-isnt-a-war-against-israel?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews. When the Jew will hide behind stones and trees, the stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslims, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ ” —The Hamas Charter

“The conventional war of conquest was to be waged parallel to, and was also to camouflage, the ideological war against the Jews.” —Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933–1945

It wasn’t the rallies with “Keep the World Clean” posters and chants of “gas the Jews.” Nor was it the glorification of Hamas paragliders by the Chicago branch of Black Lives Matter or, in New York and London, the tearing down of posters with the faces of Israeli children held hostage by Hamas. Not even the off-the-charts uptick in antisemitic incidents in Germany (240 percent), the United States (nearly 400 percent), and London (1,353 percent) convinced me.

It was, rather, one of those realizations that so many generations of Jews before me have experienced. A realization that they, like me, surely tried to push out of their minds until the reality became unmistakeable. 

This war is not simply between Hamas terrorists and Israelis. It is a war against the Jews. 

The insight began with the international media’s coverage of the conflict. Again, it wasn’t the press’s insistence on calling mass murderers “militants” or citing Hamas and its “Health Ministry” as a reliable source. For close to fifty years—as a student activist, a diplomat, a soldier, a government and military spokesman, and above all, as a historian—I’ve grappled with the media’s bias against Israel. I’ve long known that the terrorists are “militants” solely because their victims are Jews, and only in a conflict with Israel are terrorists considered credible. 

Instead, it was the media’s predictable switch from an Israel-empathetic to an Israel-demonizing narrative as the image of Palestinian suffering supplanted that of Israelis beheaded, dismembered, and burnt. It was the gnawing awareness that dead Jews buy us only so much sympathy. 

ELECTIONS, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Democrats are pushing work authorization for migrants — so they can vote By Betsy McCaughey

Posted By on October 27th, 2023

https://nypost.com/2023/10/24/opinion/democrats-are-pushing-work-authorization-for-migrants-so-they-can-vote/

If you think offering migrants luxury hotel rooms, free meals, laundry service, transportation, health care and immigration lawyers is excessive, just wait until they can vote.

Democrats are pushing to give noncitizens the franchise in local elections in New York City, Boston and other municipalities, as well as statewide in Connecticut.

The number of migrants pouring across the southern border has hit a record high, according to data released Saturday.

Illegal crossings soared 21% over the previous month.

On a yearly basis, the figure reached 2.48 million.

Democrats may feign shock and distress. 

Don’t be fooled. 

Dems see these newcomers as their guarantee of a permanent voting majority in local elections. 

Not years from now, after the newcomers become citizens.

Right now.

Mayor Eric Adams’ rhetoric is typical. 

He warns that the overwhelming number of migrants arriving — 16,000 to 17,000 a month — will “destroy the city,” but he’s also leading the legal effort to turn migrants into voters.

Adams and other New York Democrats pushed President Joe Biden to expedite work authorizations for them.

They said it’s about making migrants self-sufficient. Maybe, but Dems have another powerful motive.