http://www.spiked-online.com/free-speech-university-rankings/analysis#.WRbfQsYpCUk
The Free Speech University Rankings (FSUR) is the UK’s first university rankings for free speech. We survey British universities, examining the policies and actions of universities and students’ unions, and rank them using our traffic-light system. Read our analysis below and get clued up on the bans and bureaucracy stifling free debate.
Data accurate up until January 2017.
“Why is There So Much Politics in Arabic Class?”
I’ve been browsing the Spring 2017 issue of the Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin. It’s clear that along with all the other socio-political stances that comprise the often bizarre and contradictory (women’s rights, Islamophilia) package deal of ideologies and attitudes of the Left, an anti-Israel default position is integral to that publication.
Regular readers of my blog may remember that not so very long ago I exposed the sympathetic publicity given by the Bulletin to visiting professor and alumnus (class of ’06) Sa’ed Atshan, who deplores Israel’s very existence.
The current Bulletin assures us that he has again
“completed his annual class trip with his Swarthmore students to Israel and Palestine. He’ll continue to inspire future generations as as assistant professor of peace and conflict studies.”
There’s plenty regarding Atshan by Canary Mission here
Under the heading “Global Thinking” the current Bulletin has a feature article by staff writer Elizabeth Slocum about another anti-Israel activist, Missoula, Montana high school Arabic teacher Brendan Work (’10).
Beneath the title “Speaking the Same Language: His immersion in Arabic became a lesson in empathy” Slocum tells us:
‘Brendan Work ’10 jokingly tells his students that they are learning “an enemy language.”
“They sometimes ask, ‘Why is there so much politics in Arabic class?’” says Work … “Well, when you’re learning Spanish or French, there just isn’t an international conflict with the U.S. that involves those speakers now.”
This is important context for his students, who must work through so much history and tension tied up in the study of the language through class discussions on the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Iraq War, and Syrian refugees. He seeks to offer them a point of view beyond bias or preconceived notions that he honed as a reporter. [Emphasis added here and below]
“I knew I wanted to find employment at the intersection of Arabic and journalism,” says Work, who studied the language at the College as a comparative literature major. “I was looking for the big story, so I bought a one-way ticket into the occupied territory,” at a time when Palestine was submitting its statehood bid to the U.N.
Work secured a job at a small press agency in Bethlehem where he improved his language skills …before heading into the field as a reporter and photographer. As Work detailed the struggles of those in the conflict zone, he realized the Arab narrative was often told from a limited perspective.
For example, while covering a planned protest near the West Bank wall on the day of the statehood bid, a clash escalated and a Palestinian teen was struck by a tear-gas canister. (A Reuters photographer captured an image of Work aiding the boy moments after the violence.) Denied access to the nearest hospital because it was on the other side of the wall, the youth ultimately lost his eye. Later, out of concern, Work met with the teen’s parents…
“Their thinking was, ‘Resistance is our reality. In America, I thought, protests happened out of a sense – rather than a reality – of injustice.”
Israel is thus the only country on the planet to benefit from the doubtful privilege of being scrutinized on the least of its actions, through an agenda decided by its enemies.
There is also no need to go back to 1976, to remember the infamous UN Resolution 3379, “Zionism is a form of Racism,” under the Secretary-Generalship of a former Nazi, Kurt Waldheim, a week after Uganda’s brutal Idi Amin received a triumphant reception at the UN headquarters.
The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) met once again on March 20 to debate “Agenda Item 7,” a mandatory subject of debate since June 2006, the only one whose goal is systematically to condemn the Israeli democracy for crimes the existence of which remain to be proven.
The agenda, officially designed to assess the humanitarian situation in the Palestinian territories, in the light of the reports submitted by Fatah, the PLO and various NGOs, is part of a wider campaign, carried out by countries such as Libya, Algeria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Sudan and Yemen. Israel is thus the only country on the planet to benefit from the doubtful privilege of being scrutinized on the least of its actions, through an agenda decided by its enemies.
If it were only a question of expressing this obsession, born out of an old habit for the Arab-Muslim dictatorships to turn the Hebrew state into their scapegoat, responsible for all the misfortunes plaguing their societies, Agenda Item 7 would be a mere oddity, especially since the session is regularly boycotted by a majority of Western countries, and systematically by the United States.
Unfortunately, this Israelphobia has been spreading throughout the United Nations. In 1948, when Israel, after being officially recognized as a sovereign state by virtually all Western democracies, had just repelled the genocidal aggression of five neighboring countries, and hundreds of thousands of Jews were fleeing the oppression of Arab dictatorships, the UN gave birth to UNRWA, an organization designed to help Palestinian refugees exclusively. This was despite there already being a program for refugees at the UN, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Mark Steyn argued that exclusively blaming the other political side for your troubles can provide false comfort. When everything is falling apart the problem is probably bigger than any one point of view. “The point about civilizational collapse is that it’s a civilization that’s collapsing, not merely your political arrangements.” Take the ransomware attacks which paralyzed Britain’s national health service which forced the cancellation of operations and other medical treatments. “A global cyberattack leveraging hacking tools widely believed by researchers to have been developed by the U.S. National Security Agency hit international shipper FedEx, disrupted Britain’s health system and infected computers in dozens of other countries on Friday.” Everybody was affected. It didn’t matter how you voted.
The incident revealed at least ten NHS trusts still relied on the Windows XP. The instrusion allegedly relied on NSA tools stolen during the Obama administration from a contractor. “According to one source, that includes more than 75 percent of the hacking tools belonging to the Tailored Access Operations. TAO is an elite hacking unit that develops and deploys some of the world’s most sophisticated software exploits.”
An unnamed US official told the paper that Martin allegedly hoarded more than 75 percent of the TAO’s library of hacking tools. It’s hard to envision a scenario under which a theft of that much classified material by a single individual would be possible.
When Shadow Brokers appeared in October, it published hundreds of TAO-developed exploits, including one that, for years, had exploited what was then a critical unknown vulnerability in a widely used firewall sold by Cisco Systems. Last month, the person or group said it was shutting down in a post that dumped 61 Windows-formatted binary files. Whether Martin was somehow involved with Shadow Brokers or was a compulsive hoarder working alone, the events underscore serious security lapses inside the NSA.
It was a long time coming. The defection of Edward Snowden, the Office of Personnel Management data breach and the now infamous Hillary hacks all predated Trump though the vulnerabilities will probably continue under him. The list of commercial data breaches is also stunningly long. “It is estimated that in 2015 alone, 707 million records were exposed as a result of data breaches”. These suggest that too many of our systems may be built on rotten props or false assumptions. The ice looked solid enough until the weight of civilization stepped on it and things fell through.
One of the weaknesses of the anti-Trump resistance is their inability to address the factors which brought the current administration into existence. Too many think it’s all about one man. This may explain why the Resistance to the Resistance has been surprisingly hard to push off the Hill and why Bernie Sanders is the most popular Democratic politician in America. The key insight into the problem is that people didn’t vote for Trump but against Hillary, PC, and the ending of their world. Charles Sykes in New York Times noted this element of sheer reaction. “Mr. Trump’s most vocal supporters don’t have to defend his specific actions as long as they make liberal heads explode”.
A hundred years ago the liberal project seemed easily attainable. “I have seen the future and it works,” wrote Lincoln Steffens, yet it’s proved surprisingly hard to close the sale. The reason why the masses should reject such a brilliant vision were hard to explain. Despite Leftist fears their foes were never more than a coalition of amateurs with no particular ideology. The alt-right didn’t even know it was alt-right until they were properly analyzed and labeled. CONTINUE AT SITE
An outlandish billboard depicting President Donald Trump surrounded by a nuclear blast and money signs resembling swastikas was funded with taxpayer dollars, Judicial Watch alleged Thursday.
The billboard, erected in downtown Phoenix on March 17, also features a pin of a Russian flag on the president’s lapel. And if you look closely, the mushroom clouds look like clown faces. The work was commissioned by “arts advocate” Beatrice Moore, a longtime patron of the arts, and created by Los Angeles-based artist Karen Fiorito.
Fiorito told azfamily.com back in March that she chose the offensive symbolism to reflect “power, money, and dictatorship.”
When neighbor Jeff Whiteman first saw the Nazi Trump image staring “right back at him through his kitchen window,” he was appalled. “It’s pretty drastic. I thought swastikas were very crude and violent,” he said.
But Fiorito was unapologetic. “There are people who say, ‘Well, it’s offensive,’ but the current administration, its policies, the people that are put in power are offensive to me,” she said.
“I worked with Karen Fiorito over 10 years ago, and she created the anti-Bush W billboard for this site then,” Moore posted on her Facebook page on March 17. “Deciding we needed an anti-Trump billboard, I contacted Karen and hired her to design the current signage for the billboard, which we had printed and installed.”
Last Monday, I appeared at the University of Buffalo at the invitation of the courageous students of Young Americans for Freedom. They have to put up with campus Left-fascist thuggery on a daily basis, while I was able to leave Buffalo the morning after the event.
I say I “appeared,” because to say “I spoke” would be exaggerating a bit. Rather, I spoke a few sentences and made a couple of points in between being screamed at by Leftist and Islamic supremacist fascists who think they’re opposing fascism.
The Spectrum, the student newspaper of the University at Buffalo, reported:
Robert Spencer couldn’t speak for more than 30 seconds without students shouting and cursing at him.
…
Spencer planned to speak to students about “the dangers of jihad in today’s world” but constant heckling from the crowd made it near impossible for him to complete a full sentence.
Indeed. The raucous student mob, of course, believes it represents the side of all that is good and righteous. These students have been hoodwinked into thinking that “Islamophobes,” rather than jihad terrorists, are killing people around the world.
For example, one man held a sign that read “Queers Against Islamophobia.” The crowd booed lustily when I attempted to read from Islamic authorities about Islam’s death penalty for homosexuality. Even to read from Islamic sources is hate, apparently, at the University at Buffalo — unless, of course, one endorses such penalties rather than oppose them.
By shutting down any discussion of the motivating ideology of the jihad threat and consigning it all to the realm of “hatred” and “bigotry,” the student mob at the University of Buffalo enables that threat to grow. One day, the Leftists who screamed, heckled, and booed as I tried to speak may very well experience the consequences of their actions, carried out by those with whom they thought they stood in solidarity.
The Spectrum article did capture one thing I managed to say:
The attempt to silence someone who has a differing viewpoint was a “quintessentially fascist act, and you are manifesting it in a wonderful way tonight,” said Spencer.
There was also this:
Spencer frequently discusses terrorism by Muslims as being religiously motivated, an argument that has put him in the cross-hairs of American Muslims who say his interpretation of Islam is dangerously inaccurate and perverts their faith.
Those American Muslims have a big problem on their hands, because in reality, I offer no interpretation of Islam at all. I only report on how Muslims interpret Islam, which all too often involves justifications of and exhortations to violence. They are anxious to silence me because they don’t want Americans to know how jihadis use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify hatred, violence, and supremacism. CONTINUE AT SITE
We are living in weird times:
The state of Texas has to pass a law to get some county officials to follow the law;
Harvard University approved a “black only” graduation; and
A school in Detroit is holding a prom for Muslim girls: With the goal of creating a “safe space” in mind, a Detroit school has set out to hold a girls-only prom to celebrate traditional Muslim customs.
It’s being created for girls who would otherwise be prohibited by their ultraconservative Muslim families from going to regular proms, where attendees are allowed to have fun and dance with members of the opposite sex in good old American tradition.
Hamtramck High School’s girls-only “Princess Prom” was first organized in 2012 by a group of five Muslim girls to give them the opportunity to go to a “safe space” prom.
In 2016, 230 girls showed up. This year, they’re expecting at least 250 attendees.
Let me show respect for Muslim traditions. I understand that prom nights, or the way that some girls dress up, may violate some of their religious principles.
However, this is a public school district. I thought that we settled that issue back in the 1950s when President Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock, Arkansas!
What about a prom for ultraconservative Catholic families who want their daughters and dates in a separate environment away from talk about Roe v Wade or same-sex marriage opinions? Or Jewish kids?
The left’s silence about all of this is the other story. Where is the outrage and editorials?
With all due respect to the parents of these young girls, they should send their daughters to a private school if they want this kind of special treatment. Again, it’s a public school and no one gets a special prom.
James the Great and James the Less: Clapper defends Comey
James Clapper, Obama’s DNI chief, tried to aid James Comey, Obama’s FBI director. Clapper, in an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, said Comey felt uneasy about having dinner with President Trump on January 27, 2017 because he felt it might compromise the FBI.
According to Clapper:
“He mentioned that he had been invited to the White House to have dinner with the president and he was uneasy with that[.] … Comey didn’t want to create “the appearance of compromising the integrity of the FBI.”
Too bad NBC had Andrea Mitchell instead of real journalist interview Clapper. A journalist would have questioned Clapper by asking:
Did Comey believe that the integrity of the FBI was compromised when Terry McAuliffe, friend of Hillary, donated $700,000 to the political campaign of Jill McCabe, wife of assistant FBI director Andrew McCabe? McCabe was involved in investigating Hillary for her illegal use of a private unsecured email server. Did Comey ask McCabe to recuse himself, or better yet, give back the $700,000? Was McCabe warned, reprimanded, or otherwise spoken to about this?
Was the integrity of the FBI compromised when Comey questioned Hillary not under oath and gave immunity to Hillary’s assistants? Granting immunity is usually the function of the Justice Department in consultation with the FBI.
Was the integrity of the FBI compromised when Comey took it upon himself to make the decision whether to indict Hillary instead of following procedure to give the results of the investigation to the Justice Department for its review as to whether to indict?
Was the integrity of the FBI investigation of Hillary compromised when Bill Clinton met with Comey’s boss, Obama’s attorney general, Lynch, days before Comey gave Hillary a pass?
Was the integrity of the FBI compromised when Comey listed all the facts that warranted an indictment of Hillary but declined to indict because he added the requirement of “intent” that is not in the statutes – and worse, the issue of intent is for a judge or jury to infer from the facts?
The bottom line is that it is not the integrity of the FBI that is the issue. It is the integrity of James Comey.
Of course, Clapper is not the best witness for credibility. He admitted that he lied to Congress about the NSA’s bulk collection of data – not exactly a minor issue.
Or maybe Comey can use John Brennan, but Brennan also lied when he denied that the CIA had hacked the computers of Senate staff members.
Who else from the Obama administration can help Comey? Susan Rice, the liar of Benghazi? Hillary? Bill Clinton, perjurer?
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. — George Orwell
Nature Climate Change is a monthly magazine that is devoted to supporting the idea that we face a man-caused climate disaster that will surface at some future date. The magazine presents itself as if it is a scientific journal. But scientific journals, real scientific journals, don’t fill their pages with advocacy for a single point of view.
The April 2017 issue of Nature Climate Change carries a commentary: The food-energy-water nexus and urban complexity. The title is an indication of things to come. “food-energy-water” is abbreviated as “FEW.” Obviously, people need food, energy and water. But, why are these grouped together? People need lots of other things, for example: police, transportation, housing, and education. Is water a more urgent problem than, say, education? Some people think so. When I lived in Chicago there were true believers wandering on Michigan Avenue, proselytizing for the supposed future global warming-caused water crisis. This a few blocks from one of the great fresh-water inland seas of the world. These true believers were, no doubt, less interested in the education crisis represented by the failing public schools of Chicago.
According to the article:
“The world’s FEW systems are significantly stressed and already experiencing shortfalls due to their interactions with global anthropogenic processes such as urbanization and climate change”
Okay — urbanization, the migration of poor rural people to cities, is an anthropogenic process. In fact, everything that people and societies do is an anthropogenic (man-caused) process. Urbanization in the U.S. was largely finished by the 50s and instead we had migration out of the cities to the suburbs. But, is “climate change” a man-caused process? Not unless you believe that carbon dioxide is the great controller of the Earth’s climate.
The authors explain some of their thinking with this quote:
“National and human security approaches illuminate contrasting aspects of FEW security and their epistemological and ontological differences lead to differing proposed response options, and can hinder communication and incorporation of insights and lessons across disciplines. These differences need to be carefully elicited to avoid the risk of theoretical and practical incompatibility of inconsistency.”
I have tried to translate this into plain English, but it defies a translation that makes sense.
When the authors occasionally descend into the real world, they appear to embrace conspiracy and be badly misinformed:
“While the energy security of consumers would benefit more from distributed [solar] installations, utilities and their investors have supported regulations, business plans, and technology designs that favor industrialized, large-scale plants managed by a few.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/697-177-for-a-climate-change-musical-you-call-that-science-1494625499?mod=nwsrl_review_outlook_u_s_
Dr. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was founding director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Biotechnology.
Research is the lifeblood of technological innovation, which drives economic growth and keeps America competitive. Government-funded scientific research runs the gamut from studies of basic physical and biological processes to the development of applications to meet immediate needs. Unfortunately, the definition of what constitutes “science” has gradually expanded to include sociology, economics and woo-woo “alternative medicine.” Much of the spending on these disciplines by the nation’s two major funders of nonmilitary research, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, is systematically shortchanging taxpayers.
The NSF, whose mission is to ensure U.S. leadership in areas of science and technology that are essential to economic growth and national security, frequently funds politically correct but low-value research projects. A few doozies include the veiling-fashion industry in Turkey, Viking textiles in Iceland, the “social impacts” of tourism in the northern tip of Norway, and whether hunger causes couples to fight (using the number of pins stuck in voodoo dolls as a measure of aggressive feelings). Research funding in the geosciences, including climate change, is certainly legitimate, but not when it goes to ludicrous boondoggles such as a climate-change musical that cost $697,177 to produce.
The primary culprit is the NSF’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, known as SBE. Underlying its ability to dispense grants is the wrongheaded notion that social-science projects such as a study of animal depictions in National Geographic and a climate change musical are as important as research to identify early markers for Alzheimer’s disease or pancreatic cancer.
In January President Obama signed the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act, which accomplished little with respect to setting funding priorities other than endorsing the only two criteria NSF had previously used to evaluate grant applications—the “intellectual merit” of the proposal and its “broader impacts” on society. The bill’s lead proponent, House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, had wanted to include a “national interest” criterion defined by several factors including improving economic competitiveness, health, national security, the STEM workforce and scientific literacy.
In the end the national interest standard was retained, but only to provide examples of how grant applicants can satisfy NSF’s “broader impacts” requirement. In other words, SBE will continue funding marginal research by social scientists—what a former NSF official characterized as “the inmates running the asylum.”
As for the NIH, most of its budget—currently about $32 billion, with another $2 billion in the just-approved omnibus spending bill—goes to fund grant proposals from researchers all over the country. The proposals are not judged by their merits across all disciplines, but are divided by categories of research—cancer, aging, eye, etc. But one institute that is the brainchild of politicians—the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (formerly the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine)—on average does far-less-significant work than the others, but receives a significant amount of grant funding.
NCCIH’s stated mission is “to define, through rigorous scientific investigation, the usefulness and safety of complementary and integrative health interventions and their roles in improving health and health care.” But “complementary and integrative” often means implausible and poorly designed, because peer review at this institute permits the funding of such projects.
One study supported by the center found that cranberry juice cocktail was no better than a placebo at preventing recurring urinary-tract infections. Other supported studies include “Long-Term Chamomile Therapy of Generalized Anxiety Disorder,” “The Use of Narrative in Public Health Research and Practice” and “Restorative Yoga for Therapy of the Metabolic Syndrome.” CONTINUE AT SITE
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