RUTHFULLY YOURS

The problem on campuses across the country is that pro-Palestinian activists, in their zeal to seek self-affirmation, statehood, and “social justice,” have waged an extremely caustic cognitive war against Israel and Jews.

Being pro-Palestinian on campuses today does not necessarily mean that one is committed to helping Palestinians be productive, live well, build a free and open nation or create a civil society with transparent government, a free press, human rights, and a representative government.

What being pro-Palestinian seems to have come to mean is continually denigrating and attacking Israel with a false historical narrative and the grotesquely misused language of human rights. What is claimed to be anti-Israel sentiment often rises to the level of raw anti-Semitism.

It is enough to make Jewish students, whether or not they care about Israel at all, uncomfortable, unsafe, or even hated on their own campuses.

The California university system seems to have the dubious distinction of being the epicenter of the campus war against Israel. The situation that has apparently reached such intolerable levels that the Board of Regents of the University of California (UC Regents) was forced to take some action. This effort resulted in a study entitled the “Final Report of the Regents Working Group on Principles Against Intolerance.” The study attempts to establish guidelines by which any discrimination against a minority group on campus would be identified and censured. The report, however, specifically focused on the thorny issue of anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism as a prevalent and ugly reality throughout the California university system.

The report examined a range of incidents that occurred during the 2014-15 academic year. It cited unfortunate transgressions that “included vandalism targeting property associated with Jewish people or Judaism; challenges to the candidacies of Jewish students seeking to assume representative positions within student government; political, intellectual and social dialogue that is anti-Semitic; and social exclusion and stereotyping.”

Many Palestinian websites are stifling free speech by refusing to publish comments answering anti-Israel articles published on their sites.The latest example is an article written by Rania Khalek on Electronic Intifada

Responding to the decision by McGraw Hill Education to destroy all copies of its text book Global Politics: Engaging a Complex World – containing the accompanying maps – Khalek claimed:

“The maps, which appear in chronological succession on page 123, show Palestinian land loss from 1946, one year before Zionist militias initiated the displacement of more than 750,000 indigenous Palestinians from historic Palestine, to the year 2000, by which point Palestinian land had been reduced to a handful of tiny non-contiguous enclaves in the occupied West Bank and a sliver of Gaza.”

I endeavoured to post the following comment in response on 21 March pointing out the misleading nature of these maps:

“Map 1:

The heading “Palestinian and Jewish Land 1946“ is misleading for the following reasons:

(i) The map excludes Transjordan which in 1946 still comprised 78% of the territory of the Mandate for Palestine until granted independence by Great Britain in May 1946.

(ii) The land described as “Palestinian land” misleadingly implies legal ownership by the Palestinian Arabs of that land when in fact about 90% of it was State land under British Mandatory control and legal power of disposition.

The campus wars aren’t really about race. Race and the rest of the identity politics roster are the engine for transforming an academic environment into an activist environment.

Think of it as the Post-Educational University. Or Activism U.

The average campus already skews left, but maintains the pretense of serving an educational purpose. The demands put forward on campuses begin with racial privileges, but do not end there. These demands call for politicizing every department, the mandatory political indoctrination of all students and faculty, and the submission of non-political academic departments to activist political ones.

The campus wars are a declaration that activist non-academic departments that offer identity politics analysis while contributing nothing and which often owe their existence to campus clashes from a previous generation, should dominate all areas of life and thought at every university.

Imagine if physics majors rioted and demanded that every single area of study on campus had to incorporate theoretical physics and hire physics majors. That is exactly what is happening with identity politics studies. It’s a naked power grab that has the potential to redefine academia.

Behind the minority students that are the public face of the campaign, are embedded faculty radicals like Melissa Click whose abuses recently led to her firing from the University of Missouri. Click’s body of work, gender, race and sexuality analyses of popular culture, is fairly typical of the activist faculty behind the power grab. Media studies is often confused with journalism, but the two have little in common. Media studies has become a guide to politicizing culture by viewing it through the intersectional lens.

Click’s husband, Richard Callahan, who also took part in the harassment, is a religion professor on paper, but in practice offers class analysis of religious practices. These resumes are fairly typical of the faculty activists behind the crybully insurgency. They may belong to anthropology, sociology, religious studies or a dozen other departments, but all they ever do is overlay their political filter over a given field. And once it is in place, activism is the inevitable step for correcting the “injustices”.

They’re not academics; they’re activists with a mandate to impose their filter on everyone.

When we talk about political correctness, it isn’t just about banning certain jokes. That’s the smallest part of it. Political correctness is about making the political filter, the left’s lens, mandatory for all.

The disturbing campaign to suppress speech that is purportedly hurtful, unpleasant, or morally distasteful is a troubling and recurrent pattern of behavior by “progressive” leftists and “social justice” advocates from Muslim-led pro-Palestinian groups. Coalescing around the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, this unholy alliance has been formed in a libelous and vituperative campaign to demonize Israel, attack pro-Israel individuals, and promote a relentless campaign against Israel in the form of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. As the ideological assault against Israel and Jews intensifies on university campuses, and pro-Israel individuals begin answering their ideological opponents, the student groups leading the pro-Palestinian charge (including such groups as the radical Students for Justice in Palestine [SJP]) have decided that their tactic of unrelenting demonization of Israel is insufficient, and the best way to optimize the propaganda effect of their anti-Israel message is also to suppress or obscure opposing views.

The pronouncements of these groups are now frequently defined by baleful whining. For instance, a leaked memorandum from the Binghamton University Students for Justice in Palestine chapter revealed that members would be required never even to engage in dialogue with pro-Israel groups on their campus. They would be prohibited from “engaging in any form of official collaboration, cooperation, or event co-sponsorship with [pro-Israel] student organizations and groups.” And SJP members “shall in no manner engage in any form of official collaboration with any student group which actively opposes the cause of Palestinian liberation nor with groups which have aided and abetted Zionist student organizations” – meaning, of course, that the so-called intellectual debate that universities purport to promote in exactly this type of discussion will never take place when SJP is involved.

Earlier today I read that Ballroom Barry is doubling down on his demands that Americans open their hearts and homeland to 100,000 Syrian refugees. In his brief Easter remarks Obama said:

“We have to wield another weapon alongside our airstrikes, our military, our counterterrorism work, and our diplomacy,” Obama said. “And that’s the power of our example. Our openness to refugees fleeing ISIL’s violence. Our determination to win the battle against ISIL’s hateful and violent propaganda — a distorted view of Islam that aims to radicalize young Muslims to their cause.”

Shortly after reading that, a veteran friend out in Guam sent me this refugee pic:

Notice the obvious, that it’s wet, possibly snowing; and the coats, hoods and hands in pockets convey that it’s uncomfortably cold as well. Then notice the less evident fact that the woman is shoeless, unlike any of the seven males. Also distinct from any of those males, she is carrying two small children with the toil of her burden shown in the distressed expression on her face. Notably, hers is the only face showing any strain within the group. Seven healthy, future American males but not one will share the weight of the small children with this woman, much less see to it that she has proper footwear.