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April 2024

EDUCATION, MEDIA Comments turned off

Death to Facts: Northwestern journalism prof Steven Thrasher tells pro-Palestinian demonstrators to reject objective reporting –

By on April 30th, 2024

https://wirepoints.org/death-to-facts-northwestern-journalism-prof-steven-thrasher-speaks-at-pro-palestinian-demonstration-rejecting-objective-reporting-wirepoints/

In a speech Saturday to protesters at Northwestern University, Professor Steven Thrasher of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism endorsed the worst of what’s wrong in journalism today. “To the Medill students and journalists within earshot, I say to you: Our work is not about objectivity,” he said. “Our work is about you putting your brilliant minds to work and opening your compassionate hearts.” The speech is reported here by The Daily Northwestern and Thrasher’s full text is here.

Thrasher, and far too many in prominent positions in journalism, have long rejected the traditional goal of reporting unbiased facts. Instead, they say, reporters should promote narratives about what they believe is social justice. It’s called “advocacy journalism,” or, to critics, “woke journalism.” Three years ago, nationally recognized law professor Jonathan Turley summarized the trend this way:

Thrasher’s view of journalism is spreading among top schools. We have been writing about the assault on foundational concepts of neutrality in journalism in academia. This includes academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy. Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll has denounced how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation. Likewise, the University of North Carolina recently offered an academic chair in Journalism to New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones. While Hannah-Jones was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her writing on The 1619 Project, she has been criticized for her role in purging dissenting views from the New York Times pages and embracing absurd anti-police conspiracy theories.

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EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Five Ways Campus Turmoil Hurts Democrats and America Charles Lipson

By on April 30th, 2024

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/04/30/five_ways_campus_turmoil_hurts_democrats_and_america_150863.html

Higher education is sinking lower and lower. That’s bad news for our country, which has benefited enormously from having the world’s best system of higher education. And it’s bad news for Democrats, who face a tight election. Their party is closely tied to education at all levels, especially at elite universities. It is the party of experts, after all, and the party of the left. Universities are both. Moreover, since the Democrats control the Executive Branch, the public holds them primarily accountable for ensuring social order. Their failures are obvious to the average voter. That’s bound to hurt Democratic Party candidates in November.

Parents with children in college or expected to matriculate soon have every right to expect their kids can learn in peace, hear diverse viewpoints, and speak freely without threats, intimidation, or indoctrination. That’s true whether the parents are Jewish or not. Decent Americans won’t tolerate threats against Jewish students any more than they would tolerate them against blacks, Muslims, Christians, or Asian Americans. Yet they now see those threats against Jewish students every day, and, at many universities, they don’t see administrators standing up for their rights.

Parents don’t understand why their kids aren’t being protected. They are unhappy that classes have been canceled and graduation ceremonies relegated to Zoom. They are dismayed that their tax money is being flushed down a sinkhole of anti-American propaganda. They wonder what in the world has happened to once-respected institutions. Good question.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Why Is Israel Singled Out As The Uniquely Hated State? Francis Menton

By on April 30th, 2024

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-4-29-why-is-israel-singled-out-as-the-uniquely-hated-state

Around the U.S., and particularly at the most elite college campuses, seemingly smart and well-educated young people keep up their passionate protests in support of the Hamas rapists and murderers and against Israel and Jews generally. The claimed reason for the protests is that Israel is engaged in “apartheid” or “genocide,” or even the ultimate evil, “settler colonialism.” Yet meanwhile, the world is filled with state actors treating their own or neighboring populations in the most appalling ways, far worse than anything that Israel could remotely be accused of, without attracting anything like the passion and vitriol directed at Jews and Israel. Think North Korea, keeping its own population in permanent prison conditions, and often starving; or China, cracking down on all dissent and even confining large sub-populations (e.g., Uyghurs) in slave labor camps; or Azerbaijan, which expelled an entire Christian community of about 150,000 people just a few months ago. These examples, let alone the human rights abuses in places like Iran or Cuba or Venezuela, attract almost no interest from our passionate student demonstrators, not to mention even slight notice from the press or anyone else.

How to explain this discrepancy? In recent weeks I have seen multiple writers advance the hypothesis that this is not really about Israel specifically, but rather that Israel is just the proxy of the moment for broad hatred for the West, for capitalism, for America, and for civilization generally. That hypothesis at least offers an explanation for why all bad actors who are not of the West or of capitalism, no matter how reprehensible they may be, get a total pass. In any event, I don’t have another hypothesis that can explain that anomaly.

Consider the ongoing treatment of Christians in the Muslim world. (I might suggest considering the ongoing treatment of Jews in the Muslim world, except that Jews have been almost entirely expelled and eliminated from the Muslim world, with the result that there is no remaining “ongoing treatment” to discuss.). The treatment of Christians by Muslims in Muslim countries would be almost impossible to learn about except for the work of a single guy named Raymond Ibrahim. Ibrahim scours obscure local news sources, and also frequently interviews sources on the ground in various Muslim-majority countries, and he then puts out regular reports of the ongoing atrocities in these places.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Police at UNC Chapel Hill detain at least 30 anti-Israel protesters, crowds try to force into buildings Fox News Danielle Wallace

By on April 30th, 2024

https://www.aol.com/news/police-unc-chapel-hill-detain-174055542.html

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill confirmed approximately 30 anti-Israel demonstrators were detained Tuesday morning for refusing to leave an encampment protest set up on campus.

At 5:30 a.m., UNC Chapel Hill administrators shared a statement from Interim Chancellor Lee Roberts and Provost Chris Clemens advising protesters to leave the area and remove tents, tables or other items by 6 a.m. or they may face arrest and other consequences, including suspension from campus and, “ultimately, expulsion from the university, which may prevent students from graduating.”

At 6 a.m., UNC Police “calmly approached the group and detained approximately 30 people who refused to leave. During that time, the protesters attempted to block the UNC Police vehicles by standing in front of them and throwing items at officers. Polk Place was cleared in approximately 45 minutes. Afterwards, UNC Facilities cleared the area of significant debris,” the university said in a statement. “After the area was cleared, the remaining protesters escalated their tactics, attempting to forcibly enter South Building by pushing officers and refusing to comply with requests from Facilities and UNC Police.”

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Humiliated Blinken But Blinken Kept Begging by Gordon G. Chang

By on April 30th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20607/china-humiliated-blinken

“This was more than a slight. Aside from a calculated insult to the dignity of the United States, the move indicates Xi Jinping is making clear that the accepted norms of diplomacy will not be respected by China anymore.” — Charles Burton, former Canadian diplomat who served in Beijing, to Gatestone Institute, April 27, 2024.

Blinken was in China to discuss the growing list of disagreements between Washington and Beijing. Not surprisingly, he did not accomplish anything there other than register America’s complaints on matters such as Beijing’s support for the Russian war effort in Ukraine and unfair treatment of U.S. companies. On every major issue, the U.S. and China take different sides, and the Chinese have clearly dug in. Blinken was reduced to begging.

America is resorting to the dialogue-is-progress narrative…. In substance, therefore, Blinken in Beijing continued talking about talking.

There is no question that AI is an important topic, especially when it comes to the control of nuclear weapons. Yet this does not mean the U.S. should seek an agreement with China on that topic.

Burton and Weichert point out that China never honors agreements, so any deal with Beijing is akin to a unilateral promise.

The risk now is that the Biden administration will trade away its restrictions for meaningless promises from China’s Communists.

“China is deeply committed to the weaponization of AI and would be counting its lucky communist star if the Americans basically deterred themselves with such a protocol,” Weichert, also author of Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life, added.

The secretary of state should never have gone to China in the first place.

It is not clear whether a Chinese official was at the Beijing airport to bid farewell to Secretary of State Antony Blinken as he ended his three-day visit to China on Friday, but the send-off was in any event low-key and Chinese leader Xi Jinping slighted America’s top diplomat at the end of his troubled stay.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The New Anti-Semitism’s Nazi Lineage Marvin Bendle

By on April 30th, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/israel/2024/04/the-new-anti-semitisms-debt-to-the-nazis/

Anti-Semitism keeps evolving. In its current iteration, unimaginatively known as the New Antisemitism, it retains many of the traditional tropes found in the previous five stages of Antisemitism dating back over 2000 years, and these shouldn’t need to be rehearsed here. What is innovative in its new form is the way in which these traditional libels have been welded to the dominant discourses of the far Left, so that ‘the Jew’ has been conflated with colonialism, imperialism, global capitalism, racism, apartheid, genocide and even, in the cruellest of historical inversions, with Nazism!

Having found a comfortable home on the progressivist left, the New Anti-Semitism tries to obscure its exterminationist position by speaking in code, as did the Nazis, where, e.g., ‘placing the Jews under active control’ meant transporting them to the death camps for extermination. Similarly, the New Anti-Semites insist they are not Anti-Semitic just anti-Zionist, seeking to obscure the fact that the now ubiquitous protest chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, is code for the destruction of Israel and the extermination of the Jewish people. While it is (barely) possible that this is not known or of much concern to all the Greens and ALP politicians, media commentators, academics, university administrators, the ACTU, school teachers, local councillors, Trotskyites, celebrity protesters, Islamist fellow-travellers, and other useful idiots who mouth this slogan, its meaning goes back at least as far the Third Reich’s racial policies, Hitler and the Nazis’ plans for the Final Solution, and the genocidal aspirations of their Arab disciples.

‘The Final Solution to the Jewish Question’ was, of course, official Nazi code for the genocide of the Jews, across Europe and beyond as far as Nazi power could reach. The plan was mapped out at the January 1942 Wannsee Conference of high level Nazi officials responsible for its implementation, but its roots lie deep in the history of Antisemitism and especially into Hitler’s own hyper-paranoid worldview. This found notorious expression in Mein Kampf , in which he fulminated about “the black-haired Jewish youth, with satanic joy in his face, lurks in wait for the unsuspecting [Aryan] maiden whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate.” Joseph Goebbels similarly denounced ‘the Jew’ as “the enemy of the world, the destroyer of cultures, the parasite among the peoples, the Son of Chaos, the incarnation of evil, the ferment of decomposition [and] the decay of humanity.” Such  sentiments are echoed today regularly in mosques, on social media, and in protests (with apparent immunity from sanction by the police, the courts, or the AHRC), and one wonders to what extent the New Anti-Semites identify with these Nazi caricatures, or are aware where their ideological allegiances might carry them.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Christopher F. Rufo DEI Conquers Stanford The university now has at least 177 bureaucrats dedicated to left-wing racialism.

By on April 30th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/dei-conquers-stanford

Stanford University, its campus lined with redwoods and eucalyptus trees, has long been known as a hub for innovation and entrepreneurship. But in recent years, another ideological force has taken root: “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” a euphemism for left-wing racialism. DEI, in fact, has conquered Stanford.

I have obtained exclusive analysis from inside Stanford outlining the incredible size and scope of the university’s DEI bureaucracy. According to this analysis, Stanford employs at least 177 full-time DEI bureaucrats, spread throughout the university’s various divisions and departments.

Stanford’s DEI mandate is the same as those of other universities: advance the principles of left-wing racialism, hire faculty and admit students according to identity, and suppress dissent on campus under the guise of fostering a “culture of inclusion” and “protected identity harm reporting.”

Julia Steinberg, an undergraduate and journalist at the Stanford Review, believes that DEI is a “black box” system of rewards and punishments for enforcing ideological adherence. “I’ve observed as students are reported by their peers for constitutionally protected speech,” and professors are denounced and accused of discrimination by other students “for the crime of not being PC enough in their research or in class,” she says. “Who fits or doesn’t fit into the DEI caste system determines a student or professor’s summary judgement.”

DEI’s growth at Stanford has been fast. In 2021, the Heritage Foundation counted 80 DEI officials at the university. That number has more than doubled since then.

Sophie Fujiwara, a recent graduate, explains that DEI has become “unavoidable” for students, with “mandatory classes” and “university-sponsored activities.” Left-wing students increasingly believed that this wasn’t enough. Following the George Floyd revolution of 2020, these students “demanded more initiatives and funding from the university for DEI-related subjects.”

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EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

U.S. Campuses: Grooming Terrorists by Bassam Tawil

By on April 30th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20606/us-campuses-grooming-terrorists

For these Arabs, including some Palestinians, there is nothing “pro-Palestinian” about supporting the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group….

Those who are chanting “we are all Hamas” on the streets of New York and U.S. college campuses are not helping the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip even slightly. They are being used as human shields by the terrorist group Hamas in its genocidal war against Israel and Jews.” — Loay Al-Shareef, social media influencer from the United Arab Emirates, X, April 23, 2024.

“You would not survive a day in Gaza under Hamas, which demands that ‘infidels’ live with dignity only if they are subordinate to Islamists…. You do not understand Arabic, nor do you know Islam well enough to comprehend what awaits you if Hamas prevails (God forbid).” — Loay Al-Shareef, X, April 23, 2024.

“[Y]ou would also be the target of hatred because radical Islamists like Hamas believe in eternal enmity towards Jews and Christians. They interpret the Quranic verse (“O you who believe, never take Jews and Christians as friends,” as timeless, applicable to all Jews and Christians forever.” — Loay Al-Shareef, X, April 23, 2024.

“Hamas’ approach, in other words, has been a disaster for Palestinians in Gaza…. If universities cannot instil their students with peaceful, tolerant, and coexistent attitudes, then they have failed as institutions of higher learning.” — John Aziz, a British-Palestinian writer, Jewish Chronicle, April 22, 2024.

“Violence has failed us for decades, and the only way to accomplish justice for Palestinians is through peace.” — Hamza Howidy, Palestinian from Gaza, X, April 25, 2024.

By blocking the three Palestinian social media influences, the SJP, which claims to seek justice for the Palestinians, is proving that it does not care about freedom of speech for the Palestinians and is as intolerant as Hamas and other terrorist groups to criticism.

“The Muslim Brotherhood is a cancer on every university campus.” – Amjad Taha, Emirati researcher and journalist, X, April 23, 2024.

While protesters at Columbia University and Yale University celebrate Hamas and its “resistance” (a euphemism for violence and terrorism), Arabs have been ridiculing the “pro-Palestinian” demonstrators on American college campuses. For these Arabs, including some Palestinians, there is nothing “pro-Palestinian” about supporting the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group, whose members slaughtered 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped more than 240 others on October 7, 2023.

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NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

Don’t Count on Biden to Protect Planes Over the Baltic Sea By Jim Geraghty

By on April 30th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dont-count-on-biden-to-protect-planes-over-the-baltic-sea/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

What will we do about Russian GPS jamming over the Baltic Sea, which is starting to increase the risk of civilian passenger airliner accidents?

Nothing. We’re not going to do anything.

Someday, after Biden’s prepared remarks have been workshopped to death by U.S. State Department bureaucrats, the president may offer another one of his patented, “don’t… don’t,” warnings that have been ignored by everyone from Hamas to the Iranians to the Houthis.

Any type of retaliation or warning shot, telling Russia to knock it off, is likely to be considered too “escalatory” and “provocative” by this administration.

Biden was shaped by the Vietnam War, and his foreign policy instincts – the ones former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates characterized as “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades” – are always to avoid anything that could remotely be considered escalatory, hawkish or aggressive by a foe that is inclined to interpret any U.S. action as intolerably provocative. Remember, Biden’s the guy who urged President Obama to wait on the bin Laden raid, deeming it too risky.

What’s amazing is that Biden takes this hesitant, irresolute stance while simultaneously believing that he’s the toughest guy on the block. “Putin knows that I am president of the United States his days of tyranny and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe are over,” Biden declared in 2019. Biden also claims he went nose-to-nose with Putin and told the Russian dictator, directly to his face, that he didn’t think Putin has a soul. Of course, there were no witnesses.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Remember When Bill Clinton Stole the 1992 Election? Rich Lowry

By on April 30th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/remember-when-bill-clinton-stole-the-1992-election/

Too bad Alvin Bragg wasn’t on the case.

The Alvin Bragg case has gotten grander at trial, but also more ridiculous.

The Manhattan DA has a meaningless business-records misdemeanor wrapped within a theory about an alleged Trump conspiracy to defraud the voters by denying them disparaging information before the election and obscuring, after the fact, the payments that were used to do so.

Bragg is accusing Trump, in effect, of stealing the election.

He, thus, joins all the other progressives who have denied the legitimacy of Trump’s 2016 election, although he finds the culprit not in Russia (at least not in this case) but in the shady maneuverings around Stormy Daniels.

If this is the standard by which we judge elections, we need to go back and conclude that Bill Clinton wasn’t elected legitimately in 1992, either. The Arkansas governor’s political operation was, in part, an elaborate conspiracy to keep women who alleged to have had affairs with Clinton quiet. Hillary Clinton was an active participant in the schemes. And so, by Bragg’s logic, this Democratic power couple — dominant in the party for a decade or more and still honored today — comprises election thieves.

Clinton had the same underlying problem as Trump — namely, women with embarrassing stories to tell — but the opposite tabloid dynamic; the tabloids were trying to get Clinton, whereas the National Enquirer was trying to protect Trump.

The Clinton campaign fought to silence or discredit women as necessary. Clinton’s operatives had the foresight — there’s nothing like planning ahead — to secure affidavits of denial from women rumored to have had affairs with Clinton. The truth didn’t matter here, of course. They just wanted the exculpatory statements, and the women were usually happy to sign them. Who wants the embarrassment of such matters being aired in public?

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