RUTHFULLY YOURS

It came as no surprise this week when New York’s Senate backed Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s proposal to cut state funding to the City University of New York.

Few in Albany were prepared, however, when the Senate, in its own budget proposal, criticized CUNY’s handling of alleged anti-Semitism.

In light of the issue, the Senate said it is denying funding until it is satisfied with the school’s response “and this difficult and atrocious situation is adequately addressed.”

That budget proposal, issued Monday from the Senate’s Republican majority, has seemed to draw every imaginable reaction: an anxious response from CUNY, outrage from Democrats, praise from a Zionist group, concern from First Amendment attorneys and even dissent from within the GOP’s ranks.

“It was breathtakingly shocking to me,” said Sen. Liz Krueger, a Manhattan Democrat opposed to the cuts. “This was one giant ‘what the heck?’ moment.”

The anti-Semitism allegations surfaced in a letter from the Zionist Organization of America, an Israeli advocacy group, sent in February to CUNY Chancellor James Milliken.

It alleges numerous anti-Semitic incidents at CUNY over the past three years, from cries of “Zionists go home!” to a swastika found on one of the school’s campuses. The letter blames a university group, Students for Justice in Palestine, for many of the alleged incidents, and urges CUNY to condemn it. CONTINUE AT SITE

On February 18, Adam Falk, president of Williams College, sent an email to the Williams community announcing “the extraordinary step” he was taking by “cancelling a speech by John Derbyshire.” The email was sent on a Thursday, cancelling an event that had been scheduled for the following Monday. I have corresponded with President Falk about his decision, and with his permission, I will present his full, unedited answer.
You can skip to that below, but I hope you will stay with me as I review the broader situation.

A DISINVITED DECADE
The Derbyshire disinvitation was, of course, only one more in a growing list of disinvitations on college campuses, as well as other snubs, actions prompting invited speakers to cancel their own appearances, and speakers showing up only to be drowned out by protesters. In 2014, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) published a “List of Campus Disinvitation Attempts, 2000-2014,” which captured nearly 200 cases. That was before George Will was disinvited by Scripps College in October 2014, and before Suzanne Venker was disinvited from Williams College in October 2015. Venker is the author of several anti-feminist books and a frequent guest on Fox News programs.
As it happens, Venker wasn’t disinvited by President Falk. Her red card came from the students who originally invited her. They disinvited her after they came under intense pressure from fellow students. President Falk at the time defended Venker’s right to speak. In a column (“How to Disagree”) in the student newspaper he wrote, “Whatever our own views may be, we should be active in bringing to campus speakers whose opinions are different from our own.”

The campus disinvitation phenomenon has been widely discussed—and deplored. It represents a failure on the part of colleges and universities to uphold the cardinal principles of intellectual freedom and freedom of expression. Cry-bully students and Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists primed to take “offense” at anything that troubles them; faculty members frantically eager to engage in virtue signaling; and college presidents determined to stay ahead of the wave of political correctness have contributed to this odd form of censorship.
The beginnings of campus protest are often traced to Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM) of 1964-1965. As though the protesters had set out to prove Hegel right, the movement gave birth to its own antithesis fifty years later: a movement that flat out rejects the ideals of free expression in favor of “safe spaces.” The distance between FSM and BLM turns out to be much smaller than anyone could have dreamed.

CHANGING SCRIPPS
Among the members of the National Association of Scholars are many who view the disinvitations as a singularly bad development. I share some of that outrage, but the task of NAS is to seek to repair American higher education, and merely declaring that a college here or a university there has behaved in an egregious way does limited good. In the case of the decision by Lori Bettison-Varga, president of Scripps College, disinviting George Will, I wrote her a letter urging her to reconsider. I wrote separately to the Scripps board of trustees and yet again to the editors of the student newspaper. Rather disconcertingly, President Bettison-Varga did not reply, nor did any trustee, any representative of the trustees, or any student editor.

The decisions by all involved to ignore my letters is, I believe, part of the larger phenomenon. Not answering a letter is another way of closing the door on the exchange of ideas. It is a less visible form of silencing but important in its own way. In 1987, when I went to work in the John Silber administration at Boston University, one of my first tasks was to answer the letters of complaint that were part of an organized campaign. The hundreds of letters stemmed from the non-reappointment of a faculty member who had a base of support outside the university. Answering them was not a matter of sending the same canned response to everyone. My instructions were to take each letter on its merits and explain as fully as needed the university’s position.

Adam Mission is the pseudonym of someone who works in the admissions office of a well-known public research university.

“As you might expect, her father and I are concerned with the financials,” she said, “We’ve been diligent about saving through a 529 plan. Despite this, our shortfall would still be in the $70,000 range.”
The applicant’s parents sat across from my desk in the admission department. They seemed sheepish that they didn’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting in their account. I could tell from the moment they walked into my office that this was their first child going to college.
“Frankly, we’re old school,” the mother continued, “Besides our mortgage, we’ve never had any debt, lived within our means and saved for the future. We hope for our child to graduate with as little debt as possible.”
She paused, and finally straightened as if to brace for what she was going to say next.
“We’re both from humble, hardworking Midwest households and we’ve earned every penny we have. We’re even prepared to move here if it means getting our daughter in-state tuition.”
Her story wasn’t unusual. In fact, the high cost of college tuition is one of the most common things I deal with as an admissions counselor for a well-known public research university. College tuition is outrageously high; and it’s only getting higher every year. When my father went to college, tuition at my current institution was around $300 a year. Even accounting for inflation, the average American family a generation ago could afford going to college without breaking the bank. Now tuition at my university is 30 times as expensive. Students and their families pay for college by taking on second mortgages, working four jobs, or moving to another state. Most often they take on crippling debt that will haunt them the rest of their life.
There are a lot of theories about why the cost of tuition is so high and just as many about how to get those costs under control. Politicians, unsurprisingly, promise increased federal funding to make it “free.” Academics criticize the increased expenditure on massive collegiate athletic programs. All sorts of people disapprove of uncontrolled spending on expansive building projects and the all-inclusive resort amenities that students now seem to expect at college. What really costs money, though, is salaries. As with most businesses, the highest expenditure of a university is payroll—and that cost has been skyrocketing. The reason is the growth in administrative jobs. In the past 25 years, the number of non-academic administrative employees has doubled nationwide, growing at more than double the rate of increase in the number of students.

Kerry is willing to list the ways in which ISIS is horrific and to say HE THINKS it is committing genocide, but unwilling to definitively say it is.

In a statement on Wednesday, March 17, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry went halfway out on a limb and announced that ‘in his judgment,’ ISIS is committing genocide against Yezidis and Christians and Shia Muslims and other living things.

But –fair minded man that he is — Kerry refused to say definitively that ISIS actually is committing genocide. Such a definitive statement, Kerry insisted, could only be made by an international court.

Once upon a time, our world had people — they were called “leaders” — who were not afraid to name evil, and condemn evil when they saw it. Can you imagine Churchill or Roosevelt issuing a statement that, in their opinion, the Nazis were evil, but that any definitive conclusion on the subject would have to be issued by someone else?

So if you see other reports about Kerry’s statement today, you may find headlines saying the U.S. has announced that ISIS is committing genocide. Sadly, though, Kerry did not quite say that. He said ISIS (he now calls it Daesh, its Arabic acronym) is doing lots of terrible things that the U.S. and its coalition partners detest and want to stop.

Kerry mentioned, at the outset, the taking over of major cities and seizing of territory in Syria and Iraq, committed by ISIS over the past two years. He mentioned that ISIS has overrun major cities, seized territory in Syria and Iraq.

Those are not the first things most humanitarians would list, when listing the atrocities which ISIS has committed.

Kerry then boasted about the U.S. efforts, that it “responded quickly by denouncing these horrific acts and – more importantly – taking coordinated actions to counter them.” He mentioned the international coalition which is working “to halt and reverse Daesh’s momentum.” And ticks off the coalition’s successes and actions.

As the dire threat of Islamic Jihad continues to escalate on our own soil, we continue to witness mass denial within the West’s leadership, media and culture about the Islamic nature of Islamic terror. Just recently in Canada, for instance, a Muslim male, Ayanle Hassan Ali, walked into a Canadian Forces office in north Toronto and attacked several soldiers with a large knife, screaming “Allah told me to do this. Allah told me to come here and kill people!” while he was stabbing the soldiers.

Authorities are still searching for a motive of why Ayanle Hassan Ali engaged in this attack. Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders has made it clear, meanwhile, that the highest priority must be to avoid “Islamophobia” in reaction to Ali stabbing Canadian soldiers and screaming Allah’s name while doing so.

In response to this latest denial on the Islamic nature of Islamic Jihad, we are running Jamie Glazov’s speech at the Eagle Forum of California State Conference in 2015. He tackled The Media’s Willful Blindness about Islam, unveiling the hazardous danger of the West deceiving itself about Islamic Jihad.

Don’t miss it!

The high cost of the lies we tell ourselves.

To watch the video, CLICK HERE.http://jamieglazov.com/2016/03/17/jamie-glazov-video-the-medias-willful-blindness-about-islam/

Many biopics tend to cast their subjects in a very positive light.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley, a 2006 film about the Irish War of Independence against the British, presents an unequivocally pro-IRA viewpoint. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Spike Lee’s 1992 Malcolm X, a hagiography of the admittedly complicated but undoubtedly antisemitic figure, is in the United States National Film Registry as a “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant film.” That’s fair. Although the film glosses over Malcolm X’s antisemitism and conspiracy theories, that’s not its job. The Oscar-winning 1982 biopic of Mohandas Gandhi ignores many of the more unsavory aspects of Gandhi’s life. That’s how these kind of films are. They’re on the side of their protagonists.

So you can imagine my surprise when I read in Variety that H2O Motion Pictures is making a biopic of Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism.

That they would make a movie about Herzl is in itself nothing remarkable — Herzl certainly led an interesting life, from his years as a struggling playwright, to his manic travels across Europe to meet with whichever national leaders would see him, to his unusual and arguably tragic family life.

What surprised me is that Sidney Blumenthal is attached to the project, both as an executive producer and as a member of an advisory board to “ensure [their] approach to the story [is] as well balanced as possible.” Frankly, this is appalling.

Alex Chalmers was co-Chair of Oxford University Labour Club until he resigned in February, alleging that a ‘large proportion’ of club members had ‘some kind of problem with Jews’, while many used the slur ‘Zio’ and voiced support for Hamas. A controversy erupted and the Labour Party is now conducting an enquiry into antisemitism at the club. Chalmers argues here that the root problem is the poisonous ideology of antisemitic anti-Zionism which is bad for Diaspora Jews, bad for the Left, bad for Israelis and bad for Palestinians.

At the Labour Party Conference back in September 2015, the Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn addressed receptions held by Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East (LFPME) and Labour Friends of Israel (LFI). At both events he delivered relatively similar speeches in which he talked about the psychological toll that the conflict takes on both Israeli and Palestinian children and the need for both sides to compromise and negotiate. LFI received the speech enthusiastically, but at the LFPME event there was outrage. One attendee shouted ‘this isn’t about peace; this is about justice’, to enthusiastic applause from a large proportion of the room. When Benn tried to respond, he was heckled by people calling him a ‘disgrace’ and saying that he should not be Shadow Foreign Secretary.

This attitude of ‘justice’ over ‘peace’ is a damaging trend that has come to characterise much pro-Palestinian activism. That is to say, the demands of Western activists living in relative comfort have become progressively more detached from the aspirations of the actual people whom they claim to be defending. Whilst support for a two-state solution amongst Palestinians is lower than it has been historically, in the last 12 months, polling conducted by the Palestine Survey and Research Group has found that it is still the preferred outcome of between 45 and 51 per cent of Palestinians. Contrast this with the logo of the UK’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign which features the entirety of ‘historic’ Palestine with no mention of Israel.

Leftist students with an authoritarian streak have repeatedly gotten their way on college campuses during the Obama years — shutting down free speech at the University of California in Berkeley to the University of Missouri to Yale University.

But not at the University of Texas in Austin. Recently, one of the campus’ leftist mobs was defeated. The bullies were defeated and apparently now face disciplinary action – all thanks to professors and administrators who stood up to the mob. By following the rule of law, university officials demonstrated how to defeat leftist bullies claiming to promote social justice.

As usual, social media made the incident go viral at Texas’ flagship university. Four months ago, members of a pro-Palestinian group at the school falsely accused Israeli-born professor Ami Pedahzur of defamation and assault – all after they had disrupted a conference he was hosting that brought together a small gathering of scholars. The incident occurred just as Stanford University historian Gil-li Vardi was introduced. Suddenly, the boisterous students stood up and unfurled a Palestinian flag. They spewed the usual venomous statements regarding the state of Israel; and went on to exchange heated words with Pedahzur and other attendees who were unwilling to meekly let the students take over the event. Pedahzur, for his part, repeatedly asked told the students to “Sit down and listen, sit down and learn” – but to no avail. They quickly began to chant: “Free, free Palestinian!” and “Long Live the Intifada!” And perhaps most venomous of all, they chanted: “We want the 48; we don’t want 2 states!” – with 48 being a reference to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

Safe Schools advocates shriek ‘Homophobia!’ at the suggestion their crusade to introduce young minds to cross-dressing and the like is anything other the ‘anti-bullying campaign’ they claim it to be. Let us hope there are still some politicians prepared to wear such abuse as a badge of honour.
As expected, the so-called independent review of the Safe Schools Coalition program has proved to be a whitewash that opens the way for the compulsory application of the program in schools around Australia. The academic chosen to conduct the two-week review, University of Western Australia Emeritus Professor Bill Louden, has confirmed that only schools in moderate Melbourne suburbs were reviewed, leaving unexplored the mass of highly controversial material both contained in, and associated with, the program that drew widespread criticism in the first place. The only ray of hope, it seems, is that a remnant of the conservative and responsible wing of the Coalition will intervene at the last moment to defund the program before any further damage is done.

Meanwhile, it has been alleged in federal Parliament that Gary Dowsett, the deputy director of the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at LaTrobe University, where the Safe Schools program originated, advocated a favourable view of paedophilia in an article published in 1982, when Dowsett was a school teacher (“Irate MPs plan Safe Schools rumble”, The Australian, 17/3). The article, published in Gay Information, identified three principal political objectives for paedophiles: winning custody rights over children for gay men and lesbians; ensuring the legal “rights” of paedophiles and their young lovers; and establishing the sexual rights of children. It sought to draw a comparison between the “sexual responses” of parents for their children and “the love of a paedophile and his/her [young] lover”. The article declared that

the current paedophilia debate then is crucial to the political processes of the gay movement; paedophiles need our support, and we need to construct the child/adult sex issue on our terms.

It appears to be little doubt that the Safe Schools program has succeeded in doing just that, presenting a radical LGBTI propaganda campaign as an innocuous ‘anti-bullying’ initiative. In doing so, they have achieved an objective first articulated nearly 40 years ago.

In the mid-1970s, the infamous North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) was established (provoking Anita Bryant’s 1977 ‘Save Our Children’ campaign). At its height it attracted many supporters in Australia, especially on the far-left. NAMBLA denounced “the extreme oppression of men and boys in mutually consensual relationships” and its chief objective was to abolish age-of-consent laws that criminalized adult sexual involvement with minors. It sought to align itself with the gay and lesbian movement and waged a vigorous propaganda campaign to associate paedophilia with leftist notions of liberation.

NAMBLA’s co-founder was David Thorstad, a self-described bisexual pederast and atheist. An historian and far-left American political activist, Thorstad was a member of the Socialist Workers Party and president of New York’s Gay Activists Alliance. He played a major role in convincing the far-left that advocacy for homosexuality and paedophilia was a legitimate area of political activism. He was the author or translator of many works promoting gay rights and revolutionary politics. These include Man/Boy Love and the American Gay Movement; Gay Liberation and Socialism; Pederasty and Homosexuality; Homosexuality and the American Left; The Early Homosexual Rights Movement; and The Leninist Theory of Organization.

Thorstad saw himself as a member of an oppressed minority and compared his experience as a pederast in America to being “a Jew in Nazi Germany”. He also denounced “child-

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/262169/raymond-ibrahim-isis-and-hydra-jihad-frontpagemagcom

Raymond Ibrahim was recently interviewed by the Hoover Institution’s Strategika Podcast. Ibrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the Center, discussed his article “ISIS: The Latest Phase of the Jihad,” and explained how his original analysis concerning the resilient nature of the jihad from over a decade ago has proven equally resilient, especially in the context of the Hydra of Jihad. The 15-minute interview follows:

CLICK HERE.https://soundcloud.com/hoover-institution/isis-and-islam-with-raymond