RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mark Durie is the pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness.

This was published in the Australian Inquirer. It is a more general version of a longer article posted a few days previously on Lapido Media ‘Paris attacks were not nihilism’.

As the expressions of shock and solidarity subside after the Paris killings, the challenge to understand will remain. Much commentary of the past week has situated these atrocities in opposition to values familiar to western people. Seen in this light the attacks appear senseless and even insane. US Secretary of State John Kerry called the killers ‘psychopathic monsters’. However the first step in understanding a cultural system alien to one’s own is to describe it in its own terms.

We can and must love our neighbour, as Walid Aly urged this week on The Project, but this need not prevent us from understanding our enemy, and to do this we need to grasp that this latest slaughter was shaped by religious beliefs.

The recent wave of student protests is aimed at liberal professors and administrators.

Current student anger eerily fits the pattern of most left-wing unrest, from the cycles of the French Revolution to the campus riots of the 1960s.

First, protests gradually grow more extreme. Venom is directed at fellow leftists who are deemed insufficiently radical.

In revolutionary France, wild-eyed Jacobins soon guillotined reformist Girondins, who were considered passé. During the Russian Revolution, extremist Bolsheviks marginalized liberal Mensheviks. In the 1960s, many members of the SDS and Black Panthers hated liberals who disapproved of their violence.

A group called the Black Justice League wants the name of liberal but bigoted President Woodrow Wilson removed from Princeton University. Liberals are aghast that the century-old memory of their progressive hero might vanish from the Princeton campus.

Peter Wood is the president of the National Association of Scholars
When the defenders of academic freedom leave campus lynch mob victims to fend for themselves.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday in 1915 Columbia University economics professor E.R. A. Seligman shared a draft document with his colleagues, Princeton economics professor Frank Fetter and Johns Hopkins philosophy professor Arthur O. Lovejoy. The three succeeded in putting into final form what became the founding document of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a 16-page “Declaration of Principles.” It defined for the first time a fully worked conception of “academic freedom” and is nine-tenths of the reason why Americans give any credence to the idea that college professors should have some special measure of protection for their research, their publications, and other expressions of (some of) their views.

One hundred years later, how is the AAUP’s founding vision holding up? Consider the case of Vanderbilt professor of political science and law Carol M. Swain. Professor Swain wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper, The Tennessean, last January, under the title “Charlie Hebdo attacks prove critics were right about Islam.” The university’s Muslim Student Organization objected and the furor reached the national press. Swain also posted some of her pro-Christian views on her popular Facebook page, which Vanderbilt students began to read more assiduously after the op-ed, apparently fascinated by the spectacle of someone who was willing to dissent publicly from the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. The spectacle finally proved too much for one alumna, Emily Arnold, who created a petition calling for Swain to be fired from the university. The petition was later amended to call for “suspending” Swain instead of firing her, and requiring her to undergo “cultural sensitivity” training.

The petition says that over the past few years Swain “has become synonymous with bigotry, intolerance, and unprofessionalism.” Swain, it alleges, has engaged in unprofessional intimidation on social media, discriminatory practices in the classroom. It had gained as of a few days ago 1,736 signers.

The gist of the petition is that Arnold and her friends disagree with Swain’s views and would like Vanderbilt to shut her up or get rid of her. In an online interview, Arnold expresses her delight in the large number of fellow students who have joined her. She is “shedding tears of joy.”

Brandeis University’s Mandel Center for the Humanities recently hosted Gideon Levy. Levy, the author of articles such as, “Did Israel Really Think Hamas Would Turn the Other Cheek?”, is yet another in a line of Students for Justice in Palestine speakers who have justified the racist murder of Jews.

Last year, SJP’s Israel Apartheid Week included Max Blumenthal, an advocate of the ethnic cleansing of Israel, whose views even critics of the Jewish State find horrifying. A Forward reviewer wrote of his previous book that, “It could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club.”

One of Blumenthal’s attacks on Israel was cited by the Neo-Nazi gunman who tried to murder Jews outside the Jewish Community Center in Kansas City. Blumenthal was deemed too hateful by the German Communists who had invited him to speak. And yet he was not too extreme for Brandeis’ SJP.

Jewish students at Brandeis are forced to cope with a campus where Students for Justice in Palestine campaigns for Rasmieh Odeh, who took part in the bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket before the Sabbath. Leon Kanner and Edward Joffe, two Hebrew University roommates who had come there to buy canned food, the way so many college students do, were torn to pieces by bombs hidden in coffee cans.

On Islamophobia First, let’s define phobia.

The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (1971):

Phobia: Fear, horror, or aversion, esp. of a morbid character….So Phobist nonce-wd. one who has a horror of or aversion to anything.

Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1956) states:

Phobia: An irrational, persistent fear of a particular object or class of objects.

The Oxford definition does not claim that a phobia is necessarily irrational, but however stresses its cause as being a person. The Webster’s definition does not even mention a person, just objects or classes of objects, which, of course, can include persons. Other dictionary definitions more or less track the Oxford and Webster’s definitions.

And here is the origin of the term Islamophobia, from Discover the Networks.

The term “Islamophobia” was invented and promoted in the early 1990s by the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), a front group of the Muslim Brotherhood. Former IIIT member Abdur-Rahman Muhammad — who was with that organization when the word was formally created, and who has since rejected IIIT’s ideology — now reveals the original intent behind the concept of Islamophobia: “This loathsome term is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliché conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics.” In short, in its very origins, “Islamophobia” was a term designed as a weapon to advance a totalitarian cause by stigmatizing critics and silencing them….

Although the term was coined in the early 1990s, “Islamophobia” did not become the focus of an active Brotherhood campaign until after 9/11. Since that time, Islamist lobby organizations (including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR) and Muslim civil-rights activists have regularly accused the American people, American institutions, law-enforcement authorities, and the U.S. government of harboring a deep and potentially violent prejudice against Muslims. The accusers charge that as a result of this “Islamophobia,” Muslims are disproportionately targeted by perpetrators of hate crimes and acts of discrimination.

As students ‘occupy’ Brandeis University this week, a look at how the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is playing out at universities in a new post-PC world order.

Located on the outskirts of Boston, Brandeis University has been under siege since Friday when a group of some 150 undergrad and graduate students indefinitely “occupied” the Bernstein-Marcus Administration Center. The students, who are taking shifts in the round-the-clock protest, have vowed to remain until 13 demands are met.

On Thursday, the group, which operates under the monikers “Concerned Students 2015” and “Ford Hall 2015,” submitted their 13-point list of demands to acting president Lisa Lynch, giving her 24 hours to comply. The demands include a 10 percent across the board hiring of full-time black faculty and staff, the appointment of a vice president for diversity and inclusion, and mandatory diversity education for all students. (In 2014, the school’s website states the entire student body is under 6,000, of which some five% was black, 6% Hispanic, and 13% Asian.)

In response, over the weekend the acting president wrote the students a multi-page letter validating their feelings and vowing to boost diversity. “The atmosphere described by our students is painful to hear and calls on all of us to address these issues,” Lynch wrote, but she declined to set a timetable for actual action. (In a leaked email, interim Provost Irving Epstein instructs faculty to use discretion in regards to protesters’ class attendance and assignments.)

The Biblical and Post-Biblical Jewish history of Israel’s northwest region, the plateau called the Golan Heights.

Israel annexed the Golan Heights in 1981. In the midst of the terror wave in Israel, in November 2015, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for Israel to return the Golan to Syria. The EU included the Golan Heights in its anti-Semitic labelling decision.

What impelled Prime Minister Netanyahu recently to ask US President Obama to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights during his recent meeting with Obama?

Surely he knew that Obama would categorically reject any Israeli claim to that territory, just as he rejects any Jewish claims to Judea and Samaria and many parts of Jerusalem. Why then did Netanyahu demean himself and, by extension, humiliate the Jewish state, still only reconstituted in parts of its ancestral and biblical homeland?

The answer would seem to be a deep concern that in the wake of the notorious Obama-Iran nuclear deal, the Iranian-Syrian alliance, Russia’s military presence in Syria, and the ever constant threat of attack by Iran’s terror proxy, Hezbollah, Israel needs an “American pledge” supporting Israeli territorial control over the strategic area. It would also seem to be Netanyahu’s attempt to at least put Israel’s concerns on record.

A trip down the bloodsoaked timeline of Arab violence against Jews.

During the height of the second Intifada, the media and politicians in general were adamant, only total desperation could cause one human being to walk onto a bus full of innocent civilians and blow himself up. This twisted logic unashamedly blames the victims for the act of violence that kills them and removes personal responsibility from the terrorist. It is also a logic that only applies in Israel, as we find the same media and the same politicians have no trouble identifying the true cause of the brutal violence when it hits closer to home.

On April 30th 2003, at about 00:45, 22-year-old Asif Muhammad Hanif entered Mike’s Place, a live music tourist pub on the Tel Aviv beachfront. Asif, from London and his friend, Omar Khan Sharif from Derby, had been born, grew up and were educated in the UK. Their entire itinerary had been planned using the latest Lonely Planet Guide book and they had spent the evening with a hundred other tourists at the Hayarkon Hostel, just up the road. Upon entering the pub, Asif detonated his bomb, killing 3 and injuring 50, with the damage restricted by the brave actions of Avi Tabib, the security guard. One of the fatalities was 29-year-old French born Dominique Haas, a personal friend of mine. It would be difficult to argue that Asif and Omar were any more desperate than you or I. Young, British and university educated, they had their whole lives before them, but simply believed there was more to gain from murdering Jews in Tel Aviv instead.

It is now October 2015 and Jews are again being murdered on the streets of Israel. Today, we are being told the reason Arabs are murdering innocent Jews is because the ‘status quo’ on the Temple Mount is being threatened. It is a false rumour that has been used before, but let us embark on an historical exercise and follow this logic to its obvious conclusion.

This from Gaza in October 2015. For those that haven’t watched it, the call for stabbing, the knife, the religious references is highly disturbing viewing.

Massachusetts has announced the intention to abandon its steadfast commitment to the Common Core K–12 curriculum standards. Last week, on the recommendation of state education commissioner Mitchell Chester, the state’s education board decided to revamp its famed Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) and drop plans to retire MCAS for the Common Core–aligned PARCC test. Massachusetts will retain the MCAS but will tinker with the test by adding elements from the PARCC exam.

This reversal is a bruising blow to the Common Core, given Massachusetts’ iconic status as the nation’s longtime K–12 leader on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In fact, even though Common Core advocates conceded that Massachusetts’ standards were at least as good as those of the Common Core, they mounted a furious (and successful) push in 2009 and 2010 to get Massachusetts to adopt the Common Core — precisely because of the state’s symbolic importance. So even though plenty of states have abandoned the two Common Core–aligned tests (PARCC and Smarter Balanced), Massachusetts’ announcement drew national notice.

With the board’s decision, New York Times reporter Kate Zernike told PBS that the Common Core loses its “gold, Good Housekeeping seal of approval.” Adding insult to injury, Chester is the chair of the PARCC governing board — meaning that one of the two federally funded Common Core test providers has just been thrown over by one of its own.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427567/princeton-student-group-no-politically-correct-intimidation

Editor’s Note: The Princeton Open Campus Coalition is a student group at Princeton University formed to push back against the recent wave of politically correct suppression of open academic discourse on campus. The following letter was originally published at the Coalition’s Facebook page.

Dear President Eisgruber,

We write on behalf of the Princeton Open Campus Coalition to request a meeting with you so that we may present our perspectives on the events of recent weeks. We are concerned mainly with the importance of preserving an intellectual culture in which all members of the Princeton community feel free to engage in civil discussion and to express their convictions without fear of being subjected to intimidation or abuse. Thanks to recent polls, surveys, and petitions, we have reason to believe that our concerns are shared by a majority of our fellow Princeton undergraduates.

Academic discourse consists of reasoned arguments. We simply wish to present our own reasoned arguments and engage you and other senior administrators in dialogue. We will not occupy your office, and, though we respectfully request a minimum of an hour of your time, we will only stay for as long as you wish. We will conduct ourselves in the civil manner that is our hope to maintain and reinforce as the norm at Princeton.