RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-problem-with-columbias-statement-on-pittsburgh/

In the Columbia student’s vocabulary, few labels are more damning than the word “problematic.” The Western canon central to our school’s curriculum is problematic (an affirmation of whiteness and the patriarchy). As is our free-speech supporting, union-skeptic university president (ditto). And the endowment’s investment in fossil-fuel companies (ditto). Succinctly put,“problematic” — to the average student and, in my experience, to some instructors — is the antonym of“woke.” Never mind that this is a grammatically tenuous use of the word: At Columbia, this definition is gospel.

Our campus paper, the Columbia Spectator, reported this morning on an email the Office of University Life addressed to the Columbia community following the anti-Semitic massacre in Pittsburgh. What makes this article worthy of attention? The university’s statement omitted the words“anti-Semitic” and “Jewish.”

Here’s the text of the message:

We are deeply saddened by the senseless violence at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue on Saturday morning. Violence in our nation’s houses of worship is an affront to the freedoms our community holds dear. We stand strongly against these efforts to create fear and terror.

For some in our community, this is a particularly frightening time as we have seen a growing number of highly visible attacks directed at faith and identity – on worshippers and people of faith as they go through their daily lives, on groups gathered to celebrate an LGBT Latin night at Pulse Nightclub, on civil rights and anti-racist protesters in the streets of Charlottesville, and in so many other places, as occurred in last Wednesday’s shooting of two African-American shoppers in Kentucky. Please know that you are not alone, and that you are a part of this community founded on the fundamental dignity and worth of all.

The Columbia Spectator reports that following pushback from Columbia students and alumni, the Office of University Life issued a revision to this initial statement that characterized the attack as anti-Semitic and acknowledged that the attack specifically targeted the Jewish community.

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/columnists/nolan-finley/2018/10/29/finley-anti-semitism-fight-begins-campus/1806326002/

If you’re hunting for the places where anti-semitism thrives in America, you’d be better off looking on its college campuses than in the White House.

Just two days after the slaughter of Jewish worshippers inside a temple in Pittsburgh, the University of Michigan staged a teach-in dedicated to the nationwide drive to prod universities to shun Israel.

The Boycott, Disinvest and Sanction (BDS) Movement condemns the Jewish state as an apartheid government for its treatment of Palestinians, and pressures colleges to break ties with Israel.

It has a vigorous presence at UM, and that’s caused discomfort for Jewish students who have traditionally found a welcoming environment on the Ann Arbor campus. It’s a thin line between demonizing Israel and dehumanizing Jews.

Former student Molly Rosen, writing in The Tower magazine in 2014, said when she arrived at UM, “I was not prepared to be told that, if I cared about human rights, I could not support Israel. I was not prepared to be told that my community was racist.

“I was not prepared to see my fellow students attacked with anti-Semitic slurs.”

https://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/181027

Increasingly we who love this United States of America and the Constitution are alarmed at thehate and violence prevailing in today’s Democrat party with its extreme leftism, globalism, identity politics and open borders that threaten our future. What we are witnessing now is what George Orwell foresaw in his dystopian world to come. But what he envisaged in his dread 1984 novel was in reality not new, but rather a return to what had prevailed in earlier centuries. It seems that history is repeating itself, but has reached a new low.

During the early to late medieval era the omnipotent Kings and Queens lived their lives surrounded by fawning sycophants and protected by mercenary armies. They ruled and owned vast lands, but the people who served them lived in a very different world indeed. For centuries royalty signed treaties, forged alliances, wrote laws, made war, and made peace. And this continued without the consent of untold millions of people, especially in Europe, whose lives were often adversely impacted by those unilateral decisions.

And then in 1776, a mere 242 years ago, came the Declaration of Independence signed by a new nation that arose with a divinely inspired document that challenged directly the assumed power of a king. It did so by abolishing the very status of royalty itself. The Constitution secured and protected the Natural Law Rights and sovereignty of each individual by limiting the authority and power of a centralized government.

For years that was our America. But what of it now?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/georgetown-prep-kavanaugh-confirmation-media-circus-damage/

The media circus is gone, but mess they left behind remains.

On the afternoon of Thursday, September 13, as parents arrived at our school to pick up students, a journalist from a major network camouflaged herself among them, avoiding identification at our front gate. She was subsequently found snooping around the halls of our main building and was escorted off campus. She later apologized.

But others soon followed. One reporter from a national newspaper deceived his way into our library so that he could rummage through old yearbooks. Some of our alumni had news crews staked out in front of their houses. Reporters were even harassing their elderly parents, tracking down home addresses and banging on doors, demanding interviews.

Journalists phoned us by the dozens, mostly demanding to know how long we had presided over a circus of drug and alcohol abuse, misogyny, and criminality. At least these reporters gave us the courtesy of a call. Many other national media outlets simply ran archly critical stories without bothering to contact us at all.

This was all necessary for American democracy, some of them explained, since one of our graduates had become a Supreme Court nominee. In a sense, that’s understandable. But as I learned firsthand, the lens trained on Georgetown Prep was warped, obscuring details that ran counter to preferred narratives, and the resulting portrait of our community was grossly distorted.

We were garishly described as an institution that “celebrated heavy drinking,” “a troubled, morally questionable symbol of a snobby elite [where] alcohol was an integral part of the school’s identity,” and a place where “disregard or mistreatment of women [was] widely accepted.” A “debauched . . . scene of cloistered young men.” And those are just a few such insults from the more than 60 articles that appeared about Prep in the Washington Post alone.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/professor-accused-of-racism-for-asking-his-student-to-try-harder/

Campus insanity is headed toward The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art that, according to its website, is dedicated to Peter Cooper’s “radical commitment to diversity and his founding vision that fair access to an inspiring free education and forums for courageous public discourse foster a just and thriving world.” Only, when a professor insisted that his students show up for class, one student decided it was time to post a manifesto decrying the white professor’s racism against her as a “POC” (person of color). The student posted this letter on a public board at the school.

The letter reads, in part:

Geoff Kaplan sent me an email expressing his concern about my attendance. I knew that I was going to be late on the morning of the next class and felt anxious about attending because of the concern that was already present. I was going back and forth about whether I should just be late or if I should miss the class. I really did not want the extra attention and arrived to school with enough time to attend the class but decided not to go, which I understand is irresponsible.

When Kaplan took her to task for missing class again, the student wrote:

He was interrogative throughout the conversation, as though I wasn’t telling him what he expected to hear. He opened the conversation with asking me what was wrong. I told him that nothing was wrong… He said, “You’re a young woman of color, so you have to try harder than everyone else, which isn’t fair, but you know…'”

Boy was that the wrong move for a white guy! How dare he try and show sympathy and acknowledge that all those other kids with white privilege will never have to work as hard as this young lady of color. (Isn’t that what the new racial line is? Not according to this chick.)

Hearing him try to explain or mention what he thought my experience was felt unproductive and made me feel like he is holding me to a certain standard based on my identity. I wasn’t comfortable with how patronizing the direction of this conversation was going.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271717/newtons-anti-semitism-problem-ilya-feoktistov

Ilya Feoktistov is Executive Director of Americans for Peace and Tolerance.

Newton, Massachusetts, a large Boston suburb, has an anti-Semitism problem in its public schools. Some Newton high school teachers, trained by Saudi and Qatari-funded curriculum mills, teach about the history of the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli conflict in ways that the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights defines as anti-Semitic.

Influenced by anti-Semitic classroom portrayals of the Jewish state, some Newton students have bullied their Jewish classmates with Nazi comparisons; and swastikas have appeared at a couple of schools.

In response to the situation, local activists have been engaged in grassroots campaigns to remove the anti-Semitic elements in the Middle East curriculum. The campaign, initiated by APT, strongly supported by CAMERA, and recently joined by the group Education Without Indoctrination (EWI), has included an in-depth investigation of the curriculum by APT, a short APT documentary about the events, a scholarly report by CAMERA analyzing curricular materials, numerous published articles, as well as correspondence with the school committee, the school superintendent, and Newton’s mayor. More recently EWI initiated a lawsuit against the Newton School Committee over an illegal lack of transparency. National news stories have emerged about biased teaching in Newton schools.

Now, after seven years of grassroots campaigns, Boston’s establishment Jewish leaders, who were for a long time reluctant to address the problem, have finally acknowledged it. On October 9, at a public meeting hosted by the Israeli-American Congress (IAC), the Jewish Community Relations Council, the New England branch of the ADL, and the Committee on Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), all discussed the biased Middle East curriculum at Newton schools. All the groups, including the IAC, agreed that the curriculum and the teachers who use it are promoting anti-Israel lies to Newton students. The event further augmented the mounting negative publicity and pressure on the schools and teachers to act. Instead of addressing the problem, the very next day the educational establishment in the city struck back.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/23/turned-ivy-league-acceptances-dont-regret-one-bit/

Adam Barsouk is a cancer researcher, medical student, and science, medicine, and policy author. His work has been featured in Fox News, Newsweek, The Daily Caller, Business Insider and Reason, among others.

With college application season in full swing, many applicants hope that getting into one of the nation’s highest-ranked universities means learning skills meant for the best and the brightest. They would be wrong. As affirmative action court cases and skyrocketing tuition rates reveal, today’s Ivy League institutions have unfortunately strayed from their sacred mission, putting their own biases ahead of their students’ advancement.

As a valedictorian with a perfect SAT score, I was accepted to several Ivy League schools. After careful consideration, I turned them down in favor of my state school, which saved me over $200,000. Today, as a medical student and researcher, I have no regrets.
Tuition Dollars Don’t Go Toward Education

This past year, Ivy League tuition costs have grown an average of 4percent, raising the average “sticker-price” cost of attendance to $70,000 a year. Most of this money is not actually spent on improving the quality of education. While the University of Pennsylvania raised its tuition by 4 percent, it increased its financial aid by 5.25 percent. In other words, in a wonky, catch-22 redistribution scheme, Penn raised the tuition for some in order to lower it for others.

As tuition goes up, the number of people paying the full cost actually goes down. Financial aid uses the tuition dollars of the well-off upper class (a quarter of the U.S. population) to cover the tuition of the poor.

Of course, society should strive to ensure equal opportunity for all. Merit scholarships do just that–they allow the brightest individuals to attend university regardless of their parents’ income. All the Ivy Leagues have abandoned merit scholarships in favor of financial aid. Financial aid rewards students not on their ability, but on their circumstance.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271713/crude-anti-white-anti-male-anti-christian-matthew-vadum

Above is a curriculum the Santa Barbara Unified School District has paid an organization called “Just Communities” to impose on its K-12 students. It tells you all you need to know about the racist, anti-American left which has embedded itself in school districts like Santa Barbara all across the country.

The left-wing hate group, whose full name is Just Communities Central Coast, has a $250,000 contract with school authorities in Santa Barbara, California, to indoctrinate young people into believing that America today is a manifestly immoral, cruel country in which white people routinely oppress non-whites, men oppress women, Christians oppress non-Christians, heterosexuals oppress gays, and the wealthy oppress the poor.

This anti-American mini-manifesto aimed at fomenting social discontent comes in a “Forms of Oppression” grid produced by Just Communities, which is partnering with the Santa Barbara Unified School District (SBUSD). The grid is included in a bundle of documents published online that includes the Just Communities 2018 training manual. (The document is also posted at Scribd here.)

Just Communities is attempting to radicalize students and encourage them to become activists obsessed with the Marxist holy trinity of race, sex, and class.

With help from the extreme-left hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and other radical activists trying to impose unwanted social change on the country, public school teachers across America already saturate students with information about racial injustice in America in a nonstop barrage of historic facts and ahistorical nonsense. And in the culture at large, the media, politicians, and the entertainment industry can’t stop talking about race. The last thing any young student in America needs is to be taught about is race. Race matters only to radicals.