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EDUCATION

UIUC’s Department of Latino Studies Endorses ‘Jew Hatred’ “We know a free Palestine is only possible through queer, racial, gender, reproductive, and environmental justice.” by Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/uiucs-department-of-latino-studies-endorses-jew-hatred/

In a “Letter to Our Students on Palestine” dated from December 18, 2023, the Department of Latina/Latino Studies sought to whitewash the atrocious actions of the anti-Israel terror group Hamas and demonize and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state. The date of the letter’s posting is significant in that it came two months after Hamas’s October 7th genocidal attack on Israel, long after the barbaric details had been established and confirmed—women raped and mutilated, children set on fire, and over 1200 civilians butchered for the sole crime of being Jews.

The narrative set out by the Department of Latina/Latino Studies in their letter, which was posted on their official university department webpage and co-signed by the departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and African-American Studies, focused not on Hamas’s brutal attack but exclusively on the “historical context of Israel’s ongoing genocide and occupation of Palestine.” It placed all blame solely on Israel, the victim of this brutal ethnic crime, instead of condemning Hamas. The atrocities committed by Hamas are described merely as an “attack against Israel…which led to the deaths of over one thousand Israelis, both civilians and soldiers.”  The mention of “civilians and soldiers” is an obvious attempt to whitewash Hamas’s genocide. The terrorist organization attacked solely civilian targets—a music festival, a kibbutz—and overwhelming killed and raped civilians. The handful of “soldiers” who met their deaths were only present by happenstance or raced to the defense of the civilians who were attacked.

In that same passage, the letter refers to Israel as “the U.S.-backed nuclear power” which “has intensified its long-running siege on the Gaza Strip”—again, entirely obscuring the history of Gaza which Israel handed over to the Palestinians in 2005, as well as the Palestinians’ unceasing attempts to wipe Israel and its Jews off the world map. The letter goes on to quote Hamas-generated statistics—acknowledged by all independent observers to be highly suspect—that “the Israeli bombing campaign has killed over twenty thousand Palestinian people –the average age of the dead being just five years old.”

Barbaric anti-Israel protesters are causing mayhem at the gates of Columbia University By Benjamin Weingarten

https://nypost.com/2024/04/23/opinion/anti-israel-protesters-are-barbaric-causing-mayhem-at-the-gates-of-columbia-university/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

That Jews were made to feel unsafe to walk the Columbia University campus Passover eve in 2024, fearing risk of assault from unchecked promoters of genocidal jihadism and the destruction of Israel, America and the Judeo-Christian West, is a complete and utter disgrace. 

It is also the logical conclusion of the progressives’ long march through the institutions. 

Absent a massive sea change, not just Jews but all Americans will bear the brunt of the ceding of schools to those who would destroy the very civilization from which they sprang. 

Our elite academic institutions — and shamefully, my alma mater, which at its literal core, its core curriculum, mandates the study of a Western canon that contains the ideas of liberty and justice and emphasizes the pursuit of virtue and excellence, on which America is based — have for decades been petri dishes of left-wing radicalism that reject these noble ideals. 

Jew-hatred has in recent decades increasingly become a central feature of that radicalism, in no small part through the overlapping ideologies and interests of the Western left and Islamic supremacists — the subject of my book that foretold the crises of post-Oct. 7 America, “American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party.”

The simple explanation is the Western left, under the banner of diversity, equity, inclusion — rebranded cultural Marxism — divides the world between oppressed and oppressors and has come to cast the tiny and perpetually persecuted Jewish minority as most oppressive of them all.

‘Pedagogical Malpractice’: Inside UCLA Medical School’s Mandatory ‘Health Equity’ Class

https://freebeacon.com/campus/pedagogical-malpractice-inside-ucla-medical-schools-mandatory-health-equity-class/

Top physicians, including former Harvard dean, say required course is riddled with dangerous falsehoods.

Students in their first year of medical school typically learn what a healthy body looks like and how to keep it that way. At the University of California, Los Angeles, they learn that “fatphobia is medicine’s status quo” and that weight loss is a “hopeless endeavor.”

Those are two of the more moderate claims made by Marquisele Mercedes, a self-described “fat liberationist,” in an essay assigned to all first-year students in UCLA medical school’s mandatory “Structural Racism and Health Equity” class. Launched in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the course is required for all first-year medical students.

The Washington Free Beacon has obtained the entire syllabus for the course, along with slide decks and lecture prep from some of its most explosive sessions. The materials offer the fullest picture to date of what students at the elite medical school are learning and have dismayed prominent physicians—including those sympathetic to the goals of the class—who say UCLA has traded medicine for Marxism.

Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School and one of the world’s foremost experts on obesity, said the curriculum “promotes extensive and dangerous misinformation.”

UCLA “has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate,” said Flier, who reviewed the full syllabus and several of the assigned readings. “As a longstanding medical educator, I found this course truly shocking.”

One required reading lists “anti-capitalist politics” as a principle of “disability justice” and attacks the evils of “ableist heteropatriarchal capitalism.” Others decry “racial capitalism,” attack “growth-centered economic theories,” and call for “moving beyond capitalism for our health.”

A howl of rage against civilisation The orgy of bigotry at Columbia University heaps shame on America. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/22/a-howl-of-rage-against-civilisation/

Hands down the worst take on the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ that has taken over Columbia University in New York City for the past week is that students have always done things like this. Students have forever occupied buildings and quads to make a political point. Students have long agitated against war. Students often find themselves in the grip of passionate radical intensity. Look at the Vietnam era, says every columnist in Christendom, as if the Gaza camp were just another explosion of youthful anti-imperialism.

The wilful naivety of this take is unforgivable at this point. To liken Columbia’s strange, seething ‘pro-Palestine’ camp to earlier campus uprisings against militarism is to gloss over what is new here. It is to whitewash the profoundly unsettling nature of this rage of the privileged against the world’s only Jewish nation. Until someone can point me to instances of those Sixties anti-war kids hurling racist invective at minority groups and demanding the wholesale destruction of a small state overseas, I’ll be giving their Gaza camp commentary a wide berth.

The camp might look and sound like student politics as normal, with its juvenile bluster, megaphoned virtue and the occasional appearance of pitiable university officials warning campers of suspension. But scratch the radical surface and you’ll swiftly find an ugly underbelly of reactionary cries and even outright racism. No sooner had the students erected their tent city ‘for Palestine’ last Wednesday than it became a magnet for genocidal dreaming about the erasure of Israel and plain old bigotry against Jews.

Columbia has rang out with cries of ‘We don’t want no two states / We want all of it!’. You don’t need to be an expert in Middle East affairs to decipher this demand. It’s a sick call to seize the entirety of Israel – all of it – and create a new state more in keeping with the Israelophobic yearnings of both privileged Westerners and radical Islamists. Their longing for Israel’s erasure was made even clearer in a follow-up chant: ‘We don’t want no two states / We want ‘48!’ That is, 1948, a time when the modern state of Israel didn’t yet exist. They want a world without Israel. They want to lay waste to the national home of the Jews.

Liel Leibovitz Columbia Is Beyond Reform It’s time we approached our elite universities not as critical institutions we must repair but as national security threats.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/columbia-is-beyond-reform

Last week, Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, was called to testify before Congress and explain how Alexander Hamilton’s alma mater had become a hotbed of anti-Semitic vitriol. She delivered the Ivy League equivalent of the Bart Simpson defense: I didn’t do it, nobody saw me do it, you can’t prove a thing. The smart set praised Shafik for her evasiveness—the presidents of Harvard and Penn were far less astute—and considered the case against Columbia closed.

The kids had other ideas.

No sooner had Shafik left Washington than hundreds of students—about 800, by the latest count, or one-fifth of the undergraduate student body—put up dozens of shiny new camping tents and renamed the Morningside Heights campus the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. The American flag up the tentpole outside of what once was Dwight D. Eisenhower’s office was taken down, replaced with the green flag of Hamas. Students with loudspeakers chanted slogans like “There’s no God but Allah, and Allah loves martyrs.” An Israeli-Arab who stopped by to explain, in Arabic, why cheering on murderous terrorists was a bad idea was punched in the face and left with his mouth dripping blood. Jewish students were told to “go back to Europe“ or were greeted by a kaffiyeh-clad classmate holding a sign saying “al-Qassam’s next targets,” a reference to Hamas’s military wing. Things eventually deteriorated so badly that the university had to cancel in-person classes. As of this writing, the situation is still unfolding, not only in Columbia but also at Yale, where a Jewish student was stabbed in the eye; in Michigan, where students are handing out pamphlets advocating “death to America”; and elsewhere.

Two urgent questions, both obvious, suggest themselves. The first: How did we get here? The second: What do we do now?

Answering the first question fully would require a comprehensive analysis, but for brevity’s sake, a simple reminder is in order: What we’re seeing on college campuses these days isn’t an aberration, some strange phenomenon that emerged, like a monster from the deep, with little or no warning. It’s the result of decades of deliberate planning by a complex network of administrators, lawmakers, NGOs, and media outlets, eager to convert our universities from seats of learning and inquiry to beachheads in the war for absolute political power.

‘Jew-Hating’ Asian American Studies Program Exposed at Northwestern University Defending Hamas’ butchery and partnering with Students for Justice in Palestine. by Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/jew-hating-asian-american-studies-program-exposed-at-northwestern-university/

The Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern University has repeatedly used university resources and official communications channels to promote Jew hatred and condone Hamas’s actions against Israel and its Jewish citizens.

Roughly a week after the barbaric October 7th Hamas massacre of over 1200 Israeli civilians, the Asian American Studies Program (AASP) published a statement on the official department website and reproduced it on the official department Instagram page. Rather than condemning Hamas’s brutality and the innocent loss of Jewish lives in Israel, AASP instead decried “Islamophobia” on campus and chastised the Northwestern University administration for their “silence at the loss of life in Palestine.”

The statement blatantly whitewashed the atrocious actions of Hamas, claiming that “On October 7, 2023, Hamas, the political group that has controlled Gaza since 2006, attacked Israel. Israel subsequently declared war, marking the latest in a long line of armed struggles between the two nations since their formation in 1947-48.”  No mention was made of the sheer brutality of Hamas’s actions—raping women, slaughtering children, mutilating civilians both before and after death. In fact, AASP mocked reports that Hamas beheaded babies as “baseless claims [that] are meant to incite hate against Palestine and equate supporting Palestinian civilians with antisemitism.”

Showing almost no concern for the Israeli victims of October 7th, and the citizens of Israel threatened by Hamas’s intended genocide, AASP instead chose to demonize and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state, referring to Gaza as the “Occupied Palestinian Territories” and blaming the “civilian death toll” in Gaza solely on Israel—rather than on Hamas who started the war by attacking civilians and taking hostages and who then used Palestinian civilians as human shields.

The Asian American Studies Program also critiqued the “visible Islamophobia expressed in pro-Israel posters on NU’s campus falsely claiming that ‘Hamas is ISIS.’”  Notably, the Program did not explain why they felt that comparison to be inaccurate or Islamophobic. Both organizations are Islamist terrorist groups known for their brutal treatment of women and ethnic minorities. The comparison seems apt.

Wokester correctness lands USC in a pickle over its pro-Hamas valedictorian By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/04/wokester_correctness_lands_usc_in_a_pickle_over_its_pro_hamas

“Of all the candidates they had for valedictorian, they had to pick a pro-Hamas fanatic?”

With grade inflation, the University of Southern California had more than 100 applicants to choose from in its quest to find a valedictorian for its coming graduation ceremony in May.

They picked a pro-Hamas militant in a hijab, likely intending to show off their DEI cred. Not surprisingly, they drew protests.

How’d you like to be a Jewish parent of a young graduate at that huge ceremony attended by 65,000, and have to listen to pro-Hamas hectoring along with a heaping helping of antisemitism?

Of course it drew protests. They should have predicted it would draw protests.

The Failed Experiment with Ending Standardized Testing

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/the-failed-experiment-with-ending-standardized-testing/

When Columbia University announced in March of 2023 that it would become the latest Ivy League school to no longer require applicants to submit SAT/ACT scores for admission, the editors of National Review criticized a move that not only seemed designed explicitly to skirt the Supreme Court’s anticipated decisions banning racial discrimination in college admissions, but threatened the academic quality of the institution as well.

We have been emphatically confirmed in our position by the subsequent course of events. Harvard University announced last Thursday that it would be reversing its “standardized testing-optional” policy for applicants to the Class of 2029. This change in course — Harvard dropped the SAT/ACT requirement for applicants four years ago — comes on the heels of announcements by fellow Ivy League schools Dartmouth and Yale in February that they would be doing the same. We hail Harvard’s decision as one long overdue, and note that — given their influence on elite academic trends as a whole — it represents a setback for the continuing effort by left-wing academics to redirect higher education away from the pursuit of excellence and toward the pursuit of an ideological agenda.

The trend is unmistakable and the timing extremely telling: Unlike Columbia — which only acted last year — Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth all dropped their testing requirements in June of 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 crisis. For each school, the proffered logic was identical, and facially plausible: The chaos and national variation in Covid-19 lockdown protocols made it incredibly difficult (and in certain lockdown-happy states functionally impossible) for high-school students to sit for these tests. The problem was that the testing-optional policy remained in place long after Covid had faded away, which suggested that the pandemic was a pretextual excuse, and ideological considerations rather than epidemiological ones had driven it all along. (The fact that Columbia jumped onto this bandwagon years later and without any Covid rationale underlines the point rather demonstratively.)

Law-School Rot Hits Berkeley Dean Close to Home — Literally Tal Fortgang

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/law-school-rot-hits-berkeley-dean-close-to-home-literally/

When students turned a party into a protest, Erwin Chemerinsky learned the hard way that coddling activists won’t save you when they become the mob.

The moral and behavioral rot at our elite law schools has hit close to home — literally — for the dean of Berkeley Law, Erwin Chemerinsky. On April 9, about 60 third-year students gathered in the dean’s backyard for a pre-graduation dinner. A few of the students co-opted the occasion to rant about their school’s supposed support for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and Chemerinsky’s avowed Zionism. Chemerinsky and his wife, Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk, repeatedly pleaded with these students to leave. When Fisk tried to wrest a microphone from the student leading the demonstration, the student accused Fisk of assault and refused to move, insisting that she had a First Amendment right to continue.

In the days before the dinner, posters had gone up around campus that depicted the dean wielding a bloody knife and fork, with the message, “No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza starves.”

In his short official statement following the unsettling evening at his home, Chemerinsky used the words “sad” or “sadness” four times. He was “sad to hear” that students wanted him to cancel the dinner, as proclaimed on the posters, and that if he did not acquiesce, they would protest. And he was “enormously sad” that students would be “so rude” as to “use the social occasion for their political agenda.”

The Inevitable Result of Intersectional Gender Studies By Haley Strack

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-inevitable-result-of-intersectional-gender-studies/

Harvard University’s gender and sexuality department will offer a wide range of classes next semester: Gender as Technology; Gender and Sexuality in Korean Pop Culture; Feminism in the Age of Empire; Gender, Race and Poverty in the United States; Decolonization; Love’s Labors Found: Uncovering Histories of Emotional Labor; and more. Decolonization is as relevant to feminist theory as the songs of BTS are to Korean gender roles in Harvard’s gender studies department. As George Leef has written, gender studies is “not really an intellectual enterprise, but ideological posturing,” one that “is not about trying to understand the world, but is all about trying to change it in certain ways.”

Gender studies professors have taken the posture of supporting Palestinians since October 7, and opposing Israel since well before October 7. A recent panel held at Rutgers University, and sponsored by its gender studies department, is a good study of how mad the departments have become and a better example of their ideological ends.

The panel, called “Palestine Is a Queer Feminist Struggle against Imperialism,” was led by Maya Mikdashi, an assistant professor at Rutgers University’s Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, and Nadine Naber, an associate professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Illinois. Mikdashi went viral for complaining that criticizing Hamas’s persecution of LGBTQ Palestinians is a “homophobic” tactic. Naber delivered a word salad against “settler-colonialism,” which is good enough to quote in full:

Any movement committed to a free Palestine must take seriously how the categorical dichotomization of gender and sexuality is made material — is corporealized through violence, punishment, murder, and disappearance, and that the gender binary is foundational to colonization. And also that the gender binary, like all borders, [is] made possible through state violence. . . .