RUTHFULLY YOURS

Over the past week, two major US institutions have produced studies that discredit their names and reputations as credible organizations. Their actions are important in and of themselves. But they also point to a disturbing trend in the US in which the credibility of important American institutions is being undermined from within by their members who pursue narrow partisan or ideological agendas in the name of their institutions.

The political implications of this larger trend were clearly in evidence in the 2016 presidential election. From a larger, long-term sociological perspective, if the current trend is not reversed the implications for American society will likely be long lasting and deeply destructive.

The first study was produced by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. It dealt with the Obama administration’s policies regarding the war in Syria and specifically the acts of mass murder undertaken by the Assad regime. Authored by Cameron Hudson, a former Obama administration national security official who now serves as the director of the museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, the report absolved the Obama administration of all responsibility of the bloodbath in Syria.

As reported by Tablet magazine, the paper argued that “a variety of factors, which were more or less fixed, made it very difficult from the beginning for the US government to take effective action to prevent atrocities in Syria.”

The paper’s claim was based on “computational modeling and game theory methods, as well as interviews with experts and policy-makers.” It argued that had then-president Barack Obama not ignored his own redline and actually responded with force to the regime’s 2013 chemical weapons attack at Ghouta, it wouldn’t have made a difference.

In the last months of the Obama administration, Obama appointed several of his loyalists, including his deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, to positions on the board of the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Rhodes was one of the architects of Obama’s Syria policy.

After sections of the report were released to Tablet and the report was posted on the museum’s website, its findings were angrily rejected by prominent Jewish communal leaders and human rights activists.

For instance, literary critic Leon Wieseltier told Tablet, “The first thing I have to say is: Shame on the Holocaust Museum.”

He added, “If I had the time I would gin up a parody version of this that will give us the computational- modeling algorithmic counterfactual analysis of [then-US assistant secretary of war] John J. McCloy’s decision not to bomb the Auschwitz ovens in 1944. I’m sure we could concoct the f***ing algorithm for that, too.”

Wieseltier was exactly right. A mathematical model is based on inputs and outputs. If you input specific data, you will get specific consequences. From an academic perspective, the study’s findings are worthless.

In the wake of the firestorm the report provoked, the museum pulled the study from its website and canceled its scheduled formal presentation on September 11.

But the damage that the Holocaust Memorial Museum did to its reputation by producing and publishing a transparently false, politically motivated report is not something that can be mitigated by pulling it from its website.

As some of the Jewish communal leaders, who spoke to Tablet suggested, the Holocaust Memorial Museum diminished its moral authority as an institution by publishing a report clearly produced to rewrite recent history in a manner that absolved the Obama administration of all responsibility for the mass murder in Syria.

While distressing, the impact of the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s action is limited to a historical falsehood. The goal of the second study published this week by an esteemed institution is to distort and indeed block discussion about a problem that is ongoing.

This week, Stanford University’s Research Group in Education and Jewish Studies published a report which purports to show that there is no significant antisemitism on US college campuses and that Jewish students do not feel threatened by antisemitism.

The Stanford’s conclusions fly in the face of a massive body of data, collected by researchers over the past decade, which all show the opposite to be the case. If the Stanford study is believed, it will discredit the work of hundreds of professional researchers and academics, journalists and Jewish and academic leaders throughout the US.

But that’s the thing of it. The Stanford study is utter nonsense.

The radical Students for Justice in Palestine organized a “Smash Fascism” rally this week at the University of Illinois to attack Zionism and the fiercely democratic State of Israel as a supposedly white-supremacist, fascist country.

What these left-wingers meant by “fascism” is subject to debate. Fascism has long been in the eye of the beholder. The term has been used so promiscuously in recent decades that it has been drained of meaning.

George Orwell’s observation in the essay, “Politics and the English Language,” that “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable,’” is as true today as the day he wrote it.

When the Left speaks of fascism they don’t refer to actual fascism as an ideology and political system — they mean whatever they oppose. What is fascist changes, sometimes daily.

But today’s leftists don’t oppose fascism: they demand it. They want speech codes on university and college campuses. They want to abolish the First Amendment. They want omnipotent government and central planning of the economy. They want to kill police officers and persecute white people. They want to tear down old statues commemorating people they don’t like. They want to extinguish whatever freedom remains in this country after Barack Obama’s eight-year anti-American juggernaut.

Speakers at the rally Tuesday led the small audience in a chant of “No Zionists, no KKK, resisting fascists all the way.” Among the other groups participating were United Muslims and Minority Advocates, Jewish Voice for Peace, Asian Pacific American Coalition, Campus Union for Trans Equality and Support, Black Lives Matter, and the Chicano separatist group MEChA.

What they said was less important than what they did.

Old-time liberals, as opposed to flaming leftists, were not welcome at the rally whose organizers went out of their way to use the descriptor “radical” to refer to themselves in communiques. Tellingly, one commenter on the event’s Facebook page, linked to an old clip of Malcolm X speaking.

The assassinated Nation of Islam figure is shown saying:

There are many whites who are trying to solve the problem but you never see them going under the label of liberals. That white person that you see calling himself a liberal is the most dangerous thing in the entire Western Hemisphere. He’s the most deceitful. He’s like a fox and a fox is always more dangerous in the forest than the wolf. You can see the wolf coming. You know what he’s up to, but the fox will fool you. He comes at you with his mouth shaped in such a way that even though you see his teeth you think he’s smiling and take him for a friend.

“All men are trash.” — Esme Allman.

Allman is a young woman who, although a student at one of the finest universities on earth, considers herself to be a multiply oppressed victim and who sees the world around her as swarming with oppressors. She has been so well-schooled in the idea that whites are always the oppressors and dark-skinned people always the victims that when she sees a fellow British subject rooting for his own nation’s side in a war against jihadists, her first and only thought is to brand him an “Islamophobe” — this, even though the enemy in that war are men who would force her into a burka or consider her, as an infidel, deserving of rape and/or death.

So it is that Robbie Travers, whose only offense is believing in freedom and opposing a totalitarian ideology, has found himself in hot water — a real victim of a mentality that is all about power and dogma even as its pretends to be devoted to “dignity and respect” for all.

Robbie Travers is a 21-year-old law student at the University of Edinburgh and an articulate, insightful contributor to Gatestone as well as other websites. In his essays, he has illuminated the topsy-turvy values that dominate contemporary British political discourse – as exemplified by the refusal of the Speaker of the House of Commons to invite President Trump to address Parliament and the refusal of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn to ban Al Qaeda from Britain as a terrorist organization.

Now, Travers has become the victim of the very forces about which he has written. In April, after the US Air Force carried out a successful anti-ISIS action, he posted a comment on Facebook:

“Excellent news that the US administration and Trump ordered an accurate strike on an Isis network of tunnels in Afghanistan. I’m glad we could bring these barbarians a step closer to collecting their 72 virgins.”

It was no different from a British subject during World War II celebrating the invasion of Normandy. But Travers’s comment offended first-year history student Esme Allman, who filed a complaint with the university. In it, she charged that Travers had violated the student code of conduct and accused him of “blatant Islamaphobia [sic]” and of putting “minority students at risk and in a state of panic and fear.”

As a result of Allman’s complaint, the university is now investigating Travers on “hate crime” charges. A spokesman for the university explained that it is “committed to providing an environment in which all members of the university community treat each other with dignity and respect.” Travers, for his part, has described Allman’s complaint as retaliation for a social-media posting in which he had drawn attention to a comment by Allman that “all men are trash.”

Ever since Charlottesville, the tyrannical left has been on the rampage, trying to purge anyone and everyone who had an improper thought. Well, except for Margaret Sanger, apparently. I guess she’s cool.

That’s the mentality at work at the University of California-Berkeley, where students have been battling with administrators to purge the name of a past university president from one campus building. From The College Fix:

Barrows Hall is named after the university’s president from 1919 to 1923, David Barrows, an anthropologist who served as superintendent of schools in Manila when the Philippines became a U.S. colony, according to the University of California Academic Senate’s biography in memoriam.

The Daily said his academic work was informed by “white supremacist ideology.” In 2015 the Black Student Union demanded the name’s removal among other high-priced demands, calling Barrows an “imperialist by way of anthropology [who] participated in perpetuating American colonialism.”

In all fairness, I suspect most academics in the United States during the first quarter of the 20th century were informed by so-called white supremacist ideology.

However, the brave warriors at Berkeley have another name in mind to grace Barrows Hall. Who is this outstanding individual more worthy of recognition?

A cop killer:

The BSU insisted that Barrows Hall be renamed after Black Panther Assata Shakur, a convicted cop killer who escaped from prison in 1979 and fled to Cuba. Shakur is on the FBI’s list of most wanted terrorists.

You just can’t make this crap up, folks. You just can’t.

A man who served as a military officer, an anthropologist, an explorer, and a university president is someone of such poor moral standing that he must be erased from history, whereas a convicted and escaped cop killer is an ethical choice. CONTINUE AT SITE

On Sept. 8, 1992, the first charter school opened, in St. Paul, Minn. Twenty-five years later, some 7,000 of these schools serve about three million students around the U.S. Their growth has become controversial among those wedded to the status quo, but charters undeniably are effective, especially in urban areas. After four years in a charter, urban students learn about 50% more a year than demographically similar students in traditional public schools, according to a 2015 report from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes.

The American cities that have most improved their schools are those that have embraced charters wholeheartedly. Their success suggests that policy makers should stop thinking of charters as an innovation around the edges of the public-school system—and realize that they simply are a better way to organize public education.

New Orleans, which will be 100% charters next year, is America’s fastest-improving city when it comes to education. Test scores, graduation and dropout rates, college-going rates and independent studies all tell the same story: The city’s schools have doubled or tripled their effectiveness in the decade since the state began turning them over to charter operators.

More than 80% of their students are African-American, and an equal percentage qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. But on the most important metrics—graduation and college-going rates—New Orleans became the first high-poverty city to outperform its overall state in 2015 and 2016.

Or consider Washington. In 1996 Congress created a Public Charter School Board for the capital. After 20 years, its 120 schools educate 46% of the city’s public-school students. As in New Orleans, the board closes charter schools in which kids are falling behind, while encouraging the best to expand or open new schools.

The competition from charters helped spur Washington’s mayor to take control of the failing school district and initiate profound reforms. The district is improving rapidly. Yet my analysis of available data suggests the charter sector still performs better. The difference with African-American and low-income students is dramatic, even though charters receive between $6,000 and $7,000 less per pupil annually than district schools do.

This new model’s effectiveness has inspired other cities. A decade ago, Denver Public Schools Superintendent Michael Bennet, frustrated by the traditional bureaucracy, worked with the school board to embrace charters. They gave them space in district buildings and encouraged the successful ones to open new schools. Then they began creating “innovation schools,” with some of the freedom to operate that helps charters succeed. Last year 42% of Denver students attended charters or innovation schools.

When these efforts began, Denver had the slowest academic growth of Colorado’s 20 largest districts. By 2012 it had the fastest. Today its students—almost 70% of them qualifying for subsidized lunch—are approaching the state average on standardized tests in elementary schools and exceeding them in middle schools. CONTINUE AT SITE

Rabbi Shlomo Elkan hadn’t heard of Oberlin College before heading there in 2010 to establish a Chabad House, which functions as a campus center for Jewish students. “Rural Ohio wasn’t on my radar,” the 34-year-old rabbi, who grew up in Atlanta and received his rabbinical training in New Jersey, tells me. But a third of students at Oberlin are Jewish, and the Corn Belt seemed a quiet place to raise a family. Little did he know.

The rabbi and his wife, Devora, quickly drew regular attendance to services at their small home, but Oberlin was boiling with political debate. It was a loop playing out on campuses across the country, under the banners of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. The presumption around many quads was that to be Jewish meant you were part of the privileged, oppressor class.

“At first the questioning and conflict seemed natural. That’s what college is about, with kids seeking new identities, communities, even religious narratives,” says Rabbi Elkan, one of 200 Chabad rabbis posted at U.S. colleges. “But in the last several years we noticed hard lines forming around students to show their progressive stripes. That put many in the uncomfortable position of having to denounce Israel and their own Jewishness or stay silent when others did so.”

Early last year Oberlin rhetoric professor Joy Karega was exposed for promoting conspiracy theories and sharing anti-Semitic images on Facebook . Ms. Karega wrote that Islamic State is “a CIA and Mossad operation.” She also posted memes about Jews’ controlling the world’s banks, media and the U.S. government. These themes could have been ripped from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

The Oberlin administration initially defended Ms. Karega, citing academic freedom. But it relented and fired her in November. Some accused the school of caving to Jewish alumni by ousting the popular African-American teacher. Amid the noise, a Jewish professor’s home was vandalized with references to ovens; numerous students transferred; and Oberlin landed 11th on a Jewish newspaper’s Worst Colleges for Jewish Students list.

Donors pulled back, including one who had pledged $350,000 to relocate Oberlin Chabad to a 6,000-square-foot campus residence. The unfinished property—the site of a former YMCA—sits in mid-repair, covered with construction wrap. “That one was tough,” Rabbi Elkan says, noting his current home has one bathroom to accommodate his six children, plus the dozens of students who pile in each Sabbath. CONTINUE AT SITE

Fall semester has begun, and the University of California at Berkeley is back at the epicenter of the free-speech wars. Last weekend saw 13 arrests as Antifa activists bloodied their outnumbered foes in the city streets, and conservative journalist Ben Shapiro, former White House aide Steve Bannon and alt-right parvenu Milo Yiannopoulos are scheduled or have been invited to speak on campus this month. Stage set, Chekhov’s gun on the table.

The university’s new chancellor, Carol T. Christ, has vowed to restore free speech on campus, saying in August that it was “critical for the Berkeley community to protect this right.” Resilience is “the surest form of safe space,” she told students, and “we would be providing you less of an education” if “we tried protect you from ideas that you may find wrong, even noxious.”

Yet Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin has already asked the university to cancel controversial speakers. He said last week the city must be “very careful that while protecting people’s free-speech rights, we are not putting our citizens in a potentially dangerous situation and costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars fixing the windows of businesses.”

Mr. Arreguin also suggested that conservative speakers were “just a target” for radical activists “to come out and commit mayhem on the Berkeley campus and have that potentially spill out on the street.” Yet the risk comes not from the peaceful speakers but from masked and armed censors.

Meanwhile, Ms. Christ is schooling the mayor on the First Amendment. The chancellor believes allowing the speeches to continue as scheduled is the university’s legal obligation and spokesman Dan Mogulof told us she is prepared to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on security to protect speakers and attendees.

Ms. Christ is off to a good start, but the pressure to capitulate will increase as the semester goes on. In the student newspaper recently, Berkeley resident Sarah Cordette accused the chancellor of “giving institutional support to white supremacists” and exposing students to “mental and emotional damage.” You can imagine what the faculty is saying.

Past administrators were so intimidated by student protesters that the university installed a $9,000 emergency exit in the chancellor’s office, which soon became known as an “escape hatch.” And when Mr. Yiannopoulos tried to speak on campus last February, Antifa activists threw Molotov cocktails, used commercial-grade fireworks as grenades, shattered windows and set fires, causing about $100,000 in damage.

Mr. Chemerinsky is dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Mr. Gillman is chancellor of the University of California, Irvine. They are authors of “Free Speech on Campus,” recently published by Yale University Press.

During the past year appearances by controversial speakers on college campuses have led to a string of tense, sometimes violent, incidents. As students return to school, administrators will again face the challenge of protecting freedom of speech while ensuring safety for their students, staff and faculty. We offer this checklist to help them prepare for the difficult issues that are sure to arise.

1. Disseminate a clear statement of free-speech values and create opportunities to teach the campus community about free speech. Senior administrators at colleges and universities need to communicate with their communities the vital importance of freedom of expression and academic freedom for higher education. At a minimum, they must state that all ideas and views can be expressed, no matter how controversial or offensive, and must explain why a university can’t fulfill its core purpose without this freedom.

Campus officials can no longer assume this is obvious and therefore unnecessary. Our experience is that too many students, faculty and administrators lack familiarity with basic principles of free expression and academic freedom. Because protection of offensive speech comes naturally to few, campuses should supplement strong free-speech statements with online resources and educational programming that allow all members of the community to develop a better understanding of the issues. For example, schools can include a discussion of free-speech issues at their freshman orientation programs.

But freedom of expression is never absolute. Some speech—such as true threats and harassment and interfering with the speech of others—is not protected. Campuses can enact regulations that ensure ample opportunities for communication while preventing interference with the teaching and research of faculty and students.

2. Publish a clear statement supporting the presence of controversial speakers before particular incidents occur. Speakers should never be excluded because of their views, but campus officials also need to explain that it is completely appropriate, and indeed desirable, for students and faculty to express disagreement with speakers they find objectionable. There can be nondisruptive protests at events, statements of objection through the media, and counter-events that highlight different messages. As the old saying goes, the answer to speech we don’t like is more speech.

3. Devise and publicize transparent and neutral procedures for approving events. Campuses typically require advance permission for use of their facilities. There is no free-speech right for groups to demand unconditional access to limited campus venues at a time of their choosing. But the procedures and the criteria for receiving such approval must be clear, stated in advance and applicable to all. Otherwise such fair limitations could be abused.

4. Ensure everyone’s safety. Campuses need to prepare security assessments that ensure adequate protection for controversial speakers and their audiences. A campus might insist on venues that make it easier to prevent protesters from blocking access to the event, and it might require tickets or university identification to minimize the chances of disruption. Speakers in uncontrolled venues on campus public spaces have no right to speak without interruption or rebuttal from a gathering audience, but they do have a right to be protected from violence or threats of violence.

From California to Minnesota to the District of Columbia, the transgender agenda has infiltrated the classrooms of even the most tender youth. Last week Alexandra DeSanctis reported for National Review Online about the “transition ceremony” hosted by a kindergarten teacher at California’s Rocklin Academy Gateway to celebrate a gender-dysphoric boy donning the attire and appellation of a little girl. As DeSanctis noted, the shocked and angry parents of the Rocklin pupils had not received advance notice of the “lesson” and learned of the events only when their confused children returned home.

When the outraged parents complained to school administrators, the principal fell back on Rocklin’s non-discrimination policy and the supposed age-appropriateness of the discussions. The parents’ ire at the principal and, for that matter, even the school board was wrongly directed. The fault lies instead with the California legislature. Here’s why.

California, like 21 other states and the District of Columbia, requires schools to notify parents of their sex-education curriculum. The Golden State also joins 35 other states and D.C. in requiring schools to allow parents to opt their children out of sex education. (Three other states require parents to opt in — that is, to express consent to their children’s participation in sex-education programs.) But the California legislature specifically excluded “gender identity” from the state’s notice and opt-out requirements, by providing in Section 51932(b) of the Education Code:

“This chapter does not apply to instructions, materials, presentations, or programming that discuss gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, discrimination, harassment, bullying, intimidation, relationships, or family and do not discuss human reproductive organs and their functions.”

So, contrary to the parents’ assumption that the local administrators of Rocklin Academy failed them and their children, the blame lies with the California legislature, which purposely exempted gender identity from both the notice and opt-out mandates of its sex-education provisions.

Paradoxically, as Matt Sharp, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal-advocacy non-profit organization working with allies in California to protect parental rights, highlighted in an e-mail interview: “What is so troubling is that, under California law, schools must provide notification and an opt-out before they discuss certain biological truths of human reproduction between males and females, but not when they teach the rejection of those biological truths.”

California is unique in that its legislature expressly excluded classroom instruction related to gender identity from the state’s sex education notice and opt-out requirements. However, while other states have not (yet) taken this direct approach, parents might be surprised to learn that the of law of their state likely provides them with no better protection.

For instance, the Colorado Comprehensive Health Education Act provides that local school boards and districts must provide written notification to parents of any “comprehensive health education program” and allow parents to opt their students out of the curriculum. But the statute defines “comprehensive health education program” to mean “a planned, sequential health program of learning experiences in preschool, kindergarten, and grades one through twelve.”