RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Why is There So Much Politics in Arabic Class?”
I’ve been browsing the Spring 2017 issue of the Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin. It’s clear that along with all the other socio-political stances that comprise the often bizarre and contradictory (women’s rights, Islamophilia) package deal of ideologies and attitudes of the Left, an anti-Israel default position is integral to that publication.

Regular readers of my blog may remember that not so very long ago I exposed the sympathetic publicity given by the Bulletin to visiting professor and alumnus (class of ’06) Sa’ed Atshan, who deplores Israel’s very existence.

The current Bulletin assures us that he has again

“completed his annual class trip with his Swarthmore students to Israel and Palestine. He’ll continue to inspire future generations as as assistant professor of peace and conflict studies.”

There’s plenty regarding Atshan by Canary Mission here

Under the heading “Global Thinking” the current Bulletin has a feature article by staff writer Elizabeth Slocum about another anti-Israel activist, Missoula, Montana high school Arabic teacher Brendan Work (’10).

Beneath the title “Speaking the Same Language: His immersion in Arabic became a lesson in empathy” Slocum tells us:

‘Brendan Work ’10 jokingly tells his students that they are learning “an enemy language.”

“They sometimes ask, ‘Why is there so much politics in Arabic class?’” says Work … “Well, when you’re learning Spanish or French, there just isn’t an international conflict with the U.S. that involves those speakers now.”

This is important context for his students, who must work through so much history and tension tied up in the study of the language through class discussions on the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Iraq War, and Syrian refugees. He seeks to offer them a point of view beyond bias or preconceived notions that he honed as a reporter. [Emphasis added here and below]

“I knew I wanted to find employment at the intersection of Arabic and journalism,” says Work, who studied the language at the College as a comparative literature major. “I was looking for the big story, so I bought a one-way ticket into the occupied territory,” at a time when Palestine was submitting its statehood bid to the U.N.

Work secured a job at a small press agency in Bethlehem where he improved his language skills …before heading into the field as a reporter and photographer. As Work detailed the struggles of those in the conflict zone, he realized the Arab narrative was often told from a limited perspective.

For example, while covering a planned protest near the West Bank wall on the day of the statehood bid, a clash escalated and a Palestinian teen was struck by a tear-gas canister. (A Reuters photographer captured an image of Work aiding the boy moments after the violence.) Denied access to the nearest hospital because it was on the other side of the wall, the youth ultimately lost his eye. Later, out of concern, Work met with the teen’s parents…

“Their thinking was, ‘Resistance is our reality. In America, I thought, protests happened out of a sense – rather than a reality – of injustice.”

Last Monday, I appeared at the University of Buffalo at the invitation of the courageous students of Young Americans for Freedom. They have to put up with campus Left-fascist thuggery on a daily basis, while I was able to leave Buffalo the morning after the event.

I say I “appeared,” because to say “I spoke” would be exaggerating a bit. Rather, I spoke a few sentences and made a couple of points in between being screamed at by Leftist and Islamic supremacist fascists who think they’re opposing fascism.

The Spectrum, the student newspaper of the University at Buffalo, reported:

Robert Spencer couldn’t speak for more than 30 seconds without students shouting and cursing at him.

…

Spencer planned to speak to students about “the dangers of jihad in today’s world” but constant heckling from the crowd made it near impossible for him to complete a full sentence.

Indeed. The raucous student mob, of course, believes it represents the side of all that is good and righteous. These students have been hoodwinked into thinking that “Islamophobes,” rather than jihad terrorists, are killing people around the world.

For example, one man held a sign that read “Queers Against Islamophobia.” The crowd booed lustily when I attempted to read from Islamic authorities about Islam’s death penalty for homosexuality. Even to read from Islamic sources is hate, apparently, at the University at Buffalo — unless, of course, one endorses such penalties rather than oppose them.

By shutting down any discussion of the motivating ideology of the jihad threat and consigning it all to the realm of “hatred” and “bigotry,” the student mob at the University of Buffalo enables that threat to grow. One day, the Leftists who screamed, heckled, and booed as I tried to speak may very well experience the consequences of their actions, carried out by those with whom they thought they stood in solidarity.

The Spectrum article did capture one thing I managed to say:

The attempt to silence someone who has a differing viewpoint was a “quintessentially fascist act, and you are manifesting it in a wonderful way tonight,” said Spencer.

There was also this:

Spencer frequently discusses terrorism by Muslims as being religiously motivated, an argument that has put him in the cross-hairs of American Muslims who say his interpretation of Islam is dangerously inaccurate and perverts their faith.

Those American Muslims have a big problem on their hands, because in reality, I offer no interpretation of Islam at all. I only report on how Muslims interpret Islam, which all too often involves justifications of and exhortations to violence. They are anxious to silence me because they don’t want Americans to know how jihadis use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify hatred, violence, and supremacism. CONTINUE AT SITE

We are living in weird times:

The state of Texas has to pass a law to get some county officials to follow the law;

Harvard University approved a “black only” graduation; and

A school in Detroit is holding a prom for Muslim girls: With the goal of creating a “safe space” in mind, a Detroit school has set out to hold a girls-only prom to celebrate traditional Muslim customs.

It’s being created for girls who would otherwise be prohibited by their ultraconservative Muslim families from going to regular proms, where attendees are allowed to have fun and dance with members of the opposite sex in good old American tradition.

Hamtramck High School’s girls-only “Princess Prom” was first organized in 2012 by a group of five Muslim girls to give them the opportunity to go to a “safe space” prom.

In 2016, 230 girls showed up. This year, they’re expecting at least 250 attendees.

Let me show respect for Muslim traditions. I understand that prom nights, or the way that some girls dress up, may violate some of their religious principles.

However, this is a public school district. I thought that we settled that issue back in the 1950s when President Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock, Arkansas!

What about a prom for ultraconservative Catholic families who want their daughters and dates in a separate environment away from talk about Roe v Wade or same-sex marriage opinions? Or Jewish kids?

The left’s silence about all of this is the other story. Where is the outrage and editorials?

With all due respect to the parents of these young girls, they should send their daughters to a private school if they want this kind of special treatment. Again, it’s a public school and no one gets a special prom.

As if we needed another example of civility gone off the rails at America’s institutions of higher learning, the treatment given Education Secretary Betsy DeVos this week at Bethune-Cookman University deserves special mention.

Edison O. Jackson, the president of Bethune-Cookman, a historically black institution of higher education, invited Mrs. DeVos to be the schools commencement speaker. As she began, many students screamed at her and turned their backs to the stage. So it went for nearly the whole speech.

President Jackson, let it be noted, defended the Secretary at her side, and the school’s faculty stood onstage in solidarity with him.

The irony here is that Mrs. DeVos has dedicated her adult life to improving educational opportunities for inner-city black children, specifically so they can qualify for a higher education and the lifetime of benefits that brings.

We are reaching the limits of political polarization when it turns this self-defeating.

DePaul University in Illinois, the largest Roman Catholic university in the United States, prohibited posters with the slogan “Gay Lives Matter” to advertise a presentation by a gay reporter on Islamic discrimination against LGBT people across the world.

“Using the same look/brand as BLM [Black Lives Matter] pits two marginalized groups against each other,” Amy Mynaugh, director of the Office of Student Involvement at the Catholic university, said in an email rejecting the posters. “It doesn’t appear that Turning Point has any connection to the Black Lives Matter movement and this seems to simply be co-opting another movement’s approach.”

The posters were printed to advertise for an event with the campus group Turning Point USA, entitled “Dictatorships and Radical Islam: The Enemies of Gay Rights.” The speaker, James Kirchick, is an openly gay reporter and author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age.

The anti-Israel group DePaul Students for Justice in Palestine announced its members would protest the event. Kirchick captured a profanity-laced Facebook tirade declaring outrage against the event.

The Facebook user MK Okay characterized Kirchick as “a white, Zionist, neoliberal journalist” who would “speak on sh*t he knows nothing about.” Announcing a protest, MK declared, “Not in our f**king name will you pretend to define our safety, and where danger comes from.”

It gets better. “Not in our f**king name will you continue to demonize Islam and Muslims and ignore the radical Christian right,” the Facebook user continued. “Because we all know & see what the real danger here is – and we all know & see how this is f**ked.” Sure. Because there are so many members of the “radical Christian right” throwing gay people off of buildings…

This selective outrage merely solidified a disturbing trend among the Left. In order to emphasize the “oppression” of Muslims, liberals downplay and perhaps even ignore the deaths and sufferings of LGBT people in the Muslim world. Conservative Christians need to show more charity to LGBT people, but they aren’t stoning them and throwing them off of buildings. CONTINUE AT SITE

Colleges have declared for the enemy in the all-out war on truth and freedom. Why are American taxpayers forced to fund these hotbeds of anti-Americanism and antisemitism? http://pamelageller.com/2017/05/dartmou.html/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook

The pro-Israel community at Dartmouth College is still reeling following a decision by school leadership to appoint as their new head of faculty a leading supporter of the movement to boycott Israel and Jewish academics.
Now this.

Dartmouth College announced Wednesday evening that it will be hosting a lecture by virulently anti-Israel activist Linda Sarsour, days after an office at the school declined to co-sponsor an event featuring a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces.

This, in the wake of the outrage that CUNY invited Sarsour to keynote their commencement ceremony. This is what the left does. No matter how wrong and evil, they hunker down. We never see this on the right. They don’t stand by their people; they run.

Stand up against the norming of evil. Join us in our protest against hatemonger Linda Sarsour on May 25th. RSVP here. Speakers include:

Milo Yiannopoulos, free speech activist, “the most fabulous supervillain on the internet.”
Assemblyman Dov Hikind, 48th Assembly District
John Guandolo, Counter-Terror Expert, Founder of UnderstandingTheThreat.com.
‘Lauri B. Regan, Endowment for Middle East Truth and National Women’s Committee of the Republican Jewish Coalition
David Wood, Acts 17 Apologetics

Antisemitic bigot Sarsour is an outspoken critic of Israel who furiously supports the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement, a Hamas-inspired initiative that uses various forms of public protest, economic pressure, and lawsuits to advance the Hamas agenda of permanently destroying Israel as a Jewish nation-state.

Vis-a-vis the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, Sarsour favors a one-state solution where an Arab majority and a Jewish minority would live together within the borders of a single country. In October 2012 she tweeted that “nothing is creepier than Zionism.”

There is a place in America where civil rights don’t exist.

The First Amendment doesn’t apply. Neither does the Sixth Amendment. (Never mind the Second.) Not only Freedom of Speech, but Freedom of Association (NAACP v. Alabama) is under fire.

Snowflakes. Oversensitive. We’ve all heard those accusations leveled at college students. Are millennial college students really an oversensitive generation? Or are they right to be oversensitive.

Two types of people are sensitive; the entitled and the endangered. It’s reasonable to be paranoid about subtle social nuances if you live in a totalitarian state where the wrong word or look will be punished. Where someone is always watching for even the most minor acts of political incorrectness.

College students are afraid. And they should be.

The average college campus with its speech codes, thought policing, violent protests and kangaroo courts has no resemblance to anything else in the United States of America.

Colleges are totalitarian states. And they are the blueprints of the left’s plan for the entire country.

Individuals have no rights on campus. Intersectional tribes do. The way that these tribes negotiate conflicting rights is a mix of Kafka and Orwell. In Orwell’s homeland, Oxford University’s Equality and Diversity Unit (a name that could easily have leaped from the pages of 1984) warned students that failing to make eye contact was a racist microaggression. The usual sensible responses accomplished nothing. Then autistic students complained that the microaggression guidelines were themselves a microaggression against students with disabilities. And the “Unit” quickly apologized and retreated.

The absurdity of the situation reeks of old Soviet anecdotes. But the same system exists in the United States.

An individual’s right to free speech on campus derives from his membership in a group. What might be dangerously offensive from a white man is fully legal when coming from a Latino woman or a Muslim man.

Not just the speech, but the evidentiary process is fundamentally different based on group membership. Hysterical panics by favored minority activists lead to quick and illegal sanctions against students and faculty with no regard for the facts. Facts, like truth, are viewed as favoring white males.

Editor’s note: The University of Chicago joins nine campuses on the list of “Top Ten College Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment.” The University of Chicago provides financial and institutional support to terrorist-linked campus organizations such as the Hamas-funded hate-group Students for Justice in Palestine while actively suppressing speech exposing the truth about Israel’s terrorist adversaries and their allies in the United States.

Last night, the Freedom Center placed posters exposing the links between the terrorist group Hamas and SJP on the University of Chicago campus. When the Freedom Center placed similar posters on the campus last fall, a university spokeswoman called them “defamatory and inconsistent with our values and policies.” This latest round of posters serves to inform students about SJP’s true motives and allegiances and challenges the Chicago administration to uphold their stated commitment to free expression.

University of Chicago: Campus administration

The University of Chicago has long prided itself on producing independent thinkers and encouraging a certain iconoclasm among its students and faculty. In the fall of 2016, the university’s dean of students, John Ellison, engendered a national controversy by making an explicit statement in support of free speech in a letter to incoming students: “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial and we do not condone the creation of intellectual safe spaces where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”

It seemed that Ellison was bravely sailing against the winds of political correctness, but recent events at the University of Chicago suggest that this cherished commitment to free speech applies to students and campus organizations that seek Israel’s destruction, but not to those who defend the Jewish state and expose the terrorist connections of its enemies.

In the past few years, Chicago has witnessed the development of a highly active BDS campus movement, U of C Divest, which is currently supported by more than 20 student organizations on campus. In the spring of 2016, U of C Divest succeeded in passing a resolution endorsing BDS in Chicago’s student government. During the debate over the resolution, an amendment supporting the continued self-determination of the Jewish people and the existence of Israel was rejected, indicating that the coalition’s goals align with Hamas’s aims of destroying the Jewish state.

The University of Chicago has brought numerous pro-Hamas speakers to campus. In October 2015, UC-SJP hosted BDS movement founder Omar Barghouti for a speech on “BDS and the Ethical Obligation to End Complicity in Oppression.” During his address, Barghouti labeled Israel a “savage unrepairable society” that conducts “ethnic cleansing.” He praised terrorism against Israel’s Jews, stating that “resistance” is a legitimate response to “the violence of an oppressive system.” Several UC organizations and departments co-sponsored Barghouti’s address including the Global Voices Program – University of Chicago International House, the Pozen Center for Human Rights, the Department of Political Science, and the Department of International Studies.

Later that same month, UC-SJP held a panel titled “Jerusalem in Crisis: Insider Perspectives on the Violence in Palestine-Israel” as part of the “UChicago Israeli Apartheid Week.” One speaker at the event, a graduate student member of SJP, stated: “Palestinian violent resistance against the violent Israeli military is always justified; it is the equivalent of biting the hand that is trying to choke you to death.”

From 2009-2013, Janet Napolitano headed the U.S. Department of Homeland Security but as president of the University of California she has been unable to prevent violent thugs from quashing free speech on UC campuses. Napolitano has also remained silent during the smear surge against UCLA professor Keith Fink, but that should come as no surprise.

Janet Napolitano made her public debut in the 1991 smear campaign against Clarence Thomas, in an effort to keep the conservative African American off the Supreme Court. The lead smearer, Anita Hill, accused Thomas of sexually harassing her and Napolitano, then with a Phoenix law firm, represented Hill in the matter.

The false accusations of Napolitano’s client supplied ammo for white Democrats Howard Metzenbaum, a former Communist; Ted Kennedy, who sought support from the USSR against Reagan; and Robert Byrd, a former high-profile Ku-Klucker. Napolitano’s representation of Anita Hill came up in 1993 when president Clinton appointed her as a U.S. attorney.

In the confirmation proceedings, Napolitano interrupted Hill’s witness Susan Hoerchner, who after an off-the-record conversation, “suddenly developed amnesia,” about parts of her story that contradicted Hill. Napolitano refused to answer questions whether she had persuaded Hoerchner to change her testimony.

Napolitano’s great achievement as Arizona attorney general was to ban Christmas displays on public property. As Arizona governor, she inclined to cronyism, appointing to the state supreme court her campaign attorney Scott Bales, a liberal Democrat who also worked at her former law firm. Napolitano vetoed seven bills intended to fight illegal immigration but her anti-conservative zealotry came to the fore during her stint as Department of Homeland Security boss.

Like the 44th president, Napolitano believed that radical Islam was not the primary threat. She expunged the word “terrorism” from the DHS lexicon and purged experts showing the connection between terror and jihad. She put out the DHS report Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment, a sweeping indictment of conservatives for preferring limited government and constitutional measures such as the Second Amendment.

That, of all people, Barack Obama recently received the Kennedy Library’s “Profile in Courage” award proves that the latter has about as much to do with recognizing courage as the Nobel Peace Prize, of which the former President was also a recipient, has to do with honoring peace.

This is not meant to be a knock against Obama. Rather, it is an observation that no unprejudiced spectator of the contemporary American scene could fail to make. The stone-cold truth is that there is utterly nothing courageous about being a self-avowed “progressive,” a Politically Correct leftist, in today’s Western world.

And Obama is nothing if not a leftist.

No, neither Obama nor his ideological ilk in Washington D.C., Hollywood, the (fake) news media, and academia display a scintilla of courage in their public lives. Real bravery, as all of us teach our children, is a matter of resisting groupthink—or “peer pressure,” as we call it when referring to youth. Real courage consists in daring to challenge the prevailing ideological orthodoxy—or “what’s popular,” as the kids call it.

There are indeed people who are deserving of an award affirming courage. One such person is Paul Griffiths, a divinity professor at Duke University. Professor Griffiths, whose area of specialization is Catholic theology, is a prolific writer and scholar. He has been teaching at Duke since 2008.

He will not be returning to his position in the fall.

In February, an invitation was emailed to the divinity school faculty encouraging them to attend a two-day seminar on “racial equity” training. Anathea Portier-Young, an Associate Professor of the Old Testament, replied enthusiastically: “Those who have participated in the training have described it as transformative, powerful, and life-changing,” she wrote. “We recognize that it is a significant commitment of time; we also believe that it will have great dividends for our community,” she said.

Griffiths disagreed. He copied all of his colleagues on his response. “I exhort you not to attend this training,” he began. “Don’t lay waste your time by doing so. It’ll be, I predict with confidence, intellectually flaccid: there’ll be bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs in plenty. When (if) it gets beyond that, its illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies will show.”

Griffiths concluded: “Events of this sort are definitively anti-intellectual.”

Of course, Griffiths is entirely correct. “Events of this sort” are most definitely, always, profoundly anti-intellectual. They are instruments designed to totalize the groupthink, the religious-like dogma, of the academy. That Griffiths dared to defy the orthodoxy, that he dared to openly resist the “cool kids,” and that he undoubtedly knew what was to come next earns him a Profile in Courage award.

The Divinity school Dean, Elain Heath, responded to all faculty. She didn’t mention Griffiths by name. However, it was clear to all that it was he who she had in mind when she condemned the “inappropriate and unprofessional” nature of “mass emails” containing “disparaging statements—including arguments ad hominem” that are intended “to humiliate or undermine individual colleagues or groups of colleagues with whom we disagree.”

To insure that her point wasn’t lost upon anyone, Heath was explicit: “The use of mass emails to express racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry is offensive and unacceptable, especially in a Christian institution.”

While Dean Heath reportedly attempted to meet with Griffiths in person, this never came to pass. Subsequently, Griffiths sent out another mass email. The subject line read: “intellectual freedom and institutional discipline.” According to The News and Observer, Griffiths revealed to his colleagues that he had become the “targets” of two disciplinary proceedings. The first involves a harassment complaint filed by Portier-Young, the Old Testament professor who couldn’t rave enough about the “racial equity training.” The other has led Dean Heath to ban him from all faculty meetings and deprive Griffiths of funding for future research and traveling expenses.

As Griffiths sees it, Heath’s actions are “reprisals” against him, means by which she can “discipline” him for articulating views with which she disagrees. “Duke University,” Griffiths stated, “is now a place in which too many thoughts can’t be spoken and too many disagreements remain veiled because of fear.”

This being the case, Griffiths urged a “renunciation of fear-based discipline to those who deploy and advocate it, and its replacement with confidence in speech.”

Professor Griffiths has resigned from his position at Duke, effective next fall.

Griffiths richly deserves an award that recognizes his bravery. To be fair, however, so too does his colleague, Thomas Pfau, a professor of English and German, warrant recognition for having come to Griffiths’ defense. “Having reviewed Paul Griffiths’ note several times,” Pfau commented, “I find nothing in it that could even remotely be said to ‘express racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry.’ To suggest anything of the sort strikes me as either gravely imperceptive or as intellectually dishonest.”

Pfau added: “I also felt that differences of opinion, however stark, ought to be respected and engaged, rather than being used for the purpose of moral recrimination.”

Pfau describes Griffiths as “one of the pre-eminent theologians working in the United States today and a vital resource for students and colleagues engaged in rigorous theological reflection here at Duke.” He claims to “profoundly regret” Griffiths’ decision to part ways with Duke, and told him that he believed that it was a “mistake.”

Evidently, though, it is too late.