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Radical Activists Hijack Civics Education, Study Finds: Civics Turned Into Free Labor for Progressive Organizations

By on January 11th, 2017

The “civic engagement” movement has taken over American college-level civics education and turned it into progressive political training, concludes a new report by the National Association of Scholars (NAS).

NAS’s major new study, Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics, documents how the term “civic” has been stolen by left-wing activists who smuggle their agenda into colleges under the pretext of wholesome teaching.

These activists’ version of civics—the New Civics—trains students to be protesters instead of teaching them the foundations of government—the Old Civics.

Making Citizens documents how this came to be. It also provides four case studies: University of Colorado, Boulder; Colorado State University; University of Northern Colorado; and University of Wyoming.

The National Association of Scholars has researched the New Civics since 2012, when the Department of Education under President Obama called on all colleges and universities to make “civic learning” a “pervasive” priority.

“The devil is in the details,” said NAS president Peter Wood. “Now ‘civic learning’ doesn’t mean what you would expect – straightforward things such as understanding the Bill of Rights, the three branches of government, and the Electoral College. Instead, this New Civics is all about ‘diversity,’ environmentalism, the LGBT movement, ‘global’ citizenship, and other liberal causes.”

David Randall, NAS director of communications and author of the report, said, “Civic engagement diverts at least $40 billion a year and 1.5 million hours of student labor toward progressive organizations. In the meantime, colleges are failing to teach students how their government actually works.”

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The Campus War Against Israel and the Jews Fostering vicious lies about a bastion of liberal democracy in a sea of tyranny and hate. Bruce Thornton *****

By on January 5th, 2017

Barack Obama’s abstention from a vicious, anti-Israel Security Council resolution is merely the latest attack in the West’s long, shameful war against Israel. That the historical birthplace of political freedom and human rights should make a pariah of its cultural offspring is an indelible stain on the honor of Europe and America.

That such irrational bigotry and moral idiocy should find a comfortable home in universities is even more reprehensible. Higher education is supposedly the protected space where critical thought, fidelity to truth, and humanistic principles are honored. But as Richard L. Cravatts meticulously details in his indispensable collection of essays Dispatches from the Campus War against Israel and Jews, universities and colleges today foster and promote the most vicious slanders and lies about a country that for nearly a century has had to continually fight for its existence, yet still has remained a bastion of liberal democracy and human rights in a region devoid of both.

Cravatts is the author of Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad against Israel and Jews, a recent president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and a board member of the AMCHA Initiative at the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under the Law. His new book catalogues in fine-grained detail how universities and scholars across the world have betrayed their professional integrity and moral decency by obsessively demonizing Israel. The intensity and irrationalism of this “deranged hatred of Israel,” as Cravatts writes, has made it “a covert, and surrogate, form of anti-Semitism itself,” one that reprises all the slanderous tropes of traditional Jew-hatred.

One technique of this cognitive bait-and-switch is an Orwellian degradation of language. Calling Israel a “colonial” or “imperialist” power bespeaks a willful ignorance of history. The use of question-begging epithets like “racist,” “genocide,” and “apartheid” is a way to camouflage bigotry and make Israel responsible for the aggression and terrorist attacks it has suffered for nearly a century. Even more despicable is the false analogy between Zionism and Nazism, the greatest killer of Jews in history. It takes a particularly brazen moral stupidity to equate the victims of genocide with their murderers.

Professional malfeasance likewise fosters the academic hatred of Israel. The popularity of the fraudulent literary critic Edward Said has corrupted not just Middle East Studies departments, but disciplines like English, history, and the social sciences. Add Muslim student groups sympathetic with jihadist organizations and their eliminationist goals; left-wing bitter-enders who see Israel as a neo-colonialist outpost of Western imperialism; and juvenile admirers of “revolutionary” violence and noble-savage multiculturalism, and the result is, as Cravatts writes, “the compromised purpose of higher education, where scholarship has been degraded by bias and extremism on the part of a left-wing professoriate with a clear political agenda that cites Israel as the new villain in a world yearning for social justice.”

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Six-Week University Program Will ‘Help’ Men Not Act Like Men By Tom Knighton

By on January 5th, 2017

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is starting its six-week “Men’s Project,” a program designed to brainwash young men to not act like men because men are awful:

“The program operates on a transformative model of social justice allyship,” explains a news release from UW-Madison. “First, facilitators ask students to consider how the students’ opinions about masculinity affect their own perceptions every day. Second, they consider how those opinions affect the people around them.”

One goal of the project, said Sam Johnson, a violence prevention specialist at the University Health Services, is to “prevent future violence” by analyzing “unhealthy interactions” caused by traditional perceptions of masculinity and their role in gender-based violence, alcohol, and relationships.

The Men’s Project, which is in its second year of operation, begins with a weekend retreat and then continues with six weekly meetings lasting two hours each.

According to past participants of the program, the Project helped them become more vulnerable and make masculinity a “choice” rather than the default option.

Wait — if being masculine is simply making a bad “choice,” then won’t women who make the choice to put motherhood ahead of career also get blasted for not stepping in line with modern feminist thought?
Sponsored

Yup.

In reality, virtually all men — because of their masculinity — are both disgusted by the abuse of women and feel duty-bound to put themselves in physical risk to stop it when they see it.

Both of these nasty ideas about how men and women must behave spawn from modern feminism, which seems to want no less than total control over how other people live their lives. Imagine the outrage if a university men’s movement tried to shame women for being “too feminine.”

To make life more confusing for the men who have gone down the vulnerability path this program recommends, they later find themselves being “shamed” by the women in their life for having done so. A number of women actually want strong, masculine men, not the whiny beta males the University of Wisconsin-Madison seems determined to crank out. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Education in Sweden: “Then Things Got Interesting” by Göran Adamson

By on December 29th, 2016

She was proud of her submission, not of her achievements.

Other than that, her email was full of post-modern nonsense such as science as a “belief” just like religion. In fact, science is doubt based on knowledge, while religion is certainty based on faith. Would she, I wondered, also “deconstruct” the Koran?

She had exercised her freedom only to give it up.

She was sitting there quietly in the middle of the classroom — a Swedish Muslim all dressed in black with a white powdered face. I was lecturing on John Stuart Mill at Sweden’s University West. What did I say? I said that while religion may not be true, it still gives people a sense of belonging and trust, and liberal society cannot give you that. The liberal soup is thin, and most of us want something richer, some kind of political main-course goulash. When people say that liberal society is empty, they actually mean this: I cannot give my life any purpose, so can someone kindly do it for me? Please hand me some grandiose message to live by because I cannot figure out anything on my own. Emptiness? Well, that could be another word for limitless opportunities.

Two days later, the Muslim student sent me an email. She accused me of not being “neutral”. She wrote that I had called religious people “pathetic”. I had not. She accused me of defaming Islam, herself as a woman and as an individual student.

As for Islam, I had never mentioned it, and as for her, I had never seen her before. Possibly in her vanity, she seemed to think the lecture was about her; in fact, it was about John Stuart Mill. She said (and this shook me a bit) that she would keep me “under surveillance”; she signed off with: “The student dressed in her pride”. Too bad she could not find something else about which to be proud. She was proud of her submission, not of her achievements. If you cannot give your life meaning, perhaps somebody will chip in and do it for you.

Other than that, her email was full of post-modern nonsense such as science as a “belief” just like religion. In fact, science is doubt based on knowledge, while religion is certainty based on faith. We had given her the tools of postmodernism, and here she was trashing the fabric of Western society. Would she, I wondered, also “deconstruct” the Koran?

But I was not bothered by her email, really. Students have the right to say all kinds of things, perhaps even to write inappropriate emails to their professors. It is, someone said, a human right not to “get it”. All it takes is to talk. If a student fails to understand the basic principles of a university — free inquiry, the need to question our views — the university will introduce the student to them. So I did not reply, but calmly awaited the next step by my department.

A few days later, an email requesting a meeting was sent out. But she never got it. I did. How odd, I thought, but I went there and, in front of a wide-eyed administrator, explained the rise of the modern university as a realm of free discussion, unhampered by the power of the state and the church; and spoke about the principles of free speech, and cited Karl Popper, Mill, George Orwell, Voltaire, and others on the way. She looked happy.

A few days later came another email. Now I was called in for consultations with Head of the Department and the Head Administrator. “Look”, I told them, “this is a university. Do you know what that means?” They said they did. “Do you know why I am here?” I gave them the answer. “For lecturing on John Stuart Mill.”

“Ten years ago,” I went on, “I wrote an article about a performance of Ideomeneo — a Mozart opera that was cancelled in Berlin because it might offend Muslim sensibilities. The title of the article was ‘The Enlightenment may end up as a historical paranthesis.’ Do you know what the Enlightenment is about?”

I looked at them and they looked back at me.

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A New Documentary Shows the Extent and Nature of Anti-Zionist ‘Hate Spaces’ on Campus by Jeffrey Barken

By on December 27th, 2016

Americans for Peace and Tolerance’s (APT) new documentary, Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus, explores the roots of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement waged against Israel, and reveals the mob mentality that characterizes antisemitic student groups on college campuses across the US.https://www.algemeiner.com/2016/12/26/a-new-documentary-shows-the-extent-and-nature-of-anti-zionist-hate-spaces-on-campus/

The 70-minute film strikes a nerve, and an emotional punch.

Authenticated cell-phone videos and recorded interviews transport viewers to hate-crime scenes where Jewish students are subjected to verbal and physical abuse, and are intimidated even by college professors and administrators.

British singer George Michael, who became one of the pop idols of the 1980s with Wham! and then forged a…

This is not a propaganda film about the Middle East conflict, Avi Goldwasser, the documentary’s executive producer, tells JNS.org. It is strictly “a film about what’s happening on campus,” he says.

Indeed, recent events at schools like Northeastern University in Boston deserve scrutiny. On that campus, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) protesters have chanted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, the state of Israel has got to go!” Statues of Jewish donors have been vandalized, while cruel sticker campaigns and “apartheid walls” are used to single out and shame individual Jewish students regardless of their opinions about Israel.

In April 2013, Northeastern University SJP activists stormed into a classroom and interrupted a Holocaust memorial service. “The lessons of the Holocaust were not learned, you are child murderers,” SJP members are caught shouting on camera. Going beyond Northeastern, Hate Spaces tours the country, revealing a long list of hotspots where the BDS movement is spiraling out of control.

The rigid ideology of BDS

A quote from George Packer’s 2011 New Yorker article, “Deepest Cuts,” gets to the core of what is wrong with BDS: “Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked.” The scenes depicted in the documentary clearly demonstrate that a rigid ideology has taken hold of BDS supporters on college campuses. Groups like SJP use megaphones to shout their rallying slogans, but adherents are fundamentally uninterested in engaging in a serious, civil debate with anyone who questions their self-proclaimed righteous position.

APT is a Boston-based non-profit whose stated mission is to advocate for “peaceful coexistence and tolerance in an ethnically diverse America.” According to Goldwasser, Hate Spaces is geared at engaging “decent people in America who would look at an indecent situation … and understand the obvious unfairness.”

“No other minority group would stand for such treatment on campus,” Goldwasser says of Jewish students’ plight.

Hate Spaces meticulously charts the flow of money from dictators in Muslim countries to American universities, suggesting that this transfer of capital buttresses support for Islamic causes among academics. Devoid of intellectual integrity, professors choose a path of least resistance when discussing Israel and the Palestinian territories, and are unfairly sympathetic to the BDS agenda. The result is a classroom where one side of the debate is permitted to demonize the other, and pro-Israel students are systematically denied a voice.

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Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus A new film exposes academic Jew-Hatred . Andrew Harrod

By on December 27th, 2016

“Today on American college campuses, there is only one group of students that you are allowed to attack and you can attack at will, and those are Jews,” states the narrator in the new film Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus. This latest production from Americans for Peace & Tolerance, the makers of the J Street Challenge, engagingly examines how demonization of Israel’s Jewish state is reviving anti-Semitism in American academia.

Hate Spaces extensively documents what has become a nationwide campus “hostile environment” for Jews, according to Susan Tuchman from the Zionist Organization of America. Student signs at colleges like Columbia University appear in the film with statements such as “Israel is a swollen parasite…the Jews: Too fat…Too greedy…Too powerful…Fight the Jewish mafia.”

Quoted in Hate Spaces, University of California (UC)-Los Angeles Hillel President Natalie Charney notes an “anti-Israel culture” in which “singling out the only Jewish state creates an environment where it’s ok to single out Jewish students.” The film focuses on one of Israel’s main campus adversaries, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a leading supporter of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel with deep links to the Muslim Brotherhood. The film notes SJP members chanting “Allahu Akbar” to celebrate the nonbinding 2013 UC-San Diego student council decision for BDS and a SJP chapter president’s 2010 assault upon a Jewish UC-Berkeley student.

Former SJP member and current “pro-Israeli Muslim” Rezwan Ovo Haq notes that “SJP largely masquerades behind the human rights issue” of support Palestinians as part of a broader human rights agenda. Yet in SJP he was “slandering Israel and I had deep-seated hatred for Israel.” Corresponding to this ugly reality, a University of Tennessee SJP member once tweeted: “What is the difference between a Jew and a pizza? The pizza leaves the oven.”

Eminent law professor Alan Dershowitz notes in a film interview that “antisemitism used to come mostly from the right, now it’s coming mostly from the hard left.” Hereby “one of the strangest alliances on university campuses today is between the hard left” of minorities like blacks and Islamist groups like SJP. Accordingly, San Diego State University student journalist Anthony Berteaux discusses once identifying with SJP as a gay, Asian man.

Wall Street Journal editor Bret Stephens wonders at such leftwing “useful idiots of the twenty-first century.” “Why is it that the liberals and progressives who espouse a certain set of values are so intent on demonizing and de-legitimatizing the one country that shares their values” in the Middle East, he asks. By contrast, past African-American civil rights leaders such as W.E.B Dubois, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Bayard Rustin “have been Zionists, from socialists to liberals to conservatives,” notes African-American Zionist Chloe Valdary.

Faux progressive condemnation of Israel, Dershowitz notes, arises largely because “there is no subject today in the world which has more distortion, more lies, more dissembling, than discussion about Israel.” Hate Spaces shows women from Israel’s Arab minority joining Israel’s parliament and winning the Miss Israel beauty contest, belying a sign in the film condemning Israel as the “Fourth Reich. During speaking engagements, Dershowitz challenges listeners “to name a single country in the history of the world faced with threats comparable to those threats faced by Israel both internal and external that have had a better record of human rights.”

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Foreign Student Visas: Educating America’s Adversaries Guess who Obama’s State Department issues hundreds of thousands of student visas to? Michael Cutler

By on December 22nd, 2016

It has been said that if you give a man a fish you will feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, you will feed him for a lifetime. This simple saying illustrates how important training/education is.

Incredibly, the United States’ immigration policies formulated by the Obama administration welcome hundreds of thousands of Chinese STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) students into our nation’s premier universities while it is clear that China demonstrates hostility to the United States acting not as a partner, but rather as an adversary.

Chinese computer hackers attack computers in the United States as a matter of routine. The obvious question is how many of those Chinese computer hackers may have been trained and educated in the United States.

China’s recent theft of a U.S. Navy drone in the South China Sea underscores this hostility as do the arrest of numerous spies operating on behalf of China to steal America’s military and industrial secrets.

Not surprisingly, China has offered to return the drone while President-Elect Donald Trump has been quoted as saying that China can keep that drone.

China may have had two reasons for its illegal action. It is clearly attempting to demonstrate that it has unilateral control over the strategically important South China Sea although this claim is not based on law or fact. Additionally, China has an obvious interest in America’s military technology. By now China’s engineers have had ample opportunity to study the design of the drone and, perhaps, has managed to embed technology within the drone that would continue to provide intelligence about the use of that drone.

The U.S. Navy’s underwater drones seem to have drawn particular interest by China’s military. In fact, on April 22, 2016 Newsweek reported, “Chines Spy In Florida Sent Drone Parts To China For Military.”

On April 14, 2016 Newsweek published a report about a naturalized United States citizen, Edward Lin, who had joined the U.S. Navy only, allegedly, to be able to spy on the Navy. I cannot help but wonder if his application for citizenship had been more effectively scrutinized if his alleged disloyalty to the United States could have been uncovered sooner.

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The Anti-Trump Curriculum Fanning the flames of intolerance, educators have done a disservice to their students and the country. Larry Sand

By on December 22nd, 2016

While hysteria and fearmongering over the governance of a Republican president have become standard—George W. Bush was frequently referred to as “Bushitler”—present-day anti-Trumpers have taken the acrimony to another level. Sadly, public schools are on the frontlines.

Just six days after the election, the teachers union in Los Angeles supported students who skipped school to protest the “politics of fear, racism and misogyny.” “As educators, as people spending every day with students and caring about each student’s future, we believe we have a sacred role in times like these,” the union said in a statement. Sacred? Too bad the union didn’t use its newly discovered religious faith to preach to the students that if they are indeed so upset with the president-elect, they should vent their dissatisfaction after the school day or on a weekend.

San Francisco social-studies teacher Fakhra Shah claims she knows “first-hand what it’s like to be on the receiving end of anti-Muslim slurs and stereotyping. The United Educators of San Francisco posted her “Lesson Plan on the 2016 Election” on its website. “DO NOT: Tell [students] that we have LOST and that we have to accept this,” it emphatically advises teachers. “We do not have to accept ANYTHING except that we must and will fight for justice against an unjust system and against unjust people.” The anger and denial here is just the tip of the iceberg:

(I know that [students] might curse and swear, but you would too if you have suffered under the constructs of white supremacy or experienced sexism, or any isms or lack of privilege. You would especially do so if you have not yet developed all of the tools necessary to fight this oppression. It is our job to help them develop these tools, ie the language etc., Let’s not penalize and punish our youth for how they express themselves at this stage.) (Hate mongering people see this as an invitation to use profanity, keep your hate to yourselves, our students are not hateful.)

The rest of this alarming and borderline illiterate “lesson plan”—with links to left-wing magazine Mother Jones and the George Soros-funded website Democracy Now!—continues in a similar vein (and, to be appreciated fully, should be read in its entirety). While teachers are free to accept or reject the lesson plan, the idea that any teacher would use any part of it is truly alarming.

There’s more. Down the peninsula from San Francisco is Google’s home city of Mountain View. At the local high school, “Holocaust scholar” Frank Navarro compared Trump with Hitler in an attempt to show his students “that the 2016 election is a reflection of the past.” Navarro was put on paid leave on November 10, but returned to the classroom a week later. In Texas, under the watchful eye of a teacher, two tenth-grade students staged a skit featuring “The Assassination of Donald Trump.” Parents were outraged by the performance, in which one of the boys made a gunfire sound effect with his cell phone as the other boy, portraying Trump, fell to the ground in mock death. The teacher and his students were “reprimanded.”

Recall that when a second grader nibbled a Pop Tart into the shape of a gun in Maryland a couple of years ago, he was suspended for two days. Maybe had he chewed a second Pop Tart into a replica of George W. Bush, and pointed his “gun” at it, he too could have gotten away with a reprimand.

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Leftists Ally with Jihadis in Our Public Schools By Karin McQuillan

By on December 20th, 2016

After being subjected to jihadi propaganda by a Palestinian on an illegal visa in their third grade public school class, 8-9 year old American kids were led by their teacher to attack Israel. Watch the video.

It’s like a Maoist Red Guard indoctrination session. The children’s African-American teacher, Brooke Barnett, tells the children that Israel is hiding what’s really going from the world, but that the video they are about to see “is true, we can see what’s happening.”

After the program the third-graders were encouraged to share their reactions. The first child says, “Israel is wrong to think that Palestine could be theirs, because they already have a lot of land and they shouldn’t just take more thinking they own the world.”

“They (Israelis) should be peaceful but they’re not…they should not kill other people.”

“It’s not fair that people (jailed jihadis) will not see get to see their families.”

One child says, “When I grow up I’m going to go to Palestine and protest.’ “Welcome, welcome,” replies the speaker, “We need you to come to make struggle.” Another voice is heard saying, “Thank you.”

In the video, Code Pink leftist Ariel Gold, invited by the school to put on the program, reminds the children, “You guys are studying the Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Child, from the United Nations…so the United Nations makes laws around what people can do, what countries can do, and many times Israel violates those laws, and that is what we are working for, for international law.”

Did you know that United Nations law is taught in our elementary schools? Yes, so-called Human Rights, not the U.S. Bill of Rights, is a standard topic in third grade social studies.

Student: “If somebody is attacking…you say Inshallah, so God can help us stop it.” “That’s beautiful,” breathes their teacher. Inshallah, beautiful, God Bless America, forbidden.

Burnett helps the next child, who mumbles something about not being able to protect yourself, “She’s saying it’s not fair they (Israelis) are more powerful. They (the Arabs) should be able to defend themselves but they (the Israelis) are more powerful because they have guns.”

In an unplanned moment of humor, an Arabic-speaking child is confused into thinking that Israeli terrorists are attacking Palestinians, and suggests the Palestinians on the West Bank build their own wall to protect themselves. “If they attack you …build your own wall…use their resources (bricks) against them, if you’re scared, how is that going to help.” A wall is not the answer out leftist teacher Brooke Burnett wants to hear; she asks Bassem Tamimi to comment. He tells the class, “Our children is our resources…our children who will fight….”

Another adult voice, “And the TRUTH, the TRUTH is the resource…if everybody was building walls, then we’d all be separated by walls, that’s not how human beings want to live, we want to be together, like in this classroom.” “Then how are you going to stop Israel,” asks the Arabic-speaking boy. Tamimi: “We would like to protect ourselves with your solidarity…you are all to defend us…to be freedom fighters for Palestine.”

The principal of the elementary school, Susan Eschbach, defended the event (full text here). She falsely claimed:

There were many adults present in the class and at no time was there an anti-Israel, anti-Palestine, anti-Jewish, or anti-Muslim stance. The children took away from this experience several messages. …“ You can make friends across borders and that is a good thing.” “Love will make peace, not hate.”

Ithaca (NY) third grade event shows how anti-Israel indoctrination has moved into elementary schools.

The School District, under pressure from irate parents, later wrote that the program was politically skewed and inflammatory, and apologized.

The Superintendent of schools falsely claimed Tamimi was not an invited guest, and that the lesson was on universal human rights, but admitted to The Blaze:

The suffering of Jewish children was not discussed with the third grade children; nor was the issue of Tamimi’s relative Ahlam Tamimi (Sbarro Pizza suicide bomber) raised. …Nor were the children told that Israel’s security barrier (which Palestinian activists usually call a “wall”) was erected in order to keep suicide bombers out of Israel and that since then suicide attacks have virtually ended, saving scores of children’s lives.

Asked if any pro-Israel voices were invited to the classroom, Brown said, “No other speakers have been into this classroom to talk about human rights at this time.”

The Superintendent has done nothing to drain the swamp. The children have not been debriefed and told they were subjected to jihadi propaganda. The teacher who instigated and presided over this radical hate teaching suffered no consequences and is still in her classroom. The school principal, who enlisted openly anti-Israeli groups to design her school’s curriculum on human rights (and boasts that she wants a designation from them as a “Human Rights School” whatever leftist claptrap that is), is still in place.

William Jacobson, a Cornell law professor and blogger at legalinsurrection.com appeared on Mark Levin’s show to discuss breaking this story and posting the video. It took Jacobsen a year of litigation under the NY Freedom of Information Law to get a partial video of the event.

There were other teachers there, there were staff there, nobody said a word about it, and they tried to cover it up. This is really a microcosm of what’s happening to our educational system. We are allowing these activists … into high schools and elementary schools, and you rarely get video of it, because most people can’t just walk into an elementary school and just start shooting video….

Who was it that the leftist school teacher invited to brainwash her students? Bassem Tamimi is a Palestinian jihadi who uses his own son and daughter attack Israeli soldiers in order to film them to incite jihadi violence. The Alegmeiner:

As the website Legal Insurrection reported in October, Tamimi used his Facebook page to promote an antisemitic blood libel that Israel arrests Palestinian children “To STEAL THEIR ORGANS.” The claim Tamimi reposted included a picture of a person’s torso with a long wound stitched up along the side.

Tamimi uses children as tools to instigate confrontations with Israelis, including having his daughter, dubbed “Shirley Temper,” scream at soldiers in hopes of provoking images that portray them as cruel or brutal.

Tamimi lied about his arrest record in order to get a U.S. visa from the Obama administration and embark on a speaking tour across America in favor of the anti-Semitic BDS movement. He boasted of his broader aim – to create an intifada in America, starting with our children.

“When we are able to get a video like this, we can use it to great effect,” he said. “When enough people here see these videos and hear our stories, it can start a kind of intifada [popular Palestinian uprising] against Israel in the United States.”

Jacobsen explains:

Tamimi’s son, Mohammad, was the subject of a recent media frenzy after he threw rocks at Israeli soldiers and when they moved to arrest him, a soldier was set upon by local women and children, all as the video rolled. Rock throwing has become a serious problem, with numerous motorists killed and injured as a result, yet it is an activity Tamimi encourages (for which he has been arrested).

Yet while Tammi showed videos in Ithaca and led the American children in an anti-Israeli, pro-jihadi discussion in the Ithaca classroom, the teachers and staff in the room noticed nothing wrong.

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Students of color’ conference at University of California reportedly dissolves into a fight over who is most oppressed By Thomas Lifson

By on December 19th, 2016

Nobody saw this coming, apparently, because no conservatives were consulted. Kate Hardiman reports on The College Fix:

This year’s University of California Students of Color Conference unproductively devolved into something of an “oppression Olympics” between different minority groups, prompting arguments between participants and ultimately leading to some canceled sessions at the annual event.

First question: are there actually students at UC who have no color at all? Are they transparent? This arrogation of the concept of color as being limited to designated victim groups is disturbing to me. Nobody ever calls me a “person of color” event though my skin has a pinkish cast to it.

UCLA student Jacqueline Alvarez told The College Fix as much in a recent telephone interview, standing behind an op-ed she wrote in the Daily Bruin campus newspaper detailing the same.

She described the conference not only as an “oppression Olympics” but also “a safe space gone wrong” in her opinion article.

Ralph Washington, president of UC Student Association, which organized and hosted the conference, confirmed there were “tensions” at the mid-November gathering, and that its schedule was altered.

It sounds as if the organizers caught a lot of flak. Washington continued:

“…this year there was a lot of harm thrown around to the various organizers, and some people came into the conference without understanding what the theme of the conference was. There are constructive things that we can do to prevent this happening in the future.”

So what was this theme that caused harm to be thrown around (whatever that means)? American Thinker readers probably can guess:

The crux of the debate centered around the conference theme: “Fighting Anti-Blackness.” Apparently it was not communicated to students that the conference would have a particular theme this year. At the event, held at UC Irvine, students of different minority groups began arguing when it became known that the conference would focus almost exclusively on discrimination against the African American community.

In one of the larger workshops, one of the students raised a question about why the only issues being discussed were those involving anti-blackness, prompting an African-American student to respond that black students are the most oppressed, to which a Muslim student made a comment about her people being bombed in the Middle East, according to Alvarez.

There is a basic principle at work here that is invisible only to leftists who deny the reality of human nature. If oppression is the currency of social advantage, there will never be enough oppression to go around.

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