RUTHFULLY YOURS

Editor’s note: This article is crossposted from Minding the Campus, the original article can be viewed here.

There was a time, within living memory, when the term multiculturalism was hardly known. More than twenty years ago, Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and in late July speaker at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, wrote a book with fellow Stanford alum David Sacks called The Diversity Myth: ‘Multiculturalism’ and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford (1995).

The book’s title refers to the pretense that embracing “diversity” actually promotes diversity of all types, a claim commonly heard to this day. Thiel had been a student at Stanford when, in January 1987, demonstrators defending “the Rainbow Agenda” chanted “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!” This protest led to the infamous “revision” (i.e., suppression) of the Western Culture requirement at Stanford, replaced with a freshman sequence called Cultures, Ideas, and Values, mandating an emphasis on race, gender, and class.

In her foreword to Sacks and Thiel’s book, the well-known American historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese referred to Stanford as “a surreal world of social engineering and institutional arrogance” and highlighted the school’s efforts to wage a “campaign to reshape thought and behavior.” She noted that while the term “affirmative action” had been replaced by “diversity,” the latter term, far from actually promoting intellectual diversity, rested on “a series of interlocking attitudes and practices.”

Furthermore, “multiculturalism” did not involve greater emphasis on mastering foreign languages or carefully studying cultures other than those of the English-speaking world. Instead, work in literature and culture programs was (and still is) done increasingly in English and focused on contemporary writers. Nor did multiculturalism, any more than the word diversity, mean familiarizing students with a diversity of views. Rather, as Fox-Genovese summarized it, it meant requiring students “to agree with or even applaud views and values that mock the values with which they have been reared.” And all this, she observed, was being accompanied by rampant grade inflation.

It’s time to send the sniffer dogs into the rubble of America’s 2016 presidential election to see if there’s anything worth saving. We’ve learned some important things. We have learned that at the lower end of the income scale, the white vote is broken, or more accurately, brokenhearted. Many middle-class white voters are angry over a system they say has failed them.

They aren’t the only ones. America’s inner cities, its poorest neighborhoods, are increasingly on edge. One of these days, they could blow on the scale of the 1960s.

Much of this has to do with dismal job prospects, and better growth is part of the answer. But there’s a bigger problem than growth—the diminished state of American education.

Without an education upgrade that matches learning skills with modern jobs, all these people will still lose ground, and personal behavior will continue to degrade.

No better source of information exists on this than employers, especially manufacturers, who say U.S. schools, notwithstanding claims of improved “graduation” rates, are not producing sufficient numbers of workers able to perform at the level they need for the realities of the 21st century workplace. Apparently the universal skill of being able to manipulate a cellphone to take a selfie isn’t enough.

During a September visit to a charter school in a black neighborhood on Cleveland’s east side, Donald Trump said, “I will be the nation’s biggest cheerleader for school choice,” and an advocate for merit pay “so that we reward our best teachers instead of the failed tenure system that rewards bad teachers and punishes the good ones.”

He at least will say publicly that the U.S. public education system just doesn’t work anymore for too many people.

The natural A-students will be fine. This reality allows many smart people to stop thinking about the country’s most socially destructive problem. But for many others, elementary and secondary school is a drag on lifetime achievement. What the cry from the Trumpian heartland has revealed is that many rural schools also offer the same futureless education as inner-city schools.

These people aren’t irredeemably stupid. Their schools are stupid. Fix the schools and half of America’s myriad problems are solvable.

A new element is the descent of U.S. colleges and universities into PC hell. A basic mission, to prepare students for the new workplace, is being rechanneled into wheel-spinning controversies, such as “hurtful” speech or names on buildings. A Clinton win will empower this insanity.

Some of these institutions of higher learning actually brag about the remedial-education programs they offer first-year students who were waved through 12 years of inadequate public schooling. By 18, it’s too late. They will never catch up.

Take your schools pick: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. It’s no choice, because the proposed education policies of Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale) are, incredibly, a step back from the baby steps Barack Obama managed.

The National Education Association has spent $14 million so far to elect Hillary. The chances that a President Clinton would buck this industrial-age teachers union, whose raison d’être is killing teacher accountability, are zero. Her web site extols pouring more federal money down the public-schools mine shaft. CONTINUE AT SITE

The toxic Black Lives Matter narrative is continuing to infiltrate our mainstream culture. It is even finding its way into our public schools. Case in point is the plan by about 1000 teachers in the Seattle public school system, with the strong backing of the school system administration, to wear “Black Lives Matter” T-shirts this week. Some of the educators’ t-shirts include a raised fist, not exactly a symbol of racial harmony and peaceful dialogue.

The participants in this solidarity “wear-in” also want a school curriculum that indoctrinates students to counter what one Black Lives Matter activist and Seattle high school teacher, Jesse Hagopian, called “institutional racism”and the “multiple oppressions that our kids face.” Hagopian opposes standardized testing as an example of such institutional racism.

The Seattle Education Association (SEA) Representative Assembly passed a resolution unanimously supporting the Black Lives Matter initiative. The SEA is a public teachers’ special interest organization. Its resolution stated that SEA will “endorse and participate in an action wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts on Wednesday, October 19, 2016 with the intent of showing solidarity, promoting anti-racist practices in our schools, and creating dialogue in our schools and communities.”

The superintendent of schools also supports the demonstration of solidarity with Black Lives Matter on school premises.

The Seattle school system is not the bastion of “institutional racism” that Black Lives Matter and its supporters are making it out to be. Seattle is one of the most progressive cities in the nation. Its school district had passed a landmark “Ensuring Educational and Racial Equity Policy” in August of 2012, which called for the elimination of “the racial predictability and disproportionality in all aspects of education and its administration.” It also mandated the use of a Racial Equity Tool to ensure that “race be clearly called out and institutional and structural racism be addressed within our own organization.” The intent was to devise policies and curricula that close the “opportunity gap” holding students of color back.

Last night the Freedom Center’s poster campaign to expose the links between campus anti-Israel activists and Hamas terrorists targeted the terrorist-supporting network at Vassar College. Vassar is the smallest campus on the Center’s list of “Top Ten Schools Supporting Terrorists,” but one of the most extreme in its advocacy of the genocidal claims of Students for Justice in Palestine and the BDS movement against Israel.

Vassar College supports a highly active Hamas-inspired and funded boycott movement that successfully passed a BDS resolution on campus last spring. BDS is a toxic movement that even Hillary Clinton has denounced as anti-Semitic The Vassar chapter of SJP also distributed a pamphlet celebrating Omar Barghouti the founder of the BDS movement, which is a genocidal attempt orchestrated by terrorists to strangle the Jewish state. Vassar SJP celebrates terrorism by selling T-shirts picturing convicted anti-Israel terrorist Leila Khaled holding a gun with the words “Resistance is not Terrorism.” The chapter also posted a 1940’s era anti-Semitic Nazi graphic on social media.

The Freedom Center’s poster operation campaign identifies Students for Justice in Palestine as a campus front for Hamas terrorists and the Hamas intermediary American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). AMP was revealed in recent congressional testimony to be funneling terrorist dollars to Students for Justice in Palestine to support the Hamas-sponsored, anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign in America.

One of the posters features Vassar College Professor Joshua Schreier who is described on the poster as “SJP Supporter, BDS Supporter, Anti-Israel Activist.”

The posters are part of a larger Freedom Center campaign to Stop the Jew Hatred on Campus. The campaign is designed to confront the agents of campus anti-Semitism and expose the financial and organizational relationship between the terror group Hamas and Hamas support groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine. As part of the campaign, the Freedom Center has placed posters on several campuses including San Diego State University, Brooklyn College, San Francisco State University, and the University of California-Los Angeles. The campaign also recently released a report on the “Top Ten Schools Supporting Terrorists” which may be found on the campaign website, www.StoptheJewHatredonCampus.org. Vassar College is among the campuses listed in the Top Ten report. The section of the report demonstrating Vassar College’s support of anti-Israel terrorists follows below.

Reprinted from the Jewish Voice.

For those of us who grew up in Brooklyn in the 1960s and 70s and for those of us who decided to linger a bit longer in the County of Kings before taking the proverbial plunge into the big world out there, many of us ended up at good ol’ Brooklyn College.

Decades ago, however, this veritable Brooklyn institution boasted an integrated student population and crafted an enduring legacy as a campus that heralded the right of free speech, thought and assembly.

Not so, anymore. Apparently, the proverbial compass of time has pointed Brooklyn College in the “politically correct” trajectory as have most other urban centers for higher learning. For those not in the know, that essentially means that a fascist flavor now dominates campus political life. As such, Muslim organizations (among others) have sealed their pact with leftist totalitarian groups in order to “shut down any opposing viewpoints” and to “not allow any dissenting ideas to be publicly expressed,” says David Horowitz. A stalwart champion of free speech and founder of the eponymously named David Horowitz Freedom Center, Horowitz is one of the lone voices in the wilderness in offering an alternative narrative to the liberal, leftist, anti-Semitic ideologies that are taught on college campuses today and are being passed off to a naïve generation as the unadulterated truth.

Last week his conservative campus watchdog group issued a list of the “Top Ten Schools Supporting Terrorists” and to the surprise of many, Brooklyn College had the dubious distinction of garnering the number one position.

“I spoke at Brooklyn College back in 2011 and the atmosphere was so threatening, that I had to take body guards along with me,” recalls Horowitz. The 2011 speech to which Horowitz referred, entitled the “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Myths and Facts,” was sponsored and organized by Brooklyn College student Yosef Sobel and Mitchell Langbert, an associate professor in the department of business and economics.

“Because the Hillel organization on campus was too afraid to sponsor me, I must thank those who had the courage to do so.” said Horowitz at the time. Despite numerous warnings prohibiting verbal disruptions, Muslim student hecklers abounded and Horowitz’s remarks were often punctuated by the sounds of acrimonious attacks.

On Sunday night, the David Horowitz Freedom Center conducted a guerilla postering campaign on the campus of Brooklyn College, a school where actions such as storming a faculty meeting with demands for “Zionists off campus” or support for anti-Israel terrorism are facts of everyday life.

Brooklyn College, one of several schools making up the City University of New York (CUNY) system, is home to one of the most active and extreme Students for Justice in Palestine chapters in the nation. Brooklyn College SJP has posted articles and videos online defending terrorism including an advertisement titled “The Third Intifada” on its Facebook page. It has hosted multiple speakers on the Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, and even an event to discuss its policy of shunning pro-Israel organizations and students. A gang of 10 anti-Israel activists recently stormed a campus faculty meeting, calling one faculty member a “Zionist pig” and issuing demands for “Zionists off campus.”

The Freedom Center’s poster operation covered the campus with posters identifying the organization Students for Justice in Palestine as a campus front for Hamas terrorists and the Hamas intermediary American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). AMP was revealed in recent congressional testimony to be funneling terrorist dollars to Students for Justice in Palestine to support the Hamas-sponsored, anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign in America.

One of the posters depicts Raja Abdul Haq, a Brooklyn College student and BDS supporter. The poster contains a quote from Haq stating “It’s very important to always remember that Western colonial powers are as guilty as Israel…especially the USA.” Israel has always been the canary in the mine for the holy war that radical Islamists have declared on America and the West.

A second poster depicts a gun-toting Hamas terrorist holding the strings of a puppet labeled “American Muslims for Palestine” which in turn controls a marionette labeled “Students for Justice in Palestine.” Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is described as “The chief sponsor of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activities on campus.” Hamas is identified as “A terror organization pledged to wipe out Israel” (a goal explicitly stated in the Hamas charter) while AMP is the “Hamas-created chief organizer and funder of SJP.” The poster also depicts shadowed bodies lying in pools of blood, illustrating the bloody deeds of Hamas’s campaign of terror against the Jews. The poster contains the hashtag #JewHatred and the Freedom Center’s website, www.HorowitzFreedomCenter.org.

A third poster created by the Freedom Center asks sardonically, “Do you want to show your support for Hamas terrorists whose stated goal is the elimination of the Jewish people and the Jewish state?” and answers the question with “Join us! Students for Justice in Palestine.” The poster then lists the names of student and faculty leaders on campus who promote the genocidal Boycott Divest and Sanctions movement against Israel.

Thousands of taxpayer-supported Seattle teachers are planning to don Black Lives Matter t-shirts this week in public schools and force-feed left-wing propaganda to their students about race in an effort to draw attention to the systemic racism they imagine is embedded in the public education regime.

The shirts say “Black Lives Matter” and “We Stand Together,” which is almost identical in meaning to the Hillary Clinton campaign slogan “Standing Together.”

The Black Lives Matter cult is animated by a hatred of normal American values. Its members idolize convicted, unrepentant black militants and cop-killers Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu Jamal and have declared “war” on law enforcement. Its members openly call for police officers to be assassinated. Sympathizer Micah X. Johnson answered the call murdering five cops in cold blood during a Black Lives Matter rally in Dallas in July. Black Lives Matter, which is vehemently anti-white, ought to be designated a domestic terrorist organization for fomenting a war against police, critics say.

The October 19 event is being run by Social Equality Educators (SEA), a group of teachers within the Seattle Education Association (SEA), a local collective bargaining unit. A political faction, SEE runs candidates for offices in the SEA.

Jesse Hagopian, a SEE leader, says more than 2,000 shirts have been ordered for the event. Wearers will include teachers, counselors, paraprofessionals, nurses, instructional assistants, librarians, and others this Wednesday as part of “Black Lives Matter At School,” which he calls an unprecedented action.