RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://tomklingenstein.com/higher-ed-support-for-hamas-exposes-disdain-for-america-in-top-colleges/

Why are American academics and American college students so drawn to an antisemitic movement?

If you don’t like the pro-Hamas demonstrations by American college students, then you won’t like American higher education, which is the garden in which these flowers were grown.

Within hours of the atrocities committed by Hamas operatives who invaded Israel on October 7, groups of American college students had organized to express their support for the terrorists. This caught many Americans by surprise. How could college students at some of America’s best universities sympathize with the perpetrators of gruesome attacks on unarmed civilians?

The surprise, however, was not universal. Those of us who pay close attention to American higher education were well aware of the rising tide of antisemitism on many campuses, and aware as well of the anger that these institutions had honed against Israel and the sympathies they had cultivated for Palestinian radicals. College officials were likewise aware that, among the students enrolled in their institutions, a significant number are affiliated with factions that loathe Israel, support Palestinian “resistance,” and are well-organized practitioners of public protest. Some college presidents initially issued mealy-mouthed disapproval or offered criticisms of both Hamas and Israel as equally at fault. After finding their equivocations poorly received, they issued new statements that were sometimes sterner about Hamas, but often continued to chastise Israel as well.

Some college presidents did forthrightly condemn Hamas and express strong support for Israel. At the end of October, a coalition founded by 16 college presidents issued a statement titled, “We Stand Together with Israel Against Hamas.” That statement eventually collected over 100 signatories.

But the larger academic scene lacks such common sense.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvards-double-standard-on-free-speech

After Harvard student groups blamed Israel for Hamas’s atrocities, the global backlash was so fierce that the university’s president, Claudine Gay, released a video statement that in some ways proved even more puzzling. “Our university rejects the harassment or intimidation of individuals based on their beliefs,” she said. “And our university embraces a commitment to free expression. That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous.”

Really?

This was news to the scholars with unpopular views at Harvard who have been sanctioned by administrators, boycotted by students, and slandered by the Crimson student newspaper. And it was certainly news to anyone who follows the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s annual analyses of threats to free speech on campus.

In this year’s FIRE report, Harvard’s speech climate didn’t merely rank dead last among those of the 248 participating colleges. It was also the first school that FIRE has given an “Abysmal” rating for its speech climate, scoring it zero on the 100-point scale (even that was a generous upgrade, as its actual composite score was -10). That dismal distinction made headlines last month across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia—but not on the Harvard campus. The Crimson didn’t even publish an article in its news section, much less an editorial; Gay didn’t make a statement, either.

Once upon a time, journalists and scholars on both the left and right were staunchly devoted to free speech and academic freedom, if only out of self-interest. Liberals like Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice defended the rights of Klansmen and Nazis because they knew the First Amendment was their profession’s paramount principle. But in the past decade, that bipartisan devotion has been disappearing, particularly at elite colleges. Harvard’s journalists and scholars adopted the principles that Hentoff criticized in the title of one of his books: free speech for me, but not for thee.

Leftists are free to stir controversy without fear of punishment from Gay and other administrators, and they can count on the Crimson to defend them. Jewish groups on campus were outraged last year when the Palestine Solidarity Committee’s annual spring event, Israeli Apartheid Week, featured lurid murals accusing “Zionists” of being “racists” and “white supremacists.” The Crimson’s editorial board promptly declared itself “proudly supportive” of the murals and the international BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions) campaign to make Israel a pariah state. When that editorial stirred further outrage and accusations of anti-Semitism, the Crimson’s president issued a statement proclaiming the newspaper’s commitment to “freedom of expression.”

But that commitment vanishes when the campus’s leftist majority gets angry. The targets of their anger have received, at best, no support from the Harvard administration or the Crimson. At worst, those voices find themselves denounced, investigated, disinvited, or punished by administrators, and they have endured the Crimson’s outrageous campaigns to silence, sanction, and banish them.

https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/ron-desantis-israel-college/2023/10/28/id/1140065/

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blasted woke antisemites and anti-Zionists in American colleges, the media, and the “worthless” United Nations on Saturday on Newsmax.

“I don’t care what some imbecile on a college campus says; I don’t care what liars in the media say; and I certainly don’t care what worthless institutions like the United Nations say: We are going to stand with Israel in this dark hour for them,” DeSantis told “Saturday Report.”

DeSantis, who is campaigning for president and speaking Saturday in the Las Vegas gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition Conference, hailed his state for having revoked Florida college students’ “privilege” to support Hamas in the war against Israel over “material support to terrorism.”

“You may have a right to say certain things, but that’s material support to terrorism if you’re saying you’re part of what they’re doing, so we deactivated the Students for Justice in Palestine and were the first state to step up to the plate and do that,” DeSantis told host Rita Cosby before his RJC address.

“I was the first candidate to say that if you have foreign visa holders out there making common cause with Hamas, I’m canceling their visa and I’m sending them back,” DeSantis added. “That’s a bare minimum.

“They don’t have a right to be here on a student visa. It’s a privilege to be here on a student visa. There’s a lot of Americans that would probably want those slots. There’s other foreign nationals who actually like the United States who would probably want [one].

“They have no right to have those visas, and if they’re going to make common cause with terrorism, we are going to eject.”

The problem on college campuses in sharing anti-Israel progressive narratives has been building for a long time, according to DeSantis.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/10/make-pro-hamas-countries-that-fund-american-universities-fess-up/

We need to know more about the support that nations such as Qatar, which offers material and financial aid to Hamas, are sending to U.S. colleges

After the mass terrorist atrocity along the Israel/Gaza border on October 7, we had the horrific sight of radicals on American campuses siding with Hamas. For example, some student organizations have overtly engaged in clear victim-blaming. One Cornell professor even overtly celebrated Hamas murders. This kind of extremism has caused some businesses to run for the hills; they’ve withdrawn job offers and  threatened to never hire the students involved. Some prominent foundations and wealthy, influential individuals, including former Utah governor and ambassador Jon Huntsman, have canceled their donations to colleges and universities. Former Harvard president and Clinton- and Obama-administration veteran Larry Summers declared himself “sickened” as well as “disillusioned and alienated” by how his former university handled this issue.

It is nearly impossible to know all the factors that play a role in this sort of radicalization and pro-terrorist sentiment on campus, alongside the administrators’ sympathy and acquiescence. But one thing is a simple fact: American universities receive massive sums of money from countries that openly support Hamas and terrorism more broadly, and we know very little about what these countries are getting for their money. We need transparency about these transactions. Fortunately, just days after the attack, the House Education and Workforce Committee rolled out legislation, months in formation, to help address this problem.

Make no mistake, this is a big issue. The tiny, oil- and natural-gas-rich country of Qatar is one of the most profligate Hamas-supporting nations in the world.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/author/steven

As noted earlier in the week, I was on campus at Berkeley yesterday to host a guest lecture at the law school from Hadley Arkes about his latest book Mere Natural Law (podcast forthcoming), but yesterday happened to coincide with the “National Walkout” in favor of Hamas called for on college campuses nationwide.

I decided to take in some of the scene down at Sproul Plaza, the main site for campus protest at Berkeley ever since the Free Speech Movement was born at that location back in 1964.

I’ll add that unlike Penn and other elite universities, a clear and unequivocal faculty statement against campus pro-Hamas protests has gained nearly 400 faculty signatures so far—over 10 percent of the faculty. Some excerpts:

Open Letter on Recent Events in Israel and Gaza to the UC-Berkeley Community

On the morning of October 7, Hamas terrorists launched a brutal and vicious attack, entering Israel from Gaza. In villages and towns near the Israel/Gaza border, they murdered by gun, knife, and fire more than 1,000 unarmed civilians, including babies, children, women, the elderly, and entire families, in their homes and on the street.

They went door-to-door annihilating whole families. They killed children in front of their parents and siblings. They abused women, and paraded their mistreated naked bodies. They massacred hundreds of young people attending a nature party in the desert. And they took captive over 150 children, infants, elderly in wheelchairs, women and men, to be used as human shields, and worse. . .

While we individually have many different views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we emphatically agree with President Biden’s characterization of this murderous attack – the purposeful annihilation, rape, kidnapping, and execution of civilians – as a violation of every code of human morality.

Some in our campus community have described these massacres perpetrated by Hamas as “resistance” to be “celebrated” in a “freedom struggle.” This is repugnant and indefensible. For many of us, as we went on social media on Sunday night and Monday morning, it was shocking to realize that literally while Hamas terrorists were going house-to-house seeking to murder as many Jews as they could, some pro-Palestinian organizations on our own campus were gathering petition signatures for statements that celebrated these Hamas terrorists as freedom fighters and rejected any critique of their actions. . .

Unlike the Harvard faculty statement that was signed mostly by faculty from the hard sciences, many of the Berkeley faculty signatories are from the humanities and social sciences, and included the chancellor, Carol Christ, and (the very left) law school Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/megadonors_should_fund_new_universities.html

The size and vitriol of the anti-Israel/pro-Hamas rallies on campus has been a game changer. Yes, everyone knew that college students tend to be ill-informed politically, but the seething hatred of Jews and the misinformation — labeling Israel an apartheid society — was beyond belief. Obviously, something is terribly wrong with American higher education.

What can be done? Though many prominent donors threaten to close their checkbooks, and top school administrators offer lukewarm apologies, the answer is, sadly: not much. The only solution is to create educational alternatives, a long-term strategy where today’s elite schools fade into obscurity and join the ranks of Transylvania University, a once prestigious university that still exists but is now more closely associated with Dracula than higher education,

The good news is that this mission can be accomplished and all the ingredients — mainly brains, organizational skill, and money — exist in abundance. This strategy will not produce overnight change, but it is the only alternative.

The necessary reform is impossible. The hatred of Western Civilization that encourages woke kids to champion homophobic, misogynist militant Islam has entered American higher education’s DNA. And this is in addition to all the nonsense about gender fluidity and Critical Race Theory. No school can screen applicants for gullibility nor impose a litmus test for prospective faculty. Nor would champions of Western Civilization demand schools to return to an era when universities were church-run sanctuaries for doctrinal orthodoxy. Yes, these donations from angry billionaires are large, but funding is also fungible so Middle East billionaires or radical foundations can easily replace the likes of Leslie Wexner or Ron Lauder.

Hope starts by recognizing that many contemporary elite schools began as educational nonentities. The world-famous California Institute of Technology was founded  in 1891 as an Throop College, an obscure vocational school, and did not began its march to excellence until later. Throop College shed its name in 1910 and became Cal-Tech in 1920 thanks to the efforts of leading scientists on the faculty, notably Robert A. Millikan and George E. Hale. Only in 1934 it officially joined the ranks of other major American universities.

https://worldisraelnews.com/california-university-offers-extra-credit-for-marching-against-israel

Controversy erupted when a teacher at UC Berkeley offered her students extra credit for participating in anti-Israel activities in support of terrorist-run Gaza.

The University of California Berkeley is under fire after the school approved an instructor’s plan to offer extra credit to students who participate in an anti-Israel march or watch an anti-Israel documentary.

Graduate student Victoria Huynh, who is pursuing her Ph.D. in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, sent an email to students enrolled in her course, “Asian American Communities and Race Relations,” about the anti-Israel extra-credit options.

The email promoted an event called the “National walkout against genocide, settler-colonialism, and the siege of Gaza,” and informed students that they had the option to participate in the national student walkout or watch a short documentary on Palestine and contact their local California representatives.

This participation would count as either a field trip or an extra five points in the field trip category of their course grade.

After students posted a screenshot of the assignment on social media, the school faced heavy backlash, including with a diversity and inclusion organization that Huynh had previously worked for, Model Expand.

The post about the assignment received more than 1.9 million views in less than a day.

UC Berkeley received extensive criticism on social media, with concerns raised about the safety of Jewish students on campus and the broader implications of such actions by a teacher.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/10/jewish_students_studying_in_cooper_union_library_barricaded_and_threatened_by_hamas_activists.html

What kind of barbarism in academia is this?

According to the New York Post:

A handful of Cooper Union’s Jewish students barricaded inside the university’s library Wednesday when pro-Palestinian protesters blew past security and aggressively pounded on the building’s doors.

A Jewish senior at the East Village institution recounted the terrifying moment she watched the demonstrators slam anti-Zionist posters against the window and shout “anti-Semitic rhetoric” just a few feet away.

“When they started banging on the door, my heart started pounding. I was crying. I think if the doors weren’t locked — I don’t know what would have happened,” the student, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Post.

“I don’t want to speculate what would’ve happened. It just makes me too nervous. I was absolutely terrified in that moment.”

So you’re a Jewish kid. Maybe you are Orthodox and wear a yarmulke. You get into a good school. You study hard in a library, sometimes with your friends, because you know that schooling is important and you want to graduate. You aren’t out partying. You are doing the right thing.

And suddenly, a gang of goons from somewhere out on the streets, wielding Palestinian flags, takes a pivot from their plan to get to the president’s office, after seeing you, and then barricades you in and pounds on the doors, threatening you and flashing anti-Semitic signs through the library windows and bellowing about something happening several thousand miles away, blaming you for all of it, all because you are Jewish.

Obviously, this isn’t about Zionism, or the Israel government, or anything the Palestinian apologists claim. This is straight, naked Jew-hate. 

Worse still, it’s not thugs on the street doing thuggish anti-Semitic acts, it’s the university establishment condoning it from other thugs. The story says the protestors busted through the security guards who tried to block them. The kids called the cops. The cops got there but stood by twiddling their thumbs because the university told them not to get involved and they actully honored that, despite what they were seeing going on.