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EDUCATION

Universities Celebrate the Mass Murder of Jews American academia has descended into barbarism. by Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/universities-celebrate-the-mass-murder-of-jews/

Since Hamas initiated a brutal and barbaric terrorist attack against Israel and the Jewish people on October 7th, many Americans—Jewish and not—have mourned alongside the world’s only Jewish state and have understood the necessity of a swift and decisive military counterattack. But in the green quads and ivory towers of American academia, a very different reaction has been brewing. For the past two decades, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has shone a rare spotlight on the genocidal Jew hatred emanating from our college campuses. Student organizations like the Hamas-funded and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Students for Justice in Palestine have infiltrated our universities and turned them training grounds for the next generation of jihadists. In the wake of Hamas’s barbarism, its slaughter and mutilation of innocent Jews, its campaign of rape and torture and beheading, we can now bear witness to the effects that two decades of Jew-hating pro-terror propaganda have wrought in our institutions of higher learning.

At Harvard, arguably America’s most prestigious university, over 30 student organizations signed onto a statement declaring that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

Not to be outdone by Harvard, the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Brown University released its own statement (co-signed by the Graduate Labor Organization and Teaching Assistant Labor Organization, as well as 25 additional organizations) stating that: “We, the undersigned, hold the Israeli regime and its allies unequivocally responsible for all suffering and loss of life, Palestinian or Israeli.”

At Cornell University, SJP held a rally to “Stop Israel’s Annihilation of Gaza.” History Professor Russell Rickford who spoke at the rally declared Hamas’s barbaric attack which included the rape of women, the beheading of babies, and the deaths of entire families as “exhilarating.”

Threats to ‘Zionist Journalists’ and Their ‘Kids in School’ From UC Davis professor Jemma Decristo, still on the faculty.Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/threats-to-zionist-journalists-and-their-kids-in-school/

“One group of ppl we have easy access to in the US is all these zionist journalists who spread propaganda & misiniformation. They have houses w addresses, kids in school. They can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more.”

That was an October 10 post on X by Jemma Decristo, an assistant professor of “American studies” at the University of California at Davis. The “trans” professor added emojis of a knife, axe and drops of blood. The story went viral, drawing widespread condemnation, and UCD bosses played defense. They took down Decristo’s bio on the UCD faculty page and as the Davis Enterprise reported, emails to the professor’s UCD address bounced back.

A statement from UCD chancellor Gary S. May, obtained by Newsweek, called the post “revolting in every way” and “antithetical to the values of our university.” UC Davis, the chancellor claimed, “rejects all forms of violence and discrimination, as they are. We strive to foster a climate of equity and justice built on mutual understanding and respect for all members of the community.” As Newsweek noted, the chancellor did not name the faculty member who posted the threats to “Zionist journalists” and their families.

According to the Enterprise, UC Davis hired Decristo in 2017. A May 23, 2023 report in the Nation cites Decristo as an “organizer” in a protest over Banko Brown, a homeless person shot by a security guard, without noting the organizer’s UC Davis connection. Decristo complained that San Francisco mayor London Breed, “continues to give millions and millions more to the SFPD, and equally violent proto-police security forces.”

The call for violence against Jewish journalists and their families caught the attention of Ken Kurson of the California Globe. “I happen to be a Zionist journalist and I have an address and kids in school,” he wrote to chancellor May and USD provost Mary Croughan. “Should I be afraid?”

The current chair of the University of California Board of Regents, Kurson noted, is Rich Lieb, who would like to see more support at UC schools for Jewish students. “Presumably, threatening to kill the families of those who support the world’s only Jewish State is not what Leib had in mind.” Kurson also called out UCD donors to “demand accountability from a university that funds a professor who threatens murder and celebrates anti-American violence.”

That professor, a biological male, was “formerly known as Jeramy Decristo.”

Time for Billionaire Donors to Face Reality By Robert Weissberg

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

An important repercussion of the recent campus anti-Israel/pro-Hamas rallies is that major university donors, many of whom are Jewish, say that they are re-thinking their continued support of their alma mater.

The billionaire Ronald Lauder has threatened to end his donations to the University of Pennsylvania. Fellow Penn alum, Marc Rowan, who has donated some $50 million recently asked fellow mega donors “to close their checkbooks.”  TV producer Dick Wolf, another Penn alum, joined this chorus while the Huntsman family has already shut its checkbook. Four thousand donors just signed a letter denouncing Penn’s support of anti-Semitism. Nor are these Penn donors unusual as billionaires at other schools have finally awoken from their slumber.

Can these aroused financial titans root out anti-Semitism? No doubt, the closed checkbooks will alarm top administrators who will promise “steps will be taken,” but, sadly, matters will not change, rhetoric aside.

No university will de-fund anti-Israel organizations since this generosity for student groups is a long-standing policy and administrators cannot anticipate what campus groups will do next.

Among the 30 Harvard groups denouncing Israel (listed here) were the Harvard Divinity School Muslim Association, The Harvard Jews for Liberation and, oddly, the Design Students Society, among others that, technically, have nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Moreover, rabid anti-Semites can seize control over any campus groups just by showing up and then voting for a toxic statement in the group’s name regardless of the membership.

Why Do So Many Young People Support Hamas? Noah Rothman

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-do-so-many-young-people-support-hamas/

The monthly Harvard/Harris survey conducted in the wake of the Hamas-perpetrated massacre of over 1,400 Israelis on October 7 has good news and bad news for those who look upon this act of mass murder of Jews with horror and contempt. In the good news column, the overwhelming majority of respondents believe the U.S. is justified in branding Hamas a “terrorist group,” believe it is correct to call the attack “genocidal,” do not think the slaughter was justified, and side with Israel in its war against Hamas. The bad news is, however, impossible to dismiss as inconsequential.

Younger Americans, aged 18 to 24, disagree with their elders. This demographic is split almost down the middle when asked if the slaughter of senior citizens, the rape of young women, the murder of children, and the immolation of whole families in their homes was justified. Indeed, a slight majority of respondents in this age group said the butchery could be “justified by the grievance of Palestinians.” What’s more, only a bare majority of this demographic backs Israel in this conflict. Forty-eight percent said they side not with Palestinians but explicitly with “Hamas” in this war.

The first order of business is to heap scorn on a generation that has adopted this morally bankrupt perspective and the older adults in their lives who have so maliciously led them astray. The second task at hand is for us to understand what convinced the younger generation to sacrifice their humanity upon the altar of an intellectual fad. The answer can be found, at least in part, in one odious word that has claimed the benignity of this generation and so many before them: “framework.”

The Sickness of Our Universities—and the Cure Before graduating, students should demonstrate a minimum competence in math, science, and general knowledge By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/23/the-sickness-of-our-universities-and-the-cure/

The sheer madness that has gripped many elite universities since October 7 and the butchery, rape, torture, and mutilation of some 1,000 Israeli civilians by Hamas murderers have shocked the public at large.

Campus craziness is, of course, nothing new. But quite novel for campuses was the sudden jettisoning of prior campus pretenses. Universities have brazenly dropped their careful two-faced gymnastics to reveal at last–unapologetically, proudly, and defiantly–the moral decay that now characterizes American higher education.

Recent news stories have exposed this rot to the world, and will have grave repercussions for higher education in the next few years.

The Nazis once desecrated the tombstones of dead Jews. Our campuses have updated that hatred. Students now tear down pictures of Jewish captives kidnapped or murdered by Hamas. University presidents do not condemn the hate-filled rallies supporting the killing of Jews in Israel, even though, according to their own safety-first ideology and prior proclamations about systemic hatred, these rallies instill a “climate of fear” in some students.

An instructor at Stanford separated Jewish students from their belongings, ordered them to stand in the corner, boasted about denying the Holocaust, and singled them out for unhinged rantings. Screaming campus activists and professors openly support Hamas even after its brutal killing of hundreds of Israeli women, children, and infants. That for more than two weeks thousands of rockets—barrages initially designed to enhance the surprise mass murdering of October 7—daily continue to shower down upon Israeli cities is of zero concern to loud campus activists.

An even bolder Cornell history faculty member bragged that he was “exhilarated” on news that Jews were butchered on October 7. A UC Davis professor threatened to go after the children of “Zionist journalists.” “Savages”, “excrement” and “pigs” are the adjective and nouns one professor at the Art Institute of Chicago posted to describe Israelis.

At rallies and protests, hundreds shout about eliminating Israel altogether; students, faculty, and throngs in general occasionally wear masks or wrap their faces in keffiyehs, as if conceding that most would find anyone identifiably mouthing such advocacy despicable. In some sense, such campus haters have become the equivalent of anti-Semitic sheet-wearing Klansmen.

Jacob Howland The Campus Peril to Western Civilization Student and faculty reactions to Hamas’s atrocities demonstrate once and for all the fraud of elite higher education. We must reform our universities—or create new ones.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-campus-peril-to-western-civilization
When I interviewed in 2022 for the job of Dean of Intellectual Foundations at the just-founded University of Austin (UATX), Pano Kanelos, the university’s founding president, asked me what I thought the new institution’s mission was. “To save civilization,” I said. “And here I thought the mission was to save American higher education,” he replied.

Informed observers have known for some time that our universities are broken. But the cheerleading on American campuses for terrorists who unleashed a pogrom of a magnitude and viciousness not seen since the Holocaust has made it clear that the collapse of higher education imperils Western civilization itself. Without real higher education, we would forget the past and stumble blindly into the future. Without universities worthy of the name, there would be no civilization.

Higher education exists to preserve, transmit, and extend knowledge, including the sound judgment and knowledge of the whole we call wisdom. Universities stand at the threshold between past and future, self and society, the eternal verities above and the flow of time below. Their job is to join what would otherwise fall apart: to remember the past, fructify the present, and incubate the future. At their best, they are modern temples of Janus, the two-faced Roman god who looks backward and forward, inward and outward—a symbol of wakeful, vigilant minds that receive tradition with gratitude, seek knowledge with grace, and face challenges with grit.

But in the United States, universities have never been worse than they are today. Barbarians have invaded the temples of teaching and learning, ransacked the sanctuaries, and defiled the sacred scrolls. For decades, students have been steeped in a postmodern intellectual culture of repudiation, relativism, and reductivism. They’ve been taught to “deconstruct” the great books and noble ideals of the West; to regard morality, and even the criteria of scientific truth, as social constructions; and to understand politics and society as “discourses of power” illuminated by the doctrines of “critical theory” and “intersectionality.” Bereft of precious civilizational compasses and maps, they have learned to regard fundamental social relationships as zero-sum games of domination and servitude.

The Demons We’ve Made: Zachary R. Goldsmith

https://lawliberty.org/the-demons-weve-made/

The supporters of Hamas in the West are the products of a postmodern education.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel Demons is, at its core, a story of fathers and sons, a story of two generations typified by Stepan, the father, and Pyotr, the son. Stepan is a composite stand-in character for the Russian intelligentsia of the 1840s, who looked to fashionable Western theory and socialism as the needed tonic to cure an ailing Russia. Pyotr, on the other hand, represents the chickens coming home to roost—a nihilistic fanatic par excellence who, born in the moral and ideological morass prepared for him by his father and those of his father’s generation, endeavors for nothing less than the total overthrow of society—“quick resolution by means of a hundred million heads.”

I couldn’t help but reflect on Dostoevsky’s Demons this past week as I observed so many little “demons” descend on college campuses across the country, marching and chanting in pro-Palestine cum pro-Hamas rallies, praising the most sickening and depraved atrocities imaginable. Unfortunately, as we all know, these atrocities were not works of fiction, but all too real pogroms carried out by the fanatical terrorist group Hamas.

The national group Students for Justice in Palestine hailed the terrorist attack in Israel on October 7 that claimed the lives of more than 1,300 people and saw the kidnapping of more than 199 more “a historic win for the Palestinian people.” The group later called for a “Day of Resistance,” claiming “the Zionist entity is fragile, and Palestinian resistance is alive.” Hamas butchers are featured prominently in the promotional material of this group. At my own institution, Purdue University, the local SJP chapter hailed the massacre of Israeli civilians—the worst anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust—by celebrating “the recent uprisings in occupied Palestine” (Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005) and by encouraging the campus community to not “equate the violence of the oppressor” with that of “the oppressed.”

Purdue’s SJP decried “Western allies of the Zionist regime” for denouncing the massacre of innocents and claimed it as just deserts for “the decades of settler colonialism, genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, forceful dispossession, military occupation, and many more atrocities happening to Palestinians on their land.” The rape of women and children before the eyes of their fathers, the decapitation of babies, the burning alive of whole families in their homes—these unspeakable acts were, in the eyes of Purdue’s SJP—nothing less than the “uprising by Palestinian freedom fighters in a direct response to the ongoing violence against innocent Palestinians.” This and other recent posts by Purdue’s SJP were “liked” on Instagram by many student groups in the Purdue community, including the Purdue Disabled Student Union, Purdue’s Latinx Student Union, the Young Democratic Socialists, and Purdue Immigrant Allies. Truly, the glories of intersectionality at work.

How is it, asks The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis, that so many “flunked the Hamas Test”? That erstwhile “Students for Palestine” turned into “Students for Pogroms in Israel,” in the words of Conor Friedersdorf?

The Alternate Universe of Anti-Israel Protestors By Robert Weissberg

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

Contemporary universities have created youngsters who are willfully blind to reality and demand that others share their fantasies.

The sudden outpouring of anti-Israel, pro-Palestine outrage on countless campuses is hardly surprising given how universities are so grievance group friendly. More surprising is the content of these protests, namely proclaiming a morally upside-down world where Israel is the oppressor and Hamas the victim (the Harvard letter said, “Palestinians have been forced to live in a state of death, both slow and sudden.”) Here the killing of innocent civilians and the beheading of babies counts for nothing while Humas savagery becomes noble “resistance.” It is this rejection of reality that is truly puzzling.

What allows college students and even a few professors to justify the anti-Israel rage? That this occurs at some of America’s top schools — Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford — makes it all more remarkable.

Lacking mental health experts to psychoanalyze protestors, let me offer two possible explanations for this toxic flight from reality.

The first concerns the personal costs of living in a fantasy world for today’s college students and faculty. In the “real world” having totally wrong ideas can have dire consequences. You may decide that astrology is the key to knowledge, but normally friends will convince you of the truth. In nearly all circumstances, harsh reality constrains fantasy.

The High Price of Historical Illiteracy – Knowledge of how we won our rights is a crucial part of keeping them. David Catron

https://spectator.org/rights-high-price-of-historical-illiteracy/

Thomas Jefferson, in an 1816 letter to a member of the Virginia General Assembly, made this observation: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” He wrote this passage to highlight the need for a system of primary schools in the Old Dominion. Eventually, the Commonwealth did establish a public school system, though Jefferson didn’t live to see it. That is just as well, perhaps. He would certainly be horrified by the ignorance of the people who attend and receive diplomas from our public schools.
 
During recent years, numerous studies have found that most Americans don’t know enough about the nation’s history and Constitution to pass the U.S. Citizenship Test. A particularly thorough 50-state survey of 41,000 Americans was published by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation in 2019. Nationally, only 4 in 10 passed. In only one state, Vermont, was a majority (53 percent) able to earn a passing grade for U.S. history. This dismal state of affairs was clearly exacerbated by the ill-conceived school shutdowns that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the low 2023 ACT test scores demonstrate.
 

But the problem predates the pandemic, which arrived on our shores a year after the foundation’s survey was conducted. The real explanation can be derived by breaking out the scores by age group: In the 65+ group, 76 percent passed. Only 51 percent of the 45 to 64 group passed. In the under 45 group, a mere 27 percent passed. This suggests that history instruction has been neglected in public schools for decades. As Timothy S. Goeglein explains in his book, Toward a More Perfect Union: The Moral and Cultural Case for Teaching the Great American Story, this neglect of history in public schools comes at a high price:

When there is no historical context to draw upon, no shared history, and no understanding of how government works, it becomes seed to sow division and discord in hearts and minds. When people are not equipped to refute an argument and lack the critical thinking skills to see beyond the rhetoric, they tend to accept it at face value. They become easy prey for demagogues — from the Left and the Right alike. They become tools to be exploited for a certain agenda.

Your Tax Dollars At Work: Financing Virulent Antisemitism On Campus

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/17/your-tax-dollars-at-work-financing-virulent-antisemitism-on-campus/

Shortly after Hamas began its bloodthirsty campaign against Israel, student groups started issuing statements praising the terrorists and blaming Israel. If you were appalled, you’re not alone. But you’re also helping to pay for it.

At Harvard, 31 student groups made news when they announced that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” That prompted hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman to call for getting those students’ names so that “none of us inadvertently hire(s) any of their members.” At least a dozen businessmen endorsed Ackman’s call, according to the New York Post.

This was hardly an isolated incident. A few examples of what’s transpired on campuses over the past week.

Yalies for Palestine issued a statement saying “we hold the Israeli Zionist regime responsible for the unfolding violence and denounce the Israeli occupation, apartheid system, and military rule.”
A student group at the University of Virginia said “we stand in solidarity with Palestinian resistance fighters.”
The president of the New York University Student Bar Association expressed her “unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians in their resistance against oppression,” and said that “Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life.”
Rice University students honored the Hamas “martyrs.”
At the University of Wisconsin, pro-Palestinian students chanted “glory to the murders.” (School officials have been silent about the protest.)
Columbia University students issued a statement attacking “Israel’s apartheid and colonial system.” (An Israeli student was later attacked outside Columbia’s main library.)
At SUNY Binghamton, cars reportedly drove around campus with passengers chanting “death to Zionists.”
Other examples of attacks against Jews on college campuses can be found here.

Sen. Marco Rubio had it right when he said: “Across America, college students on federal taxpayer-subsidized student (loans) celebrated the murder of Jews.”