EDUCATION Comments turned off

There’s No Safe Space for Ideas on Campus ‘Animal Farms’ Zealous student activists find ways to punish those who make them think uncomfortable thoughts. By Daniel Payne

Posted By on November 27th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/theres-no-safe-space-for-ideas-on-campus-animal-farms-11574726733?mod=opinion_major_pos5

Most Americans know that higher education has for several decades been in the grip of a deeply intolerant, fanatical and uncompromising strain of progressive activism. Students and sometimes even faculty members regularly chase heterodox speakers off campus, demand complete fealty from terrified campus bureaucracies, and denounce and destroy each other over the slightest and most inconsequential ideological deviations. The environment isn’t unlike George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” a place where “no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.”

Yet an even more intolerant brand of campus activism is taking shape. This rising political philosophy isn’t merely allergic to dissenting ideas but is opposed even to ideas about dissenting ideas. It’s a bit like the concept of metacognition in reverse: These activists, gripped by zealotry and inflexible dogmatism, are taking pains to avoid even thinking about thoughts with which they disagree.

Consider a recent controversy at Washington College in Maryland. Students there successfully lobbied to shut down a campus production of a play just one day before it was set to open.

The aggrieved students were upset that the play, Larry Shue’s “The Foreigner,” depicts the evil antics of the Ku Klux Klan. But the play doesn’t show Klan members in a sympathetic light—on the contrary, they’re the villains of the piece, and they get their comeuppance in the end. Yet students were deeply upset by the Klan costumes the actors would wear, so the play had to go. (The theater department was “unable to find a satisfactory compromise” with the student activists, a campus official dryly noted.)

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Anti-Semitism Soars in Eastern Europe The old canard of ‘dual loyalty’ also has currency in Western European countries like Spain and Belgium. By William A. Galston

Posted By on November 27th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/anti-semitism-soars-in-eastern-europe-11574812176?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

During the past decade, as internal struggles have preoccupied the U.S., the rest of the world hasn’t been standing still. China has risen, as has populist nationalism—and so too, it turns out, has anti-Semitism.

The latest global survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League finds that anti-Semitic attitudes have increased significantly since 2015 in Central and Eastern Europe, which before the Holocaust was home to most of European Jewry. According to the ADL’s 11-question index, in use for more than 50 years, the share of the adult population expressing a high level of anti-Semitic views rose from 37% to 48% in Poland, 32% to 46% in Ukraine and 23% to 31% in Russia. Hungary showed a more modest increase of 2 points, but from a high base of 40% in 2015.

In these four countries, classic stereotypes prevailed. Asked whether “Jews have too much power in the business world,” 72% of Ukrainians agreed, as did 71% of Hungarians, 56% of Poles and 50% of Russians. Sixty-eight percent of Ukrainians, 67% of Hungarians, 56% of Poles and 40% of Russians agreed that “Jews have too much power in international financial markets.” Fifty-six percent of Ukrainians, 51% of Hungarians and 40% of Poles believe that “Jews have too much control over global affairs.” (Russians trailed at 29%, perhaps because they believe—correctly—that Vladimir Putin is more powerful than a mythical Jewish conspiracy.)

Citizens of these four countries also resent being reminded of the Holocaust. Asked whether “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them” in the genocide, 74% of Poles answered in the affirmative, as did 59% of Hungarians, 50% of Russians and 44% of Ukrainians.

This view is widespread in Western Europe as well. Fifty-two percent of Austrians regard the discussion of the Holocaust as excessive, as do 42% of Germans, 40% of Belgians, 38% of Italians and 37% of Spaniards. CONTINUE AT SITE

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Down With the Western Canon? Not So Fast Students can find a lot to learn from great books by ‘dead white men.’

Posted By on November 27th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/down-with-the-western-canon-not-so-fast-11574812136?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Editor’s note: This Future View is about teaching the “dead white males” of the Western canon. Next week, in light of the protest at the Harvard-Yale football game, we’ll ask, “Is it good for university endowments to become politicized?” Students should click here to submit opinions of fewer than 250 words before Dec. 10. The best responses will be published that night.

Who’s Afraid of the Western Canon?

If you wish to understand your world, you must read the books written by the men who shaped it. History is path-dependent. The ideas and decisions of the influential thinkers of the Western tradition directly influence the breadth of possibilities available to everyone born in the West today. Our government, culture, religion and philosophy all either arose from or in response to the ideas they put forward.

The same concept applies to literature. It isn’t independent of culture; rather, it reflects the culture of its period and builds on it. We are only the most recent link in a complex but unbroken chain.

The West is a product of a cultural conversation among the Greek philosophers, Church Fathers, Shakespeare, Enlightenment thinkers and Dostoevsky, to name only a few. To deny their importance betrays little understanding of history, and to deny it because they were white (leaving aside the anachronism, in some cases) assumes that race, or some conception of “social virtue,” is more important than truth. But even to argue the subjectivity of truth, or to subordinate it to some other value, one must engage with Plato, Aquinas and Dostoevsky—all dead, all white, all males.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Why Are College Students So Afraid of Me? Because adults at places like Bucknell and Holy Cross have convinced them they are oppressed. By Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on November 27th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-are-college-students-so-afraid-of-me-11574812050?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Few things upset American college students more than being told they aren’t oppressed. I recently spoke at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. I argued that American undergraduates are among the most privileged individuals in history by virtue of their unfettered access to knowledge. Far from being discriminated against, students are surrounded by well-meaning faculty who want all of them to succeed.

About 15 minutes into my talk, as I was discussing Renaissance humanism, a majority of the audience in the packed auditorium stood up and started chanting: “My oppression is not a delusion!” The chanters then declared that my sexism, racism and homophobia weren’t welcome on campus. “You are not welcome,” they added, as if I didn’t know.

The protesters drowned out my response before filing slowly out of the room, still loudly announcing their victimhood and leaving dozens of seats empty that could have been filled by students who had been turned away for lack of space. (The protesters had hoped to occupy the entire auditorium before vacating it, so no one else could hear me speak.)

In a subsequent open letter, a senior claimed that I came to Holy Cross to “discredit, humiliate, and deny the existence of minority students.” In fact, I came to urge the entire student body to seize their boundless opportunities for learning with joy and gratitude.

The maudlin self-pity on display at Holy Cross doesn’t arise spontaneously. It is actively cultivated by adults on campus. A few days before the Holy Cross protest, faculty and administrators at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa., convened a therapeutic “scholars” panel to take place during another talk of mine. The goal was to inoculate the university against the violence that I allegedly represented.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Thanks, Private Property! By John Stossel

Posted By on November 27th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/thanks-private-property/

Families will argue this Thanksgiving.Such arguments have a long tradition.

The Pilgrims had clashing ideas about how to organize their settlement in the New World. The resolution of that debate made the first Thanksgiving possible.

The Pilgrims were religious, united by faith and a powerful desire to start anew, away from religious persecution in the Old World. Each member of the community professed a desire to labor together, on behalf of the whole settlement.

In other words: socialism.

But when they tried that, the Pilgrims almost starved.

Their collective farming — the whole community deciding when and how much to plant, when to harvest, who would do the work — was an inefficient disaster.

“By the spring,” Pilgrim leader William Bradford wrote in his diary, “our food stores were used up and people grew weak and thin. Some swelled with hunger… So they began to think how … they might not still thus languish in misery.”

His answer: divide the commune into parcels and assign each Pilgrim family its own property. As Bradford put it, they “set corn every man for his own particular. … Assigned every family a parcel of land.”

Private property protects us from what economists call the tragedy of the commons. The “commons” is a shared resource. That means it’s really owned by no one, and no one person has much incentive to protect it or develop it.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Netanyahu indictments are shifting few Israeli voters Ruthie Blum

Posted By on November 27th, 2019

https://www.jns.org/opinion/netanyahu-indictments-are-shifting-few-israeli-voters/

The only move has been among some of his supporters who fear having the greatest and longest-serving leader in Israel’s history end his career on a low note.

According to a poll released this week by Israel Hayom, 64 percent of Israelis say that the indictments against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced by Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit on Nov. 21 will not affect how they vote in the next Knesset elections. The same survey revealed that 44 percent of the public considers Netanyahu the leader best suited to be prime minister, compared to only 37 percent who feel that way about Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz. The same poll predicts that Gantz’s party would maintain the single-seat lead over Netanyahu’s Likud that it gained on Sept. 17.

The seeming inherent contradiction in terms—that Gantz is far less popular than Netanyahu, yet his party would still beat Likud by a sliver—sheds light on the Israeli political system and the predicament in which the country has been thrust since the first of what is likely to turn out to be three legislative elections in less than a year.

Ahead of the April 9 election, polls also showed Netanyahu beating Gantz as a preferred candidate for prime minister, yet indicated a neck-and-neck race between the parties of the two. When the votes were counted, the victory appeared to be clear. Though Likud and Blue and White tied, with each garnering 35 out of the total 120 Knesset seats, the right-wing bloc was much greater than the left. A government headed by Netanyahu seemed to be in the bag yet again.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Wikipedia’s anti-Israel editors unmasked by Adam Kredo

Posted By on November 27th, 2019

https://worldisraelnews.com/wikipedias-anti-israel-editors-unmasked/

A pro-Israel organization has exposed the identities of top Wikipedia editors who use the online encyclopedia to promote anti-Israel bias and causes, a first-of-its-kind effort that is unmasking a global online network of Israel critics.

The Israel Group, a nonprofit organization that combats anti-Israel bias, is set to launch next year a database that will expose the true identities of many leading Wikipedia editors who harbor anti-Israel bias and have implanted this viewpoint across the website through more than 325,000 edits during the past 10 years. It has already listed the identities of several of these editors.

The new effort, dubbed Wiki-Israel, seeks to provide accountability for the numerous and often anonymous editors who control all of the content that exists on Wikipedia.

Leaders of the Israel Group accuse these individuals of acting as “a cabal of virulently anti-Israel anonymous editors” who are “responsible for decimating virtually the entire pro-Israel editing community.”

Leaders of the Israel Group view Wikipedia, with its global reach and wide readership, as a central battleground in the fight to combat the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Will Justice for Trump be Served in the DOJ Inspector General Report? When solidarity and loyalty are more important than truth or justice. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on November 26th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/will-justice-trump-be-served-doj-inspector-general-bruce-thornton/

Advance hints about the conclusions of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s investigation into the abuses of the FISA process are starting to trickle out. Rather than the “historic,” as Trump put it, bombshell exposing deep-state miscreants gaming the system to take down the president, the report, to be released December 9, will document mere “sloppiness” and “mistakes” on the part of lower-level functionaries. But more important, it also will absolve more highly placed officials of any political bias.

The 500-page report may not confirm this preview. Perhaps it will address what Andrew McCarthy identifies is the real question:

On four separate occasions, the FBI and the Justice Department solemnly told the FISC there were grounds to believe that Carter Page and others in the Trump campaign, potentially including Donald Trump himself, were complicit in a criminal conspiracy with the Kremlin. The question is: What was their compelling basis for making that explosive representation, which breached the American norm against government intrusion in our political process?

We’ll have to wait for the answer to that question.

But these leaks are grounds for suspicion. Back in June, Horowitz made a similar determination about James Comey––incompetent at following proper protocol, but not “politically biased.” Given that ample evidence of Comey’s political agenda had long been public, common sense suggests that those of us concerned about the politicization of our judicial and investigative agencies have some reason to worry about Horowitz’s new report.

Equal justice under the law is the bedrock of constitutional governments. This principle was serially violated during the Obama years, when those responsible for the abuse of the IRS for partisan political gain, and for the ATF’s Fast and Furious operation, which was basically running guns to Mexican cartels, were never punished, despite the death of an American citizen by a gun provided by the ATF. Then there’s Hillary Clinton’s ongoing immunity for patent crimes related to violating security protocols with her private server, and running a pay-to-play State Department to enrich the Clinton Foundation.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

ADL Acknowledges Excess Muslim Jew-Hatred In Western Europe But in typical fashion, it was downplayed. Andrew Bostom

Posted By on November 26th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/adl-acknowledges-excess-muslim-jew-hatred-western-andrew-bostom/

November 21, 2019, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released its 2019 survey data on the prevalence (occurrence) of extreme Antisemitism (defined, below) within 18 countries assessed between April 15 and June 3, 2019. Six of these countries—Belgium, The United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, France, and Italy—included a Muslim over-sample, allowing for a direct comparison of Muslims vs. Christians, those professing no religion, and the overall populations.

As ADL’s own press release stated:

Muslim acceptance of anti-Semitic stereotypes was substantially higher than among the national populations—on average almost three times as high—in the six countries tested: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and The United Kingdom.

In sadly typical fashion, however, the ADL downplayed these findings in its press release, effectively concealing them as the last of six bullet points, i.e., # 6 of 6.

The ADL also failed to expressly note how compared to Western European Christians, specifically, Muslims were also ~3-times more likely to harbor extreme Antisemitic attitudes as gauged by abiding at least 6 of 11 Antisemitic stereotypes queried. (see tabulated data)

In brief, the ADL presents respondents with the following questionnaire:

Jews are more loyal to Israel than to [this country/to the countries they live in]
Jews have too much power in the business world
Jews have too much power in international financial markets
Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust
Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind
Jews have too much control over global affairs
Jews have too much control over the United States government
Jews think they are better than other people
Jews have too much control over the global media
Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars
People hate Jews because of the way Jews behave

The “Index Score” determining the occurrence of “extreme Antisemitism” in each population surveyed is calculated as follows:

HOMELAND SECURITY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Shocking Testimony in Florida Court Accuses Rep. Ilhan Omar of Being a Qatari ‘Asset’ By Rick Moran

Posted By on November 26th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/testimony-in-florida-court-accuses-rep-ilhan-omar-of-being-a-qatari-asset/

Shocking testimony in a Florida court where a Qatari-born Canadian businessman, Alan Bender, told the court in a video statement that Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is a Qatari intelligence asset who has passed on sensitive information to the government of Qatar, which then passed it on to Iran.

The testimony came during the trial of Sheikh Khalid bin Hamad al-Thani, the brother of the former emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. He is accused of ordering his American bodyguard to murder two people, and of holding an American citizen hostage.

Bender accused Omar of being bought by the Qatari security services and said she was getting money and support even before she ran for office.

Jerusalem Post:

According to his sworn deposition, the three officials told him: “If it wasn’t for our cash, Ilhan  Omar would be just another black Somali refugee in America collecting welfare and serving tables on weekends.”

Bender testified that the officials asked him to recruit American politicians and journalists as Qatari assets, and that when he objected, was told that several prominent figures were already on the payroll. Omar was described as the “jewel in the crown,” he said.