ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

A howl of rage against civilisation The orgy of bigotry at Columbia University heaps shame on America. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on April 24th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/22/a-howl-of-rage-against-civilisation/

Hands down the worst take on the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ that has taken over Columbia University in New York City for the past week is that students have always done things like this. Students have forever occupied buildings and quads to make a political point. Students have long agitated against war. Students often find themselves in the grip of passionate radical intensity. Look at the Vietnam era, says every columnist in Christendom, as if the Gaza camp were just another explosion of youthful anti-imperialism.

The wilful naivety of this take is unforgivable at this point. To liken Columbia’s strange, seething ‘pro-Palestine’ camp to earlier campus uprisings against militarism is to gloss over what is new here. It is to whitewash the profoundly unsettling nature of this rage of the privileged against the world’s only Jewish nation. Until someone can point me to instances of those Sixties anti-war kids hurling racist invective at minority groups and demanding the wholesale destruction of a small state overseas, I’ll be giving their Gaza camp commentary a wide berth.

The camp might look and sound like student politics as normal, with its juvenile bluster, megaphoned virtue and the occasional appearance of pitiable university officials warning campers of suspension. But scratch the radical surface and you’ll swiftly find an ugly underbelly of reactionary cries and even outright racism. No sooner had the students erected their tent city ‘for Palestine’ last Wednesday than it became a magnet for genocidal dreaming about the erasure of Israel and plain old bigotry against Jews.

Columbia has rang out with cries of ‘We don’t want no two states / We want all of it!’. You don’t need to be an expert in Middle East affairs to decipher this demand. It’s a sick call to seize the entirety of Israel – all of it – and create a new state more in keeping with the Israelophobic yearnings of both privileged Westerners and radical Islamists. Their longing for Israel’s erasure was made even clearer in a follow-up chant: ‘We don’t want no two states / We want ‘48!’ That is, 1948, a time when the modern state of Israel didn’t yet exist. They want a world without Israel. They want to lay waste to the national home of the Jews.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Jonathan Pidluzny Stop the Mideast Money Fueling Campus Anti-Semitism Multimillion-dollar donations to Middle East studies centers and departments have advanced Islamist ideology and fostered Jew-hatred at U.S. universities.

Posted By on April 24th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/stop-the-mideast-money-fueling-campus-anti-semitism

Combating the anti-Semitism radiating from U.S. college campuses will require work on many fronts. Some of the drivers could take enormous effort to uproot—for example, the DEI culture that has reshaped K–12 and postsecondary institutions. A less frequently discussed factor is easier to address: U.S. universities should stop letting foreign entities shape campus intellectual life.

Centers dedicated to the study of the Middle East, many receiving lavish foreign financial support, do more to promote anti-Zionist and pro-Hamas narratives than virtually any other force on campus. Even a small number of biased faculty can have an outsize influence because the dominant intersectional ideologies leave students primed to embrace anti-Semitic attitudes.

In effect, U.S. campuses have been importing anti-Semitic propaganda for almost 50 years. As the New York Times reported in 1978, “Oil wealth from the Middle East is starting to flow onto college and university campuses throughout the country, bringing a bonanza of endowed chairs and new programs.” That initial flood of money—and specific concerns about gifts to Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies—led to the establishment of foreign gift-reporting requirements in 1986. To this day, Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires universities to report foreign gifts above $250,000.

Unfortunately, weak enforcement by the Department of Education allowed many universities to ignore the requirement. That changed in 2019, when Secretary Betsy DeVos initiated noncompliance investigations at several top schools. In 2023 congressional testimony, Paul Moore, chief investigative council at the Department of Education during the Trump administration, described the sea change that followed: “enhanced enforcement . . . produced dramatic results,” including the “disclosure of more than $6.5 billion in previously undisclosed foreign gifts and contributions.” The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), which analyzed the updated disclosures for 2014–19, found that over $2.7 billion in gifts came from Qatari sources, $1.2 billion from Chinese entities, and over $1 billion originated in Saudi Arabia.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Liel Leibovitz Columbia Is Beyond Reform It’s time we approached our elite universities not as critical institutions we must repair but as national security threats.

Posted By on April 24th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/columbia-is-beyond-reform

Last week, Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, was called to testify before Congress and explain how Alexander Hamilton’s alma mater had become a hotbed of anti-Semitic vitriol. She delivered the Ivy League equivalent of the Bart Simpson defense: I didn’t do it, nobody saw me do it, you can’t prove a thing. The smart set praised Shafik for her evasiveness—the presidents of Harvard and Penn were far less astute—and considered the case against Columbia closed.

The kids had other ideas.

No sooner had Shafik left Washington than hundreds of students—about 800, by the latest count, or one-fifth of the undergraduate student body—put up dozens of shiny new camping tents and renamed the Morningside Heights campus the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. The American flag up the tentpole outside of what once was Dwight D. Eisenhower’s office was taken down, replaced with the green flag of Hamas. Students with loudspeakers chanted slogans like “There’s no God but Allah, and Allah loves martyrs.” An Israeli-Arab who stopped by to explain, in Arabic, why cheering on murderous terrorists was a bad idea was punched in the face and left with his mouth dripping blood. Jewish students were told to “go back to Europe“ or were greeted by a kaffiyeh-clad classmate holding a sign saying “al-Qassam’s next targets,” a reference to Hamas’s military wing. Things eventually deteriorated so badly that the university had to cancel in-person classes. As of this writing, the situation is still unfolding, not only in Columbia but also at Yale, where a Jewish student was stabbed in the eye; in Michigan, where students are handing out pamphlets advocating “death to America”; and elsewhere.

Two urgent questions, both obvious, suggest themselves. The first: How did we get here? The second: What do we do now?

Answering the first question fully would require a comprehensive analysis, but for brevity’s sake, a simple reminder is in order: What we’re seeing on college campuses these days isn’t an aberration, some strange phenomenon that emerged, like a monster from the deep, with little or no warning. It’s the result of decades of deliberate planning by a complex network of administrators, lawmakers, NGOs, and media outlets, eager to convert our universities from seats of learning and inquiry to beachheads in the war for absolute political power.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

‘Jew-Hating’ Asian American Studies Program Exposed at Northwestern University Defending Hamas’ butchery and partnering with Students for Justice in Palestine. by Sara Dogan

Posted By on April 24th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/jew-hating-asian-american-studies-program-exposed-at-northwestern-university/

The Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern University has repeatedly used university resources and official communications channels to promote Jew hatred and condone Hamas’s actions against Israel and its Jewish citizens.

Roughly a week after the barbaric October 7th Hamas massacre of over 1200 Israeli civilians, the Asian American Studies Program (AASP) published a statement on the official department website and reproduced it on the official department Instagram page. Rather than condemning Hamas’s brutality and the innocent loss of Jewish lives in Israel, AASP instead decried “Islamophobia” on campus and chastised the Northwestern University administration for their “silence at the loss of life in Palestine.”

The statement blatantly whitewashed the atrocious actions of Hamas, claiming that “On October 7, 2023, Hamas, the political group that has controlled Gaza since 2006, attacked Israel. Israel subsequently declared war, marking the latest in a long line of armed struggles between the two nations since their formation in 1947-48.”  No mention was made of the sheer brutality of Hamas’s actions—raping women, slaughtering children, mutilating civilians both before and after death. In fact, AASP mocked reports that Hamas beheaded babies as “baseless claims [that] are meant to incite hate against Palestine and equate supporting Palestinian civilians with antisemitism.”

Showing almost no concern for the Israeli victims of October 7th, and the citizens of Israel threatened by Hamas’s intended genocide, AASP instead chose to demonize and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state, referring to Gaza as the “Occupied Palestinian Territories” and blaming the “civilian death toll” in Gaza solely on Israel—rather than on Hamas who started the war by attacking civilians and taking hostages and who then used Palestinian civilians as human shields.

The Asian American Studies Program also critiqued the “visible Islamophobia expressed in pro-Israel posters on NU’s campus falsely claiming that ‘Hamas is ISIS.’”  Notably, the Program did not explain why they felt that comparison to be inaccurate or Islamophobic. Both organizations are Islamist terrorist groups known for their brutal treatment of women and ethnic minorities. The comparison seems apt.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Anti-Israel Protesters Gather Outside Sen. Schumer’s Home, Demand U.S. ‘Stop Arming Israel’ Elizabeth Weibel

Posted By on April 24th, 2024

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/04/23/anti-israel-protesters-gather-sen-schumers-home-demand-u-s-stop-arming-israel/

Hundreds of anti-Israel protesters gathered outside of Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) home in Brooklyn, calling for the United States to “stop arming Israel.”

Video footage posted to X showed what appeared to be hundreds of protesters gathered in the street outside of Schumer’s home for a “Seder in the Streets” on the second day of the Passover Jewish holiday.

A seder is a Passover holiday meal, which includes songs, stories, reading, and eating special foods, along with other traditions. For those who live in Israel, it is held on the first night of Passover, but for those outside of Israel, it is held on the first two nights of Passover.

Jewish protesters gathered outside of Schumer’s home were reportedly from groups such as the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) chapter in New York City, If Not Now, and the New York chapter of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, according to a post on X by JVP NYC.

Protesters gathered were reportedly demanding that the U.S. stop sending weapons to Israel as it continues its war against Hamas.

Officers from the New York Police Department were captured on video telling protesters outside of Schumer’s home that they were “blocking vehicular traffic” and would be arrested for disorderly conduct if they did not “move and get onto the sidewalk.”

Protesters could be heard chanting, “Stop Funding Genocide.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel — An Unlikely Pariah in a Dangerous World By Janet Levy

Posted By on April 24th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/04/israel_an_unlikely_pariah_in_a_dangerous_world.html

If you believe the enemies of the free world, Israel is guilty of the worst crimes against humanity.  Governments, international organizations, NGOs, academics, and student activists condemn its post-October 7th actions against Islamic terrorists.  Leftist media makes the only democracy in the Middle East seem worse than communist China.

Consider only a few of China’s numerous atrocities that Western governments, international bodies, and mainstream media overlook:

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues its brutal suppression of students at Tibet’s universities.  Every year, beginning in March, Tibetan students organize protests to mark the anniversary of the Chinese occupation of their country in 1959.  To counter them, since 2009, China has been ordering campus lockdowns lasting as long as a month.  Surveillance cameras, facial recognition technology, and tracking via a required app called Clean Cafeteria alert the authorities to students’ locations and activities.  This year’s lockdown lasted the entire semester.  At a recent protest, over 100 students were arrested and 20 killed.
In February, over 1,000 Tibetans were arrested and beaten for peacefully protesting a dam project.  The dam will force the relocation of two villages and destroy several centuries-old Buddhist monasteries, some with murals dating to the 13th century.  China’s policies in Tibet — during its 65-year occupation — amount to nothing short of ethnic cleansing and the eradication of Tibetan culture and religion.
Chinese nationals at U.S. universities are subject to repression and surveillance by the communist state and its agencies.  If they speak about human rights violations in China, they are targeted for attacks, and their families in the homeland are threatened.  University administrations and teachers, quick to protest every perceived wrong in America and the world, do nothing for the persecuted students.  After all, they receive over $1 billion in CCP largesse and tuition from nearly 400,000 Chinese students.
The persecution of Uighur Muslims and Falun Gong adherents is well known only because of the independent efforts of exile groups and individuals in China who send out reports and videos at significant risk.  But mainstream media and governments turn a blind eye to their protests.  Even the International Criminal Court (ICC) has failed these persecuted groups.  In 2020, Uighur exiles urged the court to investigate the CCP’s campaign of torture, forced sterilization, organ harvesting, and other abuses.  The court refused, saying there wasn’t enough evidence to show Chinese officials committed crimes over which it had jurisdiction.
Hong Kong-based pro-democracy campaigner Jimmy Lai, 76, has so far spent four years in solitary confinement at a maximum-security prison.  He faces the prospect of life imprisonment for sedition.  Lai had fled mainland China at 12 as a stowaway on a boat to seek freedom in the British colony.  He became a billionaire after starting a series of businesses and later set up media houses.  His assets have been frozen, and his newspaper, Apple Daily, has been shut down.  Western governments’ responses to his son Sebastien’s appeals for their intervention are disappointing.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Rule of Law Depends on John Eastman By Mark Pulliam

Posted By on April 24th, 2024

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-rule-of-law-depends-on-john-eastman/

Editor’s Note: America is in the midst of a cold civil war. On the one side are the defenders of our constitutional regime. On the other is a revolutionary enemy: the group quota regime, which has turned our own legal system into one of its primary weapons, lawfare. When someone runs afoul of the group quota regime, he can expect lawfare to be inflicted on him with all the viciousness appropriate to wartime. 

This is what happened to John Eastman, an attorney who has been ruthlessly persecuted by the enemy for the crime of providing legal advice to President Trump amid the contested 2020 election. As Mark Pulliam writes, the questions at stake here are foundational ones; the rule of law, and the rights of citizens. These are threatened in this war. Whether the group quota regime triumphs over the American regime may well hinge on whether this lawfare is allowed to stand.

The rule of law depends on the even-handed application of laws—thus, the blindfold on statues depicting Lady Justice, derived from the Roman figure Justitia. In our adversary system of justice, a legacy of the Anglo-Saxon common law system brought to our shores by colonists from England, the resolution of legal disputes requires the zealous representation of litigants by attorneys and an impartial—or “neutral”– decisionmaker. Legal scholars have described the adversary system as a keystone of individual liberty and due process of law. The indispensability of legal representation, even in unpopular causes, has been a pillar of American jurisprudence since 1770, on the eve of the American Revolution, when John Adams courageously undertook the defense of British soldiers accused of murdering five colonists in the so-called Boston Massacre.

As we shall see, this historical episode, which legal journalist Dan Abrams has called the “most important case in colonial American history,” provides a stark contrast to travails resulting from the representation of President Donald Trump by California attorney John Eastman, who is facing disbarment, criminal prosecution, and other forms of retribution for providing legal advice to an unpopular client in connection with the controversial 2020 presidential election. How times have changed. 

Adams, a leading patriot and a lawyer, risked his family’s livelihood and incurred the considerable opprobrium of his fellow Bostonians because he believed that everyone—even the hated Redcoats–was entitled to a fair trial.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Kalifornia Krazy The Rush to Reparations-Blue State Madness

Posted By on April 24th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/24/__trashed-3/

Maybe insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But insanity is also whatever the California Legislature is doing at any given time. The most recent example? A reparations bill that would establish the California American Freedmen Affairs Agency has sailed through the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Senate Bill 1403, one of at least 14 reparations bills introduced in the Legislature, cleared the committee by a 8-1 vote two weeks ago, confirming one more time that lawmakers have descended into madness. Unless they regain their wits, reparations will break the state.

But a return to reason is unlikely. Even though California was not a slave state, the Democratic side is all in. This was obvious in 2020 when they established a task force to study reparations.

“It appeared to me that the legislators were violating a fundamental rule of governance: Never create a commission to ‘study’ a controversial problem unless you are relatively certain that you’re going to want to follow its recommendations,” University of San Diego School of Law professor Gail Heriot wrote Monday on Instapundit. Yet it was clear “from the start” that the task force “appeared to be stacked in favor of reparations.”

There’s a lot of political mileage to be gained for lawmakers in blue states who glom onto progressive initiatives that make no sense to centrists and exasperate conservatives and libertarians. Nowhere is this more true than in California, where bad ideas are birthed and then surge across the country, infecting other Democratic citadels. In terms of rank, reparations might be the worst of them all.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Many Culprits Behind Rise of Antisemitism, Including the Media by Howard Levitt

Posted By on April 23rd, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20571/canada-rise-of-antisemitism

On the face of it, who can object to diversity, equity and inclusion? It is like objecting to Santa Claus. Unfortunately, these [DEI] workshops too often have been hijacked by radical ideologues who pitted races against each other.

Who indeed is to blame for the wave of hatred toward Jews that is roiling Canadian workplaces, universities, unions, social media postings, even our streets and neighbourhoods? Who are the purveyors of antisemitism?

Over the last several years, Canadian employers have increasingly brought in “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) trainers to rid their workforces of conscious, and even subconscious, racism. On the face of it, who can object to diversity, equity and inclusion? It is like objecting to Santa Claus.

Unfortunately, these workshops too often have been hijacked by radical ideologues who pitted races against each other. The unhappy story of Richard Bilkszto, who committed suicide after alleging he was deemed a racist by one such trainer for observing that Canadians are not more racist than Americans, was simply the publicly exposed tip of that iceberg.

I have had many Jewish clients, even before Oct. 7, complain about how Jews have been treated in these DEI seminars. To what extent has this radical training played a role in the sudden outpouring of antisemitism here?

Who indeed is to blame for the wave of hatred toward Jews that is roiling Canadian workplaces, universities, unions, social media postings, even our streets and neighbourhoods?

Antisemitism has had a long sordid history in Canada and, for some (ironically many of those who have never knowingly even met a Jew), it has always been hidden just below the surface. There was a reprieve after the guilt induced by the atrocities of the Second World War. But it is ascendant again, and surprisingly, its adherents are proudly so.

Who are the purveyors of antisemitism?

Obviously, first are the radical Islamists importing their ancient historic Jew-hatred based on their particular interpretation of the Koran. Their hatred of Christians and other “infidels” is only slightly behind in the hierarchy.

There is the radical woke left, which has, since Israel’s underdog defeat of the combined armies of Jordan, Egypt and Syria in 1967, viewed Israel as an oppressor. I believe much of the antisemitism in the public sector union movement can be attributed to that strain.

There is the influence of DEI which has too often placed Jews at the top of a racial hierarchy, ignoring the fact that Jews have always been, and remain, dramatically more discriminated against than any other group, including those groups at the supposed bottom of the DEI hierarchy of intersectionality: Indigenous, Blacks, Muslims and the LGBTQIA+.

Allied with those forces are universities and colleges, which have been temples of wokeness for years, penalizing students who express views that dissent from their left-wing pronouncements. While campuses are hotbeds of support for Hamas, polls have shown young people who have not been in the clutches of our university and college professors support Israel, as do most other groups in Canada by large majorities.

Although I am distinguishing them, the left, the universities and DEI practitioners are somewhat interchangeable, and have many of the same members.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Thanks to Biden, China Could Start World War III Here by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on April 22nd, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20590/china-world-war-iii

China is swarming the waters of the Philippines, hoping to intimidate Manila into surrendering territory. US President Joe Biden and the State Department keep on issuing warnings, but Chinese President Xi Jinping continues to ignore them, suggesting deterrence is failing….

[R]ecently, China took Scarborough Shoal …. Washington then brokered an agreement for both sides to withdraw their craft, but only Manila complied. Beijing has been in firm control of Scarborough ever since.

When Chinese leaders, generals and admirals saw Washington’s failure to act, they began moving against Second Thomas Shoal and other Philippine reefs and islets in the South China Sea, went after Japan’s islets in the East China Sea, and began reclaiming and militarizing features in the Spratly chain. Biden as vice president legitimized the worst elements in the Chinese political system by showing everyone that aggression works.

Beijing has been waging proxy wars on three continents: Europe in Ukraine, Africa across its northern rim, and Asia in Israel and surrounding areas.

Xi apparently now believes he is boss of the world. “Change is coming that hasn’t happened in 100 years,” the Chinese leader told Russian President Vladimir Putin after their 40th in-person chat, in Moscow on March 22 last year. “And we are driving this change together.”

Biden is now trying to reestablish deterrence. Britain and France desperately attempted to do that in late summer 1939 when they warned Germany that they would declare war if it invaded Poland. Then, German leaders did not believe the British and the French would in fact fight because for three years they had failed to make good on previous warnings.

China is swarming the waters of the Philippines, hoping to intimidate Manila into surrendering territory. On March 5, China wounded four Filipino sailors at Second Thomas Shoal, in the South China Sea. Unfortunately, the Biden administration’s words and displays of solidarity with the Philippines have not impressed Chinese President Xi Jinping. His maritime militia, coast guard, and navy have stepped up aggressive tactics. Pictured: A China Coast Guard ship (top) sails dangerously close to Filipino fishermen aboard two wooden boats (center), as a Philippine Fisheries and Aquatic Resources inflatable boat observes, near the Scarborough Shoal, in the South China Sea, on February 16, 2024.