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May 2017

The next failed peace talks : Ruthie Blum

As part of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trip to Israel and the Palestinian Authority on May 22-23, he will meet with PA President Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem. It will be the second time this month that the two leaders will have sat down to discuss the impasse in the peace process; the first took place at the White House just over a week ago.

During their chat in Washington, Abbas fed Trump his usual lies. Among these was the claim that Palestinian children are raised to be tolerant and peace-loving. That the U.S. president did not burst out laughing at this absurdity is more a function of his being new on the job than having good manners. It is also probably due to his belief that he will be able to apply the “art of the deal” to the Israeli-Palestinian context and broker a successful agreement.

Trump will soon learn, however, that his methods will not work. Even a business deal cannot be forged when the true aim of one side is failure. Indeed, it is precisely the lack of Palestinian statehood that has been Abbas’ meal ticket internationally — and the only thing that has kept him the least bit relevant at home. Well, that and cultivating, honoring and paying the salaries of terrorists.

In fact, as Palestinian Media Watch revealed on Wednesday, while Abbas was sitting in the Oval Office, his Fatah faction was openly lauding suicide bombers and other murderers of Jews.

On its official Facebook page on May 3, Abbas’ faction Fatah sent “blessings” to 12 of the “heroic prisoners” currently staging an open-ended hunger strike in a number of Israeli prisons. According to PMW, these included Abbas Al-Sayid, mastermind of the infamous suicide bombing at a Passover Seder at the Park Hotel in Netanya, and Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five life sentences for orchestrating several deadly attacks. Incidentally, being incarcerated did not prevent Barghouti from being re-elected to the PA parliament from jail. On the contrary, it made him even more popular.

There is nothing novel about the glorification of terrorists in the PA or about the hypocrisy of killers like Barghouti. Nor is it new for an American administration to fantasize about finding the magic formula for striking peace between Israel and the Palestinians. But it is interesting that Abbas reportedly requested of Trump that the starting point of any new talks be based on the parameters of his negotiations with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008. He also was said to have presented the U.S. president with maps and other documents related to Olmert’s offer, which involved a nearly complete Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and east Jerusalem. It was an offer — as Abbas acknowledged for the first time in an interview with Israel’s Channel 10 in 2015 — which he then flatly refused.

During the interview, which appeared in a three-part series about the peace talks between PLO chief Yasser Arafat and Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2000 and those between Abbas and Olmert eight years later, Abbas made the preposterous statement that one of the reasons he rejected the deal was because he didn’t understand Olmert’s map. Apparently, he has been boning up on his cartography ahead of the next round of bad-faith negotiations that will be marked by and culminate in Palestinian violence.

The PLO’s most powerful lobbyists: Caroline Glick

In private conversations over the past week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has complained bitterly about American Jewish billionaire Ronald Lauder. According to media reports, Lauder played a key role in convincing US President Donald Trump that he can reach “the ultimate deal” with the PLO and Israel.

Netanyahu is surely right that Lauder shouldn’t be acting like he knows what’s good for Israel better than the Israeli government does. He doesn’t know better than Israel’s leaders. And no one elected him.

But Netanyahu is wrong about Lauder’s responsibility for the president’s sudden decision to start singing from Barack Obama’s hymnal on everything related to Israel and the PLO .

Lauder is far from the only member of the PLO ’s booster club.

First of all, there is the American foreign policy establishment.

After 23 years of successive administrations upholding the fantasy that all the Middle East’s problems will be resolved the minute Israel hands over Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to the PLO, it’s hard to find any establishment types who aren’t completely committed to the delusion that the PLO is the answer to America’s prayers.

Then there is the Israeli establishment. To understand its power, we need to consider the status of the Taylor Force Act.

The Taylor Force Act is a popular pro-Israel bill now being deliberated in Congress. If it passes, the US will be barred from transferring funds to the PLO-controlled Palestinian Authority so long as the PA pays salaries to convicted terrorists sitting in Israeli prisons and pays pensions to the families of terrorists killed while committing terrorist acts.

The bill, named for Taylor Force, a former US military officer murdered by a Palestinian terrorists in Tel Aviv in 2015, enjoys majority support in both houses. Nonetheless, it has hit an iceberg.

On Wednesday The Jerusalem Post reported that neither AIPAC nor the Israeli government support it.

AIPAC reportedly won’t lobby for the bill because it lacks support from Democratic lawmakers. This claim is ridiculous on its face.

If AIPAC can’t get Democrats to support a bill ending US funding of terrorism, then AIPAC might as well close its doors right now.

As for the government, it is far from clear how the government could be more supportive. Netanyahu has spoken publicly in favor of the bill.

So if Netanyahu supports it, which Israeli government opposes it?

Largest Catholic University Bans ‘Gay Lives Matter’ Posters For Event on Islam By Tyler O’Neil

DePaul University in Illinois, the largest Roman Catholic university in the United States, prohibited posters with the slogan “Gay Lives Matter” to advertise a presentation by a gay reporter on Islamic discrimination against LGBT people across the world.

“Using the same look/brand as BLM [Black Lives Matter] pits two marginalized groups against each other,” Amy Mynaugh, director of the Office of Student Involvement at the Catholic university, said in an email rejecting the posters. “It doesn’t appear that Turning Point has any connection to the Black Lives Matter movement and this seems to simply be co-opting another movement’s approach.”

The posters were printed to advertise for an event with the campus group Turning Point USA, entitled “Dictatorships and Radical Islam: The Enemies of Gay Rights.” The speaker, James Kirchick, is an openly gay reporter and author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age.

The anti-Israel group DePaul Students for Justice in Palestine announced its members would protest the event. Kirchick captured a profanity-laced Facebook tirade declaring outrage against the event.

The Facebook user MK Okay characterized Kirchick as “a white, Zionist, neoliberal journalist” who would “speak on sh*t he knows nothing about.” Announcing a protest, MK declared, “Not in our f**king name will you pretend to define our safety, and where danger comes from.”

It gets better. “Not in our f**king name will you continue to demonize Islam and Muslims and ignore the radical Christian right,” the Facebook user continued. “Because we all know & see what the real danger here is – and we all know & see how this is f**ked.” Sure. Because there are so many members of the “radical Christian right” throwing gay people off of buildings…

This selective outrage merely solidified a disturbing trend among the Left. In order to emphasize the “oppression” of Muslims, liberals downplay and perhaps even ignore the deaths and sufferings of LGBT people in the Muslim world. Conservative Christians need to show more charity to LGBT people, but they aren’t stoning them and throwing them off of buildings. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Existential Roots of Trump Derangement Syndrome: David Goldman

Just before the French election I installed the Le Monde app on my phone. French news doesn’t interest me except as it impacts financial markets or (rarely) geopolitics. That was a mistake; the lead story in France’s top national daily yesterday at 7 a.m. EST involved a “tutu protest” against the allegedly homophobic Wyoming senator Mike Enzi, in which men and women donned frilly ballet skirts for a gay rights demonstration. President-elect Emmanuel Macron is scrambling to field candidates for the National Assembly elections and proclaiming a grand reorganization of the European Union–but Le Monde reminds us what the French are really about. Trust them to point up the things we most dislike about ourselves.

Pace James Carville, we need a sign that reminds us: “It’s the culture, stupid.” One big idea unifies all of Nietzsche’s offspring–the Marxists, the Freudians, the French Existentialists, the critical theorists, the Deconstructionists, the queer theorists, and that is the right to self-invention. That is the cruelest hoax ever perpetrated on human beings, for we are not clever or strong enough to reinvent ourselves. To the extent we succeed, we become monsters.

In the Judeo-Christian past, human beings had a destiny, men to earn bread by the sweat of their brow and women to bear children in pain. People knew that their impulses must be subordinated to the requirements of God and nature. Since the French Revolution, progressives have sought to overthrow the regime of obligation in favor of the right to self-definition. Before the 2016 presidential election, they thought they had succeeded. Justice Anthony Kennedy enshrined it in common law, in the Obergefell gay-marriage decision: “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.”

If you choose your identity at whim, your life has no meaning. That is true in the most parsimonious sense of the word: if you can arbitrarily decide to be a gender-fluid bestialist as well as a F to M to F trans-entity, then your life can “mean” any number of different things, all of them equally arbitrary. The term “meaning” implies a unique meaning, which in term implies a meaning that has grounds for being there (“unique” doesn’t imply that you have only one chance to choose your gender self-designation from among the fifty provided by Facebook, after which you are stuck with it forever). The progressives made their stand on transgender issues because it appears to be the triumph of self-invention over nature and tradition. That is a cruel joke on the tiny number of individuals who feel compelled to live their lives in the gender opposite to that of their birth. They have no choice in the matter, and live difficult lives.

Dartmouth Announces Linda Sarsour Lecture, Days After Refusing to Co-Sponsor Event Featuring Disabled Israeli Soldier By Pamela Geller

Colleges have declared for the enemy in the all-out war on truth and freedom. Why are American taxpayers forced to fund these hotbeds of anti-Americanism and antisemitism? http://pamelageller.com/2017/05/dartmou.html/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook

The pro-Israel community at Dartmouth College is still reeling following a decision by school leadership to appoint as their new head of faculty a leading supporter of the movement to boycott Israel and Jewish academics.
Now this.

Dartmouth College announced Wednesday evening that it will be hosting a lecture by virulently anti-Israel activist Linda Sarsour, days after an office at the school declined to co-sponsor an event featuring a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces.

This, in the wake of the outrage that CUNY invited Sarsour to keynote their commencement ceremony. This is what the left does. No matter how wrong and evil, they hunker down. We never see this on the right. They don’t stand by their people; they run.

Stand up against the norming of evil. Join us in our protest against hatemonger Linda Sarsour on May 25th. RSVP here. Speakers include:

Milo Yiannopoulos, free speech activist, “the most fabulous supervillain on the internet.”
Assemblyman Dov Hikind, 48th Assembly District
John Guandolo, Counter-Terror Expert, Founder of UnderstandingTheThreat.com.
‘Lauri B. Regan, Endowment for Middle East Truth and National Women’s Committee of the Republican Jewish Coalition
David Wood, Acts 17 Apologetics

Antisemitic bigot Sarsour is an outspoken critic of Israel who furiously supports the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement, a Hamas-inspired initiative that uses various forms of public protest, economic pressure, and lawsuits to advance the Hamas agenda of permanently destroying Israel as a Jewish nation-state.

Vis-a-vis the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, Sarsour favors a one-state solution where an Arab majority and a Jewish minority would live together within the borders of a single country. In October 2012 she tweeted that “nothing is creepier than Zionism.”

James Comey Deserved to Be Fired From start to finish, Comey’s investigation of Hillary Clinton was very poorly handled. By Deroy Murdock

Although President Donald J. Trump fired former FBI director James Comey this week, Obama should have sacked him last July. Comey’s behavior in the E-mailgate investigation suggests either staggering incompetence or a clumsy effort to whitewash Hillary Clinton’s crimes.

• During Hillary Clinton’s July 2 interrogation at FBI headquarters, she was not under oath. How could the FBI possibly reach “the last step of a year-long investigation” — as Comey described it at a July 7 House Government Oversight Committee hearing — with the focus of that probe answering questions without a potential perjury conviction hanging over her head? Especially given Hillary’s peanut-allergy-like aversion to the truth, not swearing her in confirmed either the FBI’s grotesque ineptness or a deliberate loophole through which Hillary could slither away.

Clinton’s defenders say that, had she lied, she still could have been prosecuted for making false statements to federal officials. If so, why bother to put any American under oath?

Making Hillary raise her right hand and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help her God, would have reminded her of her solemn duty to come clean. This also would have exposed her to possible prosecution under both the perjury and false-statements statutes. But Team Comey could not be bothered with any of this. Perhaps they couldn’t handle the truth.

• Former State Department chief of staff Cheryl Mills participated in this session as one of Hillary’s nine attorneys, even though she is deeply implicated in many of Hillary’s misdeeds. Thus, a potential witness or even co-conspirator in Hillary’s possible prosecution offered legal aid as the FBI quizzed her. None of Comey’s people considered this a problem?

• Comey steered clear of Hillary’s three-and-a-half hour interview. Given the unusual and enormous stakes, he should have faced her or, at least, supervised nearby. From an adjacent room, he could have offered guidance, monitored Hillary for inconsistencies, and instructed his staffers to ask pointed follow-up questions.

• Hillary’s maid, Marina Santos, had regular access to Hillary’s classified documents, via secured communications equipment in her Washington, D.C., mansion. Santos reportedly printed records for the former secretary of state to read at home, apparently including Obama’s Presidential Daily Brief. Regardless, Paul Sperry reported in the New York Post, “It also appears the FBI did not formally interview Santos as a key witness in its investigation.” How could Comey possibly have let Santos go uninterrogated?

• The FBI agreed to destroy the laptops of Cheryl Mills and Clinton campaign aide Heather Samuels. This extraordinary promise was part of Mills’ and Samuels’ immunity deals.

However, veteran Washington attorney Joseph DiGenova told Sirius XM host David Webb that FBI agents refused to destroy these computers, in hopes that congressional investigators would subpoena them. DiGenova said in October that when he learned that these laptops still existed, “I could not believe that the Republicans had not gotten their hands on them even yet.”

Wherever the laptops of these top Clinton henchwomen are today, why on Earth would the FBI even agree to junk evidence in this case — be it damning or exculpatory? If any of the judges involved in this case asked for those laptops, what did the FBI expect to say? “Sorry, your honor. We planned to throw them into a furnace.”

John Bloom: Mark Steyn, Cole Porter and Free Speech

The Danish cartoon controversy prompted a spectacular failure of will and principle in the West, the commentator tells Quadrant. ‘First they come for the cartoonists, ultimately they move on to everybody else. The provocations … get lamer and lamer. We are losing our world.’

I’m cruising down New England country lanes that criss-cross towns that look like Norman Rockwell theme parks—on my way to find Mark Steyn—but I’m not allowed to tell you exactly where I am.

My destination is the equivalent of a military bunker—a hidden television studio where, later today, they’ll be installing the concert grand piano Steyn will be using when he launches his variety talk show. Even though I’m less than an hour from the Canadian border and ninety minutes from Montreal, and even though the last battle fought here was in 1777 (the Green Mountain Boys routed some Brits, Hessians and Iroquois under German command), tactical secrecy is the order of the day.

Mark Steyn is under a fatwa.

In a sane world I would be hoping to find Steyn in a good mood so I could ask him whether he really thinks Gypsy is the greatest musical ever staged, because many people believe that despite the stunning score by Jule Styne (“There’s No Business Like Show Business”, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses”, “All I Need Is the Girl”) and the delightful lyrics of Stephen Sondheim (before he became the mononymous bore Sondheim), the book by Arthur Laurents is, after all, a backstage story, which is the typical refuge of the journeyman Broadway playwright looking to establish excuses for downstage centre belting. I’m of the opinion that, since Laurents was also the director of the best Gypsy revival, the one in the early 1990s starring Tyne Daly as Mama Rose—who was, by the way, far superior to both Ethel Merman and Rosalind Russell—and since the Eleven O’Clock Number, “Rose’s Turn”, was spun entirely from the best scene in the book (“I thought you did it for me, mama”), it’s obvious that Laurents was constantly sacrificing his dialogue to the staging and choreography of the original director, Jerome Robbins.

But, alas, we don’t live in a sane world, so I can’t justify spending valuable interview time asking the author of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It—the apocalyptic best-seller about how Muslims are taking over the world and destroying Western civilisation—whether the songs of Harry Warren would someday be recognised for their genius, despite the novelty lyrics of “Chattanooga Choo Choo”, “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” and “I’ve Got a Gal from Kalamazoo”. Steyn is indeed the author of Broadway Babies Say Goodnight—in my opinion one of the greatest works in the rarefied world of musical theatre journalism—but spending all our time on it would be, under the circumstances, equivalent to interviewing Ronald Reagan about the nuances of Knute Rockne, All American.

“But you do really think Gypsy is the greatest musical?” I manage to wedge in later. And, to my great satisfaction, he says, “Yes, I really do.”

But back to the Islamic apocalypse. Apparently Steyn was radicalised by the events of 9/11, because on that day he ceased being a nerdy theatre critic, crooner and exponent of the American songbook, and became instead the Cassandra of Western democracy, doling out an avalanche of columns, articles, books and radio programs telling us that we have given up our Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment souls while the vanguard of the Islamic menace has been advancing toward Kansas. That he’s managed to do so without sacrificing any of the acerbic humour he displayed while describing the libretto of Les Miz or the eccentricities of Andrew Lloyd Webber makes him, sui generis, our singing dancing Tiresias, or, perhaps more accurately, that guy who stands on the side of the road in every Friday the 13th movie, saying “Turn back! Turn back now! Before it’s tooooooo late!” but, in Steyn’s case, with a Catskills-comic rimshot to further confuse the heedless libertines on their way to perdition.

Mark, glad to meet you, you’ve written one of the happiest books I’ve ever read and one of the most depressing books I’ve ever read.

I did say something to this effect when Steyn at length showed up, ambling into a construction site full of exposed electrical wires and bare support beams where, in a few days, The Mark Steyn Show would go into tryouts on the CRTV network. (Be careful when you Google it: CRTV is also the acronym of the national television network of Cameroon.)

“But it’s all part of the same package!” says Steyn with enthusiasm. “The point of politics is to free up time for what really matters in life.”

Like Cole Porter?

“Like Cole Porter.”

Steyn is a large man—above six feet, burly, with a fuzzy red beard that makes him look as if he should be handing William Wallace a halberd at Falkirk, not tinkling piano keys while sipping a Tom Collins—but then that’s his whole point.

“What I’ve learned since 9/11 is that the small pleasures—music, theatre, film—have to be earned. In the Muslim world, there is no music. In Libya they destroyed all the musical instruments—music was considered an abomination. When the demography changes, there will be no concert halls. Artists who take a multicultural view should be aware of this. Count the number of covered women in London’s West End. In Birmingham, where I went to high school, you have a provincial symphony orchestra in a Muslim city—I’m not sure it will survive. All art, all popular culture, is endangered by Islam, because there’s no room for it. It’s considered libertinism. And I’m not even talking about Miley Cyrus twerking at the music awards. What turned Sayyid Qutb against the morality of the West is that he attended a church dance in Greeley, Colorado, which was a dry town in 1948, and he heard the song ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’. He thought it was evil. And now things are getting a lot worse. Ugly things are happening.”

This is what’s simultaneously frustrating and fascinating about talking to Mark Steyn—he understands the connection between Frank Loesser, the creator of Guys and Dolls, and Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood leader executed for plotting the assassination of Nasser. If the Islamic extremists weren’t out there meddling with the canon, we could have spent the next hour discussing the various versions of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”, which Loesser wrote for the Esther Williams movie Neptune’s Daughter. What Steyn failed to mention is that, after six decades as a Christmas standard played over department-store public address systems, the song suddenly became ostracised two years ago because certain moral police officers in various social media fora decided it’s an anthem for date rape. (Apparently the National Organization for Women has more in common with the Muslim Brotherhood than either party would like to admit.) The idea is ludicrous, not only because the song is light-hearted and romantic, but also because it’s been consistently interpreted and reinterpreted to make either sex and both sexes desperate for nookie. Even the original movie uses the song twice—once when Ricardo Montalban is trying to seduce Esther Williams, but again when the man-crazy Betty Garrett is trying to seduce Red Skelton! Not to mention that Idina Menzel and Michael Bublé recorded a video version lip-synched by pre-pubescent actors dressed up as 1920s swells—should they be prosecuted for child abuse?—and, in the Lady Gaga version with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, she is aggressively trying to have sex with him.

But then sometimes Mark Steyn seems like the only conservative you can discuss these issues with, because most Republicans think popular culture is beside the point, if not downright dangerous. Steyn, on the other hand, has performed “Kung Fu Fighting” before thousands of people in civic auditoria more accustomed to Mary Kay Cosmetics conventions, so he gets it.

The Globalist Empire Strikes Back in France The progressive elite breathes a sigh of relief. Bruce Thornton

The progressive global elite is breathing a sigh of relief after “centrist” newcomer to electoral politics, Emmanuel Macron, defeated Marine Le Pen to become the next president of France. After the shocks of last year’s Brexit and the election of populist Donald Trump as president, the rejection of populist, nationalist, and anti-EU parties in Austria, the Netherlands, and now the second most important EU country suggests the tide has turned. But the Eurocrats and Europhiles shouldn’t start popping champagne corks yet. Like all of Europe, France’s problems run deep.

Macron is the consummate establishment insider, with the youth, pleasing personality, and “hope and change” rhetoric of Barack Obama, who endorsed him because he represents, as Obama said, “the values that we care so much about.” He is the opposite of the fiery, true political outsider Le Pen, who is nearing 50 and focuses on the gloomy problems of immigration and terrorism, and has hard things to say about the EU and the Euro.

Macron also got lucky when his first-round opponent in the voting, center-conservative François Fillon, was weakened by a nepotism scandal. Macron’s other opponent, radical socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is too unhinged even for a basically socialist electorate. And the long demonization of Le Pen as an anti-Semitic Petainist throwback and an Islamophobic, racist fascist has made her a political pariah despite her basically socialist and redistributionist policies, and her promise to do something about the immigration and terrorism that so many French people find threatening.

Macron had another advantage: he put forth a seemingly reasonable program for curing France’s economic ills, which are critical: government spending at 57% of GDP, the highest in Europe; a retirement age of 62 and a 35-hour workweek; 3,500 pages of employment regulations; an unemployment rate of nearly 10% (double that for those under 25); a GDP growth rate barely over 1%; public debt at nearly 90% of GDP; an income tax rate topping out at 45%; nine million people living below the poverty line; and welfare spending at nearly 32% of GDP. Macron promises to tackle the job and growth-killing policies that have created these dismal numbers, but he’s unlikely to have a parliamentary coalition big enough to get such reforms through. Don’t forget, about a third of the French voters cast a “pox on both your houses” vote, either abstaining or casting a blank or spoiled “white ballot.” This suggests a fragile foundation for Macron’s future government.

And if he tries to follow through on his campaign promises, he will likely meet stiff resistance from critics of “neoliberalism,” the epithet in Europe for free-market capitalism. In March 2006, 2.7 million mostly young French people protested against a minor reform of employment law that would allow entry-level workers to be more easily let go. And that was when the president was Jacques Chirac, a socialist who decried “Anglo-Saxon ultraliberalism,” Euro-speak for laissez-faire capitalism. Ten years later, socialist prime minister Manuel Valls faced nationwide riots and protests, some broken up with tear gas, over other employment reforms, which he had to get passed by invoking special powers and bypassing parliament. President Macron and his “neoliberal” reforms are unlikely to be any more successful, given the strength of Mélanchon’s support, the disaffection with Macron of a third of French voters, and the French people’s enduring love for their short work-week and generous subsidies.

The College Blueprint for a Totalitarian America The battle over freedom on campus is the battle for freedom in America. Daniel Greenfield

There is a place in America where civil rights don’t exist.

The First Amendment doesn’t apply. Neither does the Sixth Amendment. (Never mind the Second.) Not only Freedom of Speech, but Freedom of Association (NAACP v. Alabama) is under fire.

Snowflakes. Oversensitive. We’ve all heard those accusations leveled at college students. Are millennial college students really an oversensitive generation? Or are they right to be oversensitive.

Two types of people are sensitive; the entitled and the endangered. It’s reasonable to be paranoid about subtle social nuances if you live in a totalitarian state where the wrong word or look will be punished. Where someone is always watching for even the most minor acts of political incorrectness.

College students are afraid. And they should be.

The average college campus with its speech codes, thought policing, violent protests and kangaroo courts has no resemblance to anything else in the United States of America.

Colleges are totalitarian states. And they are the blueprints of the left’s plan for the entire country.

Individuals have no rights on campus. Intersectional tribes do. The way that these tribes negotiate conflicting rights is a mix of Kafka and Orwell. In Orwell’s homeland, Oxford University’s Equality and Diversity Unit (a name that could easily have leaped from the pages of 1984) warned students that failing to make eye contact was a racist microaggression. The usual sensible responses accomplished nothing. Then autistic students complained that the microaggression guidelines were themselves a microaggression against students with disabilities. And the “Unit” quickly apologized and retreated.

The absurdity of the situation reeks of old Soviet anecdotes. But the same system exists in the United States.

An individual’s right to free speech on campus derives from his membership in a group. What might be dangerously offensive from a white man is fully legal when coming from a Latino woman or a Muslim man.

Not just the speech, but the evidentiary process is fundamentally different based on group membership. Hysterical panics by favored minority activists lead to quick and illegal sanctions against students and faculty with no regard for the facts. Facts, like truth, are viewed as favoring white males.

University of Chicago Supporting Terrorists Silencing opponents. Sara Dogan

Editor’s note: The University of Chicago joins nine campuses on the list of “Top Ten College Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment.” The University of Chicago provides financial and institutional support to terrorist-linked campus organizations such as the Hamas-funded hate-group Students for Justice in Palestine while actively suppressing speech exposing the truth about Israel’s terrorist adversaries and their allies in the United States.

Last night, the Freedom Center placed posters exposing the links between the terrorist group Hamas and SJP on the University of Chicago campus. When the Freedom Center placed similar posters on the campus last fall, a university spokeswoman called them “defamatory and inconsistent with our values and policies.” This latest round of posters serves to inform students about SJP’s true motives and allegiances and challenges the Chicago administration to uphold their stated commitment to free expression.

University of Chicago: Campus administration

The University of Chicago has long prided itself on producing independent thinkers and encouraging a certain iconoclasm among its students and faculty. In the fall of 2016, the university’s dean of students, John Ellison, engendered a national controversy by making an explicit statement in support of free speech in a letter to incoming students: “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial and we do not condone the creation of intellectual safe spaces where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”

It seemed that Ellison was bravely sailing against the winds of political correctness, but recent events at the University of Chicago suggest that this cherished commitment to free speech applies to students and campus organizations that seek Israel’s destruction, but not to those who defend the Jewish state and expose the terrorist connections of its enemies.

In the past few years, Chicago has witnessed the development of a highly active BDS campus movement, U of C Divest, which is currently supported by more than 20 student organizations on campus. In the spring of 2016, U of C Divest succeeded in passing a resolution endorsing BDS in Chicago’s student government. During the debate over the resolution, an amendment supporting the continued self-determination of the Jewish people and the existence of Israel was rejected, indicating that the coalition’s goals align with Hamas’s aims of destroying the Jewish state.

The University of Chicago has brought numerous pro-Hamas speakers to campus. In October 2015, UC-SJP hosted BDS movement founder Omar Barghouti for a speech on “BDS and the Ethical Obligation to End Complicity in Oppression.” During his address, Barghouti labeled Israel a “savage unrepairable society” that conducts “ethnic cleansing.” He praised terrorism against Israel’s Jews, stating that “resistance” is a legitimate response to “the violence of an oppressive system.” Several UC organizations and departments co-sponsored Barghouti’s address including the Global Voices Program – University of Chicago International House, the Pozen Center for Human Rights, the Department of Political Science, and the Department of International Studies.

Later that same month, UC-SJP held a panel titled “Jerusalem in Crisis: Insider Perspectives on the Violence in Palestine-Israel” as part of the “UChicago Israeli Apartheid Week.” One speaker at the event, a graduate student member of SJP, stated: “Palestinian violent resistance against the violent Israeli military is always justified; it is the equivalent of biting the hand that is trying to choke you to death.”