RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-osama-bin-laden-became-the-big-man-on-campus-bff1c53b?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

College students haven’t always been persuaded by Osama bin Laden’s prose. Yet when his 2002 “Letter to America” went viral among young Americans earlier this month, I wasn’t surprised. I had assigned the document for a course on religion and politics when it first appeared. Students found it compelling as a clear and concise statement of al Qaeda’s motives, intentions and understanding of world and Middle Eastern history. They were horrified, as were most faculty.

Yet a year earlier, only a few days after Sept. 11, 2001, a cultural Marxist professor lectured a staff meeting on the need to understand and sympathize with the 19 unfortunate men who had been driven to their martyrdom by Western colonial oppression. Those in the towers, he intoned, had it coming. On that day, my colleagues reacted to this claim with derision and contempt. But the virus had arrived. It would soon spread.

I began to teach the course again in 2017, after a 12-year hiatus. By then the class was filled with students whose education took place entirely within the post-9/11 world. Again we read bin Laden’s letter, and again the students were horrified—this time, not at bin Laden but at me for having assigned it. The students had been trained to consider anyone who might suggest a connection between al Qaeda and religion as racist. The ground had been prepared to insulate so-called non-Western discourse from critical discussion. They denounced me as “Islamophobic” and walked out of class. But at least at that stage they hadn’t yet taken bin Laden as a model.

Today his letter appears prescient to the young because the views it espouses resonate with what their professors have taught for years. Opposition is rarely heard. At the Claremont Colleges, where I teach, 186 faculty members signed onto a letter blaming “Israeli settler colonialism” for the Oct. 7 massacre and supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. Students erected a shrine “to the insurgents who have died for the liberation of Palestine.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/cultural-revolution-on-campus

In 1966, China’s Communist dictator Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, a whole-of-society effort to remold the Chinese people into worthy Communists and to eliminate all dissenting voices. Knowing his order would need loyal foot soldiers, Mao turned to China’s youth, leveraging their enthusiasm for change and disdain for authority to execute his designs.

Mao kicked off the Cultural Revolution at Beijing University, one of China’s most prestigious colleges. Students answered Mao’s call by blanketing their campus with huge character posters and by denouncing university administrators and party leaders and humiliating them in public struggle sessions. The fervor quickly spread to other Beijing universities and high schools, as radicalized students called themselves Mao’s “Red Guards” and vowed to punish anyone, especially those authority figures who had “betrayed” the party and would stall China’s march to a purer Communism.

At the Experimental High School in downtown Beijing, an exclusive all-girls school for the children of senior Communist Party leadership, a group of teenagers formed their own Red Guards unit. They began torturing the school’s vice principal and Party secretary, Bian Zhongyun. Other adults at the school didn’t intervene, probably out of fear for their own safety. The students intermittently beat Bian for weeks until August 5, 1966, when she finally was beaten to death, becoming the Cultural Revolution’s first high-profile casualty.

The local authorities declined to press charges against the girls who had participated in Bian’s torture and death. As news spread that no one was held accountable for Bian’s murder, students at other schools were emboldened to attack teachers, administrators, and anyone classified as a “bad element.” In August 1966 alone, nearly 2,000 people were killed in Beijing.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/27/seattle-middle-school-students-send-pro-lgbtq-cards-to-conservative-moms-group-as-part-of-class-assignment/

Seattle middle school students sent a group of conservative moms pro-LGBTQ nastygrams as part of a recent assignment.

The parental rights group Moms for Liberty posted pictures of the hate mail they received from the Jane Addams Middle School class on Saturday.

Many of the colorful, hand-drawn cards repeated gay pride bumper sticker slogans such as “Say Gay” and “Gay is slay,” the Post Millennial reported. Others repeated more pointed messages, such as “stop being a rat” and “stop bullying and excluding LGBTQ youth.”

Enclosed in the package was a letter from Ann Christianson, a social studies teacher and coordinator of the Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) at the middle school. The GSA nonprofit network openly declares that its clubs are “vehicles for deep social change related to racial, gender, and educational justice.”

“Dear Moms For Liberty, Please read the enclosed cards from concerned middle school students in Seattle, WA,” Christianson wrote.

“Seattle Public Schools are spending class time indoctrinating and weaponizing your children,” Moms for Liberty responded on X. “The building of the Red Guard in America.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvards-hamas-confusion-israel-palestine-terrorism-anti-semitism-higher-education-2b9dda00?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

As Israel began exchanging Palestinian prisoners for Israeli moms and children, Harvard was dealing with its own ultimatum.

A week ago pro-Palestinian students gave university President Claudine Gay until Monday to respond to three demands. They were: that Harvard divest from any investments in “illegal settlements in Palestine”; that the university reinstate a proctor suspended for taking part in a mob that surrounded and harassed a Jewish student; and—of course—a promise from Harvard that “pro-Palestinian students and workers engaging in non-violent protest” would face no disciplinary action.

There you have it. The ethos of our modern best and brightest in a nutshell: We are taking a brave stand—but we demand that we pay no price for it.

In fairness, Harvard is no worse than most other universities here. Then again, that’s the scandal: It ought to be. Today the places that are supposed to be exemplars of how a civilized community behaves have become prone to loutish behavior as well as incoherent in their responses.

The ordinary citizen, by contrast, has little trouble recognizing that targeting innocent civilians instead of soldiers makes you a war criminal, not a soldier. Americans are consequently appalled by the pro-Hamas sentiment they see on so many campuses. The confusion has two parts.

The first is the way protest has morphed into a threat to speech. It isn’t only a matter of physical assaults or vandalism, though there’s been plenty of that. Harvard’s suspended proctor, graduate student Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, was captured in a video as part of the mob that blocked a Jewish student’s way while shouting “Shame!” at him. Mr. Tettey-Tamaklo was joined in this by Ibrahim Bharmal, an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

This isn’t speech. Students have the First Amendment right to espouse any idiocy they wish, such as the idea that Israel is entirely responsible for Hamas’s atrocities. But at a university ideas ought to be subject to civilized debate. Unfortunately, the purpose of the demonstrations these days is largely to make honest debate impossible by silencing, inconveniencing or intimidating those with opposing views.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nyu-law-students-vote-to-oust-bar-association-president-who-blamed-israel-for-hamas-attack-tore-down-hostage-posters/

The New York University School of Law student body has voted to remove Ryna Workman from her post as president of the university’s Student Bar Association (SBA), according to an email sent to the student body Monday and obtained by National Review.

The online vote, which was triggered by a “no confidence” petition signed by 25 percent of the student body, closed Wednesday after being held open for a week. Of the 1,176 students who voted, 707 said Workman should not remain in office, while 428 voted to retain Workman and 41 abstained.

Workman first made headlines with an October 10 message in an NYU Law newsletter blaming Israel for Hamas’s October 7 massacres.

“I want to express, first and foremost, my unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians in their resistance against oppression toward liberation and self-determination,” she wrote. “Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life. This regime of state-sanctioned violence created the conditions that made resistance necessary. I will not condemn Palestinian resistance.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/11/26/campus_dysfunction_easy_to_recognize_difficult_to_cure_150112.html

Machiavelli observes in “The Prince” that politics presents challenges akin to those physicians sometimes face: “… in the beginning of the illness it is easy to cure and difficult to recognize, but in the progress of time, when it has not been recognized and treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to recognize and difficult to cure.” So too for higher education in America: At this late date, our universities’ dysfunction – and the damage to the nation it has wrought – has become easy to recognize, but curing the dysfunction has become difficult.

The Hamas jihadists’ Oct. 7 atrocities in southern Israel may have provoked a watershed moment for higher education in America. Student and faculty expressions of solidarity with the mass murderers, university administrators’ initial confusion and missteps, and the eruption of antisemitism on campus compelled many who have long averted their eyes to confront our universities’ role in fanning the flames of division and discord. However, since most university administrators, professors, wealthy donors, left-of-center commentators, and politicians of both parties have allowed the dysfunction to progress for decades without calling higher education to account or warning the public, only dramatic and costly interventions provide hope at this point of remedying the cluster of pathologies ravaging America’s universities.

Evidence that it is now permissible to speak in polite society about the dire state of our universities comes from the New York Times opinion page. Since Oct. 7, the Times has published several pieces declaring that our universities have gone badly astray and proposing measures to repair them.

These opinions are welcome, but tardy by several decades. They fail to identify the chief problem. They ignore the principal obstacles to reform. They propose reforms that provide the equivalent of band-aids for gaping wounds and shattered limbs.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-inside-story-of-how-palestinians-took-over-the-world/

The brilliant Palestinian plan to capture the pliable minds of American college students was laid out in front of me 25 years ago, during a very sinister business meeting in Israel.

It was around the time of the Oslo Accords. I had been hired by the Ford Foundation to create a marketing institute for their grantees in the country. Ford was funding the operations of both Jewish and Arab organizations within the Israeli green line, in an effort to help build a vibrant liberal civil society.

Ford put me in partnership with a young Israeli woman, Debra London. (Debra, now one of my closest friends, has just been selected to head up fundraising for the rebuilding of Kibbutz Be’eri.) She and I drew up a plan to interview each of the grantees, as well as Israeli ad agencies and media firms. While we wanted to learn about the grantees, we also planned to secure free marketing work and media to be an essential part of the institute.

When we interviewed the Jewish organizations, the atmosphere was almost giddy with hope, possibility and belief in Shimon Peres’s new Middle East. Each organization we interviewed talked excitedly about peace and co-existence, a flourishing economy among both the Jews and the Palestinians, collaborative projects and interchanges.

But when we interviewed the Arab organizations, the word “peace” never passed their lips. They spoke of independence, dignity, self-rule, a state. One person even told me she would never use the word “du-kiyum” (co-existence). “There is no such thing as co-existence,” she stressed. “We are just the tenants living on the property that the Jews now own. That’s not a balanced co-existence.”

I tried to explain to my fellow Jewish liberals that we — the Jews and the Arabs — were having two very separate conversations. We were talking “peace.” They were talking “independence.” But as the weeks of interviews progressed, I found the Arab organizations were talking about a whole lot more.

I asked hard questions of both the Jews and Arabs in the interviewing process. With the Arab organizations, when I brought up any  sensitive, and not-so-sensitive, issues—like terrorism, cooperation and even budget—the interviewee would slam on the brakes.

And then from each organization, the same words were spoken: “When you are in Haifa meeting with Itijaa, you can ask that question to Ameer Makhoul.” Itijaa was an Arab civil rights organization. Ameer Makhoul was its executive director. It became clear to me that Ameer Makhoul had some type of control over all the Arab NGOs I was speaking to.

Finally, Debra and I arrived at the offices of Itijaa. Skinny, bespectacled, young Ameer Makhoul emerged from his office, took a look at me and said, “So this is the Gary Wexler who has been asking all the questions.” And then he ticked off every question I had asked along with the name of each person I had posed the question to.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/usc-professor-relegated-to-remote-teaching-after-criticizing-hamas-in-front-of-pro-palestinian-students/

The University of Southern California relegated economics professor John Strauss to a remote-teaching position after he denounced Hamas in front of students.

Strauss, who is a Jewish supporter of Israel, is barred from holding classes on campus for the rest of the fall semester. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression is speaking out on behalf of Strauss, so that other professors don’t have to face the same treatment.

“By requiring Professor Strauss to teach remotely for the remainder of the semester, USC has violated its own clear commitments to protect faculty free speech,” FIRE program officer Jessie Appleby told National Review. “Universities are supposed to be places of free inquiry and debate, but debate is impossible without the freedom to disagree and dissent — even when disagreement might be upsetting to others.”

On November 9, Strauss criticized Hamas terrorists as he was walking past pro-Palestinian student protesters for the second time that Thursday. The professor remarked, “Hamas are murderers. That’s all they are. Every one should be killed, and I hope they all are.”

One of the protesters posted a deceptively edited video which took the last sentence out of context, making it appear as if Strauss wished all Palestinians would die. He attested he wasn’t advocating for that.

A longer clip showed the exchange in full.