RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ivory-tower-hypocrite-the-university-of-pennsylvania/

When Former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill was grilled by Congress in the spring of 2024 over pro-Hamas demonstrations and calls for the genocide of the Jews on her campus, she insisted that protecting free speech was a top priority. Magill was blatantly lying. Recent events reveal that the University of Pennsylvania has enforced radically different standards on free expression, depending on who is doing the speaking.

Even before Hamas’s October 7th massacre made pro-Hamas rallies a daily feature of campus life across the nation, Penn demonstrated an extreme tolerance for speech promoting Jew hatred. In September of 2023, the campus played host to the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, an event sponsored by numerous university departments and centers including the Middle East Center, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, and the Wolf Humanities Center.

Featured speakers at the event included Roger Waters, of the band Pink Floyd, a notorious anti-Semite, who has a penchant for dressing in imitation Nazi garb during performances. Another highlighted speaker was former CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill, whose Jew hatred proved too much even for the legacy media. Lamont Hill was fired by CNN after he endorsed the genocidal statement “Free Palestine, from the River to the Sea” in a speech at the United Nations.

The festival’s co-chair, Susan Abulhawa, is a blatant Hamas sympathizer. Following a terrorist shooting outside a synagogue in Jerusalem, Abulhawa, rather than condemning the violence against civilians, sought to justify it. “Every Israeli, whether in a synagogue, a checkpoint, a settlement, or shopping mall is a colonizer who came from foreign lands and kicked out the native inhabitants,” she wrote. “They all serve in the racist colonial military. The whole country is one big militarized tumor.”

Given the line-up of pro-Hamas speakers and organizers, the festival unsurprisingly devolved into an open forum of Jew hatred. As the American Jewish Committee reported, “The festival’s inaugural event includes a screening of the film Farha, which includes a number of toxic antisemitic tropes, including a modern retelling of the blood libel trope that casts Jews as vicious, bloodthirsty, and cruel. The film is a distortive piece of fiction, yet it is often treated as evidence of extreme, unprovoked Israeli cruelty towards innocent Palestinians during Israel’s War of Independence.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-columbia-university-anti-semitism-princeton-christopher-eisgruber-due-process

“All process arguments are insincere,” political historian Michael Barone once observed wryly. So it’s no surprise that Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber, in defending the nation’s elite universities, has reached for precisely such arguments. After all, insincerity may be all these institutions have left.

Eisgruber has taken a curious stance in an Atlantic essay and a follow-up interview with the New York Times on the Trump administration’s response to anti-Semitic activity at Columbia University. On one hand, he declares that opposing anti-Semitism is “a fundamental responsibility for any university president,” and concedes that it was “legitimate” for the government to “require the university” to address the problem. On the other, he accuses the Trump administration of disregarding “due process” in cutting off Columbia’s federal funds—an action he claims undermined “academic freedom.”

This argument collapses under even minimal scrutiny.

Consider the process “due” under the Civil Rights Act to universities accused of tolerating discrimination. The Department of Education begins by opening an investigation—as it has at Columbia and Princeton. It must then give the university an opportunity to come into “voluntary compliance” with the conditions set to remedy the discrimination.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/yunseo-chung-columbia-university-hamas-anti-semitic-protest

On March 27, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the State Department had revoked the visas of at least 300 students for participating in violent anti-Israel protests. One of the first to face deportation was Mahmoud Khalil, a former master’s student at Columbia University. Given his background, Khalil quickly became the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on non-citizen terror supporters. But last month, a new face emerged: Yunseo Chung, a junior at Columbia.

Like Khalil, Chung is a green-card holder—but the similarities end there. She immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea at age seven with her parents and a sibling. She was valedictorian of her high school class, holds a 3.99 GPA at Columbia, and is a member of both the university’s undergraduate law review and its literary magazine.

Why would a straight-A Korean immigrant who has lived in America for most of her life join a violent, pro-Hamas protest? One possible answer lies in a core tenet of modern progressivism: its rejection of the model-minority stereotype. Perhaps Chung—an otherwise exemplary student with no history of lawbreaking or violence prior to college—believed that protest activity would earn her validation from non-Asian peers at Columbia University.

Since at least the 2010s, the social order of highly selective universities has been strongly influenced by the principles of Critical Race Theory, the scholarly idea that racism is embedded in the social, political, and legal institutions of Western civilization. Chief among these is the perpetual victimhood of minority groups—“people of color,” women, the disabled, transgender individuals, and so on.

https://thespectator.com/topic/deal-student-mob-campus-protest/

Last week’s violent anti-Semitic protest at Stanford is yet another sign of a pernicious climate on many campuses. The immediate targets are Jews and Israel. The larger targets are many of the values we prize in the West.

At Stanford, students broke into the university president’s office using hammers and crowbars. They proceeded to barricade themselves inside, destroy the furnishings, and scrawl noxious graffiti there and on the building outside. Some estimates say they caused $700,000 in damages.

Twelve students were arrested by local police. The Santa Clara District attorney announced that the break-in had been carefully organized in advance, caused enormous damage and warranted criminal charges. But, he said, it did not warrant severe punishment.  “I don’t think this is a prison case,” he said.

The violent protests are Stanford are hardly the only ones on campus, and the spring protest season is just getting started. At Case Western University in Ohio, students caused over $400,000 in damage by smearing buildings with red paint. Expect more to come at universities where the violence goes unpunished and prosecutors are as weak-kneed as the one in Santa Clara.

Campus violence, destruction, harassment and intimidation are more than criminal. They are also direct attacks on the basic purpose of our educational institutions. They undermine our nation’s core value of free, non-violent speech and assembly, encoded in the First Amendment.

If university leaders and local law enforcement are unwilling to protect those rights, if they are unwilling to sanction those who violate them, then they are opening the door for others who will act to protect those values and those endangered students.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/northwestern-shows-universities-how-to-fight-jew-hate/

Not all universities have been as lackadaisical or uncaring as Columbia and Harvard in fighting antisemitism on their campuses. Northwestern University President Michael Schill appeared before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce for a hearing on antisemitism almost a year ago. This was the same committee that heard the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania. Now, the university released a report in late March describing a decrease in antisemitic incidents.

More on this development, and how the Northwestern example deserves to be emulated, can be found here: “Northwestern touts 88% drop in reports of antisemitism,” by Duncan Agnew, Evanston Round Table, April 1, 2025:

Nearly a year after Northwestern University President Michael Schill appeared on Capitol Hill for a hearing on antisemitism, the university released a report Monday touting an 88% drop in documented incidents of antisemitic discrimination from November 2023 to November 2024.

NU, facing an active Trump administration investigation over alleged antisemitism on campus, said in the update that “like many universities across the nation, Northwestern was not prepared for the antisemitism that occurred last year.”

Among other things, since last summer, the university has revised its handbook and code of conduct, created a new Display and Solicitation Policy banning “unauthorized 3D installations including tents and structures” and updated the Demonstration Policy to limit how, when and where protests may be conducted.

In February, Northwestern also launched an antisemitism training module that is mandatory for all students and adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.

https://www.thefp.com/p/anti-israel-princeton-protest?utm_medium=email

Anti-Israel protesters shut down a campus event by pulling a fire alarm and hurling vile slurs. Will our college president finally act?

Last night at Princeton, Jewish students were called “inbred swine,” told to “go back to Europe,” and taunted with gestures of the Hamas triangle by masked protesters. Sadly, slurs like these have become commonplace at anti-Israel protests at my college in the months since Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, but university president Christopher Eisgruber insists he is “proud of the campus climate at Princeton.”

What would it take for him to question that belief?

The latest outrage was sparked by a visit from former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett. More than 200 students had turned up to hear Bennett talk about his time as prime minister from 2021 to 2022 and the current government under Benjamin Netanyahu post–October 7.

Days before Bennett arrived, the Princeton chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine had plastered posters all over campus, calling him a “war criminal,” and flooded listservs and social media with messages saying the college was “complicit in normalizing his murderous policies.” SJP students publicly declared that “Bennett should be in prison, not at Princeton.” Never mind that he was the first Israeli PM to form a coalition with the Arab party in the Knesset. Or that Princeton’s Hillel and four other organizations had invited him to the talk in good faith. All students who registered for the event were encouraged to submit questions in advance; only those with a Princeton ID were able to register.

Around 7 p.m. on Monday, anti-Israel protesters gathered at the campus’s flagship building, Nassau Hall, and then marched, while banging drums and shouting into microphones, toward McCosh Hall, where Bennett started giving his remarks at 7:30 p.m. I settled into a seat to hear him talk. About 20 minutes into his speech, around 25 students stood up in unison and shouted at Bennett, “War criminal!” “We charge you with genocide!” and other exclamations before walking out en masse.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-shuts-down-antisemitic-activism-at-columbia/

Columbia University, where student protesters in 1968 stormed and occupied many university buildings, forcing the resignation of the university’s president, is again at the center of the news for campus radicalism.

As FrontPage Mag has reported, Columbia grad student and green card-holding alien Mahmoud Khalil, spokesman for the pro-Hamas student group Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), has become what The New York Times called “the public face of protest against Israel” at Columbia. In addition to participating in a takeover of the library at Columbia affiliate Barnard College, he has referred to the October 7 attacks as a “moral, military, and political victory” and asserted that CUAD is fighting for nothing less than the “total eradication of Western civilization.”

To the shock and outrage of Jew haters on the Left, the Trump administration stepped in where the complicit Biden administration never would have, and arrested this terrorism-fomenting alien with possible deportation to follow.

“This is an individual who organized group protests that not only disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish American students and made them feel unsafe on their own college campus, but also distributed pro-Hamas propaganda, flyers with the logo of Hamas,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at last week’s briefing. “This administration is not going to tolerate individuals having the privilege of studying in our country and then siding with pro-terrorist organizations that have killed Americans.”

And that’s not all. Trump also threatened to cancel $400 million in federal research contracts and grants to Columbia unless the school tightened disciplinary procedures and asserted greater control over academic departments to stem antisemitism at the school, particularly in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.