EDUCATION Comments turned off

Immunizing students from true diversity. Jack Kerwick

Posted By on November 15th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/academia-producing-men-and-women-without-chests-jack-kerwick/

“Learning, then, demands fortitude, an intestinal fortitude, in fact, to meet ideas that clash with one’s own certainties, and engage civilly with those who advance those ideas. When, however, the university promulgates and enforces with an iron hand an orthodoxy, thus, immunizing students from any and all ideas that conflict with that orthodoxy, it promotes softness, weakness, shallowness.”

At the risk of sounding redundant, the public nevertheless needs to be reminded of just how politicized—and, thus, intellectually flaccid—academia has become.

Real Clear Education recently published its “2019 Survey of Campus Speech Experts.” The report identifies those colleges and universities that are “best” and “worst” for “free speech and viewpoint diversity.”  That of the 22 invitees—“academics, pundits, and policy experts”—who accepted the invitation to participate in this study the vast majority (though not all) are right-leaning is instructive, for Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to express concern that professors will inject their politics into the classroom.

As a Pew Research Center study informs us, 79% of Republicans have this concern compared to only 17% of Democrats who do so. A comparable disparity exists between the 75% of Republicans versus the 31% of Democrats who are concerned that colleges are determined to shield students from perspectives that they may find offensive.

Yet Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to be concerned with viewpoint diversity precisely because it is the leftist ideology associated with Democrats that has long since prevailed in academia.

The panelists consistently ranked University of Chicago as the best of institutions when it comes to “speech climate.”  They just as consistently ranked Yale University as the institution in “most need for improvement” when it comes to this subject.

The panelists offered their thoughts as to why they ascribe as much importance as they do to the campus speech climate.  Below is a small, select handful of particularly noteworthy comments that represent the shared judgments of the entire panel:

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Dems’ Surreal Impeachment Circus Rolls On Case built on hearsay, innuendo and manufactured “crimes” crumbles before our eyes. Joseph Klein

Posted By on November 15th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/house-democrats-impeachment-circus-rolls-joseph-klein/

The House Democrats’ impeachment investigation circus moved into its televised public hearing phase, presided over by ringmaster House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff. The public hearings began on Wednesday. The way things are going, the Democrats will need all the comfort they can get from the therapy dogs who were brought to the Hill by Pet Partners, a therapy-animal registration organization, and the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council. The Ukraine case narrative the House Democrats have been trying to build against President Trump, centering on his July 25, 2019 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Trump’s alleged use of “irregular” channels to Ukrainian officials to push his personal political agenda, is turning into a quagmire. As Jonathan Turley, professor of law at George Washington University who testified as a constitutional expert in the Clinton impeachment hearings, wrote, “Democrats want to move forward on a barely developed evidentiary record and cursory public hearings on this single Ukraine allegation.” He added, “If Democrats seek to remove a sitting president, they are laying a foundation that would barely support a bungalow, let alone a constitutional tower. Such a slender impeachment would collapse in a two mile headwind in the Senate.”

The Democrats are trying to establish what some of their more outspoken members have charged variously as President Trump’s “abuse of power,” “extortion,” “bribery” and a “shakedown.” They base their accusations of presidential “crimes” on the shaky allegation that President Trump used the leverage of withheld security assistance and the dangling of a White House meeting to improperly advance the president’s personal political interests over the national security interests of the United States. What has emerged so far, and will likely continue, is a desperate attempt by the Democrats and their friends in the mainstream media to make a mountain out of a molehill, using mainly hearsay and circumstantial evidence from witnesses in the foreign policy and national security establishment who don’t like the direction of President Trump’s policy towards Ukraine.

The Democrats have some fundamental problems that undermine their case. Much of their case relies on secondhand, thirdhand and even fourth-hand hearsay evidence. The bizarro world they inhabit is illustrated by this nugget from Democrat Rep. Mike Quigley, describing his understanding of what constitutes credible evidence: “Hearsay can be much better evidence than direct … and it’s certainly valid in this instance.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

How Fordham University Lost to Radical Palestinians in Court By Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on November 15th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/11/how_fordham_university_lost_to_radical_palestinians_in_court.html

Coinciding with the 2019 National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) conference held in Minnesota this past weekend, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) released an alarming report that exposes the toxic ideology that characterizes this radical campus group. The ISGAP report confirms what observers of radicalism in higher education have documented for years: that while SJP purports to be a group whose mission is to achieve a peaceful and just resolution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict by supporting Palestinian self-determination, in fact, as the report put it, “SJP is steeped in an ideology that has roots in racist and antisemitic extremism.”

That toxic campus radicalism has meant that administrators, supporters of Israel, pro-Israel speakers, and Jewish students and organizations have experienced the caustic side-effect of SJP’s presence on campus.  As SJP grew more aggressive in its demonstrations and behavior, it occasionally, though rarely, has been sanctioned or restrained.

Finally, in 2016, one university, Fordham University in New York, cognizant of SJP’s history of poisoning dialogue on campuses and promoting a campaign of libels, defamation, and lies against Israel and Jewish students, reversed the decision of the student government to allow SJP to become a recognized student organization and decided that SJP, based on its sorry record at other universities, had no place at Fordham.  Dean Keith Eldridge, aware of SJP’s methods and ideology, bravely decided that “while students are encouraged to promote diverse political points of view, and we encourage conversation and debate on all topics, I cannot support an organization whose sole purpose is advocating political goals of a specific group, and against a specific country [emphasis added], when these goals clearly conflict with and run contrary to the mission and values of the University[.] … The purpose of the organization as stated in the proposed club constitution points toward … polarization.”

SJP immediately sued Fordham, in Awad v. Fordham University, 2019 WL 3550713, asserting that the decision to block it from becoming a recognized student organization was, as the judge ultimately found in reversing the dean’s decision in  2019, “arbitrary and capricious,” and “it must be concluded that [Dean Eldridge’s] disapproval of SJP was made in large part because the subject of SJP’s criticism is the State of Israel, rather than some other nation,” and that “his only articulated concern was that SJP singled out one particular country for criticism and boycott.”

In fact, Fordham’s instincts were well founded in that the dean knew, based in SJP’s record elsewhere, of its pattern of radicalism, misbehavior, toxic speech, and overtly anti-Semitic behavior.  That radicalism has been problematic, particularly since research by the AMCHA Initiative, an organization that tracks anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism at universities, “indicate[s] a significant increase in actions which directly harm or threaten Jewish students, including physical and verbal assaults, destruction of property, harassment discrimination and suppression of speech, at schools with an SJP or similar anti-Zionist chapter.”  Equally serious is the report’s findings that SJP’s presence resulted in “incidents of Israel-related anti-Semitic harassment increase[ing] 70%.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Impeachment Theater of Trolls By Kyle Smith

Posted By on November 15th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/impeachment-hearings-day-one-voters-uninterested/

The American public is simmering with apathy.

As a boy, I used to watch a television show with a weekly gag titled “MasterJoke Theatre.” A pompous egghead smoked a pipe in a leather-bound chair in a richly appointed library, told a joke, and got a pie in the face for his trouble.

What the Democrats launched on the Hill this week is their own variant, with Adam Schiff sitting in the big chair as the designated pompous E. Call it MasterTroll Theatre. The Democrats know they’re engaged in a futile exercise that exists only to draw attention. They don’t have the muscle to take out the president. They read the David Brooks column that explained that nobody between the coasts is paying attention to this drama. As for what their witnesses will say, the Democrats have already leaked the pertinent facts to the press, which eagerly provided them to the public.

And the president’s approval rating? It’s 44.1 percent, according to the RealClearPolitics average. The day before the Ukraine transcript was released, it was 45.0 percent. After six weeks of set-your-hair-on-fire-and-do-the-funky-chicken impeachment hoo-ha, the Democrats have succeeded in reducing the president’s support by not quite one full percentage point. Minus red-hot public demand, the Republican senators won’t be escorting the president out the door.

Brooks noted in his column that an Ohio professor discovered that, of 80 students in his class, 78 had not heard about the impeachment saga and all 80 said they were uninterested anyway. Hence the Democrats’ hopecasting that getting the TV networks to sign on as their promotional partners Wednesday might turn their sad charade into a national obsession. “The first hour of a hearing and the first hearing has got to be a blockbuster,” a senior Democrat told CNN beforehand.

So . . . how’d that go? “Impeachment hearings play big on TV, less so with viewers,” ran a headline on, gulp, NBC News? NBC News is a television news outfit. For it to admit its own programming fizzled is not its usual habit. Does McDonald’s post a giant sign outside saying, “Yelp Reviewers Dislike the Quarter Pounder”? NBC’s story quoted Dallas businessman Travis Smallwood as saying, on behalf of the Republic, “I’m sort of paying attention, but not really.” Smallwood went so far as to say he thought Trump had broken the law (which one?) but added, “It’s not like they’re going to be able to remove him from office.”

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Other Genocide of Christians: On Turks, Kurds, and Assyrians By Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on November 15th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-other-genocide-of-christians-on-turks-kurds-and-assyrians/

“Although there has never been any love lost between Turks and Kurds, once Christians were thrown into the mix, the two hitherto quarreling Muslim peoples temporarily set their longstanding differences aside: “Holy war [jihad] was proclaimed in Kurdistan and Kurdish tribes responded enthusiastically under the planned and concerted direction of the Turkish authorities,” writes Yacoub. Thus, the Kurds “were accomplices in the massacres, and participated in looting for ideological reasons (the Christians were infidels).””

One of the most refreshing aspects of Resolution 296—which acknowledges the Armenian Genocide, and which the House recently voted for overwhelmingly—is that it also recognizes those other peoples who experienced a genocide under the Ottoman Turks.  The opening sentence of Resolution 296 acknowledges “the campaign of genocide against Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Arameans, Maronites, and other Christians.”

And that last word—Christians—is key to understanding this tragic chapter of history: Christianity is what all those otherwise diverse peoples had in common, and therefore it—not nationality, ethnicity, or grievances—was the ultimate determining factor concerning who the Turks would and would not “purge.”

The genocide is often conflated with the Armenians because many more of them than other ethnicities were killed—causing them to be the face of the genocide. According to generally accepted figures, the Turks exterminated 1.5 million Armenians, 750,000 Greeks, and 300,000 Assyrians.

As for the latter peoples (the word “Assyrian” also encompasses Chaldeans, Syriacs, and Arameans) half of their population of 600,000 was slaughtered in the genocide. In other words, relative to their numbers, they lost more than any other Christian group, including the Armenians.

Year of the Sword: The Assyrian Christian Genocide (published 2016) underscores that: 1) the Assyrians were systematically massacred, and 2) the ultimate reason for their—and therefore the Armenians’ and Greeks’—genocide was their Christian identity.

The book’s author, Joseph Yacoub, an emeritus professor at the Catholic University of Lyon, offers copious contemporary documentation recounting countless atrocities against the Assyrians—massacres, rapes, death marches, sadistic eye-gouging, and the desecration and destruction of hundreds of churches.

U.S. House Acknowledges Armenian Genocide, the ‘Most Colossal Crime of All Ages’

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

CAIR’s Victimhood Rally in Harrisburg Falls Flat By Leonard Getz

Posted By on November 15th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/cairs-victimhood-rally-in-harrisburg-falls-flat/

Billed as a “clarion call to reform the draconian and racist American criminal justice system, CAIR-Philadelphia and Emgage held their Fourth Annual Muslim Capitol Day in Harrisburg Pennsylvania on Wednesday, October 30th. But the event suffered from low attendance, a disjointed message, and confused political demands.

CAIR’s plan for the advocacy day called for bringing over 100 participants from both Muslim and non-Muslim communities (including Jews and Christians), to visit offices of elected state senators and legislators.

Considerably less than 100 participants were visible at the capitol’s rotunda to hear the speeches by State Senators Sharif Street and Anthony Williams, Reps. Joanna McClinton and Movita Johnson Harrell, PA Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, and Mohan Seshadri, Executive Director of Gov. Tom Wolf’s Advisory Commission on Asian Pacific-American Affairs. And there were no speakers representing the Jewish or Christian communities despite what the promotions claimed.

Most Pennsylvania lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans, were seemingly unaware of CAIR’s presence in Harrisburg that day, and few scheduled meetings with the group. Several legislators said they were already aware of CAIR’s background, in part thanks to a boycott campaign organized by the Middle East Forum’s Islamists In Politics Project, which arranged over 130 Pennsylvania constituents to write letters to their legislators urging them to avoid meeting with the group. CAIR is known for its extensive ties to Islamist groups including the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas and has been designated as a terrorist group by the United Arab Emirates.

The first speaker at the rotunda rally, CAIR representative Salima Suswell, used the opportunity to highlight an alleged case of Islamophobia involving a high school athlete disqualified from a track meet while wearing a hijab.  Suswell spoke in support of the young athlete. Noor Alexandra Abukaram claims that not allowing her to wear her hijab was an affront against all Muslims.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Right from wrong:Amnesty International’s offensive defense The closest that Amnesty ever comes to acknowledging any brutality whatsoever on the part of Palestinian terrorists…is by comparing them to Israelis. Ruthie Blum

Posted By on November 15th, 2019

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-from-wrongAmnesty-Internationals-offensive-defense-607892

As has been a long-standing tradition for Amnesty International – the “world’s largest grassroots human rights organization” that boasts being “independent of any political ideology” – the UK-based NGO castigated Israel this week for a crime that it didn’t commit.
Unlike most of Amnesty’s past distortions and outright lies about the Jewish state, however, the one in question was immediately refuted, even by members of the left-wing media who normally view Israel as the root of all evil.

Late Tuesday morning, about six hours after the IDF assassinated Islamic Jihad commander Baha Abu al-Ata in Gaza, the office of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) was struck by a rocket. The hit, which was witnessed by Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst and others on the scene, was the result of a flubbed launch aimed at Israel by Islamic Jihad terrorists.

“Israel did not strike this building,” Yingst tweeted. “A rocket misfired from Gaza. I was across the street when it happened.”

But in its impatience to pounce on Israel, Amnesty expressed its outrage on social media before doing any fact-checking.

“We strongly condemn [the] attack on the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights, whose office in Gaza was struck by an Israeli missile earlier this morning,” Amnesty tweeted. “Strikes targeting civilian buildings is [sic] a violation of international law. We are sending our solidarity to @ICHR_Pal.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Thought of the Day “Social Justice: Its Effect on Education, Politics and Us” Sydney Wlliams

Posted By on November 15th, 2019

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Social justice is generally thought of as being fair and just relations between an individual and society. But to understand it, we must first consider its antithesis, justice, as expressed in our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and as it was historically understood. Justice is freedom from encroachment on our rights to speak, to assemble, to own property. Justice reflects our inalienable rights that will not be denied. Social justice, in contrast, involves positive rights – the right to food, shelter, education, healthcare, etc. Justice allows for the precepts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Social justice involves the provisioning of things. Since governments have no resources other than that which they take, social justice is, as the Libertarian Leonard Read put it, “robbing the selected Peter to pay for the collective Paul.” 

Social justice warriors would have us believe government has the virtues of individuals – a moral sense that invokes empathy, mercy, love and concern for the less fortunate. But governments have no feelings. Men and women do. It is justice, not social justice, that is the purpose of a democracy. Politicians, advocating for social justice, have joined their cause with emotion. They argue that only the state has the means to gather and equitably distribute wealth in the amounts required. However, Father Martin Rhonheimer, president of the Austrian Institute of Economics and Social Philosophy in Vienna, wrote that as “…social justice is essentially a moral virtue, it applies to all other actions of human beings, insofar as they relate to the common good.” It is a Christian teaching. Father Rhonheimer went on: “Social justice in this sense applies to the actions of capitalists, investors and entrepreneurs, and also to citizens feeling responsible for persons in need and for the poor.” In other words, social justice can be accomplished by individuals and eleemosynary institutions as wells as by government – and it is in many places.

Words are cheap and some who promote social justice are distinguished by hypocrisy.  Cuba’s dictator Fidel Castro impoverished his people materially, spiritually and democratically, yet he once spoke of his goal, as being “… not Communism or Marxism but representative democracy and social justice in a well-planned economy.” He could not provide his people a basic subsistence, and he certainly could not or would not give them justice. When trust is placed in the state as arbiter and promoter of the common good, abuses of power may be seized by elected legislators and unelected bureaucrats What is lost, in a clamor for social justice, is the justice inherent in free markets, derived from a free people making millions of individual decisions, operating under the rule of law.

Our schools and colleges have become incubators for social justice warriors. In an op-ed in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Judge José A. Cabranes, a former general counsel and trustee of Yale University, wrote that “colleges and universities have subordinated their historic mission of free inquiry to a new pursuit of social justice.” He used, as an example, the change in the first sentence of Yale’s new mission statement, which before 2016 read: “Like all great universities, Yale has a tripartite mission: to create, preserve, and disseminate knowledge.” That sentence now reads: “Yale is committed to improving the world today and for future generations through outstanding research and scholarship, education, preservation, and practice.” In their desire to be woke, the word knowledge disappeared from the Yale mission statement. Despite claims of equitable treatment for all, due process for faculty and students disappeared. Despite assertions of inclusion, conservative ideas are condemned and treated as hate speech. Recently a Harvard student, protesting a representative of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency on campus to be interviewed by The Crimson, explained: “My feelings are more important than freedom of the press.”

FOREIGN POLICY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The ‘deep state’ fought Israel and lost Jonathan Tobin

Posted By on November 15th, 2019

 https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-deep-state-fought-israel-and-lost/

Nikki Haley’s memoir, which reveals how State Department veterans and White House “adults” sought to thwart the recognition of Jerusalem, puts the impeachment debate in context.

(JNS) Americans and viewers around the world have been transfixed this week by the first public hearing by the U.S. House of Representatives on the impeachment of President Donald Trump.

At the center of the proceedings was the testimony of two veteran officials: one a State Department veteran, and the other a career soldier and diplomat. The question of whether or not they helped the Democrats who are stage-managing the hearings to make their case that Trump committed an impeachable offense when he requested that Ukraine look into what he claimed was alleged corruption involving former Vice President Joe Biden is a matter of partisan dispute. Still, there’s no doubt that their testimony reflected the bitter antagonism felt by many, if not most, of those in the Foreign Service and other long-serving members of the federal bureaucracy.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Federal Judge Rules U.S.-Born ‘ISIS Bride’ Not an American Citizen, U.S. Not Required to Repatriate Her By Zachary Evans

Posted By on November 14th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/federal-judge-rules-alabama-born-isis-bride-not-an-american-citizen-u-s-not-required-to-repatriate-her/

A federal judge ruled Thursday that 25-year-old Hoda Muthana, who lived in Alabama but left the U.S. in 2014 to join ISIS, is not an American citizen and therefore the country is not required to repatriate her.

Muthana is the daughter of Yemen’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Ahmed Ali Muthana. Judge Reggie Walton ruled that because Hoda was born while Ahmed Ali still had diplomatic status, Hoda could not be considered a U.S. citizen. Ahmed Ali has since become a naturalized citizen.

 

In addition, Walton ruled that Ahmed Ali cannot provide financial aid to his daughter, who escaped from ISIS to a Kurdish refugee camp in 2018. Hoda Muthana has a son, Adam, who was born in ISIS territory.

U.S. law prevents the children of foreign diplomats from receiving American citizenship by birthright. Lawyers for Muthana’s family had claimed Ahmed Ali’s diplomatic status expired two months before Hoda’s birth in New Jersey, a claim apparently rejected by Judge Walton.

Muthana had previously said in an interview that she wished to return to the U.S.

“I want my son to be around my family, I want to go to school, I want to have a job and I want to have my own car,” she said in an interview with NBC.

The woman had previously called on jihadists in the U.S. to “go on drivebys, and spill all of their blood.”

“Anyone that believes in God believes that everyone deserves a second chance, no matter how harmful their sins were,” Muthana told NBC.

President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have previously expressed opposition to authorizing Muthana’s return.

“I have instructed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and he fully agrees, not to allow Hoda Muthana back into the Country!” Trump wrote on Twitter in February of this year.