Tag Archive for: academia

The Graves of Academe: USC School of Social Work Bans ‘Field’

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“Shall Paper live, or Ink/Since Brass and Marble Can’t Withstand/This Iron Age’s Violating Hand?” — Johannes de Bosco

The University of Southern California (that’s USC to you and me) has been thrust into the limelight yet again. In 2019, and for several years following, it was in the news as a major participant in the “Varsity Blues” scandal; rich parents were inveigled into paying bribes to the university’s water polo coach, so that their children might be admitted, as potential varsity players of the sport, to USC. It’s a university that as part of its online advertisement for itself says that “USC has conferred honorary degrees on 29 billionaires.” I’m not exactly sure why that should impress anyone, but some people at USC think it should; no doubt USC has its reasons that reason does not know. Some eyebrows were raised when USC agreed to pay its new football coach $10 million a year; not everyone on the faculty – you know, those old fogies who teach such frivolities as literature, history, and philosophy — were pleased by this demonstration of USC’s priorities. But what do those people know? Have they ever had to meet a payroll? A winning football team pays their salaries. They had better stop complaining.

And now the University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work (USCSDPSSW for short) has put USC the news again. The school has just announced that it has decided to ban the word “field” from its curriculum. No longer will anyone at the University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, whether faculty members, or staff, or students, be permitted to use the word “field.” From here on out, it’s strictly forbidden. The story of this remarkably thoughtful act of anti-racism can be found here: “Elite University Department Bans Use of Word ‘Field,’ Claiming It’s Too Racist,” by Alexa Schwerha, Daily Signal, 

The University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work will no longer use the word “field” in its curriculum or its practices as part of its anti-racist framework, according to an email reportedly sent Monday.

The school reportedly stripped the word from use due to alleged ties to “anti-Black” and “anti-immigrant” rhetoric, according to the email sent by the Practicum Education Department to the campus community, faculty, staff, and students. The school informed [sic] that the word “practicum” would be used instead to “ensure [its] use of inclusive language and practice.”

“This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language,” the email reportedly reads. “Language can be powerful, and phrases such as ‘going into the field’ or ‘field work’ may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.”

The revised language aligns with several anti-racist initiatives the school abides by, including the Council on Social Work Education’s Advancing Antiracism in Social Work Education and the Eliminate Racism Grand Challenge for Social Work, according to the email.

“In solidarity with universities across the nation, our goal is not just to change language but to honor and acknowledge incline [sic] and reject white supremacy, anti-immigrant and anti-blackness ideologies,” the email continues. “Words are powerful, but even more so is action. We are committing to further align our actions, behaviors, and practices with anti-racism and anti-oppression, which requires taking a close and critical look at our profession—our history, our biases, and our complicity in past and current injustices.”

The email then claimed the school would “train social work students” to “understand and embody social and racial justice” and told the campus community to “hold each other accountable.”

USC, the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, and the Practicum Education Department did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Don’t forgive them, Lord, at the USCSDPSSW they know exactly what they do. They are beyond all appeals to common sense. They will not engage – because they don’t know how to do so – in discussions about the right use of words. Delicacy, tact, intelligence – don’t even ask. Their every comical word-banning – don’t think they will stop with “field” — should be held up for ridicule, every jot and tittle of idiocy exposed, while those who refuse to get with the program should move unobserved from campus to campus, quietly distributing copies of Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” and even more important, Ian Robinson’s The Survival of English.

Shouldn’t we do away entirely with the word “field”? If it summons up, as we are being asked to believe, images of black slaves in fields of tall cotton (but it was Johnny Cash, a white man, who sang about “them old cotton fields back home”), and Mexican workers in the bean fields and orange groves of sunny California, then it shouldn’t be banned just from the USCSDPSSW. It should be banned everywhere. Anti-racism demands it.

Think of all the possibilities. In sports, the USC Trojans run out onto the football practicum. Everyone experiences the collective thrill of anti-racism as they hear the announcer shout “they’re on the Prac-Ti-Cum and ready to go.” Baseball – same thing. The practicum of dreams will now have players catching balls at center, right, and left practicums.

In USC art classes, students will study such works of Van Gogh as “Wheat-practicum with a lark,” “The green wheat-practicum behind the Asylum painting,” and “Wheat-practicum with crows.” It takes a little getting used to, but just keep at it, and you’ll soon get the hang of it. And each time you refrain from saying the word “field,” you will have won a little victory for anti-racism. Rosa Parks would be pleased.

In the Department of Physics at USC, that last lonely professor who refuses to get on board with string theory, that is still all the rage, should announce that he is still working on trying to come up with a Unified Practicum Theory. You’re unfamiliar with that? Here’s what it is: in particle physics, it’s an attempt to describe all fundamental forces and the relationships between elementary particles in terms of a single theoretical framework. In physics, forces can be described by practicums that mediate interactions between separate objects.” There. That shouldn’t be hard to understand. A special house blend of quantum mechanics and general — or is it special? — relativity.

And let’s not stop with banning only the word “field” from our collective vocabularies and consciousnesses. There are so many other words that need to be excised from our scandalously offensive lexicons. Take the word “bend,” as in “the slaves had to bend over as they picked the cotton in their practicums.” Let’s fix it: “the slaves had to ____their torsos as they picked the cotton in their practicums.” Fill in the blank. Anything you come up with will be better than “bend.” Then do the same to transform “a bend in the river” and “South Bend, Indiana” and “bend it like Beckham.” See – you can even have fun as you deracistize your language.

What about the word “cotton” itself? I bought a cotton polo shirt the other day, and when I got home I couldn’t stop thinking about those held in bondage in the antebellum South picking the very same stuff that my shirt was made of, and I felt so…so racist. I should have been more attentive to my language. I should have taught myself to think of my recent purchase as a “shirt made of a soft white fibrous substance that surrounds the seeds of a tropical and subtropical plant and is used as textile fiber and thread for sewing.” And from now on I will. Now, isn’t that better?

I fear there is no end to this. There are so many words — thousands, maybe tens of thousands — that will need to be replaced. Whole departments of language police will spend years to work on the problem. We’ll need to get rid of “master bedroom” and “master class” and “Master and Margarita.” We’ll need to ban “overalls” and “dungarees.” And “back” of course, which makes us think of “back of the bus.” We can’t have “back.” Oh, and “bus.” And “tree.” We can’t have “tree.” Do I have to draw you a diagram? Goodness, what work we have ahead of us. And not a moment too soon. Let’s be grateful to the hyper-vigilant people at the University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work (USCSDPSSW) who led the way. And now we have a solemn duty to take what they’ve begun to another level.

AUTHOR

HUGH FITZGERALD

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Indiana University ‘Distinguished Panelist’ is Deported Palestinian Islamic Jihad Top Dog

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Deported Palestinian Islamic Jihad “Master Manipulator” Among Indiana University’s ‘Distinguished’ Panelists

by Steven Emerson, IPT News, December 20, 2022:

Every so often, Sami Al-Arian emerges to opine on some domestic issue, reminding us of two things: He’s an inveterate liar who continues to whitewash his years of service to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). And a disappointing number of American academics are willing to ignore that record and treat him as a credible voice.

Al-Arian joined academics and attorneys last Wednesday for a webinar on “Global War on Terrorism and its Impact on Muslim Charitable Institutions.” It was sponsored by the Muslim Legal Fund of America (MLFA) in collaboration with Indiana University’s McKinney School of Law and its Muslim Philanthropy Initiative.

MLFA’s willingness to elevate Al-Arian at least is consistent. It helped fund his defense on terrorism related charges and criminal contempt. But why did two Indiana University branches see merit in lending their school’s prestige to a man recorded exhorting an audience with “Jihad is our path … Victory to Islam … Death to Israel”?

He meant it literally, telling his own 2020 academic meeting that the Muslim world “cannot realize its full potential without defeating and dismantling the Zionist project.”

No one on the MLFA/IU panel mentioned Al-Arian’s documented role on the PIJ shura council, or governing board, or the many times he publicly lied by denying any connection to the terrorist group.

Moderator Cindy M. Lott, director of Indiana University’s PhD. program in Philanthropic Leadership, described Al-Arian as “extraordinarily well known. He is the director of the Center for Islamic Global Affairs and Public Affairs Professor at Istanbul Zaim University in Turkey. He has numerous publications in many interrelated fields including education, research, religion, interfaith and he is coming at us today specifically around the areas of civil rights and human rights.”

But Lott was selectively dishonest in how she represented Al-Arian.

After pleading guilty in 2006 to conspiring to provide benefits to the PIJ, presiding federal Judge James S. Moody called Al-Arian “a master manipulator. You looked your neighbors in the eyes and said you had nothing to do with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. This trial exposed that as a lie. Your back-up claim is that your efforts were only to provide charities for widows and orphans. That, too, is a lie. The evidence was clear in this case that you were a leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. You were on the board of directors and an officer, the secretary. Directors control the actions of an organization, even the PIJ; and you were an active leader.”

During Wednesday’s webinar, University of Wisconsin law professor Mark Sidel offered a different description of his colleagues, including Al-Arian. He thanked the organizers for including him on “this extraordinarily distinguished, other than me, group of participants and speakers.”

Academics Against Research

Al-Arian did run a charity. The Islamic Concern Project, also known as the Islamic Committee for Palestine (ICP), was incorporated in 1988 to pursue “the concept of brotherhood, freedom, justice, unity, piety, righteousness and peace” through “charitable, cultural, social, educational and religious” programs, records show.

But in private fundraisers, the ICP served a different mission.

“It is the active arm of the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine,” Cleveland Imam Fawaz Damra said while introducing Al-Arian during a videotaped 1991 fundraiser. “We preferred to call it the ‘Islamic Committee for Palestine’ for security reasons.”

At the same event, Al-Arian urged his audience to give money to support the jihad.

“We want today’s Muslims to answer the call of God and to go to jihad,” he said. “… So whoever does not spend for the cause of God, will spend himself on the path to destruction and fire, God forbid! We ask God, praise and glory be to Him, to strengthen us with the truth, put the truth in our hearts and on our tongues, to bestow faith upon us, to bestow steadfastness upon us, to bestow jihad upon us, to bestow knowledge upon us, and to bestow unity upon us so that we will be united. So that we will confront our enemies united.”

At another event, Al-Arian asked, “Have we forgotten the Jews and who they are?” God “made [them] into monkeys and pigs … had cursed in this world and in the hereafter, and had imposed a punishment on them in this world until Judgment Day.”

The MLFA/IU panel, like virtually every group to host Al-Arian, did not find any of this pro-terrorism/antisemitic speech relevant in deciding whether to invite him. Nobody thought to ask how he can reconcile the two diametrically opposing images of his work. Rather, they let him spin more yarns of his own victimization….

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Taxpayer-funded Middle East Studies Centers at U.S. Universities Promote Anti-U.S. Propaganda and ‘Islamophobia’ Myths

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It’s good to see the National Association of Scholars acknowledging this and documenting it in detail. Jihad Watch has been warning about and documenting it for years, and as a result has been one of the targets of the scurrilous pro-jihad, pro-Sharia propaganda mills that operate out of these compromised universities today. A whole generation has now been propagandized with the “Islamophobia” myth and much more.

U.S. gives $2.9m to Universities that promote anti-West ideologies

Open The Books, November 14, 2022:

While there are more than 50 Middle East Studies Centers at American universities, training students in the culture and languages of the region, 11 are designated National Resource Centers, which provides federal funds.

According to a new report by the National Association of Scholars, the 11 centers each get $260,000 in Title VI funding through the Department of Education to the tune of $2.9 million a year.

They are at Columbia University, George Washington University, Georgetown University, Indiana University, New York University, University of Arizona, UCLA, University of Chicago, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, UNC/Duke University partnership.

The report, Hijacked: The Capture of America’s Middle East Studies Centers, says the centers have veered far afield their purpose, now pushing overtly anti-West ideologies focusing on social issues such as Islamophobia and immigration at the university level, and even push critical race theory to K–12 educators….

Yale University courses are frequently rife with progressive dogmas, including requiring students to read such as, “Islam Today: Jihad and Fundamentalism,” which attempts to reframe the most dangerous aspects of Islam as a “reactive force to Western colonialism,” according to the report.

“By only presenting students with books that advance a pro-immigration agenda, educators sidestep meaningful debate on the issue and bias students toward their own progressive views,” Arnold wrote in the report. “The bias of these centers has been documented for years. It’s time for taxpayers to be taken off the hook for these activist centers.”…

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Is Harvard hopelessly woke? What Harvard is really like

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Like most things, Harvard is what one makes of it — and this can include experiences rooted in faith and friendship. 

Harvard is often seen as the archetypal American university, offering a model that many others seek to emulate. So, as a new school year and new application season begin, it seems fitting to ask: what is this storied institution really like anyway? Is it home to heroes or heretics? Maker of gods… or the godless? My response is quite simple: neither extreme is accurate. Harvard is not as heavenly as some think; fortunately, it’s not as bad either.

My college decision was practically effortless. Harvard, I was told, offered everything a motivated, book-smart student could want: challenging courses; fabulous research opportunities; world-class professors; and, most importantly, insightful, intrepid, intellectually curious peers.

I envisioned a campus alive with students who genuinely loved learning, who asked big questions and pursued them to their limits, who discussed Dostoyevsky at lunch and astrophysics at dinner, and who would challenge, shape, and inspire me over the course of our college journey.

Needless to say, this vision wasn’t entirely accurate. Arriving on campus last fall, I was surprised to find that many of my peers did not choose Harvard out of a deep, reverent hunger for veritas. Rather, their motives were primarily mercenary: they had enrolled for the degree and the connections. Almost every Harvard student I know really is a smart, accomplished individual; test scores and ambition, however, are not necessarily synonymous with intellectual curiosity.

Lowered standards, heightened biases  

Critics of Harvard tend to focus on academic standards and political bias. In terms of academics, it is telling that Harvard’s two most popular concentrations are economics and government. Read: wealth and power. Students with these two goals are incentivised to take easy courses whenever possible: between grade inflation and the competitive nature of consulting applications, a B from a fabulous but challenging professor just won’t do.

As such, students offset rigorous concentration requirements with “gems,” pleasant, untaxing courses in which A’s are guaranteed and learning is optional. Last fall alone, over 800 students enrolled in a gen-ed course fittingly entitled “Sleep,” though how many attended more than one lecture remains unclear.

Administrators, meanwhile, do little to counter this trend. Notorious gems (“Sleep” excepted) are occasionally identified and restructured, but with tuition-paying customers to please and a reputation to maintain, addressing lowered standards will be essentially impossible.

The real tragedy is not the proliferation of easy A’s but the slow suffocation of liberal arts education. In lieu of a robust core is a smattering of “distributional requirements” easily satisfied by niche, fringe, or downright non-substantive courses. In other words, “Sleep” might be the only science course a Harvard student ever takes.

Thus, it’s possible to graduate from Harvard without challenging one’s prejudices, without genuinely exploring different disciplines, and without ever diverting one’s gaze from the holy trinity of law, finance, and consulting. Alas, the utilitarian ethos prevails; it was never about veritas anyway.

Harvard critics’ true concern, however, is not academic standards but politics — just how radical is the “Kremlin on the Charles”? According to the numbers, very. While 82 percent of Harvard faculty identify as liberal or very liberal, a mere 1 percent identify as conservative, and none identify as very conservative. The student body, luckily, boasts slightly more ideological diversity: conservative or very conservative individuals made up 6 percent of the Class of 2022, and nearly 70 percent were progressive or very progressive.

Can academic freedom, civil discourse, or mere open-mindedness thrive in such an environment? Here are a few illustrative examples that make it tempting to view Harvard as a powerful brainwashing machine:

First, my hallmates and I attended a mandatory, dorm-wide meeting at the start of the academic year to discuss the hookup culture. We were tasked with creating explanatory posters exploring the hookup culture in its various dimensions. One group of students crafted a suitably vague definition of “hookup” for their poster, while another brainstormed adjectives to describe hookups (highlights include “exciting” and “experimental”). Not once were other approaches to sex and dating, let alone inconvenient biological realities (sex not infrequently makes babies), ever mentioned.

Second, this past semester I watched a trembling professor issue a formal apology at the behest of her outraged students and teaching staff. Her crime: reading aloud a passage from Invisible Man — a novel advocating civil rights and equality — that contained a racial epithet. Although this incident had occurred during a discussion section before a small subset of enrollees, critics swiftly and loudly demanded that she ask the entire class for forgiveness. Pressuring a professor to apologise for her language threatens academic freedom. Critics certainly deserve a voice, but not at the expense of their professor’s.

Finally, I saw a formerly well-liked friend ostracised by her residential housemates during her last month at Harvard. This jovial, whip-smart senior was a Latina Democrat; she volunteered regularly at a youth homeless shelter, vocally advocated racial justice, and actively disliked Trump. Just participating in two pro-life rallies, it turns out, was enough to outweigh all of that.

Faith, friendship, and signs of hope

While such everyday occurrences make it tempting to believe that Harvard is a lost cause, there are two important limiting factors that suggest otherwise. First, because Harvard is a very large institution — with twelve graduate and professional schools, fifty concentrations in the undergraduate college, and an extensive array of administrative offices — centralised or consistent strategic communication is next to impossible. Having many supervisors, counterintuitively, leads to little supervision — within this large bureaucratic institution are many conservative niches, ranging from a controversial pseudonymous publication to a philosophical debating society to a growing pro-life presence on campus.

The second limiting factor is Harvard’s inherent elitism. Prestige and influence require class distinctions; in a truly equitable world, Harvard does not exist. Thus, Harvard will continue to champion progressivism — but never enough to endanger its own future. Harvard students of all political stripes perceive this hypocrisy; if anything, they graduate not more liberal but more cynical. So much for the formidable brainwashing machine.

In addition to these two limiting factors, my first year — which was hands-down my happiest in a decade — suggests that Harvard is not a lost cause. I learned to read ancient Greek, solved triple integrals, and wrote an essay on Fredrick Douglass’s conception of the human soul. I kayaked on the Charles, explored Boston’s fabulous art museums, and attended a weeklong seminar in Oxford. I befriended the dining hall workers, learned how to swing dance, and performed Schumann with my chamber ensemble.

Despite the prevalence of secularism and credentialism at Harvard, faith and friendship were central to my joyful first year. In fact, Christianity, particularly Catholicism, is alive at Harvard. Every morning, a dozen students attend daily Mass before eating breakfast together in a nearby dining hall. Weekly talks at the Harvard Catholic Center precede solemn adoration accompanied by a student band. And this past Easter alone, thirty-one members of the Harvard community were fully initiated into the Catholic Church.

Outside of the Catholic and Christian communities, Harvard students are very respectful of religion. Talking openly about my Catholic faith elicits not smirks and grimaces but genuine curiosity and the occasional request to join me at Mass. Although I attended Catholic school all my life, my faith life has never thrived as at Harvard.

Nor have I ever been blessed with such strong, beautiful friendships. Just one week into freshman year, I had already found a group of kind, intelligent friends. Yes, our everyday conversations are less intellectual than anticipated; yes, our educational goals differ significantly. But far more important is character. My friends at Harvard are truly virtuous and generous people.

What’s more, my experience is hardly singular. Personality is an important factor in Harvard’s admissions process — so while many admitted students are indeed ambitious and career-oriented, they are for the most part essentially decent people. This emphasis on personability combined with its unique housing system, active extracurricular life, and countless study abroad and fellowship opportunities means that Harvard intentionally and successfully fosters friendship.

One year into my Harvard career, I can report that no stereotype of the university is entirely accurate. By no means is Harvard an immaculate place: intellectual curiosity often suffers at the expense of utility, classes and administrators can be overly political, and students with unpopular views are often frightened into silence. Still, I have great hope for Harvard.

While it’s true that students can avoid Homer, Shakespeare, or Tolstoy if they wish, it is equally true that those fascinated by such literary giants will encounter first editions of their texts in the rare books library and brilliant professors eager to elucidate them.

Though Harvard students can graduate without having explored questions about God, morality, and the meaning of life, those brave enough to ask can consult prominent theologians and learned priests, travel to Jerusalem on Harvard’s dime, or simply walk down Bow Street to pray in magnificent St. Paul’s.

In the end, Harvard, like most things, is what one makes of it. It can never be perfect; what it can be is a haven for faith, friendship, and the pursuit of veritas.

This article has been republished with permission from The Public Discourse

AUTHOR

Olivia Glunz

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

Princeton President Conspires to Fire Tenured Prof Who Defended Free Speech

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Joshua Katz, a respected linguist at Princeton, is not being fired because of an alleged relationship in 2006, but because he criticized woke abuses in 2020.

At Quilette, Katz had courageously condemned efforts to silence free speech and eliminate academic freedom.

“Independence of thought is considered the hallmark of academia, but everyone deserves it. In the United States, thank heavens, freedom to think for oneself is still a right, not a privilege,” he concluded.

In typical fashion, the radical leftists whom he had criticized in a restrained, civil and respectful fashion, unleashed the full fury of cancel culture and set out to destroy him.

What followed was Lavrentiy Beria’s “Show Me the Man and I’ll Show You the Crime.”

Since none of the false claims that Katz was in any way a racist or had engaged in hate speech, could go beyond impotent fuming they had to find something else.

And all this witch hunt came up was this…

Princeton University’s president has recommended that the school’s board of trustees fire a tenured classics professor, concluding he didn’t cooperate fully in a sexual-misconduct investigation, according to a copy of his letter to the board’s chair reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Salem witch trial judges would be embarrassed by this.

The report said that in 2018, Dr. Katz didn’t fully cooperate with investigators examining a consensual sexual relationship he had with an undergraduate student beginning in 2006, after her junior year, and continuing until her graduation. The student declined to participate in the investigation at that time.

We know exactly why Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber wants Katz fired. He told us so himself in an op-ed in 2020, deeming his speech “irresponsible and offensive.”

“Our policies, however, protect Katz’s freedom to say what he did, just as they protected the Black Justice League’s. He can be answered but not censored or sanctioned,” Eisgruber claimed.

Now he grubbily seeks to bypass those policies.

“Show Me the Man and I’ll Show You the Crime.”

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Dartmouth Bills College Republicans $3,600 For Security After Forcing Antifa Critic Andy Nog’s Event Online

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There just isn’t any doubt about what is happening here. Dartmouth is trying to destroy the College Republicans and crush dissent. It’s what Leftists do, and virtually all of America’s major colleges and universities are controlled by the Left today.

Dartmouth bills College Republicans $3,600 for security after forcing live Andy Ngo event online

by Greg Piper, Just the News, April 21, 2022:

An Ivy League school is demanding after-the-fact security fees from its College Republicans chapter for an event the administration banned in person, threatening the club’s ability to continue hosting events, its president told Just the News.

Dartmouth College ordered the CRs to move the Jan. 20 event with Portland-based Antifa chronicler Andy Ngo online just hours before it was scheduled to start, citing “credible threats” the administration received from law enforcement.

Hanover Police, however, said it didn’t ask Dartmouth to shut down the Ngo event, which it was prepared to secure, and wasn’t told why Dartmouth moved it online.

Event security fees on campus have emerged as a high-profile flashpoint in recent years, usually with right-leaning student clubs accusing administrators of caving to the heckler’s veto by sticking them with unreasonable estimates and bills for speakers perceived as controversial.

Ohio approved legislation in 2020 to ban public universities from basing security fees on the anticipated reaction to a speaker. But an appeals court dismissed a lawsuit against the University of Minnesota after it revised a policy used to move conservative pundit Ben Shapiro to a smaller, less convenient venue than progressive speakers received.

Dartmouth CRs President Chloe Ezzo learned the club had been stuck with a $3,600 bill from the Ngo event, and was thus not in “good standing,” when she applied for funding for its Wednesday night event with James O’Keefe, the conservative firebrand who founded Project Veritas.

The Dartmouth Anarchists, an anonymous group that previously threatened to disrupt the Ngo event, publicly accused the CRs of announcing the O’Keefe event “at the last minute” to avoid scrutiny but didn’t directly threaten to disrupt it.

In a phone call hours before the O’Keefe event, Ezzo described a maddening bureaucratic process that involved three requests for funding from the 18-member Council on Student Organizations, whose rules are “very vague and selectively enforced.”

The council didn’t mention the outstanding security bill until the second request, and one member suggested a prohibited alumni fundraiser to pay the debt, according to Ezzo. It rejected her third request for a token $450 to cover just security, meaning the Department of Safety and Security may stick them with another bill of unknown amount.

“We might come out of this event with four grand of debt” and risk the college freezing its account, Ezzo said. “I feel like we’re set up to fail.”

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Penn State Professor Forces Students to Explain Why the Taliban Aren’t Terrorists

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My latest in PJ Media:

There are so many ridiculous things being taught in American colleges and universities these days that a professor who defends the Taliban may seem staid and conservative compared to some of his colleagues, but that’s just a sign of how far American academia has fallen. Christopher Cook, a professor in the Department of International Politics at Pennsylvania State University – World Campus, is teaching a class called “Politics of Terrorism,” in which he has given the students an essay assignment: “Explain why the Taliban are not terrorists.” Imagine a professor in 1944 making his students write about how the Nazis really aren’t so bad, and you’ll understand how ridiculous and outrageous Cook’s assignment really is.

Cook’s assignment was not an example of the common pedagogical exercise in which students adopt a point of view that is not their own in order to sharpen their ability to understand and present arguments. He explained his assignment in this way: “In one page* explain why the Taliban is have [sic] not and are still not a terrorist organization. You are not allowed to answer this question in any other way. Any attempt to avoid this prompt as written; or trying to argue otherwise will result in a failing grade. If you have any questions on the pedagogy behind this assignment– please contact me.”

The warnings that students could not argue the opposite view, or avoid the question altogether made clear where Cook was coming from, and he made it even clear in several tweets (after his class assignment became widely known, he deleted his Twitter account). Cook wrote: “Do you think any of my students will see this before Sunday’s deadline? The one where I ask them to tell me why the Taliban are *not* terrorists.” And: “I am going to guess there is a Venn Diagram between the people who struggled understanding why the Taliban were not terrorists for the lat [sic] 20 years and those who think there can be justified violence against the American government.” Does Cook support Antifa? It would be surprising if he didn’t.

Penn State student Kylie Stone told “Fox & Friends”: “I was completely shocked. I had made it through my first four years of college without having anything this insane and, of course, my last semester my teacher basically says ‘you have to agree with me or I’m going to fail you.’ So it was very surprising to me….I have had assignments where they asked me to argue both sides. I love doing that kind of stuff. I think it’s so beneficial to every student to be doing that but that’s not what this assignment was.” That’s obvious. Cook, like the overwhelming majority of professors all over the country today, doesn’t want to teach his students critical thinking skills; he wants to indoctrinate them into Leftist attitudes and dogmas.

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Yet Another Hijab Hate Crime Hoax, This Time in Maryland

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My latest in PJ Media:

As every good Leftist knows and very much wants you to admit, America is a racist, hate-filled country in which people of color, Muslims, and other victim classes are routinely subjected to discrimination, harassment, and even violence. The only problem with our culture of “systemic racism,” which Critical Race Theory advocates claim to be working hard to transform for the good, is that it’s not even close to being backed up by reality. Again and again, the hate crimes that are invoked as evidence of the “white supremacist” violence that the government and media tell us so much about turn out to be fake. Just before Christmas, yet another hate crime was unmasked as a hoax; the Critical Race Theory crowd would be embarrassed by all this fakery, if they were capable of embarrassment.

This latest hoax started on Nov. 16 on The Commons at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where, according to UMBC Police Chief Paul Dillon, “a student reported to a Commons staff member that an unknown male attempted to remove her hijab. UMBC Police are investigating, and the Division of Student Affairs is reaching out to students most directly impacted as well as shared governance leaders in our community.”

Dillon asked the UMBC community to come forward if they had any information about this crime, and reminded the racist, redneck yahoos roaming around Baltimore that “UMBC students, faculty, staff members or visitors who choose to violate relevant policies and laws are solely responsible for their actions.” This apparently needed to be said in order to try to quell any riots that might break out over the “hate crime.” Dillon assured UMBC that justice would be done, regardless of the perception of “systemic racism” that had been reinforced by the hate crime itself: “University authorities will make every effort to sanction individuals who violate those policies and laws.”

The intrepid guardian of justice also felt it necessary to make sure everyone understood that UMBC was against hate crimes: “Such incidents are inconsistent with UMBC values, including our community’s respect for diversity and inclusion.” In fact, UMBC was institutionally against such crimes: “Students in need of support can contact i3b – Initiatives for Identity, Inclusion & Belonging.” This campus office, also located in The Commons, declares proudly that “UMBC is one of the most diverse campuses in the nation, and we value the richness that such diversity brings to campus life. The Initiatives for Identity, Inclusion & Belonging creates opportunities for students to build their awareness and knowledge of diverse people, cultures, and belief systems. Through facilitated discussions, informal gatherings, educational engagements, presentations, and campus-wide events, individual students, student organizations, and classes learn the skills to create inclusive, just and mutually respectful communities at UMBC and beyond.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

RELATED VIDEO: This Week in Jihad with David Wood and Robert Spencer

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Why Should Academic Departments Have Foreign Policies?

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When did academic departments decide they had to declare themselves on the Palestinian-Israeli dispute but on no other foreign policy question? And why are they so eager to express their visceral hatred of the Jewish state? A report on this disturbing phenomenon is here: “Academic departments must steer clear of anti-Israel activism,” by Richard L. Cravatts, Israel Hayom, November 12, 2021:

The obsessive loathing of Israel by large swathes of academia was evident this past spring as Hamas showered Israeli population centers with more than 4,000 rockets and mortars. Instead of denouncing genocidal aggression on the part of Hamas, these woke, virtue-signaling moral narcissists took it upon themselves to condemn – in the loudest and most condemnatory terms — the Jewish state, not the homicidal psychopaths intent on murdering Jews….

There is a difference between an individual expressing an opinion on, say, social media. That opinion is his alone. No pressure has been placed on him to express it. But when academic departments put out what are presented as that department’s — presumably unanimous — opinion, those who may not agree with the majority seldom dare to express their minority opinion in the daggers-drawn atmosphere of current academic life, where dissent is only for the tenured, and even they must be very brave, to express solidarity with, or sympathy for, the embattled Jewish state that has been so demonized in the swamps of academe.

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Cary Nelson, former president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and professor emeritus of English, challenged the propriety of departments authoring statements of support for the Palestinian cause while vilifying and denouncing Israel in the process. Four academic units at Illinois had issued anti-Israel statements in the spring – the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Department of Asian American Studies, and the Department of History – prompting Nelson and 43 of his fellow faculty to write a letter to Chancellor Robert Jones and Provost Andreas Cangellaris.

In that letter, the faculty noted that “the statements in question were not issued by individual faculty or groups of faculty. They were subscribed to by departments … [and] have been placed on websites and disseminated through social media and email, which created the impression that the unit was speaking for all or most of the faculty within it. This represents a worrisome development. And it is worrisome irrespective of one’s views on the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.”…

These “departmental opinions” are the result of an atmosphere of intellectual intimidation, with those not subscribing to the majority view nonetheless being “spoken for.” Did absolutely every faculty member, for example, in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, agree that Israel is an arch-villain? Or was such an opinion presented by a handful of anti-Israel activists, without the agreement or even, possibly, the knowledge, of all of that department’s members? Did the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies decide, as in the Soviet Union, that “for the good of the Party” no dissent could be allowed and simply rode roughshod over those who dared to even mildly disagree with the kind of hysterical language that is used to blacken Israel’s image? And did the members of that same department not know, or not care, that it is the Palestinians who, as Muslims, allow husbands to “beat” their wives should they be even suspected of “disobedience”? It is the Palestinians who engage in “honor killings” of girls and women by their menfolk, who may then be let off with a short prison sentence, or too often receive no punishment at all. It is Israel that guarantees the legal equality of men and women, and it is the Palestinians who violate that equality at every turn, yet here is the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies standing foursquare with those who mistreat women, while it rages against those who defend their rights.

Academic life is supposed to be dedicated, among other things, to the pursuit of the truth. Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, professors have the great privilege of time – time to investigate matters of interest to them, time to weigh competing claims, time to analyze, to praise and to blame. The May conflict was only a few days old when academic departments issued their summary judgments against Israel. There is a rush to judgment when it comes to Israel. What led these departments to think they had to express the “department’s” opinion, instead of letting individual faculty members have their say, or if they wished, choose to say nothing at all? Why this insensate urge to force a false consensus, through veiled threats of retribution if someone fails to toe the anti-Israel line – threats that too often are successful? Those who disagree with the consensus find it more prudent to simply remain silent, rather than make enemies of fellow members of the department. For non-tenured faculty, it’s obvious why such a choice is made. But even tenured faculty may want to keep their heads down, avoid trouble, concentrate on their own work, and hope that the madness passes.

For academic departments to pronounce with such authority, on things they know so little, or nothing, about, is intolerable. Academics who have no special knowledge of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict presume that their opinions deserve special respect. They should be heeded simply because they are professors, no matter how distant their field may be from what they pontificate about. As an example, let’s look at how four departments at the University of Illinois presented what we were to assume were the collective views of its members.

Let’s start with the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois, which denounces Israel in hysterical terms, charging it with the “illegal occupation of Palestinian land”; a “siege, indiscriminate destruction and massacres in Gaza”; “state-sanctioned execution of Palestinian people”; and, echoing the venomous blood libel promoted by Rutgers professor Jasbir Puar, among others, the “deliberate maiming of Palestinian bodies.”

First, there is no “illegal occupation of Palestinian land.” Israel, in a war of self-defense started in May by Gamal Abdel Nasser, won by force of arms both Gaza and Judea and Samaria (a/k/a the West Bank). The victory in the Six-Day War did not create Israel’s claim to these territories, but allowed it to exercise its preexisting claim. Israel has a right, under the Mandate for Palestine, Article 6, to establish “close settlement by Jews on the land.” What land? All the land from the Golan in the north to the Red Sea in the south, and from the Jordan River in the east to the Mediterranean in the west – the land that the League of Nations intended to be part of the future Jewish National Home. Have these professors of urban planning read the Mandate for Palestine? The San Remo Treaty? Article 80 of the U.N. Charter? U.N. Security Council Resolution 242? Don’t be silly.

Israel gave up Gaza in 2005, pulling out all 8,500 Israelis who had been living the Strip. There is no “siege” of Gaza, as the Department of Urban Planning at the University of Illinois insists. Electricity, water, and natural gas are all supplied by Israel to the people of Gaza. There is no attempt to keep out any medicines or food. There is a blockade, but that is on goods that can be used by the terror group Hamas, which has run Gaza since 2007, in attacks on Israel. Thus, the supplies allowed into Gaza of some building materials, such as cement, are limited. For they are deemed to be “dual-use” materials, because they can be used innocuously to build apartments, but can also be used to build such things as emplacements for rocket launchers and terror tunnels.

There are no “indiscriminate destruction and massacres in Gaza.” Israeli pilots pinpoint their targets; there is no carpet bombing. Hamas places its weapons, its rocket launchers, its command-and-control centers, in or next to schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, even mosques. Israel tries very hard to minimize civilian casualties. When a target has been chosen, the Israelis warn inhabitants to leave the building, through various means – telephoning, leafletting, emailing, and use of the “knock-on-the-roof” technique. Ordinarily the Palestinians have between 15 minutes and two hours to leave. There have been no “massacres in Gaza.” In the 11-day conflict this past May, of the 260 Palestinians killed, 225 of them were determined, through the tracking of death notices, to have been Hamas fighters; 25 of them were senior commanders of the terror group. Only a few dozen of those killed could have been civilians. And there were no reports of any “massacres.” The professors in the Department of Urban Planning were simply throwing in Israel’s direction whatever grotesque charges they could fabricate against the Jewish state, counting on some of it to stick.

Similarly, there has been no “state-sanctioned execution of Palestinian people.” The IDF, as British Colonel Richard Kemp has noted, is the “most moral army in the world.” It makes heroic efforts to protect civilian lives through every possible method of warning inhabitants in or near buildings soon to be hit. Israeli pilots have been known to call off their mission if they spot children too near to the target; this happened several times during the May war.

Let’s look at the less extreme statement of the History Department at the same university.

The Executive Committee of the Department of History issued a briefer statement by email that condemned “the state violence that the Israeli government and its security forces have been carrying out in Gaza” and “standing in solidarity with Palestine and support for the struggle for Palestinian liberation” – “liberation” being a euphemism for the Middle East without Israel and free of Jewish sovereignty on Muslim land.

The statement was put out in an email, as if all members of the History Department agreed to its contents. By what right did the “Executive Committee” presume to speak for the whole department? And why does it describe as Israeli “state violence” a war that began on May 10, when Hamas launched hundreds of rockets at civilian areas of Israel, and Israel did what any nation-state would do – it fought back in defense of its people, hitting in response Hamas rockets, rocket launchers, command-and-control centers, fighters, and a network of terror tunnels? What should Israel have done? Simply let those 4,500 rockets that Hamas flung toward Israeli cities such as Ashdod and Ashkelon land without trying to hit back, in self-defense, at Hamas – its weapons depots, its rocket launchers, its fighters – so that it could no longer launch those rockets? Why is this self-defense described as “state violence”? Would America have done differently?

As for that claim of “standing in solidarity with Palestine , and support or the struggle for Palestinian liberation,” as Richard Cravatts, correctly notes, that is code for the replacement of Israel, “from the river to the sea,” by a Palestinian state. That’s what the History Department’s members – all of them – are made to seemingly endorse. How many of them are happy with that?

Immersed in the ideology of multiculturalism and the intersectionality of oppression, the Department of Asian American Studies condemned “the ongoing 73 years of settler-colonial violence against Palestine and the Palestinian people” and “the exploitation, theft and colonization of land and labor everywhere, including in Palestine. To this, we say no more.”

According to the Department of Asian-American Studies, then, since its very founding in 1948, Israel has been engaged in “settler-colonial violence against Palestine and the Palestinian people.” But there were no “settlers” in 1948, or 1958, or 1968. There was “violence” in 1948, but it was the violence started by five Arab armies that attacked the Jewish state on May 15, 1948, ignoring Israel’s offer of peace, as they tried to snuff out the young life of the nascent state of Israel. Israel was fighting for its survival, as it would have to again do so in the wars of 1967 and 1973. Those people denounced as “settler-colonials” in 1948 consisted of the following: Jews whose families had been living uninterruptedly in the Land of Israel for centuries; Zionist pioneers who had, beginning in about 1900, been making aliyah, buying land from Arab and Turkish landowners and settling on it; Jews who had fled Arab lands where they had lived for centuries, with many more of them –some 850,000 in all – fleeing in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with most of them choosing to settle in Israel; Jews who had managed to escape from Europe just before World War II; Jews who had survived the Nazis and arrived in Israel from DP camps after the war. These were the people, so many of them survivors of terrible ordeals in Europe and in Arab lands, who are now being denounced by this all-knowing “Department of Asian-American Studies” in Illinois as “settler-colonials,” for managing to find refuge in what would become, in 1948, the tiny Jewish state, and then for helping to rebuild that ancient Jewish commonwealth in the Land of Israel.

Another point to consider: the Asian-American Studies Department statement includes this: “the exploitation, theft, and colonization of land and labor everywhere, including in Palestine.” So, we are told, this “exploitation, theft, and colonization” by Jews goes on everywhere, including Palestine. Isn’t this a statement that would not be out of place in Mein Kampf?

The Department of Gender and Women’s Studies signed a statement, “Gender Studies Departments in Solidarity with Palestinian Feminist Collective,” along with some 100 other gender-studies departments. With the characteristic pseudo-intellectual babble that currently dilutes the scholarly relevance of the social sciences and humanities, the “solidarity statement” pretentiously announced that “as gender-studies departments in the United States, we are the proud benefactors of decades of feminist anti-racist, and anti-colonial activism that informs the foundation of our interdiscipline” [sic] and that “‘Palestine is a Feminist Issue.’”…

The Department of Gender and Women’s Studies asserts that “Palestine is a Feminist Issue.” And so it is, but not in the way the good professors in the department seem to think. To repeat what I wrote yesterday on the subject: It is the Palestinians who, as Muslims, allow husbands to “beat” their wives should they be even suspected of “disobedience,” it is the Palestinians who engage in “honor killings” of girls and women by their husbands, fathers, brothers, who may then be let off with a short prison sentence, or too often, receive no punishment at all. It Is the Palestinians who enforce dress codes on “their women,” who value the testimony of females as half that of males; who have girls and women inherit half what a male inherits. Israel, by contrast, guarantees the legal and social equality of men and women, while the Palestinians violate that equality at every turn, yet here is the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies standing foursquare with those who mistreat women, while it inveighs against those who defend their rights.

Three points suggest themselves:

First, let every man and woman speak for himself or herself. Don’t force people into letting their Department speak for them. Not even professors should be made to suffer that.

Second, academics, like cobblers, should stick to their last.

Third, “whereof we do not know, thereof we should not speak.”

Come to think of it, the third point is really just the second one, expressed less succinctly. But it bears repetition.

COLUMN BY

HUGH FITZGERALD

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Hamas-linked CAIR accuses College Democrats of America of ‘Islamophobia’

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Democrats supporting Israel’s self-defense against the “Palestinian” jihad? That isn’t allowed. Hamas-linked CAIR is ensuring that the miscreants get back in line, and pronto. Independent thought? Pshaw! That’s only for “right-wingers.”

Muslim advocacy group accuses College Democrats of ‘Islamophobia

by Sean Salai, Washington Times, November 12, 2021:

A Muslim advocacy group is accusing the College Democrats of America of “Islamophobia” for harassing one of their officers on social media over pro-Palestinian comments she made online as a child.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) this week called in a letter for the Democratic Party-affiliated group to open an “independent investigation” with the intent of disciplining or expelling the unnamed members who “repeatedly harassed” Rollins College senior Nourhan Mesbah on social media when she ran successfully for national vice president in August.

The harassment includes the members’ “liking” a social media comment that read in part: “Boot this jihadist out, no room for racist totalitarianism,” CAIR says.

In the letter sent this week to College Democrats President Jalen Miller, CAIR’s national deputy director Edward Mitchell also accuses the CDA members of “weaponizing” an “anti-Muslim” political ad against Ms. Mesbah over the pro-Palestinian comment she said she regretted making online as a 13-year-old.

“Anti-Muslim bigotry is not unique to any particular party, and no party is immune to it,” Mr. Mitchell told The Washington Times on Friday.

“The perception is that only the Republicans have a problem with Muslims, but the truth is that you find Islamaphobia [sic] on the Democratic side, too,” he added.

Ms. Mesbah declined to discuss the incident, which erupted after the ad featuring her childhood comment prompted fellow College Democrats to accuse her of antisemitism and push for her censure.

The letter includes testimony from several Muslim members of the organization, including College Democrats Muslim Caucus Chair Tyrese Rice, who complained on Ms. Mesbah’s behalf about the “bigoted and imbalanced implications of the organization” at both the state and national levels.

“There was a lack of Muslim representation and an underlying stigma against discussion [of] related topics and concepts,” Mr. Rice said about the College Democrats when he first joined them.

Another comment in the letter from an anonymous student says CDA perpetuates a culture of hostility toward “Palestinian liberation” and silences Muslim students who speak up about it.

“By creating a space to allow Muslim members to be called ‘jihadist[s]’ among other names, we have abandoned our progressive ideals,” the student writes.

The College Democrats have not responded to Mr. Mitchell’s letter, and their spokesman did not respond Friday to telephone and email requests for comment.

Reached Friday afternoon, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee declined to comment on the dispute….

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Madness: UCLA Suspends Professor for Refusing to Assign Grades Based on Skin Color

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My latest in PJ Media:

This is the state of American academia today: Gordon Klein has taught courses in business law, tax law, and financial analysis at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management for no fewer than forty years. He is a respected academic who has been on CNBC and quoted in the Wall Street Journal for his economic expertise. But now, after being suspended, he has filed suit in California Superior Court against the university regents over his suspension. Klein has a good case: He was suspended from teaching at UCLA for the crime of refusing to discriminate and treat his black students differently from how he treated others.

“I was suspended from my job,” Klein explained, “for refusing to treat my black students as lesser than their non-black peers.” His ordeal began on June 2, 2020, when “a non-black student in my class on tax principles and law emailed me to ask that I grade his black classmates with greater ‘leniency’ than others in the class.”

In a sane society, a “non-black student” who demanded that black students be graded with greater “leniency” than others would be castigated as a racist. But in the Left’s funhouse mirror ethics, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and treating students differently based on race is racial justice.

The student wrote to Klein: “We are writing to express our tremendous concern about the impact that this final exam and project will have on the mental and physical health of our Black classmates.” Klein believes that the student was using an online racial justice form letter: “There was no project in this class, and it was unclear to me who the ‘we’ in this case was. I suspected the student simply used a form letter he found online and neglected to change the subject.”

The letter went on to claim that black students were too traumatized by racism to do well on the final exam: “The unjust murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the life-threatening actions of Amy Cooper and the violent conduct of the [University of California Police Department] have led to fear and anxiety which is further compounded by the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on the Black community. As we approach finals week, we recognize that these conditions place Black students at an unfair academic disadvantage due to traumatic circumstances out of their control.” It concluded: “This is not a joint effort to get finals canceled for non-Black students, but rather an ask that you exercise compassion and leniency with Black students in our major.”

Klein notes that “in a subsequent conversation with a university investigator,” the student who wrote the letter made it clear that he “intended that the requested adjustments apply to Black students and not the class generally.” To strengthen the case, the student invoked the Anderson School of Management’s “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” agenda, which stresses that a “commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion as fundamental to achieving Anderson’s mission.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©rights reserved.

National School Boards Association Asks President Biden to Label Its Critics ‘Domestic Terrorists’

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Note that “a person yelling ‘a Nazi salute in protest to masking requirements’ is not a Nazi, as the NSBA is trying to imply. He is calling the school board Nazis. Meanwhile, the fascist clowns of the NSBA would almost certainly object most strenuously to any honest exposition of the motivating ideology behind an actual form of terrorism, that is, Islamic jihad terrorism.

School boards group asks Biden to consider labeling opponents ‘domestic terrorists

by Dave Huber, College Fix, September 30, 2021 (thanks to Henry):

The National School Boards Association has asked President Biden to look into slapping a “domestic terrorist” label on “angry” parents and community members who speak their minds at board meetings.

“America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat,” the group says in its letter to the president. “[As] acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”

The NSBA wants the Gun-Free School Zones Act, the USA PATRIOT Act, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, the Violent Interference with Federally Protected Rights statute, and the Conspiracy Against Rights statute all invoked to help prevent alleged threats, Education Week reports.

The Departments of Education, Homeland Security, and Justice are requested to participate in a review, along with the FBI.

On Sept. 22, the NSBA, along with AASA, the School Superintendents Association, issued a joint statement condemning “online and in-person threats, abuse and harassment.” AASA President Daniel Domenech said that while his group respected the right of free speech, “We cannot—and will not—tolerate aggression, intimidation, threats and violence toward superintendents, board members and educators.”

But some of the instances cited by the NSBA in its letter appear to be free speech, to say nothing of “terrorism.” For example, the group cites a person yelling “a Nazi salute in protest to masking requirements,” while another’s actions “prompted [a] board to call a recess because of opposition to critical race theory.”…

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Muslim Student at Washington University Removes 2,977 American Flags Commemorating 9/11 Victims

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My latest at PJ Media:

Fadel Alkilani, a student at Washington University in St. Louis, is an enterprising young man who clearly has a bright future ahead. On Saturday, as people all over the world mourned the deaths of 2,977 people in jihad attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., Alkilani busied himself with pulling up 2,977 flags that had been placed on campus in honor of the victims and throwing them away. Among Leftists today, that’s the kind of behavior that leads to rapid career advancement– clearly, Fadel Alkilani is an up-and-coming young man.

The flags were part of the Young America’s Foundation’s “9/11: Never Forget Project”: “YAF activists at high schools and colleges across the country are keeping alive the memory of those lost to radical Islamist terrorists in the world-changing events of September 11, 2001.  The iconic displays made up of 2,977 American flags—one for each innocent life taken—bring schools, communities, and individuals together to pay tribute and continue our promise to ‘never forget.’”

YAF members at Washington University duly placed the 2,977 flags, only to have Alkilani, wearing a mask and his hair in a bun, come pluck the flags up and fill trash bags with them. In a video YAF posted on Twitter, Nathaniel Hope of Washington University’s hearty band of College Republicans confronts Alikani, who justified his action by claiming (falsely) that the flag display was a “violation of school rules.” He maintained that he, on the other hand, had not violated any university rules, telling Hope: “I did not violate any university or legal policy. Now go away.”

Later, Alkilani posted online a “Formal Statement on the Flag Relocation Incident,” in which he sanctimoniously employed that tried-and-true strategy of Leftists everywhere: He claimed victimhood. Instead of apologizing for his callous, thuggish, and fascist act, Alkilani wrote: “Currently, there is a massive harassment campaign propagated primarily by Washington University College Republicans, as well as the national Young American’s Foundation [YAF] regarding an incident that occurred at approximately 6 am on Saturday, September 11, 2021. There is a large amount of misinformation circulating, and I seek to explain both what occurred and why it happened.”

The “misinformation” that he proceeds to clear up is the claim that he was “‘stealing’ the flags. This is due to a WashU College Republicans member, taking a video of me collecting flags in plastic bags. However, I had no intention of removing the flags from the Mudd Field area, and my full protest did not have the chance to be actualized. My planned protest was to place the bags of flags on Mudd field, along with various statistics [including those below] explaining the human cost of 9/11 in the past 20 years. On the sides of the bags, some writing may be visible, but the full statement was not outlined at the time of the video. I did not deface, destroy, damage, nor steal any flags, nor did I interfere with any registered event time. I assert that I did not violate any University Code of Conduct policy, though the conduct process is undergoing. Additionally, I was verbally and physically harassed by numerous WashU students and WUPD officers, whom I plan to report through official channels.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Virginia Public Schools to Focus on Muslims—As Victims—in Teaching About 9/11 On Attacks’ 20th Anniversary

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My latest in PJ Media:

On Thursday, the Virginia Department of Education published a video entitled, “Culturally Responsive and Inclusive 9/11 Commemoration,” detailing how Virginia public school teachers should handle the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 jihad terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans. The emphasis on that day and thereafter must not be on the ideology of the attackers or the ongoing jihad terror threat; rather, the focus is entirely on acknowledging and eradicating what the video calls “anti-Muslim racism.”

The video is narrated by a hijab-wearing woman, Amaarah DeCuir, who describes herself as “Professorial Lecturer, School of Education, American University & Paragon Education Consulting, President.” One would think that with all her expertise, Ms. DeCuir would know the elementary fact that Islam is not a race, and that there are Muslims, and Islamic jihadis, of all races. And of course she does know that, but she is operating in this video on the basis of the Leftist contention that opposition to jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women really stems from an irrational animus against Muslims as a people, and hence is a “racialized” form of “hatred.”

Yes, it’s toxic nonsense, but that’s the Left for you. In any case, Virginia public schools that implement DeCuir’s recommendations (and since the Virginia Department of Education published her video, it would appear that the department wants that to be all of them) will give students a presentation on the twentieth anniversary of the worst attacks ever on American soil that will portray Muslims as the primary victims of those attacks, and make herculean efforts to deflect attention away from the extremely inconvenient fact that the attacks were perpetrated in the name of Islam and in accord with its teachings.

If you doubt that fact, note that in March 2009, five masterminds of the 9/11 plot, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin As-Shibh, Walid bin ‘Attash, Mustafa Ahmed AI-Hawsawi, and ‘Ali ‘abd Al-’Aziz ‘Ali – styling themselves as the “9/11 Shura Council” – wrote a lengthy communiqué titled “The Islamic Response to the Government’s Nine Accusations.” In it, they called the 9/11 attacks an “act of Jihad,” and explained: “The Jihad in god’s [sic] cause is a great duty in our religion.” They quoted numerous Qur’an verses, including the notorious “Verse of the Sword”: “Then fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them, and seize them, and besiege them and lie in wait for them in each and every ambush” (9:5) and another enjoining Muslims to “strike terror into the heart of the enemies of Allah” (8:60).

Attorney and columnist Marina Medvin, who broke the story of this video, notes that the 9/11 Commission Report “mentions ‘Islam’ over 1,000 times and the word ‘Muslim’ over 1,000 times,” for obvious reasons. But Virginia students will learn nothing about any of that. Instead, they’ll be taught about “phobias stemming from 9/11,” “anti-Muslim racism spikes,” and the evils of the fictional “Muslim Ban.” DeCuir offers as an example of “harmful teaching” any “teaching about Islam and/or Muslims” in connection with 9/11, except, evidently, insofar as Muslims were victims of the American response to the attacks.

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Arizona community college must pay $155,000 to professor it forced to apologize for criticizing Islam

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A slight pause on American academia’s out-of-control-freight-train rush to submit to Sharia. But the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is still flogging this case in court, hoping to use it to destroy the freedom of speech and criminalize criticism of Islam.

Arizona community college to pay $155K settlement for directing professor to apologize for Islamic terrorism quiz question

by Katlyn Patton, FIRE, April 13, 2021:

Maricopa County Community College District will pay professor Nicholas Damask $155,000 in exchange for his agreement not to sue district personnel, who last year violated his expressive rights in an attempt to quell criticism of his quiz questions on social media. The district also pledged to strengthen its commitment to academic freedom.

Damask, who teaches political science at Scottsdale Community College, came under fire on social media last May after a student complained that quiz questions in Damask’s world politics course were offensive to the student’s religious beliefs. Damask said the college suggested it would require him to meet with an Islamic religious leader to review the content of his course because a student complained that three of Damask’s quiz questions about Islamic terrorism were “in distaste of Islam.”

In response, the college directed Damask to issue an apology — pre-written for him by a communications staff member — and implied that he would be investigated. The college ultimately backed down after an urgent letter from FIRE.

Now, the district is finally paying for SCC’s unconstitutional knee-jerk reaction to online criticism….

A lawsuit brought by the Council on American-Islamic Relations remains pending in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. (A district court judge dismissed the lawsuit in August for failure to state a claim, and CAIR appealed.)…

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.