Hate on our College Campuses

Tolerance on parade-The Minutemen appear at Columbia University


Gary Larson of Frontpage has written about an incident that happened on election night at Augsburg Collage in Minnesota. It may be read in its entirety at the site below:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=9C957DF6-624E-4A43-9839-29F8EB3E10C8

According to the report, 18-year-old freshman, Annie Grossmann was accosted on campus after leaving an election night gathering. Her attackers were 4 young black women (unknown to her)who followed her from the event and beat her up a short distance away. Ms Grossmann suffered a concussion and blurred vision. As yet, the attackers have not been identified or arrested.

What was the motive for the attack? Grossmann, who is a Republican, was wearing a McCain-Palin button. During the beating, she was called a racist by her attackers. In earlier social gatherings, Grossmann had been jeered for identifying herself as a Republican.

My reaction to this article is outrage but not surprise. First of all, college campuses across the nation are becoming hotbeds of intolerance. Intolerance of what, you may ask. Is it intolerance of blacks or Hispanics? Hardly. Any sign of that is met immediately by condemnation from the university and the student body-and rightfully so. Actually, it is more an intolerance of ideas that go against the majority sentiment on university campuses. In other words, if you represent anything conservative, Republican, pro-US or pro-Israel-you will be singled out to be ostracized. Universities, which traditionally have been supposed to be centers of discourse and the exchange of ideas from all sides, are now bases for the propagation of ideas from the left. If you want to bash the US Government, the President, our military, or Israel, your speech will be welcomed in the name of "Free Speech". On the other hand, if you want to honor America, support Israel, speak out against Islamic terror, praise the US Government and our military-you will be jeered-not only by students-but by professors as well. Need I recite the long list of conservatives who have had their appearances at colleges disrupted by know-nothing students-egged on by know-nothing professors?

This is the climate that exists on university campuses today. I know. I have taught part-time at the University of California at Irvine for 10 years.

Recently, at Elmhurst College in Illinois, a young Muslim woman filed a police report that she had been attacked by an unidentified male in a campus restroom after speaking at a campus event. The college and the community rallied in support of the woman. Candlelight vigils were held to speak out against hate. All well and good-until a few days later, the woman was arrested for perpetrating a hoax and filing a false police report. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, which had posted the news of the "attack" on its web site, waited 5 days before they took it down.

Question: Has anyone at Augsburg College held a candlelight vigil for Annie Grossmann? I seriously doubt it.

I could go on and on about the double standard that exists on college campuses when it comes to these types of conflicts. Yet, I need go no further than UC Irvine where the Muslim Student Union sponsors hateful speakers on a regular basis. To listen to these speakers is to listen to anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic diatribes. (They even brought in the odious Ward Churchill a couple of years back.) There have also been incidents of physical confrontations against Jewish students on campus. A Jewish female student had her camera shoved in her face by a Muslim student while she was filming an MSU event. The university and campus took no action. Last May, a Jewish female student who had filmed an MSU speech was followed back to her car, surrounded and intimidated by a group of MSU men. The campus police and the university took no action.

Of course, as I have written repeatedly, the people who run UCI are apparently terrified of the MSU and probably CAIR as well. They not only tolerate this inciteful hate speech on campus, but won't even condemn it beyond making vague statements about hate speech in general. A couple of years back, after an incident of vandalism of a Jewish display on campus, the university organized a kumbaya event to condemn hate and hate speech in general. Guess what. The leaders of the university dis-invited the campus Jewish organization group from the event.

You see, under the code of political correctness, it all depends who the victims and perpetrators are. If the victim is white, Jewish, conservative, Republican, then no one will care. If the victim is black, Hispanic, gay or Muslim, the candlelight vigils break out all over the place. I'm sorry folks, but this is hypocrisy in its purest form. It should not matter who the victims are or the perps. Right is right, and wrong is wrong. This is something that has been lost on universities across the land for several years now.

Mayne someone should call for a national candlelight vigil-to mark the death of our universities as centers for serious learning.