FOUSESQUAWK: Hostile Campus

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Hostile Campus

The below video is produced by Americans for Peace and Tolerance on Campus. It highlights the anti-Israel, anti-Semitic climate on American university campuses. Most of the footage comes from the University of California, especially Irvine and Santa Cruz. Yours truly is also shown during an interview I gave a few years ago. The video is over 12 minutes long but worth viewing because it is so disturbing.

http://hostilecampus.org/

You owe it to yourselves to become aware of what is being done and being taught on your local campuses. Don't tolerate it. If you find that this kind of hate and intimidation is being propagated on the campus where you live or where your child is a student, speak out and let the administration know that this is not acceptable.

Remember. Every single one of the future political and educational leaders of America will walk on those campuses.

5 comments:

Siarlys Jenkins said...: Unfortunately, this hashes two distinct lines of criticism. First, Jewish students who support Israel say they hear speakers saying things that they find offensive. That is not a legitimate complaint. Free speech is protected because it will always offend someone.

Second, they report being shadowed and called nasty names, which certainly borders on stalking or assault. These are two very different things. It does not help to root out the latter, to whine in the same breath about the former. We need to draw a line.

The professor who talked about eye colors should have been told "You are a racist. There are no pure blood lines." The recourse to offensive free speech is to offend right back -- as a rabbi I often ask about the meaning of passages in the Tanach observed.

Complaining about cartoons? If it is punishable to print cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed, then, and only then, it should be punishable to display cartoons of Jews as Nazis. I don't favor either one.

"We Palestinians have nothing to dialog about with Zionists..." Now that is a basis to demand that this specific professor get out of the classroom. She's not teaching her personal feelings. But be specific. Painting with a broad brush doesn't fix anything. Incidentally, a good response would be "Yes you do. You've fought three or four wars and failed to dislodge them. They haven't made you disappear either. Now, you all need to dialog, sooner or later, like it or not. Don't pout like a child." (I could say something similar of Binyamin Netanyahu.)

Nobody who uses language like Feminazis, or admires those who use it, should complain about Zio-Nazis. Again, its free speech. Now if someone wants to recommend we all tone down the rhetoric, that's a legitimate proposal. It may or may not be widely embraced.

Following people screaming all kinds of nasty things reminds me of the "right to life" mobs around clinics that offer abortion services. But again, it is behavior that should legitimately be denounced, not for the viewpoint expressed, but for the behavior it is.

Hezbi-u-Lah are not freedom fighters... but such outlandish claims need to be persistently refuted, just as the outlandish propaganda of the National Right to Work for Less Committee needs to be persistently refuted.

Students assigned the comic book about Palestine should turn in a rigorously researched refutation -- and if given a bad grade, appeal to any level necessary.

Less videos, more point by point challenge of what really is unacceptable conduct, would be more worthy of respect.; June 4, 2011 at 3:13 PM
Miggie said...: Fullerton taxpayer, here is a Newport Beach taxpayer that completely agrees with you. It is galling that civil servants engage in anti-Semitic actions but even more so when the few self-anointed, unelected, members in the Jewish leadership believe that they have such a superior and nuanced grasp of the Middle East geopolitical circumstances, far superior to the Israelis themselves, that they can finance programs that are obviously detrimental to Israel without consequence.

Incredibly, the JEWISH Federation of Orange county
REFUSES to sign a pledge that they will not knowingly finance or support an anti-Israel organization and, further, that they will not knowingly finance or support any entity that promotes a boycott, divestment, or sanction of Israel. Their refusal means that they reserve the right to use Jewish contributions for those campaigns. Apparently they feel that any harm that may comes to Israel by their financial support is a matter of indifference to the Jewish people in this community and beyond.

Further, as Gary has documented many times on this site, they have financed trips to Israel for Jewish students in a UCI program to "learn more about" the Palestinian side of the conflict. Of course the students are subjected to professional Palestinian propagandists but, never mind, our leaders foolishly believe that the college students, once fortified with all sides of the issue will resolve the Middle East conflict right there on the UCI campus! What narishkite!

The only explanation is that they are J-Street ideologues on a MISSION!
.; June 4, 2011 at 10:46 PM
Siarlys Jenkins said...: ALL history is propaganda, to a degree. What is now called "alternative" history did correct some serious biases in what history books contained when I was going through public schools in Wisconsin and Illinois. It made some vast stretches, bloopers, and self-serving generalizations of its own. The attempted correction, by entities like the Texas department of education, are introducing even more. It's a mess.

Anyone who wants to be taken seriously comparing Israel and Nazi Germany should be offering specifics, and generally, they don't. Nothing that is either conceptually or empirically comparable to the death camps has been committed by Israel.

If there is any legitimate comparison, it is seeking "land for my people" on land where someone else was already living. Some years after the 1967 war, there was a cartoon showing Moshe Dayan in a tank labeled "we want lebensraum." There is, unfortunately, a limited accuracy to that analogy.

Of course, nobody should play that up without recognizing that a lot more Arabic-speaking people would still be on their ancestral land, if they had not been ordered by various Arab armies and paramilitary gangs to get out of the way, "temporarily" while the boys with the guns swept the Jews aside. The original partition of the British Mandate of Palestine had Jewish and Arab territory all mixed up among each other, which is consistent with the patterns of settlement at the time.

After 1948, a military demarcation line defined who lived where. Them's the breaks when you take up arms.

I am happy to point these things out to people of pro or anti Israeli sympathy. I do not respect whining from either one about being "offended" by hearing a contrary viewpoint vigorously expressed. I notice neither the Fullerton nor the Newport Beach taxpayers said ANYTHING to uphold why the whiners are right to be whining.; June 5, 2011 at 5:31 PM
fullerton taxpayer said...: Siarlys, thanks for belaboring the obvious with your "Anyone who wants to be taken seriously comparing Israel and Nazi Germany should be offering specifics, and generally, they don't. Nothing that is either conceptually or empirically comparable to the death camps has been committed by Israel."; June 6, 2011 at 5:01 AM
Siarlys Jenkins said...: Why Fullerton, I can't tell whether you really appreciate a point of agreement, or you are being sarcastic. Gary spends so much time belaboring what you call the obvious, I thought I would give him some support on this one.

Hang around a while, you'll find there are a few cowards who show up spewing stuff anyone who knows a little history can dismiss in half a millisecond, or even typing digital shouts that you American scum will die for saying (fill in the blank).

It never hurts to keep setting the record straight. "Never again" will sheer sophistry passed off as news and righteous indignation be permitted to stand unrefuted. It's the least we can do.; June 6, 2011 at 3:51 PM