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The Latest Victim of the Campus Hate Industry

September 8, 2017

The Latest Victim of the Campus Hate Industry, Gatestone Institute, Bruce Bawer, September 8, 2017

(Robbie Travers is a male. Unless he dresses like a female, the photo accompanying the article appears to have been labeled incorrectly. — DM)

As a result of Allman’s complaint, the university is now investigating Travers on “hate crime” charges. A spokesman for the university explained that it is “committed to providing an environment in which all members of the university community treat each other with dignity and respect.” Travers, for his part, has described Allman’s complaint as retaliation for a social-media posting in which he had drawn attention to a comment by Allman that “all men are trash.”

Such perverse thinking, of course, is commonplace today among college students in the English-speaking countries. Instead of taking full advantage of the precious opportunity that a university education affords them, they prefer to spend much of their student years finding examples of oppression — real or imagined — to denounce. 

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All men are trash.” — Esme Allman.

Allman is a young woman who, although a student at one of the finest universities on earth, considers herself to be a multiply oppressed victim and who sees the world around her as swarming with oppressors. She has been so well-schooled in the idea that whites are always the oppressors and dark-skinned people always the victims that when she sees a fellow British subject rooting for his own nation’s side in a war against jihadists, her first and only thought is to brand him an “Islamophobe” — this, even though the enemy in that war are men who would force her into a burka or consider her, as an infidel, deserving of rape and/or death.

So it is that Robbie Travers, whose only offense is believing in freedom and opposing a totalitarian ideology, has found himself in hot water — a real victim of a mentality that is all about power and dogma even as its pretends to be devoted to “dignity and respect” for all.

Robbie Travers is a 21-year-old law student at the University of Edinburgh and an articulate, insightful contributor to Gatestone as well as other websites. In his essays, he has illuminated the topsy-turvy values that dominate contemporary British political discourse – as exemplified by the refusal of the Speaker of the House of Commons to invite President Trump to address Parliament and the refusal of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn to ban Al Qaeda from Britain as a terrorist organization.

Now, Travers has become the victim of the very forces about which he has written. In April, after the US Air Force carried out a successful anti-ISIS action, he posted a comment on Facebook:

“Excellent news that the US administration and Trump ordered an accurate strike on an Isis network of tunnels in Afghanistan. I’m glad we could bring these barbarians a step closer to collecting their 72 virgins.”

It was no different from a British subject during World War II celebrating the invasion of Normandy. But Travers’s comment offended first-year history student Esme Allman, who filed a complaint with the university. In it, she charged that Travers had violated the student code of conduct and accused him of “blatant Islamaphobia [sic]” and of putting “minority students at risk and in a state of panic and fear.”

As a result of Allman’s complaint, the university is now investigating Travers on “hate crime” charges. A spokesman for the university explained that it is “committed to providing an environment in which all members of the university community treat each other with dignity and respect.” Travers, for his part, has described Allman’s complaint as retaliation for a social-media posting in which he had drawn attention to a comment by Allman that “all men are trash.”

Robbie Travers. (Image source: Robbie Travers Facebook page)

Who is Esme Allman? A member of Edinburgh University’s Black and Minority Ethnic Liberation Group, she was a candidate this year for the position of Black & Minority Ethnic (BME) Officer at the university’s Student Association (EUSA). Not only did she not win; for whatever reason, her name doesn’t even appear on the final list of candidates.

But the university’s website does include the text of her candidacy statement, in which she describes herself as a “feminist and womanist from inner-city London” who has “a strong interest in intersectionality” and who values “inclusivity as well as building and preserving safe spaces for us.” It has been important to her, Allman writes, to run “a truly intersectional campaign” for the post of BME Officer; if elected, she promises, her “first job will be to work alongside the other liberation groups to ensure EUSA are fully representative of our views.”

Allman goes on to list several “manifesto points,” including this: “I will continue to engage in the discussions started with academics on the WhyIsMyCurriculumWhite campaign.” What is this campaign? Begun at University College London, it is a self-described effort to “decolonis[e] the academy” and “uprising against the ‘Whiteness’, Eurocentric domination and lack of diversity in the curricula.” Allman also says that she “will continue to work with the StudentsNotSuspects Campaign to protect student groups from the enforcement of the Prevent strategy.”

What is the Prevent strategy? It is part of the British government’s anti-terrorism program; its objective is to prevent Islamic radicalization, which in that country often takes place at universities.

To most sane people in the West, it seems like a laudable goal to keep college students from becoming jihadist murderers. But to certain radical types in the British academy, the very idea of such a policy reeks of Islamophobia. Hence the StudentsNotSuspects Campaign, the name of which gives a pretty good idea of what it is all about.

We don’t know much about Allman. But her candidacy statement makes one thing clear. Although only a first-year student, she has certainly learned the language of identity-group grievance and victimization. “Womanist”, if you didn’t know, is a word coined by the novelist Alice Walker to describe feminists of color and to indicate a focus not only on sexism but on racism. “Intersectionality,” coined by activist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, refers to the idea that persons belonging to more than one oppressed group experience a form of oppression that is greater than the sum of its parts. Allman’s use of the term “safe spaces” suggests that she considers much of her university campus, and presumably much of the U.K. generally, to be an “unsafe space”; from her membership in to a “liberation group,” we must assume that she considers herself, in some sense, imprisoned or tyrannized. At Edinburgh University, she is “colonized” because of her race and is oppressed by a “white” curriculum.

Given all this, Allman’s complaint about Travers is not only unsurprising, but predictable. This is a young woman who, although a student at one of the finest universities on earth (it came in at #27 in Times Higher Education ‘s latest international rankings), considers herself to be a multiply oppressed victim and who sees the world around her as swarming with oppressors. She has been so well-schooled in the idea that whites are always the oppressors and dark-skinned people always the victims that when she sees a fellow British subject rooting for his own nation’s side in a war against jihadists, her first and only thought is to brand him an “Islamophobe” — this, even though the enemy in that war are patriarchal monsters who would force her into a burka or consider her, as an infidel, deserving of rape and/or death.

Such perverse thinking, of course, is commonplace today among college students in the English-speaking countries. Instead of taking full advantage of the precious opportunity that a university education affords them, they prefer to spend much of their student years finding examples of oppression — real or imagined — to denounce. So it is that Robbie Travers, whose only offense is believing in freedom and opposing a totalitarian ideology, has found himself in hot water — a real victim of a mentality that is all about power and dogma even as its pretends to be devoted to “dignity and respect” for all.

Categories: Academia, Academia and freedom of speech, Academia and the left, Victimology
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Georgetown University and Radical Islamists: It’s a Family Affair

March 28, 2017

Georgetown University and Radical Islamists: It’s a Family Affair, Investigative Project on Terrorism, March 28, 2017

Georgetown University’s Qatar campus is set to host Sami Al-Arian for a lecture tonight in Doha. According to a news release from the school’s Middle Eastern Studies Student Association, Al-Arian is a “civil rights activist” who hopes to challenge students to “make it a better, and more equitable and peaceful world.”

Those are charitable descriptions for Al-Arian, a documented member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Majlis Shura, or board of directors. According to the Islamic Jihad’s bylaws, which law enforcement agents found during searches of Al-Arian’s home and offices, there can be “No Peace without Islam.” The group’s objective is to create “a state of terror, instability and panic in the souls of Zionists and especially the groups of settlers, and force them to leave their houses.”

It’s an agenda Al-Arian took to heart. Following a double suicide bombing in 1995 that killed 19 Israelis, Al-Arian solicited money from a Kuwaiti legislator. “The latest operation, carried out by the two mujahideen who were martyred for the sake of God, is the best guide and witness to what they believing few can do in the face of Arab and Islamic collapse at the heels of the Zionist enemy…” he wrote.

“I call upon you to try to extend true support of the jihad effort in Palestine so that operations such as these can continue, so that the people do not lose faith in Islam and its representatives…” he wrote. Four years earlier, he spoke at a fundraiser in Cleveland, introduced as the head of the “active arm of the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine.”

Why, then, is a Jesuit university, albeit at a campus in Qatar, hosting a leader of a designated terrorist group’s “active arm”?

There’s a family bond between Georgetown University and the Al-Arians. Son Abdullah is an assistant professor at Georgetown’s Qatar campus, teaching history in its School of Foreign Service. He earned his Ph.D. at Georgetown, writing his dissertation about the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood during the 1970s, a time his father acknowledges being part of the global Islamist movement.

Jonathan Brown, Al-Arian’s son-in-law, also works at Georgetown, as the [Saudi] Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization. Brown recently drew criticism for a lecture in which he argued that slavery isn’t inherently “morally evil” if the slave is treated well. He also minimized sexual consent as a recent social more, arguing no one is really free enough to grant consent anyway.

Property records show Brown and his wife Laila Al-Arian bought a modest house just outside Tampa in 2015. Brown also owns a $1.1 million house in Mclean, Va.

Brown’s boss, Georgetown University Professor John Esposito, has been a staunch Al-Arian defender. Al-Arian is “an extraordinarily bright, articulate scholar and intellectual-activist, a man of conscience with a strong commitment to peace and social justice,” Esposito wrote in a letter to a federal judge.

Brown’s slavery and sexual consent lecture was hosted by the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) in Herndon, Va. The IIIT was a prime financial supporter of a think tank Al-Arian founded in Tampa called the World and Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE). It provided cover for at least three other members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Shura Council, including his brother-in-law Mazen Al-Najjar, an academic named Basheer Nafi and Ramadan Abdullah Shallah – the Islamic Jihad’s secretary general since late 1995.

Federal prosecutors wanted Al-Arian to tell a grand jury what he knew about the IIIT’s financial support for terrorists. He refused. Al-Arian was charged with criminal contempt after maintaining that stance even after a judge granted him immunity for his truthful testimony.

The case never went to trial. Al-Arian was deported to Turkey in 2015, pursuant to terms in his 2006 guilty plea connected to his Palestinian Islamic Jihad support. He now works as “director of the Center for Regional Politics at Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University,” the Georgetown Middle East students group’s news release said.

Al-Arian is a computer scientist.

Sabahattin Zaim opened in 2010 and claims to have about 1,100 undergraduate students.

While the Georgetown University program is organized by a student group, promotional material lists Mehran Kamrava as moderator. Kamrava directs the Georgetown School of Foreign Service’s Center for International and Regional Studies.

His presence adds the university’s imprimatur to the Al-Arian event. In addition, the School of Foreign Service posted the news release promoting Al-Arian’s lecture.

Qatar has supported Hamas, the Islamic Jihad’s rival Palestinian terrorist group, providing money and refuge for Hamas leaders. In that light, Al-Arian’s invitation doesn’t seem out of place. But it is still an event hosted by a Georgetown University campus, moderated by one of its prominent faculty.

While Al-Arian has tried to deny his Islamic Jihad activities, or at least minimize them, his work to advance the group’s bloody ambitions is undeniable. He self-identified as the Shura Council’s secretary. In his plea agreement, he admits lying about Shallah’s prominent role in the Islamic Jihad.

During his 1991 remarks in Cleveland after his “active arm” introduction, Al-Arian urged donations for jihad. “Your brothers in Palestine are struggling with their beings,” he said, “so let us struggle here with our money.”

“This is the way of giving,” he said earlier. “This is the way of struggle. This is the way of battle. This is the way of jihad. This is the way of martyrdom. Thus is the way of blood, because this is the path to heaven.”

The student association’s news release failed to mention this background as a convicted felon, describing the former University of South Florida professor as a “civil rights advocate.” It fails to mention Al-Arian’s guilty plea, and whitewashes his resulting deportation to Turkey by saying “Al-Arian relocated.”

The federal judge who saw all the evidence against Al-Arian, who watched him lie about his true identity and violent ambitions, called him a “master manipulator.” Old habits die hard, apparently. The question in this case is whether Georgetown and its student groups are being duped or are witting accomplices in whitewashing a terrorist into a “human rights advocate.”

Categories: Academia, Academia and Islamists, Academia and the left, Anti-Zionism, Georgetown School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Israel, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians, Qatar
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A Modest Disposal

January 15, 2017

A Modest Disposal, PJ Media, Roger Kimball, January 15, 2017

(Good grief! How silly. Obviously, we send our kids to prestigious expensive universities to qualify for quasi-permanent government jobs if and when they bother to graduate with degrees in Women’s Studies, Black Grievance Studies,  Love not Hate Studies and Israel is the Most Racist Country on Earth Studies. So what if the employment market is about to change? Then they can cast even more aspersions on the vile new Fascist Trump government as they return to the hallowed halls of academia for more degrees and more mental constipation inspiration. — DM)

tor

There have been many inventories of academic hysterics over the Trump victory, and I won’t go through all of them now, other than to mention the latest that has come to my attention. “Teach! Organize! Resist!” intends to stage a number of on-campus protests and consciousness-raising events between Martin Luther King Jr. Day tomorrow and Mr. Trump’s inauguration Friday.  Although fomented at UCLA, this enterprise has, at last count, attracted the involvement of nearly twenty other institutions, including Princeton University and the University of California at Berkeley . . . .

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I think people on all sides of the political divide are expecting big things from the incoming Trump administration.  Some of us are looking forward to lower taxes, a less burdensome regulatory environment, the enforcement of the country’s immigration laws, the harnessing of all the country’s energy resources in the service of a pro-growth agenda, a pro-American foreign policy and upgraded military to back it up, and the appointment of judges and Supreme Court justices who understand that their primary task is to interpret the law in light of the Constitution, not to use the court to reshape society.

It’s difficult to say what the other side is looking forward to.  The difficulty comes from the incredible nature of what they say about the prospect of a Trump presidency.  By “incredible,” I mean “not believable.”  Does David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, really believe (as he wrote in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s victory) that “the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism”?

Does he really believe that the fact that his candidate did not win in a free, open, democratic election is “a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy”?  On November 9, Mr. Remnick wrote that “Trump is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader who will not only set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted.”  Has he looked at the stock market recently? On November 1, the Dow Jones IndustrialAverage closed at 18,037. Friday, January 13, it closed at 19,885. 19,885 – 18,037 = 1,848. So, the market gained almost 2000 points in two and a half months. How do you define “tumble”?

But what about Trump “strik[ing] fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted”?  (“[T]he many other variety of Other”? Alas, yes. And in The New Yorker.)

I suspect that Mr. Remnick’s overheated verbiage is just calculated hyperbole. I suspect, that is to say, that he doesn’t believe a word of it. He doesn’t like Donald Trump. He wanted the Dowager Empress of Chappaqua, the Guardian of Benghazi, the Friend of the Syrians, and the Keeper of State Secrets to win. I understand that.  But where does all that “striking fear” into the hearts of people come from? I believe it’s fabricated, make-pretend melodrama.

It’s a popular entertainment, though, especially on college campuses, where cheap melodrama can usually be indulged in without consequence and chalked up as a “learning experience.” (“That will be $300,000, please.”)  Like many other commentators from the knuckle-dragging, Neanderthal precincts of humanity, I have had some jolly fun at the expense of our overbred campus snowflakes.

There have been many inventories of academic hysterics over the Trump victory, and I won’t go through all of them now, other than to mention the latest that has come to my attention. “Teach! Organize! Resist!” intends to stage a number of on-campus protests and consciousness-raising events between Martin Luther King Jr. Day tomorrow and Mr. Trump’s inauguration Friday.  Although fomented at UCLA, this enterprise has, at last count, attracted the involvement of nearly twenty other institutions, including Princeton University and the University of California at Berkeley, i.e., some of the most prestigious institutions in the country. As Campus Reform reports,  “nine of the participating schools are public, and a total of 46 teach-ins are currently scheduled to take place.” I hope the legislators who approve the budgets for the public institutions will sit up and take notice, since one of the immediate goals of “Teach! Organize! Resist!” is to encourage professors to “use your regular class time to attend a panel with your students.” Your tax dollars at work, Comrade, and for what?

The organizers of these sideshows are admirably clear about that. “We intend to organize,” their web site informs the world,  “against the proposed expansion of state violence targeting people of color, undocumented people, queer communities, women, Muslims, and many others.” What “state violence” would that be?  While you wonder about that, note too that the organizers “intend to resist the institutionalization of ideologies of separation and subordination, including white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, and virulent nationalism.” Oh, I see.

Now some of this is just adolescent play-acting, even if many of those involved, being professors, are far beyond the chronological limits of adolescence.  Academia has an infantilizing effect. I understand that. Many professors dress and act like adolescents right up to the time they are ready to hand in their tenure and live off their generous pensions. The Peter-Pan aspect of academia is not entirely the professors’ fault.  After all, the points at which the real world intrudes upon academia are so few and so tenuous that academics may be forgiven for some of their hyperbole and inadvertently comic displays of self-importance.  They exist, like kept women of yore, entirely at the pleasure of an affluent society they despise. So in a way it is not surprising that they endeavor to transform their entire campus into a sort of existential boudoir, which is French for “room for pouting in.”

But behind or alongside the childishness of these academic histrionics there is something more malevolent going on.  If the students and professors who pretend to be frightened of Donald Trump could be sequestered into the “safe spaces” they say they desire, that would be one thing.  But they can’t. They have a deleterious effect on the larger academic environment and, beyond that, on the national conversation about the future of America. Something must be done. But what?

I have an idea. Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal advocated some original, organic, and environmentally conscious proposals to alleviate poverty, hunger, and over-population in eighteenth-century Ireland. Just so,  I’d like to offer a “modest disposal” to deal with some of the intellectual poverty, the hunger for genuine knowledge, and the clear reality of over-population at our nation’s universities.

As a first step, I propose the creation of a University Exchange Commission.  Just as the SEC was created in the 1930s to police fraud and chicanery in the stock market that had contributed to the market crash of 1929, so the UEC would police the integrity of university life in the wake of the collapse of academic standards and the proliferation of fraudulent and ideologically motivated campaigners.

I am still formulating the precise duties of this beneficent organization, but I believe that many recent initiatives could be turned from a bad to a good purpose by restaffing. For example, the totalitarian Title IX offices, which, taking a page from Orwell’s 1984, encourage anonymous reporting of students and faculty for saying or doing, or not saying or not doing, something that someone doesn’t like — this entire apparatus, I suspect, could be restaffed and employed to help dismantle all the bogus, intellectually vacuous programs, departments, and initiatives whose sole purpose is to foster an atmosphere of permanent grievance against free markets, the tradition of free inquiry and free speech, the achievements of America, or anyone associated with the male sex or ethnic and racial heritages not susceptible to preferential discrimination (“affirmative action”) by government entities and academic administrators.

That’s one thing.  The UEC will also see to it that no university will employ more than three deans, none of whom may be charged with promoting the spurious “diversity” on racial or sexual lines that has so disfigured academic life in recent years.

Women’s Studies departments and programs will be disbanded on the grounds that they are invidious: why, after all, should the study of women’s accomplishments be ghettoized by being segregated from the achievements of the rest of mankind?  Black or “African-American” Departments will be disbanded for the same reason, their legitimate subjects, as distinct from their organized opportunities for whining and complaining about how badly they are being treated, will be distributed into appropriate traditional categories: history, for example, or literature. (Also, the term “African-American will be deprecated in favor of “Black American” or, even better, “American” since the phrase “African-American” is frequently misapplied and is always divisive.) The whole industry of sexual exoticism — LGBTNONSENSE—will either be disbanded or consigned to the newly created Krafft-Ebing Institutes of Sexual Perversion.  No classes there will be eligible for academic credit.

This is just the beginning, of course.  The UEC will clearly have its work cut out for it if it is to make headway in reclaiming the university from those set on destroying it from within. But I am confident that a great deal of good work can be accomplished in a very short period if the UEC is given proper authority to enforce its determinations.  As an added inducement, I hereby volunteer to fill the slot of executive director for an entire academic year for the token sum of $1. I feel it is my public duty.  I’ll be waiting by the phone for the call from Trump Tower.

Categories: Academia, Academia and the left, Academia and Trump, Media and Donald Trump
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Exclusive AFDI video: Columbia students support female genital mutilation

January 3, 2017

Exclusive AFDI video: Columbia students support female genital mutilation, Jihad Watch, , January 3, 2017

AFDI Unveils Alarming New Video Showing Acceptance of Female Genital Mutilation at Columbia University

NEW YORK, January 3: The human rights advocacy group the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) today unveiled an alarming new video, filmed at Columbia University, showing that at Columbia University, an Ivy League school and one of the nation’s foremost centers of higher learning, most students are willing to condone female genital mutilation.

AFDI President Pamela Geller noted: “Students were asked if Planned Parenthood should fund and support female genital mutilation (FGM). FGM involves partial or total removal of the clitoris causing injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons. It has no health benefits for girls and women, and removes all possibility of sexual pleasure. It is the worst kind of misogyny. Procedures can cause severe bleeding and problems urinating, and later cysts, infections, as well as complications in childbirth and increased risk of newborn deaths.”

Geller explained: “We sent AFDI reporter Laura Loomer to Columbia and found the people there remarkably unconcerned about female genital mutilation. Probably because of fear of being called ‘racist’ or ‘Islamophobic,’ they condoned the introduction into the U.S. of this human rights abuse.”

The video shows the need for honest and realistic education about the crime of female genital mutilation, and the failure of the American academic establishment to provide that education.

Girl Dies From FGM; Judge’s Sentence: Suspended Jail Terms

Categories: Academia, Female genital mutilation in U.S.
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Western culture, as it is now, deserves its fate

December 20, 2016

Western culture, as it is now, deserves its fate, Israel National News, Giulio Meotti, December 19, 2016

(Sometimes I am glad that I am seventy-five and probably won’t be around to see the forecast outcome. Can we cure the idiocy of academia in Obama’s America, or will it persist via the students? — DM) 

Islamists will have no trouble taking over a culture that deems Shakespeare too white, Greek yoghurt the subject of academic studies, and turns theaters into safe spaces.

Which is the fate of a theater if it becomes a “safe space,” the most grotesque academic neologism that serves to protect minorities from potentially “offensive arguments”? This is what happened at the famous Chicago theater, Second City, the school of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. That theater, since the election of Donald Trump, has become a “safe space,” this by installing a panel at the entrance announcing that it will sanction “homophobic, misogynist, xenophobic and racist comments”.

And how to complete this iconoclastic rage if not with the removal of William Shakespeare’s portrait from the entrance of Literature departments, such as that of the University of Pennsylvania? Students and professors have replaced a painting of the British poet in the Fisher-Bennett Hall with that of a lesbian and African American poet, Audre Lorde. The gentle smile of the great poet, as it was immortalized by Martin Droeshout in 1623, disturbed the students.

First was Georgetown University, which publicly distanced itself from the poet. “The Shakespeare File”, a dossier compiled by a committee of academics including the poet Anthony Hecht and the critic John Hollander, gave an overview of the courses offered by seventy prestigious American universities. “The abandonment of Shakespeare is not just a trend. It is the norm,” they concluded.

Now there are even feminists who interpret Shakespeare’s dramas as the battle of sexes. So the blood that flows from Julius Caesar’s wounds is the feminization of the male at the time of death. Nothing less! Coppelia Kahn of Brown University argues that Shakespeare in “Romeo and Juliet” wanted to describe the cruelty of a patriarchal society that encourages young people to commit acts of “phallic violence”.

At Yale, the students recently promoted a purge of Shakespeare and Milton – too male too white. The Literature Department of Pennsylvania therefore voted to remove the portrait of Shakespeare “to affirm the commitment to a greater inclusion” said the head of the English department, Jed Est.

The famous liberal inclusion through prohibitions.

So forget “Macbeth” and “The Merchant of Venice”. Now the students can read “the influence of lesbianism in literature”. The question is not what a theatre has become if it is turned into a safe space. But can a civilization and culture survive if it replaces Shakespeare with an Afro-American-Lesbian poetess? The answer is that it cannot.

Take the miserable condition of the “studies” published in journals. Perin Gurel, professor at the University of Notre Dame, has just published an essay in the Journal of Critical Studies on Food in which she analyses the success of greek yogurt. Simple, that success is because it is “white” and thus a form of unconscious racial supremacism. The feminist Carol J. Adams coined the term “feminized protein” to attack the breeding of female animals. In the journal called Progress in Human Geography, Mark Carey just published an essay entitled “Glaciers, gender and science”, in which calls for the creation of a “feminist glaceology”. California University, for example, brings out a magazine entitled “Race and Yoga”, while the Journal on Dance, published at Cambridge, discovered that pilates is really “racist”.

The European Journal of Cultural Studies did researched on “Finnish rap”. The Journal on Gender Studies is not ashamed to publish articles on the “improvement of the erection as a projection of masculinity”. The University of Leeds, UK, has published a research about “the phenomenology of the gay genitals”.

It is an inescapable conclusion: Western culture, if judged on the basis of how it is now, deserves to be destroyed by the Islamists.

Categories: Academia, Islamists, Obama's America
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Professor Watching

December 1, 2016

Professor Watching, Power Line, Paul Mirengoff, December 1, 2016

(In a USA Today article titled The right’s turn to censor? Glen Reynolds argues — unpersuasively in my opinion — that Turning Point is censoring articles and being punitive. — DM)

Turning Point USA (TPUSA), a conservative organization made up of high school and college students, has compiled a website database of more than 200 professors at universities across the nation who, in the view of the organization, “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” The website is called Professor Watchlist.

This has outraged the left which, inevitably, complains of “McCarthyism” by TPUSA. Annabel Scott at the Daily Caller reports on some of the outcry here. Rod Dreher offers his take here.

Like Dreher, my instinct is to become uneasy at the notion of a professor watch list. But on reflection, and considering the particulars of what TPUSA is doing, I don’t see a problem.

The list turns out to be an aggregation of already published news stories. TPUSA only points out incidents that have already been reported by a source it considers credible. My casual review of the website suggests that its sources are, in fact, credible.

TPUSA also maintains that it is not attempting to silence the professors on the list. It’s CEO, Charlie Kirk, says:

We’re not trying to prevent teachers from saying anything. All we want here is to shine a light on what’s going on in our universities.

What’s wrong with that? From the perspective of college students and their parents, information that a professor teaches from a far-left perspective and/or discriminates against students who don’t share that perspective is valuable. There is no requirement that students subject themselves to such teaching. TPUSA’s compilation helps them avoid it if they wish to, whether by not taking certain courses or not attending a particular institution.

From the professor’s perspective, I’m not sure what legitimate beef they have. Colleges aren’t secret societies. A professor should be willing to stand publicly behind anything he says or does in a class room.

Some have complained that TPUSA is “shaming” professors. But I doubt that the professors are ashamed of the things TPUSA is reporting. (If they are, the remedy is to stop doing them). In fact, at least on professor has demanded to be put on the list. That seems like a more appropriate response.

It’s possible that the information compiled by TPUSA might cause those with responsibility for state schools (trustees and ultimately governors) to discipline or fire a professor. Given the way the world works, this seems unlikely except in egregious cases, but the possibility can’t be dismissed.

In my view, a professor who discriminates against a student based on his or her political position ought to be disciplined, if not fired. Melissa (“Where’s the Muscle”) Click, who appears on the TPUSA list, deserved discipline, at a minimum. Same with Nell Boeschenstein who publicly harangued some of her creative writing students into admitting that they voted for Donald Trump and then berated them in class for their vote.

Firing a professor for advancing a far-left position presents a different case, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t occur in extreme cases. There is some far-left advocacy that a board of regents or a governor might reasonably consider beyond the pale. It certainly seems that some conservative positions are deemed by many in academia to be unworthy of being presented in the classroom.

If we start to see leftist professors fired for the views they express in class, we can consider whether those doing the firing are engaging in what has come to be called “McCarthyism.” TPUSA is not engaging in it. The organization is simply providing the public with information many students and parents may find helpful.

Categories: Academia, Conservatives
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David Horowitz Takes on Administrators Bullying Students at Tufts

November 30, 2016

David Horowitz Takes on Administrators Bullying Students at Tufts, Front Page Magazine (The Point), Daniel Greenfield, November 30, 2016

hamas_finger_poster_2016_cropped_0

The free speech movement has become the anti-free speech movement. And as the Freedom Center fights the anti-Semitic SJP hate group, its poster campaigns are touching nerves from GMU, where Oleg Atbashian was arrested and spent 14 hours in jail and has been threatened with years of prison time, to Tufts, where the administrators are bullying students.

Now David Horowitz is fighting mad and fighting back.

November 29, 2016

James M. Glaser, Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, Tufts University

Jianmin Qu, Dean of the School of Engineering, Tufts University

Gentlemen,

I have just received your letter of November 14, conveying your “serious concerns regarding the posters placed on the Tufts University campus on October 19, 2016,” for which we took responsibility. The posters in question identify a hate group – Students for Justice in Palestine, which is sponsored by your institution. SJP calls for the destruction of the Jewish state, receives funding from the terrorist organization Hamas, and sponsors campus resolutions to boycott Israel, which liberals ranging from Larry Summers and Alan Dershowitz to Hillary Clinton have condemned as anti-Semitic. The statements in our posters are factual, or are reasonable opinions based on the facts.

Your “serious concerns” are summed up in two claims. First that “the posters in question violate our community standards” and, second, that they “violate our poster policy which requires notification and authorization by a university office or recognized student group prior to placing posters on campus.” You ask us in future to seek such permission.

Really. The two of you have already sent a letter to every member of the Tufts student body warning them that the university condemns our posters and that, “The university will be sending a statement to the posters’ sponsors in order to make clear that such materials are not welcome on our campus.” Now what student or student group, knowing that the university condemns these ideas, and has taken the extraordinary step of warning the entire student body that our ideas are unwelcome, would be willing to risk authorizing our posters? Which is why we took the step of putting up our posters without asking permission, since we are well aware that institutions like Tufts seek to be “safe places” for a politically correct orthodoxy and can be ruthless in acting to hermetically seal off dissenting ideas like ours.

I have read your terse email many times without being able to find a single reference to anything we actually said in our posters that might violate your community standards. Nor do you mention a single community standard that we might have violated. This is just another way in which you choose to show your contempt for individuals who express ideas that make you uncomfortable. And who wouldn’t be uncomfortable in your position when someone comes along to point out that you sponsor and support organizations that accuse Jews – falsely – of stealing Arab land, maintaining an “apartheid state,” and murdering innocent women and children, while giving full-throated support to the terrorists of Hamas?

Just to be duly diligent, I went up to the Tufts’ official website and found your community principles, prominent among which is the following statement: “Freedom of expression and inquiry are fundamental to the academic enterprise.” Too bad you and the Tufts administration have abandoned this principle, and too bad you lack the candor to admit it

If you had a shred of integrity you would invite me to your campus to debate this issue. Instead you will no doubt go on suppressing our efforts, all the while pretending to support the free exchange of ideas.

Sincerely,

David Horowitz

Freedom of expression these days means leftist harassment of opposing viewpoints with the aim of suppressing them.

Categories: Academia, Academia and Israel, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism in academia, David Horowitz, Freedom of speech, Hamas, Students for Justice in Palestine, Tufts University
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GW Student Groups Denounce Campus Security Protection As “Act of Violence”

November 28, 2016

GW Student Groups Denounce Campus Security Protection As “Act of Violence” Jonathan Turley’s Blog, Jonathan Turley, November 28, 2016

(George Washington could not be reached for comment. — DM)

gwu

George Washington (where I teach at the law school) has become the focus of national attention due to a letter sent out by a collection of student groups that declared the security supplied by campus police to be an “act of violence” because police are viewed as supporting President-elect Donald Trump. It is an absurd and insulting position — part of a tirade by the groups calling for everything from providing sanctuary to undocumented immigrants to breaking down patriarchy, Islamophobia, and a myriad of other social ills.

The letter reflects the contributions of a wide array of groups, including Young Progressives Demanding Action GW, the Feminist Student Union, the Roosevelt Institute, Progressive Student Union, Students for Justice in Palestine, Green GW, Fossil Free GW, GroW Community, Casa Blanca, the Theta Chapter of Latinas Promoviendo Comunidad/Lambda Pi Chi Sorority, inc., Asian Pacific Islander Student Alliance Advocacy Committee, and the Association of Queer Women and Allies.

As for GW campus police, the groups tied all officers to the organization support of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) for Donald Trump. Accordingly, the groups insists that “placing us in these officers’ care is an act of violence, especially for Black students.” Not only do the students demand that they be protected from campus security but that the university respond to this problem by increasing financial aid, discretionary funds, and other support for minority and low income students.

The connection drawn between the FOP and the campus security is facially ridiculous. These students are seeking to isolate officers based on their perceived support for a democratically elected president. The “act of violence” is the simple maintenance of a security staff for the university. None of these organizations appear to recognize the implications of barring employees from supplying services based on their presumed political leanings. These are the same groups that later in the letter demand that the university guarantee the rights of campus workers to organize and make demands. Yet, due to their perceived political beliefs, these workers are to be treated as objectified vehicles of oppression and violence:

“safety must not depend on the University’s police. The Fraternal Order of Police, the largest police union in the United States, has formally endorsed President-Elect Donald Trump. The FOP includes over 10,000 members in Washington D.C., many of which have jurisdiction over GW’s campus. Placing us in these officers’ care is an act of violence, especially for Black students.”

In addition to demanding that the university become a sanctuary for undocumented persons, the letter demands other commitments like the university recognizing “white supremacy” and how “The 2016 presidential election has emboldened the structures of oppression that are embedded in our country at all social, political, and economic levels.”

The demands also include greater protections and admissions for Palestinian students” to prevent their genocide at the hands of Israel” and the university supplying job training and community centers in Washington, D.C. as well as facilities for the homeless.

The tragic irony is that we have long had one of the most responsive and supportive security forces in the country. I have worked with campus security in a volunteer program teaching elementary students about the law. These officers operate in a high crime area and try hard to protect the faculty and students from harm. They deserve better than this unhinged tirade from those who are some of the beneficiaries of their work. I am confident that the professionals working for the university will not be affected by this letter. They will continue to do their jobs and protect all students and faculty. However, they should know that many of us appreciate their hard work and dedication.

The call for the university to subsidize various social programs for the homeless, undocumented, and other groups ignores our primary educational mission. We remain one of the most expensive schools in the country. In addition to the demand for more financial aid and discretionary funds, the supply of housing, training, and shelter services would impose tremendous costs of students who already face towering tuition debt. GW has a long history of community outreach and activism. Yet, we remain at our core an educational institutional with a duty to our students to supply an education at an affordable cost.

I am glad to see activism and passion from our students. These are issues worthy of debate. However, this letter seems more visceral and sensational than constructive in my opinion.

What do you think?

Here is the letter:

gw-letter-page-1

 

gw-letter-page-2

Categories: Academia, George Washington University, Snowflakes
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Saudi Arabia is already here, in Toronto

November 25, 2016

Saudi Arabia is already here, in Toronto, CIJ News, Diane Weber Bederman, November 24, 2016

islam-awareness-week-at-york-u-4-photo-cijnewsIslam Awareness Week at York U. Photo: CIJnews

Well, Mr. Prime Minister, you don’t have to move Saudi Arabia to live in that culture, because under your government, these intolerant, abhorrent teachings are here in Canada, at universities and in our bookstores and shared in public places like Dundas Square in downtown Toronto. They are teachings that Muslims are trying to have accepted here in Canada.

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Dear Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau,

If you were to take your family, your wife and children and move to Saudi Arabia, as an immigrant, not an expat, how long do you think it would take you to embrace the culture of your adopted country?

How long would it take before you preached the need for women to wear a Burka when leaving home, and that they must be accompanied by a male relative at all times?

Or how long before your beautiful, independent wife Sophie Grégoire Trudeau (she has kept her maiden name and said in Havana that women “can no longer be ignored”), would accept that she cannot drive, can no longer be independent of you, that her husband has not only the right but the responsibility to punish his wife for not performing her wifely duties, and that it is appropriate to beat your wife to bring her into line? Would Mme Grégoire Trudeau accept a lashing in the street from the religious police for any perceived infraction of the laws regarding modesty?

How long would it take the two of you, Sir, to teach your sons that women are inferior to men and your daughter that she has few civil rights, and that Muslims are superior to all others? And how would you explain to your children, Xavier James , Ella-Grace Margaret , and Hadrien the sight of men hanging from cranes in the middle of the square-guilty of being gay?

And what would you say to your children as you walked along the streets and saw people without hands or feet-amputated in the name of Islamic justice? And how would you explain to your children that it is appropriate to refer to Jews as pigs and descendants of apes? That is acceptable to call for “Death to the West” and “Death to Israel”?

Well, Mr. Prime Minister, you don’t have to move Saudi Arabia to live in that culture, because under your government, these intolerant, abhorrent teachings are here in Canada, at universities and in our bookstores and shared in public places like Dundas Square in downtown Toronto. They are teachings that Muslims are trying to have accepted here in Canada. They are using the false claim of freedom of religion when in fact this has nothing to do with religion and everything, Sir, to do with trying to bring Sharia Law, the ethic that underpins the ideology of Islam and undermines western freedom into law in Canada.

I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you would never embrace those teachings-that ideology. That you and your wife would enver accept the teachings in “Women in Islam & Refutation of some Common Misconceptions,” authored by the Saudi scholar Dr. Abdul-Rahman al-Sheha and printed by the Saudi Dawah organization Muslim World League (رابطة العالم الاسلامي) Or teachings being promulgated in Canada in the book “The Quran” (Saheeh International) shared now at York University during Islam Awareness Week.

The following are excerpts from the book that include Quranic verses followed by a modern interpretation:

Surah (chapter) Al-Baqarah

Verse 79

So woe 32 to those who write the “scripture” with their own hands, then say, “This is from Allah,” in order to exchange it for a small price. Woe to them for what their hands have written and woe to them for what they earn.

Footnote 32

i.e., death and destruction.

Verse 131

When his Lord said to him, “Submit,” he said, “I have submitted [in Islam] 45 to the Lord of the worlds.”

Footnote 45

The meaning of the word “Islam” is “submission to the will of Allah.” This is the way of life ordained by Allah and taught by all of the prophets from Adam to Muhammad (PBUH). A Muslim is one who submits himself to Allah.

Verse 191

And kill them wherever you overtake them and expel them from wherever they have expelled you, and fitnah 69 is worse than killing. And do not fight them at al-Masjid al-Haram until they fight you there. But if they fight you, then kill them. Such is the recompense of the disbelievers.

Footnote 69

Among the meanings of fitnah are disbelief and its imposition on others, discord, dissension, civil strife, persecution, oppression, injustice, seduction, trial and torment.

Or Surah (chapter) Al-Maidah

Verse 33

Indeed, the penalty 262 for those who wage war 263 against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] corruption is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land. That is for them a disgrace in this world; and for them in the Hereafter is a great punishment,

Footnote 262

Legal retribution.

Footnote 263

i.e., commit acts of violence and terrorism against individuals or treason and aggression against the Islamic state.

Or this:

Verse 75

And among the People of the Scripture is he who, if you entrust him with a great amount [of wealth], he will return it to you. And among them is he who, if you entrust him with a [single] silver coin, he will not return it to you unless you are constantly standing over him [demanding it]. That is because they say, “There is no blame upon us concerning the unlearned.” And they speak untruth about Allah while they know [it].

Footnote 133

The Jews do not consider it a sin to cheat or lie to a gentile or a pagan.

Verse 112

They have been put under humiliation [by Allah] wherever they are overtaken, except for a rope [i.e., covenant] from Allah and a rope [i.e., treaty] from the people [i.e., the Muslims]. 144 And they have drawn upon themselves anger from Allah and have been put under destitution. That is because they disbelieved in [i.e., rejected] the verses of Allah and killed the prophets without right. That is because they disobeyed and [habitually] transgressed.

Footnote 144

Once they have surrendered, the People of the Scripture retain their rights and honor (in spite of their refusal of Islam) through payment of the jizyah tax in place of zakah and military service due from Muslims. They are then under the protection of the Islamic state.

Just take a walk with your family along Dundas Square or stroll through York University. You can talk to people who share these beliefs openly and proudly and are expending great energy in proselytizing them. So, Sir, as a proud feminist and supporter of LGBTQ2 rights, a man who cherishes diversity, accommodation, inclusion, and tolerance, how do you defend these teachings in our cities and universities, let alone to your wife and children? And will these ideals be taught during Muslim Heritage Month?

As always, Sir, I look forward to your comments. I am ever hopeful that one day you will take the time to respond to my concerns, Sir, for I have no doubt that there are millions of Canadians who would like to hear the answers to these questions. And, Sir, we have that right and you, Sir, have the obligation to respond.

Islamic literature in Toronto deals with wife beating, stoning, crucifixion, amputation

Muslim Dawah (outreach, “call to Islam”) activists at Toronto’s Dundas Square distributed during recent years a variety of Islamic literature (click HERE)

The following are the highlights of some of the Islamic books/booklets which were obtained by CIJnews:

  • Homosexuality is a major sin

  • ‘Liberated’ Western women… are trapped in a form of slavery

  • Polygamy is permitted in certain conditions

  • Wife must obey the “commands” of her husband

  • Wife beating is permissible in certain conditions (“Submissive or subdued women… may even enjoy being beaten”)

  • Muslims have a duty to spread the message of Islam in society

  • Prayers to Allah to give Muslims victory over the disbelievers
  • Non-Muslims of an Islamic State have to pay the jizya (poll-tax) tax

  • Punishment of flogging for public intoxication and traffickers

  • Punishment of stoning to death for married adulterers

  • Punishments of amputation (hand and leg), crucifixion and execution in serious crimes

  • Punishment of cutting off the hand for the thief

  • Punishment of execution for apostates
  • Possession of slaves is permissible in certain conditions.

ICNA Canada’s online syllabus: women are inferior to men, Western civilization “enemy” (clickHERE)

ICNA Canada’s online syllabus: Songs, music, jesters, buffoons are “satanic work” (click HERE)

ICNA Canada’s online syllabus: Muslim wife must obey her husband when he calls her to bed(click HERE)

ICNA Canada’s online syllabus: “majority of the dwellers of Hell are women” (click HERE)

ICNA Canada’s online syllabus: pregnant adulteress to be stoned after giving birth (click HERE)

ICNA Canada’s online syllabus on wife beating (click HERE)

ICNA Canada’s online syllabus on stoning adulterers, chopping off thieves’ hands (click HERE)

ICNA Canada’s online syllabus on wearing hijab and honour killing in Islam (click HERE)

ICNA Canada’s online syllabus legalizes “slave-girls” (click HERE)

ICNA Canada online syllabus: “Muslims will dominate the Jews”, kill them (click HERE)

ICNA Canada syllabus: “give us victory over the disbelieving people” (click HERE)

ICNA Canada’s syllabus explains ruling on ‘sex slaves’ in Islam (click HERE)

ICNA Canada free book: “Every human being is born as a Muslim” (click HERE)

ICNA – Canada’s senior official appears to blame gays for Ontario “lurid” sex education (clickHERE)

Trudeau: We strive to show that “Islam is not incompatible” with Western values (click HERE)

Categories: Academia, Canada, Islam Awareness Week, Islamists in Canada, Quran, Saudi Arabia, Sharia law, Trudeau
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Gulag, Western Style

November 23, 2016

Gulag, Western Style, PJ Media, David Solway, November 22, 2016

newspeak

In the last analysis, this system of subjugation looks to be even more effective than the cruder techniques of its tyrannical counterparts. In the absence of public awareness and concerted pushback, we will have sold our birthright for a mess of political potage.

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There are various ways of quashing social and political dissent, some more effective than others. The “Soviet method” practiced in stringently repressive regimes—torture, imprisonment, the ever-expanding Gulag, summary execution—works extremely well in the shorter historical timeframe, until a people rise up in revolt or such demonic societies collapse from their own internal contradictions. Of course, the truly Stygian regimes, closed to the world, indifferent to economic pressures, and under the heavy boot of unbroken military control, such as North Korea, may persist indefinitely or until defeated in war. But generally speaking, the tried-and-true methods of political oppression are sufficient to the task of keeping a population in a state of enslavement for a prolonged historical period.

In the sphere of the liberal West, however, there are other means of subjection to the will of increasingly centralized governments. Because they tend to function gradually and under the radar, these tactics are enormously efficient in their deadening effects, going unrecognized until it is often too late to mount significant resistance. They operate through a process of curricular distortions, social pressure and incremental legislation targeting speech habits, facets of normal behavior, assumptions of what counts as morally legitimate, and financial and job security.

A useful technique for anaesthetizing the individual citizen and rendering him compliant is the erasure of authentic historical knowledge. We’ve remarked the success of this approach in the U.S. with the “history from below” or “people’s history” movement, associated with Howard Zinn, and the foregrounding of a bowdlerized version of Islamic history in American schools. Canada is no different. Eric McGeer, author of Words of Valediction and Remembrance: Canadian Epitaphs of the Second World War, writes: “In my last years of high school teaching I was increasingly infuriated and disgusted at the portrayal of Canada in the history textbooks assigned for use in our courses. There was no sense of gratitude in the textbooks, no empathy with the people of the past or an attempt to see them in their own terms, no sense of the effort people made to create one of the few truly liveable societies on earth. You would have thought that this country was nothing more than a racist, bigoted, this or that-phobic hotbed. My first lesson involved taking the book and dropping it into the waste paper basket and advising the students to do the same.” (personal communication). The study of history, McGeer concludes, is nothing now but a progressive morality tale and a mechanism of social engineering. Sounds a lot like Title IX. Pride in one’s nation, its accomplishments and sacrifices, is contra-indicated. There is more than one way of burning the flag.

The center-right consensus that has characterized Western nations has been under attack for some considerable time as nation after nation in the once liberal West gravitates progressively leftward. Robert Conquest’s Second of his Three Laws of Politics states that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” The consequence of Conquest’s Law is, inevitably, what Robert Michels in Political Parties called “The Iron Law of Oligarchy,” which formulates how democratic institutions tend to succumb to the rule of an elite—in our day, a progressivist camarilla that controls government policy and media outlets, and harnesses the energies of dissenting associations and cabals. In many countries, the democratic process has become or is on the road to becoming a mere formality.

The oligarchic agenda can be detected in the disastrous nationalization of the health care system; the decadence of an academy which indoctrinates rather than educates; the rise of destructive feminism and the feminization of the culture; the transgendering of everyday life—in Canada, for example, Bill C-16 has been tabled, making “gender expression” a prohibited ground of discrimination and potentially mandating non-binary pronouns such as zhi or hir, as is already the case in New York City where astronomical fines are levied for contravention; the special status ascribed to the incursions of anti-democratic Islam; the “abolition of the family,” as Marx and Engels urged in The Communist Manifesto; and the regulatory strangling of the free market economy and the conjoint attrition of the middle class. Additionally, the leftist project is materially facilitated by the growing prevalence of kangaroo courts run by committed activists of every conceivable stripe and in which no provision whatsoever is made to assist those too often falsely accused of discrimination or being in violation of some obscure code or policy of sanctioned conduct. The judgments handed down against those who have offended the sensibilities of favored identity groups will often involve harshly punitive forms of retribution that may cost a defendant his employment and his livelihood.

A Romanian friend who suffered through Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship in his home country tells me that in many ways the situation in the “freedom loving” West is actually worse. In Romania, as in the Soviet Union and the rest of the Eastern Bloc, most people knew that the regime was founded on lies and that the media were corrupt, time-serving institutions. Here, on the contrary, people tend to believe that the government is relatively, if not entirely, trustworthy, that the judiciary is impartial, and that the media actually report the news. Citizens are therefore susceptible to mission creep and are piecemeal deceived into a condition of indenture to socialist governance, an activist judiciary, a disinformative, hireling press corps, and left-wing institutions. People will vote massively for the Liberal Party in Canada and the Democrats in the U.S., not realizing they are voting themselves into bondage, penury and stagnation. The process operates insensibly and takes longer to embed itself into the cultural mainstream, but the result is alarmingly effective and durable. My friend has never read F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom or George Orwell’s 1984, but his layman’s insights and practical experience bear out Hayek’s scholarly analysis and Orwell’s dire warnings.

A totalitarian regime will control its citizens through propaganda, censorship, and outright violence, modes of oppression that are at least publicly demonstrable, evident to most. But knowing that the enchainment of the spirit is ultimately more reliable than the enchainment of the flesh, a democratic polity veering towards oligarchy will focus on propaganda and censorship as well, but in a far more subtle form. It will function mainly through public shaming rituals, social ostracism, rigid speech codes, Orwellian disinformation, and legal or quasi-legal assault. It does not need to depend on physical violence.

Fear of social rejection, the lure of groupthink, the pestilence of political correctness controlling what one may say and think, public apathy, historical ignorance, and especially the Damoclean sword of selective hiring, job dismissal, and financial reprisal go a long way to subdue a people to the will of its masters and consign them to a Gulag that may be less observable a such, but one that is nonetheless socially and economically crippling to individuals, families and businesses.

In the last analysis, this system of subjugation looks to be even more effective than the cruder techniques of its tyrannical counterparts. In the absence of public awareness and concerted pushback, we will have sold our birthright for a mess of political potage.

Categories: Academia, Censorship, Control of the people, Democracy, Dissent, Freedom, Gulags, Media, Multiculturalism, Political correctness, Serfdom, social media
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