This website has repeatedly noted the efforts of The Philadelphia Inquirer to paint over the abysmal failures of Presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard University, Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and especially Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania in their utterly and completely boneheaded testimony before a House Education Subcommittee. Well, another day, and another tactic, somewhat along the lines of a defense attorney with an obviously guilty client throwing all kinds of [insert slang term for feces here] against the wall, hoping to see something stick. Continue reading
Tag Archives: #AntiSemitism
The media don’t like that deep pockets donors won’t tolerate anti-Semitism! Colleges really hate the fact that they are not somehow "above" the real world, but a part of it
If the questions had been whether calling for the genocide of blacks or the killing of homosexuals, there is no way on earth that university Presidents Liz Magill of Penn, Sally Kornbluth of MIT, or Claudine Gay of Harvard would ever have said that such decisions on violations of rules or codes of conduct would ever depend on the “context” of such speech. Nor would Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Inquirer, be telling us that Dr Magill’s “ouster” at the University of Pennsylvania is an attack on free speech, but a horrible racist who just had to go. And while the newspaper’s Editorial Board have not weighed in on the subject, the selection of articles and OpEd columns in the Inky is certainly on the side of allowing open debate on a question once thought completely settled. Continue reading
Well, of course they did!
Our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, loaded up with the #woke as it is, has been very, very upset about Israel defending itself from the Hamas attack of October 7th through the policy of trying to utterly destroy the terrorist group, and with neocon columnist Trudy Rubin, who loves her some warfare when it comes to the Russo-Ukrainian War, fretting that Israel is causing too many civilian casualties as they try to cut down the Hamas fighters hiding amongst the ‘non-combatant’ population, is now worried that former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill’s firing resignation under fire will have a “chilling effect” on colleges: Continue reading
Well, of course he doesn’t! Will Bunch doesn't like people in authority being held accountable for what they said
I will admit it: despite paying too much for my subscription to The Philadelphia Inquirer, I only infrequently read hard-left columnist Will Bunch’s stuff, but Christine Flowers pointed it out to me this morning. The distinguished Mr Bunch, whose Inky bio states that he “the national columnist — with some strong opinions about what’s happening in America around social injustice, income inequality and the government,” waxed wroth that University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill will shortly be Penn’s former President:
Liz Magill’s ouster at Penn will help the worst people take down free speech, higher ed
Critics celebrating the scalping of Penn’s president won’t stop there. Free speech, and college itself, are in grave danger.
by Will Bunch | Sunday, December 10, 2023 | 11:44 AM EST
A band of raiders never stops at just one scalp. Just minutes after the University of Pennsylvania’s president Liz Magill pulled the plug on her stormy 17-month tenure, under intense pressure for her handling of antisemitism questions on Capitol Hill, her chief inquisitor — GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York — was back on the battlefield calling for more.
“One down. Two to go,” a clearly ebullient Stefanik posted on X/Twitter, urging on her dream of an academic Saturday Night Massacre that would also take down the two college leaders who testified last week along with Magill — MIT’s Sally Kornbluth and Claudine Gay of Harvard, which, in a controversy with more ironies than a Jane Austen novel, happens to be Stefanik’s alma mater.
I’m old enough to remember, back in the days of quill pens and parchment print-on-paper only newspapers how columnists were limited to roughly 750 words, but Mr Bunch’s rant was 1,663 words long, so prepare for it if you click on the embedded link!
But what Stefanik promised on Saturday night, and what her allies are cheering on, goes well beyond a few high-profile resignations. She promised the current crisis — over what constitutes antisemitism on college campuses, and how administrators like Magill have been handling it — will lead to more congressional hearings on “all facets of their institutions’ negligent perpetration of antisemitism including administrative, faculty, and overall leadership and governance.”
This one’s pretty long, so I’ve moved the bulk of the article below the fold. Continue reading
Aren’t our universities supposed to be institutions supporting Western civilization? As for Presidents Gay, Kornbluth, and Magill, they're toast, and their careers are over; it's just a matter of counting down the days.
M Elizabeth Magill, from her University of Pennsylvania biography page.
At least as of 9:58 AM this morning, University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill still had a job, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer’s story, “Penn President Liz Magill faces mounting pressure to resign from Capitol Hill as university backs her: The school says president Liz Magill is staying put while rebukes increase over her comments on antisemitism on campus.” But the hits keep on coming, From The Wall Street Journal:
Penn Donor Threatens to Rescind $100 Million Gift Unless President Is Ousted
Warning from financier Ross Stevens comes as congressional panel announces investigation into antisemitism at Penn, MIT and Harvard
By Melissa Korn and Joseph De Avila | Thursday, December 7, 2023 | 11:26 PM EST
The turmoil engulfing the president of the University of Pennsylvania over her handling of antisemitism on campus intensified Thursday as a major benefactor threatened to withdraw a $100 million donation. Continue reading
Is Penn President Liz Magill as dumb as a box of rocks?
We reported, on Tuesday, how University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill not just toast, but toast which has fallen on the floor, buttered side down, after The Philadelphia Inquirer noted her terrible performance before a congressional committee:
When given the chance, though, the presidents — Dr Magill, Harvard president Claudine Gay and Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Sally Kornbluth — at times didn’t directly answer, struggling to explain the point at which hate speech rises to the level of incitement of violence — or, when students or faculty should be disciplined for it.
“It is a context-dependent decision, congresswoman,” Magill said when asked repeatedly if calling for the genocide of Jews violates Penn’s rules or code of conduct.
What? If the question had been about calling for the killing of blacks or Hispanics or homosexuals, is there any doubt, any doubt at all, that Dr Magill’s answer would not have been that it was a “context-dependent decision”?
At least as of this writing, Dr Magill still has her job, but I wonder just for how much longer that will be: Continue reading
Liz Magill is not just toast, but toast which has fallen on the floor, buttered side down
We have previously reported how University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill has completely fouled up the school’s response to the antiSemitism on campus, costing the Ivy League university the good will of its many deep-pocket alumni donors.
Well, she may have just fired herself! From The Philadelphia Inquirer: Continue reading
A university professor right in theory, but wholly wrong in the real world
It is a famous aphorism that freedom of speech does not protect yelling, “Fire!” in a crowded theater, but as is frequently the case with aphorisms, the ‘general truth’ contained therein is often not completely accurate. The First Amendment states that Congress — and now extended to cover state and local governments — shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. In the case of yelling, “Fire!” in a crowded theater, a violation of the First Amendment occurs not in punishing the consequences of such an action, if that action is untrue and results in injuries due to a panic, but would be a law or regulation which prohibited people from going into theaters because they might yell, “Fire!”
We have already seen such a violation, in which the Biden Administration pressured various social media companies to “remove content it considers misleading, including about the COVID-19 pandemic.” And there was the famous but failed attempt by the Administration to create its own Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board in the Department of Fatherland Security, something that Taylor Lorenz, the Washington Post reporter who gained her greatest fame with the doxing of Chaya Raichik, a Brooklyn-based real estate saleswoman and creator of the Twitter site that the left hate, Libs of TikTok sorely lamented.
But within hours of news of her appointment, (Nina) Jankowicz was thrust into the spotlight by the very forces she dedicated her career to combating. The board itself and DHS received criticism for both its somewhat ominous name and scant details of specific mission (Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said it “could have done a better job of communicating what it is and what it isn’t”), but Jankowicz was on the receiving end of the harshest attacks, with her role mischaracterized as she became a primary target on the right-wing Internet. She has been subject to an unrelenting barrage of harassment and abuse while unchecked misrepresentations of her work continue to go viral.
Well, it’s another year, the Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board idea has died a well-mocked and well-deserved death, but now there are some defenses of people not being restricted in their speech but paying the consequences for it. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:
A truce in the Israel-Palestine tweet wars
Dozens of public figures have been dismissed from their jobs because of their social media posts about the Israel-Hamas war. It’s a scorched-earth battle, and it makes real conversation impossible.
by Jonathan Zimmerman, Columnist | Thursday, November 30, 2023 | 7:00 AM EST
Your tweet was antisemitic. You’re fired!
Your tweet was anti-Palestinian, and Islamophobic, as well. You’re fired, too!
Welcome to the digital war we’ve been waging in the United States, while a real one rages in Gaza. Dozens of physicians, entertainers, and journalists have been dismissed because of their posts about the conflict. It’s a scorched-earth battle for the age of social media. And it makes real conversation impossible.
The only solution is to let everyone tweet what they wish, whether you agree with them or not.
I have been fully supportive of people tweeting exactly what they wish, and do not want the anti-Semitic tweets censored, not because I support what they are saying, but because I very much want the anti-Semites to tell us exactly who they are, so that we can avoid them, and avoid doing business with them. I completely support the things we have previously reported about deep-pocket university donors closing their checkbooks due to anti-Semitism on campus, and creating ‘do not hire’ lists of the haters of Jews. Dr Zimmerman, who write the column cited above, was similarly displeased that the deep-pockets donors were using their money to fight anti-Semitism.
But, and fair warning here, I am going to use a word which will offend many, no one, and I include Dr Zimmerman in this, would be even remotely surprised or opposed if a company fired an employee who said that he hated niggers.[1]In posting this article on the American Free News Network, I did censor the word, not because I thought it wrong, but because I did not want to cause problems for that site.
Why did I use the dreaded “n” word? Because it points out the extreme end, the end to which even Dr Zimmerman would almost certainly not go to defend someone’s job if he said the wrong thing. Me? I’m retired, so I can’t be fired for using the word! 🙂
Corporations have exactly one purpose, and that’s to earn money for their shareholders, and if they believe that allowing employees to say things which can cost them money, or, as has frequently been the case, call into question the professional commitment of lawyers and physicians to fully support or treat patients and clients who are members of the demographic group they’ve slammed.
Dr Zimmerman then discussed a couple of cases in which he raised questions as to whether people should have been fired for tweets some found offensive, then stating:
Did NYU fire (Benjamin) Neel to create “the appearance of even-handedness” with (Zaki) Masoud, as the suit alleges? I don’t know. But here’s what I do know: There’s no way to justify firing one of these guys unless you also dismiss the other one. And if we keep calling for their heads, we will lose our minds.
How many more people will be fired for tweets about Israel/Palestine? And how do you know you won’t be next on the list if someone is offended by your own post?
Like I said, I’m retired, so I know that I won’t be fired! But corporations, companies, organizations, and schools depend on customers, patients, clients, and consumers to have faith in the people with whom they deal, and if an employee uses his freedom of speech in a manner which could cause prospective customers, et al, to lose faith in their employees and in the company in general, that employee has become a liability, not an asset.
My copy of Mein Kampf. I don’t own it because I support it, but because it is an historically significant book.
Dr Zimmerman is a university professor, and university professors have a natural interest in the free expression of ideas. Unfortunately, the immature hot heads on so many of our college campuses, including the University of Pennsylvania, do not seem to have much interest in the free expression of ideas when those ideas run contrary to what many in the student body believe. Penn itself earned some notoriety by telling “strongly advising” the actually female members of the school’s women’s swim team not to speak out to the press about Will Thomas and tried to instill fear in the women that if they did, their employment prospects would be diminished.
The columnist is right about the free exchange of ideas, but only in an abstract sense. Would he, or really anyone — other than some of today’s Palestinian-supporting university students, that is! — give intellectual credence to a calm and rational discussion of the ideas expressed in Mein Kampf?[2]There are doubtlessly some people who would claim that my ownership alone of Mein Kampf means that I’m some sort of Nazi sympathizer. Well, I’m Catholic, but I also own a Quran; some … Continue reading
Dr Zimmerman’s original column title, which I saw by putting my cursor on the tab in which the article appeared, was “We need a truce in the Israel-Palestine tweet wars.” But let’s tell the truth here: we’re not going to get that truce, and we really shouldn’t have it. Anti-Semitism festered in Europe for 1,800 years after the Romans expelled the Jews from the Levant, and the Shoah was only the most extreme example of it, unprecedented in size and scope and viciousness, but not in kind. Just as the victorious Allies did what they could to “de-Nazify” Germany after the war, we need to marginalize today’s anti-Semites as much as possible.
References
| ↑1 | In posting this article on the American Free News Network, I did censor the word, not because I thought it wrong, but because I did not want to cause problems for that site. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | There are doubtlessly some people who would claim that my ownership alone of Mein Kampf means that I’m some sort of Nazi sympathizer. Well, I’m Catholic, but I also own a Quran; some books can be used for research, without implying anything about the owner. |
As dumb as a box of rocks
Sadly, while ignorance can be cured through education, there’s really no cure for stupid!
I got this image via a tweet from Guy Benson, and it’s just shaking my head stupid. Just what do they believe that the ‘Palestinian’ Arabs think about “feminist values of protecting women and queer people of color”? According to Amnesty International:
Women’s and girls’ rights
According to the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling, 29 women were killed in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by their family members in apparent cases of domestic violence. In September, the Gaza authorities prevented sisters Wissam and Fatimah al-Assi, aged 24 and 20 respectively, from pursuing complaints for domestic violence through courts by impeding them from accessing a prosecutor to testify.LGBTI people’s rights
Authorities failed to prevent and investigate homophobic and transphobic threats and attacks.On 9 July, security forces stood by and watched as a mob beat youths and children participating in a parade organized by Ashtar Theatre in Ramallah that included rainbow flags. The attack came amid a wave of incitement to violence and hate speech against LGBTI people and feminists that the authorities failed to investigate.
The last I heard, Amnesty International was not some evil reich-wing organization!
Male homosexual activity is a criminal offence, punishable by up to ten years imprisonment, and worse. From The Jerusalem Post, written well before the current unpleasantness:
According to Palestinian law, being gay is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and in Gaza, it’s punishable by death. In 2016, Hamas executed a senior commander by firing squad in Gaza for homosexual activity. LGBTQ+ Palestinians have no legal protections against discrimination, are forbidden from adopting and gay marriage is not recognized in any capacity.
In this Pride month alone, the LGBTQ+ community has been threatened and silenced in Ramallah, forcing a concert of east Jerusalem’s Bashar Murad to be canceled when anti-gay activists marched into a concert venue and demanded the organizers cancel the event for the LGBTQ+ community.
According to Wikipedia, Northwestern University has an acceptance rate of just 7%, so one would think that the student body would be fairly intelligent, but if you did think that, apparently you’d be wrong. The University has a guesstimated annual cost of attendance of a whopping $91,290, including room-and-board.
But it doesn’t matter: at least their College Feminists are as dumb as a box of rocks.
Palestinian liberation is an intersectional issue, and goes hand in hand with feminist values of protecting women and queer people of color. As intersectional feminists, we are against all forms of oppression, including settler colonialism.
Really? As students in Evanston, Illinois, they are living on the land of the Illini and Ho-Chunk Indian tribes; have they shown their opposition to “settler colonialism” by giving up their homes and property to those tribes? Or is it the usual: they oppose other people’s settler colonialism, but have Reasons to keep what they have personally?
Ignorance, as stated earlier, can be cured by education, by teaching the person who doesn’t know something what he doesn’t know! But one would think that the Northwestern University College Feminists would have learned by now that Islam forbids homosexual activity, and most of the nations in the Muslim Middle East have legal prohibitions on such, prohibitions which are of varying severity, up to and including death, especially in Iran, which supports Hamas to the tune of an estimated $100 million per year. One would have thought that the College Feminists would have heard of the dissent in Iran which started over the religious police’s killing in custody of an Iranian woman for not properly wearing a head scarf.
Perhaps the College Feminists simply don’t understand the meaning of the word they like to throw around, intersectionality:
Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how individuals’ various social and political identities result in unique combinations of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage.[1] Examples of these factors include gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, weight, species[2] and physical appearance.[3] These intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing.[4][5] However, little good-quality quantitative research has been done to support or undermine the theory of intersectionality.[6]
Intersectionality broadens the scope of the first and second waves of feminism, which largely focused on the experiences of women who were white, middle-class and cisgender,[7] to include the different experiences of women of color, poor women, immigrant women, and other groups. Intersectional feminism aims to separate itself from white feminism by acknowledging women’s differing experiences and identities.
Does that sound like gobbledygook to you? It should, but it seems that the College Feminists have assumed the position that all people who are supposedly oppressed have something in common, when they really do not. Were Hamas to actually take over, and the Northwestern University College Feminists living there, they’d be among the first ones lined up against the wall.
Feminism and progressive politics are things which can exist in Western civilizations, another term they’d probably hate, but it’s only under the enlightenment and Christian European and English-speaking North American societies where these things are even allowed to exist. The things people have the freedom to do and say in Iceland and Ireland and Israel are not allowed in Iran or Iraq or Indonesia, and trying them can get you beaten, imprisoned or even killed.
For $91,290 a year, you’d think that they could have learned that.