Wednesday, January 11, 2017



Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus

"Today on American college campuses, there is only one group of students that you are allowed to attack and you can attack at will, and those are Jews," states the narrator in the new film Hate Spaces:  The Politics of Intolerance on Campus.  This latest production from Americans for Peace & Tolerance, the makers of the J Street Challenge, engagingly examines how demonization of Israel's Jewish state is reviving anti-Semitism in American academia.

Hate Spaces extensively documents what has become a nationwide campus "hostile environment" for Jews, according to Susan Tuchman from the Zionist Organization of America.  Student signs at colleges like Columbia University appear in the film with statements such as "Israel is a swollen parasite...the Jews:  Too fat...Too greedy...Too powerful...Fight the Jewish mafia." 

Quoted in Hate Spaces, University of California (UC)-Los Angeles Hillel President Natalie Charney notes an "anti-Israel culture" in which "singling out the only Jewish state creates an environment where it's ok to single out Jewish students."  The film focuses on one of Israel's main campus adversaries, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a leading supporter of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel with deep links to the Muslim Brotherhood.  The film notes SJP members chanting "Allahu Akbar" to celebrate the nonbinding 2013 UC-San Diego student council decision for BDS and a SJP chapter president's 2010 assault upon a Jewish UC-Berkeley student.

Former SJP member and current "pro-Israeli Muslim" Rezwan Ovo Haq notes that "SJP largely masquerades behind the human rights issue" of support Palestinians as part of a broader human rights agenda.  Yet in SJP he was "slandering Israel and I had deep-seated hatred for Israel."  Corresponding to this ugly reality, a University of Tennessee SJP member once tweeted:  "What is the difference between a Jew and a pizza?  The pizza leaves the oven."

Eminent law professor Alan Dershowitz notes in a film interview that "antisemitism used to come mostly from the right, now it's coming mostly from the hard left."  Hereby "one of the strangest alliances on university campuses today is between the hard left" of minorities like blacks and Islamist groups like SJP.  Accordingly, San Diego State University student journalist Anthony Berteaux discusses once identifying with SJP as a gay, Asian man.

Wall Street Journal editor Bret Stephens wonders at such leftwing "useful idiots of the twenty-first century."  "Why is it that the liberals and progressives who espouse a certain set of values are so intent on demonizing and de-legitimatizing the one country that shares their values" in the Middle East, he asks.  By contrast, past African-American civil rights leaders such as W.E.B Dubois, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Bayard Rustin "have been Zionists, from socialists to liberals to conservatives," notes African-American Zionist Chloe Valdary.

Faux progressive condemnation of Israel, Dershowitz notes, arises largely because "there is no subject today in the world which has more distortion, more lies, more dissembling, than discussion about Israel."  Hate Spaces shows women from Israel's Arab minority joining Israel's parliament and winning the Miss Israel beauty contest, belying a sign in the film condemning Israel as the "Fourth Reich. 

During speaking engagements, Dershowitz challenges listeners "to name a single country in the history of the world faced with threats comparable to those threats faced by Israel both internal and external that have had a better record of human rights."

Israeli-American political commentator Caroline Glick discusses the "pathology of anti-Westernism."  Various commentators in the film note that leftists quick to condemn Israel and the wider Western world often have little concern for the human rights of black slaves, women, or homosexuals in Muslim-majority countries.

"A lot of intellectuals are playing out this sort of colonial guilt thing...by sacrificing Israel to what is in fact the most ferocious imperialist, colonialist force.  Islam is a colonialist, imperialist enterprise," historian Richard Landes states.

Film segments such as "Privileged Hatred" examine double standards concerning Israel in academia, as political commentator Melanie Phillips notes on C-Span that "those promoting free speech have ended up banning speech across our campuses." 

Glick explains that "if you are part of the oppressor group, then obviously your victim has the moral right to do to you whatever he deems fit because as a victim he essentially cannot be judged."  

Therefore anti-Israel student protesters reject appeals to evenhandedness with "what's the other side to Hitler... any support of Israel is hate speech...allowing free speech is allowing free speech to the rich and powerful."  "This event is shutdown," screams one student disrupter of a pro-Israel event, who slanders that Israel and its supporters "have turned Palestine into a land of prostitutes, rapists, and child molesters."

Hate Spaces segments "Tenured Hatred" and "Schools of Ideology" explore Israel's pariah status in American faculty lounges.  While Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates contributed over $1 billion to American universities in the years 2009-2015, "for at least 50 years the faculty of most universities has been besotted by the philosophy of tyrants," Stephens notes. 

The film demonstrates the results of such factors with leftist icon Noam Chomsky absurdly pontificating that the "policies of Hamas are more forthcoming and more conducive to a peaceful settlement than those of the United States or Israel."

Against Israel's fanatical foes in the Ivory Tower, Glick issues a clear clarion call, stating that "you can't cohabitate a university campus with these people because they aren't there to coexist with you; they are there to destroy you." 

Accordingly, "if you are not willing to fight fire with fire and go after them as the hate groups that they are, then you are going to lose your voice on college campuses." 

Knowing the enemy is essential to victory, Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu once recognized, and a good place to start with defeating Israel's campus enemies is watching Hate Spaces.

SOURCE 





British Universities are being nationalised by stealth

While it’s right to smash the closed shop in higher education, these reforms are essentially a Whitehall power grab

The government’s higher education bill will run a gauntlet of opposition starting today in the House of Lords, where many members are chancellors, fellows or other panjandrums of the grander universities. Some criticisms will be self-serving and wrong: the bill has good features. But in one central respect, critics are right. This is nationalisation. The bureaucrats of the Department for Education have long wanted to get more control of universities and this bill finally grants their wish.

Britain has some of the world’s best universities, second only to America. The chief reason is that they have been almost as autonomous as the great private universities of the Ivy League. This is for three historical reasons. First, thanks to the Bill of Rights of 1689, they escaped the centralised control that continental universities experienced from first the church and then the Napoleonic or Bismarckian state.

Second, in 1919 when they faced financial ruin and were rescued by the government, British universities were nonetheless allowed an unusual degree of self-government: public money normally brings far more central control. Third, the fees revolution has brought at least some consumer pressure to bear. The OECD says fees have made British universities successful without damaging social justice.

The key problem the bill sets out to solve is the closed-shop nature of the higher-education sector, which is indeed an issue. A cartel of institutions, paying their vice-chancellors huge salaries, is generally untroubled by competition from upstart new entrants. The plate-glass novelties in the 1960s were supposed to introduce a wave of radical experimentation. Instead they aped the older institutions, faithfully copying their faults as well as virtues.

The incumbents often behave badly towards new entrants. For instance, the London College of International Business Studies has become a good higher-education institution with a degree top-up programme validated by a Swiss university. But it has searched in vain for a British university to validate its degree programmes since 2011. In one case it completed a successful Quality Assurance Agency review only to be jilted at the altar by a newly appointed pro-vice-chancellor. Le Cordon Bleu, the world’s leading culinary institute, offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees in other countries, but cannot do so here.

These are just two examples; I don’t rest my case on them, but they are illustrative of the many institutions that would invigorate the higher-education sector if allowed in; it is mostly snobbery that keeps them out. The Ucas system inevitably directs students towards members of the cartel.

Yet the Department for Education has chosen to gloss what is in effect a power grab as a liberal move. The new system of registration will be the first time the DfE has regulated the entire higher education sector, whether or not an institution receives public funding. The new Office for Students (which will surely soon be known as Ofstud) was described by Lord Waldegrave — mixing Hindu and Judaic metaphors as only a fellow of All Souls can — as a centralised behemoth of a regulator in a juggernaut of a bill. It will be able to abolish any university: Cambridge, say. Seriously. At present these powers would doubtless be in safe hands; but do we really want such a hostage to fortune lurking on the statute books? As Baroness Wolf points out, just having that power will enable the quango to put pressure on an institution.

The justification for central control is that if we are to let new entrants into higher education, then we must have the power to abolish fake universities. We don’t want Trump U here. But mission creep is inevitable. Ofstud will evolve, as Ofsted did in schools. Just as the principal anxiety in a head teacher’s life is the Ofsted inspection, and how to game it, so vice-chancellors will obsess about gaming the new Teaching Excellence Framework.

A quango with this power means mission creep is inevitable
It already happens with the Research Excellence Framework. Universities begin planning for the next REF as soon as the last one is finished, and while some of this planning is desirable — pressing low-quality researchers to do better or leave — academics are often seconded to work almost full-time for several years on the REF. As Lord Hennessy put it at the second reading of the bill, academics already spend too much time on the plumbing, rather than the poetry, of scholarship. And much of this plumbing isn’t even connected to anything as useful as a drain or a water supply. It’s plumbing for plumbing’s sake.

This reform will not address the deeper problems afflicting higher education, which are intellectual rather than administrative. It may make them worse. Yes, new entrants will ginger things up in some areas; and yes, it is right to recognise good teaching as well as good research, but Ofstud’s invention is unlikely to help students identify where brilliant courses taught by inspired professors lie concealed within generally mediocre universities. As Ofsted shows, certification tends to obscure differences between institutions.

Moreover, the bigger problem is that universities are losing touch with real life, as they did (except in Scotland) in the 18th century. They have pockets of genius, especially in the hard sciences, but they are also inflexible, navel-gazing, self-serving, not politically diverse and antithetical to free speech. Many creative thinkers are now not in universities.

University bosses regularly cave in to “snowflake” student demands for “no-platforming”, “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” against “micro-aggressions” (such as teaching Plato). Ranking universities on their attitudes to free speech is not in Ofstud’s remit; rather, with it measuring “student satisfaction”, the problem may get worse. Two years after the bloody attack on free speech on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, both Bristol and Manchester universities’ student unions have forbidden the satirical magazine from being sold on campus, lest it fail the “safe-space” policy. So much for “Je suis Charlie”.

Nor will Ofstud do anything to combat the ideological purging of universities, chronicled by Professor Jonathan Haidt of New York University, founder of the Heterodox Academy. He says that as recently as 1996 in psychology departments left-wing/progressive professors outnumbered those with right-wing/libertarian views by four to one. Today the ratio is 17 to one. “Very few people know just how radically the professoriate has changed in the last 20 years,” he said in a recent lecture. “Undergraduates are exposed to less political diversity than any other generation, except in the 18th century when universities were divinity schools.”

SOURCE 






South Australian Schools Force Children To Follow Transgender Agenda

A new Education Department policy has, for the first time, explicitly detailed how public schools should accommodate transgender students in line with their legal responsibilities. An extreme move has taken place, that echoes cultural Marxist ideology being pushed on our youth, with an aim of exploiting them with values that go against commonsense, logical thinking, morals, and to put it simply, are un-Australian. The contents of this program are extremely dangerous as it promotes and encourages a mental disorder, rather than finding ways to help these individuals, in the same way other illnesses are treated.

This policy enforces that transgender students can use their preferred first name and pronoun, such as she, he, zhe, xhe, or they. The problem with this is that it teaches our children a falsehood, in that there are more than 2 genders, which through DNA has proven that isn’t the case. The policy also enforces that transgender students can choose whatever uniform they would like to wear. This will confuse other students into thinking one can choose to be whichever gender they wish on any particular day, rather than knowing the fact, that one is born and will always remain either male or female. This is further enforced with the option given to these students in choosing which toilet and change rooms they wish to access.

Anyone can see the problems that will be encountered by having people with different genitalia in the same bathroom or change room. Not only from a moral aspect, but also that sexual assaults have occurred due to these changes, with FTM transgenders facing assaults and MTF transgenders conducting assaults on others. Furthermore these problems will also increase now that these students can share sleeping quarters on school camps with the gender they identify as. They can also take part in Physical Education lessons and sports according to the gender they choose. Imagine how unfair a contest between a MTF transgender person and a female would be. The former will enjoy an advantage that has been proven time and time again when these measures have been introduced into sport.

As extreme as this policy may seem, the department said the policy would ensure “consistent, clear” treatment of transgender pupils by school leaders. Executive Director of Statewide Services and Child Development Ann-Marie Hayes said, “the difference is that this clearly articulates what we require from schools. We had a number of queries from schools and parents, and we needed to make it very clear what our legislative requirements were and how schools enact them — supporting principals in particular but also families in what they can expect from schools.” Ann-Marie Hayes also played the SJW victim card in saying, “this is a particular group that we know get quite bullied and harassed, the message we are giving to peers here is we don’t support homophobia and transphobia in a school setting.” Homophobia and transphobia will be the least of her concerns when the consequences of deviating from the natural order and promoting confusion are manifested.

This policy follows many that we have seen come into fruition over the last couple of years. It all started with the Safe Schools program, that taught young children how to cross-dress into what they felt comfortable in, how to look up fetish and gay clubs, search porn on the internet, be told that gender isn’t confined to male or female, and that all of these extreme measures should be accepted due to tolerance. Then we saw the Respectful Relationships program that taught students about male privilege, and how they have an unfair advantage especially if white and straight, and how they are constant abusers of women. Then we saw the Building Belonging program that enforces cultural diversity by attacking Australian values. These programs have all been pushed by the same people, and are doing so due to their Marxist ideology, rather than it being programs aimed at tackling bullying, domestic violence, and racism.

Shine SA, which delivers the controversial Safe Schools program in South Australia, backed the policy. Chief executive Jill Davidson said bullying of gender diverse students had “a significant impact on well-being, school attendance and educational outcomes”, and the policy would ensure students “receive a quality education in a safe, supportive and inclusive environment”. She also said, “schools have been looking for support in this area and it is great to have formal policies that provide them with direction and guidance.” It seems as though she is oblivious to the disastrous consequences of this policy, that will actually result in worse outcomes for students.

Roslyn Phillips, the former national research officer for Family Voice Australia, however shares the views of the silent majority of Australians. She said the vast majority of young people who felt they should be the opposite sex “grow out of it” if schools and doctors did not encourage it. “It’s a real problem to single out these children and treat what they think (they are) as real,” she said. This affirms the crucial point that gender dysphoria is a mental disorder that should be treated and cured, rather than something that should be celebrated and promoted. These people are suffering with these conditions, and there are many that acknowledge that it is a disorder they have, but then we have Marxist politicians trying to enforce that what they have is normal and that they should embrace it rather than cure it. How damaging must it be for these people to be told untruths, and to not receive treatment all because extremists have decided that it is politically incorrect and too offensive to fix such issues.

Another underlying issue that needs to be discussed is that policies such as this continue to give the state more power over our children, and at the same time strip away responsibilities from parents. Ms Hayes said that it would be “highly unlikely”, regarding a child wanting to be transgendered, that they would go against the wishes of parents unless it was an “absolute last resort” such as a suicide risk. The problem is who determines what constitutes a suicide risk, it’s quite easy for people to exaggerate purposefully for the sake of an agenda. Also, Ms Hayes contradicted herself by saying that if the wishes of transgender students to “affirm their identity” clashed with those of their parents, the policy allowed schools to “assess the best interests of the child to ensure their physical and psychological safety and well-being”.

By that statement it is quite clear that they are positioning themselves to play the role of a parent, therefore stripping the responsibilities and duties that parents have in providing their children with the right values. They know that parents would never teach such degeneracy to their children, which is why they have taken it upon themselves to take over that role, in teaching the moral guidelines that the state deems fit rather than teaching our children how to read, write, and learn all of the necessary subjects to equip them for their future.

The Education Department’s policy is due to receive a huge backlash from the community, so they have put so called “alternatives” in place, in an effort to show that they are able to work with families in the community. With regards to the use of toilets and change rooms, they said “some possible alternative options may include use of disability or staff facilities.” With regards to the accommodation arrangements for transgender students at school camps, they said “the ideal situation will be for a student to access sleeping quarters that correspond to the student’s gender identity if they choose…if this is not possible or appropriate then private or separate sleeping quarters can be considered.”

One needs to understand that this rhetoric in the name of progress is continually changed and altered in order to secretly allow the Marxist agenda to be realised. When we first heard about the push for gay marriage, the Labor Party said that it wouldn’t strip away religious freedoms from churches who refused to conduct such a service. Then Bill Shorten came out and said that this no longer applies and that having religious freedom was causing discrimination. The left can not be trusted when it comes to providing what is best for our children.

The left have slowly but dramatically in the last 50 years attacked the family unit, with an aim of imposing a one world Communist and Marxist utopia. They have been successful in turning society 180 degrees, in that whatever used to be considered taboo and degeneracy is now considered good, and whatever used to be considered good is now labelled evil and bigoted. There has been several polls released on this issue of whether it is a good policy to allow transgenders to choose their pronouns, bathrooms, uniforms, sleeping arrangements, and sports. Shockingly in the Adelaide Advertiser it is a dead heat with just under 47% voting both for or against, with another 6% in the other columns. Likewise in the 7 News Australia Facebook poll it was a 50% draw to both groups for and against the changes.

This means that if the polls are legit and haven’t been tampered with, we are in a lot of trouble. Not long ago it would of been unheard of that 50% of people would support such changes, and indicates that the propaganda and brainwashing that the left have been successfully pushing through TV programs like Q&A, The Project, and in most of the mainstream media, has worked. They have been able to transform a nation from a moral, family focused, common sense society, into a degenerate, immoral, Marxist one, all in the name of a flawed understanding of love and tolerance in an effort to justify one’s insecurities.

SOURCE




No comments: