The campus war on Jews

David Horowitz

According to a recent study conducted by the "Brand Israel Group," support for Israel among Jewish college students has dropped 27% in the last 6 years. This mirrors a smaller but still significant drop in support among Americans generally, from 76% to 62%. According to Fern Oppenheim, the founder of the Brand Israel Group that conducted the survey, the source of this drop is the perceived lack of shared values between college students and the Jewish state. The same study found that 1 in 3 Jewish students reported anti-Semitic incidents on their campuses. Of these, 59% said that the incidents were related to anti-Israel attitudes. To explain this, Oppenheim blamed a political "atmosphere" on campus that divides the world into oppressor groups and victims, Israel being a symbol of the former.

"We are allowing Israel to be defined by its detractors," Oppenheim warned, which is unfortunately true. But her proposed remedy to step up efforts to brand Israel as not only a tolerant society but, in fact, the helper of victims, even of its enemies is flawed. To support her strategy, Oppenheim offers the case of Ismail Haniyeh, a leader of Hamas, the terrorist organization sworn to destroy Israel and exterminate its Jews. Oppenheim observes that Haniyeh sent his ill granddaughter to Israel to receive medical treatment because he knew "Israel is too decent to turn her away," and says: "People need to know this."

Perhaps they do. But this is clearly not the solution to the problem. If it were, Ismail Haniyeh would have left Hamas and joined Israel's supporters. Re-branding Israel alone is not the answer to a propaganda war, based on genocidal lies, whose goal is Israel's destruction. The only viable solution is to do what Jewish organizations have so far refused to do: brand the American supporters of Hamas and the campus promoters of its lies as terrorist enablers and allies.

The strategy of merely promoting Israel's good deeds, while pretending that Hamas's American supporters are merely misinformed, is failing for a simple reason: If you are accused of stealing other people's land, imprisoning them in Gaza-size ghettos, and segregating them by race, the fact that you are sending humanitarian missions to Haiti and other needy cases or providing medical care to your mortal enemies is not going to exculpate you in the eyes of people who have been seduced by Palestinian lies. In their eyes, you are still the oppressor and these good deeds are merely efforts to obscure that evil fact. That is why lesbian leftists at the "Dyke March" in Chicago banned rainbow flags with the Jewish star – even though Israel is the only country in the Middle East where a gay pride parade can be held. They see Israel's acceptance of gays as "pinkwashing" – a fig leaf provided by one victim group to cover up its crimes against another. The left even has a term for this: "intersectionality."

The only way to counter such malicious attacks is to brand the campus allies of Hamas for what they are: supporters of genocidal lies and a terrorist war to obliterate the state of Israel and kill its Jews. These American allies of Hamas terrorism include Students for Justice in Palestine, the Muslim Students Association, Jewish Voice for Peace, and assorted leftwing groups who support them.

Students for Justice in Palestine, the leader of this anti-Israel, pro-Hamas coalition was founded in 2001 by Hatem Bazian, a Fatah activist at the time. He created it as an ancillary support for the suicide bombing Second Intifada, launched in that year. The chief funder of SJP and orchestrator of its campaigns is a well-established Hamas front, American Muslims for Palestine. Hatem Bazian is the chairman of the AMP board. Since Hamas is a terrorist organization, Students for Justice in Palestine and its campus coalition are clearly instruments of its terrorist campaigns. They do not themselves plant bombs but they support the terrorists who do and spread their political propaganda, much the way the Irish political party Sinn Fein was a working partner of the terrorist Irish Republican Army.

Stigmatizing the campus supporters of terrorists would effectively neutralize the attacks on Israel. It would provide the basis for a campaign to pressure American universities to withdraw their recognition and funding from these groups. It would discredit the lies that fuel their campus campaigns and inspire the anti-Semitic attacks that have reached epidemic proportions.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center has conducted campaigns that employ this branding principle for ten years at over 100 campuses. But ours has been a lonely voice. At virtually every campus where we have organized events, our efforts have been undermined by Hillel and Students for Israel groups who smear us as "Islamophobic" and "racist," though we are neither, and who come to the defense of Students for Justice in Palestine as though they were victims and not aggressors. In other words, these Jewish groups prefer to join hands with an organization supporting a genocidal war against Jews, in condemning (in my case) a Jew who doesn't mince words in opposing our enemies. If Hillel and groups that care about Israel's survival would instead turn their guns around and brand Israel's enemies for what they are, the tide of anti-Semitic hatred on campus would begin to reverse itself, and support for the Jewish state would surely grow.

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Scottish National Party drive to get more poor children into university is backfiring on 'devalued' pupils, adviser warns

Nicola Sturgeon’s drive to get more children from deprived backgrounds into university is backfiring on pupils who feel “devalued” because they are not academically inclined, her hand-picked poverty adviser has warned.

Naomi Eisenstadt said the Scottish Government’s radical proposals for widening access to university mean schools are now under pressure to get pupils from disadvantaged families into higher education.

But youngsters from poor backgrounds told her that the best teachers tend to focus on the more able students and some, who are not suited to academia, have been left with “little support and advice”.

While Ms Eisenstadt said the SNP’s free university tuition policy is a “fantastic advantage for those who go on to higher education”, she highlighted deep spending cuts to Scotland’s colleges and urged ministers to get away from the perception that “the only thing we value is the academic route.”

The warnings were made in a report titled “The Life Chances of Young People in Scotland”, which concluded that the lives of children are still “largely determined” by the social class they are born into.

The Scottish Conservatives said the SNP government must now “face up to the reality of its universal free tuition, and realise the damage it is doing to those who need help the most.”

Annie Wells, the party’s equalities spokesman, said: “Education is such a key route in getting people out of a cycle of poverty. Yet now we see that SNP policies on free tuition are actually hindering that for many.”

Ms Sturgeon has set radical targets to increase the proportion of youngsters from poor backgrounds winning a place at Scottish universities, which will set lower entry grades for those who come from deprived areas.

But Ms Eisenstadt said that disadvantaged youngsters had told her that their brightest peers get the most help from teachers “while they get little support and advice on future choices.”

She said: “Ensuring that young people from poorer backgrounds get a fair chance at university education is vitally important, but it may have had some unintended impact.

“The pressure schools are under to get more students from disadvantaged backgrounds into university has left some young people, less suited for higher academic study, feeling devalued and under pressure themselves.”

She cited an international study showing Scotland was the only country in which boys from lower income families had higher school work pressure than their more affluent peers.

While she admitted that “parity of esteem” between university and non-academic routes is “unlikely”, given graduates’ higher average salaries, she said ministers must send a “clear message” that work experience and apprenticeships have value too.

Her report highlighted that the SNP government cut college funding by 18 per cent more than inflation between 2010/11 and 2014/15, while funding for universities was cut by four per cent more than inflation.

Citing pupil’s complaints about a lack of careers advice, Ms Eisenstadt said the Scottish Government should revisit Curriculum for Excellence given it was meant to “equip them with the skills to work out for themselves” what they want to do after leaving school.

She also advised the First Minister against repeating her boast that the vast majority of school leavers go onto a “positive destination”, saying more research needs to be conducted to understand the type of courses and jobs they are filling.

Ms Sturgeon welcomed the report, saying it “provides useful challenge to the Scottish and UK Governments to do more to improve the life chances of young people from less advantaged backgrounds and to build a fairer future.”

Kezia Dugdale, the Scottish Labour leader, said: “Naomi Eisenstadt’s last report was subject to a white-wash by the Scottish Government, toning down the language on key recommendations to help alleviate poverty.

"It is vital that the SNP doesn’t repeat the same fudge and delivers on the findings of this report.”

SOURCE 




Australia: Female doctors asked about family plans during job interviews

This is an old chestnut.  Female doctors have a much shorter working life on average than male doctors do.  But training doctors is very costly.  So to get the most out of what is spent on medical education, it makes sense to train male doctors only.  But that has produced such a shriek of anger from feminists that all medical education is now open to women.

When considering applicants for advanced medical training, however, it makes sense for the sex of the applicant to be one factor in deciding on who gets the training.  And that appears to be current practice in Australia.  But that is DISCRIMINATION so must be forbidden


Female doctors are being asked about their plans to have children during job interviews at public hospitals, in a practice the Australian Medical Association says should have "stopped yesterday".

NSW president of the AMA Professor Brad Frankum has called for tougher penalties against hospitals and training institutions in order to wipe out the practice, after he received reports of it taking place during interviews and informal talks with candidates beforehand.

He said most of the reports related to positions at public hospitals and tended to come from candidates going for specialist or advanced trainee positions across most fields of medicine

"There need to be sanctions against hospitals that do the wrong thing. "If hospitals are allowing this to happen, then those hospitals should not be allowed to employ trainees until they sort it out," he said.

"This is not information an employer needs to be privy to ahead of employing someone and nor should they be seeking it on a formal or informal basis."

SOURCE