I remember how it was -- JR
Monday, November 13, 2023
‘Woke’ Elementary School Reportedly Cancels Veterans Day Assembly
A school in Redmond, Washington reportedly replaced its annual assembly to commemorate Veterans Day with a “Peace Assembly,” according to a report from Seattle outlet KTTH.
Reportedly, Benjamin Rush Elementary in the Lake Washington School District holds a Veterans Day assembly every year. But, this year, the school’s administration decided to recognized the “International Day of Tolerance” instead (via KTTH):
Families did not have much time to learn about the change, which was jarring to those who expected a Veterans Day assembly. The “Peace Assembly” appeared in the school’s newsletter on October 29 and November 5, but it did not explain what it was.
“I was extremely disappointed and yet not surprised,” one Benjamin Rush Elementary father told The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH. He asked for anonymity to prevent reprisals for speaking up. “For years the Veterans Assembly has been a highlight at the school and one of the few midday assemblies that gathers a fairly large audience of parents to come hear the speakers.”
The school ditched the patriotic songs for those centered around the assembly’s theme of Tolerance, Acceptance and Kindness. Some of the songs to be performed are “Live in Peace,” “Peacebuilder Pledge Song,” “Amani Utupe Na Ustawi” and “Namaste.”
“Students will spend most of the assembly singing songs, with each grade level performing two songs that they learned while attending music classes at the school,” a district spokesperson said of the Peace Assembly in a statement to The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH.
To the father who reached out to The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH, this seems like a slight of veterans who fought those who threatened peace.
The father who spoke to KTTH host Jason Rantz explained that in recent years, the school administration has “moved strongly away from pride in our traditions and American history.” He added that “we should be taking the time to show our children and our community that we have brave men and women who are willing to stand up and fight for our freedom and the peace that other places in the world can only dream of.”
At least ten other schools will host their annual Veterans Day assembly. Reportedly, Benjamin Rush Elementary is the only one breaking from the tradition.
“I remember three years ago, sitting next to a parent who had recently moved to America from Germany,” the father explained. “She was sitting there with tears in her eyes. Afterward, she explained to me that she was blown away with the patriotism and American pride.”
The father added that that kind of experience “will now be missed.”
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Rabbis at woke colleges describe ‘unnerving’ antisemitism as campuses become hotbeds of hate
Thousands of rabbis gathered Sunday in Brooklyn for its famous annual Chabad event — including hundreds on the front lines at some of the wokest, rabidly antisemitic campuses in the nation.
Several rabbis who attended the photogenic event in Crown Heights and helm Jewish centers at liberal US colleges described to The Post how their campuses have been transformed into dangerous hotbeds of hate since the Hamas slaughter in Israel on Oct. 7.
“It’s been disturbing, unnerving — it’s been a shock to students to see that kind of immediate chutzpah, where the demonstrators came out even before the blood dried up, to shout with such audacity on the campus with no qualifications at all,’’ said Rabbi Levi Haskelevich, the Chabad rabbi at the University of Pennsylvania for the past 23 years, referring to protesters supporting the Palestinian cause.
Haskelvich was recently recorded in a viral video helping a student put on tefillin, or leather straps containing sections of the Torah for praying, while a group of pro-Palestinian students marched past shouting “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.”
rabbis
“We have students who are into their PhDs who said from the moment of the attacks they could not find a safe place on campus,” he said.
In the five weeks since Israel was rocked by the surprise terror attack, some US campuses have been flooded with violent pro-Hamas rallies and horrifying assaults on Jewish students.
Prestigious institutions including New York and Columbia universities in the Big Apple have roundly received failing grades for their responses to the recent spate of antisemitism.
But as hate swirls around them, many Jewish American students have seemed to regain a sense of pride in their religion and background, the rabbis said.
The rabbis said there has been a lot of “chaos” on campuses as clashes between students over the Israel-Hamas war worsen.
Rabbi Shmuly Weiss, who has been Chabad rabbi at McGill University in Montreal since 2007, said that after receiving a donation of 100 Star of David necklaces, students who had never worn one quickly opted to put one on.
“It’s not just about Israel — they’re stepping up and saying, ‘You know what? I’m going to be a proud Jew.’ Students are scared, but they’re embracing this tense situation that we’re in. They’re very, very proud of their Judaism,’’ Weiss said.
Still, Chabad Rabbi Shlomo Elkan at Oberlin College in Ohio said some students there were so scared after Oct. 7 that they urged him to cancel the campus’s Chanukah menorah lighting ceremony.
The students feared the ceremony would be read as “too pro-Israel” from the school, he said.
To try to ease tensions, there have been conversations on campus involving both Jewish leaders and the student head of the Muslim Student Association, Elkan said.
“We had a meeting last week with [the] Students for Palestine [group] talking about these issues in an effort to bring the temperature down,’’ the rabbi said. “It was a small crowd, 20-something people, but that’s where change really starts.’’
Rabbi Meir Chaim Posner, who has been Chabad rabbi at Yale University for the past eight years, said he has noticed a rise in the “quiet insidious stuff” such as discrimination and singling Jewish students out on campus.
“Many, many students have close friends that suddenly don’t understand or don’t appreciate or don’t affirm what they’re going through in terms of their sense of mourning, in terms of their sense of pain,” Posner said, referring to the aftermath of Oct. 7.
“And then in the weeks after, they’ll find a close friend who is actively supporting Hamas,” the rabbi said
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Congress is planning to turn up the heat on major universities about their funding
Republicans in Congress are planning to turn up the heat on major universities to fully disclose how they receive billions of dollars from shady foreign sources, and explain whether these countries are looking to influence the American college experience with a hefty dose of leftist and anti-Israel propaganda, The Post has learned.
The expected move follows a bombshell report released this past week that shows billions of dollars “from foreign governments, many of which are authoritarian,” including those in the Middle East, are sloshing around the budgets of our elite schools.
The report stated there is a correlation between where the money was spent and campus antisemitic activity.
According to my sources on Capitol Hill, GOP lawmakers also believe these foreign donations are at the heart of the increasingly radical pedagogy at those hallowed universities — a contributing factor in the disgusting displays by student groups at these schools celebrating the brutal Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks against Jews near Gaza.
Why foreign countries like Qatar, China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates care so much about American higher education is an obvious question. One answer: Plenty of students from those countries attended American universities.
Yet it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to imagine that places like Qatar and China, in particular, would like to use the college classroom to advance their strategic interests, which don’t really align with our own.
Qatar, for instance, is nominally a US ally, but it also is the home of Hamas’ leadership.
China is, well, China, and that has plenty of GOP lawmakers worried that both countries are using their clout with elite colleges for nefarious means.
“Congress will be putting pressure on universities to show how much money is coming from these types of sources,” said one Wall Street executive involved in the matter.
The House recently advanced legislation for heightened disclosure on foreign contributions to American universities; hearings are a possibility.
What are they getting?
“Lawmakers also want to know what the countries are getting in return for their investment,” the executive added.
The exec says many in Congress believe the universities taking this foreign cash may also be skirting the law.
Colleges are required to disclose the sources of donations that hit $250,000 or more cumulatively.
Yet many don’t, he says, at least not on a timely basis.
Moreover, colleges often don’t provide full information on the donor identities.
The report from the Network Contagion Research Institute on foreign cash flowing to US campuses found that, from 2015 to 2020, “institutions that accepted money from Middle Eastern donors, had, on average, 300% more antisemitic incidents than those institutions that did not.”
It’s not surprising that UPenn — the source of massive antisemitic protests following Oct. 7 — is high on the list of receiving funds from these suspicious sources, but it wasn’t alone.
According to the report: “Eight Ivy League schools were disproportionately represented in the highest-funded institutions from what it called “undocumented” origins.
Among those, “Cornell (2nd) and Harvard (3rd), Yale (6th), Stanford (14th), Columbia (16th) and the University of Pennsylvania (18th) — placed in the top twenty overall.”
Does that funding lead to weaponizing the academic experience to produce antisemitic monsters?
Paul Kamenar, an attorney for the National Legal and Policy Center, lays out a case that it does. “The money comes into the schools funding professors and their programs that are left-wing as hell,” he tells me. “Schools get various grants to teach students from a leftist perspective.”
Following the money trail should turn up some interesting results.
Back in 2020, Kamenar’s organization did an amazing deep dive into the funding of a think-tank known as the Penn Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
A “think tank” named after Sleepy Joe Biden is almost comical; what isn’t funny is UPenn’s curious funding source after the center was created: Communist China, the same country that quashes dissent of all kinds, engages in religious persecution and has imperialistic ambitions.
Coincidence? Maybe, but Kamenar says his group’s investigation found some disturbing coincidences.
As millions of dollars of Chinese money flowed to UPenn, Penn Biden began inviting Chinese government officials as speakers to its conferences.
One conference during the early days of COVID glossed over China’s role in the spread and likely creation of the deadly virus that led to a worldwide pandemic, instead bizarrely focusing on Hungary’s allegedly xenophobic reaction to it by restricting Chinese nationals from coming into the country.
Leftism in the guise of academic freedom has been a problem for some time, of course.
For years, universities have degraded courses in Western Civilization, branding them remnants of an educational system run by dead (and racist) white men.
They were replaced by increasingly woke core requirements.
Syracuse University is typical of the radicalizing of the college learning experience.
Its so-called “course requirement” for undergraduate students includes classes in “Magic and Religion,” “Gender in a Globalizing World” and “Popular Culture in the Middle East.”
What do you think? Post a comment.
Try not to laugh when you discuss that course load, but there’s an Orwellian quality to what’s being passed off as an academic experience these days.
Those soft subjects also include brainwashing in leftist, anti-American and anti-Israel dogma, critics say.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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