Butler University is investigating its College Republicans club for condemning antisemitism

While other universities, including Rutgers, have suspended a group called Students for Justice in Palestine over violations of discrimination and harassment policies, Butler University apparently is investigating anyone who dares to condemn the pro-Palestine organization.

Indianapolis-based Butler University launched an investigation of the school’s College Republicans chapter Oct. 30, according to an email obtained by The Daily Signal. Butler did this after the GOP club condemned the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter for holding an anti-Israel protest only five days after the brutal rape, torture, and slaughter of over 1,200 Israelis at the hands of Hamas terrorists.

The protesters on Oct. 12 repeated several antisemitic chants, including “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” (which calls for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea).

They also chanted, “Not a victim, not a crime!” This chant suggests that because pro-Palestine students believe Israel isn’t a victim, it wasn’t a crime for Hamas terrorists to rape, torture, and slaughter women and children Oct. 7 near the border between southern Israel and the Gaza Strip. (Hamas has been the elected government of Gaza since 2007.)

The Butler University College Republicans chapter condemned the protest in an Instagram post Oct. 13, describing the chant of “Not a victim, not a crime!” as an “attempt to justify the cold-blooded attacks by an internationally designated terrorist organization on innocent civilians.”

Butler University is a private, nonprofit university that enrolls over 5,000 students and receives federal funding. By taking federal funding and grants, Butler is required to maintain civil rights and Title IX staff who can investigate alleged discrimination in violation of federal law.

The school’s policy against discrimination also forbids student groups from calling for violence against or harassment of racial and ethnic groups.

According to copies of official emails and letters obtained by The Daily Signal, members of Students for Justice in Palestine filed a complaint Oct. 15 with Azure Swinford, Butler’s associate director for institutional equity and Title IX coordinator, asserting that the College Republicans’ condemnation incited violence against “Muslim and Palestinian” students.

Butler University did not immediately respond to The Daily Signal’s request that the school confirm or deny the authenticity of the emails and letters.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/12/14/butler-university-investigates-college-republicans-for-condemning-antisemitic-chants

********************************************

Solving America’s History and Civics Crisis

History and civics education in America is languishing. A troubling number of Americans can’t even pass a U.S. citizenship test.

Pioneer Institute‘s recent poll findings on the topic are “pretty sobering,” explains Chris Sinacola, the organization’s director of communications and media relations.

The Pioneer Institute, a think tank based in Massachusetts, offers solutions for how schools and educators can ignite a passion for American history and solve the civics crisis facing the country in a new book, “Restoring the City on a Hill: U.S. History & Civics in America’s Schools.”

In Pioneer’s poll, Massachusetts residents were asked questions drawn from the citizenship test.

The questions were about “things that new citizens, or aspiring U.S. citizens, need to know and they need to get 60% to pass,” Sinacola says, adding that “the average score among our citizens was 63%.”

“So you can say, ‘Yay, we passed, we can all remain citizens,’” he says, but it is a bit of an “indictment” when some Americans don’t know how long a U.S. senator’s term is or even how many members the Senate has.

“It’s a bit of a warning sign,” Sinacola says.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/12/15/solving-americas-history-and-civics-crisis

***********************************************

A Renowned Science and Engineering Institute Loses Its Way Due to Woke Leadership, Imperiling Jewish Students

As a 1981 graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I have been appalled by the behavior of the president of the university, Sally Kornbluth, in the face of the antisemitism now infesting MIT, something that wasn’t there when I was a student.

I echo all of the serious concerns raised by over 700 other MIT alumni who, on Dec. 11, sent a letter to Kornbluth and the MIT Corporation, the board that runs the university, over the “continued failure of the MIT administration to address” this dangerous plague. Kornbluth has lost the moral authority to continue as the president of MIT.

In fact, in a tone-deaf move, the members of that board issued a statement on Dec. 7 expressing their full support for Kornbluth, which, as the alumni letter correctly says, sends the wrong message to the “MIT community, and especially its Jewish members.” The statement says the board members “utterly reject” all “forms of hate” yet they refuse to take any action against those who have been spewing such hate on campus.

Of course, this tolerance for racist behavior is also no surprise to me, given MIT’s abandonment of basic principles of equal treatment of its students based on merit, regardless of their race or ethnicity, that started in the 1990s. That is when MIT started discriminating on the basis of skin color in its admissions policy. It even filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, aiming to justify such invidious discrimination, in the ultimately successful lawsuits filed by Asian American students against Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

The scandal involves Kornbluth’s dismaying and highly criticized testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Dec. 5, where she was accompanied by her woke apologists for students supporting a designated terrorist organization, Hamas, the plagiarist president of Harvard and the now resigned-before-being-fired president of the University of Pennsylvania.

At that hearing, Kornbluth implied, as the alumni letter says, “that calls for genocide of Jews may not constitute bullying and harassment under MIT’s code of conduct, depending on context.”

What context could possibly justify support for terrorist attacks and a call for genocide?! Protecting those who engage in such violent rhetoric, as my 700 fellow alumni have said, “rather than the Jewish victims of such rhetoric, sends a strong signal to the rest of the world that violent words of hate are acceptable, at least as they relate to the Jewish people.”

Somehow, I doubt that if rhetoric calling for the extermination of blacks had been spewed at these supposedly elite universities any of these college presidents would have waited a second to immediately condemn it or take disciplinary actions against the students spewing such venom.

That raises the more substantive problem. The problem isn’t just Kornbluth’s regrettable and inexplicable testimony. It is also her refusal to take any action to suspend or expel the pro-Hamas, antisemitic students who have harassed, threatened, and intimidated Jewish students and faculty members, disrupted classes, protested in areas that the school has said explicitly are off-limits for protests, and blocked access to the main lobby of MIT in November.

As a letter from current Israeli and Jewish MIT students recounts, the administration took no steps against these students for any of these actions that not only threatened other students and faculty, but physically kept Jewish students out of buildings and prevented them from attending classes.

The worst actions of these thugs who masquerade as college students occurred on Nov. 9, the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the day Jews all over Germany were attacked.

That is not just a coincidence since these ill-behaved—(and that’s putting it mildly—students who support Hamas, in their calls for a violent uprising or Intifada and their justification for the terror attacks by Hamas, are echoing the same antisemitism and violence perpetrated by the Nazis.

What did Kornbluth and the MIT administration do about that? Instead of dispersing, arresting, and detaining these thugs, the administration warned Jewish students not “to enter MIT’s main lobby” to breach the blockade because of a “risk to their physical safety.” They were told, says the student complaint letter, “to enter campus from back entrances and not stay in Hillel [a Jewish student facility] for fear of their physical safety.”

MIT allowed these terrorism supporters to overrun the campus and refused to protect their victims.

And what was Kornbluth’s excuse? In a Nov. 9 letter to “members of the MIT community,” Kornbluth refused to take action because she had “serious concerns about collateral consequences for the students, such as visa issues.” In other words, she wanted to make sure that Hamas supporters who were foreign students wouldn’t have their visas canceled or get deported.

In fact, that is exactly what should be happening. Antisemites who support terrorism and genocide, and who themselves terrorize fellow students and MIT faculty, not only shouldn’t be at the institute, if they are not U.S. citizens, they shouldn’t be in the country.

Kornbluth’s badly misguided priorities are just another example of why she is unfit to be the president of what was once known as, but appears to be no longer, the premier science and engineering school in the country.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/12/14/renowned-science-engineering-institute-loses-way-woke-leadership-imperiling-jewish-students

******************************************************

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

******************************************************