I remember how it was -- JR
French Government Launches an Investigation, Blames America for 'Islamo-Leftist' Influence Over Its Universities
As it turns out, the U.S. has contributed to “Islamo-leftist” ideas that are cracking French society like a shovel to ice.
Hence, France means to investigate the influx and melt American influence on the college scene.
The government announced such — in the words of The Daily Wire — “following months of rhetoric from top French officials and leading academics warning against ideas coming to France from American universities.”
Per The New York Times, on Tuesday, French Minister of Higher Education Frederique Vidal informed Parliament that state-run National Center for Scientific Research will probe the “totality of research underway in our country.”
According to the Wire, it’s the first time the French Powers That Be have taken explicit action to oppose “Islamo-leftist” positions.
But the notion of national identity being altered by outside sources isn’t new.
As RedState’s Brandon Morse wrote earlier this month, “The extreme leftist ‘woke’ culture…has infected the country and French officials are now sounding the alarm that it must not infect France itself. … [F]rench officials see what’s happening in America and are making it clear that they need to be ideologically opposed to it.”
The Daily Mail noted on February 9th, “Some French intellects have…argued that American universities are to blame for giving justification to acts of terrorism carried out by Muslims. After three Islamist terror attacks last fall, Education minister Blanquer accused the universities of being complicit.”
And Higher Education Minister Frederique has slammed the impact of cultural conversion before.
The Times reports:
In an earlier television interview, Ms. Vidal said the investigation would focus on “Islamo-leftist” — a controversial term embraced by some of Mr. Macron’s leading ministers to accuse left-leaning intellectuals of justifying Islamism and even terrorism.
“Islamo-leftism corrupts all of society and universities are not impervious,” Ms. Vidal said, adding that some scholars were advancing “radical” and “activist” ideas. Referring also to scholars of race and gender, Ms. Vidal accused them of “always looking at everything through the prism of their will to divide, to fracture, to pinpoint the enemy.”
Not everyone’s ebullient over the investigation, particularly among the academic set.
Frederique’s announcement, says the Times, brought backlash “among university presidents and scholars, deepening fears of a crackdown on academic freedom — especially on studies of race, gender, post-colonial studies and other fields that the French government says have been imported from American universities and contribute to undermining French society.”
Nonetheless, they’re cracking down.
In October, President Emmanuel Macro expressed that he’s not fond of an apple-pie kind of import.
Amid reference to “certain social science theories entirely [courtesy of] the United States,” the leader indicated he’d like to keep France France:
“And in so doing, we have left the intellectual debate to others, to those outside of the Republic by ideologizing it, sometimes yielding to other academic traditions. I am thinking of Anglo-Saxon traditions based on a different history, which is not ours. And when I see certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States, with their problems, which I respect and which exist, but which are just added to ours, I say to myself that it is reasonable to make this choice. And so we must, very clearly, re-invest, on a massive scale, in the field of social sciences, history, understanding of civilizations by creating posts, by stepping up dialogue, academic and scientific debate in order not to allow the knowledge, the understanding of Islam as a religion, of the civilization it underpins and its contribution to our country and our continent to become ideological and exclusively political debates.”
I’d wager many on the Left side of American politics find the world’s favorite place for quiche’s clampdown appalling.
On the other hand, if France adopts American ways, isn’t that cultural appropriation?
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What Left-Wing Educators Don't Teach During 'Black History Month'
Apart from the bizarre notion that educators should set aside one month to salute the historical achievements of one race apart from and above the historical achievements of other races, Black History Month appears to omit a lot of Black history.
About slavery, do our mostly left-wing educators teach that slavery was not unique to America and is as old as humankind? As economist and author Thomas Sowell says: “More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than Blacks brought as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed. White slaves were still being bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire, decades after Blacks were freed in the United States.”
Are students taught that “race-based preferences,” sometimes called “affirmative action,” were opposed by several civil rights leaders? While National Urban League Executive Director Whitney Young supported a type of “Marshall Plan” for a period of 10 years to make up for historical discrimination, his board of directors refused to endorse the plan. In rejecting it, the president of the Urban League in Pittsburgh said the public would ask, “What in blazes are these guys up to? They tell us for years that we must buy (nondiscrimination) and then they say, ‘It isn’t what we want.'”
Do our left-wing educators, during Black History Month, note that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s celebrated New Deal actually hurt Blacks? According to the Cato Institute’s Jim Powell, Blacks lost as many as 500,000 jobs as a result of anti-competitive, job-killing regulations of the New Deal. Powell writes: “The minimum wage regulations made it illegal for employers to hire people who weren’t worth the minimum because they lacked skills. As a result, some 500,000 blacks, particularly in the South, were estimated to have lost their jobs.”
Are students taught that gun control began as a means to deny free Blacks the right to own guns? In ruling that Blacks were chattel property in the Dred Scott case, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney warned that ruling otherwise would mean that Blacks could legally own guns. If Blacks were “entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens,” said Taney, “it would give persons of the Negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one state of the union, the right … to keep and carry arms wherever they went … endangering the peace and safety of the state.”
Are students taught that generations of civil rights leaders opposed illegal immigration and raised questions about legal immigration? After the Civil War, Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass implored employers to hire Blacks over new immigrants. Twenty-five years later, Booker T. Washington pleaded with Southern industrialists to hire Blacks over new immigrants: “One third of the population of the South is of the Negro race. … To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South: Cast down your bucket where you are. Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your fireside.”
About illegal immigration, Coretta Scott King signed a letter urging Congress to retain harsh sanctions against employers who knowingly hire illegal workers. The letter said: “We are concerned … that … the elimination of employer sanctions will cause another problem — the revival of the pre-1986 discrimination against black and brown U.S. and documented workers, in favor of cheap labor — the undocumented workers.”
These are just a few historical and inconvenient notes left on the cutting room floor during Black History Month.
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UK: The hatred of the stupid for the smart
Why do so many students hate Jews? Especially now. You’d think with so much spare time on their hands — all those sob stories about being denied the full Uni Experience of staying drunk on cheap students’-union booze 24/7 and becoming more intimately acquainted with each other and the cast of Neighbours than with their own blood relatives during communal hangover days — they’d be buckling down and using these months to do some work now that they’re prevented by law from getting together and bonding over bullying the Chosen. But no, it seems that for many of them, all that time is being used to put in the extra hours on Jew-baiting duties.
Following a report from a small group of academics at UCL, its Academic Board has passed an advisory resolution calling on the university to ‘retract and replace’ the international definition of anti-Semitism which it adopted in 2019. Rebecca Lyons, vice-president of UCL’s Jewish Society, said: ‘The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism directly codifies what it means to be anti-Semitic, thereby shielding Jewish students from acts of intolerance and hatred. The removal of the definition leaves us exposed and unsafe on campus.’
Who can call this hyperbole when a supporter of the move chose the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day to state ‘I am confident that long will pass Israel’s time, as South Africa passed before it, and we’ll laugh at these days when people actually took this state seriously’? As ever, Jews are being told what is and what is not anti-Semitism, by both their teachers and their fellow students — an unimaginable situation if it were applied to other ethnic minorities.
It’s tempting to think that this is all about Palestine, but that lets those who turn the Socialism of Fools into a campus caper off the hook. A Gentile friend told me of her experience at Dundee University (twinned with Nablus!) in 2015:
‘My best friend was in with the Free Palestine gang and thought I was weird for finding them so appalling. She was eventually enlightened when Trump was running for election — and they basically wanted him in because he was portrayed as a Nazi, so they said “At least he might finally deal with the Jews”. She finally saw what I was talking about, the basic anti-Semitism of these people hiding behind anti-Zionism. Nevertheless, I ended up having to go to the police when a good part of the campus turned on me.’
It’s all about the brains, in my opinion; see the crazy percentage of Nobel Prizes won by this extraordinary people. Anyway, academic anti-Semitism existed long before Israel was reclaimed. The thick children of the bourgeoisie have always known that they can’t keep up with these under-privileged over-achievers, so they get spiteful. Thus no sooner had the musty right-wing prejudices against Jews been overcome, with the end of quotas on the number of Jewish students accepted into the top universities, than what I’ve previously coined ‘Fresh’n’Funky anti-Semitism’ was there to take the weasel wheel under the guise of being pro-Palestinian.
The first wave of banning Jewish student societies started in 1975. Disgustingly, considering the unique Jewish experience of fascism, this was at a time when the National Front was perceived as a threat and thus many students’ unions adopted policies of ‘No Platform for racists and fascists’ with which (in the wake of the UN passing the ‘Zionism is Racism’ resolution) they mired Jewish societies, too.
But Jewish students in Britain have been systemically bullied since the founding of the very first universities right up to the present day — interrupted for a brief period after the war, when anti-Semitism was considered a bit of a faux pas. Only last year the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, sent a letter to vice-chancellors at English universities, accusing them of ignoring the persecution of Jewish students.
Fortunately, there’s no way to bring quotas back and thus prevent this cleverest of peoples from trouncing the dullard spawn of the Gentile ruling class — but by making campuses places of fear for Jewish students, they can have a go. Student activist Harry Saul Markham told me: ‘Anti-Semitism is alive and well at UCL. We, young Jews, are the ones who face anti-Semitism on campus, not these privileged, armchair academics. The provost will give racists a green light if he gets rid of this definition. And if he does that, young Jews applying to university will be sure not to apply to UCL.’
One of the many unattractive elements of wokeness is that it never really stopped hating all persecuted people, as advertised — it just doubles down on the groups of people it feels fine about hating and persecuting. Though anti-Semitism has elements of ordinary racism, it also has the unique quality of incorporating envy and resentment at the way this particular minority group have had to overcome unspeakable obstacles yet have still succeeded. It’s the hatred of the stupid for the smart — and as universities are magnets for stupid people who believe they deserve the rewards of the smart, it’s little wonder that they are Petri dishes running alive with the filthy bacteria of ‘the oldest hatred’. Students are indoctrinated into fashionable hatred of the tiny Jewish country in academia, and then they leave and join the BBC or the Guardian, where they are paid to spread the message worldwide — a vicious circle-jerk.
Except that with the contraction of the media — and specifically the way hoi polloi are increasingly reluctant to bankroll such rotten branches of the liberal establishment — the interesting and well-paid jobs in media and communication are ever thinner on the ground. Having been banging on about white privilege for the past five years, how will posh Gentile students explain their own failure to get the jobs they want even after such expensive educations? It’ll be the Jews’ fault, of course — as always.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/02/18/the-hatred-of-the-stupid-for-the-smart
************************************Elite private schools go woke
Colleges have been fertile fields of woke craziness for years now. Just a few recent examples: Middlebury College Professor Jonathan Miller-Lane claims that “To preserve American democracy, Whiteness must be demilitarized so that bodies designated as ‘White’ might become human.” A Washington and Lee University law professor insists that votes of black Americans should be counted twice as a form of “voter reparations.” Not to be outdone, students, alumni, and faculty at Assumption University, a Catholic school in Massachusetts, have attacked the school’s promotion of Catholic social teaching on marriage and abortion.
It’s no secret that the wacky world of woke has also made deep inroads into our nation’s k-12 public schools. But what about private k-12 schools? Like Covid-19, the woke pandemic does not stop at the schoolhouse door – not even at the gates of the chichi private ones. For example, Brentwood School is a top-rated private institution located in a tony part of West Los Angeles. Parents of the 1,000 k-12ers who attend the school fork over – depending on grade level – about $37,725 a year. The school boasts that all its students who graduate go on to attend a 4-year college.
You might think that parents paying large sums of money to educate their kids would expect them to get something of a non-politicized education. But no. Brentwood School has gotten into bed with the diversicrats and the segregationists. The school’s “Community-Building Sessions” are right out of the Jim Crow South.
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Harvard-Westlake is another upscale private school in Los Angeles that has descended into the woke pit. Part of the yearly $41,300 tuition parents must pony up to send their little ones to the school goes to the Glasgow Group, a Maryland-based firm which specializes in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training. In fact, the school’s DEI page includes resources guaranteed to tickle every proud wokester. The book list is full of the usual woke books-du-jour including Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. The list of “acceptable” DEI terms at Harvard-Westlake is replete with “newspeak” buzz terms – implicit bias, gender identity, privilege, microaggressions, etc.
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New York City’s swanky Dalton School, whose yearly tuition is $55,210, has gone full bore woke. Ditching its traditional liberal arts curriculum, the faculty is in the process of turning the school into a social justice utopia. Their demands include hiring 12 full-time diversity officers, and multiple psychologists to support students “coping with race-based traumatic stress.” The faculty also requires “anti-racism” statements from all staffers and an overhaul of the entire curriculum, reading lists and student plays to “reflect diversity and social justice themes.” While it is unclear as to whether the school’s administrators are happy with the faculty’s demands, they have done little to stop them.
But many parents are not pleased with Dalton’s turn. Some have disenrolled their children because the school “has totally failed in its mission to uplift the very people it professes to help.” A Jewish parent told the New York Post, “My ancestors experienced white supremacy by being slaughtered. The idea that being white automatically means you are privileged or a white supremacist is ridiculous. My child comes from people who had to fight for everything they got.”
While parents can protest a private school’s political dogma by simply removing their kids, a public school parent too rarely has the option to do so. Instead, they must get organized, and that is indeed happening. “No Left Turn in Education,” started by a concerned mom in her living room late last summer, is a grassroots movement of concerned parents, teachers, watchdogs and others. Just six months later, the group now boasts chapters in 18 states. Elana Yaron Fishbein, the organization’s founder, attributes the astronomical growth of her group to the fact that parents are fed up with far-left dogma because it’s a threat to their kids, she told The College Fix. Fishbein added that it is also “threatening their family. It’s threatening their way of life. It’s threatening their livelihood. So, it’s not something abstract, it’s very, very real.”
It is indeed very real, and the indoctrination will continue to metastasize until parents wake up and act. The cement is hardening; the time to act is now. Right now.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
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://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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