Education

Morning Ethics Wake-Up Call, May 4, 2024: Campus Anti-Semitism Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I’d say anyone celebrating Star Wars Day today (“May the Fourth be with you!”) on this May 4 needs to get out more.

In addition to being a day that promises further depressing developments on college campuses as the decades of progressive, anti-American, and Marxist indoctrination have their predictable (and probably intentional) consequences—though somehow the ivory tower revolutionaries in charge of those campuses were oddly unprepared for them!—this date has an ominous history.

The Vietnam protests reached their violent zenith with the National Guard shooting four Kent State students on May 4, 1970, a tragedy eerily reminiscent of the Boston Massacre. I’ve been surprised that there hasn’t been a student fatality in the current unrest yet: as always, the protest organizers are hoping for one to “radicalize” the campuses. Another development that seems inevitable is a terrorist attack in support of Gaza and Hamas. Today is a date that portends that, too: during a huge labor protest at Haymarket Square in Chicago, Illinois on May 4, 1886, a someone threw a bomb among the 200 police officers attempting to break up the demonstration. Police then started shooting at the pro-labor crowd, killing more than a dozen protestors and wounding nearly a hundred, several people in the crowd and injuring dozens more. The protest had been organized by pro-labor activists to protest (and exploit) of the killing of a striker by the Chicago police the day before, and about 1,500 workers participated. That episode galvanized both the labor movement and the progressive movement that produced Teddy Roosevelt, Eugene V. Debs, Clarence Darrow, and Woodrow Wilson.

The anti-war rioting at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 also took place in Chicago, and where do you suppose the Democrats are holding their nominating convention this year? If nothing else, you can accuse the party of being superstitious. That call is the equivalent of naming a new cruise ship “Titanic.”

But wait! There’s more! On May 4, 1994, then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat reached an agreement in Cairo on Palestinian self-rule, following the Oslo Accords signed in Washington, D.C. on September 13, 1993. The agreement acknowledged Israel’s right to exist! Israeli agreed to withdraw from most of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho, all land won by Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967 when the Arab nations collectively tried to wipe Israel off the map. The Palestinians agreed to avoid terrorism and maintain peace. and prevent violence in the famous “land for peace” bargain. The agreement transferred authority from the Israeli Civil Administration to the newly created Palestinian Authority, its jurisdiction and legislative powers, a Palestinian police force and relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Sounds promising, no? Almost immediately after the Israeli military withdrawal, the Palestinians began attacking Israel and its civilians. The periodic terrorism continued: there was never real “peace.” The promise to accept Israel’s right to exist was just words. Seven years later came the “Second Intifada” in 2000, a violent Palestinian uprising against Israel that left over a thousand Israelis dead and thousands injured. The schism was complete when the Palestinians elected the openly terrorist organization Hamas to lead Gaza in 2006. The fable of “The Scorpion and the Frog” comes to mind.

I wonder how many of the campus protesters are conversant in this history?

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On the False Equivilency of Anti-Semitism and Islamaphobia Invoked By President Biden and Others

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“But let’s be clear about this as well. There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students. There is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans. It’s simply wrong. There is no place for racism in America. It’s all wrong. It’s un-American.”

That’s President Biden in his long delayed statement regarding the pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic demonstrations breaking out in college campuses and in cities across the country. As usual, he isn’t clear at all. There have been no demonstrations against Muslims or Arab Americans. What does Islamophobia have to do with the price of bacon, as my father used to say?

The problem at hand is mobs calling for the eradication of Israel, the sole bastion of democracy in the Middle East, and the death of Jews. Those involved are actively declaring their support for Hamas and Palestinian terrorism, meaning, again, advocating the eradication of Israel and the death of Jews.

Throwing this unique and particularly horrible outbreak of ethic and religious hate, discrimination and persecution under the huge progressive abused-minority tent with Arabs and Muslims deliberately dilutes accountability. Americans are justly wary of Islam, with its declared determination to wipe out infidels, and nobody ever set out to exterminate six million Arabs. Nobody murdered an Arab or Palestinian Olympic team, either. Anti-Semitism is different in kind, in great part because it is centuries old lingers in cultures and societies like the shingles virus, ready to break out without warning.

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Letter From Dartmouth’s President: This Is How It’s Done, You Spineless Weenies!

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Dartmouth alumnus Curmie—Can’t you just picture him leading that horse into the Dean’s office?—shared this letter he received as a member of the “Dartmouth community” from the school’s first female president, Dr. Sian Leah Beilock. It stands in stark contrast to the nauseating Columbia letter dissected here, and Emerson College’s president’s equally revolting letter I posted on here.

Yes, it’s more diplomatic than my letter would be, but that’s why I’m not a college president. And yes, Beilock’s use of the breathless “amazing”—apparently now taking over from “awesome”—is a bit disturbing coming from an adult in high places, but never mind. She has rescued some of the tarnished honor of the university presidents’ club.

Ethics Dunce: Emerson College President Jay Bernhardt

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Bernhardt isn’t the only noodle-spined, terrorism-enabling fool running an American college or university right now, but he’s as good a representative as any. I’m familiar with Emerson (most people weren’t before its students started demonstrating for more Jew killing as if there hadn’t too much of that already) because it resides in my old stomping ground of Boston, and my aunt Bea, 97-years-old and still as progressive as they come, graduated from there.

Over 100 Emerson students were arrested in downtown Boston’s Boylston Place alleyway in an early morning confrontation with Boston police last week. The students were illegally participating in an encampment protest by the student organization Students for Justice in Palestine. They also fought with police as the cops tried to do their jobs. But in his letter of three days ago, Emerson College President Jay Bernhardt said that he will urge the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office to drop all charges. Four Boston police officers were injured during the confrontation, one seriously. Never mind, though. These are only adults who can vote, buy liquor and and otherwise have full privileges of citizenship, and they violated the law in support of terrorists. Their hearts were in the right place. They meant well. Anybody can make a mistake. For a full list of the inexcusable rationalizations being used to let these idiots escape accountability for their ignorant, illegal and violent actions, see here, at the Ethics Alarms Rationalizations List. I’m guessing at least 40 of them apply, maybe more.

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Hamas-Israel War Ethics Train Wreck Update: A Case Study in How a News Aggregator Forfeits Trust

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The escalation overnight in the anti-Israel, pro-Jew-killing demonstrations at Columbia University, temporarily at the top of the campus progressives-showing-their-true-stripes and “Oops, I guess we indoctrinated these gullible kids a little too much!” hit parades, was the breaking news I woke up to at 5 am when Spuds asked to go out. I have some ethics observations about this whole disturbing development (the Gaza support on campuses, not Spuds’ bathroom habits), which the Biden administration deserves to have hung around its neck like a stinking dead albatross for signaling that the U.S. sympathizes with terrorists just so it might pick up some Muslim votes in Michigan. In the process of researching that post, I encountered the reason for this one.

Deciding that the immediacy of the 1968 flashbacks justified bumping another post that I have almost completed, I checked the usually reliable news aggregating site Memeorandum (Ann Althouse’s favorite!) to find some early reports and commentary on the student terrorism fans at Columbia taking over Hamilton Hall. And I found…nothing. The top stories as of this moment [remember, by the time you read this, the list may have changed]:

#1: The Kristi Noem dog story! You see, that’s a top story because it reflects poorly on Republicans.

#2 according to the site is an FBI report that crime in the U.S. is really decreasing under Biden—as if there is any reason to trust the FBI any more, and as everyone I know in Northern Virginia is terrified to go into D.C. This is second on the list because it is going to take a huge “It isn’t what it is” push to convince voters that all of those chains moving out of inner cities because of runaway shoplifting are really doing it because they are racist.

#3? Another hit on a Republican, this time from that paragon of objectivity, Rolling Stone.

Coming in at #4…well, I don’t have to belabor the point. There are seventeen more “top stories,” including one about India operating a spy ring in Australia, and the drama at Columbia isn’t anywhere to be found.

Eureka! Now I know that whoever is running this news aggregator site is manipulating the news and trying to mislead the public in support of Joe Biden and the Democrats. Similarly, we have learned that the eruption of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic passion across the nation is just one more example of what a terrible, weak, foolish POTUS Joe Biden is, and how ethically corrupt his party and its supporters have become.

Here’s a third: journalism in this culture is untrustworthy and a metaphorical dagger in the back of democracy….but we knew that.

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“Bias Makes Harvard Incredibly Stupid,” the Series! Today’s Episode: “The Law of Holes”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

One of the downsides of denouncing my alma mater is that I only hear about its latest unethical conduct when the story imposes itself on my consciousness or when the alumni magazine arrives, usually containing news that it a month old or more. I was going to write about the last two, post-Claudine Gay presidency issues, which were fascinating as exercises in denial, spin, and self-delusion: the framing of Harvard’s most recent debacle was essentially that “something happened” to Old Ivy, you know, like an earthquake or a plague of frogs. These are supposed to be smart people. Instead, America is auditing a Harvard course on just how stupid bias can make us. Well, that’s a lot more useful than a lot of Harvard courses now.

But even I didn’t see this coming: I didn’t think Harvard could be this stupid. I really didn’t; when I saw this headline in the Washington Free Beacon, my first thought was that I had hit the Babylon Bee on an unfunny day. No, not only was it true, the story was two weeks old.

As the Harvard Crimson had announced on April 16, Vivian Hunt (seen here in a student production of “The Handmaiden’s Tale” or something—I don’t know what the hell she’s wearing or why, but it’s weird)…

… is the newly appointed head of the Harvard Board of Overseers. Hunt is a Harvard College alum, female, black, a likely affirmative action success, and a vocal DEI activist, even more of one, arguably, than disgraced ex-prez Claudine Gay.

Hunt is nearly “patient zero” for the DEI plague. In 2015 she co-authored the McKinsey consulting firm’s influential and dishonest paper, “Why diversity matters,”based on data that has recently been shown to be junk as many (like me) long suspected. She has vigorously argued that meritocracy “isn’t good enough” and urged the private sector to hire based on color and gender rather than that old-fashioned, busted, racist, “talent, ability, and demonstrated success” formula.

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Ethics Quote of the Week: David Marcus

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Marcus is an American entrepreneur. His depressing but revealing (though hardly surprising quote is in this tweet, which also relates nicely to the previous post:

Hey Douthat! How About Coming Right Out and Stating That U.S. College Students Are Indoctrinated into Radical, Progressive, Marxist Ideology?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Talk about burying the lede.

Sort-of conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat issued what might have been a useful column, What Students Read Before They Protest, about the reasons why students at Columbia and other “elite” educational institutions are demonstrating in favor of Hamas, terrorism, anti-Semitism, and wiping Israel off the face of the earth. But Douthat, who can write clearly and forcefully when he wants to (or, I suppose, when his woke and biased editors let him) instead buries his own objective in foggy rhetoric, Authentic Frontier Gibberish and equivocation to such an extent that 1) few will have the patience to read it and 2) the importance of his point is diluted and lost.

This is how Jonathan Turley used to write until he was red-pilled.

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This really does speak for itself, but indulge me as I make a few comments…

1. The “money quote”: “I wish I was more educated.”

2. Ah, yes, the young protesting just to protest, meet people, have fun, threaten Jews! This phenomenon was rife when I was a student, and it so nauseated me that my bias against protests and demonstrations has lasted to this day.

3. When I was 18, I was certain that giving the vote to 18-year-olds was a mistake. People like these women informed that opinion.

4. Immature, uncritical, peer-driven Americans like this are easy marks for propagandists, cultists and hucksters. Imagine: similar zombie activists enabled Black Lives Matter to warp the U.S. culture

5. Good job, American educational system! Well done, parents! The life competence rules that one should never take action on a matter before thoroughly understanding that matter, and that one should never allow others to dictate your conduct absent your informed consent—informed is a key word—have apparently never been taught, explained or conveyed.

6. Nice to see that Rudy isn’t letting his persecution by the legal community for daring to represent Donald Trump, though.

As the Biden Campaign Slaps Itself on Its Metaphorical Forehead For Not Thinking of This First…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

We should have seen this coming. Maybe you did.

Pikesville High School’s athletic director Dazhon Darien was arrested yesterday after an investigation revealed that he used AI technology to created the fake audio clip above of the school’s principal, Eric Eiswert, ranting about black students and Jews. Darien, who is black, has been charged with disrupting school activities: of course the audio clip using the principal’s voice “went viral”and Eiswert, who is white, was widely condemned by the Baltimore County community. The school had to add police personnel for security and additional counselors. Here is a typical reaction to the clip:

Darien has also charged been charged with theft, retaliating against a witness and stalking. Good.

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