Newsletter (May 16, 2024)

Kangaroo vote, open letters against campus protests, Woke Jihad, and more

On May 8, in a meeting hijacked by a small group of radical faculty, USC’s Academic Senate voted to censure President Carol Folt and Provost Andrew Guzman for what they did exactly right—removing the encampment and suspending hooligans. Faculty were not informed that the Senate would be considering the censure motion and thus had no opportunity to communicate their opinions to the senators. Our letter to the Senate, signed by more than 80 faculty, was not even mentioned at the meeting. When an attendee raised a question about the raging antisemitism on campus, they were shouted down with “Islamophobia.” An LA Times article (May 8, 2024) by Angie Orellana Hernandez, Matt Hamilton, and Jaweed Kaleem, “USC’s Faculty Senate Censures President Carol Folt and Provost Over Commencement,” highlights these glaring issues and mentions Anna’s dissenting opinion. A “kangaroo vote,” if there ever was one.

The protests, commencement, and the censure were also discussed in Hx@USC Newsletter #7. The newsletter also covers multiple violations of USC’s Kalven-like policy prohibiting departments and other academic units from issuing political statements in the name of their constituents. If you have not yet done so, please subscribe to the Heterodox at USC Substack to receive regular releases of unadulterated campus news.

The New York Times Editorial Board has published an op-ed calling on university presidents to reclaim control of their campuses, enforce their own codes of conduct, protect Jewish students, and ensure that classes and commencement ceremonies are held as scheduled. Folt and Guzman did exactly that on May 5, and got censured instead of praised.

An Open Letter from Academics Around the World Calls for the Encampments to Be Taken Down, If Not by the Protestors, Then by Administrations

Dr. Craig R. Walton, a professor at ETH Zürich and the University of Cambridge, has penned a letter calling on protestors to respect the mission of the university, take down their encampments, and to engage in civil discourse about their grievances. If the refuse, the letter calls on administrations to clear the encampments and restore order. The letter, introduced in an article by Dr. Walton on Heterodox STEM, reads as follows:

We, the signatories of this letter, believe that Universities exist to educate students and host academic research. These activities require a calm and respectful environment that promotes civil discourse. In this spirit, we oppose the movement to create encampments on University grounds. Such actions sow division and create exclusionary spaces, undermining the purpose and functioning of a University.

Observing encampment style protests across the world, we see spaces where discourse is shut down, where only a certain set of views can be safely expressed, and where, in the void of civil discussion, chaos has often ensued. In many ways, the encampments reveal exactly why the University system is so precious: that people from all over the word, all walks of life, and varied ideas can meet with a shared basic level of respect. The same cannot be said of the environment created by encampments.

We fully respect the right to free speech. That is why we welcome all those currently occupying University campuses to engage in discourse about their views with open minds - in the University tradition. In contrast, we do not support intentionally causing immense disruption to the mission of the University by occupying their private property.

We call for the protestors to disband and to put their claims up for debate in a manner appropriate for academia. Otherwise, we call for Universities to intervene and clear the encampments and restore order, safety, and a coherent academic environment for all staff and students.

View the list of signatories here.

Add your name to the list of signatories here.

An Open Letter Opposing the Escalating Academic Boycott of Israel

Three academics from three different continents have authored an open letter raising the alarm against the growing isolation of Israeli academics and calling for an end to all forms of boycotts targeting them. It states, in part:

We, scholars from various fields of the humanities and social sciences, are deeply concerned about the increasing isolation of our academic colleagues in Israel. Calls for boycotts against Israeli academic institutions are not new, but since the brutal attack by Hamas on October 7th and the subsequent Israeli-Hamas War, these calls have taken on a new dimension. On April 12, 2024, the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz published an article [see here for an archived version] based on interviews with over 60 Israeli scholars and reported an astonishing range of discriminatory practices. These include the termination of scientific collaborations, cancellation of conference invitations, refusal to consider scholarly submissions to journals, rejections of promotion evaluations, and withdrawal of offers for academic appointments, among other instances….

We strongly believe that international exchange – especially in troubled times like these – is essential for maintaining an open and global academic community. The alarming trend of excluding Israeli scholars from international academic discourse requires unequivocal response on our part. We, the undersigned, call on scholars to stand in solidarity with our Israeli colleagues on this critical issue.

You can read and sign the letter here.

End Encampments: A petition by David Southwick

And here is another petition — from Australia.

In Case You Missed Them

Here are links to two recent posts of ours:

• Remembering the Shoah (now extended with more stories by USC student Coby Russo)

• Free Speech Advocates and Legal Scholars on the Recent Campus Protests

Jewish Commencement at USC

Jewish Student Commencement. In partnership with Chabad, Hillel hosted over 200 graduating seniors, friends, and family. Image from USC Hillel newsletter.

After USC canceled comencement, Jewish students held their own ceremony, writes Matt Hamilton for the L.A. Times. Given the widespread hostility towards Israel and, by extension, Jews, including the wearing of keffiyehs and Palestinian colors at commencement ceremonies, the commencement for Jewish students offered much-needed support to the campus Jewish community. Yet, the ever-increasing segregation of identity groups on campus is worrisome. Commencement ceremonies and other academic convocations should be celebrations of the academic achievements of our students, not political rallies.

More Antics from Anti-Israeli USC Faculty

Palestinian color scarf worn on top of academic regalia at the graduation ceremony of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. Image source: screenshot from the reel posted by the USCCINEMA (official account of the USC School of Cinematic Arts). 

Radical faculty handed out “loaner” keffiyehs and anti-USC administration t-shirts for students to wear at their commencement ceremonies, as well as whistles to disrupt the events.

Jerry Coyne comments on protesters wearing the keffiyeh, which he deems the “hipster swastika,” in his post “Pro-Palestinian Demonstration on Campus; Jewish Students Counter Peacefully.”

Nearly Two-Thirds of Jewish College Students Report Antisemitic Rhetoric at Protests

Hillel has released the results of a new survey of Jewish college students about the impact of protests and encampments on their daily lives. More than 50% of respondents reported that anti-Israel protests and encampments have diminished their ability to attend class, learn, or study. Additionally,

A majority of respondents, 61%, said there has been antisemitic, threatening or derogatory language directed toward Jewish people during protests at their school. Nearly a quarter of the respondents from schools with encampment protests said that they personally were either physically assaulted (7%) or verbally assaulted (17%).

CNN Covers USC

From Hagit Arieli Chai (May 11, 2024):

My very dear student, Logan Barth, graduated yesterday. 

He will start USC law school in the Fall 2024. He is an exceptional young guy ,who is respectful towards everyone, and follows justice. I was honored to teach him and to learn from him (תהלים קיט, פסוק צט) מכל מלמדיי השכלתי , מתלמידיי יותר מכולם/ן 

Logan has been an active students who visited Israel in the last year three times. He has been recruiting students for the program called Perspective. 

Logan's two (none Jewish) friends, Aidan Bloom and Jacob Wheeler, have been in Israel three times on a mission since last summer. They organized the March for the hostages on campus on March. 

Logan resilience and integrity is admirable.  

Logan and his friends, Aiden and Jacob, are walking freely on campus without any face covering/mask, because they have nothing to hide. 

They are proudly standing on the right side oh history and advocate for all Jewish and none Jewish students to have a safe environment for learning.

Watch the report by CNN, which includes not only the interview of Logan but the surviving 10 seconds of the 45-minute interview of Anna that CNN came to our home to conduct.

CNN 10 also covered covered the debacle at USC in their segment, “Campus protests disrupt graduation ceremonies” (transcript here).

Jewish students at Columbia speak out: “In Our Name: A Message from Jewish Students at Columbia University”:

Most of us did not choose to be political activists. We do not bang on drums and chant catchy slogans. We are average students, just trying to make it through finals much like the rest of you. Those who demonize us under the cloak of anti-Zionism forced us into our activism and forced us to publicly defend our Jewish identities.

We proudly believe in the Jewish People’s right to self-determination in our historic homeland as a fundamental tenet of our Jewish identity. Contrary to what many have tried to sell you – no, Judaism cannot be separated from Israel. Zionism is, simply put, the manifestation of that belief….

The evil irony of today’s antisemitism is a twisted reversal of our Holocaust legacy; protestors on campus have dehumanized us, imposing upon us the characterization of the “white colonizer.” We have been told that we are “the oppressors of all brown people” and that “the Holocaust wasn’t special.” Students at Columbia have chanted “we don’t want no Zionists here,” alongside “death to the Zionist State” and to “go back to Poland,” where our relatives lie in mass graves.

This sick distortion illuminates the nature of antisemitism: In every generation, the Jewish People are blamed and scapegoated as responsible for the societal evil of the time. In Iran and in the Arab world, we were ethnically cleansed for our presumed ties to the “Zionist entity.” In Russia, we endured state-sponsored violence and were ultimately massacred for being capitalists. In Europe, we were the victims of genocide because we were communists and not European enough. And today, we face the accusation of being too European, painted as society’s worst evils – colonizers and oppressors. We are targeted for our belief that Israel, our ancestral and religious homeland, has a right to exist. We are targeted by those who misuse the word Zionist as a sanitized slur for Jew, synonymous with racist, oppressive, or genocidal. We know all too well that antisemitism is shapeshifting.

We are proud of Israel. The only democracy in the Middle East, Israel is home to millions of Mizrachi Jews (Jews of Middle Eastern descent), Ashkenazi Jews (Jews of Central and Eastern European descent), and Ethiopian Jews, as well as millions of Arab Israelis, over one million Muslims, and hundreds of thousands of Christians and Druze. Israel is nothing short of a miracle for the Jewish People and for the Middle East more broadly.

A University President Says All the Right Things?

A “letter” titled “From the Desk of President John Habidacus, Indiana University,” has appeared on Heterodox STEM. Here is an excerpt:

The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but not the indefinite occupation of space that belongs to someone else. As of today, any tents remaining in Dunn Meadow after 11 PM will be removed, using force if necessary. Any student  who resists the clearing of Dunn Meadow will be expelled, and any faculty who resist will be placed on unpaid leave for five years. Going forward, Dunn Meadow will be cleared at 11 PM every night. If necessary, the meadow will be cleared every hour, on the hour, through the night.

Sadly, the “letter” is a satire. For examples of what university presidents actually say, see “Three College Presidents and a Chancellor Produce Very Different Statements on the Encampment Protests,” by Lee Jussim on Unsafe Science.

Peaceful Protests—or Domestic Terrorism?

More details about the protests are becoming known. According to the LA Times’ “Police Remove Tents, Clear USC Pro-Palestinian Encampment; No Arrests Made” (archived version here):

Among the remnants of the camp on Sunday morning, a Times reporter found a crumpled and torn document titled “Ground Tactics for the Student Intifada.”

The four pages of typed papers included guides on how to organize human formations when confronted by police. “The purpose of a mass action is not make it go on for as long as humanly possible,” the document read. “The purpose of a mass action is to maximize disruption at a minimum cost to the organizers.”

Student Activists or Professional Insurgents?

A well documented expose by Eve Barlow on the Blacklisted substack provides a glimpse into the motifs, goals, and means towards these goals, employed by the protesters.

To trawl through the trove of documents is to take a dive into the minds of wannabe insurgents, not future hopeful university graduates. Contained within the sub-sections of the drive are how-to guides, including “sabotaging Zionist infrastructure”, creating print propaganda, strategizing on demands and actions, establishing an autonomous zone, “wheatpasting”, crowd and riot control, blockaiding and first aid. Are you wondering why all the encampment occupants are wearing masks and covering their identities? It’s all detailed here via PDF guides on anonymity, security, and avoiding the police. There are documents unabashedly glorifying child soldiers, martyring Aaron Bushnell (the US soldier who self-immolated back in February) and promoting the globalization of the Intifada. Also included are articles by known terrorists including Leila Khaled, Ghassan Ali, and Ibrahim Nabulsi. It’s a DIY occupation guide. No joke—that PDF is included too.

The LA Times reported similar findings related to the UCLA protests: UCLA Alleges Protesters Arrested Monday Had Tools to Barricade Buildings (May 8, 2024, Winton, Smith, and Watanabe).

And a video with even more details: “Domestic Terrorists Have Invaded UCLA: Behind Enemy Lines”

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The Woke Jihad (Abe Greenwald in The Commentary; June, 2024)

The title says it all…

The union of radical leftism and jihadism on display across American campuses is a marriage born of necessity—and of love. The necessity is reciprocal. Three-plus years after the George Floyd revolution, the left had found itself adrift. With the liberal rank and file no longer interested in police-defunding, the public turning against DEI schemes, whistleblowers revealing the horrors of “gender-affirming care” for trans kids, and the term woke a source of liberal embarrassment, what was there to constitute the vital work of social justice? A revolutionary cannot live on microaggressions alone. The left needed a new animating theme, and jihadist fury would prove more than bracing enough.

For their part, the jihadists needed the American left for tactical purposes: to propagandize for their cause and fit anti-Semitic terrorists—alongside gays, the transgendered, and African Americans—into the intersectional left’s pantheon of victims. As one coordinator of a Vancouver-based “pro-Palestinian” organization counseled Columbia University students in March: “There is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader of Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas. These are the people that are on the front lines defending Palestine.” If average Americans are shocked at how ardently the woke took to Islamist thinking, it’s because they don’t know the left as well as jihadists do.

From our neighbors: A statement by UCI Chancellor Gillman

Howard Gillman, a former dean of USC’s College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, and now Chancellor at the UC Irvine, has issued an excellent statement on the campus protests and encampments on May 13, 2024. The statement firmly explains the obvious:

I have heard from some that I should welcome the efforts of these students given my commitment to the protection of free speech and academic freedom. Indeed, I have consistently upheld the right for these students and their supporters to express their views. There have been many lawful protests, events, and messages where their positions have been freely expressed without any effort at censorship or punishment. But everybody understands that free speech does not grant the right to speak in any manner you want at any time you want, or in violation of laws and rules while claiming their violations should be exempt from sanctions. To be clear, my concerns are not with their speech, but their violations of important policies and with their assault on the free speech and academic freedom of others.

A Few More Reads Worth Your Time

“The New Propaganda War” by Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic

Applebaum, one of today’s most informed, intelligent, and insightful journalists and historians, writes about Russian and Chinese propaganda operations around the world, which expanded in the wake of of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. In Applebaum’s view, these efforts aim to erode the liberal, democratic foundations of many societies.

If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned. .. That requires more than surveillance, more than close observation of the population, more than a political system that defends against liberal ideas. It also requires an offensive plan: a narrative that damages both the idea of democracy everywhere in the world and the tools to deliver it.

As Vitaly Kresin communicated to the Circle, “It is a long and very depressing article, but there are a few passages specifically relevant to this exchange.”

Iran, for its part, offers HispanTV, the Spanish-language version of Press TV, the Iranian international service. HispanTV leans heavily into open anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial: One March 2020 headline declared that the 'New Coronavirus Is the Result of a Zionist Plot.' Spain banned HispanTV and Google blocked it from its YouTube and Gmail accounts, but the service is easily available across Latin America, just as Al-Alam, the Arabic version of Press TV, is widely available in the Middle East. After the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an international group dedicated to fighting disinformation, found that Iran was creating additional hacking groups to target digital, physical, and electoral infrastructure in Israel (where it went after electoral rolls) and the United States. In the future, these hacking operations may be combined with propaganda campaigns….

Since 2016, these tactics have been applied across the globe. The Xinhua and RT offices in Africa and around the world—along with Telesur and HispanTV—create stories, slogans, memes, and narratives promoting the worldview of the autocracies; these, in turn, are repeated and amplified in many countries, translated into many languages, and reshaped for many local markets. The material produced is mostly unsophisticated, but it is inexpensive and can change quickly, according to the needs of the moment. After the October 7 Hamas attack, for example, official and unofficial Russian sources immediately began putting out both anti-Israel and anti-Semitic material, and messages calling American and Western support for Ukraine hypocritical in light of the Gaza conflict. The data-analytics company Alto Intelligence found posts smearing both Ukrainians and Israelis as 'Nazis,' part of what appears to be a campaign to bring far-left and far-right communities closer together in opposition to U.S.-allied democracies. Anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas messages also increased inside China, as well as on Chinese-linked accounts around the world. Joshua Eisenman, a professor at Notre Dame and the author of a new book on China’s relations with Africa, told me that during a recent trip to Beijing, he was astonished by how quickly the previous Chinese line on the Middle East—'China-Israel relations are stronger than ever'—changed. 'It was a complete 180 in just a few days.' Not that everyone hearing these messages will necessarily know where they come from, because they often appear in forums that conceal their origins….

Doppelganger’s efforts, run by a clutch of companies in Russia, have varied widely [...] In November, operatives who the French government believes are linked to Doppelganger spray-painted Stars of David around Paris and posted them on social media, hoping to amplify French divisions over the Gaza war. Russian operatives built a social-media network to spread the false stories and the photographs of anti-Semitic graffiti. The goal is to make sure that the people encountering this content have little clue as to who created it, or where or why.

“The Campus-Left Occupation That Broke Higher Education,” by George Packer in The Atlantic

Elite colleges are now reaping the consequences of promoting a pedagogy that trashed the postwar ideal of the liberal university.

Along, intricate, but essentially unbroken line connects that rejection of the liberal university in 1968 to the orthodoxy on elite campuses today. The students of the ’68 revolt became professors—the German activist Rudi Dutschke called this strategy the “long march through the institutions”—bringing their revisionist thinking back to the universities they’d tried to upend. One leader of the Columbia takeover returned to chair the School of the Arts film program. “The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.

The post-liberal university is defined by a combination of moneymaking and activism. Perhaps the biggest difference between 1968 and 2024 is that the ideas of a radical vanguard are now the instincts of entire universities—administrators, faculty, students. They’re enshrined in reading lists and codes of conduct and ubiquitous clichés. Last week an editorial in the Daily Spectator, the Columbia student newspaper, highlighted the irony of a university frantically trying to extricate itself from the implications of its own dogmas: “Why is the same university that capitalizes on the legacy of Edward Said and enshrines The Wretched of the Earth into its Core Curriculum so scared to speak about decolonization in practice?”

Elite universities are caught in a trap of their own making, one that has been a long time coming. They’ve trained pro-Palestinian students to believe that, on the oppressor-oppressed axis, Jews are white and therefore dominant, not “marginalized,” while Israel is a settler-colonialist state and therefore illegitimate. They’ve trained pro-Israel students to believe that unwelcome and even offensive speech makes them so unsafe that they should stay away from campus. What the universities haven’t done is train their students to talk with one another.

“Truth Should Not Be a Casualty of War,” by Peter Sadovnik for The Free Press

The UN admits the number of civilian deaths in Gaza is 50 percent lower than first reported. Why is everyone ignoring this fact?

Millions have marched across the world demanding Israel end its “genocide” in Gaza, pointing to the number of civilians killed by the war. But the United Nations now concedes that this number—provided by Hamas—is wildly inaccurate. 

In a May 6 report, the UN stated the death toll was 34,735, including 9,500 women and 14,500 children, or at least 24,000 civilians. 

But two days later, the UN quietly revised its figures, stating that 50 percent fewer civilians had died. The total number of deaths is about the same at 34,844, but that number includes 4,959 women and 7,797 children—a total of 12,756 civilians. (And this from the United Nations, whose General Assembly adopted 15 resolutions on Israel in 2023, compared to seven for the rest of the world combined.) 

This revision is the clearest sign yet that Hamas’s statistics cannot be trusted. As David Adesnik, senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, says: “The UN should state clearly that it has lost confidence in sources whose credibility it has affirmed for months.” 

While any number of civilian deaths is tragic, “you want to be truthful,” said John Spencer, West Point’s urban warfare expert, who was in Gaza earlier this year. “Truth still does have a place in our media.”

Spencer says that even the revised UN figures probably overstate the death toll, because the numbers aren’t limited to people who were killed in the war. “The UN numbers include every death in Palestine no matter what the cause was,” Spencer told The Free Press. “Every natural death, missing person, anyone killed by Hamas.”

And yet, so far not a single major media platform, save Fox News, has reported on the new UN numbers. (MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough tweeted about them.) On Monday, the Israel advocacy group HonestReporting noted as much, adding that the old casualty figures “continued to be parroted by various media outlets.”

Meanwhile, Spencer said it’s impossible to gather accurate statistics in a time of war. He noted that we still don’t know how many civilians died in the 2016 Battle of Mosul, in which Iraqi Special Forces retook the city from the Islamic State. “It’s been maddening from my angle that anyone could think there could be a number for the dead in a war anytime in human history down to a single digit on a daily basis—it fails common sense—and be run by mass media of the world as fact.” 

And on a Positive Note: UNC–Chapel Hill Defunds DEI, Re-Funds Police

According to WUNC,

The UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees has voted to divert $2.3 million away from diversity, equity and inclusion programs and into “public safety.”

The unanimous vote occurred at a special Board of Trustees meeting Monday morning. It is unclear if the diversion of funds would lead to layoffs.

Marty Kotis is vice chair of the board’s budget and finance committee, which initially introduced and passed the “flex cut amendment.” Without citing specific examples, he called DEI programs “discriminatory and divisive.”

“I think that DEI in a lot of people’s minds is divisiveness, exclusion and indoctrination,” Kotis said. “We need more unity and togetherness, more dialogue, more diversity of thought….”

This decision follows a committee vote from the UNC Board of Governors last month to revoke a policy that mandates DEI offices at all public universities in the state. Next week, the full Board of Governors will vote on that same policy change.

If approved, the policy change will be effective immediately and individual university chancellors will have until September of this year to detail how they plan to make cuts to DEI initiatives.

Any chance we can replicate this at USC?

And, Finally, a Little Comic Relief

The satirical newspaper, the Babylon Bee, reports that Ben & Jerry’s has announced a new ice cream flavor:

BURLINGTON, VT - Beloved Communist ice cream company Ben & Jerry's is standing up to evil fascists who think Israel has a right to exist by boycotting West Bank settlements and East Jerusalem. 

To mark the occasion, they have released a limited-edition flavor called “Push The Jews Into The Sea Salt And Caramel.”

Oy.