Saturday, June 01, 2024

Links - 1st June 2024 (1 - Hamas Attack Oct 2023: College Campuses)

We are Anishinaabe Zionists. Hateful anti-Israel camps disrespectful - "Today, throughout our Treaty Lands are campus signs and chants that include the following: “There is only one solution Intifada revolution.” The phrase Canada used in the 1910s and the Nazis in WWII has been carefully adapted and callously adopted. Any Indigenous person and non-Indigenous Canadian aware of our shared history should shudder to hear it chanted and see it on our campuses. As Anishinaabe, we find the term, in all of its iterations, offensive, hateful and racist. It takes us back to a dark chapter in our shared history here in Canada; marked by the death of more than 6,000 Indigenous children. It also reminds us of the tragic loss of six million Jews across Europe during, and in the period leading up to, the Holocaust. These calls for the death of Jewish people are unequivocally anathema to The Seven Sacred Teachings... Five of the six universities on the MCFN Treaty Lands have pro-Palestinian encampments on them. Not one consulted the MCFN about encampments being set up on our Treaty Lands. Not one consulted the MCFN about the manner in which encampment occupiers and pro-Palestinian protesters behave on our Treaty Lands. No consultation took place about excluding Jewish and Zionist students and faculty from any part of our Treaty Lands or limiting their use and enjoyment of our Treaty Lands. Exclusion, bigotry, harassment, antisemitism, lawlessness, and hate are being permitted on and throughout our Treaty Lands. All of which is contrary to The Seven Sacred Teachings, the Rule of Law in Canada, and disregard the duty to consult and the essence of land acknowledgements... Erroneous false narratives are coming out of universities about current reconciliation efforts led by Indigenous peoples to justify divisive hateful conduct that overwhelmingly targets and isolates Jewish and Zionist Canadians. The use of sacred ceremonies such as the lighting of a Sacred Fire, smudging, drumming, and others, by activists in encampments on university campuses are not appropriate. It is cultural appropriation and historical distortion of the worst kind. Some have suggested correlations between Hamas and Israel in the Middle East and the reconciliation work led by First Nations here in Canada in the West. We hear the words “colonizer,” “settler” and “decolonize” to justify terror, violence, kidnapping, rape and targeted civilian massacres. These words are used to assert revolutionary violence “by any means necessary” and that “all forms of resistance” are justified. We unequivocally reject these assertions and any allyship with those who hold such views. Indigenous and non-Indigenous people found ways and continue to find ways to peacefully resolve their differences mostly through dialogue grounded in The Seven Sacred Teachings. But little respectful dialogue is heard. Instead, we see hate, antisemitism, and weak leadership on university campuses. Pro-Palestinian supporters violate the Treaties with Indigenous peoples and The Seven Sacred Teachings. Allegedly they seek to resolve a crisis in the Middle East by means that disregard Indigenous peoples, the Treaties, our Sacred Teachings, and our relationship with Canada. Equally dreadful are the measures that target Jewish and Zionist students and faculty — people who are welcome on our Treaty Lands and are deserving of the rights and freedoms enjoyed by all Canadians. Our Land, the Treaties, our values, and our hospitality are being abused. Leaders of universities, government, and law enforcement — all considered to be Treaty Partners — are allowing this to happen. University codes of conduct and Canadian laws are not being enforced."
Time to denounce indigenous people who don't push the left wing agenda as white supremacists

Most Canadians oppose anti-Israel protest encampments at universities - "According to the poll, support for the encampments is highest among younger Canadians, but a majority are still against them... Support for the protests varies by political affiliation: 59 per cent of those who consider themselves left wing support the encampments, though 27 per cent still say they’re opposed. Just five per cent of those who consider themselves right wing support the protesters and 13 per cent who put themselves in the political centre support the university encampments. For those in the centre, it’s 47 per cent opposed and only 13 per cent support the encampments.  French-speaking Canadians are also more likely to oppose the encampments (52 per cent) than those who have English as their mother tongue (48 per cent) or another language (43 per cent). But those who listed other languages as the mother tongue are also the least likely to support the protests (16 per cent). Support is 18 per cent for French speakers and 20 per cent for English speakers.  There are modest gender divides as well: 52 per cent of men oppose the encampments, compared to 44 per cent of women. “Women tend to lean a little more left than men do,” said Brym."

The boycott demands of U of T's violent encampment mob can't be met - "As a member of the University of Toronto’s Governing Council and several of its committees, I am dismayed by the violent mob that has taken over a central area of the university, targeting members of the Jewish community through such illegal actions as confinement and assault. The university’s response, under the guise of academic freedom, has been inadequate, negotiating with the mob instead of addressing antisemitism and eventually caving in to divestment. U of T would have taken a much more aggressive approach, as it should, if any of these antisemitic acts were targeted at a different at-risk group... In the ’30s, mobs in Germany shouted, “Jews go back to Palestine,” and now the encampment mob is shouting at Jewish people, “Go back to Europe!” This chant is not only morally appalling but also factually incorrect. For example, my late parents were refugees from Iraq, so Europe is not our home and now neither is Iraq. How about Israelis who came from Ethiopia, should they go back to Africa? I know of three assaults on Jewish people by U of T’s encampment mob. One of these involved a relative of mine, a 70-year-old physician who was kicked savagely in the leg by a very tall young man. The campus police have turned a blind eye. Similar documented assaults have been ignored by the university, which is more concerned about bad publicity than doing the right thing.  The university’s response — that there are Jews in the encampment mob and thus the community is divided — is misleading. A small number of self-described Jewish individuals in the mob does not reflect the views of the broader Jewish community and should not be used as an excuse for inaction. Historically, a small number of people of Jewish descent were in the Nazi military, but this does not justify the actions of the Nazis. The history of the University of Toronto has been marred by antisemitism. An example of the deeply rooted antisemitism involves the grandfather of one of my colleagues, who was admitted in the ’20s to the school of dentistry and then expelled after they discovered he was Jewish. Only after fighting the decision was he reinstated.  Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital was founded by a group of Jewish women because U of T’s hospitals would not hire Jewish doctors. After the Second World War, the university’s school of medicine used antisemitic quotas to cap the number of Jewish students accepted. More recently, Ayelet Kuper, an associate professor at U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine, has detailed an incredible level of systemic and endemic antisemitism by faculty and students at the school. The university’s Massey College is named after Vincent Massey, who was instrumental in the antisemitic “None is too many” immigration policy with respect to Jews. While Ryerson University was renamed due to Egerton Ryerson’s connection to residential schools, U of T remains unconcerned with its antisemitic history. In its refusal to act and its willingness to negotiate with the encampment mob, the university’s administration is embedding yet more antisemitism.  The encampment mob demands Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israeli institutions and products. Israeli companies constitute about 20 per cent of foreign-traded companies on Nasdaq, second only to China. Thus, meeting the mob’s demands, which U of T is now considering, would mean the university and its pension funds must divest from any funds linked to the Nasdaq index.  Additionally, according to this mob, we should not invest in Pfizer or Moderna or use any of their products, such as COVID vaccines, because of their ties to Israel. The former chief medical officer of Moderna, Tal Zaks, is Israeli, and the mRNA technology used in these vaccines is based largely on research by Ada Yonath from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, who won a Nobel Prize for it. This also means boycotting products of Teva (an Israeli company) like Copaxone for multiple sclerosis, developed at the Weizmann Institute.  Moreover, complying with the mob’s demands would require avoiding procedures involving stents developed by Medinol, an Israeli company, and thus boycotting Boston Scientific, which partnered with Medinol and has acquired several Israeli companies. This would negatively affect interventional radiology, cardiology, cardiac surgery and other medical procedures. Boston Scientific also makes defibrillators, which would need to be removed from campus according to these demands. If we further acquiesce to the mob’s demands, the university should avoid using cyber security. Much of it is based on the RSA encryption algorithm. The S in RSA is Adi Shamir, a researcher in the Weizmann Institute. As such, the mob’s demands mean that the university must boycott him and the RSA algorithm. The same goes for Israeli cyber security companies and their products, such as Palo Alto Networks, Wiz, Check Point, and others.  Adhering to the mob’s demands would also mean avoiding Nvidia products, essential for machine learning and artificial intelligence research, due to Nvidia’s acquisition of Israeli companies like Mellanox. Similarly, AMD products would be off-limits because of its research centre near Tel Aviv. Intel Corporation, with significant manufacturing and research facilities in Israel since 1974, would also be boycotted. Intel’s processors, some developed in Israel, are vital for many computing applications. Intel’s acquisition of Mobileye, an Israeli company creating autonomous driving systems, would necessitate boycotting cars from companies using Mobileye technology, such as Audi, GM and Ford. Further, the mob’s demands extend to Microsoft, which has a major research centre in Israel and has acquired many Israeli tech firms. Thus, the university would need to abandon Windows, Office, Azure, Xbox, LinkedIn, and other Microsoft products. The boycott also targets Google, which acquired Israeli companies like Waze Mobile. This means avoiding Waze and other Alphabet products.  Moreover, Apple and Samsung products would be off-limits due to their acquisitions of Israeli firms. Apple’s acquisitions include Anobit, PrimeSense, and RealFace, while Samsung has invested in numerous Israeli companies.  In summary, it is impossible in a global economy to meet the encampment mob’s demands. Acquiescing, as the university is considering, would severely and negatively affect our lives. More importantly, capitulating to a mob that supports Hamas, which is designated a terrorist organization in Canada, is both immoral and illegal. U of T’s focus on avoiding bad publicity over doing what’s right is a significant moral failure, adding another chapter to its antisemitic history."

Are Gaza Protests Happening Mostly at Elite Colleges? - "Many of the most high-profile protests have occurred at highly selective colleges, like Columbia University. But since the national media is famously obsessed with these schools and gives far less attention to the thousands of other colleges where most Americans get their postsecondary educations, it’s hard to know how widespread the campus unrest has really been.    We at the Washington Monthly tried to get to the bottom of this question: Have pro-Palestinian protests taken place disproportionately at elite colleges, where few students come from lower-income families?  The answer is a resounding yes.  Using data from Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium and news reports of encampments, we matched information on every institution of higher education that has had pro-Palestinian protest activity (starting when the war broke out in October until early May) to the colleges in our 2023 college rankings. Of the 1,421 public and private nonprofit colleges that we ranked, 318 have had protests and 123 have had encampments.   By matching that data to percentages of students at each campus who receive Pell Grants (which are awarded to students from moderate- and low-income families), we came to an unsurprising conclusion: Pro-Palestinian protests have been rare at colleges with high percentages of Pell students. Encampments at such colleges have been rarer still. A few outliers exist, such as Cal State Los Angeles, the City College of New York, and Rutgers University–Newark. But in the vast majority of cases, campuses that educate students mostly from working-class backgrounds have not had any protest activity. For example, at the 78 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) on the Monthly’s list, 64 percent of the students, on average, receive Pell Grants. Yet according to our data, none of those institutions have had encampments and only nine have had protests, a significantly lower rate than non-HBCU schools. Protest activity has been common, however, at elite schools with both low acceptance rates and few Pell students...   Protests and encampments have been more common at public colleges. This is in part because these colleges just have more students, and only a few students are needed for a protest. Even at public colleges, though, there is a clear relationship between having fewer Pell students and having had a protest or encampment... Why is it that protests are so concentrated at more elite colleges and rare at those with larger percentages of working-class students? One possible explanation is that the more selective and wealthier colleges attract and encourage students who are more public minded and socially active.  To test that hypothesis, we compared the list of schools that have had protests and encampments to our 2023 rankings of national universities, where the lion’s share of protest activity has happened, based on a set of “service” metrics we use to gauge democratic engagement. These include the number of students at a college who serve—before, during, or after attending the school—in AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, ROTC, and local community nonprofits through work study; the percentage of students registered to vote and the degree to which the school makes student voting easier; and whether a school is listed on the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification, which recognizes colleges that document their broader public engagement efforts.  As you can see in the chart below, schools that have high scores on the Washington Monthly service rankings (the bottom of the Y axis) are a bit more likely to also have had protests and encampments. But in general, the distribution looks more random, especially compared with the previous three charts. In other words, having high levels of student democratic engagement—at least according to the Monthly’s metrics, which are the most extensive we know of—is far less correlated with protests and encampments than admitting low percentages of poor and working-class students."
Protests as left wing LARPing - left wingers don't actually deeply care about the world and others: they just want to lash out using the current fashionable cause

Meme - Steve McGuire @sfmcguire79: "BREAKING: Protestors have occupied the Institute of Politics building at the University of Chicago.  One of their signs says, “abolish the university.”"

Steve McGuire on X - "NEW: Faculty at The New School have established “the first faculty led encampment in the country.”"
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "In the past, students emulated their professors. The opposite is now true. The professors have adopted the full suite of left-wing youth culture: The matching tents. The neurotic masking. The activist self-absorption. Even the infantile clapping and chanting. Pure bathos."
J.D. Haltigan, PhD πŸ’πŸ‘¨‍πŸ’» on X - "Adult psyches have disintegrated. The entire performative act is now a complete youth city of malignant narcissism, role-reversal, & emotional petulance. Deeply psychopathological. Disturbed object relations."
Why are left wing movements so cultish?

U of T has abandoned its promise to prohibit hate speech, intimidation - "this encampment is not a peaceful protest. It is an intimidating and sometimes violent event that, while professing to be anti-Israel rather than anti-Jewish, deepens problems of antisemitism on our campus. This is evidenced by incidents related to me by faculty colleagues and my own experience. Recently I witnessed physical exclusion from the encampment site through intimidation, harassment and physical assault by the occupiers. After speaking to people outside the enclosure I attempted to enter through the well-guarded entrance but was physically prevented from doing so. The person beside me was punched in the face. I heard chants of globalizing the intifada and was told that Jews should go back to Europe. Signs glorifying the “resistance,” clearly referring to acts of October 7, and “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea”, referring to ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Middle East, were prominent. Peaceful co-existence was absent from the rhetoric.  Prior to the encampment, U of T announced that it would neither tolerate hate speech nor attempts to impede people’s movement around campus. Now these forms of illegal activity are taking place openly. The fence erected to protect the King’s College Circle grounds has been repurposed by protesters as a primary weapon for intimidation and exclusion of those who do not support their agenda. This includes the vast majority of Jewish faculty and students whose belief in the indigeneity of Jews to Israel shapes our identity. Whether or not one agrees with this belief, the encampment is decidedly and aggressively discriminatory to this community within the University of Toronto. U of T has abandoned its promise.  This disobedience is not civil. The demonstrators controlling access to university property are masked, as are many of the protesters around the site, avoiding accountability for their hateful and illegal activity. Unfortunately, U of T has permitted these operatives to occupy a public central campus space, establish prejudicial criteria for entering that space and enforce them with aggressive and intimidating means... The message is clear: people on campus — not only Jews — have learned that hate speech, intimidation and bullying prevails over constructive debate in Canada’s largest academic institution. The University of Toronto, a bastion of high academic ideals for which I have been proud to serve, is currently not a safe space physically, intellectually or emotionally, for a specific and targeted population. By not acting, U of T is choosing in favour of the purveyors of hate, intimidation and silencing of free speech, empowering others who wish to promote their hateful agendas by trespassing on university-protected property and intimidating those who do not agree."

U of T, student protesters unable to reach an agreement on students’ demands - "Student protesters from UofT Occupy for Palestine (O4P) — the encampment’s organizer — continue to call on the university to disclose its financial investments, divest its holdings from companies funding the Israeli military, and cut ties with Israeli academic institutions complicit in their government’s attacks on Gaza. After a group of 50 students broke down part of the fence surrounding King’s College Circle and set up camp on May 2, the number of protesters within the gated area has gradually increased to 200 U of T students, faculty, and community members camping overnight... Following the two meetings, O4P published an Instagram post on May 8, claiming that the university “refuses to discuss divestment.” The post noted that O4P would no longer talk to the university unless the administration directly addressed their demands... McCall noted that during the meeting with the university, the administration refused the students’ demands to cut ties with Israeli academic institutions... McCall also claimed that the university said cutting ties with Israeli schools would harm Israeli academics who are “the most vociferous critics of the Israeli government.”   In response to the university, O4P wrote in an Instagram post on May 13 that Palestinian scholars are the most critical of the Israeli government. In the post, O4P also claimed that “partnerships between Israeli Universities and U of T have increased during the genocide.”  O4P outlined three demands in the post as well, calling on the administration to retract statements they made on hate speech, health, and safety that “defame” their movement, provide a written commitment guaranteeing that the police will not remove protesters, and remove all police surveillance... Mackey claimed that the university instead proposed to create two endowed chairs for Palestinian studies at U of T. The student representatives countered this proposal, demanding an entire institute for Palestinian studies.   On May 16, O4P wrote in an Instagram post that the administration is making “marginal movement[s],” which would not appease them... “A genocide is unfolding this very moment, and U of T is trying to stall until we pack up and leave,” the post read. “If U of T wants us gone, they must simply meet our demands.”"
Good luck to protesters not approved by the left who try even a fraction of this shit
When you are open that you are shamelessly blackmailing people

Meme - Wilfred Reilly @wil_da_beast630: "The extent to which this movement is composed almost entirely of people who would not have survived to adulthood in earlier eras is pretty remarkable."
Alex Rosen @iFightForKids: "This is “the resistance” 😳"
*protesters wearing ventillators, head coverings, holding umbrellas and shields*

Meme - Cam Higby πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ @camhigby: "Now that the action is over - I found this inside the UC Irvine encampment today while I was undercover. Printed directly from the Hamas media office.   Don’t let them tell you they’re not Pro-Hamas."
"Our Narrative... Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Hamas Media Office"
Time to blame Mossad undercover agents for doing a false flag

Universities bowing to anti-Israel mobs by barring opposing voices: activists - "Police cleaned out campus encampments in Calgary and Edmonton last week, while two attempts to invoke a court-ordered end to encampments at McGill have so far gone nowhere. Police in Montreal ordered two pro-Israel demonstrators to leave the McGill encampment on Friday, furthering accusations of double-standards at Canadian universities... Despite repeated assurances that university encampments are organized by students, Rizwan’s observations during his visits have made him agree with others who say they’re far too well-equipped and well-organized to be purely spontaneous actions... A UBC lecturer attempting to enter an encampment at his school was turned away after he responded that he believed Palestinians could coexist peacefully with Israel when asked whether he supported “Palestinian self-determination.”... When asked why the pro-Israel protesters were removed and not the pro-Palestinian protesters, the police spokesperson said, “I don’t have an answer. I know that there was tension between the two groups.”... Activists established the McGill encampment late last month, which has so far survived two attempts — one by students and another by administration — to force its closure by a court order."
No one is above the law - except the left
Clearly, the "students" just want everyone to live in peace

Why America’s Richest Universities Are Protecting Hate-Filled Foreign Students - "many of the students leading, organizing, and participating in these protests and expressions of antisemitism and support for Hamas on college campuses are not Americans—meaning that they are not American citizens or even green card holders. Rather, they are foreign passport holders, including from Arab and Muslim countries, who have decided to avail themselves of U.S. educational infrastructure while importing the passions and prejudices of their home countries to American campuses. Indeed, the universities have acknowledged the obvious fact that many of the campus protest leaders are foreign students, here on limited educational visas, in the manner with which they have chosen to handle the Gaza protests... There are laws on the books that apply to foreign students and other nonresident aliens in the United States who support terrorist organizations like Hamas. Since October, leading Republican lawmakers have reminded everyone of the existence of these laws... You could argue there are ideological reasons for the schools not to take action against foreign students. “Palestine,” after all, has found its place at the heart of progressive “intersectionality.” But there’s also a strong material incentive for the universities’ failure to obey the law. The average share of international students in Ivy League schools who enrolled in the fall of 2023 is about 15%. The overall international share is higher. A quarter of Harvard’s student body is now international. At MIT, it’s nearly a third. The scheme by which U.S. taxpayers pay to give 25% or more of the places at America’s most prestigious universities to foreign students is a recent innovation—one that took shape between 2004 and 2014, and has helped make the universities’ DEI rhetoric cost-free. The international share of freshmen at Georgetown nearly quadrupled from 3% in 2004 to 11% a decade later, with similar numbers at Berkeley and Yale... the number of incoming foreign students at Ivy League schools rose by 46%. Behind this increase lies the simple reality that only a comparatively small number of Americans can afford the mind-numbingly high fees that American universities extort from their captive domestic market. Foreign students, the overwhelming majority of whom are either the children of wealthy foreign elites or directly sponsored by their governments, represent a serious source of funding for American colleges, public and private alike. These students often pay full or near-full tuition and board, and help public universities balance the books in the face of budget cuts. More broadly, they augment revenue by helping to fill federally funded programs that are based on racial and ethnic quotas. Depending on how you look at it, American universities have made either an exceedingly clever or else exceedingly reprehensible bargain: Quota-filling at a profit. While this practice is generally covered with asinine bureaucratic language such as “promoting diversity” and “fostering a cosmopolitan culture” for a “global community,” it is in fact a racket by which universities take slots presumably intended for members of groups that are held to be economically and culturally deprived—and on which the universities would be obligated to take a loss—and instead sell them at a profit to the families of some of the more privileged people on Earth, while also continuing to sell identity-politics platitudes as institutional ideology... universities can pretend that these views are normal—and encourage home-grown professors to serve as faculty advisers and active sympathizers—so as not to disturb their cash cow. And it’s not just tuition money that schools are milking. Foreign governments also write big checks to ensure that their students—and their politics—are given red-carpet treatment at big-name universities. According to the National Association of Scholars, since 2001 Qatar has given around $5 billion to American universities, more than any other foreign government. Between 2014 and 2019, American colleges and universities received $2.7 billion in Qatari funding without any public acknowledgment of the source of those funds. Given that Qatar hosts the leadership of Hamas, one can see how cracking down on Hamas-sympathizing students might seem like a bad idea for university presidents who cash Qatari checks. The political and financial incentives for the universities, therefore, are straightforward. But here’s the thing: It’s not just the students who are breaking the law. The schools are actively doing so, too. Universities did not simply refrain from expelling foreign students who violated the terms of their visas by espousing and endorsing terrorist activity. They took extra steps to protect foreign students from the legal repercussions of their actions, which in some cases would appear to make the universities themselves accessories to the crime of facilitating terror-supporting activity... the schools hired people—who will work with the Offices of General Counsel, the Offices of the Provost, and Barnard College Information Technology—to erase whatever damning footprint their foreign students may have left online, which could be used as grounds for visa revocation and deportation. It should be noted that foreign students are not merely exercising their rights to free speech, whether determined by the First Amendment or university administrators: Foreign students are not U.S. citizens, and their entry and presence in this country are strictly conditional. Once these conditions are violated, the violators have no right to stay or exercise rights that belong to citizens... But what the schools also know is that they have political cover from the Biden administration to violate the country’s visa and terrorism laws. On Nov. 1, three weeks after the Oct. 7 pogrom and the eruption of antisemitic, pro-Hamas street action in U.S. cities, the White House unveiled “the first-ever National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia in the United States.” The initiative, with its inversion of reality, gave a green light to pro-Hamas protesters while telegraphing to the university administrators that the former were members of a protected class—rather than a danger to public safety. University administrators were hardly the only ones to get the message. In Massachusetts, for example, the top-down imperative to protect student demonstrators from the legal consequences of supporting terrorist groups led to a wholesale change in police functioning that under any other circumstances would be excoriated by the left as evidence of incipient fascism. “Under Massachusetts law,” the University of Massachusetts Amherst explained in a statement, “daily police logs, including the names and addresses of arrestees, must be made public ‘without charge to the public during regular business hours and at all other reasonable times.’ For several years, the University of Massachusetts Police Department (UMPD) has posted these logs online to ensure compliance with state law. Beginning in December 2023, UMPD police logs will no longer be available on the UMPD website. UMPD logs will, however, remain available to the public at no charge at the UMPD lobby at 585 East Pleasant Street in Amherst.” The real victims, you see, are the brave students chanting genocidal slogans in public; the villains are the people who attempt to “dox” them by posting footage of their noxious statements and behavior online."

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