Community Magazine December 2013

Education and Indoctrination College universities are not only places of learning, but also places of indoctrination of all kinds: anti-Israel, anti-Zionism, anti- Semitism, promiscuity, drugs and secularism are all vigorously promoted on many campuses. Your child will be exposed to rhetoric, radical ideology, and relative moralism from the first day as a freshman through graduation day. And for many, those one-sided views are often all they are exposed to, in a kind of brainwashing that has permeated the classrooms. Imagine a college professor in a course about terrorism saying, “No educated person can support Israel ... Educated people don’t have those kinds of views.” It’s happening, and has happened often, all across the United States. Sarah Livingstone of Columbus, Ohio can tell you that being a vocal and proud Zionist on campus at Ohio State University wasn’t always popular – or even safe. She and her friends have been met with hostile confrontations that have left her still “annoyed and troubled.” She witnessed anti-Israel activity firsthand when Israel defended itself against terrorists during the last Gaza War. “We had a chance to come together and support Israel in terms of defending herself,” she said of herself and her likeminded pro-Israel peers. However, the Palestinian student organization staged a protest against Israel, she added, and the clashes “seemed absurd. It was really vicious.” They presented a “death in” – where they would lie down, pretending to be dead during the conflict. “These entitled kids had no idea what it’d be like to live in that environment [of Israel]. Their response was invariably to storm off when we tried to engage them in dialogue. We [Jewish students] were always trying an intellectual and non-argumentative stance.” Later, Ohio State suffered a string of racist events, such as swastikas etched on a university building, she said. The Palestinian student group never missed an opportunity to cause a ruckus. When an Israeli Defense Forces soldier visited Jewish students for a Shabbat, the Palestinian group protested outside the Hillel’s doors. “It was irritating,” said Livingstone. Jewish students were forced to surreptitiously enter through a back door to avoid being harangued. There is no shortage of incidents like these experienced by Jewish students on campus. They include anti-Israel campus rallies and demonstrations, and class “discussion” about Israel’s supposed crimes – even in non-political courses. Ben Shapiro, author of Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate American Youth , notes the example of the UCLA Muslim Student Association (MSA), which has unabashedly supported the notoriously anti-Semitic Muslim Brotherhood. There is evidence to suggest, he adds, that the MSA has had close enough ties to suggest financial support as well. “The university system is one of the largest brain washing machines on the planet,” he said. Actual quotes he compiled from professors include: “Anyone who bombs the Pentagon has my vote,” and “the people who caused 9/11 might fit into Locke’s definition of justified resistance.” The War Against Academic Freedom David Horowitz, founder of the online news magazine FrontPagemag.com and author of Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom , has spoken at more than 300 universities over the last 20 years. He has conducted extensive interviews with students and faculty alike, to determine the ideological climate on campuses, and his findings might send shivers down the spine of parents. They show that while Americans have grown accustomed to a “marketplace of ideas” and embraced a wide-ranging spectrum of views, the university has become increasingly narrow in its tolerance of anything other than extremist liberal perspectives. At the University of Michigan, for instance, Evelyn Azeeza Alsultany, Professor of Arab-American studies, taught a course called, “Why Do They Hate Us? Perspectives on 9/11,” positing the notion that there are legitimate reasons why Muslims harbor enough hatred towards Americans to murder 3,000 of them. She also taught a course focused onAmerican cinema, examining what she described as the images that “justify anti-Arab racism and U.S.-led wars in the Middle East.” Professors are increasingly seeing themselves as armchair moralists, rather than imparters of knowledge and wisdom, Horowitz asserted. The underlying theme in most of these lectures is that America and Israel are irredeemably evil. As Harvard President Lawrence Summers said in a 2002 address to the Harvard community: Where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israeli have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities (such as university). Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent. As case in point, to the chagrin of many, the University of California’s governing board recently welcomed a Muslim student member named Sadia Saifuddin. This would have received little fanfare but for the fact that Saifuddin co-sponsored a bill calling for the divestment of university funds from businesses with economic ties to the Israeli military or Israeli companies operating in Judea and Samaria. The University of California has also seen regular pro- Palestinian protests that include checkpoint simulations and placards with swastikas with the Star of David. When Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren was invited to speak at UC Irvine in 2010, a group of 10 Muslim students repeatedly heckled him and were subsequently convicted of misdemeanors. Swastikas have also been seen on UC Irvine university buildings. Then there’s Jenny Peto. Her student thesis caught the attention of the Jewish community in Canada, who perceived it as a highly inaccurate hit job on certain facets of Jewish education, to put it mildly. BEWARE: Students attending secular college universities most likely will be exposed to anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and anti-religion rhetoric. TEVET 5774 DECEMBER 2013 41