Saturday Miscellany

First, it took them far too long, but the Biden administration has joined with other world leaders in calling for Hamas to release the hostages they have been holding for some 6 months now.

The Daily Mail has the story:

President Joe Biden joined leaders from 17 other countries on Thursday in calling on Hamas to release all the hostages being held in Gaza.

All of the countries have citizens being held hostage by Hamas. In addition to demanding their release, the leaders call for an 'immediate and prolong ceasefire.'

'We call for the immediate release of all hostages held by Hamas and Gaza, now for over 200 days,' the leaders say. 'They include our citizens. The fate of the hostages and the civilian population in Gaza, who are protected under international law, is of international concern.'

'We emphasize that the deal on the table to release the hostages would bring an immediate and prolonged ceasefire in Gaza, that would facilitate a surge of additional necessary humanitarian assistance to be delivered throughout Gaza, and lead to the credible end of hostilities.'

As of early April, 133 hostages remained in captivity in the Gaza Strip.

Surely, these dumbass world leaders did not really believe that Hamas really wanted a ceasefire and humanitarian assistance. As long as these leaders were trashing the Israelis, Hamas concluded that they were winning and that Joe Biden had their back.

Second, you remember the pier that we are building in Southern Gaza, the better to facilitate the transport of humanitarian assistance for the human shields held by Hamas.

Well, Ryan Saavedra has reported that Hamas has greeted the construction with a round of artillery shells:

Palestinian terrorists fired mortar shells at a pier that is being constructed by U.S. forces to bring aid into Gaza The mortar attack occurred as United Nations officials were touring the site with Israeli troops on the coast of central Gaza, the IDF says in response to a query on the incident. The IDF says the UN officials were rushed to a shelter by troops amid the attack. A Hamas official told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the militant group will resist any foreign military presence involved with the port project.

Third, on the campus front of the war against terrorism, we learn that the president of Columbia University has a rather sketchy academic publication history:

Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak reports:

Nemat Shafik - @Columbia Prez only has 1 well-cited publication in her life, in Oxford Econ Papers 1994. This paper is lifted almost entirely from a 1992 report coauthored with consultant not credited in the publication. This is wholesale intellectual theft, not subtle plagiarism.

Reminds you of Claudine Gay, doesn’t it.

Fourth, on this score I have hardly been derelict. As it happens, the more America’s great academic institutions become war zones, the more America’s corporate chieftains and hedge fund tycoons are ceasing to recruit from them.

These young people are destroying the value of their diplomas. Apparently, they are not as smart as we thought they were.

The New York Post has the story:

The violent, antisemitic protests at some of the nation’s elite colleges has forced top corporate recruiters to assess the quality of the education dispensed at these places — and whether they should look elsewhere for job candidates, the Post has learned.

Activist investor Daniel Loeb, a Columbia University graduate, has begun to reconsider whether to focus offering jobs at his hedge fund to fellow alums and other Ivy League schools like Harvard, Yale, Penn amid their tepid responses to the protests on their campuses, he told The Post.

The anti-Israel protests now at Columbia, and throughout some of the country’s once revered, top-tiered universities are tarnishing degrees from these places, these people say.

At issue: Can schools that rationalize non-stop protests while allowing course curriculum that imbibes students with a leftist interpretations of world events be trusted to produce quality job candidates?

The re-evaluation of the elite-school degree comes amid a broader crackdown on strident political dissent in the office environment. 

Now, recruiters say, many that haven’t tapped down on violent protesters or moved their curriculum away from “woke” core courses are paying the price in terms of the perceived diminished value of the degrees they are handing out when students begin to look for jobs.

Now, that Ivy League degree is going to become an impediment.

Fifth, I have occasionally remarked that the bloom is coming off the feminist rose. Women are asking themselves whether feminism really helped them.

Now, Petronella Wyatt-- formerly the girlfriend of one Boris Johnson-- asks the hard question in the Telegraph:

Where, for instance, does it [feminism] leave women like me, when we have reached the age of 54, as I have, and find ourselves both single and childless? Hugging the collected works of Proust, or engaging in furtive sojourns to the pub that bring remembrances of things pissed? One in 10 British women in their 50s have never married and live alone, which is neither pleasant nor healthy. 

Wyatt identifies the problem:

Feminism made the error of telling us to behave and think like men. This error was a grave one, and women like myself are paying for it, like gamblers in a casino that has been fixed. We are not men, and in living the single life, with its casual encounters, we play for much higher stakes and have more to lose. I wish I had not been taught to throw the dice so high. Even Shakespeare’s princes needed someone to look after them in their old age.

Sixth, Louis Gerstner, formerly of IBM, argues that a budding corporate executive cannot learn how to manage when he is working remotely. For those who have not been following my numerous expressions of doubt about the value of remote work, here is another better informed opinion, from the Wall Street Journal:

The class of employees for whom working in a solitary setting is highly detrimental is people who aspire to lead or manage others in an academic, nonprofit, governmental or business institution. One learns how to manage and lead principally by watching others demonstrate how—or how not—to do so.

He continues:

Another skill you can’t learn sitting at home is motivating others to reach for success. Leadership involves getting people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t. This requires articulating and continually reinforcing an external purpose and a visceral sense of teamwork. It isn’t a cold digital process; it is a human and at times personal connection with all the members of your team. It manifests itself in immediate and constructive feedback. None of us are born with these skills, nor are we conditioned or trained to do them well. Watching others who have successfully developed this leadership capacity is, in my mind, the singular way to learn it. There are, of course, many other skills that are learned “on the job” principally by watching others demonstrate them. We also learn a lot by failure—not only our own but that of others.

Seventh, large numbers of Americans believe that illegal migration is a major problem. More and more of them support the idea of mass deportation.

David Strom reports:

Axios commissioned a Harris poll and discovered something unsurprising, even if the establishment was shocked. 

Americans support mass deportations of illegal aliens. I suspect they would support mass deportations of some legal aliens who express anti-American views as well, come to think of it. 

Eighth, Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Virginia used to be the top ranked high school in the nation. Then, the grandees who run the place decided that it needed more diversity and inclusion. They decided to dispense with the test driven admissions criteria, thus reducing the number of Asian students. The result, from Number 1 to Number 14.

The Coalition for TJ; Fighting for Merit reports:

TJ for the first time dropped out of the top 10 of the US News list of top US high schools, falling from being number 1 2020-2022, to 5 in 2023, to now 14 in 2024 as its college readiness score and state test assessment scores fell dramatically.

Ninth, it could not have happened to a nicer guy. Adam Schiff parked his car in a garage in San Francisco. When he left it unattended, thieves broke in and stole his suitcase. 

Kevin Fagan has the story in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Hello to the city, goodbye to your luggage. That was Senatorial candidate Adam Schiff’s rude introduction to San Francisco’s vexing reputation for car burglaries Thursday when thieves swiped the bags from his car while it sat in a downtown parking garage.

The heist meant the Democratic congressman got stuck at a fancy dinner party in his shirt sleeves and a hiking vest while everyone else sat in suits. Not quite the look the man from Burbank was aiming for as he rose to thank powerhouse attorney Joe Cotchett for his support in his bid to replace the late Dianne Feinstein in the U.S. Senate.

“I guess it’s ‘Welcome to San Francisco,’ ” Cotchett’s press agent Lee Houskeeper, who was at the dinner, remarked dryly.

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A Culture of Grievance

Nothing is quite as self-defeating as grievance culture. That is, defining yourself in terms of your grievances. That is, of all the bad things other people have done to you.

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni has written a book making the argument against grievance culture. And Pamela Paul offers a commentary around a rather simple concept: just because you have been wronged does not make you right.

Nicely stated.

One should add two points that Paul overlooks. 

First, you gain access to your grievances by introspecting. A grievance culture seems to be an outgrowth of therapy culture. Thereby you define yourself through the traumas that you have suffered. You may have noticed that trauma is all the rage these days. Everyone has one or two; and everyone knows how to overcome them.

Second, grievance culture defies meritocracy. If you define your social value in terms of trauma, you are not defining yourself in terms of your successes. You are complaining about failure. And you are blaming someone else for your failings. One of the best ways to pile failure on failure is to blame someone else for your failures.

Paul explains how pervasive grievance culture is:

If you’re on the left, you have been oppressed, denied, marginalized, silenced, erased, pained, underrepresented, underresourced, traumatized, harmed and hurt. If you’re on the right, you’ve been ignored, overlooked, demeaned, underestimated, shouted down, maligned, caricatured and despised; in Trumpspeak: wronged and betrayed.

One understands that a New York Times columnist must trash people on both the left and the right.

Paul suggests that Bruni sees the therapy culture aspect of it all. And he also sees that introspection is self-defeating, therapeutically, because it removes people from social commerce, and makes them self-importantly self-involved.

Tending to our respective fiefs, Bruni writes, is “to privilege the private over the public, to gaze inward rather than outward, and that’s not a great facilitator of common cause, common ground, compromise.”

Paul suggests that our search for offense teaches us to practice endless stewing-- I would have preferred a better term:

The compulsion to find offense everywhere leaves us endlessly stewing. Whatever your politics, it assumes and feeds a narrative that stretches expansively from the acutely personal to the grandly political — from me and mine to you and the other, from us vs. them to good vs. evil. And as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff warned in their book, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” the calculus is that if you’re hurt or upset, your feelings must be validated. 

And yet, the more we define ourselves by membership in an oppressed group, the more we will find ourselves competing with other members of other oppressed groups. 

The thought is certainly useful, especially as it shows the futility of defining different people by different forms of subjugation, leaving them to compete against each other to see who is the most oppressed.

Paul writes:

Who is more oppressed, an older disabled white veteran or a young gay Latino man? A transgender woman who lived for five decades as a man or a 16-year-old girl? What does it mean that vying for the top position involves proving how hard off and vulnerable you are?

You end up with the Oppression Olympics:

Instead, as one undergraduate noted in the Harvard Political Review, “In pitting subjugated groups against one another, the Oppression Olympics not only reduce the store of resources to which groups and movements have access, but also breed intersectional bitterness that facilitates further injustice.” Rewarding a victim-centric worldview, which we do from the classroom to the workplace to our political institutions, only sows more divisiveness and fatalism. It seems to satisfy no one, and people are more outraged than ever. 

The end result is a society defined in terms of competing grievances, where no one is held to account for dereliction and where no one believes that he can, of his own volition, overcome his problems:

The acrimony has only intensified in the past few years. The battlefield keeps widening. What begins as a threat often descends into protests, riots and physical violence. It’s difficult for anyone to wade through all of this without feeling wronged in one way or another. But it wrongs us all. And if we continue to mistake grievance for righteousness, we only set ourselves up for more of the same.

So, we should be wanting to see a return to meritocracy. We should rid the world of DEI initiatives. And we should stop complaining about everything. That means, we should overcome the bad habit we have learned from therapy culture.

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Columbia's Tiananmen Square

Naturally and rationally, the visions of student encampments at Columbia and other universities bring to mind the now distant memory of what happened in Tiananmen Square some three and a half decades ago.

In April of 1989 students occupied Tiananmen Square to commemorate the death of Communist Party Secretary Hu Yaobang. An important leader in the reform movement at the time, he favored a more democratic China.

At roughly the time when Francis Fukuyama trotted out his neo-Hegelian eschatology and declared that liberal democracy would inevitably prevail, the student protesters in Tiananmen insisted that it come about, sooner and not later. They were not satisfied with Deng’s reforms, which involved free enterprise and privatization. They wanted democratic elections, freedom of speech and a free press.

Of course, Fukuyama believed that liberal democracy included capitalism and free enterprise. The Chinese begged to disagree.

Playing itself out in Tiananmen Square was one of the most important theoretical questions of our time. Can you have capitalism without liberal democracy? Will the one necessarily lead to the other?

Some members of the Politburo, led by Premier Zhao Ziyang sympathized with the students. And yet, after a month of deliberative debate China’s leaders decided that the student protesters more closely resembled the Red Guards, not the revelers of Woodstock. 

China had undergone severe turmoil during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution-- in large part because it was a children’s crusade, and because the children in question had no self-control or discipline. 

Now, flash forward to Columbia University. Is it fair to ask whether the students encamped in the Columbia University quad, along with students at other universities were more like the Red Guards or more like party goers at Woodstock.

Strangely, they were not even trying to hide their truth. They have been saying that they are more like Hamas, a group the murdered, massacred and raped Israelis. They have assaulted and harassed Jewish students on campus, to the point where the university president recommended that Jewish students stay off campus-- she could not guarantee their safety.

Islamic terrorism has much in common with the Red Guards. The Red Guards murdered more than a million people, but they did not throw babies into ovens. They did however end up eating their teachers-- in the literally cannibalistic way. 

We might say that the leaders of universities like Columbia are congenitally weak. And yet, when you see the student protesters in open defiance of the president’s authority you should conclude that these young people have no respect for authority. Perhaps this is the fault of an older generation that rejects authority, and even denounces anything that resembles authoritarian government, but the truth remains, the chaos in the Columbia quad or outside of NYU manifests a rank refusal to respect adult authority.

As for how the situation unfolded in 1989, consider this. When a twenty-one year old student named Wuer Kaixi-- an ethnic Uigher-- appeared on television in dialogue with Premier Li Peng, he harangued and taunted the leader, causing him to lose some considerable face. 

It was a miscalculation, assuming that it had been calculated at all. Wuer was saying: you are not in charge; we are in charge. What are you going to do about it?

Outside of the square,the breakdown in the respect for authority caused the social fabric to disintegrate. Many Chinese were sympathetic toward the students. Troops that were stationed around Beijing, the troops that would normally have been used to quell the demonstration, had already declared that if such orders were given they would refuse them. In more pedestrian terms, they were in mutiny.

Keep in mind, Deng Xiaoping was among the leading targets of the Cultural Revolution. Mao had declared him to be the number 2 capitalist roader. At the time of Tiananmen Deng was called the Supreme Leader, but the only title he had was as Chairman of the Military Commission. 

The Tiananmen Square demonstrations bore some semblance to the Cultural Revolution. China’s leaders had survived the first one and were not going to allow a second one to start.

Premier Zhao Ziyang argued the student position in Politburo deliberations, and eventually walked down to the Square to tell the students that they had lost the debate. 

The leadership decided that it needed to make a show of force, to make clear that they were in charge. It was an assertion of authority, one that was no longer subject to debate. The students who had refused to go home were run down by tanks and shot down by snipers. It was a decidedly ugly scene. No one knows how many died. 

It looked like repression. Journalist Nicholas Kristof declared that the regime would necessarily be overthrown, because repression always leads to rebellion. 

Strangely, they were all wrong. The government continued its reform program and continues it to this day.

Anyway, we are not proposing that the forces of law and order suppress the student protests violently. We are far too civilized for that. And yet, someone needs to take charge of the situation on America’s college campuses. And those who are disrupting education in order to defend Hamas should be punished.

Of course, the issue in China was: who was in charge? Was anyone in charge? Evidently, the tanks and snipers offered one answer to the question.

As for Columbia University, evidently no one is really in charge. The university president did call in the police to clear out the quad, but once that bit of theatre was over, the demonstrators returned and took up residence in places they were told not to take up residence. Evidently, her words were not backed up by any consequential action, so she evidently was not in charge.

The larger issue is quite simple: should certain institutions of higher learning be saved? Many people, mostly from the conservative right, have long inveighed against what is being taught at these institutions. But, has the rot so thoroughly infested them that they have become irretrievable?  

Liel Liebowitz suggested in the City Journal that the institutions are lost. He was implying that parents should begin a national boycott of these universities and send their children (and their money) to non-Ivy League colleges and universities:

It’s time we approached our elite universities not as critical institutions that we must repair but as national security threats that we must address forcefully. The message out of Columbia this week is that there’s nothing left on campus but fanatics awash in foreign funds, and fawned over by a faculty that long ago lost its decency, its courage, and its reason. Let’s waste no more time trying to reform the unreformable. Let’s hold the violent zealots accountable, and then get to work building new institutions worthy of our children.

If you are more inclined to promote reform, you might be happy to see these universities break their ties to Middle Eastern countries who have been funding Muslim and Arab Study programs, places where anti-Semitism has been allowed to fester. The leaders of such institutions cannot assert their authority if they allow student demonstrators to align themselves with Hamas and to call for the death of Jews.

Jonathan Pizludny makes that case in the City Journal:

In effect, U.S. campuses have been importing anti-Semitic propaganda for almost 50 years. As the New York Times reported in 1978, “Oil wealth from the Middle East is starting to flow onto college and university campuses throughout the country, bringing a bonanza of endowed chairs and new programs.” That initial flood of money—and specific concerns about gifts to Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies—led to the establishment of foreign gift-reporting requirements in 1986. To this day, Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires universities to report foreign gifts above $250,000.

Unfortunately, weak enforcement by the Department of Education allowed many universities to ignore the requirement. That changed in 2019, when Secretary Betsy DeVos initiated noncompliance investigations at several top schools. In 2023 congressional testimony, Paul Moore, chief investigative council at the Department of Education during the Trump administration, described the sea change that followed: “enhanced enforcement . . . produced dramatic results,” including the “disclosure of more than $6.5 billion in previously undisclosed foreign gifts and contributions.” The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), which analyzed the updated disclosures for 2014–19, found that over $2.7 billion in gifts came from Qatari sources, $1.2 billion from Chinese entities, and over $1 billion originated in Saudi Arabia.

The issue is the assertion of authority. We have rendered the notion retrograde and no one respects authority any more. It is time for a reckoning on America’s college campuses.

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Wednesday Potpourri

First, it’s a rather obvious point, but Omri Ceren makes it well:

American colleges and universities spent the last decade censoring conservatives - canceling events, punishing teachers, etc. - because they said they wanted to ensure their students never felt unsafe. They spent uncountable millions institutionalizing leftwing diversity programs and staff, with the same pretext. Either they were lying or Jewish students don't count for them. Or both.

Second, when you’ve lost Alan Dershowitz…. The emeritus law professor has broken with the Democratic Party. Hmmm. He cannot belong to a political party that countenances anti-Semitism.

During an interview on the “Just the News, No Noise” show, Dershowitz expressed profound disappointment in his party's failure to address the pro-Palestine demonstrations at Columbia University that have been ongoing since last Wednesday.

Remember when Sen. Chuck Schumer denounced Israel for defending itself against Hamas. 

I am sure that you do. Now, however, when much worse is going on across academic America, these fearless opponents of the radical right have nothing to say. Dershowitz continued:

“We're hearing nothing from Democrats. We are hearing nothing from Chuck Schumer,” Dershowitz explained. “We're hearing nothing really direct from President Biden. He made a very disappointing statement. In the same breath, he talked about the demonstrators in passing and he said, ‘but you have to understand the Palestinian situation.’ No, you don't have to understand the Palestinian situation. When people are calling for rape and murder and beheading. The Democrats are an extraordinary disappointment."

The result, one less Democrat:

"I am no longer presumptively voting for Democrats," he added. "I'm gonna vote for whoever is the best candidate, that may include Democrats, but I have no loyalty anymore to the party.” 

And Dershowitz connects the current campus anti-Semitism with diversity admissions programs:

“Many of the students [protesting] today are unqualified students,” Dershowitz said. “They were admitted because of DEI. They were admitted because Qatar and other Arab countries are paying for foreign students. These are not the best and the brightest students, they are the loudest students, but they're certainly not students who are looking out for the best interests of America.”

As for the comparisons with Carlotteesville and January 6, Dershowitz debunks them:

“What we're seeing is something that I believe, and this is going to be very controversial, I believe is potentially more dangerous than January 6, which was terrible, and than Charlottesville, which was terrible,” Dershowitz said. “Because those didn't involve as many students, not as many elite people, as many future leaders. We're hearing the future leaders of America chanting ‘We are Hamas.’ In other words, ‘we are rapists. We believe in raping Jewish women. We are beheaders. We are kidnappers. We are murderers.’ That's what they're chanting. And these are people who will run for Congress ... 10 years from now, who will be partners at law firms, and who will be working in the editorial rooms of CNN, and the New York Times.”

Of course, if foreign student nationals are participating in the rioting, they are here with student visas.

Would it be too much for our State Department to cancel their visas and deport them?

Third, Randy Barnett counters the notion that what is happening in blue cities and on college campuses represents America. It is a useful qualification:

This is important. What’s happening is not “America.” It is Democrat-governed cities, generally in blue states, and on college campuses. Focus your concerns on the “root causes” of Jew hatred and intimidation in these venues.

Fourth, on the other side of the pond, anti-Semitism is alive and well. To the point where the British police allow pro-Hamas rallies, while warning Jews to stay away from such rallies. Julie Burchill comments:

Every week the British police tolerate the pro-Hamas rallies which have defaced and disgraced the capital since the 7 October pogroms in Israel. We’ve seen the gallantry displayed by the boys in blue towards the boys with the black flags; we’ve seen policemen watch helplessly as Palestinian protestors clamber onto war memorials, and stand by amiably as the genocidal slogan ‘From the river to the sea’ is beamed onto the Houses of Parliament. This led the Conservative MP Andrew Percy to state: ‘It’s the pathetic response we’ve come to expect from the Met – a force that has at times appeared to act more like a PR arm for the protesters than a law enforcement agency.’ So protective are they of their team that a young Iranian man was arrested after carrying a poster which read ‘Hamas is terrorist’. He was wrestled to the ground by five police officers.

She concludes:

I would venture that ‘anti-Semitism’ doesn’t cover what’s going on right now – ‘Judeophobia’ says it better. For this really is an irrational neurotic ailment. Why are people so hostile to such a loyal, productive, well-assimilated, un-criminal, non-violent immigrant group, who have often driven me into sullen silence when they insist on singing the National Anthem of the UK at every public meeting? Why are we treating them so badly and – in the case of the police – assisting other groups in tormenting them? Why, for the first time last year, when figures on hate crimes against Jews hit a record high, was there for the very first time at least one incident in every police region in the UK, which means that anti-Semitism now exists in regions even where there are no Jews? No one with any sense believes that this is about the number of deaths taking place in Gaza; the big giveaway is that the first London rally took place before Israel fought back. It was a simple celebration of Jew-killing, the oldest hatred dressed up in fashionable new clothes.

Fifth, do you believe that migrants, especially the illegal variety, are more prone to commit crimes? Statistics appear to suggest that such is not the case in America, but, then again, one suspects that the statistics are being systematically falsified.

So, to find more accurate and honest statistics, we look to Germany. Guess what? Germany is seeing a migrant crime wave.

Ben Bartee reports for PJ Media:

 

The number of foreign suspects soared to around 923,000 last year, representing a massive 18 percent increase in just one year nationwide, according to crime statistics from the German Interior Ministry released on Tuesday. However, the even more shocking number may have to do with violent crimes, which soared to record levels in 2023.

The data from the interior ministry shows that 41 percent of all crime suspects are foreigners, with 2.246 million people in the country suspected of a crime in 2023, which is 7.3 percent more than in 2022. Overall, foreigners only represent 15 percent of the population.

This corresponds to an increase of almost 18 percent, reports Die Welt, citing the as yet unpublished crime statistics for 2023 from the Federal Ministry of the Interior. They now account for almost 41 percent of all suspects. A total of 2.246 million people in Germany were suspected of a crime – 7.3 percent more than in 2022.

So, to recap: 15% of the population commits 41% of all crime — and that’s relying on the government’s numbers, which we can only take with a boulder of salt given the inconvenience that migrant crime poses to the preferred policy of replacement migration.

Sixth, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman seems to have conquered his depression and even his brain damage. 

He said this about protest demonstrators:

If you show up in a Starbucks with a bullhorn and start yelling at people, that doesn't make you noble; it just makes you an asshole.

Seventh, regarding the notion of military proportionality, recently introduced into books about warfare in order to score propaganda points against the Israeli military’s Gaza operation, NYU Professor Scott Galloway had this to say on the Morning Joe show:

2,200 American servicemen killed at Pearl Harbor. We go on to kill 3.5 million Japanese, including 100,000 in one night. 2,800 Americans in 9/11. We go on to kill 400,000 people in Afghanistan and Iraq. We weren’t accused of genocide.

While the Biden administration insists that it supports Israel, it has just put that nation on a list of the most egregious human rights offenders, that is, of Iran and Russia.

This shows, among other things, that the current wave of anti-Israeli protests are designed to open a new front in the Gaza war, the better to restrain Israel and to save Hamas. 

Eighth, the bloom is coming off the rose. That means, the current rash of demonstrations in favor of Hamas atrocities is damaging more than the education of the students, Jewish and otherwise, on these campuses.

They are damaging the reputations of these schools, to the point where more and more parents are looking to send their children to schools that do not belong to the Ivy League.

Famed pollster Nate Silver tweeted this:

 “Just go to a state school. The premium you’re paying for elite private colleges vs. the better public schools is for social clout and not the quality of the education. And that’s worth a lot less now that people have figured out that elite higher ed is cringe.

Ninth, following the money, we discover, by reading Jonathan Pidluzny in the City Journal, that much of the anti-Semitism on college campuses is being funded by foreign governments, like the government of Qatar.

He explains:

Centers dedicated to the study of the Middle East, many receiving lavish foreign financial support, do more to promote anti-Zionist and pro-Hamas narratives than virtually any other force on campus. Even a small number of biased faculty can have an outsize influence because the dominant intersectional ideologies leave students primed to embrace anti-Semitic attitudes.

He recommends the following steps:

Universities should refuse all gifts from entities with interests antithetical to this country’s, especially gifts related to academic programs. Programs built on foreign donations should be dismantled unless they are obviously worth supporting from the general fund. State lawmakers can pass legislation to forbid, or at least carefully scrutinize, partnerships and contracts at public institutions with countries of concern.

And this, from the Daily Mail:

Top American Ivy League universities including Cornell and Harvard have received over $8 billion in the last 35 years from Arab countries, a report has revealed. 

According to a report by the Executive Director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, Cornell University received over $1.5 billion from the Middle East. 

The report, authored by Dr. Mitchell Bard, was originally released in 2021 and showed how the Ivy League school received 127 gifts totaling $1,513,778,660. 

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