Northeastern University — Profs Gone Wild
Many people suspect that American college students get a left-wing and sometimes radical slant from their professors, especially when it comes to matters concerning the Middle East. But few ever get a chance to peek into the lecture halls to see for themselves what today’s higher education provides. It can be shocking.
On April 2, Americans for Peace and Tolerance/On Campus (APT/OC) released a 16 minute video showing radical professors and guest lecturers at Northeastern University in Boston teaching students that Israel is a Western colonialist project and that the Jews “use” the Holocaust to distract from their needless oppression of the Palestinians, which is in fact comparable to the Holocaust itself. They are also taught that Jews do not qualify as “a people” and so therefore do not qualify to have their own state. These things were taught at Northeastern in programs designed to teach students about the genocide of Europe’s Jews.
Readers can view the film for themselves here.
Tasked with responding to the film, Northeastern’s provost, Steven Director, chose not to apologize to Holocaust survivors or the Jewish community, but instead to charge us — the filmmakers — with “cherry picking” and to counter with a list of speakers who had positive messages about Jews. But of course we chose the egregious cases — that was the entire point. Should the Jews be offended only if all of the speakers and professors were this horrible? And do lists of good presentations erase the bigotry?
A university administrator can only speak to Jews this way. He would not dare try that if it were found that a Black History Month observance featured speakers (even one) who postulated that blacks use their past suffering to take advantage of white people today. He would never dare suggest to blacks that a sympathetic speaker balances out the bigots. Imagine offering to blacks an Eric Holder to balance David Duke and then acting as though it were a wash.
We all know what would happen if radical professors offended any other minority group on campus: You could count on one hand the seconds it would take the provost to assume the proper level of self-abasement. As night follows day, the university would direct all, top administrators included, into campus sensitivity programs.
But Mr. Director doesn’t have to worry this way about offending the Jews, because many Jewish professors and administrators at his university will give him cover and because Boston Jewish community leaders would rather sue for peace than make a fuss.
Anti-Israelism abounds on campuses across the nation. Yet we do not hear much about this from Jewish professors who are the best witnesses — either because they are too intimidated or too beholden to their employer, or out of some sense of loyalty to an idealized scholarship that is above politics. They simply will not speak honestly in public about what they know happens on their campuses. And this is the problem behind the problem.
Jewish professors we’ve talked to at Northeastern knew about the abuses (and some complained internally), but they would not — and to date will not — go public. And now some are trying to keep Jewish students from speaking out.
“And now some are trying to keep Jewish students from speaking out.”
A million years ago when I was in college I got into a nasty dispute with the university president over free speech. He had written a letter to a journalist major asking her to amend her position in an article she had written, and to publish an apology to the party he felt she offended. We won that little scrap.
I dont think I would make it in University these days. I would be expelled within a week.
I am quite familiar with Northeastern (as I had mentioned in previous article on this subject). If you want some insight on this, I would say, “look at the demographics.” In the 25-odd years since I’d taken courses there, NU has become a very foreign-born, Muslim-heavy university indeed. I don’t know what the precise percentage is, but it has become fairly significant in recent years.
Make of this what you will.
“Radical professors give anti-Israel lectures while their Jewish colleagues remain silent.”
There is something wrong with this subtitle.
Do you see it?
Maybe this will help:
Radical professors give anti-Italy lectures while their Catholic colleagues remain silent.
Oh!
A better analogy would be:
“Radical professors give anti-Vatican lectures while their Catholic colleagues remain silent.”
Or: “Radical professors give anti-Italy lectures while their Italian-American colleagues remain silent.” Jews are also a people, not just a religion.
Point is that all other minorities in academia stand up for themsleves. If there is a lecture planned by someone who is considered hostile to Muslims or even just pro-Israel Arabs and Muslims will complain or even shout the speaker down if the lecture isn’t cancelled. You might say American Jews have absolutely nothing to do with Israel, and for most of them it is indeed the case. However, if 6 million Jews in Israel are wiped off, that’s almost half the Jews worldwide, and some American Jews have relatives in Israel, and some other American Jews see Israel as an insurance policy since you can never know – Jewish experience informs those who pay attention to it that there is no guarantee that whatever country they live in today will remain hospitable to Jews, even if they were born in it and even if their family lived there for generations. I don’t believe all the Italian-American profs and students will remain silent if Italy was involved in a conflict where the other party openly say they want to annihilate Italy and the American academia would largely take the side of the other party. Maybe they will, maybe they completely don’t care about Italy. I sure know Muslims and Arabs aren’t silent in academia.
Andrew Breitbart, where are you now that we need you? This is the sort of filth he would have love to out. One hopes and prays that his successors, or someone else with resources and cojones, will pick up the cudgel.
This is a dreafully-more serious problem than most Jews realize. Pre-WWII, german universities were hotbeds of Nazism and contributed mightily to the takeover by the beasts. So too are Jewish teachers and students, not to mention the rest of the US Jewish population, re-enacting the typical Diaspora syndrome of keeping their heads in the sand,hoping the problem will go away.
Everyone must learn about the Evian Conference of 1938. Here, the West gave implicit support to Hitler’s Final Solution by refusing to take in the Jews freely offered by Hitler. The Jews died in the Nazi Holocaust because EVERYONE decided that they were too much trouble having around. Only the Dominican Republic offered substantial relief. How strange!
The aura of the Evian Conference pervades today’s debate about the separatism of the Jews. The Jews have created a wonderful place in Israel for themselves and those Arabs fortunate enough to be part of their project. But Jewish success is proof of their insidious character to all those who retain jealousy as part of their personality configurations. Jealousy morphs easily into hatred that requires actions to accommodate the feeling. “Death to Israel” is perfectly acceptable today as much as it was in the years prior to the formation of the State of Israel. Again, how strange!
Why do most Jews politically support the very ones who wish them the worst?
Because they are scared and confused, and the products of our twisted higher education system. If you identify with a group of people that number in the low millions, and you are willing to admit the truth to yourself, namely that: (1) there persists in this world a seemingly eternal irrational hatred for your race/nationality, no matter what your contributions and behavior have actually been, and (2) that whatever country you live in may likely (if history is any guide) eventually turn against you, and (3) that your ‘homeland’ is surrounded by many tens of millions of people who will readily support their governments’ and religious leaders’ killing you, and (4) that even supposedly enlightened countries (ala the ‘West”) will generally refuse to recognize your legimate right to defend yourselves,….. Well, then its understandable that its easier to find another viewpoint that somehow insulates you from the senseless and ceasless hatred. If that means that you actually become aligned withthe ‘blamers’ of your race, it is anot actually that surprising. One violent attacke on America (911) shook our nation, and rightly so. No one likes to be hated, as we Americans are discovering. If you’ve been hated for centuries, it really gets old, and so some look for a way to avoid it.
What a load of crap. American Jews have voted for and continue to vote for and support the left despite the left’s embrace of Islam because for American Jews, ideology trumps smarts.
Numbers 1 and 3 are accurate but 2 and 4 are way off. America and especially Christian Americans have gone out of their way to support and protect American Jews who have thanked us by kicking us in the groin for years. And we are staunch supporters of Israel.
And this is of a concern to whom? American Jews made their bed with the left now they must sleep in it.
Not sure what you mean. I was trying to answer the question posed from a psycological point of view. If its ideology, then why the adherence to ideology. To answer your question, its a concern to me, a Jewish American. I fully appreciate the way America has treated the Jews and Israel and hope like hell we don’t turn on our only real ally in that region.
I’m having a very hard time buying how wonderful these Jewish professors actually are. How many of these same professors were the first to march with Moslem organizations after 9/11 and blame US policy? It was a recurring theme at many universities. The Jewish on-campus organizations tripped over themselves to show they were liberal and to enforce the notion Jews in general are liberal.
Want to see these blameless, selfless, untiring beacons of truth and academic freedom yelp a bit? Try reforming the academic system that is indebting students and wiping out the middle class. Try cutting out the required course-bloat classes which cost as much per credit as a hardcore major. Most of these radical professors hide on the fringes in these exact kind of courses and would not have a voice let alone a job if they were to compete for students.
Radical hatred is not the problem of academia it is a symptom of a bad corrupted system.
“Northeastern’s provost, Steven Director, chose not to apologize to Holocaust survivors or the Jewish community, but instead to charge us — the filmmakers — with “cherry picking” and to counter with a list of speakers who had positive messages about Jews.”
“But aside from that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?”
Speaking of left-leaning Jews, I know the family name, Director, from the Bronx. It may very well be that Mr. Director is of leftist Jewish origin, placing him precisely within the caricatured group of which many posters have spoken.
Some 20th century sociology for those who are interested. Jews are not, decidedly not, a monolithic group. New York Jews settled where they felt comfortable. Communist Jews moved to the Bronx where “Freiheit” was the dominant Yiddish publication. Freiheit, meaning Freedom, was a standard Communist publication that rarely, if ever, criticized Stalinist Russia no matter how great the Russian atrocities. A number of apartment houses were Communist dominated “co-ops” that may still exist, though they no longer contain any Jews.
The Lower East Side was dominated by the Yiddishists whose favorite paper was The Forward, now available in English, which favored a secular interpretation of the world, but was not as hostile to Jewish habit and custom as were the Communists. It supported “assimilation” but maintained a Jewish consciousness.
Brooklyn was and is the home of religiously observant Jews who favored the Algemeiner Journal, a publication that was less political and more heimish (home -oriented). Brooklyn was the natural home of the Zionists.
A Western colonialist project – the West Bank? Well, we certainly had a funny way of going about that one, considering the history of the British Mandate. Good thing we recovered our wits in time to help co-opt the massive territories of the West Bank.
It’s a third again bigger than Clark County in Las Vegas. We’ll all become rich once we have all the casinos and a Disneyworld up and running.
Meanwhile we turned our backs on our other Western Colonialist project – Iraq. Too much beach, not enough water or beer.
This makes me think about a scene from the movie, “The Debt”. The old Nazi, while being held prisoner by Jewish agents, explains to his captor why the Nazi’s persecuted the Jews. He said that we knew we could do anything we wanted to the Jews when it only took a handful of armed guards to load thousands of Jews into the boxcars. He also said in fact even when we took their children away from them, they still did nothing. Sort of explains a lot, doesn’t it?
Sadly a lot of Jews have forgotten about all that.
Not all of them though:
http://www.khirman.com/node/50
No, it really doesn’t explain anything. Think about the fact that in Germany just prior to the war, Jews were forced into walled ghettos, were constantly harassed by police, had their jobs taken, were very limited in where they could travel, and constantly reminded by state policy that they were second-class citizens who could easily be “disappeared.” A good few years of this treatment will completely demoralize a populace. They didn’t have access to weaponry, so even if they decided to revolt, they would be massacred by the Nazis. Add to this the fact that absolutely no one could have possibly conceived of concentration camps, and it becomes easy to see how ANY population of people could be led off to the gas chambers given the right political atmosphere.
In other words, by the time their children were taken away, the German Jews were little more than shells of human beings – starved, half-crazed, defenseless slaves being held at gunpoint by a well-oiled, pitiless killing machine.
The reason the German officer in The Debt said those things was because he knew that it would infuriate his captors, and that by infuriating them he might catch them off guard and escape. Which he did. In other words, he tricked them by exploiting their greatest fears and regrets. And based upon your reading of this scene, apparently he tricked you as well.
yes. pretty much what “whitey” is not doing as of this writing. and there are no waffen ss with machine guns and killer dogs by their side. not yet, anyhow.
You trivialize an effect that our Obamanation will soon play on America.
Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” showed how the Soviet NKVD had honed the techniques to where even the most haughty official could be broken into a compliant mouse in less than 24 hours without laying a hand on him.
By 1937 the word “Jew” and the word “criminal” had become synonomous in Germany.
Oh, and in the U.S., the State Propaganda Ministries of the Media had changed “progressive” to “liberal” and “conservative” to “fascist” between the 1964 and 1976 elections. So now the entire U.S. electorate are compliant mice.
Mr. Jacobs, my comments echo those I made in response to a recent PJ column by Abraham Miller. Thank you for your courageous work. The situation on campus is bad. I know, because I work here. Because I don’t have tenure, I won’t speak out right now; my previous forays into pro-Israel advocacy at other institutions cost me my job. (I got sympathy from fellow Jews, but no backup at all.)
Unfortunately, we continue to feed the beast through our pusillanimity, our donations, and respecting the credentialing system of academia, which legitimizes its ultimate Marxist, anti-Semitic agenda. We don’t need to sensitize administrators and faculty; we need to defeat our mortal enemies in war. Think outside the box; stop all academic donations and taxpayer subsidies; support conservative, freedom-loving institutions; network; speak up (those who can).
The same attitude of the “Intelligentsia,” aided the Holocaust. Only when it was too late did they protest. Must it be too late once again? Maybe it is time for Jewish Students to vote with their feet. A well publicized exodus of talent casts a shadow over a university. Even in academia money talks.
I agree – they should all walk out en-masse and enter a college that respects them. To me it was already too late when I saw the stupid little fools at the AWS holding up and chanting anti-semitic messages with absolutley no idea how monstrous or hateful they are. It would never occur to them to treat muslims or blacks this way. The problem with Jews is they are white and an easy target. Funny how I remember some 40 years ago people were saying that because Jews weren’t white ENOUGH and THAT’s what caused the holocaust. Today they may lose their lives precisely because they ARE white enough.
Don’t you just love organizations with names like “Americans for Peace and Tolerance/On Campus (APT/OC)?” That’s a great name, especially when they don’t advocate any peace OR tolerance at all! Sort of like North Korea calling itself the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” What a joke. There you have a Stalinist state calling itself “Democratic” and a “Republic” in the same title. Quite an achievment. So when you see anything on campus advocating “Peace” and “Tolerance,” those are now code words for being anti-semitic and trying to hide it under the banner of higher education. Just shows you that campuses today get paid a lot of money to spew hatred and intolerance. Makes you kind of wonder why anybody would want to go to one.
APT/OC made the film. Perhaps they really are for tolerance and peace.
My son, who attends UCLA, signed up for a course THE POLITICS OF JERUSALEM and on the first day the lecturer asked who in the class was Jewish. He did not ask the ethnicity of any of group in the class. This says it all.
Posters, please google, ‘When History Becomes Hijacked’.It is a Letter to the Editor at The Tech, MIT’s oldest and largest student newspaper. It tells the sordid story of a Provost at MIT who personifies the anti-Jewish/Israel animus on US campuses. It was penned by my son. More’s the pity……
Adina Kutnicki, Israel
It’s all words.
Jews of Boston need to do something: rally, protest, even disturb such lectures, protest, make noise.
Don’t give NU up. If you do, they’ll move to the next school.
DO SOMETHING
What burns my grits is the Jewish professors keeping quiet.
It reminds me of something I read about Eichmann — he was good at getting the Jewish leaders themselves to organize the others, getting all ready for those special transports to the East. I think it was in the Hannah Arendt book, maybe; was it Vienna she wrote about? I had never read about that before, having grown up on the film/tv standard of jackbooted thugs doing all the bad guy stuff, but getting the chief rabbi to do some of it…. a bad business indeed.
Why should the Jewish professors be expected to respond, and not their non-Jewish colleagues? Part of the problem may be that they feel isolated. Fighting against anti-Semitism, in whatever guide, is the task of society as a whole, and does not sit on the shoulders of Jews alone. So let others show their convictions.
I mean “in whatever guise,” of course.
Exactly! Are the others relieved of their human responsibility. These others have no trouble presesnting themselves as the “protectors” of those who have no “voice”. But here a segment of their own campus communities are being deprived of their voice in class and being shouted down in pro Israel or pro Jewish presentations. Yet these self impressed “liberals” are silent at best and more often actively complicit.
You are right on that part — nobody should remain silent.
Sooo…. the decendents of people who made it through 40 years of wondering in a desert, survived the Holocaust, and then established a country in the midst of unfriendly neighbors are cowed by a few intellectual buffoons. Their ancestors would not be proud. In fact, their forefathers may wonder if it was worth the effort.
Anti Semitism seems to be a Black, Left wing, Muslim, Gay sort of thing along with self hating Jews. Their ultimate source and inspiration of course is that Far LEFT ideology Fascism and NAZIsm.
For decades now Academia has been brainwashing student with left wing propaganda completely unfettered and uncontrolled. Which is why so many of today Political elite are Politically Correct moonbats who just love Multi Culturalism provided Jews are excluded.
I fear a great deal of crockery is going to be broken before all this is over.
Maybe the donor’s family should sue if the university is not keeping their agreement and educational mission intended by the donor and use of the donor’s contribution.
All I needed to know, I learned in kindergarten.
We played musical-chairs, no longer a staple of our cooperative society. However, it was our first and formative experience with Darwin’s theories of survival. For those of you who are ignorant of the game, here is how it worked. Nine chairs, ten children, music plays. When the music stops, every child sits down. The slowest or unluckiest child is “out” and the teacher removes another chair. This process continues until there is one winner. He/she is the survivor. Death by good manners visited the others. The sweetest or least assertive kids lost first, but chance played a smaller part than we wanted to admit. We did not realize that the teacher could manipulate the game. We thought it was “fair,” but the teacher was able to stop the music when her favorite was in the best position. Sounds like government today, choosing winners and losers. This game is fraught with reality, don’t you think!
Making application of the game of musical-chairs to these spinless professors, Jewish and non-Jewish, we realize that there are only a certain number of chairs. Sitting in a chair permanently only happens for those who please those who are already ensconced in permanent chairs. It sounds to me like college is not that much different than kindergarten. We agreed to play the game because we thought we had a chance of winning, but we were stupid at age five and we have retained that stupidity right into our adulthood.
the jewish mindset is always tuned to the future, when a seat at the table is most meaningful. jewish students are more focused on grades and committed to their goals than any other group besides asians, who are similarly so inclined.
standing up in the face of fascists is no casual thing. it requires the pragmatic understanding that you may have to give up everything, even your life.
those gentiles who stood up for their jewish friends and neighbors and even strangers, are known to jews as, the righteous among nations. each one is honored along with the remembrance of the 6,000,000 murdered jewish souls.
the heroic righteous gentiles who outlived the war (and the concentration camps where they were sent when caught protecting jews), while in different countries and circumstances, when questioned as to why they did it, all answered the same.
how could I not do it?
“the Jewish mindset is always focused on the future”.
Thank you for sharing that.
You mention asians and jews. I do not think Jews would get caught up in this precisely because they focus on the future.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/04/toy-company-money-laundering.html