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Lincoln
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No problem. It wouldn't be Apolyton if we couldn't argue about something. I wonder what Rodney King would think about all of us?
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Lincoln
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Anyway, here is another reason why US Conservatives are concerned about what comes from the hallowed halls of liberalism:
From the National Post:
Last week, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up on a Tel Aviv bus, propelling pounds of densely packed metal shrapnel into the vehicle's passengers. Five people were killed instantly, and 60 others wounded.
The event presumably failed to darken the day of Ted Honderich, a Canadian-born philosopher who teaches at University College London. Last week, he told an audience in Toronto that Palestinians have a "moral right" to blow up Jews. And he encourages them to exercise it: "To claim a moral right on behalf of the Palestinians to their terrorism is to say that they are right to engage in it, that it is permissible if not obligatory."
In Britain, where Honderich now lives, his theories have generated controversy. A disgusted Daily Telegraph reviewer called his new book, After the Terror, "one of the worst books I have ever read." But on his Canadian tour, Honderich was greeted warmly. Following his lecture at the University of Toronto, audience members lined up to respectfully parse the fine points of his philosophical theories. And since Honderich blames the West and Israel for what happened on Sept. 11, the CBC naturally regards him as star material. On Sept. 8, Michael Enright interviewed Honderich on national radio -- an opportunity Honderich used to repeat his claim that suicide bombings are a proper response to Israel's "rape" of Palestine.
Honderich is a symptom of a poisonous, unapologetic hatred of Israel that is now part of mainstream campus culture. In the United States and Europe, academics have tried to boycott Israeli scholars -- but not those from, say, Syria or Iraq, whose violent "rape" of dissenting minorities makes Ariel Sharon look like the world's most tender lover. Here in Canada, Sherene Razack, director of the Centre for Integrative Anti-Racism Studies at the University of Toronto, has distributed hysterical mass electronic mailings accusing Israel of "atrocities beyond belief," and calls on Canadian academics to demonstrate "solidarity" with the Palestinians.
Do all of these pronouncements rise to a sort of soft anti-Semitism -- as Harvard University President Lawrence Summers argued last week? It's an attractive theory. While anti-Israel academics claim they are merely standing up for the world's "oppressed," they have a remarkable habit of ignoring anyone who doesn't happen to be oppressed by Jews. In Chechnya, many times more Muslims have died at the hands of Russians than Palestinians at the hands of Israelis. In Sudan, more than a million Christians and animists have been killed by a genocidal government in Khartoum. But last time I checked, Europe's profs weren't targeting Russian chess players or Sudanese mullahs. All their wrath and attention is reserved for Israel and the United States. Following Honderich's lecture last week, I asked him whether the people of Lebanon would be justified in using terror to fight back against the "rape" committed daily by 35,000 Syrian troops. He had no opinion. "I'd have to look at the situation," he told me. "I don't know much about it."
But anti-Semitism -- even the indirect variety Summers talks about -- can't be the only culprit. Like most of the academics who bash Israel, Honderich does not come across as a bigot: In fact, he suggested in his speech that early Zionists too had a "moral right" to terrorism. The real problem is more generic, and has to do with the lingering instinct among academics to romanticize terrorism as an expression of righteous class struggle. Honderich and his European colleagues still see Yasser Arafat as Che Guevara in a kaffiyeh.
Indeed, Honderich spent a good deal of his speech talking about poverty in Africa and the evils of capitalism (which he calls a "vicious economic system"), and suggested both had something to do with the assault on the World Trade Center. "Is it possible to suppose that the Sept. 11 attacks had nothing at all to do with ... Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Sierra Leone?" he asks in After The Terror. "In thinking about it, remember that the attacks on the towers were indeed attacks on the principal symbols of world capitalism."
Never mind that the first major al-Qaeda supported attack against Americans came nine years ago in Somalia, where the United States sacrificed the lives of 18 soldiers in an attempt to distribute food to famine-stricken Muslims. Never mind that the words "Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Sierra Leone" appear in al-Qaeda exhortations rather less frequently than, say, "exterminate the infidels wherever you find them." Never mind the West's campaign to liberate two million Muslims in Kosovo. Never mind that the majority of al-Qaeda murderers are middle-class doctors, engineers and civil servants from Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich sheikhdoms. By the deluded lights of warmed- over Marxists, it all comes down to class struggle. Apocalyptic Islam and anti-Semitism are just clever cover stories for liberating the masses.
William F. Buckley once said that he'd be better off living in a country governed by the first 100 names in the Boston phone book than by tenured members of the Harvard faculty. He's still right. A five-year-old child has the sense to know that slaughtering innocent civilians is wrong. To convince yourself otherwise, you have to spend years hanging around a university.
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Capt Dizle
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Probably been listening to Rush talk about the feminazis.
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Sardaukar
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Salusa Secundus
Sep 2002
time: 00:22
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quote:
So go to Bob Jones, whiner boy. You voluntarily attend a university with multicultural requirements. The choice is yours, shut up and stop being a whiner-boy or go someplaces else. It's your money after all. You agreed to go there, knowing they had requirements. You agreed to take the classes. It's too bad that they challenge your conservative indoctrination with history about someone besides you. |
this is a classic example of a liberal who can do nothing more than offer up an ad hom attack as any form of counter-argument for what im talking about. I have done nothing more than challenge the status quo, and this is the best you can offer up as a substantive argument. weak. I think i've made valid points that the purpose of a liberal arts education is not to provide politicized, sanitized views that are immune to skepticism and debate. Your logic dictates that, therefore, I must be some backwoods hillbilly who is suited for nothing more than a fundamentalist uni.
quote:
You are going to have to explain that one... I don't think so |
I 'll give two examples
exhibit 1 - ward connerly, an african-american, anti-affirmative action speaker was asked to speak at our university. Despite the fact that the session was supposed to be a speech followed by a question and answer session, the PC militant AA activists jeered and harassed connelly throughout the speech to the point that he was driven off the stage halfway into the speech and had to be police escorted from the premises. Pc fascism in action.
exhibit 2 - during "coming out week", the gay groups wanted to hoist a rainbow flag under the US flag on the large main flagpole. coming out week is a good and fine thing. no problems there. But why hoist a symbol of the movement on a flagpole that is reserved for the greatest symbol of our sovereign nation. Nevermind that a vigorous debate on the subject was completely ignored. The flag went up anyway cuz i guess people were too afraid that feelings might be hurt, and it just seemed like the right thing to do.
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Sardaukar
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Salusa Secundus
Sep 2002
time: 00:22
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quote:
Maybe the problems isn't really the cources but the students that dominates. |
But the profs and admin support it if it suits there political fancy. they even support forms of civil disobedience and sit-ins if the cause is the right one. If its not, you can fully expect to be assaulted and prosecuted to fullest extent of the law
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chegitz guevara
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Ft. Lauderdale, FL Communist Party of Apolyton
Jun 2000
time: 00:22
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quote:
Originally posted by Ned
Liberalism encourages dissent and alternative viewpoints. Fascism is the opposite. It represses dissent and non uniform thinking. |
Liberalism encourages dissent and alternative viewpoints. Conservatism is the opposite. It represses dissent and non uniform thinking.
I'd like people here to actually point out examples of PC oppression that happened to them.
I'll point out a few of mine. As an openly communist student at DePaul university, I was fired from the student newspaper because I allowed any students to say what they wanted in the Op/Ed section. I nearly lost my job when I complained about the changing of the school mascott without any input from the student body. I was fired when I allowed a student to complain about professors treating her as if she was inferior.
I was consistently given trouble by the registrar's office. I had to fight to stay in school, even though my grades were good enough to stay.
One professor criticized everything I said and gave me an "F" on every paper. Another professor (in an Economics of Socialism class), consistantly gave me crap when I disagreed with him, even though I was a socialist and he wasn't (when he talked about the ideas of socialism).
In general, (but not always), conservative teachers gave me a much harder time and did not accept my alternative point of views.
The most popular teacher in the History department, a communist, was denied tenure after the whole department (except the three conservatives) said he should get it. Tenure is generally a rubber stamp, but the conservative dean refused to give him tenure. The comment that stuck out most was that labor history was a very narrow subject (from a man who's speciality was Portugese colonial Africa).
I heard conservative students compain, yes. They complained, like Sardaukar does here, that they were exposed to view points that differed from their own. But none of them were ever complain that they weren't getting the grades they deserved.
Last edited by chegitz guevara on 28-09-2002 at 00:16
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GePap
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of the Big Apple
Nov 2001
time: 23:22
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Great Post Che!
I have neve gotten the conservative obsecion with PC- I don't think any conservative would like to be constantly called a fascist, racist Nazi. hey would say such chracterizations are wrong: Then thet decry the fact that certain group, just like themselves, do not want to be labelled in ways they find offensive, like native Americans. If many of them don't want to be called Indians, then why should they be?
How many conservatives would lik it if i made a sportsteam, then made a charicature head of someone, made them wear a crucifix, and called the team the Stormtroopers? Yeah, you would not hear any comlaints, since all conservatives so deeply believe in free speech........
quote:
But the profs and admin support it if it suits there political fancy. they even support forms of civil disobedience and sit-ins if the cause is the right one. If its not, you can fully expect to be assaulted and prosecuted to fullest extent of the law |
Can you give one example of liberal profs or liberal administrations cracking down on political protests by conservatives for conservative causes?
This reminds me of that stupid group in SC that protested because they were being asked to read a book on Islam that had somehting positive to say about the religion, while these idiots said it was the religion of the 'enemy'. That imbecile O'reily went as far as to say that it was like asking student to read Mein Kampf during WW2 and that was wrong! Is this the tye of PC repression you speak of Sardauar? Being forced to confront and digest points of view you disagree with or find offensive? So basically, what you cal for is the freedom to be ignorant of opposing view-points.... Why the hell seek a liberal education in the first place?
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chegitz guevara
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Ft. Lauderdale, FL Communist Party of Apolyton
Jun 2000
time: 00:22
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"PC" in the 1950s = McCarthyism.
"PC" in the 1890s = Know-nothingism
"PC" in the 1820s = Freemasonry
"PC" in the 1780s = pro-US (tories were chased out of the country)
By and large, it is not the "left" in the US (by left, of course, we mean moderates, as the US has only occasionally had a substantive left), that has done the oppressing and the thought control in this country. Even today, despite the claims of whiner-conservatives, you are far more likely to lose your job for being a progressive than a conservative (especially if you are a leftist, the communist candidate for mayor of Miami-Dade was fired from his job last Sept. for being a commie). I have never heard of a conservative losing his job because of his politics. I have heard, and continue to hear of, people losing or being denied jobs because they are too leftist. I have heard of people being harrassed by the police because they are leftists. I have heard of people getting attacked physically because they are leftists. Yet we, supposedly, are the one's doing the oppression.
Anti-PCers need such a reality check.
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27-09-2002 05:28
? Not like there isn't a great supply of teachers that more than meets the demand (which in turn drives down salaries).
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