Down the purity plughole.
Exclusive: The Scottish Greens have expelled a number of members who declared "sex is a biological reality".
An official complaint accused them of making the party less safe for trans and non-binary members. pic.twitter.com/fhaFjXkuHx
— Holyrood magazine (@HolyroodDaily) May 16, 2024
is that death in Auschwitz – and almost all died, the majority on arrival – becomes, by compare, a sort of moral failure: a lack of imagination, resource and luck. For those who don’t understand Birkenau – and you wouldn’t read this book if you did, and if this is all you read you wouldn’t – it brings un-magic Jews and Nazi psychopaths no closer.
The prose style is a minor crime. “Her eyes dance before him”. “His heart skips a beat”. “His mind [is] a whirlpool”. He works “around the clock”. (Too many transports, you see: it’s exhausting.) “Flowers. He learned from a young age, from his mother, that women love them”.
Or, Lale says, “always dress to impress”. Lale is quite keen on fashion. On meeting the SS for the first time he thinks: “Under different circumstances he might appreciate the tailoring”. Would he? “I’m just a number,” Gisela tells him. “You should know that. You gave it to me.” As I read this junk, I write a parallel musical in my head and I think: if that doesn’t close Act 2, what can? There is a rogue, too: Josef Mengele, who is a sort of pantomime villain like Captain Hook. He stalks around with a soul “colder than his scalpel”, smirks and steals people’s testicles. It never happened….
If you want to read about the Shoah read histories and memoir. Primo Levi’s If This is a Man and Elie Wiesel’s Night are partial, but they don’t pretend to be anything else. Levi himself said: “We who survived the camps are not true witnesses. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless”. But that is Levi, not Morris, who has the gumption to write Mills & Boon in hell. It fulfils the criteria of the Shoah novel for idiots, at least. It makes the reader feel better, know less, and care less, about the people who are fictionalised. That is, they die twice.
Still, there’s laughter in the trying. I would have called it Under a Birkenau Moon. Or Love Macht Frei.
“empathy” or “good citizenship”, whatever some of its advocates like to say. And if, finally, there is anything to be learned from this dark chapter in the history of scholarship, it surely is this: we cannot allow politics to supplant truth as the university’s highest end.
e most prominent protest leader was George Mason Murray, who taught freshman English as a graduate student while serving as the minister for education of the Black Panther Party. According to The Daily Sundial, the student newspaper at San Fernando Valley State College:
An immediate, violent revolution of black people against “the fascist leaders of this country” was called for by Black Panther George Murray, addressing a crowd of about 300 in the open forum Tuesday … “A tide of fascism led by Lyndon Johnson is running rampant in America,” said the bearded Murray … Murray called Hubert Humphrey “a homosexual, freakish monster.” He further charged that the federal government was “full of homosexuals.” To confirm this he said that the atom bomb was copied after a man’s penis.
[…]
The clearing of tent encampments on a number of universities by police during the present anti-Israel protests does not mean that most universities will not capitulate to some or all protester demands later, when public attention is focused elsewhere. Already Brown has bowed to pressure and agreed to a vote on divestment from Israel. The Rutgers administration has also agreed to consider divestment from Israel and—you saw it coming, didn’t you?—agreed to “develop anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism training for all administrators and staff.” All that training means more work and money for existing left-wing faculty and perhaps the hiring of additional left-wing bureaucrats or nice paychecks for external consultants who will develop expertise in anti-Arabophobia training overnight. Northwestern has agreed to create a segregated community center for the exclusive use of “Middle Eastern, North African, and Muslim students” and has promised to fund five fully paid undergraduate scholarships for Palestinian students and two professorships for visiting Palestinian faculty.
The kaffiyeh may have replaced the kente cloth, but the self-serving strategy in which leftist professors persuade naive students to blackmail university administrators into giving them more subsidies, status, and institutional power has not changed since Black Panther Education Minister George Murray led the movement for Black studies at San Francisco State in 1968. Decades from now, when today’s campus protests have receded into history, their legacy may be the permanent transformation of American universities from engines of upward mobility and scientific progress to fairgrounds with expensive tickets and midway tents on a quad, displaying exotic varieties of leftist identity politics.
American and Canadian universities.
Canadian students demand the liberation of Palestine!
A set of demands from the student union at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada (via Jerry Coyne):
We demand:
1. Public disclosure of the entirety of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University investment portfolio.
2. Immediate divestment from all weapons manufacturing, military supplying, and companies operating in Israel or the occupied Palestinian territories.
3. In response to emails sent from Dr. Shannon regarding the rights and responsibilities for students and faculty to speak truth to power, and exercise their academic freedom: an apology from, and the resignation of, the President of NSCAD University, Dr. Peggy Shannon.
4. Anti-oppression training for ALL faculty and administration at NSCAD, focusing particularly on Queerness, indigeneity, and anticolonialism.
5. Free tuition for all students.
6. Free housing for all students.
7. The implementation of a Palestinian Art History course.
8. A scholarship offering free tuition and housing for one student currently living in Palestine.
9. That the NSCAD Board of Governors be made up entirely of students, faculty, and staff, with at least 50% +1 seat on the Board being held by students.
10. That NSCAD university moves all its banking to a credit union.
11. The immediate breaking of the lease of NSCAD with the Port Authority, regarding NSCAD’s Port campus, and a commitment of no financial dealings with the Port Authority going forward.
12. That all funds divested through the process of realizing the above demands be reinvested in the rebuilding of universities from the Gaza Strip that have been destroyed.
Yes, that would be the Greens. From the JC:
Three Green Party parliamentary candidates have shared incendiary material online including a video in which a woman claims “Zionists will drink the blood of Palestinians”, the JC can reveal.
The disclosures, which follow a recent JC exposé of inflammatory posts by newly elected Green councillors, have heightened fears that the party has become a safe haven for extremists.
Other posts by the candidates feature an October 7 conspiracy theory, support for the Palestinian “resistance” and material comparing Israel’s war against Hamas to the Holocaust….
Elizabeth Waight, who is standing in Bethnal Green and Stepney, posted a video on Instagram on March 27 in which a woman said: “What’s left for the Zionists [is] to eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Palestinians… I think this will happen soon.”
Chingford and Wood Green candidate Chris Brody uploaded links to an article that suggested that the 9/11 and October 7 terror attacks were “false flag operations executed to open the path toward more slaughter and mayhem”.
Bristol East candidate Naseem Talukdar circulated comparisons between the Holocaust and the war in Gaza and liked a video clip in which anti-Israel activist David Miller says “we have to destroy Zionism”.
Oh dear. Whatever happened to the whales?
The descent of Owen Jones, pt. 73:
Owen Jones platforming unsourced conspiracy theories that dehumanize Jews?
Yes, that is utterly predictable. pic.twitter.com/3yAN0iwXCy
— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) May 15, 2024
nst the Bats would result in disciplinary action and could even be viewed as “an act of discrimination”.
The same meeting included accusations a 6ft 2in, 14st Bats player had once broken the leg of 5ft 6in, nine-and-a-half stone opponent in two places and claims 24 of the injured player’s team-mates had quit because they did not want to face the LGBTQ+ side.
Flying Bats went on to win the $1,000 (£514) first prize on Sunday.
Now here's Claire Chandler:
The Flying Bats fielding 5 males in a women’s football league is no anomaly. Watch as I show that it was an explicit direction from the very top of Australian sport that male intrusion in women’s community sport is to be prioritised over fairness for women, and women who object… pic.twitter.com/5Opoo9u8d5
— Senator Claire Chandler (@SenatorClaire) May 15, 2024
“>Schools in England will be banned from teaching sex education to children under nine, under new government guidance to be published on Thursday.
The BBC has not seen the new guidelines but a government source said they included plans to ban any children being taught about gender identity.
If asked, teachers will have to be clear gender ideology is contested.
But…and there lots of buts..
But headteachers have told the BBC that there is no evidence of a widespread problem….
Pepe Di'Iasio, headteacher at a school in Rotherham, told Today that he believes pupils are being used "as a political football".
Teachers "want well informed and evidence-based decisions", he said, and not "politicised" guidance.
Not so keen at the BBC then. "A political football"…
Also.
BBC not even attempting impartiality here https://t.co/gkTvSbi0pd
— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) May 15, 2024
ur and religious fervour without offending some of the other leading world faiths.
Ain't that the truth.
Islamist fervour is a major factor in our political landscape – mainly, but not only, in the Middle East. But yes, they do get offended easily. It's a lot safer to stick with these wacky Christian fundamentalists…