Tag: universities

Registered Israeli foreign agent driving contrived campus antisemitism crisis

Lawsuits accusing top US universities of harboring antisemitism all originate from one source: a corporate law firm that fielded the pro-settler ex-US ambassador to Israel, and which was registered as a foreign agent of an Israeli principal as recently as 2021.

The firm now represents professional Israel lobby activists posing as victimized “Jewish students” and seeking to crush the free speech rights of Palestine solidarity activists.

The fallout from December 5 House Committe on Antisemitism hearings has already cost University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill her job, while demands by billionaire pro-Israel donors and politicians for the firing of Harvard’s Claudine Gay have grown by the day. Both stand accused of refusing to condemn calls for the genocide of Jews, even though no such calls have taken place on their campuses.

Meanwhile, little attention has been paid to the forces orchestrating the carefully choreographed, heavily-funded campaign to crush Palestine solidarity activism on campus.

The law firm leading the assault on the universities has included David Friedman, the former ambassador to Israel under Donald Trump, among its partners. Until 2021, this firm, Kasowitz Benson Torres, was registered with the US Department of Justice as a foreign agent on behalf of an Israeli principal.

The firm’s clients include associates of a jailed Ukrainian billionaire who bankrolled neo-Nazi militias, along with a who’s who of corporations accused of defrauding and even killing consumers.

Meanwhile, the “Jewish student” witnesses who set the stage for the attacks on Magill and her fellow university presidents at the House Antisemitism Committee were employed on at least a semi-professional basis by Israeli lobbying cutouts.

They included Jonathan Frieden, a Harvard Law student who moonlights as president of Alliance for Israel; MIT graduate student Talia Khan, the president of MIT Israel Alliance; and Bella Ingber, co-president of NYU’s Students Supporting Israel.

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WORLD’S FIRST SUPERCOMPUTER THAT WILL RIVAL THE HUMAN BRAIN TO BE UNLEASHED IN 2024

Researchers in Australia are developing the world’s first supercomputer capable of simulating networks at a scale comparable to the human brain, which they say will be complete by next year.

The remarkable supercomputer, which its creators call DeepSouth, is a neuromorphic system designed to be capable of simulating the efficiency of biological processes, achieved with hardware that emulates large networks of spiking neurons at an astounding 228 trillion synaptic operations each second.

The human brain is remarkable for its efficiency. Capable of processing the equivalent of one billion-billion mathematical operations per second, known as an exaflop, each second while only using 20 watts of power, researchers have long hoped to be able to replicate the way our brains process information.

Under development by a research team at Western Sydney University, Australia, the astounding 228 trillion synaptic operations per second that DeepSouth is expected to be capable of will not only rival the capabilities of the human brain, but also pave the way toward the future creation of synthetic brains that may exceed the remarkable capabilities ours possess.

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Washington Post Op-Ed Argues That Colleges Should ‘Restrict’ Speech To Fight Antisemitism

Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, college campuses around the country have been embroiled in intense anti-Israel protests. Elite college campuses have seen particularly aggressive demonstrations that have frequently included outright support for Hamas.

On December 5th, the college presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) appeared at a Congressional hearing, where they were grilled on their schools’ response to allegations of campus anti-Semitism. During the hearing, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), asked all three if “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate their school’s policies. 

“It is a context-dependent situation,” University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill responded. “If the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment,”

Outrage over Magill’s answer—both from those who wished to see her commit to banning legal but offensive anti-Semitic speech and from those who pointed out Penn’s consistent record of punishing professors for much less offensive expression—culminated in her resignation on Saturday.

While First Amendment advocates have expressed hope that these recent controversies would show just how easily abused anti “hate speech” rules on college campuses are, many administrators seem to be taking the opposite position, advocating for more censorship, not less.

On Sunday, Claire O. Finkelstein, who is a member of Penn’s Open Expression Committee and chairs the law school’s committee on academic freedom, took to the pages of The Washington Post in an article titled “To fight antisemitism on campuses, we must restrict speech.”

In it, Finkelstein farcically argued that “the value of free speech has been elevated to a near-sacred level on university campuses,” adding that, “as a result, universities have had to tolerate hate speech.”

The idea that free speech is treated as “near-sacred” on college campuses is beyond absurd. Far from being treated as sacrosanct, free speech and free expression are constantly under fire at American college campuses, elite colleges most of all. 

As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) CEO Greg Lukianoff points out, over the past decade, “we know of more than 1,000 campaigns to get professors punished for their free speech or academic freedom. Of those, about two-thirds succeeded in getting the professor punished.” 

The most disturbing detail? Lukianoff says that almost 200 of these professors were fired, “nearly twice the number estimated for the Red Scare.”

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‘This is Definitely Plagiarism’: Harvard University President Claudine Gay Copied Entire Paragraphs From Others’ Academic Work and Claimed Them as Her Own

Harvard University president Claudine Gay plagiarized numerous academics over the course of her academic career, at times airlifting entire paragraphs and claiming them as her own work, according to reviews by several scholars.

In four papers published between 1993 and 2017, including her doctoral dissertation, Gay, a political scientist, paraphrased or quoted nearly 20 authors—including two of her colleagues in Harvard University’s department of government—without proper attribution, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis. Other examples of possible plagiarism, all from Gay’s dissertation, were publicized Sunday by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo and Karlstack’s Chris Brunet.

The Free Beacon worked with nearly a dozen scholars to analyze 29 potential cases of plagiarism. Most of them said that Gay had violated a core principle of academic integrity as well as Harvard’s own anti-plagiarism policies, which state that “it’s not enough to change a few words here and there.”

Rather, scholars are expected to cite the sources of their work, including when paraphrasing, and to use quotation marks when quoting directly from others. But in at least 10 instances, Gay lifted full sentences—even entire paragraphs—with just a word or two tweaked.

In her 1997 thesis, for example, she borrowed a full paragraph from a paper by the scholars Bradley Palmquist, then a political science professor at Harvard, and Stephen Voss, one of Gay’s classmates in her Ph.D. program at Harvard, while making only a couple alterations, including changing their “decrease” to “increase” because she was studying a different set of data.

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UNLV gunman ID’d as Anthony Polito, 67, professor who failed to get job at school

The madman who slaughtered three people in a mass shooting at the University of Nevada Las Vegas on Wednesday was a professor who failed to secure a job at the school and claimed to have solved the mystery of the Zodiac Killer and missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.

Anthony Polito, 67, had unsuccessfully applied for a professorship at UNLV before he unleashed his deadly rampage on the campus just before noon, law enforcement sources told ABC News.

Polito was armed with a handgun during his massacre and was killed following a shootout with two police detectives, the outlet reported.

The shooting began around 11:45 a.m. on the fourth floor of Beam Hall, UNLV’s business school, near the student union building.

Police found three people dead when they arrived.

A fourth person was taken to an area hospital, where they were listed in critical but stable condition.

Four others were hospitalized after suffering panic attacks and two officers were treated for minor injuries suffered while clearing buildings, LVMPD police said.

Polito’s LinkedIn account states he was a “semi-retired university professor” based in Las Vegas and attended undergraduate at Radford University in Virginia, where he graduated with a double major in mathematics and statistics before he earned his master’s degree at Duke University and completed his doctorate of philosophy at the University of Georgia.

He served as an associate professor for 15½ years at East Carolina University from August 2001 to January 2017.

During that time, he also ran a personal website about his life, in which he posted a 15-page theory claiming he decoded the messages left by the Zodiac Killer, who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s.

“Just so you won’t initially write off my solution as that of a total crackpot, let me first say that I have been a member of MENSA for 35 years, I hold a double undergraduate degree in Mathematics & Statistics (two skills closely associated with successful cryptographers) … and I hold a masters degree and a doctoral degree from top-tier universities as well,” Polito wrote in the introduction.

“So I am not a dumb guy!”

He further claimed to have solved the fate of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 and figured out the true meaning of Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2010 film “Inception.”

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Ohio State University health course will require students to address ‘whiteness’ and explain how they ‘navigate race’ in their daily lives

The Ohio State University students who have signed up for a health sciences course are required to address their white, heterosexual or able-bodied privileges, documents have revealed.

The course titled ‘Individual Differences in Patient/Client Populations’ is offered through the university’s School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences.

Do No Harm, a group of physicians, healthcare professionals, medical students, patients and policymakers who aim to ‘protect healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology’ obtained course details through a Freedom of Information Act request.

In the documents, reviewed by Fox News, one assignment in the course titled ‘Unpack the Invisible Knapsack’ asked students to complete a series of activities about privilege.

Three options were provided to students as per the document obtained by Do No Harm that allowed students to select from the ‘white privilege knapsack,’ the ‘heterosexual privilege knapsack’ and the ‘able-body privilege knapsack.’

The assignment stems from a 1989 essay titled ‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack’ in which anti-racist activist Peggy McIntosh addresses her own experiences of race.

McIntosh’s work, which attempts to prove white privilege exists, is scattered through the course document including statements such as: ‘Whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress and violence, which I was being subtly trained to visit, in turn, upon people of color.’

The course has seen some backlash by online critics who believe The Ohio State University is a ‘sick waste of money.’

One critic said: ‘Health sciences program offered at The Ohio State University requires students to take part in an array of discussions about gender and race, including students to address their ‘privileges if they are White’, heterosexual or able-bodied.

‘It’s time to flush out college DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion).’

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Billionaire graduate accuses Harvard of discriminating against white males

Harvard University has “lost its way” and discriminates against white males as well as (East) Asian and Indian men, who are also perceived to be successful, billionaire alumnus Bill Ackman has said.

Ackman made headlines in October when he called upon Harvard President Claudine Gay to release the names of students who had signed a letter blaming Israel “for all unfolding violence” in the wake of the Hamas attack on the country earlier that month.

The CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management argued that it should be done so that he and other executives can make sure not to ever hire those people.

In a new address to Gay, which he published on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday, Ackman argued that “anti-Semitism is the canary in the coal mine for other discriminatory practices at Harvard.”

“The problems at Harvard are clearly not just about Jews and Israel. It is abundantly clear that straight White males are discriminated against in recruitment and advancement at Harvard. That is also apparently true to a somewhat lesser extent for men who are Asians or of Indian origin,” he wrote.

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US Army Enlists University of Arkansas at Little Rock To Fight Online “Misinformation”

The US Army has announced a “combat” partnership (effective through 2025) with the publicly-funded University of Arkansas at Little Rock – and what they plan to “combat” together is none other than whatever is deemed to be online disinformation, but also, something defined as “cognitive threats.”

And by that, they don’t mean all manner of government and formally or otherwise government-associated entities falling over themselves trying to pass off various forms of speech suppression and censorship as fighting “disinformation.”

But there’s no denying that this, too, could fall under the definition of misinformation and cognitive threats offered here – namely, the goal is “to detect and combat bad actors online who are trying to manipulate how and what populations think.”

But if an actor is perceived as “good” – does manipulating how and what populations (note the plural) think, then magically become a good thing?

Sarcasm aside – the new initiative is backed with a grant worth $5 million. What the deal reveals is that more and more universities in the US are getting “hired” – whether by non-profits, or, again, the government – to work toward this goal via various dedicated research hubs.

In UA Little Rock’s case it’s called the Collaboration for Social Media and Online Behavioral Studies (COSMOS) Research Center. Beside the US Army’s own Research Office, another key player in putting this project together was Senator John Boozman.

“War is on the social media platforms,” is one of the comments cited in reports about this development, but curiously, it doesn’t come from a military representative but a budding academic with the COSMOS Research Center, graduate assistant Mano Har.

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Even Hateful Protests Are Protected, Free Speech Group Reminds Congress

If you know the history of Israel, that the country was created after one-third of the world’s Jewish population was murdered by Nazis (it has yet to fully recover), it’s difficult to stomach protesters who often slip from supporting the Palestinian cause to gloating over Hamas’s terrorism and the prospect of destroying the Jewish state. There’s not a lot of good will in projecting “Glory to Our Martyrs” on buildings or chanting “from the river to the sea“—let alone explicit endorsements of the attack.

But even assholes have speech rights. That’s because all individuals have rights, however they use them, and because free expression only works if it’s available to everybody, not reserved as privilege for the “right” ideas. And, importantly, respecting free speech lets people show us who they are.

Unfortunately, political officials’ natural distaste for dissent can combine with honest revulsion at despicable sentiments to produce a reaction that would violate the right to free expression.

“Today, Congressman Mike Lawler (NY-17) announced that the House passed two amendments he put forward to the House’s appropriations bill for Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education (LHHS) to combat antisemitism on college campuses,” the New York Republican announced November 15. “His second LHHS amendment, rescinding federal funding for college campuses that give a platform to antisemitism hate, was adopted with broad, bipartisan support.”

One reaction to this is that the federal government shouldn’t be funding colleges to begin with. I agree. But so long as it is handing out cash, those funds shouldn’t be used to bypass legal protections for individual rights. And no, just deciding to reject federal money might not be enough; Hillsdale College did that to escape federal regulation and now faces efforts to subject the school to control just because it has tax-exempt status enjoyed by many institutions.

The only way to keep authoritarians from getting a foot in the door is to defend liberty as a principle.

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Thousands of students at Warwick University are ‘forced to go vegan’ after a handful of activists voted for a meat and dairy ban in the institution’s canteens

Thousands of students at one of Britain’s top universities will be forced to ‘go vegan’ after activists won a vote banning meat and dairy products. 

Students at the University of Warwick backed a motion forcing union-run catering outlets to adopt plant-based menus, with three now required to do so by 2027. 

But the move, pushed through by campaign group ‘Plant-Based Universities’, has ignited fury after it emerged that just 774 students – about 2.7 per cent of 28,600-stong campus – were behind the plan, while 516 voted against it. 

Vivek Venkatram, Plant-Based Universities Warwick campaigner and president of Warwick’s Vegetarian and Vegan Society championed the vote and said: ‘We want this change to benefit everyone.’

However, the Countryside Alliance condemned the decision backed by a ‘tiny minority’ and said the vote raised questions about whether the sweeping change was ‘made with the interests of the wider student population in mind’.

‘Students shouldn’t let such a small cohort get away with isolating the wider student population. Vegan campaigners are welcome to present their arguments in favour of plant-based diets, but should not impose a diet in university-affiliated buildings,’ said alliance spokeswoman Sabina Roberts.

‘Students should take on their democratic duty and place forward a counter-motion that keeps meat on the menu.’

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