DIVEST from University of PENN and all Such Schools
by Prof. Eugene Narrett – copyright 2006
Reading a report on the www.israelnationalnews.com home page informs us that the University of Pennsylvania at the eleventh hour quashed an art exhibit planned by a Jewish student. The exhibit documented the destruction of Jewish holy sites. Every reasonably alert, educated person knows that such destruction is a common and alarming feature of this historical period in Europe and throughout the Islamic world. Indeed, this destruction, a cultural genocide matching mass murder is an ugly story two millennia long. In recent decades the vilification and demonization of Jews has been and remains the modus operandi of the “Palestinian authority,” Fatah and Hamas.
The University banned the exhibit in the name of its policy of “zero tolerance for hate” and because the exhibit ostensibly did not provide “cultural diversity.” Sorry, but it’s impossible to find an Islamic state or region in which Jewish holy sites or Jewish lives are safe, protected and respected. The exhibit is a vital bit of historical documentation that our “tolerance” based society would be expected to back. So the University of Pennsylvania’s so-called policy of “zero tolerance for hate” actually is a familiar sort of politically correct Orwellian deceit: it is in fact and effect a policy of suppressing, humiliating, hating, silencing and marginalizing Jews and of hiding what Islamic states and organizations do to the Jewish people.
This treatment includes Islamic school textbooks that teach Muslim children that Jews are “the descendants of pigs and monkeys” and that “the virgins of paradise” will reward them for murdering Jews, crimes equated with “martyrdom.”
American higher education has been an oxymoron for nearly four decades and the rot has increased exponentially as political correctness has become entrenched and grown to include a blatant pro-Islamic bias. Partly this reflects a greedy, truth-be-damned desire for petro-dollars. Partly it reflects the hatred of one’s own roots that is intrinsic to leftist-feminism. But it also reflects something, now recrudescent, much older and more deeply embedded in the conflicted heart of western civilization.
It is getting worse. Jews be warned.
How ironic that this ban on Jewish education and documentation of the pillage of Jewish holy sites occurred as reports arrived that Muslims in Israel have AGAIN desecrated the tomb and memorial of first century Torah sage Rav Shimon ben Gamliel, one of the discussants in Pirkei Avot.
This essay is a call for TOTAL JEWISH DIVESTMENT AND DISINVESTMENT FROM ALL American institutions of so-called higher education and the re-channeling of money to new academies (there are plenty of excellent teachers, the present writer is one) that will teach Jewish history, history which is abundant and abundantly attested by many cultures; academies that will teach the conflicted origins of western culture and explain its long term decline and suicide, something that all Americans and peoples of the West urgently need to know.
This also is a call for American Jews to withdraw from the professions and seriously consider moving to the homeland of the Jewish people. Even one hundred thousand American Jews could turn around the suicidal path of subservience to America’s ruling elites that Israel has been trudging toward its ruin. In any case, it is increasingly clear that America, once so great, led by its post-modern ‘opinion makers’ and re-shufflers of the world has no place for Jews aware and proud of their heritage.
It’s time to leave. And meantime, to divest and disinvest from all American universities and try the intermediate step of founding and funding academies of true higher education that can make sense for students heading to all and any profession of what the culture is in which we all must make our way; of a genuinely classical education that will tell us who we are and can be.
As a first step, let the University of Penn and the Hillel there know your outrage at the stifling of Jewish history and free expression and of the blatant anti-Jewish bias of their Orwellian p.c. apologia. “They named it Egypt and left it.”