My latest in PJ Media:
For quite some time, it has been obvious that our nation’s colleges and universities are no longer institutions of higher learning, but radioactive wastelands of leftist indoctrination and antifa recruitment. Resounding confirmation of this came Tuesday from the University of Michigan, when a Jewish student was condemned for telling the truth and groveled before his persecutors with an abject apology that is unlikely to remove the cloud of suspicion over him that he is guilty of wrongthink.
JNS.org reported that “the student government at the University of Michigan has passed a resolution condemning its president for remarks critical of the Palestinians he made as a high school senior.”
Yes, as a high school senior. As far as we know, Benjamin Gerstein, the condemned student, has been in total ideological lockstep with leftist totalitarians during his entire time at the University of Michigan. If he had not been, they would certainly have condemned him for that, as well. But as it stands, the condemnation is for things he said before he even got there.
What kind of star chamber is the University of Michigan student government running, that they would censure this young man for statements he made before he was a University of Michigan student, and for which he has issued an abject apology? The snotty little Nazis who condemned Gerstein are now demanding that one march in ideological lockstep with them every day of one’s life or pay the consequences for dissent, no matter how callow one was at the time of the dissent, and how groveling one’s apology.
The University of Michigan student government further covered itself in shame with the fact that the vote wasn’t even close. Those who will dare to stand for the truth and freedom there are apparently quite thin on the ground. JNS reported that “the final vote of the Feb. 25 resolution rebuking Central Student Government president Ben Gerstein was 25 in favor, zero against and four abstentions.”
What double-plus ungood things did Gerstein say? On the TV show “North Town News Magazine” in 2017, he said: “There should be a test for what type of people deserve a state and what type of people don’t. I think the Palestinian people, with rejecting constant peace deals, with their financing of terror, with their raising kids to hate people purely because of their religion, I don’t think that people deserve a state at this point in time. Until we see a significant change in the Palestinian mentality and a significant change in the Palestinian leadership, I don’t think they deserve a state at this point.”
These statements are true. The “Palestinians” are indeed “rejecting constant peace deals,” financing terror, and “raising kids to hate people purely because of their religion.” So what was Gerstein apologizing for?
Even worse, his apology could not have been more servile, more reminiscent of the self-incrimination of a Chinese victim of the Cultural Revolution at its most febrile and hysterical:
“In this video as well as an op-ed,” Gerstein wrote, “I made statements that erase the history of the Palestinian people.”
What history? The “Palestinian people” are a propaganda fiction, a people that has no history, as The Palestinian Delusion proves. They were invented in the 1960s. Before that, even in the tumultuous days of the founding of the modern State of Israel, there is not a single mention in the international press, the deliberations of the UN, or the statements of Muslim Arab leaders of any “Palestinian people.” They’re the local Arabs, indistinguishable culturally, religiously, ethnically, and linguistically from the Arabs of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. So what history did Gerstein “erase”?
And how would it even have been possible for an American high school student to “erase” the history of an entire people with a few oppositional statements, even if that people did exist? Is this the kind of flaccid, flabby, lazy thinking that the University of Michigan is encouraging? Yes.
There is much more. Read the rest here.