Former President Jimmy Carter coming to UCI May 3rd

A friend of mine tipped me off to this and gave me the following questions that he/she already submitted for filtering by the administration. Feel free to post these same questions, just please do not cite the Concerned UCI Student.

UCI's announcement of Carter's visit on May 3rd

Go here to post a question

[INSERTING UPDATE]
If you do pose questions through the UCI website, please also email them to Reut Cohen; she is gathering the questions together for flyers as well as to generally get a sense of how many relevant questions are passed over by the UCI censors: rrcohen@uci.edu
[/INSERTING UPDATE]

Dershowitz's latest article on Mr. Carter (referenced in question 1 below)

Questions:

1) Mr. Carter, could you please explain reports that
you chose to keep a monetary reward in the name of
Shiekh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, even after Harvard
returned money from the same source because of its
anti-Semitic history?


2) Mr. Carter, the Muslim Student Union continues to
issue statements and bring in speakers which use
language that it characterizes as anti-Zionist and are
just critiques of Israeli policy.

This same language has been characterized by Jewish
students, faculty, and staff, as well as the US
Commission on Civil Rights, as anti-Semitic.

Could you please give some examples of language that
would go beyond being merely a civil criticism of
Israeli policy and Zionism, and would cross over the
line into anti-Semitism?


3) Mr. Carter, the Muslim Student Union on this campus
has invited speakers again and again who in their
speeches on this campus unequivocally support, cheer
on, and even call for violent indiscriminate attacks
against Jewish civilians - men, women, children, and
the elderly - who are targeted simply because they are
Jewish.

Events have been held by the Muslim Student Union to
memorialize the founders of a group which includes in
its covenant references from the anti-Semitic forgery
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as well as
selected quotes from Islamic scripture against Jews,
including one which talks about trees and rocks
calling out to Muslims to kill Jews - a quotation most
recently repeated by that same group's spokesperson
not three weeks ago on PA TV.

Mr. Carter, the same UC Irvine Muslim Student Union
has used quotations that have proven to be completely
falsified year after year after year as rallying
points for events - including their annual week-long
anti-Israel Week - most recently titled "Holocaust in
the Holy Land" - all in an attempt to incite hatred
not only against Jews in Israel, but also the Jewish
students, faculty, and staff at this university.
Please note that the knowing use of falsified
information both inside the classroom as well as
outside the classroom is grounds for discipline and
even dismissal from UC Irvine under campus rules and
regulations.

In 2004, an anti-hate rally was held on campus where
all student organizations were invited to participate,
except Jewish organizations, which were explicitly
dis-invited. The dis-inivited organizations included
the non-political / non-religious Jewish fraternity
and Jewish sorority. The Vice Chancellor for Student
Affairs - with full knowledge of the explicit
dis-invite - still chose to speak at the anti-hate
rally and has yet to apologize publicly for it.

This past January, a video was published of UC Irvine
Muslim Student Union members calling for Israel to be
wiped off the map, and the leader of the group stating
his wish that he could use more than words, that he
wanted to use violence against Jewish students,
faculty, and staff. These calls were answered with
shouts of "Allu Akbar" which in English is "God is
Great".

Even after repeated requests year after year after
year to the university administration to have the
perpetrators of these acts of intimidation, bigotry,
and calls to violence to be prosecuted, to our
knowledge not one prosecution has happened. So far,
the university administration's only public moves have
been to hold inter-religious events, which on another
campus would have probably solved the problem, but the
case of our university, it has only encouraged the
Muslim Student Union and its partners to intensify its
attacks on Jewish students, faculty, and staff.

Mr. Carter, because of these Muslim Student Union
events and actions, as well as other incidents on
campus, this university has been under investigation
by the US Department of Education's Office for Civil
Rights for not appropriately protecting Jewish
students, faculty, and staff against this anti-Jewish
hatred.

Mr. Carter, what should Jewish students, faculty, and
staff be doing in response to these acts of
anti-Jewish hatred and the university administration's
unwillingness to take effective action against it?

Harvard publishes paper criticizing media bias during the Summer Lebanon War

LGF's summary:

During Israel’s war against Hizballah, at LGF we were continually outraged by the media’s uncritical promulgation of terrorist propaganda, and their overwhelming bias against Israel. The barrage of staged and manipulated disinformation culminated in the infamous Adnan Hajj fauxtography incident; and it can be argued that the culture of tacit cooperation with terrorists was at least partly responsible for that stunning case of phony news.

How could Reuters’ experienced editors miss a fake picture that was so bleeding obvious, at every step of the way toward publication? Answer: because they just didn’t care.

It’s interesting that in an age of obsessive media focus on scandals, no wire service or newspaper has ever followed up on that story in any real way. Adnan Hajj seemed to simply vanish off the face of the earth; no interviews, no photos of him, no investigations, nothing; just that one statement where he claimed his fakery was to “remove dust.”

For blowing the whistle on Hizballah’s manipulation of Reuters, LGF was smeared by numerous leftists; the diversionary tactics ranged from personal attacks to attempts to minimize the importance of the faked photos.

Now the Harvard Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, hardly a bastion of neocon wingnut thinking, has issued a paper that absolutely skewers the media for their outrageously biased and terrorist-enabling behavior. Maybe this will be a little harder for them to ignore.

The full report (PDF)

"Richard Cohen gets something right"

Yet another way to spot anti-Semitism worded as anti-Zionism. See here for Natan Sharansky's 3-D's method.

Copied from Israel Matzav

My old friend Richard Cohen at the Washington Post is trying to figure out today why British journalists chose to boycott Israel of all countries. While he says a lot of things I don't like along the way, his bottom line as to why the journalists chose to boycott only Israel is spot-on:

The British journalists, like the academics before them, dare to tread where an army of goons has gone before. If they do not recognize the ember of anti-Semitism still glowing within them, they ought to park themselves before a mirror and ask why, of all the nations, they single out Israel for reprimand and obloquy. This business of assigning to Jews a special burden, for seeing in them more of mankind's bad qualities and less of its good, has a dark and ugly pedigree: the Chosen People, again -- and again in the wrong way.

Sympathies for those grieving after the Virginia Tech massacre

I'm still trying to figure out how to react to the VT massacre. My heart goes out to those who have family or friends who died, and those those who are still healing from wounds, may you heal quickly and painlessly and be back to your normal self as quickly as possible.

This event happened on a public university campus. UCI is also a public university campus - you'll note there are no gates and the public is welcome to visit. As I've told a few people, my greatest fear is that one day the MSU's, SAS's, and their partners-in-crime's hateful rhetoric will send somebody over the edge, whether it be a case of the so-called "Sudden Jihad Syndrome", or someone on the other side (Jewish, Christian, moderate Muslim, etc.) getting over-worked by the bullying tactics.

When violence breaks out again at UCI (from what I've been told, rocks and fists have been thrown in the past and unless the situation improves on campus, violence will eventually happen again), I hope the victims sue the UCI administration for every penny they've got for letting this go on for so long (7+ years?) and not doing everything in their power to stop it.

Credit is due: The image in the upper right hand corner is originally from here

"God Almighty When Will It End?" Subliminal & Miri Ben-Ari

Hat tip: Pajamas Media



If the above video doesn't work: Link

While the images in the above music video are definitely geared toward another generation, the rapper Subliminal's words and Grammy Award winning violinist Miri Ben-Ari's haunting version of my favorite melody of Adon Olam really struck me.

They are releasing this as part of the Gedenk (Remember) Movement, which according to the website:

Gedenk will use commercial outlets, i.e. music, dance, billboards and celebrities, to communicate its message and make the Jewish Holocaust relevant to today’s youth. Those that do not speak up are as guilty as the criminals themselves!

Great Support The Troops Video

Hat tip: FoxNews (click on the link to the video for supporting the troops)

Created by none other than a 15-year-old.

Already has more than 2 million hits on YouTube.

It's called "Remember Me".

Link if the video doesn't work

Saturday night is Yom Ha'Shoah

Saturday night is Yom Ha'Shoah, the annual day of remembrance of the Holocaust. Rabbi Stuart Altshuler of Congregation Eilat of Mission Viejo, CA wrote the following in his weekly message to the congregation:

This year saw the Denial of the Holocaust convocation in Tehran, Iran, an attempt on the part of the Iranian government, joined by some pretty vicious supporters all over the world which espouse the basest forms of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism and sponsor worldwide terror against Jews.

In England, education leaders all over the country have declared that they will remove the Holocaust from their public school curriculums in order to mollify Muslim and other "critics" who do not want to learn about the Shoah.

If we remain silent and stand by, if we ignore these horrific attempts to obliterate the memory of 6 million of our Jewish brothers and sisters who were murdered because they were Jews, then there will, for sure, be no one left to remember.

Zichronam Livracha---let’s make their memory our memory, a blessing for the survival of Judaism and the Jewish people forever.

The Censoring by PBS of "Islam vs. Islamist: Voices from the Muslim Center" - WITH YOUR TAX DOLLARS

Hat Tip: LGF

Islam vs. Islamist: Voices from the Muslim Center is a documentary film that covers the threats moderate Muslims have to face from radical Islamists in the US and elsewhere. It was to be one of eleven films in a PBS series called America at a Crossroads, which, according to the website

is a major public television event premiering on PBS in April 2007 that explores the challenges confronting the post-9/11 world — including the war on terrorism; the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan; the experience of American troops serving abroad; the struggle for balance within the Muslim world; and global perspectives on America's role overseas.

According to one article, $700,000+ of your tax dollars were spent on the 12-month production.

And if the Islamists and some of the powers-that-be in the Corporation for Public Broadcasting get their way, you'll never see the film. Why?

[Robert] MacNeil [the host of the Crossroads series and of the MacNeill-Lehr News Hour] was on the Diane Rehm show...for the purpose of promoting this series of films. Unfortunately, ours is not going to be one of them, as he said, in his own words, because it is alarmist, and extremely one-sided.

The American people need to know about it, and I [Frank Gaffney, director of Islam vs. Islamist] think frankly, [the American people] need to know about it more than they need to know about [Robert] MacNeil’s vision of Muslims in America, which it turns out, according to his website, he, by the way, got a film as part of this series when he became the moderator, that was not selected as part of the competition. It wasn’t even submitted as part of the competition. It was one of a number of examples...of instances in which it appears that the people at PBS were so determined to keep our film from being shown, that they actually commissioned another film outside of the competition to cover some of the same subject matter. But interestingly enough, according to [Robert] MacNeil, the Muslims in America are the Muslims of the Muslim Student Association [a partner organization of UCI's friendly neighborhood Islamist organization, the Muslim Student Union]...And that’s the subject of his film, his vision of American Muslims, as opposed to the anti-Islamist Muslims that are featured in ours. And that’s the man who’s deciding, it appears, at least in league with others, deciding as to which of the films is one-sided, or alarmist.

For your review:

Producer: PBS dropped 'Islam vs. Islamists' on political grounds

Silencing Muslim moderates

Here’s the actual letter to the PBS Board of Directors from Frank Gaffney, Martyn Burke, and Alex Alexiev (Burke and Alexiev are the documentary's co-producers)

Why is PBS using our money to make a film that we’re not allowed to see?

Note: Gaffney is also president of the Center For Security Policy, but according to the link immediately above, the CfSP had no link to the film.

TAKE ACTION NOW!

According to that last link, Patricia de Stacy Harrison, the President and CEO of the CPB "has been very helpful" in making sure this film was made. Gaffney says she's the reason why they weren't shut out of the process - so DON'T BEAT HER UP.

Instead, do what Gaffney said in the article - plead with her to make sure it is either included with the Crossroads series, or ask her to permit another network to show the film (I'm sure Fox News will pick it up).

Here's how you reach Pat Harrison:

Dial the CPB at 1.202.879.9600.

If you get the CPB's automated phone system, hit the 1 key on your phone, then dial H A R R (4277) and wait - the system will connect you.

Then ask to speak with her or leave a message.

Again, BE NICE TO HER. Praise her for her help in getting the film where it is today, and ask her to make sure it makes it into the Crossroads series (where it should be), or if not, allow another network to pick it up.

Heck, see if they'll let it be put on YouTube...

Don't let your tax dollars be used for censorship.


UPDATE:

The Washington Post has picked up the story and written in more detail.

In addition, apparently PBS's review board for Crossroads included Professor Aminah McCloud of DePaul University (which is also home to Norman Finkelstein). Professor McCloud apparently is also a board member of Chicago's Council on American Islamic Relations (aka CAIR), and in what has been termed to be a violation of journalistic principles, she apparently screened footage from the film for members of the Nation of Islam.


UPDATE

Here's another article - this one written by one of the film's co-producers, Alex Alexiev


UPDATE 2007/04/20 0916 PST

Google News has a bunch of additional articles on the topic.

April 12: UCLA: Totalitarian Islam's Threat to the West

Student of Objectivism alerted me to the following event - some of you might find this of interest:

http://studentofobjectivism.blogspot.com/2007/04/free-public-event-totalitarian-islams.html

PDF Flyer

From the Iranian hostage crisis to September 11 to the London subway attacks to the Iraqi insurgency—it is clear the West faces a grave threat from a committed enemy. Conventional wisdom holds that the enemy is a rogue group of fanatics, who have hijacked a great religion in order to justify their crimes. It tells us there is no way to permanently eliminate these violent groups, that we have entered an "age of terror" and that we must give up the desire for a decisive victory.

But is the conventional wisdom right? Join us for a panel discussion titled "Totalitarian Islam's Threat to the West."

A distinguished panel of Middle East experts will provide new and illuminating answers to the most important questions of our time: Is the West ready to concede victory so easily? Are the terrorists a fringe group of fanatics, or are they part of a much wider ideological movement? What threat do they pose to the West? What can the West do to ensure victory? Is peace possible?

While the experts will answer these complex questions from diverse points of view, they all agree on one thing: the real threat is Islamic totalitarianism, and the right response necessitates engaging in a principled, ideological battle to defend the West from the jihad declared against it.

Panelists:
Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum
Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute
Wafa Sultan, writer and commentator
Moderated by Edwin A. Locke

Location and Details:
UCLA campus
Moore Hall 100 [map]
Los Angeles, California 90024
7:00 PM

Parking:
Purchase parking for Structure 6 at parking information kiosk:
400 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90024 [map]


UPDATE via a nudge from Student of Objectivism:

There's an announced protest against the event


UPDATE

Reports on last night's event from Infidels are Cool (includes video of the brief disruption) and Student of Objectivism.

Note that the Student of Objectivism link includes a link to the Ayn Rand Institute's web site, where there is supposedly a video of the event, but it does require registration. I hope the ARI will post the video without registration - or perhaps even puts it up on YouTube.

UPDATE

Student of Objectivism now has a link to an Ayn Rand Institute page that allows viewing of the full video of the event without requiring registration: Link (note: requires RealPlayer)

Both Infidels are Cool and Student of Objectivism are continually updating their posts with more info, so I suggest to everyone to go there for updates.

UPDATE

Daniel Pipes, one of the speakers at the event, posts his own thoughts on the event.