The Young America Foundation has a question for George Washington University.
Alas, the odds are that it'll be a rhetorical question.
By Moe Lane Posted in Liberals — Comments (12) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
YAF has written an open letter to GWU President Steven Knapp. Background here, by the way.
An open letter to Steven Knapp, president of The George Washington University
October 10, 2007
President Steven Knapp
The George Washington University
2121 I Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20052Dear President Knapp,
Seven students at your institution falsely attributed the "Hate Muslims? So Do We!!" fliers to The George Washington University chapter of Young America’s Foundation. When the fliers initially surfaced you said, "There is no place for expressions of hatred on our campus. We do not condone, and we will not tolerate the dissemination of fliers or other documents that vilify any religious, ethnic or racial group."
We agree. Vicious personal attacks levied on students are intolerable, and should not go unpunished. The question remains: what will you do about such blatant character assassination now that the truth is out? How will you demonstrate that you don’t "condone" or "tolerate" the dissemination of hate?
It would be spiffy if this problem was addressed, but don't hold your breath. GWU's uncritical willingness to jump all over the YAF because of the clumsiest of forgeries doesn't exactly speak well for the school administration's collective reasoning ability, and it's unlikely that they'll be any better at learning from mistakes.
Read on.
Open letter or no, I probably shouldn't publish the whole thing, but I'd like to highlight the following:
There is, of course, a clear difference between ordinary Muslims who positively contribute to society and radical Jihadists who boast about murdering people indiscriminately. It’s a typical left-wing tactic, however, to just call names, such as "racist," rather than engage in a serious debate, in this case, over radical Islam. Only the intellectually deficient revert to such slanderous attacks.
The seven who put up the phony fliers are frauds.
You should issue an apology to the conservatives unfairly targeted. It was obvious that the fliers were spreading lies, but your administration, led by Bridgette Behling—the assistant director of the Student Activities Center—sent emails to the young conservatives pressuring them to sign statements disavowing any hate speech that may originate at any future Young America’s Foundation event.
[Bolding mine]
...and that last bit is why all of this is a problem worthy of the front page, and why I personally expect that GWU will stonewall this issue for as long as it personally can. Let me be blunt. There are two possible ways that someone could look at this flier and believe that it originated from a conservative group. One, you could be abjectly stupid. Two, you could be so wrapped up in your particular worldview that anything that validated it would be accepted without critical analysis - which is sort of the same thing as One, only with bigger words. Either way, falling for this is precisely the sort of thing that should make you reconsider your assumptions about your opponents. Should, but probably won't.
You'll notice that I'm not really targeting the students who did this, per se. They're antiwar activists. Their leader is Adam Kokesh of Iraq Veterans Against the War (the group that tried to push the Jesse MacBeth nonsense). Lying about their opponents is what they do, particularly if it can somehow involve infantilizing the people they pretend to be defending. But college administrations are supposedly made up of people who are able to put their underwear on inside their pants, remember which car is theirs nine times out of ten, and order off of the adult menu.
Should we be revising that supposition?
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The Young America Foundation has a question for George Washington University. 12 Comments (0 topical, 12 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
I doubt it'll be cleaned up by the time my children get there... and I don't have kids (or, at the present moment, a girlfriend). There's going to have to be a lot of swamp-draining going on to restore some sanity, and I'm only afraid it's going to get worse before it gets better.
"I don't understand why the same newspaper commentators who bemoan the terrible education given to poor people are always so eager to have those poor people get out and vote." - P.J. O'Rourke
...a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right...
---Thomas Paine---
How stupid it is to call criticism of Islam "racist"? Who but a fool would conflate a religion (which is not even a majority Arab) with a race?
_________________
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.
Individuals count for nothing. Once you understand that, you understand how PC campus morons "think."
Freedom Fighter in Occupied VA
Race theories never made sense. It was always pop biology based on nothing but casual observations by people with social agendas.
So in this I don't blame them, heh. They're applying the theory as intended.
To wit: http://www.wtopnews.com/index.php?nid=25&sid=1264405.
I think we ought to give them credit for at least that much.
How Nazi Socialist of them... "Mystery Riders!"... I wonder if they get paid with cash or with discount coupons at the School Bookstore.
Nothing like putting policies forth that encourage others to rat on their own.
"Took the nickname Troll long before BlogTrolls existed..."
Besides, what's wrong with 'snitch?' Perfectly descriptive word to use, here.
The Fuzzy Puppy of the VRWC. I've been usurped!
Actually, I found the picture on the poster humourous, and I'm sure I could find something like it on a humor site if I spent enough time refining a Google search.
I'd never post a flyer like that to try to raise awareness about an issue I care about. The verbiage that goes with the picture is just all wrong. It's so wrong, it has to be parody, and therefore protected under the First Amendment (probably in truth as well as in interpretation by the current set of 9 deciders). But it's also so wrong I expect a middle school student to recognize it as something the YAF would not have been posting. So, if I recall my University of Columbia premises correctly, the University should have been defending the right of people to post such a flier, and use it as a teaching moment. But under no circumstance should they have taken any action against YAF. And I think if I were one of the students who had recevied such email or other written admonition from the University, I would be looking for a Burkeian lawyer right about now.
No, I revised the proposition that university apparachicks are adults shortly after (maybe even before) leaving college some 20 years ago. I don't recall if it was the constant musings by the physics proff about what a nice place China was to visit, or the Asian Literature (breadth requirement) proff who whined about his recording of Vietnamese poetry with a charming bell ring was cut short by a fire fight a ways up the river.
More proof that academia is becoming the bastion of incongruent imbecility.
Hopefully, it will be cleaned up by the time your children get there....
"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori"
Contributor to The Minority Report