Prestigious academic institutions' declining prestige

Prestigious academic institutions' declining prestige

    Friday, October 11, 2024   No comments

Princeton Praised a Professor for Winning a MacArthur; and at the same time, Princeton launches a Probe Into Her stance on Palestine.

As congratulations poured in for the recipients of this year’s MacArthur Award, Dr. Ruha Benjamin, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, should have been celebrating a career-defining achievement. But the full story was a bit more complicated. Around the same time that she had been awarded one of the most prestigious prizes in intellectual circles, Dr. Benjamin was being chastised for pro-Palestine activism by her university.  

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The Racist History of Psychology

The Racist History of Psychology

    Thursday, July 18, 2024   No comments

“The general wards were abysmal, and there were only five doctors, four of them foreigners, who were not licensed to practice in the United States, and did not have credentials as psychiatrists in their home country. The fifth psychiatrist was in charge, and he was clearly unfamiliar with modern psychiatry, and looked like he was running a plantation in some southern state.” This was part of the report written by Inspector Marilyn Rose, when she participated in a 1967 committee to inspect psychiatric hospital facilities, especially in Alabama and Mississippi, where black people with mental health problems, or what would now be known as psychopaths, were cared for.

Yes, they were treated separately, in institutions that did not allow them to mix with the white population, within the context of racial segregation and the persecution of blacks that the United States of America has known since its founding, until recently, and the face of psychiatry was ugly in that matter, and at that time.

In the history of the establishment of psychiatry, many psychological experiments and studies have sought to distort and oppress black people. In fact, many pioneers of psychology who have made significant contributions to the field of psychology have been involved in supporting this racism and strengthening its control over their scientific and research work.

From the facilities of psychiatric hospitals in the states of Alabama and Mississippi, we move to the College of Education at Stanford University, specifically in the early twentieth century, where Lewis Madison Terman, one of the most prominent American psychologists, worked. He later became famous as a pioneer of educational psychology, and among his achievements was the development of a special test to measure a person's intelligence level, called the "Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test".

Terman was one of the prominent scientists who supported the idea of ​​"improving" the race, and he was a member of a well-known organization at that time called "Human Improvement", in addition to holding the position of President of the "American Psychological Association".

In his work on the IQ test, Terman made several statements that were later deemed extremely racist against people of color, including saying that black people were "innately dull" and that "the children of these groups [of color] should be separated into special classes and given concrete and practical instruction...they cannot handle abstract matters." Terman also said that "from the eugenics point of view, 'blacks' pose a serious problem because of their unusually prolific breeding."

Black people, "They're not supposed to get sick"

This racist school of psychology believed that black people were immune to mental illness and would not fall into the clutches of depression or other neurotic symptoms, all because of their special psychological and mental makeup, or in Terman's words because of their "innate dullness," as he claimed.

Dr. Uchenna Umeh, a former doctor in San Antonio, Texas, and a woman of Nigerian origin living in the United States, decided to leave her job in 2018 to focus on public lectures, with the aim of spreading and raising awareness about mental disorders among people of African descent in the United States.

Dr. Oceana explains that for many years, many black people believed that they were supposed to be free from mental health problems, based on the bizarre idea of ​​John Galt, a physician and medical director of the Williamsburg, Virginia, Asylum, published in 1848, that black people had a natural immunity to mental illness.

Galt based his earlier view on the assumption that Africans were enslaved, that slaves owned nothing, had no role in free enterprise, and did not participate in civic affairs or engage in political activities such as voting or holding office. Based on this assumption, the risk of developing mental health problems would be higher among whites who are exposed on a daily basis to the effects of political activities, the competition for ambition and advancement within entrepreneurial and commercial communities, and the resulting stresses that accompany gains or crises that follow losses.

Samuel Cartwright was one of those doctors who argued that slavery was the “natural state” of African Americans, adding that they benefited from hard labor and were unable to care for themselves outside of this system. Cartwright also claimed that people of color displayed a “childish” simplicity of feeling and a lack of complex emotional processes, which he saw as characteristic of their entire race.

Based on Cartwright’s view that slavery was the “natural” state of black people, deviation from this “natural” state was a mental disorder. This is exactly what Cartwright explained in 1851, when he published a report in which he invented two “psychic” disorders, the symptoms of which included the tendency of “slaves” to escape or resist hard labor, and these disorders were classified as “mental diseases,” and he called them “draeptomania” and “dysaesthesia aethiopica.”

Hospital administrators used Cartwright’s ideas to justify their medical opinions that there were no real psychiatric treatments for African American patients, that they did not feel the same way as whites, or that they were not suitable for things like psychoanalysis or group therapy. This is why black patients were segregated into separate, substandard hospital facilities, and were put to work in the hospital laundry, kitchen, and fields.

“My family, my friends, my acquaintances, my patients, their parents, their grandparents, we are all black, so we are supposed to never have to struggle with mental health issues,” says Nigerian-American physician Uchenna Umeh. “Unfortunately, we ourselves have bought into this narrative [of Galt and others like him], that mental health issues do not exist in our race, and we have unconsciously spread this narrative to our detriment.”

During her work, Dr. Uchenna noticed a significant increase in depression and suicidal ideation among her patients. “Suicide rates among African American children ages 5 to 11 have increased steadily since the 1980s and are now twice as high as those of their Caucasian peers,” she says. “Black men accounted for 80 percent of African American suicide attempts in 2015. And those numbers are rising.”

In order to understand the practice of racism and its presence in psychiatry historically and sequentially, let us tell you the roots of the matter from the beginning. Specifically, between 1861 and 1865, the period in which the "Civil War" took place between the northern and southern states of America, and during which the American field of "psychology" was officially institutionalized, where programs, departments, academic degrees, societies and schools specialized in the study of psychology were established and created.

This war is considered one of the worst bloody events that the American Federal Union has been exposed to, and one of its main causes was the "slavery/servitude" system. At a time when the northern states wanted to restrict the scope of slavery and put in place laws that would achieve this, the southern states were expanding slavery, and even relying primarily in their economic system based entirely on agricultural slave labor.

The Civil War freed nearly four million slaves across the South, but this did not lead to more enlightened medical attitudes toward the treatment of African Americans. Quite the opposite, as psychiatry continued its racist sectarianism.

In 1895, Dr. Powell, the superintendent of the Georgia State Asylum, as it was called, noted an alarming increase in mental health problems among blacks in his state. Powell attributed this increase to the three decades of freedom that had preceded the emancipation of slaves, as a large segment of them had not been able to adjust to the openness and consequences of the Civil War. Powell seemed to see slavery and freedom as biologically innate and inevitable.

Powell argued that when former slaves gained their freedom, they were unable to control their desires and emotions, which in turn led to abuses that led to higher rates of mental health diagnoses.

Of course, Powell did not see the truth, which was right in front of him, but his racism prevented him from going to the root of the problem, as the reason for the increase in mental health problems among blacks goes back to a long history of living under extremely poor social and economic conditions, including poverty, racial discrimination, and the specter of violence that may have reached the point of execution, but he chose the easiest way; he said that black people obtaining freedom is the root of their mental and psychological problems.

Colonial Psychology

When the American Psychological Association was founded in 1892, it was headed by Granville Stanley Hall and had 31 white male members elected to its membership. At that time, formal psychology was primarily white-led and heavily relied on the then-popular theory of evolution. The Western psychological field gave its full support to the idea of ​​"white" male superiority, as a result of its findings, and focused its entire attention on demonstrating individual differences among different racial groups.

In 1904, G. Stanley Hall, the founding president of the American Psychological Association, published his theory of "adolescence." In it, he described the First Nations, the indigenous peoples of the Americas before the time of Christopher Columbus, as living in a phase of "human childhood," and that their adults were more like the adolescents of white children or adolescents.

Hall developed colonial "civilization programs" specifically designed to meet what he saw as the needs of the First Nations. These programs provided the moral framework for colonialism, and the result was the cultural genocide of different peoples, with the glamorous goal: we are doing this in order to civilize them and subordinate them to the Western model, under the rule of the white man.

But after World War I, a reverse movement occurred, as some of the sons of poor peoples rushed to the United States and other rich countries of the North, and unprecedented numbers of immigrants arrived, accompanied by a surge in anti-immigration sentiment, and here the theory of "eugenics" emerged, using the principles of genetics. Here, African Americans, who were said to suffer from mental "deficiencies", faced a new and more serious threat to their safety.

The science of "eugenics" was based on two parallel principles: encouraging births among people with a "good" genetic stock, and sterilizing those who were not fit to reproduce, including individuals suffering from mental illness, as well as the poor and those accused of sexual abuse. The focus was on sterilizing African Americans. In California alone in the 1930s, African Americans, who represented 1% of the population, accounted for 4% of the victims of legal sterilization.

Many pioneers in psychology advocated a social agenda that sought to limit the number of children born to people classified as “less fit,” and people of color classified as “less fit” were considered inferior in Western society in terms of knowledge and common law.

Sir Francis Galton, one of the early leaders of psychology, was the first to coin the term "eugenics". Galton is considered one of the icons of "race science", a branch of science that studies the origins and characteristics of different peoples. The "eugenics theory" played a major role in supporting the idea of ​​racial distinctions in their personal and psychological abilities.

His book "Hereditary Genius", published in 1869, was considered the first scientific attempt to study "genius and greatness", and was seen as one of the early literature that contributed to the study of individual differences and psychological measurements in European and American psychology. He concluded that the average intellectual level of the "Negro race" is two degrees lower than that of the white man.

Francis’s book was a major reference and was widely used by the first generation of psychologists who founded the American Psychological Association, the first recognized psychology journals, and the most influential research programs. Many prominent academics were implicated in popularizing notions of white superiority not only in intelligence, but also in moral, cultural, and psychological terms.

In the journal Psychological Review, just one year after the first issue of the American Psychological Review, a study was published showing that samples of so-called First Nations and blacks sometimes had “faster” reaction times than whites, which they interpreted as indicating a greater degree of haste and impulsiveness in their responses, due to their propensity for violence. The study’s authors argued that the quick response was due to “primitiveness,” and that the more developed intelligence of the white participants led to deeper thinking and slower responses.

Many psychologists continued to support the idea of ​​white superiority in both public and academic outlets. For example, in 1922, psychologist James Rowland Angell, president of Yale University, gave a series of lectures describing the hierarchy of races, espousing white supremacy, and discussing the low intelligence of blacks.

In 1922, the Journal of Comparative Psychology published a study linking the degree of “white blood” in First Nations peoples to higher IQ scores. In 1933, more studies were published arguing that First Nations children were more dishonest than white children.

Perhaps the logical question here is: Was the research or results conducted at the time falsified in order to prove that whites were superior to their colored counterparts? The answer: Perhaps not, but the study itself and the results drawn from it were conducted through a mindset dominated by the idea of ​​white evolution and superiority, so that even if the research and studies came back with the opposite results that people of color were superior in some aspect, this result would be viewed and formulated within an interpretive framework from the position and reference of white superiority.

This is what happened in 1897, when a study conducted on black and white children concluded that colored children had stronger memories, and that they generally outperformed white children on a memory task.

Here, although the results of the study were positive for black people, they were formulated in a completely negative way, as the author attributed the strength of black children’s memories to the ability of their “primitive brains” to remember more than others, and described black children as deficient in thinking.

Racism controls psychiatric diagnosis

Psychiatrists’ preconceived biases against people of color have led to unscientific diagnoses that do not adhere to professional standards. A 2023 study found a significant disparity in the prevalence of schizophrenia spectrum disorders (seeing imaginary figures and hearing voices) between people of color in the United States and Canada and whites in those same countries. Black people are diagnosed with these disorders at higher rates than other groups.

The consequences of this scientifically inaccurate diagnosis are exacerbated by punitive societal effects throughout life, including increased stigma, reduced opportunities, poorer care, and increased likelihood of criminalization and arrest. Stereotypes associated with psychotic symptoms may put these patients at risk for police violence and premature death.

The unfortunate side of this is that, as new data show, the differences in diagnosis rates are unlikely to be genetic, but rather societal in origin. Overdiagnosis of schizophrenia spectrum disorders is largely due to racial biases among clinicians.

The study showed how misunderstandings of race confound attempts to diagnose and treat schizophrenia spectrum disorders in black individuals, in addition to implicit biases preventing black patients from receiving appropriate treatment from primarily white mental health providers, which the study described as a “lack of empathy” among doctors for their patients.

In the same context, Dr. Uchenna Umeh, in her article published on the “blackpast” website, questioned the validity of the diagnosis of children detained in psychiatric hospitals and mental health disorders, as she explained that asylum authorities often praised the abilities and skills of these children, which raises many questions about the validity of their mental illness diagnosis in the first place.

Here Uchenna says: “If these black people were truly ‘lost their minds’, how were they able to perform continuous, hard work that required special skills, while white patients were often too ‘weak’ mentally to work?!”

The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) explains that there is a long history of discrimination and racism in mental health care. People with mental illness have always been discriminated against, denied full participation in society, labeled dangerous and criminal, and many were held in institutions that were more like prisons designed to punish than hospitals designed to treat.

This discrimination was bad for anyone with a mental illness or disorder, but it was especially bad for the most marginalized, including African American men, women, and children. Some centers in states like Alabama and Mississippi segregated patients on racial grounds, and even claimed that it was “medically” necessary to separate patients on racial grounds.

In the 1960s, a series of federal legislation and lawsuits attempted to end this discrimination. The Community Mental Health Centers Act (CMHA) was passed to improve the provision of treatment and care for people with mental illness, or what is now known as mental disorders. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed, which included a provision that made it illegal for any facility or service receiving federal funds to discriminate on the basis of race.

At the time, some states still had segregated treatment policies, which put them at risk of losing funding and receiving no financial support to provide medical care. Instead of accepting these provisions and finding ways to end segregation, states including Alabama and Mississippi chose to fight the federal government in court. They claimed that they had the right to administer state services without federal interference, and that it was “medically” necessary to separate patients on the basis of race.

As with research, experiments, and statistics, doctors based their view of the need for “segregated” treatment on a long history of racist ideas in psychiatry. And Dr. John Galt, who made the preposterous claim that black people shouldn’t have mental health problems, was not the only one whose medical opinion was driven by racism. Since the early 19th century, some psychiatrists have argued that African Americans were biologically “inferior” to other people and races.

Here, Dr. Ochena explains the conditions of treatment for black people with mental health problems: “Most pre-Civil War mental health facilities in the South typically denied treatment to enslaved people.”

It seems clear that mental health experts believed that housing blacks and whites in the same facilities would negatively impact the recovery of whites. Housing conditions in Southern asylums for the few who accepted enslaved people were disastrous compared to white patients. Blacks were often housed outdoors near these institutions or in local jails. There were accounts of some black children being housed in asylum grounds.

"Apology"

Finally, after all this long history of injustice and oppression in mental health and psychiatric institutions for black people, the American Psychiatric Association in 2021 acknowledged and apologized for all of the above. In January, the 176-year-old association issued its first-ever apology for its racist past. It acknowledged what it called the profession's "horrific" past actions, committed its board of directors to identifying, understanding, and correcting past injustices against black people, and pledged to adopt new anti-racist practices aimed at ending this long history of discrimination.

However, some critics saw this apology as insufficient, and doubted that any real positive step would take place, noting that the American Medical Association issued a similar apology in 2008 for its "racist" history of more than 100 years of promoting or accepting racial inequality negatively, and excluding African American doctors, without offering anything actual or realistic after this apology.

Critics inside and outside the APA have made clear that the association needs to overcome significant obstacles to fix its problems and address its racial equity issues in a meaningful way, including the association’s diagnostic biases, the persistent shortage of black psychiatrists, and a physical structure that tends to exclude people who cannot pay for services out of pocket. This may make the crisis of racism in psychiatry too deep and entrenched to be resolved with an “apology” and a “promise” of reform. This was confirmed in the summer of 2020, when Dr. Ruth Shim, director of cultural psychiatry and professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of California, Davis, left the APA, explaining her departure in a tone that expressed her frustration and frustration and in the important statement that “institutional racism is an existential crisis in psychiatry.”

  - Arwa Nagib

Fātima Al-Fihri the founder of the oldest university in the world that is still operating without interruption

Fātima Al-Fihri the founder of the oldest university in the world that is still operating without interruption

    Tuesday, July 25, 2023   No comments

The Guinness World Records classifies Al-Qarawiyyin University in Fez, Morocco, as the oldest university in the world that is still operating without interruption, despite the scientific controversy that makes it compete with al-Zaytouna Mosque and University of Tunisia (which began its lessons since 737 AD / 120 AH) for the title of the oldest university in the world.

The merit of the establishment of the "Al-Qarawiyyin" is attributed to Fātima Al-Fihri, who founded the Al-Qarawiyyin Mosque in the mid-ninth century AD / mid-third century AH, but the accounts of historians who witnessed the era of Al-Qarawiyyin University after the era of Fatima, such as Ibn Khaldun and Abi Al-Hassan Ali bin Abi Zar' Al-Fassi, do not suggest that it was established as a university, but rather as a mosque built by Fatima with her money from stone and mud after she bought the land that was allocated to the mosque and the university later from her great inheritance.

The mosque and the university

The Al-Qarawiyyin Mosque was considered the oldest university because it did not go through the stumbling stages experienced by the institutes of Al-Zaytouna, Al-Azhar and Al-Mustansiriya Scientific School, and the "Qarawiyyin" remained far from the events of the capitals of the East and their great transformations, which preserved for it the continuity of its system and traditions, and dispensed with its endowments and spacious lands from the support of the authorities and the countries that passed through it.

The answer to the question of the time of the beginning of teaching in the villagers does not seem easy, but it certainly resembles the study of the many histories of mosques that combined the function of worship and prayer with being a center for education and teaching.

And the historian of the 14th century AD, Ali Al-Jaznai, believes in his book “Reaping the Flower of Myrtle in Building the City of Fez,” that the beginning of the villagers’ transformation into a university came with the scholars who established the villagers’ qiblah, and it was known about the poet Bakr Al-Tahrti and Imam Yahya the Fourth that they held scientific councils in the villagers.

Looking at the founding dates of European universities (Italian Bologna in the mid-12th century, and the Sorbonne at the beginning of the 13th century), Al-Qarawiyyin already appears to be the oldest university in the world, and the story of its founding is similar to the story of the Sorbonne, Bologna and Oxford universities, which also began teaching theology by monks before gradually developing into ancient universities, according to Moroccan historian Abd al-Hadi al-Tazi, author of the book "The Mosque of Al-Qarawiyyin".

Fatima Al-Fihri, the mother of the children

There are only limited sources about the life and story of Fātima Al-Fihri, including what was written by the historian Ibn Abi Zar’, who lived in the 14th century AD, in his book “Rawdat Al-Qirtas”, and described the land that Fātima bought and built the mosque on.

Ibn Abi Zaraa narrates the journey of the Tunisian villagers’ delegation to the Idrisid king, Yahya I, and their settlement around the slope of the villagers, including the “blessed woman Fātima,” the daughter of the Tunisian Arab man, Muhammad bin Abdullah Al-Fihri. Fatima was with her sister Mary, and inherited a huge fortune that she spent on charitable work and building the mosque.

And Ibn Khaldun mentions in the 14th century on the authority of Fatima after he transmits what Ibn Abi Zaraa narrated, referring to the transfer of the Friday sermon to the Al-Qarawiyyin mosque and the crowding of the surrounding area, and Ibn Khaldun follows, "as if the kings' intentions were alerted afterwards."

The historian Abd al-Hadi al-Tazi saw in his study, which was originally a doctoral thesis on the al-Qarawiyyin mosque, that the construction of the mosque began during the reign of Sultan Daoud bin Idris based on a historical document dating back to the Idrisid period that was found during modern restoration work.

Although he does not know much about Fātima's life from ancient sources, Ibn Abi Zaraa and Ibn Khaldun narrated the story briefly, and the first explained the story of building the mosque from mud, gravel and yellow sand, and narrated the digging of the well in the courtyard of the mosque and Fatima's abundant spending on construction so that it would be a continuous good deed that would be rewarded in the afterlife.

After her departure, the Almoravid, Almohad, and Marinid states took care of the mosque, expanded it, and renovated its construction.

Transfer to university

This care taken by the rulers to win a moral status by supporting science and scholars contributed to the prosperity of the university and the formalization of its ancient educational systems, and in this way the mosque gave birth to a university.

Reference began to be made to the unique scientific status of the Al-Qarawiyyin Mosque since the 12th century AD, and its library gradually grew through books, donations, endowments, and the efforts of princes to increase its holdings, and Al-Qarawiyyin preserved its value as a center of religious and scientific knowledge in the Islamic world.

Although it is difficult to find an exact date for the mosque’s transformation into a university, some historians believe that the beginning of the transformation was in the Almoravid era (1056-1147 AD), coinciding with the change in the shape of the villagers during the era of the Almoravid state from its previous form, as they built a new platform for the mosque decorated with verses of the Qur’an, while others believe that the real transformation came during the era of the Marinid state, which sought to reform the mosque and build schools around it and enhance their presence, in preparation for the intervention in appointing preachers for the mosque that the notables supervised. manage it.

Al-Qarawiyyin University knew the system of scientific chairs, and endowments were allocated to spend on it. The scientific chair is considered a high-established degree that can be compared to modern academic positions.

The university attracted many scholars and philosophers, including Ibn Baja (d.: 533 AH / 1138 CE according to one of the sayings), Al-Sharif Al-Idrisi (559 AH / 1166 CE), Ibn Rushd (d.: 595 AH / 1198 CE), Musa bin Maimon (d.: 603 AH / 1205 CE), Ibn Khaldun (d.: 808 AH / 1406 CE), as well as the Pope of the Vatican. The French "Sylvester II (940-1003) who studied science in Arabic and is believed to have transferred Arabic numerals to Europe.

Fake images in #IranProtests: Iran's karate woman and the boy who's still alive, Bahrain protesters in Tehran, etc

Fake images in #IranProtests: Iran's karate woman and the boy who's still alive, Bahrain protesters in Tehran, etc

    Thursday, January 04, 2018   No comments

Since December 28, 2017, a wave of protests has swept Iran. Citizens have broadcast dozens of videos online showing the demonstrations and the resulting police crackdown. As ever in these kinds of situations, there have also been many fake photos and videos circulating, not only on social media but also mistakenly shared by journalists and in mainstream media across the world. The FRANCE 24 Observers team has done a round-up of some of the most widely shared fake images around the Iranian uprising.

    Original article >>

Google Academics Inc., financial support for academics and policy experts to influence public opinion in favor of Google

Google Academics Inc., financial support for academics and policy experts to influence public opinion in favor of Google

    Thursday, July 13, 2017   No comments

Campaign for Accountability (CfA) released a new report, Google Academics Inc., revealing Google’s extensive financial support for academics and policy experts.  CfA identified 329 research papers published between 2005 and 2017 on public policy matters of interest to Google that were in some way funded by the company.

CfA Executive Director, Daniel Stevens, said, “Google uses its immense wealth and power to attempt to influence policy makers at every level. At a minimum, regulators should be aware that the allegedly independent legal and academic work on which they rely has been brought to them by Google.”

Google Academics Inc. examines the contours of Google’s academic influence machine.  For instance, the report reveals that the number of Google-funded studies spiked during periods when its business model was under threat from regulators and when opportunities arose to push for new regulations on its competitors.

Google-funded studies are published by a wide variety of sources, and often blur the line between academic research and paid advocacy.  Reports funded by the company have been authored by academics and economists hailing from some of the nation’s leading law schools and universities, including Stanford, Harvard and MIT, as well as some of the most prestigious universities in Europe, including Oxford, Edinburgh, and the Berlin School of Economics.




Read the report here.

Are European countries planning to censor media outlets they don't like?

Are European countries planning to censor media outlets they don't like?

    Monday, November 28, 2016   No comments

Underscoring the importance of media outlets, the EU parliament approved a non-legislative resolution aimed at countering what they called hostile state and non-state actors. The resolution ended up equating Russian media with ISIL's. The EU statement on this matter states:

Hostile propaganda against the EU and its member states seeks to distort the truth, provoke doubt, divide the EU and its North American partners, paralyse the decision-making process, discredit the EU institutions and incite fear and uncertainty among EU citizens, says the text.

This is alarming development when considering the many channels of propaganda and disinformation originate in Western countries. It raises the stakes. It proves the importance of media and media literacy in general. But given that some European countries acted to virtually shut down some Russian and Iranian media outlets, Russia Today and PressNews, thos who believe in the freedom of the press should be worried.
  

Below is the official EU statement:

_____________________________________________________________________
MEPs sound alarm on anti-EU propaganda from Russia and Islamist terrorist groups
www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/20161118IPR51718/meps-sound-alarm-on-anti-eu-propaganda-from-russia-and-islamist-terrorist-groups

Propaganda pressure on the EU from Russia and Islamist terrorist groups is growing, MEPs warn in a resolution voted on Wednesday. It seeks to distort the truth, incite fear, provoke doubt and divide the EU. To counteract anti-EU campaigns, MEPs suggest reinforcing the EU’s tiny “strategic communication” task force and investing more in awareness raising, education, online and local media, investigative journalism and information literacy.

“I was given the task of describing the propaganda of both state and non-state actors. We have seen many transformations of it. As regards the Russian Federation, the situation is now clear. After its annexation of Crimea and aggression in the eastern part of Ukraine, many countries are fully aware of its disinformation and manipulation“, said rapporteur Anna Fotyga (ECR, PL). “This report, in the course of its preparation, was also a target of hostile propaganda”, she added.

The resolution stresses that the EU needs to counter disinformation campaigns and propaganda from countries, such as Russia, and non-state actors, like Daesh, Al-Qaeda and other violent jihadi terrorist groups.

Hostile propaganda against the EU and its member states seeks to distort the truth, provoke doubt, divide the EU and its North American partners, paralyse the decision-making process, discredit the EU institutions and incite fear and uncertainty among EU citizens, says the text.

Russia seeks to divide

MEPs warn that the Kremlin has stepped up its propaganda against EU since annexing Crimea and waging hybrid war in the Donbass. They note that ”the Russian government is employing a wide range of tools and instruments, such as think tanks [...], multilingual TV stations (e.g. Russia Today), pseudo-news agencies and multimedia services (e.g. Sputnik) [...], social media and internet trolls, to challenge democratic values, divide Europe, gather domestic support and create the perception of failed states in the EU’s eastern neighbourhood”.

The resolution stresses that the “Kremlin is funding political parties and other organisations within the EU” and deplores “Russian backing of anti-EU forces” such as extreme-right parties and populist forces.

Daesh targets the EU



As the EU and its citizens are major targets of Daesh, MEPs call on EU member states to work more closely to protect society from its recruitment drives and enhance resilience against radicalisation. They also suggest developing a narrative to counter Daesh, “including through the empowerment and increased visibility of mainstream Muslim scholars who have the credibility to delegitimise Daesh propaganda.”



Information literacy

To counteract anti-EU campaigns, MEPs suggest investing in awareness raising, education, online and local media, investigative journalism and information literacy, which would empower citizens to analyse media content critically.  It is equally important to adapt communication to specific regions, including access to information in local languages, says the text.

The resolution also suggests deepening EU and NATO cooperation on strategic communication, reinforcing the EU’s 9-strong strategic communication task force and providing more support to boost media resilience in EU neighbourhood countries.

The resolution was approved by 304 votes to 179, with 208 abstentions.

Procedure:  Non-legislative resolution

While Obama calls Erdogan's treatment of journalists 'very troubling', his body guards attacked journalists calling one "PKK whore"

While Obama calls Erdogan's treatment of journalists 'very troubling', his body guards attacked journalists calling one "PKK whore"

    Saturday, April 02, 2016   No comments

  Obama: Erdogan treatment of journalists 'very troubling'
President Obama on Friday called out Turkish President Recep Erdogan, saying his policies toward journalists have been "troubling."

During a press conference following the Nuclear Security Summit, Obama was asked if he believed Erdogan is an authoritarian.

“I have expressed this to him directly so it’s no secret, that there are some trends within Turkey that I have been troubled with,” Obama said.

“I am a strong believer in freedom of the press. I’m a strong believer in freedom of religion. I’m a strong believer in rule of law and democracy," he continued. "There is no doubt that President Erdogan has been repeatedly elected through a democratic process, but I think the approach that they’ve been taking towards the press is one that could lead Turkey down a path that would be very troubling.”

On Thursday, a policy discussion featuring the Turkish president at the Brookings Institute was overshadowed by clashes between his security detail and protesters. His bodyguards also reportedly kicked out a Turkish journalist who has been critical of him.  source

The absence of a presidential meeting on Erdogan's trip to the US capital had been glaring. Although there was a statement that the two leaders met, still the lack of media coverage of such meeting and Obama's refusal to schedule a meeting ahead of time spoke loudly about how troubled Obama is with Erdogan's behavior. 

Erdogan's violence against journalists and and regression of the media was on display in DC as well. Erdogan's body guard "aimed a chest-high kick at an American reporter attempting to film the harassment of a Turkish opposition reporter, and another called a female foreign policy scholar a "PKK whore."  Source

Why Al Jazeera America Was Destined to Fail

Why Al Jazeera America Was Destined to Fail

    Monday, January 18, 2016   No comments

Al Jazeera America never had a chance. Having struggled in vain to attract an audience since it launched in 2013, the cable news channel announced Wednesday that it would shut down come April. “The decision is driven by the fact that our business model is simply not sustainable in an increasingly digital world, and because of the current global financial challenges,” CEO Al Anstey said in a staff memo, thereby glossing over all of the operation's actual failures.


Maybe you liked Al Jazeera America's news coverage. More likely, you never watched it. After spending $500 million to buy Al Gore's Current TV and put itself in about 40 million homes, the channel reached a piddly 28,000 prime-time viewers in 2015. CNN, by comparison, reaches around 700,000. That is not the sort of gap you can simply ascribe to a secular decline in cable audiences as people spend more time online. Some of the trouble undoubtedly boiled down to its name. Many Americans were never going to watch a channel created by Al Jazeera, the media network owned by the Qatari government with a reputation (fair or not) for being a smidgen hostile to the U.S.

But if Al Jazeera America's brand was a handicap, its philosophy was a death sentence. The channel was founded on the utterly ill-conceived idea that Americans were starving for sober, “unbiased” hard news coverage. In other words, it made the mistake of offering viewers the programming they claimed to want, instead of the programming that all available evidence suggests they actually enjoy. Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2013, the channel's first CEO, Ehab Al Shihabi, said market research suggested that there were 40 million or 50 million Americans yearning for deep, old-school reportage.  “If we do the kind of reporting that is considered ‘back to the future’—the hard-core journalistic reporting, not biased, not for entertainment, but fact-based—do we have a place? All the research indicates yes,” Al Shihabi later told the Nation. source

Erdoğan to 1,128 academics: You are not enlightened persons, you are dark

Erdoğan to 1,128 academics: You are not enlightened persons, you are dark

    Tuesday, January 12, 2016   No comments

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has strongly reacted to a petition signed by more than 1,000 local and international academics calling on the Turkish government to end the security operations being committed in southeastern Anatolia and to return to table for talks to resolve the Kurdish issue, describing the signatories as “ignorant.” After an urgent meeting on Jan. 12, the Supreme Education Board (YÖK) announced that legal action would be taken over local academics who have signed the petition. 

Some 1,128 academics from 89 different universities - including foreign scholars like Noam Chomsky, David Harway and Immanuel Wallerstein - signed the petition titled “We won’t be a part of this crime,” which called on Ankara to end the “massacre and slaughter.”

Erdoğan, in an address to Turkish ambassadors gathered for an annual conference, lashed out at the signatories and said human rights violations in the southeast were being committed by terrorists, not by the state.

“Despite all of these facts, this crowd, which calls itself academics, accuses the state through a statement. Not only this, they also invite foreigners to monitor developments. This is the mentality of colonialism,” he said. Likening today’s situation with the Turkish War of Independence, Erdoğan said the country was again facing “treason” from “so-called intellectuals.”

“Hey, you so-called intellectuals! You are not enlightened persons, you are dark. You are nothing like intellectuals. You are ignorant and dark, not even knowing about the east or the southeast. We know these places just like we know our home addresses,” he said, reiterating his position that Turkey’s problem is “not a Kurdish one, but one of terror.” 

  

source

Fake Images of Crisis in Syria’s Madaya politically motivated

Fake Images of Crisis in Syria’s Madaya politically motivated

    Monday, January 11, 2016   No comments

A flurry of new stories surrounding mass starvation in the besieged Syrian town of Madaya, once a popular resort destination, have included some shocking images of starving children, and reports of people surviving on grass and tree leaves.

Even the editors here at Antiwar.com were briefly taken in, posting a story from the normally dependable al-Jazeera which used photographic “evidence” which turned out to be recycled photos from previous incidents.

Al-Jazeera’s top image of a starving child in that story, for instance, is the same child from a YouTube video in Derna, Syria, way back in May, months before the Madaya siege even began.

His isn’t the only image falsely attributed to the current crisis, with el-Akhbar identifying many of the other most high-profile pictures as having previous origins, one as far back as a 2009 picture of a refugee arriving in Europe, and a photo of a starving infant “in Madaya” dating from early 2014, and the infant shown is trapped in the ISIS-occupied Palestinian refugee camp or Yarmouk.

The shocking nature of the images makes for great press, and many are trying to parlay that into a chance to condemn the Syrian government, their Russian allies, and Hezbollah. While there are crises all over Syria and well-documented suffering that has produced millions of refugees, one would think there would not be a need to manufacture phony stories surrounding recycled pictures. For those looking to hype the crisis-du-jour, however, it seems that asking for real photos of the real situation is just too inconvenient, and it’s easier to just re-brand the first starving child you see.

 Source

Judge Permits Professor Steven Salaita's Free Speech Case Against University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to Proceed

Judge Permits Professor Steven Salaita's Free Speech Case Against University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to Proceed

    Friday, August 07, 2015   No comments

University’s Attempt to Dismiss Salaita Suit Over “Uncivil” Tweets Rejected by Court                    

August 6, 2015, Chicago, a federal judge rejected efforts to throw out a lawsuit against the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) for firing Professor Steven Salaita from a tenured position based on his personal tweets criticizing Israel’s military assault on Gaza last summer.  The university has admitted that it based its decision on Salaita’s tweets, calling them “uncivil.”   The court firmly rejected the university’s claim that it did not have a contract with Professor Salaita, stating, “If the Court accepted the University’s argument, the entire American academic hiring process as it now operates would cease to exist.” The court further rejected the university’s attempt to dismiss Professor Salaita’s First Amendment claims, finding that his tweets “implicate every ‘central concern’ of the First Amendment.”

“Given the serious ramifications of my termination from a tenured professorship to a wide range of people, I am happy to move forward with this suit in the hope that restrictions on academic freedom, free speech, and shared governance will not become further entrenched because of UIUC's behavior,” said Steven Salaita.

The lawsuit, brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Loevy & Loevy on Prof. Salaita’s behalf, argues that UIUC violated Salaita’s rights to free speech and due process and breached its employment contract with him. It seeks Professor Salaita’s reinstatement and monetary relief, including compensation for the economic hardship and reputational damage he suffered as a result of the university’s actions. Shortly before the lawsuit was filed, UIUC rejected a recommendation from the university’s own Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure (CAFT) that the university reconsider its decision.

“The court’s ruling clears the way for Professor Salaita to seek redress for the wrongs done by the university, including violating his right to speak freely on issues of public concern without being fired,” said Center for Constitutional Rights Deputy Legal Director Maria LaHood. “The university must finally face the facts of what it has done to Professor Salaita and principles of academic freedom.”  

Today’s ruling comes on the heels of an Illinois state court’s decision in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit on June 12 ordering university officials to turn over emails related to Professor Salaita’s firing that they had refused to divulge, as well as a vote by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to censure the university on June 13. The AAUP issued a report in April that concluded UIUC had violated academic freedom and due process.

The university’s leadership has faced increasing nationwide criticism over Salaita’s firing, particularly within the academic community.  Sixteen academic departments of the university have voted no confidence in the UIUC administration, and prominent academic organizations, including the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association and the Society of American Law Teachers, have publicly condemned the university’s actions. More than 5,000 academics from around the country, including Dr. Cornel West and Angela Davis, have pledged to boycott UIUC, resulting in the cancellation of more than three dozen scheduled talks and conferences at the school. Last September, UIUC students staged a silent walk-out to protest what they said was the university’s silencing of Salaita.

“In its effort to have Professor Salaita’s lawsuit thrown out before discovery into the reasons for its decision, the university’s administration took a number of positions that showed contempt for its constitutional obligations, and raise serious doubts about the university’s commitment to academic freedom and its willingness to honor contractual commitments to its scholars,” said Anand Swaminathan of Loevy & Loevy. “We are extremely pleased that the court has rejected the university’s dubious arguments.”

After a rigorous year-long national search and interview process, the American Indian Studies program at UIUC offered Professor Salaita a tenured faculty position in Fall 2013, which he promptly accepted. Relying on UIUC’s contractual promise, Professor Salaita resigned from his tenured faculty position at Virginia Tech and prepared to move to Champaign. In August 2014, just two weeks before he was due to begin teaching, UIUC Chancellor Phyllis Wise and Vice President Christophe Pierre informed Professor Salaita that it had terminated his appointment. He was not given an opportunity to object or be heard.

Read the Ruling; learn more about the Salaita v. Kennedy, et al.
case.

_________________

Source: CCR Press release

WikiLeaks Cables Show a Saudi Obsession With Iran and interference in business of academic institutions around the world

WikiLeaks Cables Show a Saudi Obsession With Iran and interference in business of academic institutions around the world

    Thursday, July 16, 2015   No comments

Saudis wanted to fire university president

For decades, Saudi Arabia has poured billions of its oil dollars into sympathetic Islamic organizations around the world, quietly practicing checkbook diplomacy to advance its agenda.

But a trove of thousands of Saudi documents recently released by WikiLeaks reveals in surprising detail how the government’s goal in recent years was not just to spread its strict version of Sunni Islam — though that was a priority — but also to undermine its primary adversary: Shiite Iran.

The documents from Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry illustrate a near obsession with Iran, with diplomats in Africa, Asia and Europe monitoring Iranian activities in minute detail and top government agencies plotting moves to limit the spread of Shiite Islam.



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Ancient Sea Rise Tale Told Accurately for 10,000 Years

Ancient Sea Rise Tale Told Accurately for 10,000 Years

    Wednesday, January 28, 2015   No comments

Aboriginal stories of lost islands match up with underwater finds in Australia

Melbourne, the southernmost state capital of the Australian mainland, was established by Europeans a couple hundred years ago at the juncture of a great river and a wind-whipped bay. Port Phillip Bay sprawls over 750 square miles, providing feeding grounds for whales and sheltering coastlines for brine-scented beach towns. But it’s an exceptionally shallow waterway, less than 30 feet in most places. It’s so shallow that 10,000 years ago, when ice sheets and glaciers held far more of the planet’s water than is the case today, most of the bay floor was high and dry and grazed upon by kangaroos.

To most of us, the rush of the oceans that followed the last ice age seems like a prehistoric epoch. But the historic occasion was dutifully recorded—coast to coast—by the original inhabitants of the land Down Under.

Without using written languages, Australian tribes passed memories of life before, and during, post-glacial shoreline inundations through hundreds of generations as high-fidelity oral history. Some tribes can still point to islands that no longer exist—and provide their original names.

That’s the conclusion of linguists and a geographer, who have together identified 18 Aboriginal stories—many of which were transcribed by early settlers before the tribes that told them succumbed to murderous and disease-spreading immigrants from afar—that they say accurately described geographical features that predated the last post-ice age rising of the seas.

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Professor fired for Israel criticism urges University of Illinois to reinstate him

Professor fired for Israel criticism urges University of Illinois to reinstate him

    Wednesday, September 10, 2014   No comments

Steven Salaita, a university professor whose appointment at the University of Illinois was withdrawn last month after he was critical of Israel on Twitter, spoke publicly for the first time on Tuesday, saying he should be reinstated on the grounds of academic freedom.

“I am a passionate advocate for equality, a fair and open-minded instructor, and highly collegial. No legitimate evidence exists for any claims or insinuations to the contrary, which have severely damaged any reputation and my prospects for future employment,” he said.

Salaita, a former tenured professor of English at Virginia Tech, accepted a faculty appointment at the University of Illinois in October 2013 to teach in the American Indian Studies program starting January 2014. But his appointment was revoked in early August, after Salaita posted to Twitter several messages criticising Israel.

“Only Israel can murder around 300 children in the span of a few weeks and insist that it is the victim,” said one. “If Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised,” asked another.

In explaining his dismissal, university officials described his comments as uncivil, saying they represented “disrespectful and demeaning speech that promotes malice”.

Since then, some academics have mounted a boycott of the university, saying it is not the institute’s place to dictate civil discourse. They also claim the university has become too beholden to wealthy donors who they say are informally dictating decisions involving hiring and tenure. Internal emails surfaced last week that suggested the university’s decision to drop Salaita was motivated by threats from wealthy donors.

“‘Civility’ is the new banner of what is expected on college campuses and it’s a frightening reality for those of us who have to figure out what it is to teach under that banner flying over our campuses,” said Robert Warrior, chairman of the American Indian Studies program, who is fighting to get Salaita reinstated.

Late last month, university trustees released a statement saying that Salaita was rejected for the inflammatory nature of his Twitter posts, not his views. “There can be no place for that in our democracy, and therefore, there will be no place for it in our university,” chairman Christopher Kennedy wrote.

However, emails published on Wednesday by the News-Gazette in Champaign-Urbana showed donors threatened to withdraw their financial support if Salaita’s hiring was approved. 

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Out of a Job: Gaza war and academic freedom

Out of a Job: Gaza war and academic freedom

    Wednesday, August 06, 2014   No comments

By Scott Jaschik
Many faculty job offers (which are well-vetted by college officials before they go out) contain language stating that the offer is pending approval by the institution's board of trustees. It's just a formality, since many college bylaws require such approval.

Not so with a job offer made to Steven G. Salaita, who was to have joined the American Indian studies program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this month. The appointment was made public, and Salaita resigned from his position as associate professor of English at Virginia Tech. But he was recently informed by Chancellor Phyllis Wise that the appointment would not go to the university's board, and that he did not have a job to come to in Illinois, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation.

The university declined to confirm the blocked appointment, but would not respond to questions about whether Salaita was going to be teaching there. (And as recently as two weeks ago, the university confirmed to reporters that he was coming.) The university also declined to answer questions about how rare it is for such appointments to fall through at this stage.

Salaita did not respond to numerous calls and emails.

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Israel's military censor wanted prior review of the New York Times' article on Second Lt. Hadar Goldin, a missing Israeli officer now believed dead

Israel's military censor wanted prior review of the New York Times' article on Second Lt. Hadar Goldin, a missing Israeli officer now believed dead

    Sunday, August 03, 2014   No comments

In the New York Times' August 1 article, "Gaza Fighting Intensifies as Cease-Fire Falls Apart," the newspaper revealed that it was the first time "in more than six years" Israel wanted prior review.

The Times said it didn't fully comply with the order. Instead of sending "a draft of this article," they just "summarized" the section of its article about Goldin in a phone call. The Times's report reads, as of August 2:

"Israel’s military censor informed The New York Times that material related to the missing officer had to be submitted for review, the first such notification in more than six years. International journalists must agree in writing to the censorship system in order to work in Israel. The Times did not send the censor a draft of this article before publication, but summarized over the phone its biographical references to Lieutenant Goldin."

Interestingly, the Huffington Post noted that the Times didn't include that paragraph about the censor until "nearly six hours" after publication, pointing to News Diffs' record of changes to the article. That may have been because the prior review request came after publication for future reports.

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American media's new pro-Israel bias: the same party line at the wrong time Evolving conversations on the ground demand probing questions on-air; So why does TV news look like a Netanyahu ad?

American media's new pro-Israel bias: the same party line at the wrong time Evolving conversations on the ground demand probing questions on-air; So why does TV news look like a Netanyahu ad?

    Friday, August 01, 2014   No comments

Here are a few questions you won’t hear asked of the parade of Israeli officials crossing US television screens during the current crisis in Gaza:

• What would you do if a foreign country was occupying your land?
• What does it mean that Israeli cabinet ministers deny Palestine’s right to exist?
• What should we make of a prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, who as opposition leader in the 1990s addressed a rally under a banner reading “Death to Arafat” a year after the Palestinian leader signed a peace accord with Israel?

These are contentious questions, to be sure, and with complicated answers. But they are relevant to understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today. They also parallel the issues routinely raised by American journalists with Palestinian officials, pressing to consider how the US would react if it were under rocket fire from Mexico, to explain why Hamas won’t recognise Israel and to repudiate Palestinian anti-Semitism.

But it’s a feature of much mainstream journalism in the US, not just an issue of coverage during the last three weeks of the Gaza crisis, that while one set of questions gets asked all the time, the other is heard hardly at all.

In years of reporting from and about Israel, I’ve followed the frequently robust debate in its press about whether Netanyahu really wants a peace deal, about the growing power of right-wing members inside the Israeli cabinet opposed to a Palestinian state, about the creeping air of permanence to the occupation.

So it has been all the more striking to discover a far narrower discourse in Washington and the notoriously pro-Israel mainstream media in the US at a time when difficult questions are more important than ever. John Kerry, the US secretary of state, and a crop of foreign leaders have ratcheted up warnings that the door for the two-state solution is closing, in no small part because of Israel’s actions. But still the difficult questions go unasked.

Take Netanyahu’s appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. The host, Bob Schieffer, permitted the Israeli leader to make a lengthy case for the his military’s ground attack, guiding him along with one sympathetic question after another. Finally, after describing Netanyahu’s position as “very understandable”, Schieffer asked about dead Palestinian civilians – but only to wonder if they presented a public relations problem in “the battle for world opinion”.

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Jeff Bezos and the Imperial Paper; Washington Post’s prestige based on proximity to power

Jeff Bezos and the Imperial Paper; Washington Post’s prestige based on proximity to power

    Saturday, March 01, 2014   No comments

If the United States derived its might primarily from its economic power, the Washington Post would enjoy the same degree of international influence as, say, the Xinhua newspaper of Beijing. The two countries have roughly comparable outputs, with China’s GDP being about 80 percent the size of the US economy when adjusted for purchasing power, according to the IMF.
But a large part of what makes the United States a unique superpower is its role as the world’s military hegemon, reflected in part by its roughly 1,000 overseas bases. (China has none.)
It is this added power emanating from the Pentagon that helps confer an outsize authority to the opinion pages of the capital’s major paper. The Post’s status as a weathervane for the political winds of official Washington makes its views—unlike those of any other paper serving a city of a mere 630,000—virtually required reading for much of the world.

Billionaire Internet mogul Jeff Bezos seemed to understand this when he made his first foray into the industry by acquiring the Post, the go-to newspaper for Beltway policymakers, and not, for example, the Los Angeles Times, which boasts greater daily circulation.
And therein lies one underacknowledged key to understanding the Washington Post editorial board’s foreign-policy stances: As beneficiaries of the prestige and reach that come with worldwide US dominance, board members would just as soon advocate for policies that run counter to US power as they would trade places with their counterparts at, say, the Denver Post.
And yet this bipartisan support for Washington’s supremacy, which the Post mirrors, runs counter to the public will. A Washington Post blog post titled “Team America No Longer Wants to Be the World’s Police” (9/13/13) highlighted two polls showing that by a 2-to-1 margin, the US public disapproves of its government taking “the leading role among all other countries in the world in trying to solve international conflicts,” and disagrees that the US “should be ready and willing to use military force around the world.”
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The ‘Islam is different’ argument

The ‘Islam is different’ argument

    Monday, February 24, 2014   No comments

BY EUGENE VOLOKH

[This is my last post serializing my just-published article, Religious Law (Especially Islamic Law) in American Courts, 66 Okla. L. Rev. 431 (2014); you can see the posts so far here.]

I have argued that many (though not all) of the things that are condemned as intrusions of Islamic law into American law are actually the applications of traditional American legal principles. Those who believe in equal treatment without regard to religion, I have argued, should extend to Muslims the benefits of those principles just as Christians, Jews and others can take advantage of those principles.

Some, however, have argued that Islam should not be treated the same as those other religions. One line of argument goes so far as to say (in the words of noted televangelist and political figure Pat Robertson) that “Islam is not a religion. It is a political system bent on world domination.”[111]

It’s hard to figure out exactly what the first part of this means. What constitutes a religion for legal purposes can be fuzzy around the edges,[112] but surely Islam — a prominent system of beliefs about God and God’s supposed commands to mankind — must qualify.[113] The argument, I assume, must be that Islam, though it is a religion, is not simply a religion but is also a political ideology and therefore loses its status as a religion for, say, religious accommodation purposes.

But that can’t be right. Many religions, especially many strands of Christianity, are “political system[s]” in the sense that they create an agenda for political action. The conservative Christian political program of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and others is one example.[114] The “liberation theology” followed by some liberal Catholics is another.[115]

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What Nicholas Kristof gets wrong about public intellectuals

What Nicholas Kristof gets wrong about public intellectuals

    Wednesday, February 19, 2014   No comments

In the not so distant past, Politico reporter Dylan Byers engaged into a rather public spat with The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates’ contention that Melissa Harris-Perry is “America’s most foremost public intellectual.” Byers offered a list of intellectuals to counter Coates’ claim made up entirely of white men and a singular (deceased) white woman, provoking yet another proper sonning from the Twitterverse. It was telling that Byers couldn’t imagine or embrace the idea that an African-American woman could be a public intellectual. His default model returned to white and male.

A similar myopia resurfaced this past Sunday in a NYT column penned by Nicholas Kristof bemoaning the “absence” of academics in the public square.

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