Rebel News - Independent News and Analysis

“Is Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead simply glib and superficial?”

Some thirty years ago now, it was one of the English essay questions put to me in my final year at high school.  My written answer—‘Yes’—was perhaps itself a little glib and superficial and deserving of its low mark.  But I was eighteen years old and going for the laugh.  I suspect they would not ask such questions these days, for it would be deemed too demanding, too excluding, too elitist, too unfair.  After all, it would require a pupil to read, comprehend, think, and write.  Heaven forbid.  In the eyes of the liberal-left that simply will not do.

 

For nearly four years the Cal State Long Beach community has seen repeated attacks on me. Powerful activist organizations — the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League — have come to campus to condemn me. Several departments at the university have issued public denunciations, and I have been harassed and condemned by individual professors on faculty e-mail lists. Beginning with the current semester, several students have disrupted my classes; they have campaigned to get me fired and have written inflammatory articles in the Daily 49er.

"Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that has committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims." – Prof. Arnold Toynbee, Foreword to the Transformation of Palestine, 1971

"Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial." – Ariel Sharon

Israel keeps selling disinformation to the public. Channelling it through the media they own and control, the one institution that’s difficult to control happens to be the university.

Zionists have spent a great deal of money distributing their propaganda and circulating their image management. On university campuses with significant numbers of Muslim students, the Pro-Israel groups don’t have quite the freedom to run rampant with their campaigns.

The undergraduate student government of UC San Diego unanimously passed a resolution supporting the right of eleven students to protest an event held at the University of California, Irvine last week. The resolution calls for an immediate levy on all academic charges held against the eight UCI and three UCR students.

After the resolution passed with a unanimous vote of yes UCSD Students for Justice in Palestine President Anfal Awwad said, “We stand in solidarity with our fellow UCI and UCR courageous students. Even though students on our campus as well as community members protested the presence of Israeli ambassador Michael Oren differently than the students at the UCI event, that does not mean we disagree with their approach, on the contrary we applaud their courage and this resolution is our way of saying that. I hope that that we at UCSD have set an example for other campuses to support this movement and make sure these eleven students do not get expelled from their universities.”

 

In a press release today, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) urged Jews to not make monetary contributions to the University of California at Irvine (UCI) and for Jewish students not to apply there. The Zionists are angry that the university administration has not clamped down hard enough on Palestinian and Muslim students who dare to criticize the criminal policies of the illegitimate state of Israel.

 

“Make a child smile—kill a counselor.”

A passable joke and a admirable sentiment. Face it, a kid cannot even fart these days without being offered counseling or Ritalin. We are enfeebled by prevailing victim culture, brought low by its burgeoning support industry of hand-holders and quack fixes; we are considered remarkable—borderline freakish—should we actually manage to cope.

The price paid for the bullshit peddled is high. Dignity is replaced by dependency, reserve by emotional incontinence; humor has given over to grim earnestness, stoicism and grit to flaccid self-pity. To ‘have issues’ is to be interesting (it used to be called flakey), to be ‘troubled’ is now the default excuse for any who intend to behave like an asshole. And happiness and contentment are nowhere.

I have been inspired over the last several months by many of the critiques of different aspects of modern society put forth by Alex Kurtagic. The sardonic yet brutally honest way in which he tackles airport security, telephone technical assistance, television—and in his novel Mister, virtually everything comprising modern democratic civilization—corresponds to the way I think every minute of every day about the things around me. This inspiration, coupled with realizations gleaned from my daily routine, produced my article “American Secondary Schoolers” in which I explained the utter hopelessness of today’s middle and high school students. Recent developments have encouraged me to put those students’ counterparts in my cross hairs: American educators.