UNMIA

Editorial by Lynn Provencio

UNM’s current vision statement does not contain the left-wing buzzwords cited in the article below, but “social justice” teaching is a strong undertow in several UNM departments. Each year there are several courses across the campus that give credit for “community organizing” and “social justice” of various flavors.

Is any credit given for right wing organizing? Has anybody ever gotten course credits for campaigning for Republicans, spending the weekend volunteering with the Minute Men, attending an AIPAC conference or lobbying for offshore drilling? Why not? Chances are the very thought made you laugh. But seriously, objectively, analytically: In what way is it better to go to Central America and teach local people how to be political activists than it is to show local young women practical alternatives to abortion for unwanted pregancies, for example? Is campaigning for the Democratic candidate more academically desirable than campaigning for the Republican candidate? What if a UNM climatologist wrote a professional paper showing that global warming, as described by the UN and Al Gore, were not true? What would be the results for his career at UNM? Good, bad, no effect?

Social Justice at face value is a good thing, of course, …

By Hillel Stavis - FrontPageMagazine.com

Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman touched off a fierce debate when he recently wrote in The New York Times Magazine that Islamic Sharia law represents the highest state of “the rule of law.” But what many of Feldman’s critics did not recognize is that his argument has been building over several years.

Just as an old photographic print slowly becomes visible when immersed in developing solution, Noah’s claims about the alleged virtues of Sharia first surfaced in his 2005 book, Divided by God written when he was still a professor at NYU. Three years later, Feldman, who helped draft the Iraqi constitution, has turned his argument into a new book, called The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. The book marks Feldman’s emergence as a leading academic advocate for Sharia law.

If this seems like a bizarre role for someone who attended the Orthodox Maimonides School near Boston, it is in line with the career trajectory of a very bright young man who wants to be preeminent among the severely compromised academics inhabiting the Middle East Studies Association. Thus, one week after his article, “Why Sharia?” was featured in the Times’ magazine, Feldman presented …

What do they do in those conferences? Read on…

By Mary Madigan
FrontPage Magazine and Campus Watch
April 10, 2008

The poster advertising New York University’s “Academic Freedom in the Age of Permanent Warfare” conference featured a scolding Statue of Liberty pointing an accusatory finger and stating: “YOU! Stop Asking Questions. You’re Either With US or You’re With the TERRORISTS!”

The speakers and attendees gathered around the pastry-laden table at NYU’s new Frederic Ewen Academic Freedom Center last week didn’t appear to be oppressed or under attack. But once they wiped the sugar from their mouths and stood up to speak, they assured the audience that they were, in fact, victims in an “age of permanent warfare.”

According to keynote speaker Roger Bowen (of “Revolting Behavior” fame), director of the Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellows Program, the purported enemies of academic freedom include the “rabid right” and/or “Republicans, conservatives, the elderly, and the uneducated.”

Joan Scott of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, decried the loss of academia as a sanctuary, both from public opinion and the “enmity of patriots and trustees.” David Hollinger, professor of history at UC Berkeley, noted that fellow academics in engineering and the hard sciences often felt “no …

During the long discussion about the outrageous “Three Jerusalem Women” presentation sponsored in part by MEPJA (Middle East Peace and Justice Alliance), and in part by the UNM Humanities department, we not only published the articles and video on the UNMIA website, but the UNM Daily Lobo printed comments about the event.

The first article it published was a protest by Dotan Kennedy, and Israeli student who was present at the event. Then the rabid anti-Israel Lobo regular, Brian Fejer posted his standard anti-Israel statement, something stupid about the “Zionist Regime”. Kennedy made a brief answer to that. In the meantime UNMIA members posted two publishable comments, neither of which was posted on the Daily Lobo. Next it published four glowing accounts of the events, mainly by MEPJA members, and rejected two more comments critical of the event.

The “independent” Daily Lobo’s effort was evidently to make the Israeli student look like a lone and unreasonable dissenter in a flood of loving and approving comments about the publicly sponsored anti-Israel propaganda. At least two other people wrote to voice their protest of this event, but their comments didn’t appear in the Lobo. All but perhaps one of the people who found …