Category Archives: Campus Issues and Personal Commentary
Multiculuturalism: Anti-Semitism’s New Mantel
This week, a Washington University student’s group by the name of Universal Beatz, is hosting “U.S.-Mideast Hip Hop Exchange Week.” They received some $12,799 from the Student Union’s individual appeals account. The event, as it was sold to them, intended to “[break] down the misconceptions Americans have about the Middle East and Middle Easterners have about America through the artistic medium of hip-hop.” Group president Nicole Lopez said, of hip-hop, that “It’s a medium for people who otherwise wouldn’t have a voice to criticize society or talk about the day-to-day realities they might face.” Naturally then, one would expect a diverse roster, selected apolitically.
In broad terms, one might argue that the original line-up fit such a description. It included rappers of both genders, local acts, and those hailing from countries such as Morocco and Israel. Marvin Casey’s Tribe 13 was the only Israeli representation on a heavily Arab list, but given the relative percentage of the Middle East’s population, that would’ve been entirely fair. I stress “would’ve,” because they have since been disinvited. Why? Because the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee reached out to some of the other rappers performing, and talked them into threatening a boycott if Tribe 13 remained invited. This led Universal Beatz to “[evaluate] the effects of this on our event” and conclude that Casey and Tribe 13 should be disinvited.
In what may be the most feeble attempt to justify caving into such pressure that I have ever witnessed, the group claims that they behaved in a politically neutral capacity by not pandering to Sharif “the Truth” and BiRD, the no-name rappers who had threatened to boycott. Their invitations were not so much withdrawn as they were not extended for a second time after the named individuals first refused to appear. Yet, to Nicole Lopez, this keeps the event “politically neutral in the matter by physically representing neither side of this conflict.” Giving into one side, but only accommodating their wishes in full, without supplemental groveling, is not neutral. Not is a decision like this apolitical. By disinviting the only Israeli representation, there becomes a relative homogeneity of voices, which seems antithetical to a supposedly multicultural event.
But then, such is the nature of multiculturalism, is it not? In practice, multiculturalism means the promotion of minority cultures, from which Jews seems categorically excluded, as we are grouped with caucasians when such matters are being considered. The essence of the STL-PSC’s complaint is that any is Israeli not actively shunning their home country and treating it as an apartheid state (which, for the record, is an idea rejected by the black community) is diverting attention away from Palestinian suffering, and thus is to be boycotted. Never mind that Mr. Casey is not a part of the Israeli political right, or that the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement never condemns the heinous crimes of the Palestinians. Instead, the issue here is that simply being an Israeli renders one a villain by default in the eyes of these champions of multiculturalism.
British journalist Melanie Phillips stated that “Anti-Semitism is protean, mutating over the centuries into new forms. Now it has changed again, into a shape which requires a new way of thinking and a new vocabulary. The new anti-Semitism does not discriminate against Jews as individuals on account of their race. Instead, it is centred on Israel, and the denial to the Jewish people alone of the right of self-determination.” And that is exactly the force at work behind the actions of groups like the STL-PSC. Overt racial or religious anti-semitism has been deemed socially unacceptable in the civilized world since the full horrors of the Holocaust became known. Israel provided the answer, in the it is essentially Jewish, but being a nation, is open to more stringent criticism than would ever be tolerated of Jews directly in our modern context.
As Mrs. Phillips puts it, “This has produced an Orwellian situation in which hatred of the Jews now marches behind the Left’s banner of anti-racism and human rights, giving rise not merely to distortions, fabrications and slander about Israel in the media but also to mainstream articles discussing the malign power of the Jews over American and world policy.” This is exactly what we’re witnessing, and what we need to speak out against.
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Minimizing Tragedy: The Damning Effects of False Rape
For some time now, I’ve been meaning to write about rape, specifically in regards to how we profoundly exaggerate its frequency, disregard the ubiquity of fraudulent charges of it, and paint a grossly distorted picture on the whole. To date, I’ve avoided doing so, largely because Pierce Harlan does such an exceptional job speaking to these issues on a regular basis on his blog, The False Rape Society. But, in recognition of Sexual Assault Awareness Week, my campus newspaper has decided to run a lengthy article about rape and attempted rape, presenting it as news, despite its reliance on appeals to emotion over the presentation of fact and the inclusion of demonstrably incorrect information. While a blatant disregard for basic journalistic standards is old hat for the paper, this particular article is too egregious to go unchallenged.
The article opens by declaring:
Most students on this campus are shocked to learn that one in four of their female peers are the victims of rape or attempted rape. But this is the reality that exists at Washington University and on college campuses across the nation. This week is Sexual Assault Awareness Week, and Student Life is taking a deeper look into sexual assault on campus and why so many rapes and rapists go undetected. In the hopes of debunking the myth that rape can only be defined as a violent crime between strangers, one student has shared her story of rape.
Now, there are a couple of fair points within this paragraph. Namely, it is correct to say that Washington University is not immune from rape, and that the act of rape needn’t be a man jumping out of the bushes to attack a woman casually passing by. Everything else stated therein however, is false. The “one in four” canard, elaborated on shortly thereafter, is an absurd Department of Justice statistic that, if true, would translate to approximately 750 undergraduate women at Washington University either having been raped, or been the victims of attempted rape. Realizing that the average undergraduate spends four years at Washington university, we should expect approximately 188 rapes and rape attempts to have occurred within the past year. Yet, as the Student Life article readily admits, only five women on campus reported being raped in 2009.
What this means is that if we accept the DOJ numbers, 97.3% of rapes or attempted rapes where current Washington University students are the victim go unreported. That number alone should suggest that the DOJ’s estimates are too extreme to be trustworthy. Still, the official statistic is one in four. So how exactly is that number reached? According to the National Institute of Justice, which is part of the Department of Justice, the “one in four” canard comes from a “methodologically rigorous” study by Koss, Gidycz, and Wisiewski. It turns out however that study doesn’t hold up too well to scrutiny. Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers does a phenomenal job demonstrating its flaws. In short, the survey of some three thousand college aged women asked a series of 10 questions about their past sexual activity, from which she concluded that 15.4 percent of respondents had been raped, and that 12.1 percent had been victims of attempted rape, translating to 27.5% overall, called “one in four” out of convenience.
There are two problems however. First, the definition of rape included any woman who admitted to having sex after having ingested alcohol or drugs, making no distinction regarding her actual level of impairment, the willingness of the woman to ingest such substances, or even how they reacted once sober. Second, and even more damning, Koss and her associates entirely disregarded whether or not a woman regarded themselves as having been victimized. As such, roughly one quarter described their experience as rape or attempted rape, five percent as some other crime, and the remaining as a simple matter of “miscommunication,” where in many cases no victimization was felt. In essence then, the “one in four” canard gives a big tent definition of rape and attempted rape which includes women who don’t feel victimized or who willingly ingested even the smallest quantity of alcohol.
This trivializes real rape. But so does the story of “Rachel,” the anonymous figure whose story in the Student Life article is supposed to sway emotionally those of us not moved by obviously false statistics. She, after a night of drinking, blacked out and awoke later with vaginal pain. Despite remembering almost nothing of that night, including having had sex, she believed that the male peer who drove her home had sex with her, and thus raped her. Now, there seems to be no evidence for this (other than a UTI, obtainable through other means), and certainly no way to know whether or not he too was intoxicated, if indeed they had sex. And, likely because it was not rape, but at most drunken sex between the willingly intoxicated, she did not regard herself as a victim until quite a while later, under the guidance of a friend who has grown up in a generation that believes rape to be far more prevalent than experience and hard data suggests, and who by extension see rape where it is not.
It is worth noting that the law does hold a person unable to consent after ingesting alcohol. However, if both parties are intoxicated, it is generally only the male who is liable to face criminal charges. This is in keeping the cultural and legal emphasis on defining rape as a male crime against women. The reality however, is quite different. And if we are to recognize the severity of rape, and thus seek to properly address it, we must recognize that men are just as seriously victimized by rape.
The male victimization occurs in two forms: actual rape, and the trauma of false rape accusations. Regarding the former matter, it is often overlooked, but the prevalence of prison rape is quite astounding - 240,000 American men falling victim to it each year. Before dismissing it is as the fitting punishment of criminal scum, remember that many men raped in prison are there for victimless crimes, especially of the drug related variety. Sanctioning prison rape then, aside from granting approval to something inhumane and otherwise immediately fit for condemnation, is sanctioning rape for possession of marijuana. And that is all without even discussing male rape outside of prison, particularly of minors.
False rape accusations get even less attention. Outside of the Duke Lacrosse scandal, such matters are rarely discussed. Yet RADAR (Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting) has demonstrated nearly half of all rape accusations against non-criminal males are false. Their conclusion is based on three academic studies of rape accusations (one in the Air Force, another in a large midwestern city, and a third at a pair of universities), all of which found between 41% and 60% of rape allegations to be false, as measured primarily through the accuser recanting their charge of rape. As they disturbingly note, with 95,000 reported rapes per year in the US, this means that approximately 47,000 men are falsely accused of rape each year within our borders. And, even those who avoid conviction have their lives ruined.
In the spirit of Sexual Assault Awareness Week, let us therefore reject unsound dogma and acknowledge certain facts:
- Rape is not vastly underreported. While no doubt some women who are genuinely raped never file a police report, it is not the rarity the DOJ statistics would have you believe. Moreover, about half of those instances where rape charges are filed are bogus.
- Men can be victims of rape too, and are, in large numbers. Prison rape is a serious phenomenon.
- False rape accusations and gross statistical distortions, as well as defining intoxicated sex as rape, serve to belittle true victims by both introducing greater doubt in genuine cases, and in trivializing rape by making it falsely appear to be something so commonplace and potentially non-violent.
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The Rise of Kate Gaertner And the Fall of Her Newspaper
They [sic] hypocrisy of this institution is beyond nauseating and this piece is just another example of a lame-duck editorial beating around the bush on an issue while another recent staff-ed took a very vocal position on homophobia when it suited their liberal, anti-commerce agenda. [See screenshot]
The above quote is a verbatim reproduction of a comment made by Richard Jesse Market at 10PM on September 13, 2010 in response to a fence-sitting staff editorial entitled “Donate Blood and Fight Homophobia,” which ran in that day’s issue of Student Life, the ever-declining rag which is the Washington University campus newspaper. Written not long after I had criticized the paper over their decision to remain silent about the staggering hypocrisy of the university in first ending its cooperation with Target in response to their indirect aid of a homophobic politician, and then running a massive blood drive from which homosexuals are prohibited, this editorial was intended to encourage students to have their cake and eat it too, and to avoid admitting that the self-satisfaction so many members of our community enjoy is undeserved.
If you clicked through to read the staff editorial, you may have noticed that Mr. Markel’s comment is absent from the page. And why exactly is that? Well, it is the result of the continued degeneration of journalistic standards and the notion of editorial independence under Kate Gaertner.
Where first she made a name for herself in censoring conservative submissions from long time columnists, she soon moved on to hiring new writers based exclusively on their political positions. Dissent was never something she tolerated, hence her eventual decision to close down the Editorial Board to non-editors (a position she has since switched again, now requiring new editorial writers to attend). But now it seems her loathing of an alternative opinion has reached such profound heights that she has banned all members of the Editorial Board from openly disagreeing with the staff editorial. Never mind that it is a consensus view and not something which all members must sign off on. Here, it must be pointed out that Richard Markel is as close to a conservative member of the editorial board as can be found, and thus is always shouted down. So, in effect, this policy exists to curtail the critical speech of a single member, based entirely on the grounds that it would look “unprofessional” for an editor to break with his publication. It is worth mentioning that such policies never existed under previous management, and this decision was made by Kate Gaertner herself.
It is at this point where I must mention that Mr. Markel did not merely have his comment deleted, but was explicitly threatened. He was told to fall in line, or to resign. This speaks to Kate’s seeming goal of chasing every last non-liberal off of the paper’s staff. First, I resigned in August of 2009, after having spent but a few weeks under her as Senior Forum Editor, based on her willingness to censor columns she disagreed with and her infusion of political bias into ever aspect of her management. Later, with Kate’s promotion to Editor-in-Chief and the end of the academic year, the generally moderate-toned libertarian who joined at the same time I did, Phil Christofanelli, resigned as well. He attributes his decision largely to the displeasure he felt writing for Kate, who he acknowledges put personal politics above editorial freedom.
This alienating pattern of mismanagement has had some severe consequences. When I wrote for Student Life there were so many forum contributors that there was talk of having each writer submit a piece every third week. Now however, they are currently “desperate for writers,” according to one inside source. And it shows in the many issues where they struggle to fill even a single side of a page with editorial content. Alarmingly, they would have even less if Kate Gaertner had her way, as it is only through the intervention of Senior Forum Editor AJ Sundar that a handful of right-leaning editorials have been published from Mr. Markel, who even as a voter for Barak Obama is apparently too conservative for the Editor-in-Chief’s tastes. What little content they do run from other writers tends to be shamefully bad, with pieces either being little more than stream of consciousness drivel, or burying the lead so deeply as to leave the reader wondering if the article ever underwent even the most modest revisions.
Particularly striking was “Constitutionally Correct?” by Sophie Adelman, which after deftly managing not to express any opinion for the first two thirds of her mercifully short article, ends with what amounts to a condemnation of free speech rights protecting Fred Phelps. Mr. Markel, outraged by her position, sought to write a response defending the importance of extending free speech even to the most reviled bigots. After turning in said article, he was confronted by other members of the paper staff indicating that his column would not be run as submitted. Various points made by those party to the discussion, such as a refusal to include language that made it a direct response rather than an alternative view of the same issue, were at least understandable even if not correct. Others however, are a different story, which you’ll soon discover yourself.
As it happens, within the Student Life office, various staff members tend to congregate. And, since that can make for some excellent drama, occasionally some of those not party to the argument of the moment will secretly record the conversation and share it with others for amusement. That happened the very same day Mr. Markel was arguing to have his article run, and I have since been given a copy of the argument.
In the conversation, he is told that the word “fag” cannot appear in his article, even in the context of quoting Phelps and the signs he protests with. The idea of running a censored version of that word was met with nearly as much hesitance. Moreover, discussion of how Mr. Markel has been making too many waves and would be advised to watch out can also be found, though this is stated somewhat less bluntly. Embedded below via Youtube is the audio file, which I have edited only to remove information which might identify my source, and to try and improve sound quality. I have cut off the start and end points as necessary, but the middle portion remains unedited, so that you too can judge how they handle such matters.
Lastly, though I have already spoken a great deal about censorship as directed by Kate Gaertner at Student Life and its negative ramifications, I must share one last thought. The September 22nd staff editorial, of which Kate was a strong proponent, is focused on condemning a peer institution’s newspaper for its failure to censor columnists. Now, while I’ll readily admit that the Johns Hopkins editorials condemned by Student Life don’t reflect especially well upon the paper that ran them, the very last thing a newspaper should go out of its way to advocate is increased editorial censorship. The fact then that the current staff is so enthused by it as to no longer simply practice it covertly, but to champion it in print, says all that is needed to confirm that Student Life is a damn disgrace of a newspaper.
Please note that the information included above has been culled from a variety of sources, ranging from my own interactions with various staff members, to tips given by a large number of past and present Student Life staff members. That Richard Markel is the protagonist of this particular entry on Kate Gaertner’s Student Life speaks only to the fact that he remains among the brave few willing to stand his ground in some capacity. His opinion was not solicited at any time before, during, or after the composition and editing of this piece. All sources that have asked not to be named will remain anonymous.
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Hypocrisy, Thy Name is WashU
Authored by אנדר-ויק. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
Target is homophobic…or so Washington University in St Louis would have you believe. Not long ago, this ever so progressive university withdrew from the Target After Hours Shopping program the retail chain created to serve college freshman through offering not only extended hours, but transportation from campus to the store and back. The justification given by Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Jill Carnaghi was that, “We need to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. ” What Carnaghi meant is that Washington University cannot merely preach tolerance, but must actively champion it. So you’d think that Target must’ve been donating to the Westboro Baptist Church or doing something equally nefarious, right?
As it turns out, Target earned the university’s ire by making the mistake of donating some $150,000 to Minnesota Forward, a political action committee formed to “ensure that private-sector job creation and economic growth are at the top of the agenda during the 2010 campaign.” How is this an issue of tolerance? Well, it seems that Minnesota Forward decided to give Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmers some money. Emmers, more than simply failing to stand up for gay rights, is closely associated with a homophobic rock ministry that advocates the murder of homosexuals based on the Bible (though curiously, they seem less concerned about killing violators of the Sabbath, another scriptural gem). While this is no doubt troubling, this is also not related to why Minnesota Forward helped finance his campaign. On their own website, the group notes that “As a legislator, Tom Emmer voted against job-killing taxes and for reduced government spending. Emmer voted with the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce 91% of the time on votes scored by the Chamber.” In other words, for a commerce-minded PAC, he seems to be an ideal candidate. Likewise, as Target is a Fortune 100 company interested in protecting its bottom line and delivering ever-larger returns for its investors, it seems only natural that they would donate to Minnesota Forward. That Emmers is a bigot (or at least keeps company with them) does not indicate Minnesota Forward or Target supports discrimination. In the case of Target, one would be hard-pressed to find a more tolerant company of its size. When not setting records with its generous charitable contributions, Target is busy earning a perfect rating on the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index, which measures GLBT treatment in the work place. And it has long had some of the most generous domestic partnership benefits of any major American corporation.
So you would think that if the university was prepared to hurt its students to send a message to a gay-friendly corporation that they ought not donate to groups that donate to incidentally-homophobic individuals, that it must take a similarly extreme approach across the board. I did. Hence my surprise when in my university inbox I see an announcement for a university-sponsored blood drive that will be taking place next week. Maybe the higher-ups missed a memo, or maybe they just didn’t think they could get the same smug satisfaction from treating the American Red Cross with the disdain they did Target, but this effort is exponentially more harmful to homosexuals than anything Target can be linked to. Why? Well since 1983, any “male who has had sex with another male since 1977, even once,” has been barred from giving blood thanks to the FDA. This, of course, is one of a myriad of restrictions imposed that would seem intent upon limiting the spread of HIV. Since homosexual men constitute the majority of HIV-positive individuals in the US, this seems reasonable enough on the surface. But, while the majority of those with HIV may be gay, the majority of those who are gay do not have HIV. Even those who can prove their health are ineligible on a permanent basis to donate blood. That, to me, seems far more outrageous than a gay-friendly company backing a PAC for economic reasons, which later went on to back a homophobic candidate for economic reasons.
And I won’t even get started in pointing out the hypocrisy of getting outraged at Target without kicking the ROTC off-campus like Columbia and Stanford.
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More on the Universal Beatz Controversy
Apr 16
Posted by Caleb Posner
Recently, I wrote about Universal Beatz, and their decision to bow before anti-semitic pressure groups and disinvite the lone Israeli participant from their supposedly multicultural hip-hop week. Unsurprisingly, in expressing this view in the comments of the campus paper, I got many negative responses. Given the unreliability of the Student Life website when it comes to archiving, I have copied my responses below.
“Bre” stated:
To which I replied:
And then some ISM folks affiliated with the university, who apparently are blind to reality, wrote a rather lengthy defense of the disinvitation of Casey.
My reply to their message is as follows:
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Posted in Campus Issues and Personal Commentary, Israel and the Middle East
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