Mick Hartley

Undergraduate Thought Reform

Via David Thompson, a story of student indoctrination at the University of Delaware, uncovered by civil liberties organisation FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education):

The University of Delaware subjects students in its residence halls to a shocking program of ideological reeducation that is referred to in the university’s own materials as a “treatment” for students’ incorrect attitudes and beliefs. The Orwellian program requires the approximately 7,000 students in Delaware’s residence halls to adopt highly specific university-approved views on issues ranging from politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism...

The university’s views are forced on students through a comprehensive manipulation of the residence hall environment, from mandatory training sessions to “sustainability” door decorations. Students living in the university’s eight housing complexes are required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs). The RAs who facilitate these meetings have received their own intensive training from the university, including a “diversity facilitation training” session at which RAs were taught, among other things, that “[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.”

The university suggests that at one-on-one sessions with students, RAs should ask intrusive personal questions such as “When did you discover your sexual identity?” Students who express discomfort with this type of questioning often meet with disapproval from their RAs, who write reports on these one-on-one sessions and deliver these reports to their superiors. One student identified in a write-up as an RA’s “worst” one-on-one session was a young woman who stated that she was tired of having “diversity shoved down her throat.”

According to the program’s materials, the goal of the residence life education program is for students in the university’s residence halls to achieve certain “competencies” that the university has decreed its students must develop in order to achieve the overall educational goal of “citizenship.” These competencies include: “Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society,” “Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression,” and “Students will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality.”

At various points in the program, students are also pressured or even required to take actions that outwardly indicate their agreement with the university’s ideology, regardless of their personal beliefs. Such actions include displaying specific door decorations, committing to reduce their ecological footprint by at least 20%, taking action by advocating for an “oppressed” social group, and taking action by advocating for a “sustainable world.”

The letter from FIRE to University President Patrick T. Harker is best read in full. Some choice passages:

In the Office of Residence Life’s internal materials, these programs are described using the harrowing language of ideological reeducation. For example, the “assessment plan” for the Gilbert/Harrington complex curriculum states that “through the Gilbert/Harrington curriculum experience (a treatment) specific attitudinal or behavioral changes (learning) will occur.” The Russell complex curriculum’s assessment plan similarly asks: “What is [students’] attitude and/or values about those specific social identities after the treatment?” The fact that the university views its students as patients in need of “treatment” for their incorrect attitudes reveals the university’s utter lack of respect both for its students and for the fundamental right to freedom of conscience. And the university’s definition of learning not as a process of acquiring knowledge or technical skill, but rather as the attainment of specific attitudinal or behavioral changes, represents a distorted idea of “education” that one would more easily associate with a Soviet prison camp than with an American institution of higher education. As another example, after an investigation showed that males demonstrated “a higher degree of resistance to educational efforts,” the Rodney complex chose to hire “strong male RAs.” Each such RA “combats male residents’ concepts of traditional male identity,” in order to “ensure the delivery of the curriculum at the same level as in the female floors.” This language is disturbingly reminiscent of a pivotal scene from George Orwell’s 1984, in which the protagonist’s captors tell him that “The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them.” [...]

Somehow, the University of Delaware seems terrifyingly unaware that a state-sponsored institution of higher education in the United States does not have the legal right to engage in a program of systematic thought reform. The First Amendment protects the right to freedom of conscience—the right to keep our innermost thoughts free from governmental intrusion. [...]

As aggressive as civil liberties organizations like FIRE may seem, at the heart of all concepts relating to freedom of the mind is a recognition of our own limitations—like us, those in power are neither omniscient nor omnipotent, and therefore have no right to dictate to others what their deepest personal beliefs must be. Concerns for free speech and freedom of conscience are rooted in the wisdom of humility and restraint. The residence life education program, which presumes to show students the specific ideological assumptions they need in order to be better people, crosses the boundary from education into unconscionably arrogant, invasive, and immoral thought reform. We can conceive of no way in which the residence life education program can be maintained consistent with the ideals of a free society.

See also here (via Instapundit)

Donning an Abaya

A couple of weeks back I posted that picture of Laura Bush sitting next to a woman covered in a sack during her recent trip to the Middle East. In the circumstances I thought the first lady carried herself pretty well. She was, as I posted later, on a trip to raise awareness of breast cancer: a notably worthwhile endeavour. The next day, in Saudi Arabia, she was photographed wearing an abaya.

Subsequently she's come under attack from blogs in the US: lgf, for instance, and, less stridently, Roger L. Simon. Now comes the harshest and most eloquent criticism, from Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post, under the heading "Laura Bush's embrace of tyranny":

For people around the world, the United States is not merely a country, and not merely a superpower. The United States is also a symbol of human freedom.

Because their country is a symbol, the way that American officials behave is rarely taken at face value. Rather, their behavior is interpreted and reinterpreted by friend and foe alike.

Because she has no statutory power, the American First Lady's actions are wholly symbolic. So when last week First Lady Laura Bush embarked on a visit to the Persian Gulf to promote breast cancer awareness in the Arab world as part of the US-Middle East Partnership for Breast Cancer, she traveled there as a symbol. And the symbolic message that her visit evoked is a deeply disturbing one.

As a Washington Post report of her trip to Saudi Arabia from last Thursday noted, there is a dire need in the kingdom to raise public awareness of breast cancer and its treatments. Due to social taboos, some 70 percent of breast cancer cases in Saudi Arabia are not reported until the late stages of the disease. It is possible that the local media attention that Mrs. Bush's visit aroused may work to save the lives of women whose husbands will now permit them to be screened for the disease and receive proper medical treatment for it in its early stages.

And this is where the disturbing aspect of Mrs. Bush's visit enters the picture. During her public appearances, the First Lady limited her remarks to the issue of breast cancer awareness. Yet in the Persian Gulf, it is impossible to separate the issue of breast cancer or for that matter the very fact of the First Lady's visit from the issue of the systematic mistreatment and oppression of women in the Saudi Arabia specifically and throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds generally.

Glick then outlines all the oppressions that Saudi women suffer under, then...

Due to the fact that the abayas convey a symbolic message of effective enslavement of women, Mrs. Bush's interaction with women clad in abayas was the aspect of her trip most scrutinized. In the United Arab Emirates, Mrs. Bush was photographed sitting between four women covered head to toe in abayas while she was wearing regular clothes. The image of Mrs. Bush sitting between four women who look like nothing more than black piles of fabric couldn't have been more viscerally evocative and consequently, symbolically meaningful.

The image told the world that she - and America - is free and humane while the hidden women of Arabia are enslaved and their society is inhumane.

But then Mrs. Bush went to Saudi Arabia and the symbolic message of the previous day was superseded and lost when she donned an abaya herself and had her picture taken with other abaya-clad women. The symbolic message of those photographs also couldn't have been clearer. By donning an abaya, Mrs. Bush symbolically accepted the legitimacy of the system of subjugating women that the garment embodies, (or disembodies). Understanding this, conservative media outlets in the US criticized her angrily.

Sunday morning, Mrs. Bush sought to answer her critics in an interview with Fox News. Unfortunately, her remarks compounded the damage. Mrs. Bush said, "These women do not see covering as some sort of subjugation of women, this group of women that I was with. That's their culture. That's their tradition. That's a religious choice of theirs."

It is true that this is their culture. And it is also their tradition. But it is not their choice. Their culture and tradition are predicated on denying them the choice of whether or not to wear a garment that denies them their identity just as it denies them the right to make any choices about their lives. The Saudi women's assertions of satisfaction with their plight were no more credible than statements by hostages in support of their captors.

As the First Lady, Laura Bush is an American symbol. By having her picture taken wearing an abaya in Saudi Arabia - the epicenter of Islamic totalitarian misogyny - Mrs. Bush diminished that symbol. In so doing, she weakened the causes of freedom and liberty which America has fought since its founding to secure and defend at home and throughout the world.

I'm mystified by this reaction. First, what was the context in which the abaya photograph was taken? Here's the Washington Post:

When gynecologist Samia al-Amoudi was found last year to have breast cancer, a disease that still carries an intense stigma in this conservative country where women are forced to cover in public, she decided to share the details in her newspaper column, shocking many Saudis.

But the 50-year-old single mother insisted on telling her story in more than 30 television, magazine and newspaper interviews, trying to force a spotlight, she said, on a disease believed to be the leading cause of death among Middle Eastern women.

This week's visit to Saudi Arabia by first lady Laura Bush, who is on a regional tour to raise awareness about breast cancer, is a windfall to Amoudi's battle to bring the issue to the public, she said.

"The fact that there is a lot of media coverage of your visit, and people know you are here only for the purpose of spreading breast cancer awareness, that gives it importance and will really help our campaign," Amoudi told Bush at a "Break the Silence" coffee meeting Wednesday with other breast cancer survivors...

At the end of the meeting, Amoudi presented Bush with a gift from the group -- a black head scarf adorned with two pink ribbons stitched on the sides. Bush draped it over her hair briefly as the women beamed and moved in closer for photos.

She was given a head scarf as a present, she briefly put it on, photographs were taken....and she's embracing tyranny? Weakening the causes of freedom and liberty? The poor woman really doesn't deserve this kind of abuse. She was, quite clearly, acting with what she thought was the appropriate degree of civility. She'd already sat uncovered in a meeting with Saudi King Abdullah: that was an occasion where the symbolism of an uncovered head was significant, and she rose to it. Here, meeting women involved in the breast cancer awareness campaign, she opted for being polite, being friendly. To judge from the expression of the other woman there, she made the right decision.

As for her comment - "These women do not see covering as some sort of subjugation of women, this group of women that I was with. That's their culture. That's their tradition. That's a religious choice of theirs" - she's quite correct. Admittedly the word choice is a little strained in the context, but it doesn't do to push this false consciousness line too far. We may think they're being subjugated by a requirement to wear a head scarf in public, and we're entitled to try and persuade them of that fact, but we shouldn't be surprised if in the end they disagree.

There are of course degrees here, and it's a fine line to walk. My view is that a scarf over the head is nothing to get exercised about. It's not necessarily a sign of the subjugation of women. In the West it's a common enough display of feminine modesty when, for instance, entering a church. It's the veil over the face, the denial of a social identity, that offends me. If Laura Bush had stuck a black sack over her head I'd probably agree with her critics. As it is it all seems a distraction from what was a notably worthy and, let's hope, successful visit.

A Powerful and Malign Influence

Policy Exchange must be delighted that their report (pdf) on the availability of hate literature in British mosques (executive summary here: again pdf) made it on to the Times front page:

Books calling for the beheading of lapsed Muslims, ordering women to remain indoors and forbidding interfaith marriage are being sold inside some of Britain’s leading mosques, according to research seen by The Times.

Some of the fundamentalist works were found at the bookshop in the London Central mosque in Regent’s Park, which is funded by the Saudi regime and is regularly visited by government ministers. Its director, Ahmad al-Dubayan, is also a Saudi diplomat and was among those greeting King Abdullah when he arrived in Britain last night for his official state visit.

Extremist literature, including passages supporting the stoning of adulterers and waging violent jihad, was also found on sale at many other mosques regarded as mainstream institutions...

The report called for a radical overhaul of Britain’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, which it argued has a “powerful and malign” influence over British Islam and sponsored the export of fundamentalist Islamic doctrine.

Is anyone particularly surprised by this? Still, it's all nicely timed to coincide with King Abdullah's state visit, with the six planes at Heathrow carrying his entourage:

It took three hours for all the luggage to be unloaded while a convoy of 84 limousines drove the party into London, our correspondent said.

Among them were 23 personal advisors who will stay at Buckingham Palace and more than 400 aides who are spilling out into London hotels...

For a different take on the Saudi royals, read Amir Taheri:

As the Arab proverb has it: the camel is not the most congenial of travel companions, but it is the most trustworthy.

Race Murder

Hitchens on Kurds, Armenians and Jews:

To recapitulate: At the very suggestion that the U.S. House of Representatives might finally pass a long-proposed resolution recognizing the 1915 massacres in Armenia as a planned act of "race murder" (that was U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau's term for it at a time when the word genocide had not yet been coined), the Turkish authorities redoubled their threat to invade the autonomous Kurdish-run provinces of northern Iraq. And many American Jews found themselves divided between their sympathy for the oppressed and the slaughtered and their commitment to the state interest of Israel, which maintains a strategic partnership with Turkey, and in particular with Turkey's highly politicized armed forces.

To illuminate this depressing picture, one might begin by offering a few distinctions. In 1991, in northern Iraq, where you could still see and smell the gassed and poisoned towns and villages of Kurdistan, I heard Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan say that Kurds ought to apologize to the Armenians for the role they had played as enforcers for the Ottomans during the time of the genocide. Talabani, who has often repeated that statement, is now president of Iraq. (I would regard his unforced statement as evidence in itself, by the way, in that proud peoples do not generally offer to apologize for revolting crimes that they did not, in fact, commit.) So, of course, it was upon him, both as an Iraqi and as a Kurd, that Turkish guns and missiles were trained last month.

And here, a further distinction: Many of us who are ardent supporters of Kurdish rights and aspirations have the gravest reservations about the so-called Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. This is a Stalinist cult organization, roughly akin to a Middle Eastern Shining Path group. (Its story, and the story of its bizarre leader Abdullah Öcalan, are well told in Aliza Marcus' new book Blood And Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence.) The attempt of this thuggish faction to exploit the new zone of freedom in Iraqi Kurdistan is highly irresponsible and plays directly into the hands of those forces in the Turkish military who want to resurrect Kemalist chauvinism as a weapon against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government, which it sees as soft on Kurdish demands. There's a paradox here, in that the uniformed satraps who claim to defend Turkish secularism are often more reactionary than the recently re-elected and broadly Islamist Justice and Development Party. The generals vetoed a meeting earlier this year between Abdullah Gul—now president of Turkey and then foreign minister—and the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq. This alone shows that they are using the border question and the PKK as a wedge issue for domestic politics.

This is enough complexity to be going on with, but Congress and the executive branch have been handling it with appalling amateurishness...

Fighting International Terrorism

A new definition of chutzpah:

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has accused Britain of not doing enough to fight international terrorism, which he says could take 20 or 30 years to beat.

He was speaking in a BBC interview ahead of a state visit to the UK - the first by a Saudi monarch for 20 years.

He also said Britain failed to act on information passed by the Saudis which might have averted terrorist attacks...

In the BBC interview he said the fight against terrorism needed much more effort by countries such as Britain and that al-Qaeda continued to be a big problem for his country.

Extremely Shocked

A strange headline:

Man who had sex with bike in court

No, he didn't in fact have sex with a bike in court: he had sex with a bike in the privacy of his room before being rudely interrupted, and subsequently had to appear in court, charged under the Sexual Offences against Bicycles Act or some such:

A man has been placed on the sex offenders’ register after being caught trying to have sex with a bicycle.

Robert Stewart was discovered in his room by two cleaners at the Aberley House Hostel in Ayr, south west Scotland, in October last year.

On Wednesday Mr Stewart admitted to sexual breach of the peace in Ayr Sheriff Court, where depute fiscal Gail Davidson described how he had been found by the hostel workers.

She said: "They knocked on the door several times and there was no reply.

"They used a master key to unlock the door and they then observed the accused wearing only a white T-shirt, naked from the waist down.

"The accused was holding the bike and moving his hips back and forth as if to simulate sex."

Both witnesses, who were extremely shocked, notified the hotel manager, who in turn alerted the police.

Mr Stewart was placed on the sex offenders’ register but his sentence was deferred until next month.

He is not the first man to be convicted of a sexual offence involving an inanimate object, however.

Karl Watkins, an electrician, was jailed for having sex with pavements in Redditch, Worcs, in 1993.

Dressed Respectfully

A nicely patronising tone to this report in Arab News on women who work (oh yes, work!) in Saudi Arabia - provided of course that they dress respectfully, are protected from any chance meeting with single males, and get picked up from work by their brothers:

Women can be seen working at various venues throughout the Kingdom. Although it may be difficult for some people to stomach, working women are becoming part of the Kingdom’s social fabric. At the Al-Shallal Theme Park on Jeddah’s Corniche, women are employed in huge numbers.

They sit at the ticket office, and once you enter inside women can be seen supervising games, and standing at shops and cafes. All are dressed respectfully in their abayas and some are even veiled.

“Work is not something to be ashamed of,” said Ebtisam, who is in her late twenties and works at the theme park. “As long as women carry themselves respectfully, they can work in public places in a mixed environment, and people will still respect them. I have never been in a situation that made me regret working here. On the contrary, I feel protected and safe,” she said.

Al-Shallal provides a safe and family-like atmosphere for workingwomen, said Hassan Al-Ansari, deputy manager at the theme park. “The women are well looked after by the management as well as their co-workers,” he added.

The number of women applying to work at women-friendly places such as Al-Shallal is increasing.

Al-Ansari said women employees at Al-Shallal undergo training to be able to operate and repair machinery, and deal with health and safety issues in emergency situations. “Women employees need to be well trained and should be able to fulfill their tasks by themselves,” he said.

Speaking about men misbehaving, Amani Kattana, assistant operations and sales manager at the theme park, said, “It is very rare to have such situations as the place is only for families. Single men are not allowed in. Male colleagues do treat working women with respect and the women command respect through their behavior. After all they come to work, and they do appreciate the fact that they have a job and a decent income.”

Employees are required to have finished high school or college. “They work eight hours or more depending on the work load. We start from morning and continue until late evening,” said Kattana.

Working late hours at night does not bother women, said Ebtisam, adding that her brother drops and picks her up from work.

"Women employees need to be well trained and should be able to fulfill their tasks by themselves". By themselves! Remarkable.

Radiant with Love of the Revolution

Talking of flatulence problems, here's some sub-Riefenstahl military bombast from Iranian TV with a strong fascist whiff about it. The band at the start sounds more like the Salvation Army on a bad day, but it gets better as Zulfiqar, the sword of Ali - represented by warriors whose faces are "radiant with love of the revolution" - pierces in two the US flag.

We shout the glory of the name of Iran on the summit of fame and dignity.

Our proud Iran is proud of you – its brave children.

Tales from Das Vaterland

It sounds like the film Mel Brooks never made. Hitler, apparently, was the victim of "uncontrollable flatulence":

Spasmodic stomach cramps, constipation and diarrhea, possibly the result of nervous tension, had been Hitler’s curse since childhood and only grew more severe as he aged. As a stressed-out dictator, the agonizing digestive attacks would occur after most meals: Albert Speer recalled that the Führer, ashen-faced, would leap up from the dinner table and disappear to his room.

This was an embarrassing problem for a ruthless leader of the Third Reich. With uncharacteristic concern for his fellow human beings, Hitler had first tried to cure himself when he was a rising politician in 1929 by poring over medical manuals, coming to the conclusion that a largely veg diet would calm his turbulent digestion as well as make his farts less offensive to the nose. A rabid hypochondriac, he would also examine his own feces on a regular basis and administer himself camomile enemas. Hitler decided to swear off meat completely in 1931, when his niece (and presumed romantic interest) Geli Raubel committed suicide: When presented with a plate of breakfast ham the next morning, he pushed it away muttering, “It’s like eating a corpse.” From that squeamish moment on, great piles of vegetables, raw or pulped into a baby mulch, were Hitler’s daily staple. (All cooked foods, he decided, were carcinogenic). He showed a particular fondness, culinary historians assure us, for oatmeal with linseed oil, cauliflower, cottage cheese, boiled apples, artichoke hearts and asparagus tips in white sauce. Strangely, Hitler was unfazed by the fact that this high-fiber diet was having the opposite effect on his digestion than what he had intended: His private physician, Dr. Theo Morell, recorded in his diary that after Hitler downed a typical vegetable platter, “constipation and colossal flatulence occurred on a scale I have seldom encountered before.”

Commercial Dylan

Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour is in its second season, and he's up to no. 56, on the subject of Cadillacs.

If you're making a show based on a commercial brand, you might as well make the most of it. So that's what the man's done.

Here's a shorter version, and here's the shortest. What he says at the end - and god knows it's not easy to hear - is "What's life without taking a detour?"

On Theme Time Radio 53, Days of the Week, Dylan read out an e-mail from a (most likely apocryphal) listener knocking Sheryl Crow for using a Buddy Holly song (Not Fade Away) in a hair dye commercial: "I felt the most awful stinging disappointment...I felt betrayed by Crow." "Well Jackie," drawls Dylan, "I have to disagree with you. How often do you hear Buddy Holly on the radio nowadays. There aren't too many programmes like Theme Time Radio Hour... How many people never heard of Nick Drake until he was in a car commercial? A lot of musicians have always been proud to have commercial affiliation. Sonny Boy Williamson sold flour. I can't imagine Sonny Boy saying, "My blues is too sacred. I wouldn't sell flour." Jimmie Rodgers sold biscuits. Sheryl Crow sells hair dye. More power to her. And Jackie, have you ever seen a Victoria's Secrets ad?"

RightWingBob is a happy man, mainly because it's bound to annoy Dylan's "spokesman of his generation" left-wing fans. Posts here, here, and here (with a surprise reference to William McGonagall).

Me, I expected it to happen. I knew he'd lost control.

It's an ad full of Americana - blues, highways, wide open spaces, oil......and Cadillacs. And at the end he gets out, of course, at the crossroads.