Pro-Palestinian students at the University of Virginia crashed a panel featuring reserve officers from the Israeli Defense Force, reported The Cavalier Daily. UVA police received a report that an assault occurred and said they are still investigating.
The Brody Jewish Center’s Rabbi Jake Rubin, who hosted the event on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said “While free speech and the ability to protest are important aspects of college life, we are disappointed that protesters refused to engage in conversation and instead continued to shout intimidating and hostile slurs directed at students, staff, and panelists.”
Wow, they refused to talk? What a shock. It’s almost like leftists are more interested in commanding than communicating and power instead of persuasion.
Meanwhile, Dean of Students Allen Groves said the pro-Palestinian students, who made use of a megaphone, violated the school’s standards of conduct, as well as its protest and amplified sound policies. Groves said the UVA community rejects the heckler’s veto and told the school that “the University is a place for intellectual inquiry” and that “we can only learn from each other if space exists to exchange ideas freely and without disruption from those with whom we may disagree,” according to an email sent to the UVA community and obtained by Campus Unmasked.
Okay, pause. My alma mater UVA will always have a special place in my heart, but exchanging ideas freely? This is the same college that in December denied a conservative group from registering a campus chapter, only reversing the decision after immense public pressure. And this is the same school that last month told students to call 911 if they saw “offensive flyers.” Looming over all of this, of course, are the Charlottesville Confederate monuments, of which the city has desperately tried to rid itself for the past couple of years, even covering them with makeshift burkas.
It’s a school decked with accolades like US News & World Report’s #3 public university for 2017 and Playboy’s #1 party school for 2012, but UVA’s commitment to free speech can definitely use some improvement. Oh, and they could probably stand to drop Aramark, the food company that even prisoners have protested.
Jefferson’s birthday falls on April 13 and, up until now, Charlottesville has designated the nearest working day a paid holiday. But all that might change if city Mayor Nikuyah Walker gets her way, according to Campus Reform. The mayor suggested ditching Jefferson’s birthday as a paid holiday in exchange for Liberation and Freedom Day, which celebrates Charlottesville’s emancipation of slaves.
Walker didn’t really expand on the suggestion, but a little more vocal was city Councilor Wes Bellamy. You know, the Wes Bellamy who used to serve as vice mayor and tweeted stuff like “I DONT LIKE WHIT[E] PEOPLE SO I HATE WHITE SNOW” and “White women=Devil.”
Bellamy condemned Jefferson for being a slaveowner, which, if that’s our standard for not honoring someone, kind of excludes quite a few people before 1865. He also claimed that Jefferson raped his slave Sally Hemings. But I’ve reported before that DNA tests, as well as several Jefferson scholars indicate that Hemings didn’t give birth to ANY children by Jefferson.
The College Republicans at Charlottesville’s University of Virginia, the school Jefferson founded, criticized the mayor’s proposal, but I wasn’t too impressed with some of the language they used. The group called the Jefferson issue “complicated” and “complex” and said they were “dismayed” by the mayor’s proposal.
I really wanted to see them excoriate Walker, put her on blast. But the conservatives at my alma mater don’t seem to be of the fighting variety. UVA’s College Republicans rescinded its endorsement for Donald Trump after the Access Hollywood tape just a month before he won the 2016 election.
So when I left you guys last time, a petition was going around urging UVA not to accept a possible invite from Trump to the White House. The petition claimed Trump “has done all he can to stoke racial tension and embolden white supremacists,” citing Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” comment after the Charlottesville rally.
Of course, they don’t note that that comment was not about neo-Nazis, as the media would have you believe, but instead people on both sides of the Confederate statue debate. The whole petition’s based on a false premise, too: accepting an invitation to celebrate a sports win with an individual, regardless of who he is, doesn’t an endorsement of that individual’s politics.
Anyways, UVA basketball coach Tony Bennett released a statement saying “We have received inquiries about a visit to the White House. With several players either pursuing pro opportunities or moving on from UVA, it would be difficult, if not impossible to get everyone back together. We would have to respectfully decline an invitation,” reported Campus Reform.
So I’m just going to go ahead and call this what it is: hogwash. Do you really think Trump’s going to mind if a few players can’t make it — this is like cancelling class because some people are going to be absent. Just like the kiddos at Taylor University who are trying to disinvite Pence as the commencement speaker, UVA needs to realize that snubbing Trump’s not going to delegitimize the office, it’s just going to prevent individual students who may want to see the president and VP from doing so.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard that Joe Biden announced his bid for the 2020 presidency. But his announcement video was a bit peculiar in that it didn’t tell us why we should vote for Biden, but rather why orange man bad.
Biden slams Trump for the president’s “very fine people on both sides” remark, according to Campus Reform, but never actually gives the full context of that remark and it’s funny because when I was doing research for this video, I’d forgotten all about it at first, I guess because the media has so routinely omitted it in their coverage.
Trump had been referring to Confederate monument supporters/protesters, not neo-Nazis. I spoke with Matthew Nalls, a member of the University of Virginia College Republicans chapter, and he said:
“Biden’s announcement video is still a conspicuous attempt to capitalize on a tragedy in a city he has no ties to. Biden clearly did not listen to the Charlottesville community when they demanded he refrain from using the events for political purposes. Such an act is incredibly disappointing and unbecoming of any official seeking office.”
Now I’m not necessarily all about the whole “something tragic happened so therefore you must only be sad and not make any political observations that could maybe fix the problem.” It would be a bit tougher to fight radical Islam, for instance, if you couldn’t say anything after every bombing or truck attack. But here’s the thing: Biden isn’t attacking white nationalist terrorism — he’s attacking Trump. And when he’s deceitfully doing this by framing Trump’s “fine people on both sides” comment as about neo-Nazis instead of as about Confederate monument supporters, the whole thing kind of falls apart and really just resembles the campaign Hillary ran in 2016.
From “Black Lives Matter” to “all love is equal,” Democrats sure are fond of their platitudes. But they may have overlooked the aptness of one old adage: “there’s no such thing as bad press.” Billing himself as the anti-Trump instead of actually selling himself on his own merits may result in Biden just biding his time until another 2016 Dem disaster. See what I did there, fam?
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