So George Mason University’s student senate said that it would not tolerate “hatred and acts of malice” and called its Jewish community “a vital part of the Mason community” in a resolution last week, reported The Algemeiner. But what’s really interesting is what the GMU student senate speaker pro tempore McKenna Bates said on the subject.
Apparently, while she was holding a kiosk on media bias, McKenna “was told that Palestinian lives matter more than Jewish lives, and that the murder of Jews is justified because Palestinians are at the bottom of the oppression system and thus any expressions of resistance are ultimately justified.”
And see, this is the really dangerous thing about oppression olympics. Perceived victimhood becomes a kind of currency that justifies not just bigger platforms for certain people on critical issues, not just affirmative action that could make or break an academic or professional career, but yes, actual violence.
Anyways, McKenna was a fan of the anti-Semitism resolution, as was George Mason’s Hillel group. Now, GMU doesn’t often come on my radar for anti-Israel or left-wing bias, but you may remember Professor Noura Erakat over there, who complained about a Washington Post headline reading “Israel’s Use Of Fatal Fire In Gaza: Excessive Force Or Justified Mob Control?” with a tweet saying ““Mob”??? Can we plz try to acknowledge Palestinians as human? Not bugs to be exterminated. This is a freedom struggle.”
Well, it might shock you to learn that Noura is a bit of a hypocrite. Or maybe not — she’s a professor, after all! The professor has seemed to have no problem using the term “mob” while referring to groups of Israelis and Jewish people on Twitter.
George Mason is also the same school where hundreds of staff and faculty freaked out when the school decided to honor the late conservative justice Antonin Scalia by naming its law school after him. They didn’t stop the renaming with their petition and that renaming, as well as accepting millions of bucks from Republican donor Charles Koch, does seem to point to GMU’s administration being slightly more sane than that of other universities.
Some students at George Mason University demanded that the school to fire Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who’s teaching a course there over the summer, according to TheCollegeFix. More than 3,000 people have signed a petition demanding that George Mason “terminate AND void ALL contracts and affiliation with Brett Kavanaugh at George Mason University” and issue “a formal apology from administration to survivors.”
Now, Kavanaugh’s going to be teaching a course called “Creation of the Constitution,” something he probably knows a lot about, and as for the students who say they’re uncomfortable with him on campus…there’s just one slight problem: Kavanaugh won’t be teaching the course on GMU’s main campus in Virginia, but instead more than 3,000 miles away in Runnymede, England, the site where the British king agreed to the Magna Carta. Anyway, none of this stopped one George Mason professor from suggesting that, months after the controversy and the confirmation, the school investigate Kavanaugh.
The school president seemed pretty shocked by that. And that wasn’t the only professor who had a problem with Kavanaugh getting paid an admittedly sizable sum of $25,000 for the two-week course. International relations prof Ahsan Butt put out a take that, somehow, out-cringed his name: “GMU: we are a serious university, don’t you realize we officially became R1? Also GMU: Let’s hire a rapist who repeatedly lied to Congress to teach law.”
Wow so either the Senate Judiciary Committee really missed out on a key witness, or Mr. Butt may want to look into defamation law. I mean, really, this reminds me of when a Pennsylvania professor called Jordan Peterson, who has a wife and kids, an incel. She deleted that tweet when Peterson threatened her with legal action. And look at how the Southern Poverty Law Center is falling apart after Gavin McInnes’s lawsuit — coincidence? I don’t know. But when reasoning with these activists and “scholars” doesn’t work, lawfare may be the best recourse.
On Thursday, George Mason University Noura Erakat tweeted out a Washington Post article entitled “Israel’s use of fatal force in Gaza: Excessive force or justified mob control?” reported The Daily Caller News Foundation. This headline triggered Noura, who responded ““Mob”??? Can we plz try to acknowledge Palestinians as human? Not bugs to be exterminated. This is a freedom struggle.”
When I saw this awesome display of intellectual brilliance, I immediately put aside all thoughts like the fact that at least 50 of the 62 individuals killed by Israel Monday were Hamas or Islamic Jihad terrorists and thought to myself, “wow, what an upstanding citizen Noura must be, policing offensive words out of the English language.” It never even occurred to me that she might be a total hypocrite who shudders when the word “mob” is applied to Palestinians, but has used the exact same word to describe Israelis.
Oops, actually, here’s one of her tweets from a little while back: “Fadi Alloun – shot dead by Israeli police while he ran away from an Israeli mob.” And, of course, she neglects to mention that Alloun had allegedly stabbed a Jewish boy right beforehand. In case this didn’t convince you of how superb a mental gymnast Noura is, contorting language to fit her agenda, take a look at this time she tweeted about the murder of a Muslim teen in Virginia. She says “White supremacy breeds in all quarters,especially in the most liberal ones we call home.”
Except, as a commenter pointed out, the teen’s accused murderer, Darwin Martinez Torres, was not white, but Hispanic. Noura, of course, very adeptly dodged this pesky fact by saying “White supremacy is an ideology and what drives Islamophobia. Not race specific. Don’t need to be white to practice it.”
