Anti-Defamation League Has Lost It's Way

An anonymous letter of July 16 [a reader's online comment printed in July 16 issue, click here for original] takes sharp issue with the opinions of UCSB Professor William Robinson regarding his comparison of Gaza to World War II's Warsaw, calling his comparison "malicious and deliberate slander," and regretting the failure of the university to "discipline" him.

Perhaps understandably, the mystery writer does not mention any of the following:

(1) Professor Robinson's written and (forwarded) photographic comparisons are part of an academic's usual and normal freedom to express an opinion as long as his students are free to disagree (they are);

(2) No student has the right not to be presented with opinions he finds objectionable;

(3) The attempt to "discipline" Professor Robinson was orchestrated by the Anti-Defamation League, partly in cooperation with university officials who had the responsibility to evaluate the charges against Robinson, but did not reveal the ADL connection;

(4) 100 UCSB professors and 20 department heads signed letters, and many UCSB students organized via a web site, all objecting to the charges against Robinson as an attack on academic freedom;

(5) UCSB Academic Senate Charges Officer Martin Sharlemann avoided the usual first step in such proceedings, i.e. having the two complaining students contact the Dean or Department Head to see if an informal resolution could be obtained. He also: violated the Faculty Code of Conduct by demanding Professor Robinson answer a set of general charges before the required convening of an Ad Hoc committee to authorize such action; refused repeated requests from Robinson to make these general charges - copied from the Faculty Code of Conduct - specific; then later, when he did make them specific, refused the professor's attempt to answer them, saying Robinson had had his "chance," thereby eliminating the professor's right to participate in the process in any meaningful way; violated the Faculty Code of Conduct by deleting one of the students' charges that could never have been sustained (antisemitism) and adding a charge ("coercion of conscience") the students did not make, thus acting as an agent for the complainants; and although having no authority to "investigate" anything, spied on distributed emails of the Sociology Department (to which Professor Robinson belongs) by subscribing to one of the departments listservs without revealing his own position as the charges officer.

(6) Professor Aaron Ettenberg, given a place on the Charges Advisory Committee which was convened to evaluate the complaints, violated the confidentiality provision of the Faculty Code of Conduct by discussing the matter with a person not authorized to participate, a Rabbi Gross-Schaefer, who then wrote letters to the Independent and the News-Press attacking Robinson; violated the conflict-of-interest provision of the Faculty Code of Conduct by not revealing his previous membership in Hillel, to which the ADL belonged.

Properly, the UCSB Academic Senate unanimously dismissed the students' frivolous complaints. Properly, it has voted to investigate possible improprieties by some of its members who were active in this matter.

In my opinion, shame accrues to the corrupt behavior of Professors Sharlemann and Ettenberg; to the Anti-Defamation League, once devoted to vigorous defense of persecuted persons, now devoted to scurrilous smear-mongering and attempts to silence those (especially elected officials and teachers) who oppose the despotic policies of the state of Israel; and to University of California Chancellor Henry Yang, whose failure immediately to provide Professor Robinson with an apology reeks of cowardice. William Smithers

Source: The Santa Barbara Independent

Big Brother in the electronic age

WE’RE a big country so I guess it’s understandable that not only is Big Brother watching — but now it’s Big Sister, Big Uncle, Big Aunt, Big Whoever. It’s becom ing a Big Mother of an operation.

OK, we know about pat-downs at the airport that, for some of us, are the only time we have any physical body contact at all so let’s not knock that. But isn’t this whole invasion-of-privacy thing overdone? No place a private citizen can be private anymore. If a nice lady ends up in bed with a semi-nice guy in the so-called privacy of her own nice bedroom, she still can’t be sure she’s not being filmed. Spooks tell you super-mini-cameras can be tucked not only behind a painting or in a light fixture but in your ear, up your nose, between your toes or, with the greatest respect, God knows.

E-mail. The new generation doesn’t even know how to write longhand. Stationery has gone the way of papyrus. Stamps may be going up but letters are going down. Everyone e-mails. A guy’s breaking up with his longtime live-in? He does it by e-mail. You’re receiving a legal document? Comes by e-mail. A dumb married South Carolina governor getting it on with an overheated unmarried lady in downtown Argentina upchucks about the wonders of scratching her itch — on e-mail! Lawyers warn that you must be careful of e-mail. That there’s no way to ever get rid of it. That it’ll remain there longer than a hair transplant.

ATMs? These machines have big mouths. They know what you took and where you were when you took it. Can’t tell the missus you were in Cleveland on business when your ATM will state that on such-and-such particular Thursday you were in hot Buenos Aires pulling cash for a hot time on a hot bod.

Source: RINF News

Suppressing Free Speech Here at Home

While the Ayattolahs in Iran are intimidating people into ceasing their criticism of the government, U.S. Justice Department prosecutors are doing the same here in the United States, specifically in the trial of U.S. vs. Robert Kahre, which is currently taking place in Las Vegas. Upset with critical comments posted by American citizens regarding the prosecution of a man who used gold and silver coins issued by the U.S. mint as legal tender, the prosecutors have been abusing their power to issue grand-jury subpoenas.

This prosecutorial-abuse saga, which I blogged about here, began with an ordinary news article in which the Las Vegas Review Journal explained what the Kahre prosecution was all about. Dozens of people posted comments under the article, most of which were critical of the government and the prosecution.

Obviously stung by the criticisms, the prosecutors responded by serving a grand-jury subpoena on the paper demanding that it produce all identifying information on all of the people who had posted the comments.

After the paper resisted the subpoena, the prosecutors issued a new subpoena that limited their request for identifying information to only two commentators. One commentator wrote: “The sad thing is there are 12 dummies on the jury who will convict him. They should be hung along with the feds.” Apparently the other commentator bid 12 Quatloos (Star Trek money) that one of the prosecutors would not celebrate his next birthday.

It would seem rather obvious that the issuance of the narrower subpoena is prima facie proof that the primary aim of the prosecutors was intimidation when they issued their original subpoena. After all, if they really were concerned about only two comments, why subpoena identifying information about all the other commentators?

Moreover, in my opinion the aim of the narrower subpoena is about intimidation as well. Here’s why:

The central issue is: Is there any reasonable possibility that the Justice Department is going to prosecute the commentators for the precise words they used in their comments?

The answer to that question has to be “No.” After all, this is not Iran but rather the United States, a country in which people are still free to express critical opinions about what their government is doing, no matter how repugnant.

Consider the first comment — that the jury “should be hung along with the feds.” The word “should” is a subjunctive and, as such, does not connote anything but an opinion. It is, in fact, a common figure of speech that has long been used in this country. If it were a criminal offense to use it, the penitentiaries would be even more filled than they already are.

Consider the second comment, where the commentator bids Quatloos that the prosecutor does not celebrate his next birthday. Is there any reasonable possibility that a jury would convict a person of a crime or that a federal court would uphold a criminal conviction based solely on the utterance of that precise phraseology?

Again, the answer is “No.” After all, it is impossible to determine any objective meaning to the phrase. Is the commentator suggesting that the prosecutor might not reach his next birthday because of a heart attack brought on by the stress of the Kahre trial? Or is he implying that someone might do harm to the prosecutor? We don’t know. Far more information would be needed to sustain a criminal conviction on the mere utterance of those precise words.

So, what’s the point of subpoenaing the newspapers records in an attempt to secure the identity of the commentators, if it’s not to intimidate and scare the commentators and everyone else? After all, everyone knows that the commentators can refuse to answer any questions before the grand jury based on the Fifth Amendment, something they would almost certainly do. In that case, the prosecutors would be left with nothing more than the phrases posted on the newspaper’s website.

But in the process, the prosecutors will have forced the newspaper to identify commentators on its website and forced the commentators to appear before a federal grand jury. They will also have threatened the commentators with the prospect of a federal criminal prosecution for what they wrote.

In other words, the prosecutors will have sent a powerful message to the American people, the same message those Ayatollahs are sending to the Iranian people: “If you know what’s good for you, shut up and stop criticizing what we’re doing.”

by Jacob G. Hornberger

Source: The Future Of Freedom Foundation

America Closing Her Door to Freedom

At 47, I lament how today’s America is far less free than the country of my youth. Replacing it is not a 1984ish totalitarian dictatorship, but what Alexis de Tocqueville called the “soft tyranny” of what Mark Levin sees as a 21st century “nanny state.” We so feared a Stalin or Hitler that we ignored endless assaults on our liberty by idealistic home-grown statists and the seductive narcotic of ever more government goodies buying our acquiescence. What makes Americans’ surrender to statism so shameful is that we freely chose this course in direct contravention of our founding principles.

Nowhere have we seen such an accelerating atrophy of our freedom as in K-12 public schools, where recent decades have witnessed far more books banned, and not some print version of Debbie Does Dallas. No, literary classics like J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Mark Twain’s Huck Finn are verboten -- required reading in those decadent days of my ‘70s high school. But educrats with the backbone of a large worm now avoid anything controversial.



Students have far less choice of classes in high school, and often teachers can’t make their own lessons since they must teach the test so schools can make “adequate yearly progress.” Only about 40 percent of my college students say they ever discussed any controversial issues in high school. My high school classes reveled in such debate.

Similarly, so many high schools have become gated, closed campuses. Mine was wide open. “Zero tolerance” for drugs and violence policies punish students carrying aspirin, cough drops, and Tweety-Bird key chains. Now diligent do-gooders want to ban school Coke machines as well. And to think at my high school we could even smoke!

Today political correctness constipates free speech at many schools (as well as in much of the public and private sectors), and hysterical sexual harassment policies suspend children for hugging a classmate. If you had predicted all this to my 1980 senior high class, we’d have laughed that you’d smoked some mighty bad dope to conjure up such an Orwellian dystopia.

Young folks’ freedom has been lost off campus as well. The drinking age has of course been raised, and now there’s a host of teen driving restrictions I never had to obey.

But we’ve all lost so much liberty. Look how government’s neurotic nannies have restricted us with a host of seatbelt, child seat, and helmet laws. Likewise, so many cities and states ban smoking even in private restaurants and bars. A WWII vet can’t even light up in his own bar.

So many laws have eroded our Second Amendment gun rights that, as P.J. O’Rourke notes, if Massachusetts had the same gun laws in 1775 that it has now, we’d all be Canadians.

Even political campaign speech is constricted. The Obama administration argued at the U.S. Supreme Court that the McCain-Feingold Act can ban books about ongoing election campaigns. Yet Justice Hugo Black warned that: "The freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate, or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish. "

Almost half of all U.S. income is taxed today, which means we’ve lost about half our economic freedom. With record government spending and soaring debt, we’re set to lose a lot more. And to think the Boston Tea Party was waged over a three-cent-a-pound tax on tea.

Government regulations on business cost us well over $1 trillion a year in higher consumer prices, and there are exactly 26,911 government words policing the sale of a head of cabbage.

In recent years, obsessive-compulsive environmental regulations halted a Massachusetts town from using fireworks on Independence Day since an “endangered” bird’s nest was found near it. News flash: on July 4, we celebrate independence from a tyrannical government. Yet George III never taxed, regulated, or policed us remotely as much as Washington , D.C. does today. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says “Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory.”

Everywhere rules and paperwork mushroom as nit-picking bureaucrats grow in numbers and power. As a buddy bemoaned, the increasingly shrill message of the establishment is “Sit down – and shut up.” No wonder so many Americans feel frustrated and impotent.

Why has our liberty eroded so badly? Statist public schools have long taught that equality (of results) and “social justice” trump freedom since liberty is the handmaiden of “selfish” individualists harming “the community.” As we’ve grown affluent, there’s more desire to protect everyone from risk, and our burgeoning welfare state demands ever more of our economic liberty. Plus, as societies get more secular, they become more socialist (see Western Europe ).

We also have endless media-savvy professional grievance groups contending that every erosion of freedom is imperative for our safety. But, as Justice Louis Brandeis warned: "Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

Jefferson warned that “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” I pray Americans never forget that we are the heirs to the most libertarian, God-fearing revolutionaries in history.

by Douglas Young

Source: Strike at the Root