<snip> “To expose the internal ‘threats,’ (Americans for Victory Over Terrorism) has compiled a sample list of statements by professors, legislators, authors, and columnists that it finds objectionable,” writes the New York Library Association. “The strategy appears similar to an earlier, much-criticized effort to monitor war dissidents by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a group founded by Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, and neo-conservative Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman.”
“Bill Bennett, this nation’s self-appointed moral cop and founder of Empower America, is AVOT’s chairman,” explains Sheila Samples. “Bennett and his right-wing, neo-conservative henchmen vow to ‘resist’ dissention both here and abroad. In simpler terms, Bennett’s mission is to seek out American citizens who dare to question Bush. Then, by using the far-ranging tentacles of AVOT and ACTA—to smoke ‘em out, git ‘em on the run—and bring ‘em to justice…” ACTA (American Council of Trustees and Alumni) is “referred to as ‘a conservative nonprofit group devoted to curbing liberal tendencies in academia’ by The New York Times in a Nov. 24 <2001>,” according to John Troyer. “Rarely did professors publicly mention heroism, rarely did they discuss the difference between good and evil, the nature of Western political order or the virtue of a free society. Indeed, the message of much of academe was clear: BLAME AMERICA FIRST,” states an ACTA report, Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America and What Can Be Done About it, authored by Lynne Cheney.
Obviously, as Jacobs notes in his email, “what can be done about it” is simple: college GOP groups, with help from Campus Watch and AVOT, will hound professors deemed “anti-American” until they either give up their positions (as in the case of Churchill, under death threats) or are removed by university administrations for their “equivocation to explicit condemnations of America,” as described by Cheney (note the use of the word “equivocation,” in other words they are not cheerleading mass murder and waving their little plastic flags strenuously enough). “The fact remains that academe is the only sector of American society that is distinctly divided in its response,” Cheney continues. “Indeed, expressions of pervasive moral relativism are a staple of academic life in this country and an apparent symptom of an educational system which has increasingly suggested that Western civilization is the primary source of the world’s ills—even though it gave us the ideals of democracy, human rights, individual liberty, and mutual tolerance.” <snip>
Campus Watch, the brainchild of right-wing Zionist Daniel Pipes, “publishes dossiers on professors, as well as some examples of their writings,” explains Will Youmans. “While the website dresses their monitoring as a purely academic exercise, it generates hostile phone calls and e-mails to listed professors and their families, as a profiled academic told me. Not only is this website inflammatory, but it clearly seeks to bring political pressure to bear on the professors and institutions. Under the guise of keeping the public informed, they are trying to force professors who do not share their unquestioning support for Israel to be silent.” Again, in Churchill’s case, it has generated death threats as well. <snip>
http://www.pej.org/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1770&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
