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Arizona: Muslim Students Threaten to Kill Prof for Suggesting Islam Is Violent
This will teach those Islamophobes that Islam is a religion of peace: a professor is facing death threats for suggesting otherwise. Nicholas Damask, Ph.D., has taught political science at Scottsdale Community College in Arizona for 24 years. But now he is facing a barrage of threats, and his family, including his 9-year-old grandson and 85-year-old parents, is in hiding, while College officials are demanding that he apologize – all for the crime of speaking the truth about the motivating ideology behind the threat of Islamic jihad worldwide.
Damask, who has an MA in International Relations from American University in Washington, D.C., and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Cincinnati, says he is “to my knowledge, the only tenured political science faculty currently teaching in Arizona to write a doctoral dissertation on terrorism.” He has taught Scottsdale Community College’s World Politics for each of the 24 years he has worked at the school.
Professor Damask’s troubles began during the current Spring semester, when a student took exception to three quiz questions. The questions were:
Who do terrorists strive to emulate? A. Mohammed
Where is terrorism encouraged in Islamic doctrine and law? A. The Medina verses [i.e., the portion of the Qur’an traditionally understood as having been revealed later in Muhammad’s prophetic career]
Terrorism is _______ in Islam. A. justified within the context of jihad.
Damask explained: “All quiz questions on each of my quizzes, including the ones in question here, are carefully sourced to the reading material. On this quiz, questions were sourced to the Qur’an, the hadiths, and the sira (biography) of Mohammed, and other reputable source material.” And indeed, the three questions reflect basic facts that are readily established by reference to Islamic texts and teachings and numerous statements of terrorists themselves.
Despite this, the student emailed Damask to complain that he was “offended” by these questions, as they were “in distaste of Islam.” Damask recounted: “Until this point, notably, the student had expressed no reservations about the course material and indeed he said he enjoyed the course.”
Damask sent two lengthy emails to the student responding to his complaints, but to no avail. A social media campaign began against Damask on the College’s Instagram account. Damask notes: “An unrelated school post about a school contest was hijacked, with supporters of the student posting angry, threatening, inflammatory and derogatory messages about the quiz, the school, and myself.”
At this point, College officials should have defended Professor Damask and the principle of free inquiry, but that would require a sane academic environment. Scottsdale Community College officials, Damask said, “stepped in to assert on a new Instagram post that the student was correct and that I was wrong – with no due process and actually no complaint even being filed – and that he would receive full credit for all the quiz questions related to Islam and terrorism.”
On May 1, Damask had a conference call with Kathleen Iudicello, Scottsdale Community College’s Dean of Instruction, and Eric Sells, the College’s Public Relations Marketing Manager. Damask recalls: “I was not offered to write any part of the school’s response, and there was no discussion of academic freedom or whether the College was even supportive of me to teach about Islamic terrorism. The very first point I made with them on the call (and virtually the only input I had) is that I insisted that the College’s release was to have no mention of any actions to be required to be taken by me personally, I was very clear about that.”
Predictably, Iudicello and Sells ignored that. They issued an apology to the student and to the “Islamic community,” and stated on the College’s Instagram page that Damask would be “required” to apologize to the student for the quiz questions, as the questions were “inappropriate” and “inaccurate,” and would be permanently removed from Damask’s exams.
Damask also had three phone calls with Iudicello, who gave him a bracing introduction into today’s academic funhouse world, where if someone is offended by the truth, it’s the truth that has to be deep-sixed. “During one call with Iudicello,” Damask recounts, “she stated that my quiz questions were ‘Islamophobic,’ that before continuing to have any further class content on Islamic terrorism I would likely need to meet with an Islamic religious leader to go over the content, and that I would likely need to take a class (perhaps at Arizona State) taught by a Muslim before teaching about Islamic terrorism.”
“The irony here,” says Damask, “is that literally during this phone call, I and my wife were tossing socks and jammies and our nine-year-old grandson’s toys into a suitcase to get the hell out of the house because of the death threats made by Islamic commenters on the College’s Instagram page.”
College officials took no public notice of the fact, but the posts on its Instagram page discussing the incident had begun to fill up with threats against Damask, including these statements: “if he is still around I suggest the students take action to make sure he isn’t”; “drop the professor’s address I just wanna talk”; “what’s the instructor’s name and address, I just want to say ‘hi’”; “I wish everything bad on these kuffar” [unbelievers]; “I hope he suffers.”
According to Damask, “there are literally hundreds of posts like this. There have been death threats, at least one call for a school shooting, and at least one call to burn down the school. Again, all of these threats are still on the College’s Instagram page.” When he asked school police to shut down the social media posts in light of these threats, they told him the posts were being monitored. Yet the threats were not taken down.
On Sunday night, the school sent Damask the apology that he was to make to the offended student. It is full of the expected embarrassing groveling: “I know,” Damask is supposed to inform the student, “a simple apology may not be enough to address the harm that I caused but I want to try to make amends.” He promises the student: “I will be reviewing all of my material to ensure there’s no additional insensitivities.” (Apparently politically correct academics cannot be bothered to internalize basic rules of grammar.)
“It goes without saying,” says Damask, “that I will not apologize for anything, that it is perfectly appropriate to discuss Islam, Muhammad, the Quran, the hadiths and any other matter related to Islamic terrorism. Incidentally: there has been no official complaint, no due process for me, just a mad scramble by the school to appease Islam.”
Damask’s introduction to the new Leftist academic world in which identity trumps truth has been bitter. “The College,” he says, “has displayed an appalling lack of respect toward my rights; it has essentially engaged in defamation by terming my course material inaccurate, insensitive and that I have violated the College’s values; has denied my civil rights through waiving any and all due process procedures; violated my First Amendment rights by demanding I make an apology to the student; and violated my First Amendment and civil rights by demanding I alter my course material. Further and perhaps worse, I believe the school has effectively encouraged and permitted these threats to be made against me when the school could have immediately put a stop to them, which is tantamount to allowing mob threats against me.”
It’s a terrible story, but there is one silver lining: at least we all know now that Islam is a religion of peace.
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The Morning Briefing: Betsy DeVos Brings Back Due Process and Libs Lose It
Much has been made the past few years about the turnover and turmoil in the Trump administration. People come and people go, often at a rather blinding pace. Personally, I’m fine when bureaucrats don’t linger in their jobs. The revolving door in this administration sometimes seems more like a feature than a bug.
There has been one shining constant throughout, however. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has been a perpetual thorn in the sides of liberals since she was first confirmed in 2017 and it’s always glorious to watch.
DeVos is everything the awful liberal public education pimps hate, which is what makes her so likable. She’s rich. She’s a lifelong Republican. She has long been a champion for school choice, which makes their heads explode.
The Democrats fought to keep her from being confirmed, and Vice President Pence had to cast the tie-breaking vote.
Since taking office, DeVos has endured nonstop criticism, protests, and horrible press.
See? What’s not to like?
DeVos’s most important work has been addressing the insanity that has been visited upon young men on college campuses in the past couple of decades, the most notable and infamous incident being the Duke lacrosse case.
She has been working diligently to bring rules and order to a previously arbitrary system that gave almost no rights to the accused.
The New York Times:
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Wednesday issued final regulations on sexual misconduct in education, delivering colleges and schools firm new rules on how they must deal with one of the biggest issues that have roiled their campuses for decades.
The rules fulfill one of the Trump administration’s major policy goals for Title IX, the 48-year-old federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in programs that receive federal funding, bolstering due-process protections for accused students while relieving schools of some legal liabilities. But Ms. DeVos extended the reach of the law in other ways, establishing dating violence as a sexual misconduct category that must be addressed and mandating supportive measures for alleged victims of assault.
Title IX had become a flash point in recent years after sexual assault cases rocked high-profile universities like Stanford and Duke, and serial sex abuse by staff at the University of Southern California, Michigan State and Ohio State demonstrated how schools had failed to properly investigate complaints.
DeVos is bringing clarity to the vague Obama-era “guidance” that created a situation in which college administrations felt compelled to “to side with accusers without extending sufficient rights to the accused.”
When Ms. DeVos announced in 2017 that she was rescinding the Obama-era guidance, she said she would give schools, from kindergarten to college, regulations with the force of law that balanced those rights. Her final rules, which she called a “historic” break from the “kangaroo courts” of the past, take effect Aug. 14.
Liberals are aghast that DeVos has brought fairness to a previously nightmarish situation. Rather than objectively assess the new rules, they’re miffed that their least favorite Cabinet member dared touch something that The Lightbringer instituted.
Crazy Joe the Wonder Veep has vowed to undo DeVos’s changes if America hits the toilet and elects him president:
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden promised to repeal the recent change in Title IX rules that reestablished due process for those accused of sexual assault on campus, saying that women deserve “to have their voices heard, their claims taken seriously and investigated, and their rights upheld.”
That’s an insane mischaracterization from an even more insane man. It’s also doubly laughable given the fact that he and everyone who supports him are actively trying to shut up a woman who’s accused him of sexual misconduct.
What DeVos has done should be universally praised. The lunatics on the Left who are opposed to her would rather every young male in America have no rights whatsoever.
They need to be kept away from, well, everything.
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Australia: Teachers to adapt lessons to focus on most important aspects
Students will learn a stripped-back version of the NSW curriculum for the rest of term two, with educators given permission to factor learning disruptions from the last six weeks into their teaching plans and focus on the most essential content.
A staged return to school begins on Monday for NSW public schools, but Department of Education Secretary Mark Scott said it would be a while before regular calendar events such as assemblies, excursions and school sport resumed.
Principals will spend this week closely monitoring attendance rates, school drop-offs and staff room distancing while teachers will also reconsider their original lesson plans for the second half of term two.
"There are a lot of requirements, particularly in the K-10 curriculum. Guidance has been given from the NSW Education Standards Authority that not all aspects of the curriculum are equally important at this point," Mr Scott told the Sun-Herald.
"Teachers will focus on the most important concepts. Deep engagement around the more important aspects of the curriculum will be the priority. That allows teachers a level of flexibility to identify where students are up to and recalibrate what's been taught in light of the disruption to learning in recent months."
Parents are still permitted to keep children at home during the phased return to school period, so long as students remain engaged with learning. Mr Scott said it was hard to predict how many would choose to stay home, but he expected the "vast majority of families will follow the guidelines" and send kids to school on their designated day.
School attendance dropped as low as 6 per cent at the end of term one, but hovered between 15 and 17 per cent last week.
Schools across New South Wales will reopen this week as part of a staggered and slow return to the classroom.
"We want to look carefully at the experience of schools in coming days. We want to see how schools are adapting to social distancing requirements for adults. We want to look at the flow of students in and out of school, and how we work with parents around that," Mr Scott said.
The department's next goal is getting all students back into classrooms full-time. NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has flagged she wants full-time attendance by the end of May, however Mr Scott did not commit to a date. "We’re waiting to learn from [this week] and think that is a wise course of events," he said.
At that stage students would resume normal teaching and no longer undertake the one mode of remote learning. The department's policy around keeping children at home would also be reconsidered.
But Mr Scott said it will still be a while before schools are fully operating. "For a period of time there will be no assemblies, excursions, work experience, sport or cultural events," he said.
"There will be some big events on the school calendar that won’t happen this year. The 2020 school year will have some significant differences and we’re just going to have to manage that carefully."
Without NAPLAN tests this year, the department will work with schools on assessments to identify gaps in student wellbeing and learning. "Good teachers will do regular low-stress assessment anyway, to check where students are at. This will become a priority when schools become operational again," Mr Scott said.
The Department of Education found about 10 per cent of its roughly 806,000 students has experienced a technology gap at home, meaning they did not have either a device or fast broadband access to complete remote learning activities.
"It was striking to us the number of students in metropolitan Sydney who did not have Wi-Fi or any technology in the home beyond a phone," Mr Scott said. "In metropolitan schools, you could have 100 or more students. And that disadvantage was not a factor of remoteness; it was right in the midst of the suburbs."
He said the department would become more cognisant of the technology divide in homes after the pandemic. This could involve purchasing technology for schools that is also appropriate for loaning out, and focusing on laptops instead of desktop computers.
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