31 May 2007 @ 12:38PM >> I always thought that a “Tunnel of Oppression” was nothing more than a brilliant parody concocted by the minds of Trey Parker and Matt Stone. But I guess I was wrong. And just where will you find a “Tunnel of Oppression” out in the world beyond South Park? Why, on a college campus, of course! (Quite many of them, it seems.)

If you’re having trouble imaging what a “Tunnel of Oppression” might look like, here are some videos to get you started. (One question, though: why does it have to be a tunnel, exactly?)

This education in political correctness has been brought to you by today’s Quote of the Day, courtesy of John Derbyshire:

I have this flash mental image of a stranger showing up on an American campus and asking someone for directions to the Dean’s office. “Sure: you keep right going here, turn left at the Museum of Tolerance, past the Office of Diversity Awareness, cross over Peace Plaza, hang another left at the Matthew Shepard memorial, around behind the Tunnel of Oppression, and it’s right there, next to the Global Warming Awareness study hall...”

29 May 2007 @ 8:05AM >> Some forms of government-mandated segregation just don’t seem to stir that much passion among the world’s do-gooders:

Saudi officials have arrested a man in Mecca for being a Christian, saying that the city, which Muslims consider to be holy, is off-limits to non-Muslims.

Nirosh Kamanda, a Sri Lankan Christian, was detained by the Saudi Expatriates Monitoring Committee last week after he started to sell goods outside Mecca’s Great Mosque.

After running his fingerprints through a new security system, Saudi police discovered that he was a Christian who had arrived in the country six months earlier to take a job as a truck driver in the city of Dammam. Kamanda had subsequently left his place of work and moved to Mecca.

“The Grand Mosque and the holy city are forbidden to non-Muslims,” Col. Suhail Matrafi, head of the department of Expatriates Affairs in Mecca, told the Saudi daily Arab News. “The new fingerprints system is very helpful and will help us a lot to discover the identity of a lot of criminals,” he said.

24 May 2007 @ 8:58PM >> From London’s Daily Mail, more evidence that multiculturalism is more important than truth to politically correct educators:

Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government backed study has revealed.

It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.

There is also resistance to tackling the 11th century Crusades - where Christians fought Muslim armies for control of Jerusalem - because lessons often contradict what is taught in local mosques.

The findings have prompted claims that some schools are using history ‘as a vehicle for promoting political correctness’.

The study, funded by the Department for Education and Skills, looked into ‘emotive and controversial’ history teaching in primary and secondary schools.

It found some teachers are dropping courses covering the Holocaust at the earliest opportunity over fears Muslim pupils might express anti-Semitic and anti-Israel reactions in class.

The researchers gave the example of a secondary school in an unnamed northern city, which dropped the Holocaust as a subject for GCSE coursework.

The report said teachers feared confronting ‘anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils’.

23 May 2007 @ 9:52PM >> Stanley Kurtz of National Review, who wrote a piece about Indoctrinate U after our Tribeca Film Center media screening at the end of April, has now published a much longer review. Here’s a taste:

Why do people see campus “political correctness” so differently? Conservatives know it’s a problem. Even some on the Left recognize that the campus marketplace of ideas has been replaced by a monopoly (and they’re fine with that). Others of good will don’t quite know what to make of the many highly publicized “anecdotes” about campus P.C. Are these merely isolated incidents, or symptoms of a pervasive problem? One of the virtues of Indoctrinate U, Evan Coyne Maloney’s powerful new documentary, is that it helps us answer the “isolated anecdote” argument — both intellectually, and at a gut level.

[...]

At one level, Maloney overcomes the “isolated anecdote” charge by graphically conveying the results of various studies of campus political bias. Over the past few years, these empirical studies have shifted the balance in our public debate over campus political correctness, and Maloney does a great job of bringing it all across visually. Yet the real power of this film lies in those “nightmare” cases. By showing the faces and bringing us the words of the individuals involved — and by describing the battles themselves in some detail — Maloney allows us to see that many P.C. “anecdotes” are anything but isolated.

[...]

I guess it takes a movie to bring across the amazing, campus-wide power of even a single expertly conducted case of P.C. intimidation.

[...]

When the film is over, you’ll feel in the pit of your stomach what the unfortunates on screen already know: what’s happened to them is actually a threat being leveled at you.

22 May 2007 @ 9:30AM >> “Edwards charges $55,000 to speak to UC Davis students about poverty”

20 May 2007 @ 1:25PM >> Last fall, I commented on an ill-conceived proposal in the Netherlands to ban the wearing of burqas in public:

The way to address the fact that there are some Jihadists in the Muslim world who need to be defeated is not to strip all Muslims of their right to wear religious attire. Doing so does nothing to further the integration of Muslims, it only serves as a signal that they are not welcome.

Western cultures will go down a dangerous path if we start outlawing legitimate, non-violent and uncoerced expressions of faith.

I feel the same way about this proposal in Switzerland:

A group of right-wing politicians is gathering signatures to try to force a national vote on banning the construction of minarets in Switzerland.

The planned building of minarets, the towers attached to mosques from which the Islamic call for prayer is issued, in small Swiss towns has sparked local protests.

A group of politicians from the Swiss National Party and Federal Democratic Union are seeking to prevent the construction of minarets in national law, saying they are a symbol of power and threaten law and order in Switzerland.

The campaign has to gather 100,000 signatures by November 2008 to force a national vote on the initiative which, if it gains a majority vote, would then be written into law.

“We have no doubt that we’ll reach the goal,” Ulrich Schlueer, a Swiss National Party parliamentarian for Zurich who is heading the initiative, said.

Muslims living in the West can be our long-term allies against the Jihadists, but only if they are integrated into society as equal members. To treat them as second-class citizens by placing restrictions on the construction on their houses of worship when no such restrictions apply to any other religion is not only short-sighted, it goes against the founding ideals of Western civilization.

It is legitimate to combat those who would seek to destroy us, but it is unfair to treat all Muslims as though they fall into that category.

18 May 2007 @ 7:24PM >> I will be a guest tomorrow morning on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal Weekend” discussing Indoctrinate U. Apparently, clips from the film will be shown, and we will also be taking calls. The show airs at 9AM ET and will last about a half-hour. It may also be repeated several times throughout the weekend.

Update: Here’s a direct link to an MPEG-4 video of the show.

18 May 2007 @ 7:14PM >> Earlier today, The Weekly Standard published a nice review of my upcoming film Indoctrinate U. The review was also featured on Drudge Report.

16 May 2007 @ 9:08AM >> I guess al Qaeda was hoping that the Socialist would win:

An Al-Qaeda front group in Europe threatened on Tuesday to launch bloody attacks in France in response to the election of “crusader and Zionist” Nicolas Sarkozy as president.

“As you have chosen the crusader and Zionist Sarkozy as a leader ... we in the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades warn you that the coming days will see a bloody jihadist campaign ... in the capital of Sarkozy,” the group’s “Europe division” said in an Internet statement addressed to the French people.

[...]

The group previously claimed responsibility for the July 2005 terror attacks in London, as well those in Madrid in March 2004 and in Istanbul in November 2003.

The only way for Western nations to be safe from this type of terrorism is to let al Qaeda choose our future heads of state.

15 May 2007 @ 10:36AM >> Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is getting praise for his Sister Souljah moment — his comments on affirmative action:

On affirmative action, Obama, a Harvard Law School graduate, said he thinks that someday when his two young daughters apply to college, they “should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged” and there is nothing wrong with that.

“I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and been brought up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed,” he added. “There are a lot of African-American kids who are still struggling.”

Obama said that “if we have done what needs to be done to ensure that kids who are qualified to go to college can afford it, that affirmative action becomes a diminishing tool for us to achieve racial equality in this society.”

If Obama actually opposes race-based affirmative action outright, I’d consider it an act of political courage. Supporting racial preferences is a default Democratic position, and given the current state of American racial politics, it is a position that black Democratic candidates in particular are expected to take. To demonstrate that you don’t always take the default party position can be refreshing to people, especially when doing so runs the risk of getting you labeled as a traitor to your race.

But does Obama really oppose racial preferences? When he was running for Senate four years ago, Obama wrote a letter to Black Commentator addressing a number of topics, including affirmative action:

I favor affirmative action, but I’m still going after the votes of white union members who oppose affirmative action, because I think I can convince them that it’s Bush’s economic agenda, and not affirmative action, that is eroding their job security and stagnating their wages.

So, there you have it. Obama recently hinted that he opposed affirmative action, but four years ago, he he opposed it quite explicitly. Unless he just-as-explicitly says he has since changed his mind, I take the more definitively worded position (”I favor affirmative action”) to represent his actual beliefs.

Maybe Obama’s recent statement is just an example of his “going after white union members who oppose affirmative action.”

If he now speaks out against race-based affirmative action, he would be applauded by many people, including me. A viable black presidential candidate opposing affirmative action would be a milestone in American racial politics. Will it be Obama?

14 May 2007 @ 11:09PM >> From Ann Althouse:

I keep reading about how hybrid cars and compact fluorescent lightbulbs can reduce the production of greenhouse gases, but I have yet to see an article about the savings that could be achieved if we were to stop delivery of newspapers and magazines and do all of our news reading on line.

13 May 2007 @ 7:04PM >> The people in this video don’t sound like they are in the mood for compromise on immigration legislation. To put it mildly.

12 May 2007 @ 1:48PM >> It turns out that my friend Karol Sheinin grew up with two of the six men accused of plotting a terrorist attack on Fort Dix:

When Elvis and Dritan Duka, two of the three brothers arrested on terrorism charges in Fort Dix, were kids, they were neighborhood bullies. When they got a little older, they became drug dealers.

How do I know? They grew up in my neighborhood, my brother and his friends used to brawl with them on a fairly regular basis. My brother’s best friend’s mom was friends with their mom. Then they moved to New Jersey and became Jihadis. Of all possible paths for the Duka kids, that one didn’t seem the most likely.

10 May 2007 @ 8:18AM >> In a fascinating and in-depth piece from The Wall Street Journal, the president of the Rousseau Institute in Paris wonders whether France’s decline will accelerate to an unstoppable fall—or whether newly-elected French President Nicholas Sarkozy can save the Fifth Republic.

8 May 2007 @ 8:35AM >> Media bias isn’t usually as obvious or explosive as, say, Dan Rather’s laughably bogus memos intended to torpedo a presidential campaign. Most often, slanted reporting is far more subtle. It takes the form of adjectives and adverbs that inject the reporter’s opinion, or in the form of sloppy errors that reflect erroneous beliefs held within certain ideological communities.

Let’s deal with the latter first. Reuters is an outlet that for some reason seems constitutionally incapable of accurately reporting the history of the Kyoto global warming treating. Here’s the latest example:

President George W. Bush pulled the United States out of Kyoto in 2001, arguing it would cost U.S. jobs and that it wrongly excluded 2012 goals for poorer nations such as China.

The only problem with that statement is that the Kyoto treaty was never ratified by the U.S., never signed by an American president, and never even submitted to the Senate for ratification. How can President Bush pull out of a treaty that the United States never approved? In fact, in 1997, the U.S. Senate unanimously voted against ratifying any treaty structured the way the Kyoto Protocol was, which may explain why then-President Clinton never signed the treaty or even bothered to submit it for ratification.

But in Reuters-land, the fact Kyoto was effectively rejected before President Bush took office doesn’t matter. In fact, Reuters’ record on this is so bad that the transgression is repeatedly caught by eagle-eyed readers who write in with corrections. The tepid explanation from editors was, “It appears our record on explaining this isn’t great.”

Yeah. It appears that way.

But maybe Reuters is just trying to keep up with rival AP, which has its own past problem getting this right.

Often, though, media bias takes forms not nearly as obvious as this blatant distortion of fact. Take, for example, this piece in the Washington Post:

In the heady opening weeks of the 110th Congress, the Democrats’ domestic agenda appeared to be flying through the Capitol: Homeland security upgrades, a higher minimum wage and student loan interest rate cuts all passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.

The word “upgrades” used above implies improvement, leading me to believe that the writers agree with the fact that the legislation passed by the newly-elected Democratic congress is in fact an improvement. I suspect that the people who voted against it did not necessarily see it as an upgrade. But if you’re a reader of that piece, you’re left with the impression that it is an uncontestable fact that the Democrats improved Homeland Security. The word “changes” would have worked just as well there, and it wouldn’t have attached the reporter’s opinion to the piece, either.

On rare occasions, media bias is outright: the newsman proclaims himself to support this or that cause. Sure, you sometimes see signs of a previous political prediliction. The titan of the Sunday morning talk shows, Tim Russert, worked for Mario Cuomo, the twelve-year governor of New York. Hardball talker Chris Matthews worked for Tip O’Neill, the former Speaker of the House, a man who spent nearly 40 years in Congress. And then there’s George Stephanopolous—now sitting in the chair once occupied by David Brinkley—who helped get Bill Clinton elected in 1992 and helped him weather many a scandal as well. The one common element among these giants of the establishment political media is that they all worked for Democrats.

Nothing wrong with that. In theory, adhering to the rules of strict objectivity should prevent any of those affiliations from making a difference. Assuming, of course, that the conscious mind alone is capable of shutting down the subsconscious mind in order to prevent a person’s own preferences from coloring the way they describe their view of the world to others.

Personally, I have a hard time believing that true objectivity is possible on a frequent enough basis that we shouldn’t consider junking the obsolete notion altogether. Instead of reporters pretending to be unbiased and only having that lie revealed in some subsequent scandal, why don’t they level with us and tell us where they stand? If anything, that would only make us more informed consumers of the product they’re selling.

If the ingredients of food we ingest should be listed so that we can be wise consumers, why shouldn’t the ideological components of the often opinion-tinged news also be listed? What’s wrong with us knowing the thought patterns of the people who string the words together and decide what images we see?

That’s why I applaud Brian Montopoli of CBS News for revealing his own beliefs. Montopoli was roundly criticized for sharing his personal view that the media should jump-start a national discussion on gun control. He laments the fact that “politicians who would prefer tighter laws, usually those on the left, don’t want to talk about the issue,” and hopes that Cho Sueng-Hui’s mass murder spree at Virginia Tech will give the media the proper “hook” to “focus on a huge issue”—gun control—”that isn’t going away any time soon.”

What Montopoli fails to realize is there is always a political debate raging about topics that still stir sharp divisions around the country. But when a national political consensus has been reached, it’s because people in both parties have recognized that the electorate clearly favors one position over another. Most Democrats who seek statewide or national office have given up on stricter gun penalties because they want to win elections.

So while I suspect that Montopoli’s true desire is to re-open a debate in the hopes of changing the outcome, I respect Montopoli for at least being up front about his beliefs. In the future, if I encounter Montopoli’s reporting on gun control, I’ll know a bit more about his motivation. And as news consumers, our ability to evaluate the product put out by the news media would be far superior if all reporters were as open about their views as Montopoli is.

Maybe the journalists of tomorrow recognize that exposing one’s own biases is the future of honest reporting:

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Robert S. Mueller was interrupted by protestors last night, during a speech at the Institute of Politics’ John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum.

Mueller, who was set to speak before a full crowd managed by tight security detail, had just begun his prepared remarks when the first protestor interrupted with screams from the second floor.

[...]

“We will never forget the role of the FBI in McCarthyism!” screamed Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky ‘07, who is also a Crimson editorial editor.

It should be noted that the Harvard Crimson is not an opinion paper. It’s the university’s daily student newspaper, and is a stepping-stone for the type of person who wants to move on to journalism school and eventually join the media elite.

So some day, Mr. Gould-Wartofsky may end up working at Reuters, or at CBS News.

And in all likelihood, he’d do very well there.

1 May 2007 @ 8:53AM >> &When Iran needs help building two nuclear reactors, where do the mullahs go to place the ad?

To their acquaintances at The New York Times Company, of course!

Update: A reader has alerted me to the fact that the ad also appeared in a recent issue of The Economist (page 111 of the April 28th, 2007 edition, on the lower-righthand side). I would have expected The Economist to exercise better judgment than that.

All this reminds me of the statement “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them,” which is attributed to Vladimir Lenin. Although in this case, it’s not rope, it’s radioactive fuel. And we’re teaching Iran how enrich it, perhaps so it may one day end up in a nuclear bomb.