To borrow a meme from work-shy multimillionaire socialist Bernie Sanders, surely the only man in history ever kicked out of a ’60s hippy commune for being too lazy, I am once again asking Australia to bulldoze the universities.
Not because I am against higher-education. On the contrary, genuinely higher education is an immeasurable blessing on a society. I’m a product of it myself, after all.
No, I want to see the current universities bulldozed out of existence because they have become the antithesis of genuine higher education. The modern Australian university is little more than a diploma mill for foreigners, dedicated to nothing but enriching itself. Worse, they have become actively hostile to the supposed first principles of university education: fostering critical thinking, with a focus on preparing thoughtful, responsible citizens.
Hands up who thinks they are doing that in any form? Anybody? Anybody?
In fact, they’re doing the opposite, by churning out robotic, hateful little Red Guards. And this time, they’re not targeting ‘bourgeois elements’: they’re going for the Jews.
Universities have been “morally complicit’’ in growing anti-Semitism, the academic appointed to rate universities for the federal government says.
Emeritus professor Greg Craven said the failure to stamp out anti-Semitism on campus was “one of the greatest failures of Australian universities in their history … the universities, in failing to take a stance, have been morally complicit in a sense that they have contributed to the authorising environment of anti-Semitism.’’
As we’ve seen horrifically demonstrated at Bondi, the outcome of university academics indoctrinating their little droogs to ‘globalise the Intifada’ has real and appalling real-world results. For their complicity in this alone, the universities have merited nothing but a big ol’ D9, all fueled up and ready to bulldoze.
Emeritus Professor Craven, a constitutional lawyer and former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University, was appointed by the Albanese government’s Special Envoy to Combat Anti-Semitism, Jillian Segal, last month to prepare a “report card’’ on how each university was responding to anti-Semitism on campus, and report by March.
Speaking in the wake of the deadly mass shooting that targeted a Jewish festival on Bondi Beach, he criticised universities for tolerating the “occupation of buildings, vicious protests, occupation of campuses and interference with Jewish people’’.
He said that over the past two years since the Hamas attack on Israel and ensuing war in Gaza, it had become “less and less unusual to be anti-Semitic and more and more permissible to be fashionably anti-Semitic’’.
Not just permissable: almost mandatory. While known jihadis, from an organisation widely banned as a terror group, were welcomed onto university campuses, Jewish students were attacked and ostracised – often with the open encouragement of academics.
Emeritus Professor Craven said “a large majority of academic staff and students have sympathies with the left. Therefore they find it very hard to confront the left, because large parts of the left are anti-Semitic.’’
His assessment came as the University of Sydney sacked a staff member filmed abusing Jewish academics and students on campus as “parasites” and “filthy Zionists’’.
But they only sacked her when they needed a scapegoat, to make it look like they were doing something in the wake of the Bondi horror.
The university waited until after the massacre to dismiss academic Rose Naked – more than two months after it began investigating her four-minute foul-mouthed tirade. A spokeswoman said the behaviour was “deeply distressing and utterly unacceptable … We immediately suspended the staff member pending a formal process, and have now terminated their employment on the grounds of serious misconduct. This decision followed careful consideration in line with our clear expectations of behaviour and obligation to make sure our campuses are safe and welcoming for all.”
Unless they’re ‘filthy Zionists’… by which, of course, they mean ‘Jews’.
Of course, the vice-chancellors are hurriedly spouting their HR-approved, bland, insincere statements about ‘we condemn anti-Semitism… blah blah blah’, which is about as convincing as Mehreen Faruqi’s wooden ‘condolences’.
A Jewish academic at the University of Queensland, associate professor of mathematics and physics Yoni Nazarathy, said anti-Semitic behaviour, such as calls to intifada and direct vilification of Zionists, had “gone unchecked’’ on university campuses.
“It was not handled properly by our education system and university leaders,’’ he said.
The universities regulator, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, is refusing to reveal which universities it is investigating for failing to tackle anti-Semitism.
Probably because it’s all of them.
Jenkins, fire up that D9, there’s a good fellow.
