Welcome to America 2019 where expressions Nazi type extremism  are frightening, a sad commentary and a commonplace occurence.

The Guardian 11.30.2019

Symbols at University of Georgia and Georgia College & State University fuel renewed calls for hate crimes law

Swastika symbols on two Georgia university campuses have students and parents on edge.

Swastikas were drawn on message boards recently in Creswell and Russell halls at the University of Georgia, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

“This shouldn’t be in your mind, concerns if you are going to be safe,” said Brett Feldman, 21, a UGA senior who met with the university’s dean of students to discuss student concerns.

Two students at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville also reported to campus officials that a swastika was drawn on the doors of their residence hall recently.

Administrators at both schools asked students to share any information with campus authorities that may help the investigation. They’re also offering counseling services.

The presidents of both schools also wrote messages to students, but some are critical of the response.

Dov Wilker, regional director of the American Jewish Committee Atlanta, was glad the UGA president, Jere Morehead, described the incidents as “displays of hate” but believed he should have also called them antisemitic.

Federal officials in October found that religious-based hate crime on college campuses has increased significantly nationwide over the past decade.

Georgia is one of a handful of states that does not have a hate crimes law. Some say the recent crimes show that one is needed.

“I feel like it’s a deterrent that would prevent a student from acting that way,” said Feldman, who is president of the Georgia Israel Public Affairs Committee, a student group.

The Georgia house of representatives passed a bill earlier this year that would have created stiffer penalties for people who commit crimes based on hate. However, the bill stalled in the senate after some lawmakers questioned its effectiveness.

San Francisco State has always been a tough place to attend college.

It is certainly not an Ivy Legaue campus. It is today and always has been a working class people’s university. One unmistakable change is the higher tuition and cost of housing.

It was a fiery time on campus when the longest student strike, four months, shut down the campus in late 1968 and into 1969.

Even though nothing like that depressing event has recurred, San Francisco State has always been in the forefront of political and cultural movements.

Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle – 11.29.2019

Morale at San Francisco State University has at times been as gray as the fog rolling in off the ocean. Strained relations between students and the administration. Tension among ethnic groups. Resentment within faculty.

Racial and ethnic issues have ripped through the campus that recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the country’s only College of Ethnic Studies, born of student demands for diversity.

In March, after three years of acrimony and court fights, Jewish students reached a legal settlement with administrators, whom they had accused of tolerating anti-Semitism. The students sued the university and Associate Professor Rabab Abdulhadi, director of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies, in 2017 after pro-Palestinian classmates shouted down Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat in 2016. In turn, Abdulhadi sued the university in state and federal court this year, claiming discrimination. The university denied the allegations, and a trial in the federal case has been set for 2021.

There are other sources of tension. When then President Leslie Wong announced cuts to the College of Ethnic Studies in 2016 because of a shortfall, angry students staged a hunger strike. Hundreds more confronted the administration and booed the president even as he vowed to find the money elsewhere. The college’s former dean, Kenneth Monteiro, has pursued legal actions against the university since 2017, saying administrators wrongly blamed him for the troubles.

Meanwhile, complaints by black instructors about racial bullying from white instructors are a perennial problem, said the union’s Martel.

Since arriving, new President Lynn Mahoney has met with the Muslim Students Association, the General Union of Palestinian Students, and with Jewish students from Hillel. She had lunch with La Raza students and sat down with the Black Student Union, among others.

“We have to make all students feel welcome and safe,” she said.

But a warming trend is taking hold on the campus of nearly 29,000 students — and many credit their new president, Lynn Mahoney, a former provost of Cal State Los Angeles and now San Francisco State’s 14th president. She arrived this semester — the university’s first permanent female president — and replaced Leslie Wong, who retired after seven years.

“Hi, I’m Lynn Mahoney, university president. Nice to meet you!” the slender woman with short, dark hair said the other day as she approached a woman in the student services center and stuck out her hand.

Colette Cowan, an outreach specialist preparing to retire after 36 years of helping applicants, wasn’t about to waste the opportunity when Mahoney asked how many campus tours students lead each year.

“Not enough,” Cowan told the president. “If we had more resources, they could do more. Students need employment. We really need to give them hours so they can survive in the city.”

Mahoney, 55, listened and nodded. She likes to wander around campus each week with different guides, getting to know people. On this warm fall morning, she greeted students on Malcolm X Plaza before entering the Student Union.

“She seems interested in listening to us and working with us,” said James Martel, who often sees a dispirited side of campus as head of the faculty union that helps aggrieved instructors. “Even if it’s just a honeymoon period, I’ll happily take it.”

Student leaders say they’ve met with Mahoney three times already — at her request.

“She said, ‘I need students’ voices all around,’” said student body President Preyansh Kotecha, a computer science major. “That was a big eye-opener.”

Nancy Gerber is also pleased. As president of the Academic Senate and chair of the chemistry and biochemistry department, Gerber has the ear of professors. She’s impressed by Mahoney’s ability to join in academic discussions — not always an administrator’s forte. “She knows data and research around student success. That’s really, really welcome,” Gerber said.

A New Yorker, Mahoney is the daughter of a salesman and a mom who returned to college in her 40s to earn a computer science degree. As a child, Mahoney sometimes joined her mother in class — but never expected to go to college because the professors spoke too quickly.

But she did go, earning a bachelor’s degree in American Studies from Stanford and a doctorate in history from Rutgers.

“I was going to be a history professor,” said Mahoney, who did that, specializing in U.S. and women’s history, feminism, race and ethnicity.

At SF State, where Mahoney earns $367,690, with a $60,000 housing allowance, she’ll also oversee the legal settlement with Jewish students. Its requirements include hiring a coordinator of Jewish Student Life, assessing its anti-discrimination policies, promoting “equity on the basis of religious identity” and installing a tolerance mural designed by students of differing viewpoints.

“I sense a much calmer campus climate since Dr. Mahoney’s arrival,” said Marc Dollinger, a Jewish studies professor. He praised not only the hiring of the Jewish Life coordinator — done last semester under Wong — but also Mahoney’s hiring of a Muslim Student Life coordinator this semester. “I believe the purpose of a university, and SF State in particular, is to engage difference.”

Abdulhadi, meanwhile, showed Mahoney a profanity-riddled death threat she received and described to the president her success in building her academic program amid what she described as an anti-Muslim atmosphere.

“It is our hope that President Mahoney will change (the) toxic campus environment that has been characterized by Islamophobia, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism and discrimination, bullying, and smearing attempts,” she said.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-State-s-new-president-Lynn-Mahoney-makes-14870810.php#photo-18678063

Great Thanksgiving commentary

The Guardian. Joshua David Stein – Originally published 11.19.2015

Thanksgiving celebrates all that our country holds dear: gluttony, sloth and avarice

Already the belts across America are being loosened, and the turkeys brought to slaughter. In anticipation of upcoming familial discord, the Ativan is flowing and the couches of therapists – whose uncomfortable throw pillows one wants to cast aside but which one worries are actually subtle psychological experiments – are occupied.

Thanksgiving is in the offing and it’s the closest thing the US has to an annual collective freak-out.

Yet of all the holidays we’ve turned into festooned tent-poles that hold up the flaccid fabric of our lives, Thanksgiving seems to offer the most promise. Christmas is pure tinsel cupidity. Valentine’s Day is a pinko infantilizing conspiracy. Halloween is heaven for candy companies, hell for everyone else. Memorial Day utterly fails to strum any mystic chords of memory, and Labor Day is simply the end of summer. Neither the fallen nor workers are a match for barbecue.

Only Thanksgiving – which has no baked-in retail component, brooks no costumes, and hardly requires historical recall – has the potential to be great.

But is it? Not even close.

Historically, Thanksgiving celebrated the friendship between the Wampanoag of what is now Massachusetts, and the Puritans of Plymouth who came together for a three-day harvest feast in the autumn of 1621. Setting aside the fact that that friendship was repaid in genocide, the impulse to take a moment to give thanks is still a lovely one.

Thanksgiving has become a parodic feast, a celebration of gluttony and discord. As much as turkey has become an integral part of the holiday – a historically inaccurate menu choice, by the way – so too has the eating of it until one is so full one collapses into a deep slumber.

The New York Times estimated average caloric intake to be around 2,500 calories though also admitted it could actually reach up to the oft-bandied about and grossly prodigal 4,500 figure. Thanksgiving is an amateur eating contest, where wannabe Joey Chestnuts and Kobayashi’s make like living taxidermy and turn their bodies into ballotines.

It’s not simply the shocking volume of what is consumed, but the corporate nature of the menu as well. The table is set with the bounty powered by Big Food: Stove Top stuffing, Ocean Spray cranberry sauce, Butterball turkey. The national recipes are written with trademarks appended. Our culinary constitution is now trademarked.

Far from the white-on-white purity of Norman Rockwell’s famous painting, Freedom from Want, today’s classics are the culmination of furious lobbying. Each dish from the cranberry sauce to the mashed potatoes to that golden bird comes with its own well-heeled advocacy group, from the National Turkey Federation to the US Potato Board.

And much of what we’ll eat is produced by a handful of Big Food corporations like Sysco, Hormel and the latest behemoth, the Kraft Heinz Company, a company with $28bn of yearly revenue. It’s a long way from Plymouth.

After the gorging, racked by indigestion and heartburn, we find places to be horizontal: shelves, sofas, the floor. We leave it to whomever is the weakest among us to slowly gather the soiled dishes, while some trundle to the bedroom and others to the den. The television is turned on and football begins. Aggressive graphics. Loud print pocket squares. Shouting. And thus another sordid tradition kicks off: vegging out.

This is, in fact, the closest many of us will get to vegetables on Thanksgiving: sitting in front of the television to watch football for hours. Though there is only 11 minutes of playing time per game, the broadcasts begin at 12.30pm and end well past 11pm. We who are food-stuffed unto coma watch as men hurl themselves at each other until they, too, end up comatose.

By now it has become clear that the tackles we cheer rend not just ligaments but brain cells from brain cells, causing life-long damage. By now it has become clear that the football culture we applaud overlooks and enables terrific abuse. That so many Americans let Roger Goodell, that bumbling ass, into their homes augurs poorly for our national security.

And as the last game winds down – the Bears beating the Packers or vice versa – and the clock strikes midnight, we rouse ourselves and lumber to our cars. Is it to home we go? No. This is Black Friday, the biggest sales day in America. So we line up, wild-eyed and bloodshot, in the parking lots of Walmart and Best Buy and Target to wait for dawn.

And when dawn comes, we push each other with tidal ferocity. We clamor and scrum. We kill each other for a discount. Literally, we do.

According to Black Friday Death Count, there have been seven deaths and 98 injuries in the last decade. This year will be no different.

On Friday morning, we’ll awake to headlines of riots at big box stores, of an increase in traffic accidents, and with a hangover. Padding around in our socks and sweatpants, gassy, we’ll peer into the cold, bright fridge at the vast expanse of tinfoil and Saran wrap. And maybe then, in the dawn, we’ll take a moment to consider what a travesty Thanksgiving has become.

And we’ll say, simply, no thanks.

 

Does this protest in favor of the disgraced and indicted Prime Minister seem familiar?

Trump and Netanyahu are both shameless, selfish and corrupt men who will hang onto power by any means necessary.

TImes of Israel 11.27.2019

Much-hyped rally to back Netanyahu against state legal system draws relatively small crowd, and very few lawmakers; starts on a conciliatory note but quickly turns dark

 

Walking into the square alongside this reporter, Ari Vaknin, a smiling “pro-Bibi, pro-Likud, pro-right” father of four from Beit Shemesh, who came to the rally with his whole family, said he saw the event as something of a civics lesson for his 11- to 19-year-old children.