Here is an example:
I know the University of California at Irvine very well. It is a seven-minute drive from my home and congregation. I taught at their law school for six years and was one of their most popular professors. My subjects there were Remedies and Advanced Torts. Students begged to get into my class. I have documentation: six years of stellar student reviews. I was so popular that students persuaded the administration to allow me to create a brand-new course in American Law and Jewish Legal Issues, as a sort-of expansion beyond other courses on law of interest to Black and Muslim students. I worked 200 hours on preparing that course proposal. We went through all the channels. The course finally was approved by the deans. Students were ready to sign up. And then the course never was offered.
Nor was I ever allowed an opportunity to be considered for a tenure-track position. Rather, I was an adjunct, invited to teach courses on a temporary year-to-year basis, with no employee benefits. I was hired by the extreme-left Erwin Chemerinsky, the soft-spoken radical who backs packing the U.S. Supreme Court with as many leftist judges as needed to reverse the conservative majority. He knew I am a conservative and an Orthodox rabbi, and he would not consider me for tenure track.
I had all the qualifications for a tenure-track position: I had graduated from a nationally ranked Top 15 law school, UCLA Law School. Not only had I done Moot Court and made law review, but I even was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review. Not only had I spent time under a judge, but I clerked in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit for one of the nation’s top appellate judges and unquestionably the smartest, Danny J. Boggs of Louisville, Kentucky. Judge Boggs rose to be Chief Judge of the appellate circuit and even was on George H.W. Bush’s short list when he ultimately named Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Moreover, I had actual real-life law experience by litigating nearly a decade at two of the nation’s highest-rated law firms, JonesDay and Akin Gump. My clients included the biggest corporate names: Experian, AT&T, Samsung, and so many more.
I was actually overqualified to teach at the new law school. But I was a political conservative, so all that was nullified. Only years later did Erwin’s disgustingly corrupt and dishonest hiring practices become public knowledge. Watch this one-minute video, posted by Christopher Rufo, in which the churlish cheating Chemerinsky tells an entire class at University of Berkeley Law School that he proudly lies, defrauds, and covers up his dishonesty and bigotry when it comes to hiring or refusing faculty, based on race and ethnicity.
So I know UCI and how it operates, brainwashing students by enveloping them in an all-left environment. I still keep tabs on UCI, particularly its college and its School of Law. Several years ago, a bunch of Arab and Muslim students infamously disrupted a speech by Israel’s ambassador to America, Michael Oren. The thing is, Orange County still has enough of a conservative Republican presence not to stand for the garbage that goes on in Harvard and Cornell regions.
So, although the UCI college president wimped out, the District Attorney of Orange County brought criminal charges against eleven of the wild hooligans who disrupted Ambassador Oren. That gutsy move by the off-campus Orange County D.A. put an end to it, and no Arab Muslim UCI student ever again has done that. Yet, in that heated environment, the anti-Semitic Muslim Arab organization, CAIR, came out in support of the prosecuted 11 hooligans, and I was invited to debate a national CAIR leader in two televised debates: here and here.
The poison remains at UCI, and it reared its ugly head at this latest leftist anti-Israel brainwashing event titled: “Ask a UCI Professor: Israel-Palestine Conflict 101.”
That sounds academically fruitful, doesn’t it? “Ask a UCI Professor: Israel-Palestine Conflict 101.” Sounds like an opportunity to learn. But at UCI it is a scheme to brainwash.
The key: ask which professors. These were the four: A Muslim Arab who hates Israel. Another Muslim Arab who hates Israel. . . .
Hmmm. That calls for balance, does it not? And balance there was:
A Jewish professor who hates Israel. And another Jewish professor — this one an Israeli who has a long record of attacking Israel.
Imagine college kids coming to such a program. They hear one professor after another attack Israel, distort history, say things about Israel that are lies, things about a phony entity fraudulently called “Palestine” and about Arabs who fraudulently call themselves “Palestinians.” Lies about “colonialism” and “apartheid.” There is little concern that Jews have been murdered, slaughtered, butchered, beheaded, raped, with pregnant women cut open live and their fetuses torn out of them, then burned, and then the women burned, and babies burned in ovens. That is not the day’s concern.
Understand who these four snakes are:
One is sometimes Mark “Levine,” when he wants to attack Israel and intensify the attack by conveying that even a Jew hates Israel. And when he wants to hide the Jewish roots of which he is ashamed, he goes by Mark LeVine, professor of history, as though he is French. He ain’t French. He has been cited several times by Campus Watch for his Israel hate. As the late Prof. Steve Plaut wrote:
While hardly the only Israel-hating extremist at UCI, LeVine has built an academic career on it in a way that others have not. There are few anti-Israel or pro-jihad events at UCI in which he is not somehow involved. LeVine regularly addresses the anti-Semitic Hate Rallies at UCI organized by the student supporters of Hezb’Allah and al-Qaeda, in which Jews are denounced as “Zio-nazis.” LeVine rationalizes and defends the UCI intifada, and blames violence and tensions at the UCI campus on the malevolent Zionist Lobby. . . .
LeVine routinely organizes anti-Israel “scholarly conferences” at UCI, which are little more than anti-Israel indoctrination camps. No dissident pro-Israel opinion may be expressed in them. The standard LeVine format is to include Arab haters of Israel alongside Israeli far-leftist anti-Israel radicals, and then present the invariable bashing of Israel as the consensus position of both Jews and Arabs seeking peace. Among the Israelis who have been included in LeVine “panels” have been Oren Yiftachel, a geographer and fanatic anti-Zionist from Ben Gurion University, best known for his endless rants against Israeli “apartheid,” and Yoav Peled, a hard-core Stalinist Israeli professor of Political Science from Tel Aviv University.
And that is exactly what this program was: two Arab Muslims who hate Israel, a Jewish apostate, and an Israeli saboteur. One former UCI student even devoted an entire blog to exposing the lies against Israel taught by Mark Levine, he of the vine.
The Israeli, Liron Mor? More poison. She endorsed a hate Israel book.
And this!
She signed as “Liron Mor, Cornell Students for Justice in Palestine.”
On another Hate Israel list, she is #136 on “Elephant in the Room.” The aforementioned Mark LeVine is #1256:
That’s the second of the 2 Jewish presenters. Now for their “cousins”:
Yousuf al-Bulushiwrote this: “In World War II, the Nazis were the obvious aggressors, occupying a foreign land illegally. In present-day Israel and occupied Palestine, it is Israel that is the aggressor . . . .”
Thus, Israel is to be equated with Nazi Germany. Get it?
As for Meryem Kamil, she likewise has attacked Israel’s “occupation of Palestinian land.”
Imagine: a college student attends such a Hate Israel Fest without realizing that it is what it is. In their classes, they are assigned to read books that hate America and Israel on reading lists aimed at hating America. They teach such hate in history class, sociology class, philosophy class, political science class, even in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) courses.
The kids do not even know what is hitting them, that they are not being educated but instead are pawns being brainwashed. Then they come home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, transformed. They no longer are the children you brought to shul every weekend and holy day. The child you had circumcised. The one who loved Israel and the values you taught at home.
Your children are lost to you. You may never have them back. In the left-wing nationwide college invasion of the body snatchers, they have been seized, their minds and souls emptied.
That is what is going on today on America’s campuses. How is it done? You just read it.
A solution is to avoid college, but that is not a solution most Jewish parenrts with secular knowledge want for their children. Another option is Yeshiva University or Touro. An even better option can be learning in Israel, perhaps two years at a seminary and then a college there. The thing is, even with Israel, a parent has to be very careful which school and which program because many such places like Haifa University, Tel Aviv University, and Ben Gurion University are even worse than the American leftist jungle unless you know which courses to choose. So it is terribly hard for a parent to get it right. But at least be aware of what is out there.
Adapted by the writer for Arutz Sheva from a version of this article that first appeared here in The American Spectator.
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Rav Fischer’s memorable two televised debates with a national leader of CAIR, the leading anti-Semitic Arab Muslim body in the United States, can be found here and here.