Friday, November 06, 2009
Jihad at Fort Hood
that you are a Palestinian.
You will be in good company. Read about one of America's finest new
Palestinians here:
Jihad at Fort Hood – by Robert Spencer
Posted By Robert Spencer On November 6, 2009 @ 2:23 am In FrontPage | 7
Comments
Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, murdered twelve people
and wounded twenty-one inside Fort Hood in Texas yesterday, while,
according to eyewitnesses, "shouting something in Arabic while he was
shooting." Investigators are scratching their heads and expressing
puzzlement about why he did it. According to NPR [1], "the motive behind
the shootings was not immediately clear, officials said." The Washington
Post [2] agreed: "The motive remains unclear, although some sources
reported the suspect is opposed to U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq
and upset about an imminent deployment." The Huffington Post spun faster,
asserting that "there is no concrete reporting as to whether Nidal Malik
Hasan was in fact a Muslim or an Arab."
Yet there was, and what's more, Major Hasan's motive was perfectly clear
but it was one that the forces of political correctness and the Islamic
advocacy groups in the United States have been working for years to
obscure. So it is that now that another major jihad terror attack has taken
place on American soil, authorities and the mainstream media are at a loss
to explain why it happened – and the abundant evidence that it was a jihad
attack is ignored.
Nidal Malik Hasan was born in Virginia but didn't think of himself as an
American: on a form he filled out at the Muslim Community Center in Silver
Spring, Maryland, he gave his nationality not as "American" but as
"Palestinian." A mosque official found that curious, saying: "I don't know
why he listed Palestinian. He was not born in Palestine."
Center. He is a graduate of Virginia Tech and has a doctorate in psychiatry
from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. While there,
NPR reports, Hasan was "put on probation early in his postgraduate work"
and was "disciplined for proselytizing about his Muslim faith with patients
and colleagues."
He was a staff psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for six
years before transferring to Fort Hood earlier this year. While at Walter
Reed, he was a "very devout" member of and daily visitor to the Muslim
Community Center in Silver Spring. Faizul Khan, a former imam at the
Center, expressed puzzlement over Hasan's murders: "To know something like
this happened, I don't know what got into his mind. There was nothing
extremist in his questions. He never showed any frustration….He never
showed any remorse or wish for vengeance on anybody."
So he identified himself as Palestinian and was a devout Muslim – so what?
These things, of course, have no significance if one assumes that Islam is
a Religion of Peace and that when a devout Muslim reads the Koran's many
injunctions to wage war against unbelievers, he knows that they have no
force or applicability for today's world. Unfortunately, all too many
Muslims around the world demonstrate in both their words and their deeds
that they take such injunctions quite seriously. And Nidal Hasan gave some
indications that he may have been among them.
On May 20, 2009, a man giving his name as "NidalHasan" posted this defense
of suicide bombing [3] (all spelling and grammar as it is in the original):
There was a grenade thrown amongs a group of American soldiers. One of the
soldiers, feeling that it was to late for everyone to flee jumped on the
grave with the intention of saving his comrades. Indeed he saved them. He
inentionally took his life (suicide) for a noble cause i.e. saving the
lives of his soldier. To say that this soldier committed suicide is
inappropriate. Its more appropriate to say he is a brave hero that
sacrificed his life for a more noble cause. Scholars have paralled this to
suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help
save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers. If one suicide bomber can kill 100
enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered
a strategic victory. Their intention is not to die because of some despair.
The same can be said for the Kamikazees in Japan. They died (via crashing
their planes into ships) to kill the enemies for the homeland. You can call
them crazy i you want but their act was not one of suicide that is despised
by Islam. So the scholars main point is that "IT SEEMS AS THOUGH YOUR
INTENTION IS THE MAIN ISSUE" and Allah (SWT) knows best.
Of course, it may not be the same Nidal Hasan. But there is more. One of
his former colleagues, Col. Terry Lee, recalled Hasan saying statements to
the effect of "Muslims have the right to rise up against the U.S.
military"; "Muslims have a right to stand up against the aggressors"; and
even speaking favorably about people who "strap bombs on themselves and go
into Times Square."
Maybe he just snapped, perhaps under the pressure of his imminent
deployment to Iraq. But it's noteworthy that if he did, he snapped in
exactly the same way that several other Muslims in the U.S. military have
snapped in the past. In April 2005, a Muslim serving in the U.S. Army,
Hasan Akbar, was convicted of murder for killing two American soldiers and
wounding fourteen in a grenade attack in Kuwait. AP reported: "Prosecutors
say Akbar told investigators he launched the attack because he was
concerned U.S. troops would kill fellow Muslims in Iraq. They said he
coolly carried out the attack to achieve 'maximum carnage' on his comrades
in the 101st Airborne Division."
And Hasan's murderous rampage resembles one that five Muslim men in New
Jersey tried to carry out at Fort Dix in New Jersey in 2007, when they
plotted to enter the U.S. Army base and murder as many soldiers as they
could.
That was a jihad plot. One of the plotters, Serdar Tatar, told an FBI
informant late in 2006: "I'm gonna do it….It doesn't matter to me, whether
I get locked up, arrested, or get taken away, it doesn't matter. Or I die,
doesn't matter, I'm doing it in the name of Allah." Another plotter,
Mohamad Shnewer, was caught on tape saying, "They are the ones, we are
going to put bullets in their heads, Allah willing."
Nidal Hasan's statements about Muslims rising up against the U.S. military
aren't too far from that, albeit less graphic. The effect of ignoring or
downplaying the role that Islamic beliefs and assumptions may have played
in his murders only ensures that – once again – nothing will be done to
prevent the eventual advent of the next Nidal Hasan.
[4]
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Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article:
http://frontpagemag.com/2009/11/06/jihad-at-fort-hood-by-robert-spencer/
URLs in this post:
[1] According to NPR:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120138496
[2] Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/05/AR2009110503467.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR
[3] a man giving his name as "NidalHasan" posted this defense of suicide
bombing: http://www.scribd.com/NidalHasan
2. There is one interesting twist (well, more than one) to the recent
story in Israel of the American Jewish killer Jack Teitel getting arrested.
That is the suddent unexpected incarnation in the Israeli mainstream media
of the "T" word, "terrorist."
As you know, the media outside Israel has for years signaled their support
for Arab terrorism against Jews by always referring to the murderers as
"activists" and militants," as if they were marchers to save the whales.
Most of the Israeli mainstream media followed suit.
Until Teitel was apprehended. There is not a single news story in Israel
about Teitel that does not refer to him as a terrorist.
He is clearly a killer and he may be mentally insane. Is he a terrorist?
Well, to annoy my leftist friends I have been referring to him as an
activist and a militant.
The other interesting thing is that there are countless Op-Eds in the
Israeli mainstream media denouncing all rightists, all Orthodox, and all
settlers as murderers, as those ultimately guilty of the crimes of people
like Teitel, Yigal Amir, and Baruch Goldstein. If I had a shekel for each
such media article, I could buy Lev Leviev's empire.
The great amusement in this is that the very same people writing such
McCarthyist nonsense would also be the very first people to rush forward
and insist that the hundreds of thousands of victims of Islamist terrorism,
including last night's jihad at Fort Hood, should definitely not be grounds
for generalizing about the barbarism of Arabs or Muslims!
Tel Aviv University - Uri Hadar (Dept of Psychology) claims the "vengeful"
Israeli "unconscious" wants a "Palestinian Holocaust"
Israel's "attack on Gaza" the previous winter, Hadar told the audience, had
"little to do with security" (as if 8000 rockets and mortars fell on London
people would just yawn). What, then, he asked there, "enables Jewish
brutality toward Palestinians?" Since Israel, he explained, has never
properly mourned the Holocaust, the society has a "vengeful
unconscious"--and takes it all out on the innocent, bewildered
Palestinians. Israelis say (or used to say, back in the 1950s) that Jews
will never again go "like sheep to the slaughter"; so the Palestinians,
insists Hadar, are their "sacrificial lamb." Indeed, "a full-blown
Palestinian Holocaust is part of the unconscious [Israeli] itinerary."
Tel Aviv University Psych Prof Uri Hadar – Inventor of Blood Libels
by Joel Amitai
4/11/2009
In 2005, the year Israel removed every last soldier and settler from Gaza
in the disengagement, 179 rockets were fired at Israel from Gaza. In 2006,
the number went up to 946; in 2007 it was 896; and in 2008 it went up to
1752. (These figures don't include mortar fire, sniper fire, incursions and
kidnappings, and so on; the combined rocket-mortar total for 2008 was about
3000.)
During October 27-28, 2008, two months before Israel finally launched the
Gaza military operation in response to even further escalation in rocket
and mortar fire during December, Uri Hadar, professor of psychology at Tel
Aviv University, presented a paper at a conference in Gaza City. The
conference was titled "Siege and Mental Health…Walls vs. Bridges." Prof.
Hadar's own "research" paper was called "The Siege Without and the Siege
Within: An Israeli Perspective." In it--discussing what he called "the
siege"--he never once mentioned the rocket fire or any other form of
violent aggression against Israel from Gaza. In other words, he walked into
the Hamas' den and said the party perpetrating a siege was…Israel.
Hadar is married to Mirjam Hadar, who cofounded the extremist New Profile
organization that coaches young Israelis in using lies and tricks to obtain
illegal draft exemptions (her home was raided by the authorities last
January). Husband Uri said in his presentation, "The siege situation [in
Gaza] is only the most extreme case in which Israeli policies aim to
enclose large Palestinian populations and separate them from the rest of
the world." Speaking to Gazan Arabs who have been indoctrinated since they
were toddlers to see Israelis--and Jews generally--as the incarnation of
evil, Prof. Hadar reinforced their hatred and delivered the goods, stating:
"In Gaza, we have seen some of the most unrestrained actions of the Israeli
army, such as dropping a one-ton bomb in a residential area or not
hesitating to shoot at innocent children on the beach, by way of
'collateral damage.'"
Hadar didn't mention, of course, that a one-ton bomb was dropped (in 2002)
in order to kill Salah Shehade, then the central Hamas planner of terror
operations, responsible for the murder of hundreds of Israelis and known at
the time to be planning even larger-scale attacks. Nor did he mention that
this assassination became a cause cיlטbre precisely because it was the only
Israeli assassination of a major Hamas figure that took a sizable civilian
toll (of fourteen people); in all other cases the pinpoint strikes either
minimized or totally avoided collateral civilian losses.
But if in this case Prof. Hadar engaged in mendacity by omission, his
reference to "not hesitating to shoot at innocent children on the beach" is
either gross ignorance or pure slander against the country that funds his
cushy university job. The case he is referring to is one in which Israel
was accused initially of having fired Israeli artillery responsible for a
2006 explosion on a Gaza beach that killed seven Palestinian civilians. It
was subsequently established that there was no Israeli artillery fire at or
towards the beach on that day. But why get Prof. Hadar tangled up in facts
when he can demonstrate his anti-Israel bona fides by defaming his own
country to a pro-terror audience.
Two months later the Gaza War (or Operation Cast Lead) broke out. It will
come as no surprise that Prof. Hadar--the same chap who earlier gave a talk
on "the siege" in which he never mentioned a single rocket fired from
Gaza--saw the whole war as a brutal Israeli attack. In September 2009, he
and three coauthors published an article called "Psychoactive and Operation
Cast Lead." The title refers to an organization, in which the authors are
members, whose full name is Psychoactive--Mental Health Professionals for
Human Rights, and which "includes both Israeli Jewish and Palestinian
mental health professionals and maintains extensive connections with
colleagues in Gaza and the West Bank…."
The article describes the travails of the Israeli Jewish members of
Psychoactive during the war--which it exclusively refers to as "the
attack," i.e., by Israel. On the Israeli side, "the indifference, and
sometimes hostility, with which we were met by the [pro-self-defense]
Israeli consensus, our relatives, friends, neighbors…led to a growing sense
of helplessness and isolation which…accompanied us throughout the weeks of
the attack and beyond, until this very moment: a sense of deep
disconnection from the Israeli collective."
But on the Palestinian side it wasn't much better. Hadar and friends write:
"Mostly, our attempts to express empathy, too, for our own suffering--that
of Jewish Israelis in the south who had been under attack for years from
Qassam rockets and Jewish Israelis whose lives have been disrupted by fear
of terror attacks--such attempts were on the whole seen [by Palestinian
interlocutors] as a bid to justify the attack on Gaza. The fact that we
were activists speaking out against the attack did not really count in our
favour: we were perceived as part of the attacking entity and hence as an
address for expressions of frustration and outrage….
"…by and large, our Palestinian colleagues challenged Jewish hegemony in
Israel and thought that Israel should stop defining itself as a Jewish
state as a condition for coexistence and civil equality.
"Our listserve during this period also became a source of alternative
information….We were exposed to pictorial material which, among other
things, compared the activities of the Israeli army in Gaza with those of
the Nazis against the Jews. This evoked hard feelings among the Jewish
participants…. From time to time the Jewish participants came up with calls
for Palestinians to express their disavowal of Hamas or their recognition
of the suffering of the Jewish citizens of Sderot or the Gaza area. Such
demands were perceived as non-legitimate by most Palestinians….
"…We needed to confirm our humanity and morality through its appreciation
by the Palestinian participants. When this did not quite happen, we found
ourselves, again, coping with a sense of isolation and loneliness."
It is not hard to see through the fog of verbiage here: Hadar and his
associates, incapable of loyalty to or identification with their own
society even in wartime, seek acceptance from their "Palestinian
colleagues" by demonstrating to them that they are "good Israelis" who
condemn Israel for carrying out an "attack." No need to mention or condemn
the eight-year rain of Hamas rockets on Jewish children. The peace-loving
Palestinian "colleagues" respond by demanding Israel's demise, likening
Israelis to Nazis, supporting Hamas, expressing total indifference to the
Israeli victims of rocket fire, and incomprehensively refusing to acquiesce
in "confirming" the "humanity and morality" of Hadar and associates.
Did this kindle any suspicion in the minds of Hadar and his friends' minds
that the ambitions of the Palestinian "peace partners" are less than
peaceful? Or that Israel's use of force against terrorists was fully
justified? Of course not. Why that would expose them to suspicions of
being Zionists!
Now if Hadar writing elsewhere at least seemed to express a modicum of
sympathy for Israeli suffering, all such pretense vanished the next month
when, again on his own, he gave a talk at a conference of London
University's Birkbeck Institute. The conference was called "Sites of
Conflict: Psycho-Political Resistance in Israel-Palestine." Hadar's address
had the imposing title "Burning Memories: Sacrifice and the Unconscious in
History."
Israel's "attack on Gaza" the previous winter, Hadar told the audience, had
"little to do with security" (as if 8000 rockets and mortars fell on London
people would just yawn). What, then, he asked there, "enables Jewish
brutality toward Palestinians?" Since Israel, he explained, has never
properly mourned the Holocaust, the society has a "vengeful
unconscious"--and takes it all out on the innocent, bewildered
Palestinians. Israelis say (or used to say, back in the 1950s) that Jews
will never again go "like sheep to the slaughter"; so the Palestinians,
insists Hadar, are their "sacrificial lamb." Indeed, "a full-blown
Palestinian Holocaust is part of the unconscious [Israeli] itinerary."
A genocidal Nazi-like Holocaust being planned by the Jews! Nothing less,
all from Tel Aviv University Professor Hadar. Leaping on the anti-Semitic
bandwagon, Hadar proclaims that Israelis are Nazis, planning the next
Holocaust, but of Arabs. Amidst a storm of risible psychobabble, a
pathologically pseudo-academic libels his own country in the most
disgusting terms before anti-Semitic pro-terror forums -- in Gaza City and
London. And all the while getting paid for it by Tel Aviv University with
the hard-earned cash ponied up by the Israeli taxpayer.
Joel Amitai is an independent researcher and filmmaker. Reach him at
jamitai40@gmail.com.
University of Utrecht, Netherlands: Former Technion Linguistics/Computer
Professor Yoad Winter denounces Israeli "terrorism"
By Lee Kaplan, www.Isracamapus.org.il
6/11/2009
Yoad Winter is a Linguistics and Mathematics expert who works with
computers, formerly from the Technion in Israel, now employed as an
academic lecturer at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. I have
elsewhere commented on the Linguistics department at Tel Aviv University
and how Israeli linguists denounce and vilify Israel. Some of the
anti-Israel crowd in the field of linguistics were and are groupies of the
notorious neo-Stalinist Linguistic "guru" and anti-Semite Noam Chomsky. The
late Tanya Reinhart, another well-known anti-Israel basher, was a disciple
of Chomsky. Apparently Yoad Winter himself is a disciple of Reinhart,
following in her footsteps after having studied under her.
Winter specializes in what could be called Boolean semantics, combining
language with mathematical computational models to study the form and
interpretation of language. The computing dictionary describes "Boolean" as
"The type of an expression with two possible values, "true" and "false, as
a variable of Boolean type or a function with Boolean arguments or result.
The most common Boolean functions are AND, OR and NOT."
Logic is an important part of Boolean algebra, used by Winter in his
computational models about language. Again, the computing dictionary
defines this logic as a "deductive logical system, usually applied to
classes, in which, under the operations of intersection and symmetric
difference, classes are treated as algebraic quantities."
But when it comes to true or false values regarding Israel's right to exist
or defend itself from the Arab and Muslim fascists seeking to destroy the
Jewish state, truth and falsehood seem irrelevant to Winter.
Yoad Winter, now in the comfort and safety of the Netherlands, castigates
Israel for defending itself from Arab terrorism and threats of
annihilation. Simply put, it's all Israel's fault, no ANDs, ORs or NOTs
about it.
Yoad Winter belongs to a growing crowd of anti-Israel Israelis living
outside Israel, and is part of a group called Gate48 in Amsterdam. During
the war in Gaza he and his fellow Israeli academics and fellow travelers in
Gate48 wrote the following to the Dutch government:
"We, a group of Israelis living in the Netherlands, call on you to publicly
disapprove of the brutal military operation claiming the life of
Palestinian civilians in Gaza. We urge you to intervene in this conflict by
sending a message to the Israeli government, which denounces the attacks on
Gaza, and insists on an immediate ceasefire. We are following the reports
from Gaza with anger, shame and frustration at the inability of the
international community to stop the violence. Since the beginning of this
operation approximately 700 people, among them more than 200 children were
killed. 700,000 Palestinians are living without water and nearly a million
without electricity. Israel blocks the delivery of sufficient humanitarian
aid, which has resulted in starvation, and a lack of proper medical
assistance. We cannot find any justification for such war crimes against
civilians."
The bulk of the "700 people killed" (ultimately 1,300 claimed by the UN by
war's end) were proven to have been armed terrorists from Hamas and Islamic
Jihad, who used the civilian population (including children) on many
occasions as human shields.
In addition, obviously 700,000 Arabs were not living without water, nor one
million without electricity. Israel did not block delivery of humanitarian
aid and the population in Gaza is and never has been starving. Those are
the inventions of the International Solidarity Movement, a Hamas-supporting
movement, and similar outfits, which consistently try to get the West to
believe that Gaza is "under siege" because Israel controls the borders to
stop weapons smuggling from Iran and Syria. The ISM has a strong presence
in the Netherlands.
Over 1,300 Israeli trucks transported humanitarian aid to the civilians of
the Gaza Strip, passing through the different crossings during Operation
Cast Lead. In addition, 1,711 liters of diesel fuel for heating purposes
were supplied, together with 96 thousand liters of diesel fuel for
transportation purposes, 234 tons of natural gas, and 282 thousand liters
of diesel fuel. Throughout Cast Lead Israel coordinated the evacuation of
382 injured Palestinians from the combat zones, in addition to 1,150
uninvolved Palestinians from those zones. Israel also facilitated the
entrance of 17 fire trucks to different fire centers, and of several
professional teams that took care of the repair of infrastructure problems
combat zones. The evacuation of 460 Palestinian foreign nationals from the
Gaza Strip to Israel through the Erez Crossing was also facilitated. The
officers of the Coordination and Communication Headquarters also
coordinated the transfer of 500 trucks and 131 ambulances from the northern
to the southern Gaza Strip.
Yoad Winter and his friends were kind enough to acknowledge that missiles
were fired on Sderot and southern Israel and graciously suggested that this
was "unacceptable." But they did not mention in their letter that this had
been ongoing for 8 years, with over 4,000 rockets fired on Israeli children
and other civilians who were not within the safety of the Netherlands.
Their glib attitude of tolerance towards this mass terrorism is itself
unacceptable.
"These must be brought to an end through a real and viable long-term
political solution," Winter writes. But have Winter and his Gate48 buddies
even read the Hamas charter that openly calls for the annihilation of world
Jewry and the unconditional end of Israel as a Jewish state?
While still at the Technion, Yoad Winter signed a petition (initiated in
the UK, an EU country again, no less) accusing Israel of interfering with
"academic freedom" in the West Bank and Gaza. According to the petition,
"It is clear that there can be no real academic freedom in higher education
unless it is possible to reach the institutions where one studies, teaches,
and carries out research. Academics within the State of Israel are able to
do this, but those working in the higher education institutions in the
Occupied Palestinian Territories are not. There, checkpoints, blockades,
walls and fences prevent thousands of students and teachers from leading a
normal academic life, and lecturers with non-Palestinian passports, who
wish to teach in those institutions, are prevented from staying for long
enough to carry out meaningful continuous teaching."
Never mind that Israeli college students have been the victims of
Palestinian terror and never mind that Gaza and West Bank "universities"
are little more than terrorist training and indoctrination camps.
Yoad Winter surely knows that Hamas is part of the student government at
Bir Zeit University along with other terrorist groups and that Palestinian
colleges are used by the terrorist organizations. His objections to
checkpoints and the Security Fence, which not only protect Israeli Jews but
also Arab students, lack any Boolean logic.
6. Time for affirmative action for BOYS!!
The Lost Boys By RICHARD WHITMIRE (wall st journal)
This week, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced that it will
investigate whether colleges discriminate against women by admitting less
qualified men. It will strike many as odd to think that American men would
need such a leg up. From the men-only basketball games at the White House
to the testosterone club on Wall Street, we seem surrounded by male
dominance.
And yet, when looking to America's future—trying to spot the future
entrepreneurs and inventors—there's reason to be troubled by the flagging
academic performance among men. Nearly 58% of all those earning bachelor's
degrees are women. Graduate programs are headed in the same direction, and
the gender gaps at community colleges—where 62% of those earning two-year
degrees are female—are even wider.
Economists at both the Department of Education and the College Board agree
that, to ensure high future earnings, men and women have an equal need for
college degrees, and yet only women are getting that message. The numbers
are startling. This summer the Center for Labor Market Studies at
Northeastern University published the results of a study tracking the
students who graduated from Boston Public Schools in 2007. Their
conclusion: For every 167 females in four-year colleges, there were 100
males.
In theory, the surge in the number of educated women should make up for
male shortcomings when we're looking at the overall prospects for the
economy. But men and women are not the same. At the same levels of
education, women remain less inclined to roll the dice on risky business
start-ups or to grind out careers in isolated tech labs. Revenue generated
by women-owned businesses remains less than 5% of all revenue. And while
the number of women taking on economically important majors is rising,
women still earn only a fifth of the bachelor's degrees granted in physics,
computer science and engineering.
Why males don't seem to "get" the importance of a college education is a
mystery, especially considering the current collapse of jobs that
traditionally don't require post-high-school study. (Even "cash for
clunkers" isn't going to mark the return of car companies as a major
employer of uneducated men.) And who could miss the message of the
recession, where as many as 80% of the workers laid off have been male?
Too many boys arrive at their senior year of high school lacking both the
skills and aspirations that would get them into, and through, college. At a
typical state university, a gender gap of 10 percentage points in the
freshman class grows by five points by graduation day, as more men than
women drop out.
All this explains why colleges have been putting a thumb on the scale to
favor men in admissions. There just aren't enough highly qualified men to
go around. Determining that colleges practice discrimination doesn't take
much detective work. Higher acceptance rates for men show that colleges dig
deeper into their applicant pool to find them. The final proof: Freshman
class profiles reveal that the women, with their far higher high-school
grade point averages, are more academically qualified than the men.
Interviews with admissions officers reveal that the girls' essays sparkle
compared to the boys', and girls far outshine boys in extracurricular
activities as well.
The Commission on Civil Rights cited an example written about in U.S. News
& World Report in 2007: Virginia's University of Richmond was maintaining
its rough gender parity in men and women only by accepting women at a rate
13 percentage points lower than the men.
It would be patriotic to report that this discrimination against women is
carried out in the national economic interest of boosting graduates in key
math and science fields. But, in truth, it's really a social consideration.
Colleges simply want to avoid approaching the dreaded 60-40 female-male
ratio. At that point, men start to take advantage of their scarcity and
make social life miserable for the women by becoming "players" on the
dating scene.
The case to abolish male gender preferences is problematic. Most of those
male preferences are granted by private colleges, which consider themselves
on solid legal ground. (Some public colleges and universities also grant
those preferences at considerable legal risk, an indication of the depth of
the fear about broaching that 60-40 threshold.)
In truth, these gender preferences are a sideshow. The real issue is the
flagging academic interest among boys, a phenomenon that dates back only
about two decades. It's a new issue to most Americans but hotly debated in
countries such as England. So far, nobody has solved the boy mystery, but
some countries are years ahead of the U.S. Australia has had some success
with literacy-boosting programs for young boys. Until the code gets
cracked, there's a national economic interest in keeping those preferences
in place—just for a few more years.
—Mr. Whitmire is the author of the forthcoming book "Why Boys Fail."
