Day: December 16, 2023

The Daily Mail Harvard received its lowest number of early admission applications in years following a spew of controversies surrounding anti-Semitism and plagiarism. The Ivy League university saw a 17 percent drop in applications from students applying through early admission with 7,921 total candidates, compared to last year’s 9,553. The decline doesn’t come as a shock to many following the scandals that the prestigious institution has been wrapped up in over the past few months. READ THE FULL STORY 

SF Gate More than 400 protesters gathered at Google’s San Francisco office on Thursday to demand the tech company cut ties with Israel’s government. Occupying a block of Market Street, attendees chanted, held up Palestinian flags, waved signs and listened to speeches by Google workers. Activists from the Palestinian Youth Movement and Jewish Voice for Peace also spoke, advocating for an Israel-Hamas cease-fire and an end to what they called Israel’s “apartheid regime.”  The focus of the protest was Google and Amazon’s Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract with Israel, launched in 2021, that provides the country with local data centers and cloud computing services. At various points in the two-hour event, speakers led the crowd in chants accusing Google of complicity in a genocide. READ THE FULL STORY                   

The New York Post  Half a century ago, George Orwell, writing on literary censorship, wrote that “unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.” That dynamic now broadly extends to an opaque network of government agencies and self-proclaimed anti-misinformation groups that have repressed online speech. There’s no official ban on discussing the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines or criticizing American involvement in the Ukraine-Russia war, but editors and journalists have realized that writing on such topics can come at a cost.  READ THE FULL STORY                     

Daily Caller Leaked amateur pornography shows a congressional staffer having anal sex with an unknown man in the Senate hearing room, video obtained by the Daily Caller shows. The alleged staffer can also be seen in a photo, naked on all fours, looking back at the camera on the table where Senators often sit to ask questions during a hearing. It appears to be unprotected sex. A source identified the room to the Daily Caller as Senate room Hart 216- The Judiciary Room. The Caller blurred out his face because his identity has not been confirmed. READ THE FULL STORY

New York Post An extremist Michigan cleric whose hate-filled sermons were said to have inspired the London Bridge terrorist attack has called on American Muslims to wage Jihad against the “infidel West” — and blamed the US led by “senile Pharaoh” Biden for what he called a “genocide in Palestine.” Ahmad Musa Jibril, 51, a radical Islamist preacher who was born in Dearborn, is seen in videos posted on social media arguing that Muslims in the US should turn away from what he described as a watered-down “American-Zionist Islam” that ignores the idea of Jihad. “Yes, there is holy war in Islam, it is Jihad,” Jibril lectured in one clip posted on X by an account associated with the fanatical imam.  READ THE FULL STORY        

Breitbart News Harvard University may intend to reduce the proportion of Jews in its student body to 1-2 percent, roughly the Jewish share of the U.S. population, according to a newsletter published by a new group of Jewish alumni of the institution. In a “December update,” the newly-formed “Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance” reported Friday (original emphasis): We have seen data that suggest that the Jewish population at the College has declined from 20-25 percent in the 1990s-2000s to 5-7 percent today, but that almost all that decline occurred in recent years. We have heard from multiple sources at the University that it is the official, undisclosed policy of the school to drive down Jewish admissions to 1-2 percent of the student body, proportionately matching Jews’ percentage of the U.S. population. This violates basic meritocratic principles and recent Supreme Court jurisprudence. Like the shameful Jewish quotas in Harvard’s past, current limits mimic the Soviets, who used similar tactics to limit Jewish access to education. The purported 2 percent quota would go much further than the 15 percent Jewish quota then-Harvard President Abbott Lowell tried to impose a century ago, when the proportion of Jewish students at Harvard was over 20 percent. READ THE FULL…