ST. PAUL TEACHER WHO WAS FIRED FOR SPEAKING OUT AGAINST RACE-DRIVEN SCHOOL DISCIPLINE POLICY GETS OVER $500K IN LAWSUIT SETTLEMENT: And rightly so. It’s shocking to me how tenaciously the identity politics crew sticks to the narrative that everything is due to racism. And how flat out wrong they are about the facts underlying the school discipline issue.

TITLE IX FOR ME BUT NOT FOR THEE: With (1) all the Title IX “violations” that were never intended by Congress to be Title IX violations and (2) all the discrimination against men in scholarship and other program eligibility, it’s curious that the one area where women really are discriminated against (admissions) gets no attention.   Whatever …

WILL HISTORY REPEAT?: Roger Simon writes about how candidates are repeating the lie that an overly aggressive police officer murdered Michael Brown.   Historically the problem was mostly the other way around: Overly passive police displayed little interest in protecting black communities from crime. We seem to be re-entering the passive phase.

KURSAT PEKGOZ IS A WARRIOR FOR MEN’S RIGHTS ON CAMPUS: He has done wonderful work attempting to hold colleges and universities responsible for what is often blatant sex discrimination in scholarships and other programs. Is that why, by letter dated August 28, 2019, the University of Southern California has dismissed him from its Ph.D. program in English Language and Literature? I worry that it might be.

JOHN FUND:  Justin Trudeau, Identity Politics Hypocrite.

WELL, OF COURSE:  Big three ignore Kavanaugh correction.

POWERLINE ON THE SHAPE OF THE RACE:  Not only has Elizabeth Warren moved into second place in the polls, she is in first place among the candidates for “combined first and second.”  (Just don’t vote for her because  you think her well-known study on medical bankruptcy was fair and accurate.  It was neither.)

DOING PHYSICS WHILE BLACK:  John Rosenberg tells us about Stanford’s efforts to “diversify” physics.

JULIAN CASTRO  IS THE LATEST CANDIDATE TO LASH OUT AT  “ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM”:  Interestingly, when the Commission on Civil Rights went looking for evidence of racism in the location of coal ash dumps, it found that they were disproportionately located near whites.  It’s funny how the world is more complicated than our political slogans …

PETER WOOD ON THE NYT’S 1619 PROJECT:  Teaching that America Is Hopelessly Racist.

AEI HAS SOME POLLING DATA ON SCHOOL DISCIPLINE:  E.g.: Only 28% of adults support a federal policy prohibiting school from disciplining students of color at higher rates than other races, while 49% oppose.  The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights didn’t get the message. Fortunately, Secretary DeVos did.

THE COMMISSION WRITES ITS REPORTS FIRST AND GATHERS ITS FACTS LATER, IF AT ALL:  In 2015, the Commission on Civil Rights issued a ghastly report that purported to find egregious conditions at immigration detention facilities.  (Maggots in the food!  Torture!  Or … uh … rather something that seems to us a little bit like torture!)  Interestingly, the draft was largely written before that anyone from the Commission had visited any of these centers.

I hope you’ll agree that my dissent made it clear just how misinformed that report was.  

The Commission will release an “update” to that report in a few weeks.  This time its members didn’t bother to tour a facility at all.  I had to arrange a tour in my private capacity.

This post is a shout out to the ICE officers who gave me and a USD colleague of mine a tour yesterday morning of the Otay Mesa Detention Facility here in San Diego County.  Thank you!  

I won’t be able to write as much this time.  The Commission has seen to it that I won’t have enough time.  But I will get something out.

ON THIS DAY IN 1957: The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was signed into law by President Eisenhower. It was the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, and on the surface its purpose might seem relatively modest–to create two new institutions, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and the Commission on Civil Rights (on which I currently sit). But those institutions were extremely important to the history civil rights.  Without them it would have been a lot hard to eliminate Jim Crow.

Does the Commission on Civil Rights continue to serve a good purpose?  That’s a question for Congress, not me.  In 2007, I testified about the Commission to a Senate Committee celebrating the Act’s 50^th anniversary. Alas, I was much too optimistic about the Commission’s ability to turn out useful reports. My defense is that I was new to the Commission then. These days I’m tickled to death when I can just get it not to embarrass itself.

On the other hand, it’s not impossible for the Commission to do good work. While it’s always an uphill battle, we’ve done it a few times in recent years.

ON THIS DAY IN 1986, FLIGHT ATTENDANT NEERJA BHANOT DIED SAVING THE LIVES OF PASSENGERS ON PAN AM FLIGHT # 73: She was just two days short of her 22^nd birthday.

Flight #73 originated in Mumbai and was ultimately bound for New York. It was initially carrying 394 passengers, 9 infants, 19 Indian flight attendants and an American pilot and co-pilot.

During a stopover in Karachi, four heavily-armed hijackers—part of the Abu Nidal Organization–stormed the plane. Alerted to the hijacking, the pilot and co-pilot escaped from the cockpit via the Inertial Reel Escape Device, thus leaving the aircraft immobilized on the ground.

Realizing that the plane was pilotless, the hijackers sought out an American passenger, eventually singling out a 29-year-old Californian named Rajesh Kumar. Kumar was ordered to kneel facing the front of the aircraft with his hands behind his head. They threatened to kill him if Pan Am’s negotiators did not send them a flight crew immediately.

Bloodthirsty and dissatisfied with the speed of the negotiators’ response, the chief hijacker shot Kumar in the head and dumped him onto the tarmac. He died before he reached the hospital. Thereafter, they told the negotiators, a passenger would be executed every 15 minutes until a pilot was produced.

The hijackers then turned to purser Neerja Bhanot, who remained calm and collected even when a gun was put to her head. They demanded that she and the flight attendants under her control collect the passports from all passengers. Believing that the hijackers intended to kill the more than 40 Americans on board, she had the flight attendants hide some of the American passports in the seats and dumped the rest of them down the rubbish chute.

For a time, the hijackers considered executing a British national instead, but ultimately did not.

Meanwhile, Bhanot surreptitiously handed a passenger the instructions, hidden in a magazine, for how to open the door and deploy the slide in case the opportunity arose.

The hijackers were stymied. By late evening, the auxiliary power unit shut down, causing all but the emergency lights to come down. At that point, the hijackers tried to set off the explosive belt one of them was wearing. If they’d been successful, they could have blown up everyone on board. Instead, the explosion was rather puny. Immediately, they began shooting their guns and throwing grenades. With bullets ricocheting off the walls, passengers were dying everywhere.

In the bloody melee, Bhanot was able to open one of the aircraft doors. She could have escaped herself, but instead one-by-one she assisted passengers out the door. She died as a result of wounds suffered shielding three children from the hail of bullets.

(The passenger who had been slipped the instructions by Bhanot got his door open too and was able to deploy the slide. So Bhanot gets credit for causing two doors to open.)

Sources differ slightly on the number of dead and injured. I am going with 22 dead, including Bhanot, and 140 injured. Without her, the carnage likely would have been a lot worse.

All four hijackers were arrested, convicted and imprisoned in Pakistan. In late September 2001, Pakistani authorities released the chief hijacker, but he was picked up by American law enforcement authorities shortly thereafter, apparently with the blessing of the Pakistani government. He is currently serving 160 years in a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. His fellow terrorists were released in 2008 over the objections of the United States. One was reported dead in a 2010 drone strike, but his death is unconfirmed.

A movie called Neerja was made about Bhanot’s heroism in 2016.  (Unlike most real-life figures portrayed by gorgeous actors or actresses, Neerja Bhanot was drop-dead gorgeous herself. But beautiful or not, she had the right stuff.)

Rest in peace, Neerja.  Americans in particular have reason to thank you.

CHARLES LIPSON ON FISA ABUSE:  What to expect.

NOW THERE’S A NAME I HAVEN’T HEARD IN A WHILE:  Sirhan Sirhan stabbed in prison by fellow inmate.  

p.s.  Next thing you know somebody is going to try to attack Lee Harvey Oswald … no … wait.

THE 8^TH CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS HELD THAT CHRISTIAN VIDEOGRAPHERS DON’T HAVE TO VIDEO SAME-SEX MARRIAGE, JUST BECAUSE THEY WOULD VIDEO A TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE: The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights took a very different view on this general subject a couple of years ago. Here is my dissenting statement.

SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL: Stanford University has a separate physics course for students from under-represented minorities. Plus two course physics courses focusing on diversity and inclusion.

It should try this instead.

FAKE NEWS ISN’T NEW:  On this day in 1835, the New York Sun began the Great Moon Hoax.  The pictures are great.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG?:  The California Legislature is close to prohibiting schools from suspending students for willful disobedience.

Alas, much of the effort by federal and state authorities to control local discipline policy is based on serious misunderstandings of the facts.  I try to help correct that here. But there are many people out there who aren’t interested in getting the facts straight.

HATE CRIMES:  The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights just voted to adopt a mammoth report on hate crimes that liberally cites the Southern Poverty Law Center.  I voted against it for several reasons.  One of those reasons is that the federal hates crimes statute, which purports, in part, to be an exercise of Congress’s authority to ban slavery, is unconstitutional, as explained here.

ON THIS DAY IN 1959, HAWAII OFFICIALLY BECAME A STATE: There was dancing in the streets that day.

Some members of Congress were especially keen to bring Hawaii into the union, because it was seen as a successful multi-racial society. Alas, things haven’t looked quite as good on that front in the last 15 years or so.  The link is to some testimony I gave 10 years ago.  There have been some twists and turns since then, but the basic story discussed in the testimony is still worth knowing about.

ON THIS DAY IN 1996: The Inter-Ethnic Adoption Act was signed into law.   That statute prohibited federally-funded adoption agencies from requiring that the race of adoptive parents match the child they wish to adopt. This was particularly significant in speeding up the adoption of African American children who otherwise tended to languish in foster care longer than white children. Curiously, it was the National Association of Black Social Workers who most opposed this approach. A few years before the statute was passed the NABSW president testified before Congress that its members viewed “placement of Black children in white homes” as “a blatant form of racial and cultural genocide.”

ON THIS DAY IN 1919, RODDIE EDMONDS WAS BORN NEAR KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE:  Almost a century later, in 2015, he was posthumously recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations,” Israel’s highest honor for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

He never told his story to his friends or family. His son learned about it only after his father’s death.

Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds’ unit was surrounded by the Nazis during the Battle of Bulge. While they held out as long as they could, they eventually surrendered on December 19, 1944. On January 27, 1945, Edmonds arrived at Stalag IX-A along with well over a thousand fellow POWs, all of them exhausted, dirty, half-starved, cold, and no doubt frightened. As the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer among them, he was in charge.

For reasons I cannot begin to understand, the camp commandant’s first priority was to separate the Jewish from the non-Jewish POWs. Germany’s defeat was all but certain by then; you’d think he’d have given it a rest. Nevertheless, as soon as Edmonds arrived with his men, the commandant ordered Edmonds to assemble all Jewish soldiers the next day so that they could be dealt with separately.

“We are not doing that. We are all falling out,” Edmonds’ men remember him saying to them. So instead, all of the American POWs assembled that morning. The irate commandant held a pistol to Edmond’s head and ordered him to identify the Jews: “They cannot all be Jews!”

“We are all Jews,” Edmonds replied.

Edmonds told him that if he wanted to kill the Jewish POWs, he was going to have to kill them all. He reminded him that there is such a thing as a war crime and that under the Geneva Conventions name, rank, and serial number are all you get, not religion.

Miraculously, the commandant relented.

The Jewish-American prisoners at the other camp—Stalag IX-B—were not as lucky. It’s not clear what the facts were there. By some accounts, Jewish prisoners were asked to identify themselves and the senior officers there urged cooperation. By other accounts, the Nazis picked out the prisoners who looked Jewish (along with prisoners who were identified as troublemakers). Both stories may be true. In any event, those selected were sent to a slave labor camp where the death rate was horrifically high, despite the fact that the war in Europe lasted only another 3 ½ months.

Jews were only about 2 or 3% of the American population at the time, but they were a higher percentage of the prisoners at Stalag IX-A.  Edmonds’ courage is thought to have saved about 200 lives that cold, winter morning. He was then, now, and forever an American hero.

JOHN ROSENBERG AT MINDING THE CAMPUS:  Intimidation produces silence at Stanford.