Miranda Devine –,Wednesday, April, 15, 2015,(12:30am)
WE all laughed when we heard about the Oxford University feminist conference at which clapping was banned because it might trigger anxiety in certain neurotic individuals.
Instead, the UK’s National Union of Students asked the audience to use “jazz hands” to indicate applause, that is, waggle hands about in the air, silently.
You really couldn’t invent a better parody of new age feminist craziness.
But the problem is that it’s not a joke. One of the world’s most prestigious universities had succumbed to the tyranny of “trigger warnings”, which are really an instrument of control for the authoritarian Left.
The aim is to infantilise university students and protect them from anything deemed to cause “offence”, whether it’s the sound of two hands clapping or “domestic violence” themes in The Great Gatsby.
Trigger warnings are just another tool for one group of people on campus to ensure ideas they don’t like are excluded.
We’re lucky a healthy dose of Australian common sense has shielded us from the worse excesses of nanny leftists. But it’s only a matter of time.
There is a new mood of intellectual oppression on our campuses. Ideas or speech that might cause offence are shut down. Those who dare to express offensive ideas or are even suspected of harbouring unsound thoughts are actively persecuted.
From poetry professor Barry Spurr being hounded out of Sydney University to the disruption of a lecture on the ethics of warfare by Lt Colonel Richard Kemp to the ousting of climate sceptic scientist Bob Carter from his adjunct professorship at Queensland’s James Cook University, we see contrary ideas silenced in the very place where they should be freely debated.
Kemp fell victim to the tactic of “no-platforming” imported from the UK, in which protesters deny a public platform to opinions they dislike by kicking up such a stink that the speaker cannot be heard.
In this case Kemp, a retired commander of the UK armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, who in the past has expressed sympathy for the Israel Defence Forces, attempted to speak about the ethics of warfare last month, at a Sydney University event organised by the Australian Union of Jewish Students.
He was barely into his speech when a group of pro-Palestinian students forced their way in, screaming abuse though a megaphone and drowning him out.
They stood between Kemp and the audience, yelling “Richard Kemp, you can’t hide, you support genocide”, and made it impossible for him to continue. When security guards tried to eject the protesters, two left-wing academics, Associate Professor Jake Lynch, the vehemently anti-Israel director of the university’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, and senior lecturer Nicholas Riemer, intervened, and tried to “intimidate the security officers into allowing the abusive demonstration to continue,” wrote Kemp.
Sydney University is reportedly to send “show cause” letters this week to some of those involved. But who cares. The damage was done.
It’s one thing to protest, it’s quite another thing to shut down a lecture. But Sydney University’s craven capitulation to campus totalitarians was even more egregious in the case of poetry professor Barry Spurr.
Someone hacked into Spurr’s private email account and leaked private correspondence in which he used politically incorrect slang to describe Muslims, Asians and women. Spurr said the comments were just part of a part of a “whimsical linguistic game” with a friend. But, when published in leftist webzine New Matilda, the private emails were judged racist, sexist, misogynistic and Islamophobic.
Mobs of campus Trotskyists screamed through megaphones outside Fisher Library that Spurr was “racist filth” and a “vile bigot”. They demanded his resignation, descended on his office and daubed graffiti on the door. He was suspended, banned from campus and forced to resign in December.
When I defended Spurr on Radio National recently I was told by David Hetherington, executive director of progressive think tank Per Capita, that the university could not tolerate professors who held improper thoughts: “In position of social and organisational leadership people are not expected to hold discriminatory personal opinions.”
Hello Big Brother.
Students of the future may look back at this age of jazz hands and see the gesture in a more sinister light. Rather than being a thoughtful form of applause, jazz hands are a cartoonish symbol of cultural distress. Wave your hands in the air and silently scream.
Entire Article Here
"Trigger warnings are just another tool for one group of people on campus to ensure ideas they don’t like are excluded."
Sounds a bit like this forum lol
