Tuesday, April 01, 2008

MICHELLE MALKIN: POISONED CAMPUSES

New York Post
http://www.nypost.com

Prof. Madonna Constantine, who was targeted with a noose on her office door, speaks at rally on October 10th.


April 1, 2008 -- Is the affair of the Columbia University noose finally nearing the end of its rope?

The latest twist in the noose mystery will come as no surprise to those who have closely monitored the racial-grievance cauldrons on American college campuses.

The Post's Murray Weiss reported exclusively yesterday that a Manhattan grand jury has subpoenaed the university records of Professor Madonna Constantine of Columbia Teachers College, who found a noose hanging from her office door nearly six months ago.

The case garnered national attention and inspired an outpouring of rage, a slew of anti-noose legislation - and several copycat noose-hangings by publicity-seeking wannabes.

But now, as Weiss notes, this subpoena signals that investigators are now looking at possible links between Constantine, her friends and the racially charged incident.

Given the onset of staged hate crimes since the Tawana Brawley hoax two decades ago, skepticism is warranted.

As Weiss reports, the noose-hanging happened at the height of the school's probe of plagiarism charges against the professor - conditions that provide a "possible motive for a sympathetic friend to consider placing a noose on her door - thinking it could whip up support for her."

Stunningly, Constantine got to keep her job after the university determined that she had filched the work of a colleague and several students. Predictably, she cried "systematic racism" about that, too.

We don't know yet for sure what happened at Columbia.

And, as I've reported several times over the years, faked hate crimes are an abhorrently common phenomenon on modern college campuses, where race-consciousness reigns in such a poisonous way that it would make integrationists weep.

"Students of color" are herded into separate dorms, separate departments and separate graduation ceremonies. "Professors of color" carve out lucrative niches in the diversity/blame-whitey indusry.

Mix identity politics, multicultural studies, cowardly administrators and sympathetic media - and you've got a toxic recipe for opportunistic hate-crime hoaxes. Today's Tawana Brawley-copycats couldn't ask for better enablers.

* In 2001, Arizona State University student Ahmad Saad Nasim admitted to police that he'd fabricated two anti-Muslim hate-crime incidents against himself.

* In 2002, black students at the University of Mississippi scrawled racist graffiti in campus housing.

* In 2004, Kerri Dunn, an assistant visiting professor at Claremont McKenna College, was sentenced to prison after staging an anti-Semitic hate crime against herself.

* In 2005, a lesbian student at Mt. Tamalpais HS in Marin County, Calif., faked several anti-gay incidents to garner attention and sympathy.

* Last fall, George Washington University student Sarah Marshak admitted scrawling swastikas on her own dorm-room door.

* Last December, an idiot Princeton student, Francisco Nava, falsely claimed he was targeted and beaten because of his politics.

Campuses remain fertile ground for hate-crime hoaxes because administrators - whipped up into p.c. frenzies when the "crimes" are first reported - are reluctant to crack down on minority students and professors who perpetrate the lies. In many of these cases, charges against the con artists are reduced to wrist-slaps or dropped completely.

And the university grievance-coddlers come up with excuses to rationalize away the manufactured hate: They meant well. At least they "raised awareness." Nobody was hurt.

Bull, bull and bull. Faked campus hate crimes diminish the credibility of whistleblowers with bona-fide claims of victimization. They squander law-enforcement resources. They poison the academic environment.

It's time to man up, stand up to race charlatans and crack down hard on those who play the system.

As the grievance-hustlers like to chant: "No justice, no peace."

malkinblog@gmail.com

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