USC disgraces itself again -- banning a leading professor over an altered video from a pro-Hamas protest

The University of Southern California gets into a lot of scraps and scandals -- from perverts on its medical team, to the famous admissions scandal involving many universities, to Chicago Way-style corruption. It does stupid, politically correct stuff at times. It was extra pallsy with Harvey Weinstein. And there have been incidents of horrible street crime.

But now it's eating its own.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

Until recently, USC professor John Strauss was known mostly for his research on the economics of developing countries, with decades of fieldwork in Indonesia and China.

That changed Nov. 9, when Strauss stopped before students staging a walkout and protest calling for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and holding a memorial to thousands of Palestinian civilians killed in the Israel-Hamas war.

The economics professor’s interactions with students that day ended with the 72-year-old Strauss, who is Jewish, declaring: “Hamas are murderers. That’s all they are. Every one should be killed, and I hope they all are killed.”

Students captured those remarks on their cellphones, almost instantly seeming to recognize a viral moment. “Can you say that for the camera?” one pressed.
 
Within hours, Strauss’ comments were posted online, shared and reshared on X, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.

As his remarks raced across the internet, his condemnation of Hamas was often excised, leaving only his “hope” for “all” to be killed. Captions and comments online framed his demand for “every one” to be killed in myriad, at times deceptive, ways. One Instagram post shared to millions of users claimed falsely that Strauss told the students, “[I] hope you get killed....”

So the little pukes altered and manipulated the tape, to get it to say what they wanted it to say, making Hamas and its Palestinian cheerleaders the victims of the wicked Jewish professor who supposedly wanted to kill them.
 
It was colossal rubbish, an actual blood libel, and they weren't done with him.
 
After that, according to the Times, they tattled to their local wokesters in the USC administration and promptly got him banned from his own campus and put on administrative leave, unable to finish teaching his students except on Zoom.
 
And there was more: They put out a petition calling out Strauss for his "racist, xenophobic behavior" (they had a live one), and using their fake tape, drew an easy 6,000 signatures demanding that the distinguished old professor, with decades of research benefitting the reputation of USC, and actual service to the university, be fired.
 
They're quite a Jew-hating bunch, aren't they? And ignorant as heck, too, having ignored the 1,400-person murder spree of the terrorists they are marching for. The Council for American-Islamic Relations, the controverisal Islamist organization which was declared a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates based on its alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, got involved, too, claiming that Muslim and Palestinian students were targets of "hate and bigotry."
 
All the old professor did was state his opposition to Hamas terrorists and his hopes that they be dealt with the way the U.S. military normally deals with bona fide terrorists.
 
Some 9,000 more people (update: 15,000) signed a petition saying the professor was badly treated by these smear artists and needed to be reinstated.  
 

 

No word from the Los Angeles Times about what the disposition of this outrage against the professor is, but let's just say the numbers on that pro-Strauss petition are quite a bit higher than that of the pro-Hamas crowd.

The USC DEI team or whoever it was struck out at the professor without having all the facts. They failed to punish the punks for smearing the man, and for that matter, for the fact that they were defending killers who pulled their own 9/11 and now stand to meet the fate of al-Qaida by Israel.
 
Fair? Not this bunch. Once upon a time decent people opposed terrorism, they didn't rationalize it the way these dishonest malevolent pro-Hamas protestors do.
 
The professor said nothing wrong to the students in expressing his strongly held views. If the unaltered words sounded harsh, any lawyer would tell you he had a good "fighting words" case given the punk provocations and in any case it never escalated from his side.
 
Surely the university should be concerned about the video manipulation, too, given that that kind of dishonesty is likely present in the punks' academic schoolwork, too. When I was a student at Columbia University, we were told of a student from a previous year who was expelled on the spot for faking a quote in a story. That's what these people did, and I certainly hope that USC has the same academic standards as Columbia.
 
It also creates a bad academic atmosphere for research that will permeate the organization and its research. We all know that demonizing cops led to a lot of cop resignations. What will this craven failure by the USC administration to stand by one of their top professors (and admonish or expel the dishonest punks) do to scholarship and the university's academic reputation in the long term, with that kind of shoot-first-ask-questions-later ethos of the USC administration?
 
USC probably should expect to see some Jewish donors pull their money as has happened in other wokester universities, by donors disgusted at the coddling seen for terrorist-apologists. If that happens, maybe it will get their attention. 
 
Image: Twitter screen shot
 
 
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