Cornell’s slippery Slope Day: At the end of each school year, thousands of Cornell undergraduates flock to Ho Plaza to enjoy a concert that has featured A-list headliners.
This year’s featured entertainment, the singer Kehlani, isn’t bringing the fun. Pro-Israel students and parents are outraged over the selection of the R&B artist, who has called for “intifada” and said, “It’s f— Israel, it’s f— Zionism, and it’s also f— a lot of y’all too,” and posted statements to Instagram like, “DISMANTLE ISRAEL. ERADICATE ZIONISM,” “Long live resistance in all of its forms,” and “No one should feel comfortable or safe until Zionism is extinguished.”
Cornell president Michael Kotlikoff acknowledged concerns from the student group Cornellians for Israel—but said it’s too late to make a change. The university was not aware of Kehlani’s statements when it first began negotiations for the performance in October, he said, and there’s no longer time to secure an “acceptable or appropriate” headliner. Oh well.
“The concert is funded by Cornell’s Student Activities Fee, which is mandatory for all undergraduates. It sat at $384 per student for the 2024-25 school year and will rise to $424 next year,” our Jessica Schwalb reports. “Undergraduates cannot opt out of paying it. … Last year, about half of the $715,000 budget—$350,000—was allocated to talent.”
READ MORE: ‘F— Israel, F— Zionism’: Uproar at Cornell Over Featured Spring Concert Singer Kehlani
Facing the music: Raphael Warnock’s housing situation, which has him living rent-free in a lavish $1 million Atlanta home thanks to the Ebenezer Baptist Church, as the Free Beacon reported, is a great deal for the senator. But it may violate Senate ethics rules, according to a new watchdog complaint obtained by our Andrew Kerr.
Those rules “limit how much lawmakers can accept from outside employment,” writes Kerr. In other words, Warnock’s free housing deal is only kosher “if it’s customary for Ebenezer Baptist Church to provide free luxury homes to its part-time pastors and if it’s something that the church provided to Warnock independently from his position as a senator.”
“Those requirements ‘have not been met,'” according to the ethics complaint from the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, which notes “that the value of Warnock’s housing benefits appears to far exceed the part-time nature of his work with the church.”
READ MORE: Raphael Warnock Slapped With Ethics Complaint for Living in Free $1 Million Luxury Home
More than a few bad apples: In its push to spur change at top institutions of higher education, the Trump administration has targeted by name certain programs and schools, like Columbia’s Center for Palestine Studies and Harvard’s François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights.
The Free Beacon‘s Jessica Costescu takes a look inside the latter. The center, which is housed within the School of Public Health and is the driving force behind Harvard’s historic partnership with terror-tied Birzeit University in the West Bank, hosts “a half-dozen faculty members and affiliates who have defended Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and accused Israel of ‘genocide’ and ‘terrorism.'” Among them is the center’s director, former New York health commissioner Mary T. Bassett, who “sent a message to the center’s students and faculty just one week after Oct. 7 accusing Israel of ‘potential genocide'” and penned an article for Qatar’s Al Jazeera in February arguing that Israel aims to kill ‘all Palestinians in Gaza’ and calling on the Jewish state to pay ‘reparations.'”
Bassett and the cast of FXB fellows who work underneath her “reflect the persistent nature of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activism at Harvard,” writes Costescu. “Visiting scientists and fellows like Abdulrahim and Muhareb are not considered full-time faculty members and typically serve in temporary roles. But as director, Bassett, a former Columbia professor who has held the position since 2018, plays a leading role in filling those fellowships and driving the center’s direction.”
The Trump administration has demanded Harvard turn to an external body to review the center, and it’s not backing down. Its anti-Semitism task force plans to pull an additional $1 billion in federal funds to Harvard over that demand and others, the Wall Street Journal reported, which would bring the total amount of frozen funds above $3 billion.
READ MORE: At Harvard’s Center for Health and Human Rights, Academics Paint Israeli Jews as the Real Terrorists
Away from the Beacon:
- Here we go again: The Omani foreign ministry says the next phase of talks between Iran and the United States aims to seal “a fair, enduring and binding deal which will ensure Iran [is] completely free of nuclear weapons and sanctions, and maintaining its ability to develop peaceful nuclear energy.” Where have we heard that before?
- One week after self-described “knucklehead” Tim Walz mocked Tesla’s plummeting stock price, a fiscal policy analyst for Walz’s state government in Minnesota was busted “for allegedly causing approximately $20,000 in damage while vandalizing Teslas,” according to the New York Post.
- Environmentalists make the best villains: The Washington Post wants you to drink“pea milk,” which it says “emits a fraction of the planet-warming gases of cow’s milk production.” No thanks.
Original News Source – Washington Free Beacon
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