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Hi Jim, I am currently at this moment as I write you this message reading your very very fine and very well written book on John Basilone ” I’m staying with my boys” this is one of my favorites of the hundreds of war books I have read in a few years and the close to a thousand I read in my life time thank you very much

Scott Bilota

Thank you, Scott.

JP

 

This is just too good to be true – if you can appreciate the hilariously dense students and faculty of the University of Connecticut in this report.  You can’t make this stuff up.

First, the alarming headline…

“Faced with alarmingly low graduation rates for black males, the University of Connecticut is trying something it calls bold — and critics call segregation.”

Now for the set up…

“The school’s main campus in Storrs has launched a program slated for fall in which 40 black male undergraduates live together in on-campus housing. Proponents believe the students can draw on their common experiences and help each other make it to commencement. But others cringe at the idea of black-only housing, saying it turns decades of hard-fought racial progress on its head.”

I will cut out comments from the reasonable and intelligent people and cut right to the clown chase…

“My immediate thought was ‘What?’” Haddiyyah Ali, an Africana studies and political science major, told Daily Campus. “I know there had to be a lot of research that went into it…but just for me coming from a student perspective, my initial thought was, ‘What about black women and girls – what about us?’”

Africana Studies?  Sounds expensive.  More from the university faculty…

“Vice Provost Sally Reis rejected critiques of the program.

“It’s no more segregated than putting individuals with an interest in entrepreneurship together because they have common interests,” Reis told FoxNews.com.”

Hold on, it gets better…

“Erik Hines, a UConn professor set to serve as faculty advisor to the ScHOLA²RS House students, said that while the only current race-based group was for black males, the administration could add learning communities based on other races, genders or cultures.

“We have all types of learning communities,” he told FoxNews.com. “If they bring forth a proposal to our Office of Programs and Learning Communities they will be considered by our executive director.”

Hines said about 13 students had already applied for ScHOLA²RS House. Male students “who identify as African American/Black or mixed-race will be prioritized in selection, however any student interested in engaging in topics related to the experience of black males in higher education is invited to apply,” according to the UConn website.

“In predominantly white institutions, some of the experiences that African-American males face on campus is a little different than some of the other populations,” Hynes said. “In some of your courses you can be the only African American male in your class. It could be stressful and that’s a huge burden to shoulder.”

I know, you’re thinking, “What about me?  I grew up as a (insert your ethnicity or identity group here) and I was the only one in my college class.  What a burden that was!”  I feel you.  I was the only Irish-Russian Catholic with a Jewish father throughout most of my elementary, high school and college education.  It hurt then, it hurts now.

But here’s the killer punchline, no one sees coming.  Please put down anything you may be drinking at this moment and swallow completely.  Fair warning.

“Puppetry major Isaac Bloodworth told Daily Campus that opposition could be rooted in racism.

“The white portion of the University of Connecticut is probably not ready for it,” he said. “You have people who are going to go against it because they are just racist and they see this as a form of segregation or that we’re getting better things than they are.”

Puppetry major.  Who knew?  Honestly, you can’t get better than this for hard news and incisive commentary on the state of our higher education and cultural racism.

Around the wrist of many devout Muslims you may notice a string of 33 prayer beads. Like rosary beads for Catholics, these are memory devices used to remind the faithful to pray.  In Catholics, prayers are repeated for each bead and for Muslims one of the 99 names of God are invoked.  3 trips around the “misbaha” and you have all 99 names such as Allah the All-Merciful, the Pure One and the Source of Peace.

What you will not find is a name that mentions love.  In the Christian faith, God is love. Arguably, love is the central and most important aspect of Christianity.  Love is mentioned 409 times in the Bible, but only 69 times in the Koran.  Of those 69 Koranic references only 20 have to do with God’s love for man and those are all conditional.   Primarily, Allah loves those “who do good” (5 mentions), then those “who are pure and clean” (3 mentions) and on down to “Truly Allah loves those who fight in His Cause in battle array, as if they were a solid cemented structure.” (1 mention).

Certainly in the Bible’s Old Testament there are similar references to God’s conditional love, after all he asked Abraham to kill his only son to prove his love.  But among Christians generally, God’s unconditional love for man and his command conveyed by Jesus to “love thine enemy” is a central belief.

Jesus’ disciple Paul defines the concept further in his letter to the rebellious early Christians in the Roman city of Corinth, “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”

And on that rock, to paraphrase, Paul built the Christian church.

Within all that was written that then became the “gospel truth” of Christianity a civilization arose that overthrew the ruling state and theology of Rome, until love itself became divine and inspired a flowering of human devotion that swept the world and animates much of it to this day.

Yet Islam continued to dwell in its antiquity, untouched by this empowering concept of love, until, ignoring St. Paul’s gospel, love’s believers came to convert Muslims by force during the Crusades.  The love of Allah for warriors was well appreciated then as they fought and survived but were ever-after dominated by the Christians or “the people of the book” as they were once – perhaps even affectionately – known.

For almost 1,000 years now, the great cultural and scientific advances of the Christian west have come only second-hand to the Muslim world.  The great Muslim centers of learning that developed the alphabet, mathematics, medicine and architecture have been silent, except for the murmur of Koranic verse.

“Love thine enemy” and “love thy neighbor as thyself” never helped to cool the Muslim hatred or relieve their humiliation.  And so, the bitterness against their enemies the Christians has only settled deeper and their hatred against their neighbors, the Jews, has only grown more fierce.

And this hatred, it may be fairly said, has created the most prominent and possibly the only contribution of the Muslim world in the last 1000 years – terrorism.

Allah may love those who do battle in his name, but let’s pray that our Muslim neighbors, whom we love as ourselves, find one more name for God.