This is what seems like a sting operation conducted on a hapless academic administrator, Cornell’s assistant dean for students, Joseph Scaffido. As originally reported by the New York Post, an investigator working for the conservative group Project Veritas posed as a prospective Moroccan student and visited Scaffido, asking if the university would be amenable to having a guest speaker from ISIS, to funding the “freedom fighters”, and, in the end, even running a training camp for students conducted by an ISIS fighter. This was all secretly videotaped. And to all of these suggestions Scaffido said, “No problem,” as you see in the undercover video below.
At first I thought Scaffido was just clueless, not knowing which “freedom fighters” the fake student was mentioning, but later the student mentions the “Islamic state,” so it should have been clear.
This video has raised a considerable ruckus, especially about Scaffido’s comparison of a proposed Cornell terrorist training camp to a sports camp. That’s just crazy. But of course such a request would never have passed the vetting of Cornell’s higher administration.
Have a look:
Yes, this dean is surely hapless and ignorant but, to give him some credit, he’s probably trying to help a “Moroccan student” feel at home on campus, and may not fully understand the nature of the “freedom fighters” discussed by the interviewer. But Scaffido really shouldn’t have expressed such enthusiasm. Do recall, though, that Project Veritas is run by James O’Keefe, who did the same kind of undercover reporting for the ACORN “scandal,” and, after doing enormous damage to that organization, was later found to have been guilty of dishonest reporting.
When the interview above became public, the president of Cornell was forced to issue a statement, as reported in the Cornell Daily Sun:
In a statement released Wednesday afternoon, President David Skorton said the idea that Cornell would welcome terrorist groups such as ISIS and Hamas on campus is “ludicrous and absolutely offensive.”
Skorton described the video — which has been widely circulated online by various media outlets — as a “shameful” product of Project Veritas, which he said “has been repeatedly vilified for dishonest, deceitful activity.”
“It is shameful that any individual would pose as a student facing racial discrimination at another university, ask leading questions on hidden camera about Cornell’s tolerance for differing viewpoints and backgrounds, and then conveniently splice together the resulting footage to smear our assistant dean and our University,” Skorton said.
Skorton added that while many forms of free expression are welcome at the University, violence is not tolerated on Cornell’s campus.
“Cornell has an unwavering commitment to the free and responsible exchange of ideas,” he said. “However, we remain vigilant in maintaining an appropriate balance of freedom of expression within accepted boundaries. Of course, incitement to violence is not protected and would never be tolerated on our campus.”
It’s a pretty appropriate response, though he may have been too quick to shoot the messenger. Of course you’d want to use a Muslim-appearing student to broach the question, as those would be the students most likely to want ISIS on campus. And the president’s statement about “racial discrimination” is just a red herring designed to make Cornell look empathic. Finally, without seeing the full video, the University should not imply that its footage was dishonestly spliced.
But Skorton’s statement about free expression is good, and I, for one, would not be opposed to an ISIS speaker on campus, so long as he or she didn’t try to incite terrorism or violence (given how ISIS behaves, that would be hard to avoid). I am a bit concerned, though, about what Skortin means by “an appropriate balance of freedom of expression within accepted boundaries.” What are those boundaries? But training camps—hell, no!
The Cornell Daily Sun published its own editorial excoriating the video down the line on grounds of “questionable journalistic practice”. I don’t think this is all that questionable, since undercover videos are a staple of modern journalism. The only thing that I see as unethical about this is whether the video was edited to put the dean in an unfair light—and perhaps how the investigator misrepresented himself. But of course lots of federal investigators misrepresent themselves in sting operations, and the interviewer reportedly represented himself as only a “prospective” student.
h/t: Steve
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banana 😉
I would agree, with the caveat that, if it’s in an academic setting it must have a valid academic purpose.
If a student group / club / association / whatever wants to invite an ISIS speaker for a group function, that should have as much support from the university as, say, a chess tournament.
But if the ISIS speaker is being invited to give a university-sponsored lecture on, say, the political situation in the Middle East…well, that runs perilously close to a biology department having a Creationist guest speaker, which gets academically indefensible right quick.
I’m pretty sure you’d agree with this clarification, Jerry; I just thought it might be good to get it out of the way before somebody runs with it in the worng direction.
b&
I guess I’m a bit dense this morning and haven’t had sufficient coffee, and likely I am misunderstanding you, and perhaps am unwittingly “running with it in the wrong direction.”
But, to congenially inquire, what is the essential difference between “a student group / club / association” talk and “a university-sponsored lecture”? By the university allowing the given group to exist on campus, to that extent the group is university-sponsored.
Seems the dissemination of and exposure to ideas, whether good or bad, true or false, is a purpose of a university, whether strictly “academic” or not. The student group event, no less than a university-sponsored event, can and ought to be easily reported in the student paper and other media.
The sponsoring student group, whether opposed to or supportive of ISIS, should be smart enough to invite the public and media to hear the ISIS rep out, and the ISIS rep should reasonably and appropriately submit to questioning to reveal ISIS propaganda/lies.
For sure, all necessary security precautions should be taken should such a rep be invited – let him moan and ululate to Allah and Mohammed about that as he will – since one would reasonably and prudently assume he would be no less inclined than any other ISIS ideologue to behead some non-ISIS type on campus if he got the chance.
Students have lives outside of the classroom, but most of their non-academic lives are tied up on campus out of necessity. Universities recognize this and provide non-academic support for student life. Many campuses, for example, have gym facilities that rival those of any commercial “24/7 Fitness” company’s — and these are available to all students, with other sport-specific facilities for the athletes.
If you’re a student at a university, you might want to, for example, get together an Harry Potter fan club. And the university will be happy to help you with that, by providing a room for you to meet in and other sorts of logistical support. The university isn’t endorsing your activities or your positions; they’re just providing a service to a customer, essentially.
The university also, obviously, has its academic programs that include classroom instruction, faculty research, lecture series, and so on. Those are official university functions sponsored by the university, and are expected to maintain the highest levels of academic rigor.
Just as students are free to organize their own literature clubs, they’re also free to organize their own political clubs. You’ll find student-run groups for both Republicans and Democrats…but also even Communists and Nazis. And that’s fine. ISIS would be…well, perhaps not welcomed, but tolerated in the same context.
But it would be very bad for the University to endorse one party or candidate over the other, and that would extend to ISIS as much as it would to a major party.
Does that help?
b&
It’s rather complicated when one group is protected not just by free-speech legislation but by the widespread fear that protesting against their views could put you in physical danger. The correct response should be, as you say, to tolerate their right to air their views, and at the same time vehemently criticise those views. This is what liberals and left-wingers rightly do when far-right, white supremacists talk in public – and they gather in large, numbers to do so.
I remember the legions of anti-racists that gathered outside the BBC Question Time studios when the British National Party leader was invited on the show – they practically bashed down the doors. But they did so in the knowledge that violent, even fatal, reprisals from BNP members at a later date were unlikely.
I don’t think there’s the same feeling of security amongst people considering whether or not to protest against Islamic extremism(or just organise a counterpoint talk on campus in response to a visit by some radical preacher), partly because the numbers protesting Islamic extremism as opposed to far-right extremism are much smaller, but mainly because Islamic extremists have proven themselves to be generally a good deal more violent than their western fascist brothers in arms.
I certainly wouldn’t feel as confident of my own, and others’, safety if I were to form a band of anti-ISIS protesters. I’d also probably alienate myself from a lot of my fellow liberals, who’d see it as evidence of Islamophobia. It’s far more intimidating to push back against Islamism than it is to push back against any other revolting ideology, and free-speech advocates have a problem here in ensuring that critics of extremist Muslims can actually speak out freely. The balance is off at the moment – the extremists’ side is being heard, but in practice their critics are cowed.
Again, a lot of this could be solved if only left-wingers and liberals were honest about religion, and if they just treated Islamic extremists with the same contempt they reserve for white, American Christian extremists.
If it’s become socially unacceptable to voice opposition to a gang of thugs who decapitate and defenestrate those who aren’t deemed worthy of being burned alive, then it’s our society itself that’s become unacceptable.
b&
Although he didn’t list all of the boundaries, I think he makes it clear that incitement to violence is beyond one of them.
Indeed, and I agree with that. That’s also the standard of the U.S.’s first amendment as interpreted by the courts.
If this video is indeed from O’Keefe’s group, you can be 100% sure it was dishonestly spliced together.
For O’Keefe3 to call his outfit “Project Veritas” is supreme irony. That poor excuse for a human being hasn’t done one honest thing in his entire life. He lies to the people he interviews then heavily edits the videos to put his victims in the worst possible light. Anyone who takes O’Keefe at face value and without a ton and a half of road salt is a fool.
I suggest checking this story at Salon.
This is nothing but an appeal to prejudice.
This video illustrates exactly why there’s a need for liberal voices to question campus dogma on religion and Islam – because otherwise you get bullshit right-wing fishing expeditions like this.
Any undercover reporter who genuinely wanted to find out whether Scaffido supports allowing ISIS terrorists to conduct training camps at Cornell would have asked exactly that, in those words, as opposed to couching it in the most obtuse, vague terminology so that they can eventually shout ‘gotcha’ once the ‘minimum requirements’ for the sting were reached.
The right are not in the slightest bit interested in any of the values they attack ISIS for traducing. They’re not interested in free-speech, their position on equality is often closer to conservative Islam than to liberalism and given half a chance some of their more extreme contingent would have America turn into an ISIS style Old Testament theocracy. I’m not taking lessons in honesty from an organisation that hoodwinks an admittedly bloody dopey dean into giving them the story they want. The whole interview reeks of that awful, sanctimonious tabloid style of journalism where they’ve got the idea for a story and then they make the story happen.
Admittedly there’s a story here about liberal complacency and left-wing apologetics, but this adds nothing to it at all and the stupid thing is that it could’ve done if they’d been upfront and honest with the dean. Then we might’ve learnt something.
No. People respond differently when they think you are one of their team, and this can produce revelations. that is why cops go undercover. Ask that Oklahoma fraternity if they sing racist songs at parties, and what response would you expect?
My point is we haven’t learnt anything much from this. The interview was couched in such euphemistic language that it’s impossible to draw any real conclusions about what the dean actually thinks. You can’t tell if he really would allow ISIS terrorists to speak on campus, never mind set up a training camp, because the language used by the interviewer was intentionally indeterminate.
And the fact that the dean would say ‘no’ to the question if it’d been phrased in an honest, up-front way isn’t inherently evidence of dishonesty on his part. That’d be the case only if we already knew his opinions.
In the Oklahoma fraternity’s case we already knew they were racist, so subsequently asking them if they were racist afterwards would of course say something about their honesty. In the dean’s case we don’t yet know if he supports any of the things Veritas accuses him of supporting, and we don’t know because they weren’t interested in finding out. They were interested only in eliciting the bare minimum information necessary for feeding him to their conservative hounds.
I’m not involved in or aware of what goes on at American Colleges regarding any of these things. However, I have to think someone was setting this guy up. He was also a bit stupid to be talking about all this with someone he probably hardly knew and was possibly video taping or recording him.
Just the general idea that a college would want to bring an ISIS or any other Islamist terrorist person to the school to speak is way over the top in my thinking. Do not see this as reasonable or even practical.
Besides, if the kids want to get an ear full of this, just log on.
A legitimate news organization would make the entire, unedited recording available, to demonstrate that it was not deceptively edited. Project Veritas won’t do that, they are not journalists, they are political operatives. So the recording is suspect and likely does not represent the actual conversation.
How often does NBC make all its tapes public? O Keefe has done so in the past, and probably will again, when people dig themselves holes he can point out.
I have read in a number of places that this video is dishonestly spliced together, using the same dishonest techniques used in the infamous “Expelled” video.
I’d never heard of O’Keefe before, but just the shifty, vague terminology the undercover reporter uses is enough to render the whole thing suspect.
If they were genuinely interested in finding out if the dean really believed ISIS should be allowed to have training camps on campus they could have asked him exactly that, instead of couching the whole interview in indeterminate language and sprinting off once they’d got the bare minimum they needed to nail Scaffido.
The only thing that I see as unethical about this is whether the video was edited to put the dean in an unfair light—and perhaps how the investigator misrepresented himself.
Not only is the video spliced, but please notice that the narrator uses different language than the undercover “student.” The “student” refers at first to a ‘humanitarian group in northern Iraq and Syria’, the narrator openly refers to ISIS. This is to force the connection in your mind that the dean was not making.
a ‘humanitarian group in northern Iraq and Syria’
I’m not surprised the Dean didn’t make the connection with ISIS. That’d be like describing the Klan as “a progressive residents’ association”.
I suppose the Dean will have to install his own surveilance camera.
O’Keefe recently tried to get an employee of his to incite violence against the police.
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/18/i_wish_i_could_kill_some_of_these_cops_james_okeefes_plan_to_infiltrate_anti_police_protesters/
He is a real scumbag.
Presumably they have a firsthand account of the full interview from Scaffido himself. If they’ve vetted his story and are satisfied that he’s reporting honestly, that seems an adequate basis on which to conclude that Project Veritas is reporting dishonestly.
Yes, of course.
But out of curiosity, would that work? Wouldn’t an active member get arrested for terrorism today, and perhaps for crimes against humanity in the future? (I think UN is thinking of asking for an ICC investigation. But ISS does seem to target the instigating leaders every time, as they should, so it may not apply here.)
Returning apostate ex-members shouldn’t face such problems, but they have another agenda of course.
Ah. He. Was just reading about the US-Russia talks on ISS, with the outcome of possibly building an ISS v2.0 (where China and India et cetera may participate) after the current version has served out.
So, yeah… Caturdays.
It might be a little unsettling to the students with a drone flying over the school…
Per the NY Times the other day, Facebook is contemplating – or is intent on – putting up a multitude of Internet-providing drones (with a wingspan of a Boeing 767) throughout the world.
I’m sure that will fill airplane passengers’ hearts with joy and gladness.
Yes, they may want to rethink that one. Maybe go with satellites….
Google wants to use balloons.
Airborne relays beat satellites in terms of latency and battery drain on mobile devices. (It takes 100 times as much power to reach a satellite at 250 km as it does to reach a balloon or drone at 25 km.)
They also seem preferable to cutting roads through the jungle to set up and maintain a grid of cell towers.
I don’t see that airline passengers would have anything to worry about, given that these relays would hover at about twice the altitude of commercial air traffic, and their positions would be extremely well known by virtue of thousands of internet users pinging off them continuously.
“I don’t see that airline passengers would have anything to worry about, given that these relays would hover at about twice the altitude of commercial air traffic . . . .”
Fine, so long as they don’t fail and plummet. One more thing for airline pilots and passengers to have to concern themselves with.
I trust that the resulting internet users will also have sufficient fresh water and food and health care and education and standard of living, and not be inclined to succumb to every whipstitch ad Facebook presumes to inflict on them.
I’m having a tough time visualizing a scenario in which reliable internet access somehow depresses the standard of living or prevents government agencies and NGOs from delivering food, water, healthcare, and education to remote areas.
As for the Facebook ads, I’m willing to let people decide for themselves how much of that they want to tolerate.
I’m not quite sure what else ISIS members have to talk about once inciting terrorism and violence is off the agenda. Male baggy fashion perhaps, or the state of play in sweat-free fabrics and mecca-locating alarm clocks.
Having said that isn’t there an ISIS cookbook? Maybe they could chat about that, flog some copies at the entrance.
ISIS do not need a campus, anywhere, they have all the global attention they need. But, if they were there recruiting that would be a different story. An ISIS speaker may not even mention violence but violence in all it’s forms seem to be what they are, even if he or she were standing there eating an ice cream.
Look, I mean really look at that dean’s face. He is scared, really frightened. O.K., we can judge if we want to, but what I want to know is; was a contract signed? Did the dean indicate that a contract would be signed?
We are talking about ISIS here. Recall, they behead people that don’t follow their doctrine to the letter (I’ll reiterate, BEHEAD). This wasn’t a Navy Seal the guy was approaching (although if O’Keefe truly considered himself a brave journalist, he would do that himself), it was an academic.
Anyone can pontificate on how they would have handled it differently, but given the circumstances, I think the dean handled his fear incredibly well.
I was thinking something similar; that what he tried was to give a polite brush-off (and it was edited/spliced to appear otherwise) or faked enthusiasm to get them out of the room, with the objective of issuing a formal “no” at a later time.
I imagine chancellors’ offices deal with all sorts of crazy student requests, and I doubt very much they ever respond to any such request with a flat out verbal “no.”
“I was thinking something similar; that what he tried was to give a polite brush-off (and it was edited/spliced to appear otherwise) or faked enthusiasm to get them out of the room, with the objective of issuing a formal “no” at a later time.”
So your excuse can be boiled down to, Scaffido faked it all because he simply didn’t want to hurt the feelings of this “prospective Moroccan student” by flat out telling him that there was no way in Hell or otherwise ISIS would be allowed on campus.
Yeah . . . right. Should I pull the other one?
Could you please be more polite in your response–I’m referring to the last sentence. We try to be civil around here, and I suggest that you read “Da Roolz” on the left margin.
What if Scaffido were letting this conversation go on as it did in order to feel out the fake-student and decide whether the student was a potential terrorist in need of being reported to Homeland Security? What if Scaffido were intentionally giving the fake-student enough rope to hang himself?
I work as a video editor. We have no idea, from this material, what questions were actually asked. However, some of the assistant dean’s answers don’t seem to match the questions we’re hearing.
Such as when the questioner asks “That would not be a problem helping out the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” at 4:12. The assistant dean responds “No, a lot of student organizations do that”. No, sorry, he’s responding to a different question. I’m not buying “a lot” of student organizations are helping ISIS at Cornell. There is also a noticable fade up of ambient room tone between this question and the response. This is editing 101 and I do it every day. Although I like to think I’m a better dialogue editor than this.
If you listen to the whole thing, the subject never uses any of the specific terminology of the questioner. All the answers seem to be generic responses to questions about the formation of a student group or club. I’ve cut a few interview pieces and the subject of the interview almost always keys off the question, repeating and rephrasing it as they formulate their answer. There’s none of that here.
My professional opinion; show me unedited tapes. This stuff is nonsense. Well, that’s the polite way of putting it.
But if you go by what the other commentors on this post state that would be because Scaffido is simply leading this “prospective Moroccan student” on either to be polite or in an effort to determine if the “prospective Moroccan student” is a possible terrorist that needs to be turned over to the Department of Homeland Security
Most interview subjects, including actors, are very poor at improving. The most likely response, if the questions we hear were actually asked, would be a request for clarification or an awkward pause. That he launches directly into answers that don’t seem to address the question suggests a simple dub of a new question over the production audio.
Can I say for certain the questions are faked based on this rather short piece? No. But I can rely on over a decade of experience to evaluate what I’m seeing.
First, in an interview you go as long as the subject will allow. The final cut piece will be a condensation of your best material, so you try to get as much source material as possible. Yet the subject here, in the most damning material they could find, never mentions ISIS, The Islamic State, Iraq, Syria, or even the middle east in his responses. The connection to ISIS is either made by the questioner, or even worse, by the narrator.
Go to 2:49 in the video. The narrator says the questioner asked if the local community would be sympathetic to “The most provocative causes”. We then hear the assistant dean promoting the community and describe it as liberal. This has literally nothing to do with the narrator’s leading question, a complete non sequitur. However, it appears the video maker felt just describing Ithaca as “liberal” was sufficient to smear the community. This narrative technique is frequently used when you have something in your source material you want in the final program, but don’t have a smooth way to get into it. The assistant dean said the word “liberal”, They wanted that in as red meat to their intended audience, so they set it up with some leading narration. The narrator could have asked if the college would be open to satanic orgies with baby sacrifices and then cut to the same response. Same technique as what we’re seeing here, just maybe a little too obvious for even this video’s intended audience.
Again, I can’t say exactly what was asked, but the crude touches I can detect immediately relegate the video into the propaganda bin.
From editing glitches, and especially, having a report from Scaffido himself, pointed out above, I think it is fair enough to assert that the video was dishonestly spliced.
Reblogged this on Shashank Patel.
The claims about O’Keefe’s “dishonest reporting” have always been laughable. O’Keefe did not alter a single thing said by the idiots at ACORN. Instead we get people complaining about how O’Keefe was shown walking down the street dressed like a stereotypical 1970s pimp when in fact he appeared at ACORN dressed in regular street clothes. That doesn’t change one iota of the advice given to him by the people at ACORN.
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