UPDATE: Ethan Epstein, a reader, noted that “I think you’re being a bit too credulous about the O’Keefe ISIS videos. I wrote a little blog post about it at yes, The Weekly Standard“, and he makes some good points. So I’m adding the link to this post.
****
If you’re one of those people who immediately reject anything reported by an organization like Project Veritas, don’t watch this video. (But I’d add that you’re putting your fingers in your ears and screaming “nah-nah-nah-nah”, for even an execrable right-wing organization can reveal some bad stuff.) And yes, these videos taken in Florida colleges, showing student advisors and administrators giving tacit approval of pro-ISIS clubs, may be dishonestly edited. But are you going to refuse to watch because of the source? What if they are accurate?
I don’t know myself, but I’m willing to at least consider the possibility until the facts are in.
h/t: Malgorzata
“(But I’d add that you’re putting your fingers in your ears and screaming “nah-nah-nah-nah”, for even an execrable right-wing organization can reveal some bad stuff.)”
Life is short. I have better things to do than watch videos which are obviously misleadingly edited put out by an organization already known for exactly that sort of shoddiness before.
I’m one of those readers who also refuses to watch another video about morality by the American Family Association. Once they’ve peed all over their credibility pants, I’ve lost all desire to sniff them to see if they’ve been cleaned, even if it is a new week.
I will happily not watch because of the source. How many people on this site would read David Irving I wonder?
(I note that Hitch almost certainly would, but then Hitch had also read the Bible and the Qur’an, two other books I won’t read because life’s too short to read rubbish).
I didn’t know what Project Veritas was and was going to watch but then I read your description and decided it was too likely to be a waste of my time and other, more interested people could dig into it instead. This comment might be stupid but I thought it the notion that your encouragement actually sabotaged my interest was more amusing than the content of the video itself.
This beggars belief.
James O’Keefe? Really? The guy known for deceptively editing videos (often shot illegally without the consent of his marks) to suit a phony right-wing narrative?
One of the readers has pointed out some potentially serious problems with this video as well as the Cornell video I posted previously. I have now added a link to the criticisms as an update. As I said, I’m not passing judgment on these videos but wanted to put them up to incite discussion.
I did offer 9 minutes to watch it. Unless the author got looalikes to play the roles of the University officials no amount of editing could make them say what they are saying. It is scary, no matter who produced it. The refusal to even watch it reminds me of the attitudes of British officials who refused to deal with a massive pedofile rings because perpetrators were Muslims and they were afraid to be branded as racists and islamophobes.
I think you’re underestimating what can be done with AV editing software and just a little bit of experience. It’s actually easy to rearrange and edit, especially the audio portion.
Still, I have to wonder what’s happening in these people’s heads – especially when Frederique joins the conversation and it’s explicitly about “Oh, you want to send support to ISIS.” And they just seem OK with this.
James O’Keefe is a thoroughly discredited asshole occupying the same sleazy, sewer niche in which Rushbo dwells.
He is not deserving of even minimal trust in anything he offers. He’s scum of the worst order.
Agreed. I was willing to give the video some benefit of the doubt and watch it until I saw it was made by O’Keefe. I only get half an hour for my lunch break, and I’m not about to give up 1/3 of that for a known liar’s latest lies. Maybe some time tonight after my daughter goes to bed if I’m particularly bored.
This may be of interest…
http://www.quilliamfoundation.org/blog/the-liberal-dilemma-islamists-on-campuses/
Like like. Like like, like like like like. Like like? Like!
With that out of the way –
I see lots of creative editing. One of the more obvious examples being when they’re talking about the festival of nations – there’s an obvious cut and transition.
And the section where you can’t actually see the speaker, which would be even easier to edit in such a way that the speaker could say anything.
But, there is a part where the woman (in addition to saying “like” a lot), says something to the effect of “they’re terrorists, and we want to support them.” And the administrator seems OK by this.
So, I think there’s a little to be critical about in terms of school administrator’s behavior, but more to be critical about in terms of editing. I’d like to see the uncut video or a transcript.
Assuming that creative editing was not done, it seemed to me that the angle the student was going for was to mention ISIS and that they are terrorists and stuff, but then she would a bit more often emphasize the humanitarian part of their effort since they have lost infrastructure and need aid.
This slightly off balance approach narrowly worked b/c the officials were bored and inattentive and more inclined to assume that the aid to terrorists bit was just a misunderstanding.
I can see how this can work.
Yes, that’s true, there’s lots of equivocation in that conversation.
Toward the end, however, there seems to be less, and more “Oh, you mean sending supplies to ISIS? Okey dokey.”
I’d still like to see the unedited conversation.
I made it 2/3 the way through, so I did not see that.
It’s hard to get through it all!
I don’t understand anyone’s attitude — I’m not going to watch this and this is because it’s too lame or crazy. Hell, most everyone waste more time on the tube everyday doing whatever.
My only input is to ask why are colleges funding organization or clubs to raise money for anything. There are hundreds of actual charity organizations out there that you can support. What possible reason is there for schools to get into this business? Sorry but I thought they had plenty to do already in the education business or the sports for money business.
I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the end: does the woman behind the camera fill out an official application, provide her student ID etc in the video or after? how much money did the school give to the terrorist club? did they wind up sending the flashlights?
If I were still working at the college I worked in for years and a student came to me, I would be afraid to say no to them to their face. I would definitely tell them that I need to speak with my superiors (like the guy did). I might say “You have to do XYZ to create a club”, but then hope that my superior or the teacher advisors the student asks will turn the student down. So, I would not be a singular target for an upset student supporting such a scary club idea.
Of course, it looks like everyone in this situation is trying to not tell this girl “No”.
Yes. Which is why the editing is worrying. They are trying to help her get what she wants done, done. That is not the same as encouraging or approving. A few comments do suggest approval, but we cannot tell without the full exchange.
There is a problem, as I see it, on many Western universities (and not only universities). The ultraorthodox liberal stance is (with limitation: I never heard about a KKK or neo-Nazi club which got any help from a university) to allow people with clearly genocidal agenda to act freely. Many in the Western societies are against it but the only people who are doing something about it are the likes of Mr. O’Keefe, who seems both dishonest and discredited. So normal people do not even want to know what he discovers. I’m afraid the history somehow repeats itself (with modifications). When Hitler came to power Stalin gave order to the German Communist Party to direct its propaganda and its fight against social democrats and democracy, not against Nazis. Having just two thing to choose among: Communism and Nazism, the Germans had chosen Nazism. Now in Western Europe people who talk about genuine concerns of an average citizen are people on the far right. And it is they who are the target of liberal and democrats who refuse to deal with what concerns citizens. We can suddenly be forced to choose between Islamists and Western fascists because democrats and liberals washed their hands.
With all due respect, I think you are overreacting.
Please take a look at David Laitin’s review article: Rational Islamophobia in Europe. European Journal of Sociology, Dec. 2010:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-wECjRJuDsAfmY5M3RZQXVIUVJ4eVdaVzRZdUFySWxnWmppaGppbUlHUmgzUUtjVmpBeTg&authuser=0
Laitin, now professor at Stanford, is a former colleague of Jerry:
https://web.stanford.edu/group/laitin_research/cgi-bin/wordpress/bio-cv/
Unfortunately, I can’t open this file – it says “Access denied” so I’m not sure in what way I’m overreacting. What I took as example were statements of social workers in Rochdale, U.K. who said that they didn’t deal with the complaints about raping of girls by Muslim because it was very sensitive and could be perceived as rasism and Islamophobia. Similar statements came from the police. But the story became known after 2010 when the paper I couldn’t read was published.
I e-mailed the pdf file of Laitin’s paper to what I think is your e-mail address taken from:
http://www.listyznaszegosadu.pl/
In brief, in this review article Laitin reviews Christopher Caldwell’s book “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West”, Doubleday, 1989. The book makes the case that Europe (its essence) is under threat from immigrants from Islamic countries …
It’s one thing for misguided liberals or leftists to indulge and promote fashionable epistemological relativism, the criticism-of-Islam-equals-racism meme, and assorted idiocies. It’s a completely different thing for politicians to be influenced by this. Politicians care first of all about being re-elected. And not taking the threats posed by ISIS and related people and movements seriously looks like a dangerous strategy from this point of view. There are other politicians who are just waiting for governing parties to misstep in this regard (Marine Le Pen, Pim Fortuyn, are names that come to my mind) so that they can get into government in their stead.
Of course, it is sad that young minds on American campuses are so confused … I recommend again (re-)reading Bertrand Russell’s “An outline of intellectual rubbish” where he writes in the first paragraph:
“folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived. The follies of our own times are easier to bear when they are seen against the background of past follies. In what follows I shall mix the sillinesses of our day with those of former centuries. Perhaps the result may help in seeing our own times in perspective, and as not much worse than other ages that our ancestors lived through without ultimate disaster.”
http://www.personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Philosophy/RBwritings/outIntellectRubbish.htm
Thanks, I got it and I’m reading it.
I agree with those commenters who are vary of the veracity of this video. (Why am I thinking of Michael Moore?) Like them, I don’t feel like wasting my time trying to verify its authenticity.
On the other hand, I’m reminded of what Malgorzata’s fellow countryman Leszek Kolakowski (philosopher and historian of ideas) said about his encounters with the student movement in 1968 at Berkeley:
“I found the so-called student movement simply barbaric. There are of course ignorant young people at all times and in all places. But in Berkeley their ignorance was elevated to the level of the highest wisdom. They wanted to ‘revolutionize’ the university in such a way that they wouldn’t have to learn anything. They had all sorts of silly proposals. For instance, they wanted professors to be appointed by students, and students to be examined by other students. I remember one leaflet issued by the black student movement asserting that the libraries contained nothing but ‘irrelevant white knowledge’.”
Dædalus, Summer 2005
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/daed
So there are well-established precedents for student idiocy. And many university administrators live in their own bubbles … (think of the Social Text/Sokal affair, the Duke university gang rape allegations, etc.)
I have the same problem I had with the previous undercover video of the dean at Cornell – it’s not just the editing, it’s the obtuse bait and switch of the questions – to flash up references to giving aid to ISIS, then cut away as the guy starts sounding sceptical, to liberally intermingle the idea of helping ISIS and the idea of sending aid to war widows and children in ISIS controlled areas, to talk about sending flashlights, in the first instance to help ISIS fighters see in the dark, and in another instance to help civilians cope with powercuts – this is designed to confuse and disorient the university official so that there’s enough footage to edit into a case for the prosecution.
There’s no attempt at all to determine what he actually believes about the propriety of funding terrorists with university money. An impartial undercover reporter would have kept their questions precise, consistent and clear so that there could be the minimum subsequent confusion about the guy’s stance. They wouldn’t have changed the subject or switched the substance of their requests every time he seemed to express doubt.
Even if I’d heard nothing else about this O’Keefe guy’s methods and politics I’d be dubious. If Veritas have a story, if they’ve genuinely uncovered something appalling, then they should provide a huge, easy-to-find link to the original, unedited footage. They’ve no reason not to – in theory the unedited footage should do nothing but strengthen their argument.
As with the other clip at Cornell, this tells us nothing about the man involved, his beliefs, or the attitude of the university, and it’s clear from Veritas’s approach that they couldn’t give a monkey’s about good investigative journalism. I’ll keep my mind ajar, but on the evidence they’ve provided so far it’s impossible to draw any firm conclusions.
Remember that one time when James O’Keefe basically got a legitimate organization shut down primarily based on lies he made up? I do.
No, but I remember ACORN.
>>Remember that one time when James O’Keefe basically got a legitimate organization shut down primarily based on lies he made up? I do.
>No, but I remember ACORN.
Your response puts you in my /ignore file
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Community_Organizations_for_Reform_Now
“On an unrelated issue, ACORN suffered an extremely damaging nationwide controversy beginning in the fall of 2009 after two conservative activists secretly made and released videos of staged interactions with low-level ACORN personnel in several offices, portraying them as encouraging criminal behavior. Some media publicized the videos without investigation. These videos were later found in several independent law enforcement investigations to have been partially falsified and selectively edited by the activists, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles. [9] The organization suffered an immediate loss of funding from government agencies with which it had contracts, and from private donors.[10][11][12] prior to the results of any investigations. Legislative amendments to spending bills in the United States House and Senate prohibited government funding of the group.”
“Four different independent investigations by various state and city Attorneys General and the GAO released in 2009 and 2010 cleared ACORN, finding its employees had not engaged in the alleged criminal activities and that the organization had managed its federal funding appropriately. Their reports described the videos as deceptively edited to present the workers in the worst possible light. The loss of funds had been too damaging and by March 2010, 15 of ACORN’s 30 state chapters had already closed.[10] ACORN announced it was closing its remaining state chapters and disbanding.[13] Some state chapters have reorganized to continue operations under different names.”
There’s some damning stuff here, especially at the end, but there is a LOT of cutting. A lot. I think one needs to see the unedited tapes. I would not be surprised if we do, eventually, after several people have gone on record saying things they will regret.
My tentative verdict: not proven.
I agree, and I hope that the unedited tapes will eventually become public.
It’s likely that both sides are at fault here. O’Keefe has clearly edited the tapes in a way to make them incriminating. Some college administrators are probably also too accommodating of anything related to Islam, for fear of being accused of discrimination.
O’Keefe is still a bottom dweller, though. What he does has nothing to do with journalism.
“O’Keefe has clearly edited the tapes in a way to make them incriminating”
Oh, you mean the same sort of editing tricks M.Moore uses in his ‘documentaries’?
I don’t know if Moore did cut and splicing and overdubs to the same degree as O’Keefe, but yeah, I wouldn’t call Moore an objective journalist either. But I don’t think he claims to be one. O’Keefe claims to be presenting facts when in fact he’s manipulating the evidence, so I would rate him as more dishonest.
As the subject video editing came up, I wanted to recommend watching this video by the awesome youtuber potholer54:
TV tricks of the trade — Quotes and cutaways
This video is really good.
Absolutely agreed. I don’t know who ‘potholer54’ (the video maker) is, but he’s good.
A new nazi youth movement that will be sanctioned and respected by the new left. Beautiful. The KKK gets no respect these days.
what is it with liberals seeing anything ‘right’ or conservative as the most evil of things, while completely discounting and ignoring the most conservative, reactionary and fascist ideological system in the world: political islam. This is happening on campuses, I’ve seen pro Hamas groups on my own campus, and this was years ago.
There is this insane, absolutely insane leftist tendency to view Islam as an untouchable “brown people’s” religion, when in reality Islam is a totalitarian, fascist and imperialistic ideology with an empire to back it up. Those who appease the crocodile will only end up eaten last.
this should be on every self-described liberal’s reading material:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Flight-Intellectuals-Controversy-Islamism/dp/1935554441
As I said in regards to the first video, this is crude propaganda, nothing more. There’s nothing damning here. Nothing. Unless you find the idea that students are allowed to form humanitarian clubs, without censorship from the university, to be damning.
The student actually says the purpose of the club is to reduce or eliminate terrorism by providing humanitarian assistance to widows and orphans. The closest the piece gets to controversy is the part about providing flashlights to help ISIS fight at night. But here we have no response from the university officials. There’s just an odd non sequitur about large shipments being expensive. And again, everyones face is off camera, so it’s impossible to tell if the answers correspond to the questions.
Like the first piece, we also can detect outright lies from the video makers, such as at 3:48 when the narrator says “According to Mr. Bley, our pro-Isis club could receive hundreds of dollars of support from the university.” and then…he never says anything of the sort.
To be honest, I find these videos to be about as thought provoking as clips from “Expelled”.
Oh, good god (and yes, I use that term advisedly). The “reporter” constantly talks about pencils, paper and flashlights. Hell, those are things the Red Cross would supply if asked. It’s not even sophisticated “gotcha journalism.”
Here PV, you want get me? Have the student group try pitch sending arms to ISIS. AKs, RPG’s, oh why not go all in and offer tanks. You get a college club adviser to support that, then you got me. Pencils and paper to widows and orphans? Come on.
I just wonder if you would be equally positive towards humanitarian help to widows and orphans of SS men and Wehrmacht soldiers during the IIWW? There was great suffering in Germany and many orphans went without pencils, paper and flashlight. They could use some help.
Are you suggesting the university should preemptively decide for the students which humanitarian missions or organizations are acceptable and which are not?
Yes, I think there are organizactions which no university in a free world should support. They are not supporting Ku Klux Klan nor Nazis (rightly and with plenty of reason). They should not support an organization which behead people, throws homosexuals from high buildings and is trying to exterminate all minorities.
You seem to be playing fast and loose with both what I have said, and what was actually said in the interview.
I asked if the you believe the university should be able to decide for students what types of clubs they can form, not what organizations the university itself supports. In both videos the university officials specifically state they don’t judge the student’s clubs. It’s not their business. Perhaps you believe it is.
There is also a fundamental difference between a student trying to start a humanitarian club they believe will stop or reduce ISIS’s activities, and one meant to encourage or promote terrorism. One could argue that humanitarian aid won’t change ISIS a whit, I certainly don’t believe it would, but there’s a difference between opposing ISIS’s behavior in a way I think is ineffective, and actually endorsing that behavior.
I’m sorry, but by giving the club a professor (to guide? to supervise? what was this female professor who signed a paper suppose to do?), by giving the club a place to meet, by giving money (they were promised, weren’t they?) the university supported their activity. And even if the student herself was as naive as Marie Herf and believed that pencils to ISIS children would help to stop terrorism, university’s officials shouldn’t be. Besides they should have been cynical enough to suspect that the goal of such a club can be more sinister than just giving pensils and papers to kids. And I strongly suspect (unfortunately I cannot prove it) that if a white girl came to the same man and said that she wants to organise a club which would aim to work with KKK, for example by collecting money to take their children for excursions to zoo, the response would be different. He would worry about more than just hiding the three K from the name of the club.
You seem to be working hard at conflating the idea that students should be able to form clubs of their choosing with the university promoting ISIS. You also seem to be taking the claims of the video, from a fairly well known propagandist, at face value.
I belonged to a student club in college so can answer some of your questions, at least for the university I attended. A professor is there for the club members to question about the subject matter of their club, if they desire. Faculty advisers neither supervise, guide, or even attend. I never saw my club’s advisory faculty member.
A club might be allowed to meet on campus, usually in a student common area when it was not otherwise being occupied.
As for money, the video makes this claim, but as I pointed out already, it is completely unsupported. I suspect the video makers are considering use of meeting areas as financial support. Or perhaps copy room supplies.
As for your hypothetical, I disagree. If a student approached the same people and said they wanted to support poor racists, with the explicit aim of reducing their racism by reducing poverty, I believe they would have received the same response; the university doesn’t censor what type of clubs are formed.
This isn’t to say universities have no guidelines or codes of conduct for clubs and I suspect this is why both of the “club organizers” avoid advocating any actual ISIS positions.
Finally, the video states that the only real objection was the club name. Sorry, again, this is a highly edited piece from a propagandist. I don’t accept that claim.
Yes, I would. And in fact, the Red Cross did supply care packages, not only to widows and orphans, but actually to Nazi POWs.
Pity that Red Cross was not equally eager to deliver packages to Russian POWs who died from hunger in their thousands, and certainly not to Jewish ghettos and death camps.
Well, and I’ll admit this is conjecture, I think the Red Cross would have gladly supplied aid to Russian POWs and victims of the concentration camps if they had been given access. Let me be clear, I am absolutely NOT putting the SS or ISIS on an even remote equal moral footing as their victims. In fact, I find both organizations to be an anathema to humanistic morality. But, I think there is difference between aiding widows and orphans and aiding the bad players. BTW, I forgot to mention this previously, giving flashlights to combatants for night fighting against an army with U.S. supplied night vision devices, actually puts them at greater disadvantage than being without the flashlights.
The Red Cross has apologized for the part they played in the Holocaust.
EVERYONE (pretty much) was anti-semetic 80 years ago which is how the Nazis were able to do what they did.
Interesting factoid: the Japanese government, even though they were wartime allies of Nazi Germany, were more accepting of Jewish refugees than many/most/all Allied countries during WWII.
They had no religious reason to support Nazi attitudes, unlike the Allies, who obviously didn’t give a sh*t about Jews anyway.
My disinterest in watching the video isn’t like putting my fingers in my ears. I have no doubt there are stupid and silly people in the world, and people with very different ideas and values than my own.
I note that there has been accusations here of colleges and universities and censorship in the past when it comes to people we support. Now there is concern when they appear to accept a club that wants to support a horrific organization.
Are universities places for the exchange of free ideas, or not? If they are, than an “ISIS club” should be acceptable, as long as they don’t break any rules or laws.
If we are advocating free expression, then as has been stated here before, free expression means hearing things we don’t like. I would assume a leader of the college would know and understand that, and that this is just a Q and A, and formalization would require forms and or releases that ensure the club and members will break no laws or college/university rules.
I would also imagine he gets plenty of people coming to him asking about wacky and concerning clubs, but if he is following the idea that the students have the right to assembly and free speech, then there is little he can do other than trying to be supportive of all those who come before him, putting his own feelings aside as a professional would.
If I found there was such a club at my local university I would make time to protest and picket them and make people aware they are on campus. I think we are far better off knowing who these sadly misguided misinformed people are, rather than having them hiding in dark places, festering.
Actually, I agree with you, and I said so on the post about the Cornell club. So long as a group doesn’t condone immediate violence, it shouldn’t be suppressed. What I objected to at Cornell was the idea of an ISIS “training camp.” Granted, the administrator didn’t seem to fully understand what was going on, but I still found it a bit disturbing that he equated that with a sports camp. Nor would I call for an ISIS speaker to be banned from campus. My solution has always been, like yours, counter speech.
But I think the videos (IF they are fairly edited) do give us some insight into the cluelessness of these people.
Unfortunately the world’s not short of clueless people, even in universities.
Your right of course, a training camp is beyond the pale.
From the descriptions of the videos (no I haven’t watched them!) the ‘students’ were deliberately being vague so as not to give the administrators a clue. And the administrators were selectively edited to make them appear in the worst light.
Add to that any official’s natural desire to be helpful (that’s their job) and not just shut down their ‘customer’, and I can very well see that they might be made to appear, at best incoherent, and at worst to be supporting something which in fact they would never support.
So I think, without the full unedited videos, ‘clueless’ is a quite unfair conclusion.
I also agree with that basic premise – First Amendment protections mean a pro-ISIS club should be allowed to operate at a public university. (Though it’s also important point that providing any kind of material support to a terrorist organization like ISIS is very much a violation of the law.) Albeit, I think that if it was a “pro-National Socialist” club, or even a “Men’s Rights” group, the administration would react very differently, and this is where you get into the issues of the very selective kind of censorship that many universities are practicing currently.
All that said, this video has the feel of earlier Project Veritas videos, notably their notorious 2009 video that brought down ACORN. Basically, the tactic is to entrap a low level functionary of an organization in something smacking of criminal conspiracy or at least something highly unsavory and make political hay over it, aided by some very selective editing of source material.
If an organization is allowed on campus, does this mean that the university is in favor of it, or merely that there is no legal, moral or ethical way in which they can prevent the organization from being established?
If someone wanted to establish a campus chapter of the KKK, does the university have a right to say “no” unless there is a law or ule explicitly saying that the KKK and other such organizations can’t be on campus?
What if the club says it is merely sympathetic to the KKK?
Where and how should a university draw lines about such things? If the organization isn’t explicitly founded to incite illegal activity, it seems to me that a university MUST rubber-stamp approval without ironclad reasons to say no.
A public university might not be able to ban a KKK club, but they could set rules as to who is admitted, and one would probably be that blacks and minorities could not be excluded. That’s what happened at Vanderbilt (a private school), they had a rule that any club couldn’t exclude people on the basis of religion, meaning that a christian club was forced to not only accept non-christians but let them run for office positions. That caused a firestorm in Tennessee.
I think it’s fair to say that there could be something here, but O’Keefe’s deplorable track record demands, at minimum, the unedited video to make that determination.
The guy has a well known reputation for doing exactly what we would need to give him the benefit of the doubt for NOT doing here – dishonestly editing videos in order to create whatever reality he wants.
Even when you listen to some of the responses and say “I don’t see how this could be edited out of context”… I suggest going back to look at the ACORN “scandal”, and some of the crazy things he supposedly filmed their employees saying, until the unedited film was seen. It can be done, quite easily.
Nothing more than a shoddy video made by a convicted thief and fraud artist and conservaguerilla scumbag….which doesn’t show people saying what it claims they do…textbook FUD aimed at making all academics look like terrorist coddlers. Too many cuts to even count, and all used to deceive. In a video like this a cut = a lie.
Jeebus Crabst.