A Brooklyn College Political Science graduate student enrolled in a Middle East course offered at Brooklyn College for this Spring. The newly hired adjunct professor for the course is Kristofer Petersen. 

Dismayed after doing some online search on the newly-hired adjunct professor, the student wrote on January 12 to the Department Chair:

Mr. Kristofer Petersen is an active partisan of Palestinians in Gaza. As a recent graduate student, he has published his views in one of the most virulent pro-Palestinian forums and elsewhere, and I have found little else in his online record displaying either balance or a wider scholarly understanding of Israel and the Palestinians… His writings and associations point to an apparent one-sidedness with regards to the Middle Eastern issue of Israel and Palestinians.

Kristofer Petersen’s own description of his background includes: “Outside the academy, I worked for some time as a human rights activist in Gaza and the West Bank and I still maintain close contact with the Palestinian activist community.”

The student points out Electronic Intifada as the venue for two of Petersen’s writings and quotes a pro-Palestinian activist and journalist, Ray Hanania, Member of the National Board of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, who wrote, “Electronic Intifada, [is] a place where hypocrisy is the norm, factual inaccuracies are common place, and anger and hatred drive their mission….And they are the first to denounce the killing of Palestinians, but never denounce the killing of Israelis.” (NGO Monitor has a Fact Sheet on Electronic Intifada. The Dutch government told an interfaith organization it funds that it may cut off funding if it continues funding Electronic Intifada.)

For that matter, the Israel-Palestinian dynamics are a relatively small part of issues in the Middle East. As the WikiLeaks revealed, the principal Arab state preoccupation is threats from Iran. (BBC Middle East editor: “Now their own people can see that in private they are saying the same things about Iran as many Israelis and neo-conservative Americans.”)

Petersen is preoccupied with the Palestinian narrative, as evident in his syllabus on the course, Politics of the Middle East: “the course is structured around the broad theme of identity and will be conducted at two levels: (1) a macro level which focuses on the Arab Middle East in general—and does not include details about Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan or Pakistan—and (2) a micro level which focuses specifically on Israel/Palestine.”

There are two required readings in Petersen’s course syllabus.. The first is The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Muslim World by Mohammed Ayoob, who concludes writing:

Above all, it is the unstinted and unquestioning American support to Israel, especially to its policy of continued occupation of and settlement within Palestinian lands conquered in 1967, that demonstrates to politically conscious Muslims that the United States is committed to treating Muslims and Arabs not only with insensitivity but with utter contempt.

Ayoob footnotes John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt and Rashid Khalidi, strident critics of Israel.

The propaganda issued by the Obama administration to obtain support for ObamaCare is blatant and wrong. An example is touting that ObamaCare has helped small businesses to obtain medical insurance. The federal Department of Health and Human Services cites a Democrat-front organization. The real facts say otherwise.

The federal Department of Health and Human Services website HealthCare.gov offers this “fact”: “According to a new survey from the Small Business Majority, one third of employers that don’t offer health insurance said they are more likely to do so because of the small business tax credits included in the Affordable Care Act, which help small employers afford coverage for their employees.”

But, as an expose in the New York Times says, “As far as the Agenda knows, the Small Business Majority research is the only research that has found that small businesses buy in to pay-or-play. All of the other small-business advocates claim the opposite, and by greater margins.”

What is the Small Business Majority? According to the New York Times expose:

The group has been around since 2004, founded by a tech entrepreneur named John Arensmeyer….Small Business Majority has no membership — if it did, Mr. Arensmeyer says, it could no longer objectively represent all of small business, since memberships are by definition self-selecting. Nor is it funded by small businesses; instead the organization depends almost entirely on foundation grants…. Small Business Majority is nonpartisan only in the most technical sense, in that it is not formally allied with any party. Informally, however, it is allied with the Democratic Party. Mr. Arensmeyer serves as a board member of the Bay Area Democrats, which describes itself as “a network of private citizens active in national Democratic Politics.” Since 2002, Mr. Arensmeyer has given generously, and exclusively, to Democratic candidates, according to F.E.C. records. (“I’ve voted for Republicans,” he offers.)… But when Mr. Arensmeyer insists that his organization is not ideological, he appears to mean that it is not “conservative.” The whole project, frankly, seems fundamentally ideological, and clearly liberal. It’s received a leg up from Demos, the advocacy group that counts among its objectives “a more equitable economy with widely shared prosperity and opportunity” — no initiatives to foster Ayn Rand-style self-reliance here. (Demos serves as a fiscal agent, which allows the group to raise money as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.)

In Business Week, Prof. Scott Shane, of Case Western Reserve University, lays out the reality:

Sellers of small group policies report little change in demand for employee health insurance policies among small business owners. The sellers explain that compensation limits for employees make few small businesses eligible for the credit and that the low value of the credit does little to get business owners to provide employee health insurance.

The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that the uptick in the share of firms offering employee health insurance is an artifact of high failure rates of the most vulnerable small businesses (which tend not to offer employee health insurance) during the economic downturn. With more of the companies not providing insurance out of the sample, the share of those providing insurance has increased for purely mathematical reasons….

Another claim is that the new law is bringing down health insurance premiums. Even if the law might, possibly, maybe, at some time in the future, bring down premiums, it hasn't done that yet. Trade publication Employee Benefit News explains that private companies' spending on health insurance is expected to have increased by 4.3 percent in 2010, a rise from the 2.5 percent expected the month before the PPACA was passed because of changes in COBRA policies….

So why am I challenging the claims of the law's cheerleaders? Because its effect so far has been a net negative. That's because many business owners have formed negative expectations of the future effects of the law. For instance, a survey of 459 businesses conducted by Fidelity Investments in June revealed that 49 percent of small employers expect the new law to increase their costs. Many small business owners are responding to these expectations by passing on health insurance costs to employees, by changing the type of insurance they offer, and by planning to drop employee health insurance coverage in the future.

As to the reduced workforce, this USA Today study points out that employment recovery from this recession is slower and less than from prior ones: “This year's hiring should lower the 9.8% jobless rate to 8.9% or so by the end of the year, Moody's Analytics says. That would still leave about 13 million Americans jobless by year's end and many economists say it will take at least five years for unemployment to return to its normal 5% to 6% rate.”

Why are firms either not hiring or limiting hiring?

The President of the US Chamber of Commerce knows the primary reason, excess regulations and taxes sapping the ability and willingness by entrepreneurs to start or stay in business, or by businesses to expand employment or to retain benefits programs. ObamaCare, for example, “creates 159 new agencies, commissions, panels, and other bodies. It grants extraordinary powers to the Department of Health and Human Services to redefine health care as we know it.”