RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/14464/where-is-our-shame

CLIVE CROOK, who for many years was a senior editor at The Economist, wrote the other day that he used to think his finest moment at the magazine was in June 2000, when he approved what became one of the most memorable covers in the publication’s history — a photo of North Korea’s ruler Kim Jong Il, “looking wonderfully absurd” as he waved stiffly to an audience. The headline above the picture: “Greetings, earthlings.”

Millions of North Koreans have starved to death because of Pyongyang’s deranged policies.

Now, having read the new UN report on the Kim regime’s institutionalized barbarity, Crook feels a “pang of shame” at the thought of that cover. North Korea jokes no longer seem so funny.

Indeed. It has been known for years that North Korea is a totalitarian hellhole ruled by megalomaniacs who have turned the country into a vast concentration camp. Millions of North Koreans have died from starvation caused by their government’s deranged policies; millions more have been victimized by its fanatic efforts to repress any hint of independent thought, and by its merciless assaults on human dignity. But the report issued by the UN panel this month, after a year-long investigation that gathered evidence from more than 320 victims and witnesses, paints such an extensive and meticulous portrait of evil that it compares in significance, as the Washington Post observed, to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s devastating history of the Soviet labor camps, The Gulag Archipelago.

Israel demographicIsrael demographyIsrael jewish PopulationIsrael PopulationMichael WidlanskiUNRWAUNRWA PalestiniansYasser ArafatYasser Arafat population timebomb People who predict population trends need to learn from weather forecasters: when your forecasts are wrong more than right, go home before they lock you at home.‎ Many who yell “demography” when discussing ‎Israel’s future, pretend to have the facts on their side. Actually, […]

Hamas’ real problem with the UNRWA curriculum is that it could spoil the Islamist movement’s ongoing efforts to stir the hearts and minds of Palestinian children to wage jihad against the “enemies” of Islam. Hamas wants Palestinian children to be taught how to become suicide bombers and seek the death of Jews and “infidels.”

Palestinian schoolchildren in the Gaza Strip have been denied the opportunity to learn about human rights after the Hamas government determined that such a subject “dangerously contravenes Palestinian and Islamic culture.”

Hamas’s announcement came in response to an attempt by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to include a course on human rights in schools run by the agency in the Gaza Strip.

The UNRWA bid drew strong condemnations from the Hamas government, whose representatives accused the international agency of seeking to “brainwash” Palestinian children.

Mutasame al-Minawi, a senior official with the Hamas-run Ministry of Education, explained that the main reason why his government was opposed to the human rights subject being taught in Palestinian schools is because it “ignores the nakba [catastrophe] of the Palestinian people, seeks to scrap the right of return for Palestinian refugees [to Israel] and promotes the culture of peaceful resistance and submission as a way of restoring our rights.”

Al-Minawi said that UNRWA proposed two years ago to include in its school curriculum the subject of human rights. UNRWA was hoping, he added, that the subject would be taught to children from Grades 7-9.