RUTHFULLY YOURS

An African-American scholar says that emphasis on STEM education is bad for blacks. Earlier today on Sirius XM Urban View, an African-American talk station, the guest was Daryl Scott, president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. The conversation turned to STEM — science, technology, engineering, and math — education, and the origins of the ongoing push to encourage institutions and students to focus on those subjects. Can you guess what happened?
In 1983, the guest explained, a commission empaneled by the secretary of education issued a report titled “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform.” In a memorable phrase, it warned of “a rising tide of mediocrity” in the nation’s public schools. That phrase, he said, was a “euphemism.” A euphemism for what? “For us — for African Americans.” There is nothing that happens in these United States that will not be impugned as secret racism. Nothing. “A Nation at Risk” is in fact full of memorable phrases — “unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament” is redolent of the Cold War concerns of the day — any of which might be read as racist code by a 21st-century progressive, because a 21st-century progressive can read the ingredients on a pack of Bazooka bubble gum as racist code.

Even if many Muslims came to Europe seeking economic opportunity, they are often defined as victims of racism and oppression. So, the thinking goes, if you are a victim of racism and oppression, how can you be racist yourself?

The Palestinians repeat almost daily that they would like to kill the Israelis, while the Israelis say they would like peace. What follows are usually bitter, politically-motivated denunciations of Israel by Europe, masquerading as human rights.

Despite the increasingly savage state of the world and an openly genocidal Iran — soon to be nuclear, if it is not already — Israeli leaders remain the ones Europeans love to accuse, hate and demonize.

The terrorist attacks are denounced by journalists and political leaders, but their denunciations always sound sanctimonious and thin, condemning the “anti-Semitism” they themselves have been encouraging.

In Europe today, slandering Israel is widely conveyed by European Muslims, and if a political leader or journalist does not agree with what they say, he must be a racist.

There are now 44 million Muslims in Europe.

Killing comes ahead of antigovernment protest march in Moscow on Sunday

MOSCOW—Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down on a bridge next to the Kremlin late on Friday, in what authorities said appeared to be a contract killing.

“The president said this brutal killing bears all the hallmarks of a contract murder and is of an exclusively provocative character,” Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for President Vladimir Putin , told Russian news agencies.

He said the president asked to monitor the investigation personally, and had offered his deepest condolences to Mr. Nemtsov’s family.

It was the highest-profile killing of political figure in more than a decade, more typical of the violent years just after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 than of today.

The White House condemned the “brutal murder” and called for a “prompt, impartial & transparent investigation,” in tweets posted by the U.S. National Security Council.
Mr. Nemtsov, 55 years old, was killed just yards from Red Square and the Kremlin wall in the shadow of the multicolored domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, as he walked across the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge around midnight, on an unseasonably warm winter night.

Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress this week that no one should pre-judge a nuclear deal with Iran because only the negotiators know what’s in it. But the truth is that the framework of an accord has been emerging thanks to Administration leaks to friendly journalists. The leaks suggest the U.S. has already given away so much that any deal on current terms will put Iran on the cusp of nuclear-power status.

The latest startling detail is Monday’s leak that the U.S. has conceded to Iran’s demand that an agreement would last as little as a decade, perhaps with an additional five-year phase-out. After that Iran would be allowed to build its uranium enrichment capabilities to whatever size it wants. In theory it would be forbidden from building nuclear weapons, but by then all sanctions would have long ago been lifted and Iran would have the capability to enrich on an industrial scale.

On Wednesday Mr. Kerry denied that a deal would include the 10-year sunset, though he offered no details. We would have more sympathy for his desire for secrecy if the Administration were not simultaneously leaking to its media Boswells while insisting that Congress should have no say over whatever agreement emerges.

France’s Anti-Terror, Free-Market Socialist Prime Minister Valls talks about ‘Islamofascism,’ his personal experience with rising anti-Semitism, and the necessity of economic reform.

Paris

‘France has been struck very much at its heart by terrorism—jihadist terrorism and radical Islamism, because let us call things like they are.”

So begins French Prime Minister Manuel Valls as we sit down Tuesday in his office at the Hotel Matignon, the prime minister’s elegant compound in the French capital’s 7th arrondissement, on the left bank of the Seine. Mr. Valls speaks English, but in the interest of precision he uses an interpreter for this meeting. A portrait of President François Hollande, Mr. Valls’s boss, looks down from a corner.

When Mr. Valls says “let us call things as they are”—this is his first interview with an American publication since the terrorist atrocities in Paris last month—the contrast with the U.S. president is hard to miss. But when I later ask why other world leaders seem reluctant to acknowledge the Islamist nature of the terror threat, the prime minister says with a sly smile: “It’s up to you to draw the analysis.”

Dressed in a slim-fitting white shirt, and with his deep, firm voice, Mr. Valls exudes an intense confidence. You might say the 52-year-old Socialist embodies energy in the executive, a quality his compatriots have come to admire in an age that calls on leaders to “always start with the real situation, not an imaginary world,” as Mr. Valls puts it.

The “real situation” in France is perilous. When Mr. Valls was appointed interior minister in spring 2012, authorities were monitoring 30 possible jihadist cases, he says. “Now we have more than 1,400 people identified as a potential risk in terms of jihadism. And we have 90 French citizens or people who resided in France who died in Iraq or even more so in Syria. And the intelligence services now have to monitor some 3,000 individuals in relation to jihadist networks, which is huge and unprecedented in the history of counterterrorism.”

Product Details

Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947Feb 24, 2015 | Deckle Edge
On July 22, 1946, seven milk churns containing concealed bombs exploded in the basement of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Six floors of British government and military offices collapsed, and 92 people were killed, most of them Arab, British and Jewish civilians. What was at the time the most lethal terrorist attack in history was perpetrated by the Irgun Zvai Leumi (Hebrew for National Military Organization) headed by Menachem Begin, a future prime minister of Israel. The organization’s main aim was to force the British out of Palestine, which they had ruled since 1917.

Bruce Hoffman, the director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the United States Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center, uses the story of the Irgun as a test case. At a time when terrorism seems to have an increasing and devastating effect on the course of history, Hoffman’s opening question is riveting: “Does terrorism work?” His answer is that in contrast to what most governments claim, terrorists can attain at least some of their fundamental aims, provided they operate under “the right conditions and with the appropriate strategy and tactics.” Indeed less than two years after the attack on the King David, the British were gone and the State of Israel was in existence. This sequence of events is misleading, however. Terrorism may work, as Hoffman suggests in this thought-­provoking book, but to prove his contention, more solid evidence is needed than the case of the Irgun in Palestine.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=EDWARD%20ALEXANDER%20JEWS%20AGAINST%20THEMSELVES

EDWARD ALEXANDERS I AUTHOR OF THE FORTHCOMING BOOK AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER: Jews Against ThemselvesMay 31, 2015
by Edward Alexander
Is it possible that American journalists are so ignorant of the recent past that they have failed to remark upon John Kerry’s scandalous rewriting of history in his attack upon Israeli prime minister Netanyahu during his congressional testimony on Wednesday (February 25)? To illustrate Netanyahu’s poor political judgment Kerry angrily alleged that the Israeli PM may be wrong about Iran’s nuclear program and intentions, just as he had been wrong in 2003 in his support of the invasion of Iraq—“and you remember how that turned out,” he sarcastically added.

Apparently Mr. Kerry takes his views of history from people who blame Israel for every misery on the planet except avian flu. Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, for example, blamed Israel for talking President Bush into that invasion, though even those two conspiracy theorists knew that Ariel Sharon, not Netanyahu, was PM at the time. In 2007 Lawrence Wilkerson, a member of the US State Department’s policy planning staff and later chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, said that “the Israelis were telling us Iraq is not the enemy—Iran is the enemy.”

House (23)

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (Ore.) — Wrote a Jan. 29 column in The Huffington Post explaining his decision, saying the Constitution “vests the responsibility for foreign affairs in the president.”

Rep. G.K. Butterfield (N.C.) — The head of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) focused on Boehner undermining Obama in a statement and emphasized he’s not urging a boycott.

Rep. Andre Carson (Ind.)

Rep. James Clyburn (S.C.) — Clyburn is the highest-ranking Democratic leader to say he’ll skip the speech.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/u0j4Vm-XVIY?feature=player_detailpage

The crisis between the United States and Israel has been manufactured by the Obama administration. Building a crisis up or down is well within the administration’s power, and it has chosen to build it up. Why? Three reasons: to damage and defeat Netanyahu (whom Obama has always disliked simply because he is on the right while Obama is on the left) in his election campaign, to prevent Israel from affecting the Iran policy debate in the United States, and worst of all to diminish Israel’s popularity in the United States and especially among Democrats.

Suppose for a moment that the Netanyahu speech before Congress is a mistake, a breach of protocol, a campaign maneuver, indeed all the bad things the White House is calling it. Grant all of that for a moment for the sake of argument and the behavior of the Obama administration is still inexplicable. Clearly more is behind its conduct than mere pique over the speech.