RUTHFULLY YOURS

Benjamin Balint’s column is a review of a book….Teaching Plato in Palestine By Carlos Fraenkel whose author is “a student of medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy who now teaches at McGill University in Montreal. Balint who lives in Israel has taught at ” Al Quds University whose president is Sari Nusseibeh. It is an affront to Israel and the fact that Bard University has a program there tells one all one needs to know about how Bard’s students are taught Middle Eastern History…..rsk

One afternoon last year, I returned home from a “great books” seminar that I taught to Palestinian students at Bard College’s liberal-arts program at Al Quds University in Jerusalem. I mentioned to a friend that the classroom discussion on Plato’s “Republic” had been interrupted by a militant rally staged outside our building by students from the Islamic Jihad faction shouting into loudspeakers. “Back from Syracuse?” he asked.

Professors and historians urged opposition to the College Board’s new curriculum for teaching AP U.S. History.

The memory hole, a creation of George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” was a mechanism for separating a society’s disapproved ideas from its dominant ideas. The unfavored ideas disappeared, Orwell wrote, “on a current of warm air” into furnaces.

In the U.S., the memory-sorting machine may be the College Board’s final revision of the Advanced Placement examination for U.S. history, to be released later this summer.

The people responsible for the new AP curriculum really, really hate it when anyone says what they are doing to U.S. history is tendentious and destructive. In April, the nine authors of the “curriculum framework” published a relatively brief open letter to rebut “uninformed criticisms” of the revision.

A private school field trip to a sex shop in my hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota, made national news recently. This scandal from America’s heartland is merely a harbinger of worse to come as the insanity of same-sex “marriage” (SSM) spreads across the world.

Starri Hedges, the director of the small Gaia Democratic School with 25 students (including several described by the school as transgender), took pupils as young as 11 to Smitten Kitten as a conclusion to the school’s sex education curriculum. “Everything deemed pornographic was off limits to the students, though sex toys and other products were visible,” Hedges later explained to reporters. “The sexual health aspect, there is no right age for all kids,” Hedges said, as some “students…are already going through puberty at 10 or 11.” “It was certainly the first time we have taken that kind of field trip and it will probably be our last, which I feel bad [about] because the kids had so much fun,” Hedges added.

The following letter (sent via iPhone) is from Marilyn T., a teacher. She has worked in the greater New York City area for many years and wants everyone to know how debased and crazy our classrooms have become. She sums it up this way: “NYC is lost. Totally.”

Every American should be keenly concerned about understanding and saving New York City, because your own city is probably using the same bad methods and heading toward the same level of failure.

The letter:

Rather than choose what works in our schools, we are often using poorly designed programs in order to meet some philosophical ideal. Cohesive Curriculum is now the buzz. Unfortunately too often our administration chooses weak programs because of the philosophical ideal rather than the efficacy of the program.

Presently the administration spent thousands on a reading program which throws sight-words and phonics at the students simultaneously. Mixing these two at equal strength can set students years behind because sight-word instruction confuses decoding instruction. Rather a seamless program that is phonetic, systematic and explicit is best.

In a stunning blow to Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has lost its parliamentary majority for the first time in over 13 years. By curtailing Erdogan’s power, the results of the general election held last Sunday (June 7) are likely – at long last – to have some positive repercussions for the Greater Middle East.

Erdogan had hoped to obtain a two-thirds legislative supermajority, which would enable him to push through a new constitution that would create an executive presidency and make him de iure, as well as de facto, Turkey’s autocrat with sweeping powers which would have made the U.S. presidency look weak by comparison. His by now openly Islamist AKP, which has governed Turkey since February 2002, went along with his plan. In view of Erdogan’s victory in the presidential election less than a year ago with 52 percent of the vote in the first round, and the AKP’s ability to steadily increase its share of the vote in three consecutive elections, the party’s top brass initially assumed the AKP would be able to gain the 400 seats which Erdogan boldly promised at the beginning of the campaign. Some weeks later he lowered his expectations to 330 seats, the number necessary to hold a referendum on the constitutional amendment he wanted. In the final fortnight of the campaign he remained confident that the AKP would get at least 276 seats needed to form a single-party government for the fourth time.

China continues transfer through its own territory, nuclear weapons technology involving both North Korea and Iran.

In April, North Korea launched a ballistic missile from a submerged platform. The North Korean underwater launch test was closely related to the further development of a missile-firing submarine capable of hitting the U.S. — “a first step,” according to Uzi Rubin, “in achieving a very serious and dangerous new military capability… it will take many years to build up the missile defenses, so we had better use the time wisely.”

Although the Chinese profess to be against nuclear proliferation, documented evidence illustrates just the opposite — as a means of asserting Chinese hegemony, complicating American security policy and undermining American influence in the region.

Unfortunately, no matter how attractive a strategy of diplomatically ending North Korea’s nuclear program might look, it is painfully at odds with China’s established record of supporting nuclear proliferation with such collapsed or rogue states as Iran, Syria, Pakistan, North Korea and Libya.

The Guardian has published, before this, praise for several North Korean films, including A Flower Girl. But North Korea is one of the world’s most repressive and dangerous states, governed by a regime that might even make the Ayatollahs of Iran hesitate. So why no letters in The Guardian boycotting their films? Oh, I forgot, nobody ever calls for a boycott of North Korea or any really repressive state.

The activists never march against Saudi Arabia, which has just confirmed the sentence of a blogger, Raif Badawi, to a flogging of 1000 lashes, “very harshly” as the flogging order read, as a punishment for writing thoughts such as, “My commitment is… to reject any oppression in the name of religion… a goal we will reach in a peaceful and law-abiding way.” They never march against Qatar, Iran, North Korea, China, Russia or Sudan.

To uphold human rights by supporting a murderous terrorist state, while condemning a democracy forced to defend itself against outside forces bent on its destruction — do any of these writers know what free speech or human rights are about, what democracy means or what international law consists of? One suspects not.

They came in the early eighth century across the Straits of Gibraltar, unleashing terror and carnage across Iberia “like a desolating storm.” They were stopped deep inside today’s France, at Tours, by Charles Martel in 732. They kept attacking Europe throughout the Middle Ages, but their next sustained assault was at her vulnerable southeastern flank, taking advantage of Byzantium’s weakened state after the infamous Fourth Crusade. They conquered Constantinople and destroyed the Christian nations of Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary. They were finally stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1683.
Europe seemed safe over the ensuing 250 years of unprecedented demographic, scientific, technological, and geopolitical advance. The “sick man on the Bosphorus” was reduced to a mere object of European imperial ambitions, while “Arabia,” irrelevant to the civilized world, remained stuck in its primitive ways.

On Thursday and Friday, June 11-12, there will be a gathering of some of the nation’s and the world’s leading climate change “skeptics” in Washington, D.C. and joining them will be members of Congress and their staffs. The Tenth International Conference on Climate Change will occur and the odds are that the mainstream media, as it has done for all the previous conferences, will do its best to ignore it.

In attendance as well will be scores of scientists, economists, and policy experts for a conference being held just two blocks from a White House in which the President of the United States resides while lying about “climate change” as the greatest threat to the planet.

In March, the Gallup Poll revealed that “Although climate scientists have been in the news describing this winter as a strong signal that global warming is producing more extreme weather, Americans are no more likely today (55%) than in the past two years to believe the effects of global warming are occurring.”

On Monday evening, after two and a half days of back-to-back lectures, panels, workshops and children’s activities, Limmud Oz 2015 came to a close. Though the major Jewish conference was founded in Britain in 1980, its model is now used by communities around the world. Each has its own flavor, depending on the location, but the idea behind the endeavor is basically the same: to gather Jews from all walks of life, levels of religious observance and political orientation and learn from one another.

I had the good fortune to be invited to this year’s event in Sydney, Australia — hosted by the Shalom Institute at the University of New South Wales — to present my perspective on the Israeli elections, the framework for the Iranian nuclear deal, Zionism, anti-Semitism and aliyah. This gave me the opportunity, in between my own sessions, to attend those of other lecturers and panelists.