NO POSTINGS UNTIL 8/13
https://www.city-journal.org/cuny–objective-testing
“Let’s face it: if more people were aware of how badly the school system performs, there’s no telling what might happen. So the three R’s must be replaced by the three D’s—distraction, deflection, and deceit. The integrity of the City University of New York is just the latest casualty in New York’ ongoing education tragedy.”
The City University of New York has announced plans to eliminate objective testing intended to determine which of its incoming students can do college-level work and which require remediation. Politico reports that CUNY chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez plans to move the university “away from high-stakes testing” while “reducing its reliance on placement tests students must take to determine whether they need remedial interventions.”
CUNY has been here once before—and the results nearly killed the university. Adjusted for euphemism, the decision points toward a reversal of 1990s-era reforms that pulled the university out of a long period of stagnation and decline. Abandoning testing would represent an effective return to so-called open-admissions policies from the 1960s and 1970s. Those allowed virtually anybody who could stumble through CUNY’s front door to enroll. Eventually, the university’s classrooms filled up with unqualified students, severely degraded the quality of education, and reduced the once-great university to a national laughingstock. CUNY’s rescue, a joint venture of then-governor George Pataki, then-mayor Rudy Giuliani, and others, was not easily achieved—and it will doubtless take some time for the university’s new admissions policy to start showing damaging effects. But that’s just a matter of time.
The new policy is a huge win for teachers’ unions and unaccountable bureaucrats because it greatly relieves pressure on New York City’s public schools to do better. It was achieved with the silent acquiescence of Governor Andrew Cuomo, the only politician in the state who could have stopped it. Back in 2012, Cuomo declared himself the chief lobbyist for New York’s public school students, and for a while, he really was—promoting and protecting charter schools, strengthening accountability for teachers and school administrators, and—critically—supporting student-performance benchmarks. In recent years, though, he’s been silent, standing aside as the Albany legislature refused to allow New York City’s astonishingly effective charter school movement to expand; as hard-won teacher-accountability reforms were peeled away and discarded; and as the state Board of Regents moved to abandon its 150-year-old practice of proficiency testing of high school students statewide. And now CUNY is following suit, embracing a new open-admissions era.
https://youtu.be/ZfljAZ04wzQ
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14633/iranian-intolerance
What, one has to ask, does Iran’s Islamic regime have to fear from the country’s Christians, Baha’is, Zoroastrians, Sufis, Sunni Muslims, or Jews? Yet its treatment of these minorities is so repressive that it seems not unreasonable to ask if the clerics might be afraid of what they consider challenges to their fantasy of pure Islamic identity.
So why this persecution? Because they represent a challenge to the radical shari’a law doctrines of the clergy, who impose Ayatollah Khomeini’s religio-politico system of Velayat-e Faqih (rule by the theocratic Islamic government).
“If they [Muslims] had gotten rid of the punishment for apostasy, Islam would not exist today.” – Islamic leader Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
The Iranian people who have been fighting for their freedom all these years deserve our immediate help.
The regime that currently rules Iran was set up after a revolution in early 1979, and after forty years remains in power. It will have escaped no one’s attention that relations between Iran and the West, notably the United States, have never been healthy and in recent months have deteriorated further.
The United States has placed increasingly harsh sanctions on its clerical foe, including some on Iran’s hard-line Supreme Leader (Rahbar-e A’zam), the ageing but still powerful Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. These sanctions are justified on several grounds: Iran’s massive involvement in Middle East conflicts beyond its borders (For example, in Syria Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Venezuela and the Gaza Strip); its financial, moral, and physical support for major terrorist bodies such as Hizbullah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad; its funding and arming of its own Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), now designated as a terrorist entity by the US; its carrying out of executions of dissidents, homosexuals, religious minorities, among others, making it responsible for over half of all recorded executions worldwide; its enforcement of strict codes of modesty on women, who can be arrested merely for wearing a hijab badly or not at all – a policy that was reinforced in 2016 and 2019 through the recruitment of thousands of morality police; its mass arrests, imprisonments and murders of dissidents, human rights activists, religious minorities, and others, with little or no evidence and without access to defence, and its rejection of diplomatic efforts to secure the release of the innocent British-Iranian woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe because its government refuses to recognize the international standard of dual citizenship.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14574/pakistan-forced-conversion
“The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan reports that the police often turn a blind eye to reports of abduction and forced conversions thereby creating impunity for perpetrators. The police will often either refuse to record a First Information Report or falsify the information, thereby denying families the chance to take their case any further.” — Report conducted in 2018 by the University of Birmingham’s Commonwealth Initiative for Freedom of Religion or Belief, United Kingdom, 2018.
“Local police and political leaders… are often accused of being complicit in forced marriage and conversion cases by failing to properly investigate them. If such cases are investigated or adjudicated, the young woman is reportedly questioned in front of the man she was forced to marry, which creates pressure on her to deny any coercion.” — Annual Report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, 2019.
“The most important reason for this [abduction and conversion] is the desire to increase Pakistan’s Muslim population, which stems from the Islamic teaching that that a person who converts one non-Muslim to Islam will be granted a place in paradise.” — Sardar Mushtaq Gill, Pakistani human rights lawyer and head of the Legal Evangelical Association Development (LEAD-Pakistan).
“The judiciary are often subject to fear of reprisal from extremist elements, in other cases the judicial officers’ personal beliefs influence them into accepting the claims made that the woman/girl converted on her own free will.” — Report conducted in 2018 by the University of Birmingham’s Commonwealth Initiative for Freedom of Religion or Belief, United Kingdom, 2018.
“Higher authorities also have done little to nothing to pass legislation specifically criminalizing this issue….International pressure on Pakistan is an important element of seeking to end this abuse. Without motivation coming from outside the country, it is very unlikely the Pakistani government will listen to minority leaders and civil society to pass laws combating this issue.” — William Stark, South Asia regional manager at the International Christian Concern.
On July 12, Hindus and Sikhs gathered in the Sindh province of Pakistan to protest the kidnapping of young girls, their forced conversion to Islam and subsequent marriage to their abductors. Demonstrators at the rally also railed against the government of Prime Minister Imran Khan for not safeguarding minority rights in the Muslim-majority country.
https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/06/igniting-civil-war/
Government sponsorship of violence against opponents or complacency in the face of incitement to violence is a powerful tool of political repression. Regimes such as Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, China, and other tyrannies have used such tactics to great effect. When mobs attack anti-government demonstrators, for example, the police either disappear or stand by watching. In American cities run by Democrats and on the U.S. college and university campuses, the authorities increasingly have been standing by as radicals do the dirty work of beating up or silencing conservatives.
In societies riven by mutual hate, the people who control the police and public communications make all the difference. When they maintain impartiality, as did Germany’s Weimar government while the Nazis and Communists struggled for primacy, partisan warfare tends to be resolved politically—though the results are harsh. When societal hatred or the partiality of authorities results in deaths, long-smoldering cold civil war can blaze into holocaust.
We Americans are now facing the danger of a civil war thus ignited. We do not think of civil war this way because our Civil War from 1861 to 1865 was less a conflict within society than it was a highly organized war between states. That war notwithstanding, personal friendships and mutual esteem persisted on both sides, such as that between Ulysses S. Grant and prominent Confederate General James Longstreet.
What we face now is worse.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274515/remembering-first-and-forgotten-armenian-genocide-raymond-ibrahim
Last April 24 was Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. Millions of Armenians around the world recollected how the Islamic Ottoman Empire killed—often cruelly and out of religious hatred—some 1.5 million of their ancestors during World War I.
Ironically, most people, including most Armenians, are unaware that the first genocide of Christian Armenians at the hands of Muslim Turks did not occur in the twentieth century; it began in 1019—exactly one-thousand years ago this year—when Turks first began to pour into and transform a then much larger Armenia into what it is today, the eastern portion of modern day Turkey.
Thus, in 1019, “the first appearance of the bloodthirsty beasts … the savage nation of infidels called Turks entered Armenia … and mercilessly slaughtered the Christian faithful with the sword,” writes Matthew of Edessa (d.1144), a chief source for this period. Three decades later the raids were virtually nonstop. In 1049, the founder of the Turkic Seljuk Empire himself, Sultan Tughril Bey (r. 1037–1063), reached the unwalled city of Arzden, west of Lake Van, and “put the whole town to the sword, causing severe slaughter, as many as one hundred and fifty thousand persons.”
After thoroughly plundering the city—which reportedly contained eight hundred churches—he ordered it set ablaze and turned into a desert. Arzden was “filled with bodies” and none “could count the number of those who perished in the flames.” The invaders “burned priests whom they seized in the churches and massacred those whom they found outside. They put great chunks of pork in the hands of the undead to insult us”—Muslims deem the pig unclean—“and made them objects of mockery to all who saw them.”
Eight hundred oxen and forty camels were required to cart out the vast plunder, mostly taken from Arzden’s churches. “How to relate here, with a voice stifled by tears, the death of nobles and clergy whose bodies, left without graves, became the prey of carrion beasts, the exodus of women … led with their children into Persian slavery and condemned to an eternal servitude! That was the beginning of the misfortunes of Armenia,” laments Matthew, “So, lend an ear to this melancholy recital.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274504/chinas-spies-us-universities-john-glynn
In May of this year, in a commentary titled “United States, don’t underestimate China’s ability to strike back,” Wu Yuehe, a journalist at the People’s Daily, had this to say:
We advise the U.S. side not to underestimate the Chinese side’s ability to safeguard its development rights and interests. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!
A few weeks later, two Chinese professors at Emory university lost their jobs. Li Xiaojiang and Li Shishua, who were conducting research in the field of genetics, failed to disclose grants they received from nebulous institutions in China.
Two questions:
[1] Why were two scientists employed by an American university receiving grants from China?
[2] Why were the pair so reluctant to disclose the grants?
The answers to both questions are as simple as they are worrying. FBI Director Christopher Wray recently told senators that China is engaging in a concerted effort to steal its way to economic dominance. As I write, there are more than 1,000 investigations underway on intellectual property theft. Every single one of these investigations leads back to China.
The Chinese have been engaged in this sort of nefarious activity for years, and American institutes of education appear to be their prime focus. In August 2015, an electrical engineering student based in Chicago sent an email to a Chinese national titled “Midterm test questions.” Two years later, the email was the subject of an FBI probe in the Southern District of Ohio. Law enforcement agents suspected the student was actually a plant, an intelligence officer who was sent to the United States for one reason only: to acquire technical information and share it with defense contractors in China.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274549/el-paso-fort-hood-lloyd-billingsley
Last weekend, Patrick Crusius shot down 22 victims in El Paso, Texas. Ten years earlier in Fort Hood, Texas, some 500 miles to the east, U.S. Army major Nidal Hasan was planning a deadly attack, similar in some ways but decidedly different in response from the media and political establishments. Unlike the El Paso shooter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, then headed by Robert Mueller, was on to Hasan from the start.
On May 31, 2009, the Muslim army psychiatrist, a self-described “soldier of Allah,” contacted terrorist mastermind Anwar al-Awliki, probing whether it was okay to kill American soldiers by suicide bombings and such in order to help fellow Muslim combatants. “This logic seems to make sense to me,” Hasan replied. These and other emails between the two were in the hands of the FBI at that time.
In June of 2009, the FBI’s Washington field office responded “WFO does not currently assess Hasan to be involved in terrorist activities.” The FBI promptly dropped the case until November 5, when field agents said: “You know who that is. That’s our boy.”
As it emerged in the 2012 congressional hearings on Lessons from Fort Hood: Improving our Ability to Connect the Dots, their boy Nidal Hasan, “walked into the Soldier Readiness Center at Fort Hood, Texas, and shouted the classic jihadist term ‘Allahu Akbar’ and opened fire on unarmed soldiers and civilians. He killed 13 and wounded 42 others. This was the most horrific terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11.” That was accurate, but did not capture the details.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/karen_armstrong_and_the_islamists.html
What do the Dalai Lama, a former nun, and a group accused of supporting terrorism have in common? All of them are connected to a multinational initiative to “help people adjust creatively to our globally interdependent world,” known as the Charter of Compassion.
The former nun is prominent author and academic Karen Armstrong. In 2009, after receiving the prestigious $100,000 TED Prize, she, along with other members of the founding council, drafted the Charter for Compassion, advocating that those of all religions bind together to create a “global community.” The list of signatories of the charter reads like a “Who’s Who” of global superstars, including New Age guru Deepak Chopra, South African Anglican bishop Desmond Tutu, filmmaker David Lynch, actress Goldie Hawn, Oxford scholar Tariq Ramadan, the Dalai Lama, and singer Peter Gabriel, to name a few.
Even though the Charter for Compassion bills itself as a document to bind all of the religions of the world together around the concept of compassion, the charter seems far more interested in Islamic jurisprudence than true ecumenicalism.
For example, a section of the official website deals exclusively with Islamophobia and links to resources by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
CAIR has long been accused of promoting an Islamist ideology, and even U.S. Federal prosecutors have shown the group’s close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. CAIR itself has been designated as a terror group by the United Arab Emirates.
In its “Islamophobia Guidebook” section, Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid advises Charter supporters, in an article entitled “Fourteen Ways You Can Fight Islamophobia”, to “Remember the Prophet” who “remained steadfast, patient and tolerant in the face of Islamophobia.”
