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April 2025

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Do Not Be Fooled by the ‘Anti-Hamas’ Protests by Bassam Tawil

By on April 1st, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21521/anti-hamas-protests

Those who are rushing to celebrate the protests in Gaza need to consider that they are most likely nothing but a show by the Iran-backed Hamas to fool the world into thinking that there is an uprising against the terrorist group.

After all, this is the same Hamas that kept signaling to everyone, years before its terrorists attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, that it was not interested in another round of fighting. Then it murdered and brutally tortured 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 251.

What would Norway or Denmark do if ISIS or Al-Qaeda were on its border, seeking to destroy it?

According to some reports, Hamas members have been spotted leading some of Gaza’s demonstrations.

Last year, Israel tried to encourage anti-Hamas clans to play a role in managing the Gaza Strip — without success. Regrettably, several clans have, over the past year, issued statements expressing support for Hamas as the “sole representative of the Gaza Strip.”

The current protests are taking place for one reason only: Hamas is conspicuously losing the war… The protesters are just angry that Israel retaliated so hard.

All Hamas would have to do for Israel to stop is to free the 59 remaining hostages, only 24 of whom possibly remain alive – but all of whom are victims of a kidnapping that should not have happened in the first place.

Sadly, there is no alternative to the complete removal of Hamas…. [T]here is no difference between Hamas’s political wing and its military wing. Hamas’s political wing, in fact, requires the military wing, to be able to stay in power.

If the West falls for Hamas’s latest ploy, the terror group will simply soon be able to take control of the Gaza Strip with a rebranded name. Hamas’s primary goal, after all, is to remain in power.

It is time to stop projecting Western values and aspirations onto Islamist societies. The protests in the Gaza Strip are not a shift toward peace. Instead, they are a symptom of the Palestinians’ failure, once again, to achieve their goal of murdering Jews and eliminating Israel.

Make no mistake: Once the Palestinians recover from the war, they will continue their jihad against Israel. Many of the “anti-Hamas” protesters will then reappear, this time complete with masks, weapons and military gear.

The recent anti-Hamas protests in the Gaza Strip are seen by some Western and Arab political analysts as a positive and encouraging development.

Those who are rushing to celebrate the protests in Gaza need to consider that they are most likely nothing but a show by the Iran-backed Hamas to fool the world into thinking that there is an uprising against the terrorist group.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Setting the Record Straight on Three Education Issues Overwrought allegations about “massive teacher layoffs,” the elimination of the DOE, and school choice abound. by Larry Sand

By on April 1st, 2025

https://www.ruthfullyyours.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

As someone who has been writing about education issues for years, I have noticed that disinformation, misinformation, and all-around twaddle are now more ubiquitous than ever. I will cover three areas here.

Massive teacher layoffs

Various online articles report that “massive teacher layoffs” —notably in California— are “devastating, chaotic, and detrimental” to student learning conditions.” While some layoffs include other employees, including librarians and nurses, most cuts are to teachers.

Most of the hysterics don’t acknowledge that many districts are over-staffed due in part to the expiring $190 billion federal Covid relief funds. Also, a major contributor to the need for fewer teachers in California is that while there were 6.3 million students in 2006-2007, now just 5.8 million are enrolled, and the state projects that number to fall to 5.3 million by 2031.

Looking at the bigger picture, researcher Chad Aldeman reports that in the 2023-24 school year, public schools nationwide added 121,000 employees, hitting a record high, even though enrollment dropped by 110,000. He discloses that about one-third of these districts added teachers while serving fewer students. For instance, Philadelphia lost nearly 16,000 students but employed 200 more teachers, dropping its student-to-teacher ratio from about 17:1 to under 15:1.

Aldeman writes that about a quarter of all districts followed the path of California’s Capistrano Unified School District, which lowered its teaching force over time but not as fast as it lost students. Capistrano suffered a “22% decline in student enrollment but reduced its teaching staff by just 7%.”

It’s worth noting that in most of the country, where teacher union contracts are in play, layoffs are made based on seniority, not teacher quality. Hence, students suffer not because of fewer teachers but rather fewer good ones.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Starts Undoing JFK’s Worst Mistake

By on April 1st, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/01/trump-starts-undoing-jfks-worst-mistake/

While Democrats were busy hyperventilating over the nothingburger “Signal scandal,” President Donald Trump quietly took an action that could do more to drain the swamp – and Democratic Party finances – than any other action he’s taken to date.

On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order that ends collective bargaining rights for most federal workers, a move that “is a magnitude of tenfold on what they’ve done so far on their attack of the federal workforce and the labor movement,” Cathy Creighton, director of Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations Buffalo Co-Lab, told the Washington Post.

Actually, it is the first step toward righting a wrong committed by President John Kennedy in 1962 when he signed an executive order allowing federal workers the right to collectively bargain. Up until then, politicians on both sides of the aisle agreed that letting government workers unionize was a terrible idea.

Even the sainted FDR attacked the idea as “unthinkable and intolerable,” saying that “the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”

But Kennedy needed to pay unions back for their crucial support in his narrow election victory and, once he did so, union membership among federal workers soared. In 1978, Congress turned Kennedy’s executive order into law with the Civil Service Reform Act, which had the strong support of the American Federation of Government Employees.

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