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EDUCATION

The Lethal Indoctrination of Children in Palestinian Education How UNRWA-run schools incubate anti-Semitism and terror. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/lethal-indoctrination-children-palestinian-richard-l-cravatts/

Signaling yet another unfortunate reversal of Trump-era policies, President Biden was in Bethlehem in the West Bank on July 15th to affirm U.S. support for the long-aggrieved Palestinians.

During that meeting with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, Biden suggested that “Palestinian refugees deserve to live in dignity, to see their basic needs addressed, and to have hope for the future,” and one remedy for their condition, of course, is U.S. aid, namely, “an additional $201 million for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) to continue delivering critical services to Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.”

UNRWA, the UN’s division dedicated solely to the Palestinian refugees, has been the subject of much scrutiny and criticism, which is why in 2018 the Trump administration eliminated further funding for the controversial agency. That approach was a good step, since UNRWA, established when some 400,000-700,000 Palestinians were made refugees with the founding of Israel, has perversely served as a political and diplomatic tactic by which the hapless Palestinians have languished stateless, as if in amber, used as a hammer with which to bludgeon Israel by blaming the Jewish state for the condition in which these refugees, including millions of the descendants of the original refugees, now find themselves. The slavish attention paid to this particular group of refugees suggests that their importance is based on the symbolic import of their existence as Israel’s victims, thus the budgetary and organizational commitment to UNRWA’s operations.

Specifically, UNRWA employs some 30,000 people to tend to the needs of only 5.7 million people identified as Palestinian refugees (or 190 refugees for every employee) while The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the division responsible for every other refugee in the world, some 59 million people, has only 18,000 employees (3277 refugees for every employee).

22 State AGs Sue Biden Regime Over Threat to Withhold Nutrition Assistance from Schools That Don’t Submit to Radical LGBTQ Policy By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/28/22-state-ags-sue-biden-regime-over-threat-to-withhold-nutrition-assistance-from-schools-that-dont-submit-to-radical-lgbtq-policy/

More than 20 Republican attorneys general have filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration over the Department of Agriculture’s threat to withdraw funding from school meal assistance programs unless the schools submit to the regime’s “expansive and unlawful interpretation of federal antidiscrimination laws.”

The lawsuit, led by Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery, was filed on Tuesday. The coalition of 22 State AGs claim that the federal government has adopted “a new and unlawful application of the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County as it applies to antidiscrimination requirements.”

In a statement Tuesday, Slatery said, “these transformative changes were made without providing the States and other stakeholders the opportunity for input as required by the Administrative Procedures Act (APA).”

The coalition of attorneys general said in a letter to Biden last month, that a new USDA guidance greatly expanded the concept of “discrimination on the basis of sex” to include gender identity and sexual orientation, and did “much more than offer direction.”

“It imposes new—and unlawful—regulatory measures on state agencies and operators receiving federal financial assistance from the USDA,” the letter stated. “And the inevitable result is regulatory chaos that would threaten the effective provision of essential nutritional services to some of our most vulnerable citizens.”

The AGs allege in the lawsuit that the Biden administration “inappropriately expanded the law far beyond what statutory text, regulatory requirements, judicial precedent, and the U.S.
Constitution permit.”

To be clear, the States do not deny benefits based on a household member’s sexual orientation or gender identity. But the States do challenge the unlawful and unnecessary
new obligations and liabilities that the Memoranda and Final Rule attempt to impose—obligations that apparently stretch as far as ending sex-separated living facilities and athletics and mandating the use of biologically inaccurate preferred pronouns.

IN PORTLAND, THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION STARTS IN KINDERGARTEN -Christopher Rufo

https://www.city-journal.org/in-portland-the-sexual-revolution-starts-in-kindergarten

The city’s public schools teach K-5 students to subvert the sexuality of “white colonizers” and begin exploring “the infinite gender spectrum.”

Portland Public Schools has launched a war against the “gender binary” and adopted a radical new curriculum teaching students to subvert the sexuality of “white colonizers” and begin exploring “the infinite gender spectrum.”

I have obtained a cache of documents from a source inside Portland Public Schools that exposes the nature of this curriculum. The lessons seek to turn the principles of academic queer theory into an identity-formation program for elementary school students. The premise is simple: privileged white heterosexuals have created an oppressive gender system in order to dominate racial and sexual minorities. As the curriculum explains, “gender is colonized,” and Western societies have used language to erase alternative sexualities.

“When white European people colonized different places, they brought their own ideas about gender and sexuality,” the curriculum reads. “When the United States was colonized by white settlers, their views around gender were forced upon the people already living here. Hundreds of years later, how we think and talk about gender are still impacted by this shift.” (When reached for comment, Portland Public Schools wrote: “We make certain that our curriculum is LGBTQ+ inclusive for students who identify as transgender, gender non-conforming, gender-queer, and queer to create a safe and inclusive environment for all of our students.”).

Black Studies as Cultural Reparations The chickens of the 1960s have come home to roost. Jason D. Hill

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/black-studies-cultural-reparations-jason-d-hill/

In current conversations regarding reparations for blacks, few consider the phenomenon of cultural reparations as a sufficient contender.

This legacy of the civil rights movement is not to be taken lightly. Indeed, cultural reparations were an enormous contribution of the United States of America to bring blacks fully into the domain of what may be termed the sovereign mass that constitutes the citizenry of our republic.

One reason, among several, that reparations discussions today are uneven, is that they overlook the important fact that cultural reparations in the form of Black Studies that began in the 1960s were a hugely reparative moment for blacks in America.

Soon after tasting the victories of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which civilly and criminally outlawed racism, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act—blacks became voraciously hungry. They were hungry for power—black power. They were hungry also for revenge. They were also filled with anger and rage. Gratitude was not an emotion they felt, as beneficiaries of the rights accorded them via the civil rights movements. They were eager to assume the perpetual mantle of victims and the conferral of moral, iconic sainthood that came with it for the first time in their collective history.

Major Military Academies Have Been Teaching Critical Race Theory for Some Time By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/26/major-military-academies-have-been-teaching-critical-race-theory-for-some-time/

A new study by an education watchdog group claims that major military academies in the United States have been actively teaching the far-left and anti-White concept of “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) to future military leaders.

According to Fox News, the report comes from CriticalRace.org, which focuses on monitoring the spread of CRT across the country, particularly in education. The website is a project of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to freedom of speech and academic freedom on campus. As part of the project, the foundation has expanded the scope of its investigation to include military academies as well.

“The good news is that CRT and related ideologies have not yet captured the military service academies the way they have overrun higher ed, professional schools, and increasingly K-12,” said William Jacobson, the founder of Legal Insurrection. “The bad news is that these ideologies have established a beachhead at the military service academies and are likely to expand as part of a more general military wokeness campaign from the top down.”

Jacobson said that the investigation had discovered this trend after taking a closer look at the curricula at the United States Air Force Academy, the United States Coast Guard Academy, the United States Merchant Marine Academy, the United States Naval Academy, and the United States Military Academy at West Point. The report concluded that every single one of these elite military institutions has been teaching some form of CRT, otherwise known as “anti-racism,” as part of the broader “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) agenda.

The National Association of Scholars Takes on the Marxists in Education By John Dale Dunn

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/07/the_national_association_of_scholars_takes_on_the_marxists_in_education.html

I am not a professional academic but for many years I have been a member of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), a politically conservative academic professional group that has always opposed the Marxist socialist, collectivist invasion of educational and other institutions of Western democracies.

On June 13, 2022, Peter Wood (PhD Anthropology, U of Rochester) President of NAS, released a position paper opposing leftist invasions of American education and culture that are broadly referred to as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) in a long and thorough (more than 4000 words) critique and call to arms and opposition: Regime Change: Repelling the DEI Assault on Higher Education .    

I provide some pertinent excerpts from the monograph and some comments.

Dr. Wood Introduces the Position Paper:|

Criticism of American society for its inequitable treatment of blacks and other minority groups has become a focal point of American education at every level of instruction. Sometimes this criticism is historically well-grounded and tempered by recognition of social, political, and economic complexity. But more often this criticism veers into simplistic claims and fictions presented as fact. . . .  “anti-racist” agenda in post-secondary education have not drawn nearly as much attention as they have in K-12 schools. In this essay I intend to address the critique of America on racial grounds mainly at the college and university level, but problems in K-12 schools will necessarily come into the picture

The Sexual Experiment at the Ivy Leagues By Abigail Anthony

With courses such as ‘Queer Dance’ and events featuring the drag queen ‘LaWhore Vagistan,’ campus life today is steeped in gender and sexuality.

Until very recently, most people were unaware that asserting that only women can menstruate and become pregnant could be controversial, or that pronouns could be incendiary. Yet today, gender ideology dominates the news cycle. Netflix employees protested Dave Chappelle’s comedy special with “transphobic” jokes. Avid Harry Potter fans boycotted J. K. Rowling’s work because of her supposedly “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” views. It’s not merely a culture war. The State Department recognized International Pronouns Day. Recently, President Biden signed an executive order to “advance LGBTQI+ equality,” which in part promotes “expanded access to gender-affirming care,” even for minors.

How did such radical social change happen so quickly? As incubators of gender fundamentalists, universities are equipping students with ever-expanding terminology for sexual orientation and encouraging activism without cultivating a sense of intellectual humility. Graduates become the directors of corporations, editors of newspapers, and staffers to politicians, thus occupying powerful positions that shape American culture. To help readers understand the college-campus dynamics, National Review compiled academic coursework, extracurricular programming, and institutional resources related to gender and sexual ethics at the eight Ivy League institutions, which serve as exemplars of higher education and train the country’s future elites.

Confucius Institutes 2.0: Chinese Government Money Speaks Loudly by Peter Schweizer

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18697/confucius-institutes

A new, detailed, and thorough report by the National Association of Scholars confirms that not a single one of these [Confucius] “institutes” disappeared; they were just re-branded under a “sister university” arrangement with universities in China, given a different name, or moved to a different sponsor school. And the money continues to flow.

Jamie P. Horsley, senior fellow of the Tsai Center and its former executive director, defends the purpose of Confucius Institutes on American campuses. He argues that they are needed to teach students Mandarin, a language increasingly necessary for business success. She has also written articles minimizing the effects of China’s social credit system and supporting its Belt And Road Initiative.

This is exactly what many Americans fear about placing Chinese government funded institutes, whatever they are called, on American campuses. It is what led the US State Department to classify them as diplomatic missions.

Peterson asked the Chinese director [of a Confucius Institute at an American university] how she would respond if a student asked her about Tiananmen Square. The director answered that she “would show a photograph [of it] and point out the beautiful architecture. That’s the most important thing about that square.”

In the book Red Handed, we meet a remarkable young man named Nathan Law, the Chinese-born, Hong Kong-raised leader of a pro-democracy effort called the “Umbrella Movement,” which protested Beijing’s crackdowns on freedom in Hong Kong. His efforts were brutally crushed by the Chinese government and Nathan Law went to prison for eight months. TIME Magazine named him one of “the 100 Most Influential People of 2020.”

China’s Trojan Horse Confucius Institutes Persist on Campuses Benjamin Weingarten

https://www.newsweek.com/chinas-trojan-horse-confucius-institutes-persist-campuses-opinion-1725085

Would any sane nation permit its enemies to freely propagandize at its educational institutions; intimidate faculty into silence, self-censorship, and complicity in enemy information operations; and hold funds over said institutions’ heads as leverage?

If the answer is a resounding “No,” as it should be, then it is hard to see the American academy as anything other than insane—and dangerously so—when it comes to China and its Confucius Institutes, as a bombshell report from the National Association of Scholars (NAS) makes clear.

The report demonstrates that news of Confucius Institutes’ death in America has been greatly exaggerated. The story of Confucius Institutes in America is a cautionary tale illustrating the ability of China to weather efforts to combat its malign machinations, and the corruption of the very institutions that ought to be standing as bulwarks against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The CCP’s modus operandi in its long march towards global hegemony has been to encourage “open,” seemingly non-hostile relations with foreign nations to penetrate, exploit, and influence them. The West has for decades, both out of greed and naiveté, been all too willing to comply. Confucius Institutes, which began appearing in the U.S. in 2005, and came under heightened scrutiny during the Donald Trump presidency, were but one aspect of China’s game.

Evidence emerged that of the more than 100 institutes on college campuses at their peak, these purported centers of U.S.-Chinese cultural exchange, which sometimes offered for-credit classes, were funded, guided, and staffed by and in accordance with the CCP, serving as Trojan horses for the regime that enabled it to project soft power.

Resegregating American Education By Kenin M. Spivak

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/resegregating-american-education/

The Biden administration and progressives are encouraging schools to separate students along racial lines — an unforgivable step backwards.

It took 86 years from the ratification of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection to the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and therefore unconstitutional. With support from the Biden administration and the complicity of the Department of Justice, it has taken less than 70 years for radical leftists to reimpose separate educational facilities under the guise of promoting equity.

More than a year after its Freedom of Information Act request, Judicial Watch this month received records from District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) that show D.C. officials are providing segregated “affinity spaces” for its teachers and other staff on the basis of race and sexual identity. A September 2021 DCPS presentation explains, “Affinity spaces are gathering opportunities for people who share a common identity. This space will be organized based on the racial identities represented in Central Office as we aim to lean into the Courageous Conversation condition of isolating race.”

A form included in the presentation asks respondents to submit their pronouns and to select the racial affinity group(s) they intend to join. The choices are: Asian American/Pacific Islander, Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx, Indigenous/Native American, Multi-Racial, and White. The form also asks if respondents are interested in new LGBTQIA+ affinity spaces. Those spaces are divided into BIPOC (Black/Indigenous/People of Color) LGBTQIA+ and White LGBTQIA+.

A June 2021 email setting the agenda for a meeting at Marie Reed Elementary School explains that the “goal of these affinity groups is to create a safe space among colleagues to process the impacts of racism and white supremacy within our school community and identify collective actions to take as individuals and as groups.”