RUTHFULLY YOURS

In a sense, veteran anti-Israel journalist/activist Robert Fisk is too easy a target. But as an illustration of his delusional mindset, this is priceless

In the shape of columnist Robert Fisk, Britain’s liberal-Left Independent — poor relation to The Guardian — can still claim to have in its possession one of the star performers in recent decades among the massed ranks of the country’s demonisers of Israel.

The trouble with Fisk, like all such characters, is that once you’ve tried everything to discredit the Jewish state, where do you go next? In his latest article, Fisk gives us an answer: the real reason for the failure of a peace was that Yasser Arafat, the Godfather of modern terrorism, was just too generous and trusting:

“He made so many concessions to Israel – because he was growing old and wanted to go to “Palestine” before he died – that his political descendants are still paying for them. Arafat had never seen a Jewish colony on occupied land when he accepted the Oslo agreement. He trusted the Americans. He trusted the Israelis. He trusted anyone who appeared to say the right things.”

Well he certainly trusted in the thousands of terrorists he unleashed against Israeli men, women and children in a blood thirsty second Intifada that came as he bluntly rejected two-state solution agreements brokered by President Clinton in 2000 and early 2001. But that doesn’t get a mention, of course.

Fisk’s delusion is actually the same as the delusion that has dogged the Palestinians for decades — the delusion of eternal victimhood.

“The moral of this story is to know what your children are being taught at school. Unfortunately, the Common Core train has left the station and reversing course will be difficult and will take time. In the meantime, if your children are under the influence of this curriculum, you may need to spend a significant amount of time debriefing them after school. Not only that, you may find you need to teach very basic skills that the schools are no longer teaching. Of course, Common Core or not, parents should always have this mindset when sending their kids to public school. They alone — not the schools — are ultimately responsible for the education of their children.”

Now that school is in session, parents have begun sharing on Facebook and other social media outlets some of the Common Core homework assignments their children are bringing home. Below are ten really bad ones that will give you an idea of the direction education is going under Common Core. All of these assignments were shared recently on social media sites dedicated to informing parents about Common Core.
1. Star citizen: quiet, sitting, neat

This paper came from a Rhode Island first grade classroom. One mother commented, “I went to elementary school in Poland during communism. This is exactly what I was forced to learn.” It’s a step in the right direction for those who want a compliant, obedient citizenry. That said, this is not new to schools and we shouldn’t necessarily blame Common Core. Children — boys in particular — have been taught for decades that being “good” means being quiet and compliant. The link to good citizenry is something I haven’t seen before, however.
2. It’s not about the right answer — it’s about the journey.

This poor Florida first grader thought she was following instructions by coloring in all seven segments of the bar to “make 7.” Unfortunately, she was supposed to divine that an equation was required. In Common Core, the journey is more important than the correct answer, it seems.
3. The Supreme Court “says if laws are fair.”

An Iowa second grader brought this assignment home. The mother disagreed with the teacher’s call on whether or not the “government settles disagreements” — and after the recent events related to the budget, almost no one would disagree with her! (And obviously, the undefined use of the term “government” implies that the government is a monolithic body that rules over us.)

But even more problematic is the matching question at the top of the page. “The Supreme Court — says if laws are fair.” If by “fair” they mean “constitutional,” I might be inclined to agree. However, in the context of a “government” that makes laws and settles disagreement, I suspect they mean “fair” in the way most 2nd graders would interpret the word — everyone gets an equal amount of ice cream after dinner.

The Palestinian Authority was created by the Israeli Labor Party in 1994. The Labor Party believed that, with the breakup of the Soviet Union and America’s ringing defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War, radicalism had essentially become a losing proposition and the Palestinians knew they had no choice but to work out peaceful coexistence with Israel.

Since then the idea of Israeli-Palestinian peace has been an obsessive theme of international politics. For a time it also sharply divided Israel into two camps of believers and nonbelievers; today, after two decades of terrorism and rocket fire, all polls show that the nonbelievers are by far the dominant camp.

For those who bother to inform themselves about the Palestinian Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza—their education, culture, politics, religion—the ongoing insistence of U.S. and European establishments that Israeli-Palestinian peace is the order of the day, with Israel as the party that stymies it, is surreal almost beyond belief.

Palestinian schools, media, and mosques entirely negate Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state, and systematically deny any Jewish connection to the Land of Israel and Jerusalem. They also honor and glorify Palestinian terrorists in every possible way, from stipends and ceremonies for living ones to the naming of streets, public squares, sporting events, and children’s camps after deceased terrorists. Glorification is especially lavished on those who killed large numbers of Israelis in mass attacks.

For about six years, what used to be the unitary Palestinian Authority has been divided into what are essentially two entities—the remaining Palestinian Authority on the West Bank and Hamas-run Gaza. The latter is an Islamist statelet openly sworn to Israel’s destruction; the U.S. and even the European Union officially outlaw Hamas as a terrorist organization.

The Palestinian Authority, however, with its relatively secular Fatah leadership, continues to be regarded as a force for peace. The problem with that view is that it is an inversion of the truth.

Bangladesh is on the road to becoming another Afghanistan, fulfilling the clearly stated desires of jihadists and fundamentalists, according to Bangladeshis who have fled their homeland.

Imams describe women as filth and demand that they cover themselves. They accuse exploited female garment workers of prostitution when they are forced to work late into the night to earn a living. Schoolchildren have to dress in Islamic garb, even if they are not Muslims. Workers are discriminated against if they are other than Muslim. Land grabs by Muslims of property owned by minorities occur all the time — with impunity. Atheist bloggers are beaten and even killed for “insulting Islam,” and all this under the supposedly secular Awami League administration.

The Hindu empire once stretched from Afghanistan to Indonesia, before the Muslim invasions whittled it down. According to Dr. Sachi Dastidar, professor of politics at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, Long Island, forty-nine million Hindus are missing from the Bangladesh census over the period of 1947 to 2001. At the time of the partition of India in 1947, Hindus comprised thirty-one percent of the population of Bangladesh. The population of Hindus in Bangladesh is now down to a mere nine percent. The numbers are shrinking very fast due to coerced conversions; the kidnapping of girls and women, as well as rapes followed by murder; forced flight — and genocidal massacres.

In the near future, all the non-Muslims may be “ethnically cleansed” from Bangladesh. The world will have lost one more part of the globe to fundamentalists and gained one more staging ground for new attacks on the West.

The minority population in Bangladesh lives under constant fear of loss of life and property, especially in the countryside, where Muslim transgressions more easily escape being publicized.

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2013/11/19/the-shia-didnt-like-renegade-yemenite-jew-abdullah-ibn-saba-either/ At Pajamas Media I blogged about the mainstream Sunni doctrine which insists Abd Allah b. Saba, an alleged renegade Yemenite Jew was the founder of the heterodox Shiite sect. He is held responsible—identified as a Jew—for promoting the Shiite heresy and fomenting the rebellion and internal strife associated with this primary breach in Islam’s […]

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/11/books-good-nazis-bad/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=2ffa570fd9-Mosaic_2013_11_19&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-2ffa570fd9-41165129

“I don’t think we really need another film about the Holocaust, do we? It’s like,how many have there been?” Thus lamented Kate Winslet in the U.S. debut of the Ricky Gervais series Extras in late 2005. Winslet was playing herself, and she was in the process of explaining why she’d accepted the role of a nun in a Holocaust movie. She continued: “I’m doing this this because I’ve noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust you’re guaranteed an Oscar…. Schindler’sbloody List, The Pianist—Oscars coming out their ass.”

It was a cunning bit of snark at the time, and it only became more so three years later when—life imitating satire—the Academy voted to grant Winslet her first Oscar for her performance in, yes, a Holocaust movie, The Reader. It was a particular irony given that this was a subpar performance in a mediocre film, and that Winslet actually deserved the award for another performance the same year, in Revolutionary Road, for which she was not nominated. Suffice it to say that the whole episode did not exactly put to rest the calculated gamble that Holocaust movies beget Oscar gold.
Related

The Ligh

And so another awards season brings another film (adapted from another international bestseller) offering up the unrelated and uncontroversial lessons that reading is good and Nazis are bad. The Book Thief, directed by Brian Percival and based on the novel by Markus Zusak, is essentially The Reader reimagined as an Afterschool Special: similarly earnest and plodding, but with the sex and moral ambiguity removed.

http://blogs.cfr.org/abrams/2013/11/18/the-case-of-the-phony-fatwa/ It’s common knowledge that Iran’s “Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Khamenei, has issued a fatwa banning the possession of nuclear weapons. This “fact” has recently been cited by President Obama and by Secretary of State Kerry. In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September, the President said the Supreme Leader has issued a […]

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/alanjohnson/100245799/george-orwell-betrayed-islamist-tariq-ramadan-gives-a-lecture-in-his-name/

The present political chaos is connected with the decay of language. (George Orwell, Politics and the English language, 1946.)

This week in London, the annual George Orwell Lecture was given by the Islamist writer Tariq Ramadan. Where is one to start?

George Orwell was against religious censorship. Tariq Ramadan campaigned successfully to cancel a production of Voltaire’s play Le fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophete in Geneva.

Orwell was a rational man. When Ramadan taught at the College de Saussure he argued in favour of Islamic biology over Darwin.

Orwell risked his life fighting for the Spanish Republic against Franco’s fascists. Ramadan is a coward when it comes to fighting fascism. In November 2003, on French television, the future French president Nicolas Sarkozy invited Ramadan to condemn the practice of stoning women. He would not. Ramadan squirmed: “I have called for — because I know my position is a minority one within the Muslim world today — a moratorium so that there can be a real debate between Muslims.”

Orwell opposed state control and religious indoctrination. Ramadan would like the former to impose the latter. He wants Muslim parents to control the content of state school programmes according to “Islamic values”.

Ramadan pokes fun at feminism with silly jokes. Western society supposedly obliges women to “become brick workers or lorry drivers to show that women are effectively liberated”. (OK, so maybe there is a connection to Orwell, who was a bit of a sexist.)

http://www.leebsmarketforecast.com/content/the_complete_investor/lavabit-founder-ladar-levison-plots-route

You come home from work, turn on the TV, and start chuckling at your favorite comedy. Everything feels normal, but it’s not. You’re inside the Government Matrix. No joke. You’re watching a show—and a captured operation.

The California Endowment, a private foundation spending millions on ads aimed at enrolling young adults and Hispanics in Obamacare, now also has granted $500,000 to educate TV writers and producers on Obamacare, and suggest ways to weave its many splendors into fictional prime-time shows.

“We know from research that when people watch entertainment television, even if they know it’s fiction, they tend to believe that the factual stuff is actually factual,” said grant recipient Martin Kaplan of the University of Southern California’s Norman Lear Center.

If your insurance is canceled, your new premium costs triple, and your doctor won’t see you, will you forgive all after seeing Modern Family’s hilarious episode on the glorious Affordable Care Act?

The California Endowment’s grant to “educate” television’s creative talent does not plop the government into the writers’ room, not directly anyway. But Endowment president Robert K. Ross, an active Obamacare advocate, also happens to sit on the board of Covered California, the official state-run insurance exchange set up by ObamaCare. That’s about as convincing a separation as Lucy and Desi’s twin beds on I Love Lucy.

I have a dream that some Hollywood big shot will shout, “I may be a second-rate hack, turning out third-rate entertainment, but I do have integrity. I won’t relinquish my show for government use as a deceptive propaganda tool.”

Considering Hollywood’s wholesale capitulation to China, that has as much chance of realization as does a Duck Dynasty star of winning an Academy Award. In 2012, China’s richest man, Wang Jianlin, bought the AMC movie theater chain for $2.6 billion, forging the world’s largest movie theater chain.

http://www.thejerusalemconnection.us/blog/2013/11/18/the-counterfeit-arabs.html They are the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians. They are indistinguishable from those Arabs who live in the surrounding artificial states such as Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia or the other entities throughout the Middle East created by the colonial powers, France and Britain. Both powers were victorious after the Ottoman Turkish Empire lay defeated […]