EDUCATION Comments turned off

Campaign to Halt Classroom Indoctrination Gets a Boost from New Website Proposing a Code of Ethics for K-12 public school teachers. Sara Dogan

Posted By on December 20th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272306/campaign-halt-classroom-indoctrination-gets-boost-sara-dogan

The David Horowitz Freedom Center has completed a comprehensive update and reorganization of StopK12Indoctrination.org, a website devoted to halting indoctrination in America’s public schools. The site exposes instances of classroom and curricular indoctrination across the United States and seeks to work with parents and legislators to enact a Code of Ethics for K-12 Public School Teachers in their states.

Our public schools have traditionally been the cornerstone of our country’s democratic values, but no longer. As recent events documented on StopK12Indoctrination.org reveal, no age group and no corner of our K-12 classrooms are immune from the left’s ideological aggression.

• At the Edina School District in Edina, Minnesota, all employees, even bus drivers, must take “Equity and Racial Justice Training” instructing them that “dismantling white privilege” is at the core of the district’s mission. They must acknowledge their racial guilt, and embrace the district’s “equity” ideology.

• To enhance “cultural diversity,” students at Maryland’s La Plata High School were ordered to copy the Islamic creed “Shahada” which states in part, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” One worksheet distributed by the school stated, “Most Muslims’ faith is stronger than the average Christian.”

• An Ohio middle school teacher assigned his students to rank 12 individuals, described by race, profession, gender, religion and sexuality, by who is most deserving to survive an apocalypse on Earth. The potential survivors included “a racist armed police officer who is accused of using excessive force”; “a militant African-American medical student”; “a 21-year-old female Muslim international student”; and “a homosexual male professional athlete.”

• Public high schools in Newton, Massachusetts were sued by a coalition of parents after they discovered that their children had been given lessons from the Arab World Studies Notebook, a textbook which is funded by a Saudi Arabian oil company which also funds the terrorist groups Hamas and Al-Qaeda. This textbook falsely claims that there is a “Hollywood Jewish conspiracy” to portray Arabs negatively in film and that Jerusalem is “Palestine’s capital.”

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Saudi Man in Oklahoma Admits to Attending Al-Qaeda Terror Camp, Visa Fraud By Patrick Poole

Posted By on December 20th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/saudi-man-in-oklahoma-admits-to-attending-al-qaeda-terror-camp-visa-fraud/

A Saudi national, who attended an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan in 2000 and then lied to conceal his activities when applying for a U.S. visa, has admitted to illegally obtaining the visa and lying to the FBI when questioned about it, announced the Justice Department last Friday.

Naif Alfallaj, 35, was arrested in Oklahoma earlier this year after the FBI discovered his fingerprints on documents recovered by U.S. forces in Afghanistan at the notorious Al Farooq terror training camp operated by al-Qaeda.

Alfallaj used his non-immigrant visa to enter the U.S. in 2011, and has been living in Oklahoma ever since. His wife holds an F-1 non-immigrant student visa; Alfallaj applied as a spouse.

According to the criminal complaint filed last February, Alfallaj filled out a five-page Mujahedeen data form when applying to enter the Al Farooq camp in September 2000. Using the kunya “Muthana al-Najdi” on the form, he listed his birthplace as Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and supplied the cell phone number of his father as a point of contact.

He agreed to a two-month training program at the Al Farooq camp for indoctrination into violent jihad and basic military tactics. The camp was known for providing instruction in firearms, explosives, chemical weapons, and other weapons of mass destruction.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Mattis Resigning, Tells Trump to Pick a SecDef ‘Whose Views Are Better Aligned with Yours’ By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on December 20th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/mattis-resigning-tells-trump-to-pick-a-secdef-whose-views-are-better-aligned-with-yours/

With a letter offering a foreign policy critique and remaining mum on his thoughts about the commander in chief, Defense Secretary James Mattis announced that he will resign at the end of February after representing the U.S. at a NATO defense ministerial.

Mattis, 68, was commander of U.S. Central Command before retiring from the Marine Corps in 2013. He is currently the longest-serving secretary in President Trump’s cabinet.

Mattis wrote that he is “proud of the progress that has been made over the past two years on some of the key goals articulated in our National Defense Strategy: putting the Department on a more sound budgetary footing, improving readiness and lethality in our forces, and reforming the Department’s business practices for greater performance.”

He emphasized his “core belief” that America’s “strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships.”

“While the U.S. remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies,” Mattis wrote, adding that doesn’t mean being “policemen of the world” but using “all tools of American power to provide for the common defense, including providing effective leadership to our alliances.” He praised NATO’s commitment to fighting alongside the U.S. after 9/11.

“Similarly, I believe we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours,” he continued. “It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model — gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions — to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbors, America and our allies. That is why we must use all the tools of American power to provide for the common defense.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Feminism’s Dependency Trap written by Marilyn Simon

Posted By on December 20th, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/12/20/feminisms

Reading the news stories about #MeToo and sexual harassment, and the barrage of social media posts that accompanied these headlines, I became saddened but also increasingly frustrated. It wasn’t the reports of men behaving badly that angered me, but the despair that seemed to be the expected response to these stories, and the helplessness that my female friends appeared to attach to femininity itself that I found troubling.

The unintended and painful irony of recent feminism’s preoccupation with overcoming male oppression has been to place men at the centre of female identity. This makes the feminine experience something like an echo; women’s voices seem to be little more than a response, or a rebuttal, to men’s voices, which are taken to be primarily an instrument of patriarchal oppression. But, in my own experience, men aren’t interested in maintaining power and control over women—they simply don’t see women as a group that they are oppressing, or that they would like to oppress.

We hear a lot about “male privilege” but historically it has been the “privilege” of men to make their way in the hard world in order to first win a woman’s affections, and then support the family structure financially. We might call this “patriarchy,” but this term isn’t the synonym for misogyny that contemporary progressive political culture seems to think it is. (One has to appreciate the misplaced sincerity of many of my university students who roundly condemn The Patriarchy, while driving their father’s Toyota to campus every day, and using his savings to pay for their tuition. Not infrequently it occurs to me that the people who are most vocal against The Patriarchy are those who have benefited from it the most.)

A further concern I have with the message and tone of contemporary feminism is that women have evidently forgotten that we have power over men as a result of the fact that we’re women—men adore us, and almost all their efforts at work or at home or in social settings, are made to win our approval, if not our admiration. In short, I am bewildered by the fact that in a culture in which The Patriarchy has never had less power over women, women seem to want to attribute to it a greater power than men in fact have, thereby confining women to a position of victimhood and powerlessness.

Victim status holds its own form of power, of course, but this nurtures resentment which is always utterly joyless. Curiously, mainstream feminism seems designed to perpetuate the story of male power and oppression: feminists seem to need it as an antagonist against which to define themselves.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Normal Americans Get Militant By Julie Kelly

Posted By on December 20th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/20/normal

Kurt Schlichter is funny. Really funny. Unlike so many commentators on the Right—especially those staid NeverTrump harpies—Schlichter has a wry, cutting sense of humor that animates his radio and television interviews, his Townhall columns, and his latest book, Militant Normals.

The book expands on what Schlichter—a retired Army colonel and California-based trial attorney—has been saying about the Trump era for more than three years: The election of Donald Trump was as much about an uprising by the “normals” against the ruling elite as it was about the man himself. In Trump, millions of Americans found a leader who, for the first time in years, actually spoke to their deep concerns about the current condition of the country they fiercely love. “The Normals chose Trump. And it was not okay with the Smart Set.”

While Republicans and Democrats spent the past decade jockeying for props on global issues like climate change and peddling the myth of unbounded “free trade” between nations, working-class voters became increasingly nervous about the rise of illegal immigration; the unseen and ignored toll of international trade agreements; a deadly tide of illicit drugs; a fixation on unwinnable foreign conflicts; and the breakdown of trusted institutions from trade unions to academia to the Catholic Church.

Then along came a brash billionaire from Manhattan who could speak to soybean farmers and masonry workers in Des Moines better than anyone. “The Elite did not just fail to do its job running our institutions and providing us a stable society and economy, though it has failed to do those things,” Schlichter writes. “The Elite has decided to declare war on the people who make up the backbone of this country because it just cannot live knowing the Normals are out there living free and uncontrolled. And in doing so, the Elite ignored the conflict we are living through today.”

Like me, Schlichter was not an early Trump supporter. His epiphany occurred exactly three years ago this week during an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon. (You can watch the clip here.) Lemon became agitated when Schlichter refused to condemn Trump for using the word, “schlonged.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Senators Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton push bill recognizing Israeli control of Golan

Posted By on December 20th, 2018

https://worldisraelnews.com/senators-ted-cruz-tom-cotton-push-bill-recognizing-israeli-control-of-golan/

GOP Senators Ted Cruz (R.-Texas) and Tom Cotton (R.-Ark.) introduced a bill on Tuesday urging U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Cruz and Cotton, in the joint statement on Tuesday, said:

“Israel gained possession over the Golan Heights in a defensive war over 50 years ago, and has responsibly controlled the area ever since. It’s past time for the United States to recognize reality by affirming Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights.”

Yair Lapid, leader of the Yesh Atid party, tweeted Tuesday night, “Good news today: Senators Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz presented a bill in the Senate for American recognition of Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights. Another important step in the diplomatic process that I led in the last year.”

Lapid, among other Israeli leaders, has pushed the U.S. to recognize the Golan. In an interview with The Algemeiner earlier this year, he said:

“Reality has changed. We cannot return the Golan Heights to a mass murderer who just killed half a million of his own people. And the last seven years of civil war in Syria have just proved how important it is for Israel to have the strategic control of the Golan Heights.”

“The U.S. has never denied our right to the Golan Heights, but it’s been hesitant on the issue since the mid-1970s,” he added.

“Now, I think, there is a point for the Americans to take a small stand, opposite the psychopath, without it being necessary for them to put boots on the ground or go and fight another war in the Middle East,” he said.

HISTORY Comments turned off

Western Leaders Pervert History in Recalling World War I By Julia Gorin

Posted By on December 20th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/20/western-leaders-pervert-history

No sooner was President Trump derided for “brightening” upon Vladimir Putin’s arrival at the Armistice Day centenary last month than he canceled his planned meeting with Russia’s president at the recent G20 summit. This left Putin to high-five Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in a gesture, no doubt intended to troll the Western hypocrites pretending to not know either.

Pretense and hypocrisy, however, seem to rule the day, and their current mascot is French President Emmanuel Macron. At last month’s Armistice Day observances, which his country hosted, he presumed to lecture the American president on nationalism.

Quite rightly, Trump skipped the peace forum Macron “had arranged with the intention that his fellow leaders ruminate on the murderous follies of the Great War and compare it to the rise of nationalism today,” the Guardian reported. World affairs editor Julian Borger observed an “absence of Western solidarity,” concluding that “Trump showed himself ill at ease with most of his European counterparts and the fleeting encounter with Putin was a reminder of his much greater affinity for autocrats.”

Or perhaps his greater affinity for those who can smell a rat. This is the same “united West” which uniformly snubbed a commemoration that was at least as important: the last major celebration of Victory Day that any veterans may still be alive to celebrate. In May 2015, the 70th anniversary, Washington gave an instruction to world leaders to boycott Russia’s observances. Only the Czech Republic defied it, President Zeman sending the American ambassador packing, and reaffirming that his visit would be a thank-you to Russia “for not having to speak German in this country.”

There were Americans who saw the snub for the insult it was to our own dead from World War II. The following letter from Michael Gardner of Jacksonville, Florida appeared in English-language Pravda:

. . . When I heard our U.S. government was not going to send a delegation to Moscow for the 70th anniversary victory celebrations, I was very angry. It was an insult to the men of all the Allied Forces who fought and died in Europe. Their sacrifice was ignored because of petty politics by the U.S. government . . . I was moved by what I saw in Moscow, and . . . boycott or not, I will be in Moscow in 2020 for the 75th anniversary victory celebration and I will carry a picture of my father, Corporal James P. Gardner, and honor all those who fought in the Great Patriotic War.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Back to Discipline Disparate impact reflects disparate reality. Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on December 20th, 2018

https://www.city-journal.org/disparate-impact-analysis

A federal commission on school safety has repudiated the use of disparate-impact analysis in evaluating whether school discipline is racially biased. The Trump administration should go further, and extirpate such analysis from the entirety of the federal code of regulations, as well as from informal government practice.

Disparate-impact analysis holds that if a facially-neutral policy negatively affects blacks and Hispanics at a higher rate than whites and Asians, it is discriminatory. Noticing the behavioral differences that lead to those disparate effects is forbidden. In the area of school discipline, disparate-impact analysis results in the conclusion that racially neutral rules must nevertheless contain bias, since black students nationally are suspended at nearly three times the rate of white students. In 2014, the Obama administration relied on this methodology to announce that schools that suspended or expelled black students at higher rates than white students were violating anti-discrimination laws.

To understand how counterfactual such an analysis is, consider Duval County, Florida, which has Florida’s highest juvenile homicide rate. Seventy-three children, some as young as 11, have been arrested for murder and manslaughter over the last decade, according to the Florida Times-Union. Black juveniles made up 87.6 percent of those arrests and whites 8 percent. The black population in Duval County—which includes Jacksonville—was 28.9 percent in 2010 and the white population 56.6 percent, making black youngsters 21.6 times more likely to be arrested for homicide than white youngsters. Nationally, black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens combined; if Hispanics were removed from the equation, the black-white disparity would be much greater.

Beneath those homicide numbers is a larger juvenile crime wave. “The reason so many kids commit murder in Jacksonville is not because they are murderers, but because they are everything else: drug dealers, robbers, thieves, rapists and a bunch of other types of criminals whose crimes of choice has a great likelihood of leading to a murder,” a teen murder convict, Aaron Wright, told the Florida Times-Union. Fifty-nine percent of juvenile murder convicts from Duval County who responded to the paper’s inmate survey reported that they were committing another crime such as robbery or burglary when they or their co-defendant killed their victim. Wright himself was robbing a woman when his fellow robber shot and killed her, making Wright guilty of felony murder.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

France Afire By Anthony Daniels

Posted By on December 20th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/12/31/france-afire/

The ‘Yellow Vests’ torch cars as President Macron decrees happiness

Returning to England from France, I happened to find in an antiquarian bookshop a pamphlet titled “The Great Week in Paris.” It began:

The events which have taken place in Paris have been so extraordinary, that it would require the pen of a Gibbon to give them a suitable colour.

The writer described the situation in France as follows:

There are among the first ranks of society men . . . who sentimentally adhere to those rotten branches of a decayed trunk! some from habit, others from gratitude for past favours, and many from a consciousness of their total unfitness to figure in the new order of things.

Plus ça change: The great week in Paris referred to in the pamphlet, by an eyewitness to it, was in 1830, the week in which the unpopular monarch, Charles X, was overthrown by revolution. A man who sometimes works for me in my house in la France profonde calls President Macron “Napoleon the Fourth,” though perhaps “Charles the Eleventh” would be as apt.

General dissatisfaction is in the air, and it is not because of the levels of carbon dioxide in it. Millions of Frenchmen are far more concerned with their pouvoir d’achat (their purchasing power), which has risen very little in the last ten years and may actually be declining, than with allegedly saving the planet by reducing carbon emissions — unlike the Parisian elite.

The elected monarch’s concerns seem to them exactly the opposite of those of most Frenchmen: First he reduced the speed limit on France’s excellent but mainly empty rural roads from 90 to 80 kilometers per hour, to many people’s intense irritation, and then he increased taxes on fuel, particularly diesel. You have to be rich these days in France to be able to live without a car, and it is not long since the government encouraged the population to buy the diesel vehicles that it now wants to eliminate for supposedly ecological reasons. This strikes much of the population, which is struggling to maintain its standard of living, as let-them-eat-cake-ish in spirit.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Women’s March, Sponsors Silent on Anti-Semitism Allegations By Alexandra DeSanctis

Posted By on December 20th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/womens-march-sponsors-silent-on-anti-semitism-allegations/his is how toxic the far Left has become.

It has been a week and a half since Tablet magazine detailed extensive allegations of anti-Semitism and financial corruption on the part of the Women’s March leadership.

The organization, which since November 2016 has organized grassroots efforts across the country to demonstrate and vote against the Trump administration, has yet to offer a formal statement on the exposé. And so far, not one of the more than 100 partners and sponsors of the Women’s March has raised a fuss over the story — including more than 20 high-profile groups that National Review contacted directly seeking comment.

As of this morning, the Women’s March website still featured a November 20 statement from co-chair Linda Sarsour side-stepping demands from the group’s founder that the current co-chairs resign over their support for anti-Semitic Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Louis Farrakhan.

The Tablet essay, by Leah McSweeney and Jacob Siegel, from earlier this month added fuel to that fire. Several sources told the magazine that at the leaders’ first meeting in November 2016, Carmen Perez and Tamika Mallory, now co-chairs along with Sarsour, “first asserted that Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people — and even, according to a close secondhand source, claimed that Jews were proven to have been leaders of the American slave trade.”

Later, Mallory and Perez allegedly “berated” one of the group’s leaders over the fact that she was Jewish, saying, “Your people this, your people that” and “Your people hold all the wealth.” The co-chairs have also been accused by former group leaders of reshaping the financial structure of the organization for their personal benefit and of employing members of the NOI security team for Women’s March events.