EDUCATION Comments turned off

Training Americans for Dependency One Bite at a Time By Robert Weissberg

Posted By on July 29th, 2017

Over the last century America has gone from a nation that prized self-reliance to one where millions seem unbothered by dependency. For a political leader just to hint at curtailing entitlements or adding a work requirement certifies him as evil. This is hardly surprising is that Washington itself promotes dependency and this training for irresponsibility begins early in life. Long before a youngster can vote, he or she learns, regardless of what economist say, that there really is such a thing as a free lunch.

A recent Wall Street Journal article (July 19, 2017, A3) highlighted how this sorrowful condition is encouraged. The Journal article concerns government financed school meals (lunches but increasingly larger numbers of breakfasts). This generosity, in addition to providing daily vitamins and minerals also supplies a daily message that government, not parents, put food on the table. To be specific, in 2016, 73.3% of all school children availing themselves of school lunches ate either free or reduced priced lunches; this compares to 15.1% in 1969.

More is involved than just instructing youngsters in the statist Lord’s Prayer where the Department of Agriculture (USDA), not the Lord, gives us our daily bread. This “instruction” also applies to the millions of other youngsters whose families do not financially qualify for subsidized meals and must therefore pay something toward their daily bread. At least they, unlike those on the subsidized meal plan, ought to see the connection between the sweat of somebody’s brow and their daily bread.

No such luck. Though the Department of Agriculture that administers school food programs explicitly requires schools to notify parents when junior is a deadbeat, inaction regarding no-pays is commonplace. Yes, some school districts are cracking down, for example, banning freeloaders from attending graduation or even withholding meals until the bill is paid (legally permissible), but many other school districts permit junior (and his parents) to stiff Uncle Sam. For example, the Los Angeles Unified School District recently absorbed $629,000 in debt for these unpaid meals; the Yonkers New York School District had an even more forgiving policy and thus wound up with a deficit of $800,000.

This tolerance for freeloading is predictable. Public schools are not like McDonald’s and few educators seem alarmed over burgeoning education costs. In fact, some educators resist any effort to get deadbeats to pay up for their meals and if a school instead supplies a bag lunch to lunchroom deadbeats, the school is condemned for “lunch shaming” (nearly half of all schools engage in some form of shaming). Though shaming is permitted by USDA rules, Texas and New Mexico currently prohibited it and other states are now considering anti-shaming measures. A proposed federal law — the Anti-Lunch Shaming Act of 2017 — has even been introduced in Congress. And needless to say, a no money, no food policy is unthinkable in today’s educational hyper-compassionate environment.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Germany Confronts the Forgotten Story of Its Other Genocide By Gabriele Steinhauser

Posted By on July 29th, 2017

SHARK ISLAND, Namibia—Just over a century ago, Germany built one of its first concentration camps on a narrow peninsula jutting into the Atlantic.

A 1904 uprising in what was then called German South-West Africa turned into a war of annihilation against the Herero and Nama peoples. At least 60,000 are believed to have died, including some 2,000 in the Shark Island camp, where inmates were starved, beaten and worked to death.

That episode of colonial brutality, considered by many historians to be the first genocide of the 20th century, is now testing the limits of historical apologies.

Namibia says it wants Germany to officially recognize that its actions constituted genocide, to issue a formal apology and to pay reparations. Berlin says it is willing to meet the first two demands and to pay some form of compensation. The two countries have been negotiating for more than a year.Other governments have expressed regret or sorrow for past atrocities. What makes the current situation novel is that most have stopped short of any official apology, and financial payments have been rare.

The talks “are being watched very closely by other countries,” says Germany’s ambassador to Namibia, Christian Schlaga.

Debate has surged in recent years about whether and how nations should take responsibility and make amends for horrors inflicted generations ago.

Belgium apologized for its role in the 1961 assassination of Congo’s first post-independence prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, but not for its colonial abuses in that country. In 2006, then-U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed “deep sorrow” for Britain’s role in the slave trade, but didn’t apologize.

Former French President François Hollande recognized the suffering of Algerians under France’s “brutal and unfair” colonial rule, but again there was no official apology. Last year, U.S. President Barack Obama paid homage to the victims of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, but didn’t apologize.

Japan has come the closest to what Germany is trying to do now. In 2015, it settled a long-running dispute with South Korea by agreeing to pay about $9 million in support funds for surviving Korean “comfort women” used as sex slaves by the Japanese military in the 1930s and 1940s. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe extended an apology.The question has exquisite historical resonance for Germany in particular. Countless museums and memorials throughout the country act as reminders of Germany’s genocidal slaughter during World War II. Because most Germans accept their history has dark chapters, and are proud of how they have been handled, they might find it easier to face colonial atrocities than citizens of other European powers, says Jürgen Zimmerer, professor of global history at the University of Hamburg and president of the International Network of Genocide Scholars.

Following World War II, Germany acknowledged its responsibility for the Holocaust and agreed to pay damages to survivors, but not to the families of those who were killed.

A successful conclusion to the negotiations between Germany and Namibia “would be a signal, and an invitation, to other former colonial powers to deal with their past,” says Medardus Brehl, a historian at the Institute for Diaspora and Genocide Studies at the ​Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany.

At the same time, ​a growing number of Germans are beginning to bristle at constantly carrying their historical guilt. Right-wing parties have recently called for the country to move beyond its past and develop a new sense of patriotism. CONTINUE AT SITE

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

One Dead in Hamburg Stabbing Attack At least six others injured in rampage at supermarket By Anton Troianovski

Posted By on July 29th, 2017

BERLIN—A rejected asylum applicant from the United Arab Emirates killed one person and injured six others in a stabbing rampage at a Hamburg supermarket on Friday, officials said, an attack that could reignite debate over security and immigration as the German election approaches.

The 26-year-old suspect, whose identity wasn’t released, couldn’t be deported because he lacked identity papers, Hamburg Mayor Olaf Scholz said in a statement late Friday.

“It further makes me angry that the attacker appeared to be someone who sought protection among us in Germany and then turned his hatred against us,” Mr. Scholz said. “This shows how urgently the legal and practical obstacles to deportation must be removed.”

The attack began in a supermarket in the Barmbek section of northeast Hamburg, where the suspect stabbed a 50-year-old German man to death with a large knife, police said. The attacker injured five others, at least some of them as he fled, and a 35-year-old Turkish bystander suffered injuries as he subdued the attacker before authorities arrived.

The attacker yelled “Allahu akbar”—Arabic for “God is great”—according to one witness interviewed by Germany’s N-TV television and another whose interview with reporters on the scene circulated in a video on social media.

A Hamburg police spokeswoman said she couldn’t confirm the “Allahu akbar” exclamation or that the attack was ideologically motivated. “We are investigating in all directions,” she said.

But the revelation that a rejected asylum applicant appeared to have carried out the attack had the potential to revive Germany’s immigration debate—an issue that has largely faded into the background even as the Sept. 24 national election approaches. Ever since the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants to Germany two years ago, Chancellor Angela Merkel has pushed to tighten asylum laws, speed deportations and negotiated with Turkey and north African countries to reduce the number of migrants who reach Europe’s shores.

While several hundred asylum applicants are still crossing into Germany daily, officials say, those numbers are a far cry from the thousands a day seen in 2015. Germany hasn’t had a terrorist attack since last December, when an Islamic State supporter drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, leaving 12 dead. CONTINUE AT SITE

BOOKS, MEDIA Comments turned off

The Media’s Embellisher-in-Chief A newsman with a Godlike baritone who was a star in every medium—and also made stuff up. Edward Kosner reviews ‘The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th-Century Journalism’ by Mitchell Stephens.

Posted By on July 29th, 2017

Among the celebrated people in America in the 1920s and ’30s were Franklin Roosevelt, Charlie Chaplin, Babe Ruth, Shirley Temple, Jack Dempsey, Clark Gable, Bing Crosby—and Lowell Thomas. All those names still resonate—except Thomas, for decades the “Voice of God” in network newscasting, now a curious footnote in the frisky history of American journalism.

In his heyday, Thomas (1892-1981) was almost impossible to miss. He sold out huge concert halls with his exotic travelogues—the first mixed-media shows, dressed up with music, hand-tinted slides and quick snatches of film, some of which he shot himself from airplanes. His nightly radio newscasts often drew more listeners than “Amos ’n’ Andy,” the most popular show in America. His narrator’s voice on Fox Movietone News boomed out in jammed newsreel theaters before television took over. And when NBC started the first commercial TV station, W2XBS in New York, Thomas made the first newscast, from the World’s Fair in 1939, and the next year was the host of the first regularly scheduled program, a 15-minute news show.

The wonder of it all—or perhaps the explanation—is that Lowell Thomas, in the early days of his career and later in his double-barreled memoirs, elaborated and embroidered his stories and simply made stuff up. He was, in old-school newspaper argot, a “pipe artist.” He made millions by entertaining millions and often informing them in the bargain.

The Voice of America

By Mitchell Stephens

St. Martin’s, 328 pages, $26.99

Now Mitchell Stephens, an accomplished chronicler of journalism, has resurrected Thomas from what might be considered well-earned obscurity. And it’s fair to ask if the subtitle of his biography, “The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th-Century Journalism,” is a sly wink at its subject’s penchant for making a good story even better.

Thomas’s industrious ancestors had come to America in the 17th century, and he seems to have been born on the make. The son of a doctor obsessed with self-improvement and an attentive mother, Thomas grew up in a honky-tonk gold-rush town on the western slope of Pikes Peak in Colorado. His father drilled him in elocution, and at 9 he stood on long lines twice to shake hands with and chat up the touring Vice President Teddy Roosevelt. By 19, he was the editor of his hometown paper, the Victor Record, writing headlines like “Mayor’s Nephew Shot in Love Nest.” (The youth was shot, all right, but turned out not to be related to the mayor.) Thomas quickly picked up two degrees at the University of Denver, then headed off to Chicago for law school.

But even before enrolling, he got a job on the Chicago Daily Journal, sitting next to Ben Hecht, the roistering epitome of the harum-scarum Chicago newspapering he later confected into “The Front Page.” Whether under Hecht’s tutelage or not, Thomas soon fit right in. Within a year, the Journal splashed his “exclusive” interview with a supposedly insane young heiress who was being held captive by her family after chasing her new husband with a knife and threatening suicide. The heiress was real enough; the interview wasn’t. There was a stink, but Thomas survived. In his spare time, he took law classes and taught public speaking to his fellow students. He was 21.

By the time he was 25, Mr. Stephens recounts, Thomas had studied for a Ph.D. and joined the faculty at Princeton and twice traveled to Alaska and the Yukon, returning with slides and film for lectures. Then he decided to cover World War I—raising $900,000 in today’s money from a group of Chicago investors with the sales pitch that his stories and illustrated lectures would build support for the war effort.

In Europe with his cameraman, Thomas heard that the British had captured Jerusalem and sped there. One day he spotted a diminutive Englishman resplendent in Arab garb walking on the street and stopped to chat. It was Maj. T.E. Lawrence—and before long Thomas would turn Lawrence and himself into international stars.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Danger of Progressives’ Inhumanity to the Humanities Science moves forward; literature doesn’t—and when it tries, the results can be monstrous. By Paula Marantz Cohen

Posted By on July 29th, 2017

Ms. Cohen is a dean and English professor at Drexel University.

There was a time when both literature and the study of literature came under the delightful rubric belles lettres—beautiful letters. When the phrase was introduced in the 18th century, literature was considered, at its best, beautiful. Devotees tried to emulate that beauty in their response to it.

Modernism was a turning point, when literature became more alienated and combative with respect to society. American literature, with its muscular, democratic associations, contributed to the change. Belles lettres seemed too elitist, not to mention too French, to describe early-20th-century writing.

The prestige of belles lettres was further impaired by the rise of science as civilization’s potential savior. Science was necessary to defend democracy, first during World War II and then during the Cold War. Now, it is the means of moving ahead in a competitive, technological society. Who has time for beauty when there is serious work to be done?

The death knell for belles lettres came with a 1959 lecture by the scientist and novelist C.P. Snow, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” Snow seemed to call for cooperation between science and the humanities, but he was really decrying the scientific illiteracy of writers and critics who, unlike him, didn’t happen to be scientists as well. His lecture touched a nerve. It spoke to the insecurity of the humanist who wished to have the hard knowledge and social status of the scientist.

The eminent literary critic F.R. Leavis delivered a rebuttal in 1962. He took issue with Snow’s tone and sense of superiority. But his critique was not so much about Snow himself (though it was taken this way) as about the assumption that science and the humanities could be judged by the same standards. Literature, according to Levis, had a role in society that had no bearing on what science—a focused, fact-based discipline—could do.

Leavis’s argument met with mockery and abuse. It was labeled foolish, intemperate and overly personal—which is to say original, emotional and subjective, the very qualities associated with the human condition that are central to the humanities.

He had few supporters at the time, but he never retreated from his position—and he turned out to be prescient. Snow’s scientific bias has infected all humanities disciplines at all levels. We have seen the prestige of numbers and facts take precedence over imagination and discernment.

The problem, as Leavis understood, is that science and the humanities are inherently incommensurate endeavors. Science builds on its discoveries. It moves forward, so that the past is the literal foundation for the present and future. Literature does not move forward in this way. Poets and writers may be influenced by their predecessors, but they do not have to be. One need not read Shakespeare to write a play or a poem. By the same token Shakespeare is as relevant today as he was when he wrote. That cannot be said of Ptolemy.

The simple truth that progress is central to science but not to the humanities is difficult to grasp for people who seek improvement in every walk of life. It fuels the drive to render the humanities scientific—through the use of technical jargon, general theories about social texts, and quantitative tools to analyze word choice, sentence structure and other aspects of literature. There are even efforts to measure the imagination using functional magnetic resonance imaging.

All this is fine as it pertains to political science, linguistics and neuroscience. But literature and literary criticism—belles lettres—ought not to be usurped in the process. Their purpose is different. Literary study ought to be concerned with the search for meaning and value in life. The humanities teach wisdom—or at least exercise the faculty that leads to that elusive end. Without wisdom, so-called progress can lead to corruption and devastation.

When the humanities desert their mission and seek to ally themselves with progress, they become dangerous adjuncts to ideological agendas. Students come to feel there is a definitive, “virtuous” reading of an event or a text; they excoriate great authors of the past for not abiding by the standards of the present; they come to see the world as divided into victims and oppressors. They create a climate that arouses opposition from those who feel excluded or demeaned by such thinking but who lack the humanistic training to do more than lash out.

The unique role of the humanities is to recognize genius, revere complexity, and be deliberative in judging character and action, in life as in art. Without training in this habit of mind, we become a polarized society with no tools to communicate across difference. Nothing happens except name-calling and retribution. CONTINUE AT SITE

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Republican ObamaCare Crack Up The party had a historic chance to act in the public interest. It failed.

Posted By on July 29th, 2017

After promising Americans for seven years that it would fix the Affordable Care Act, the Republican Party failed. This is a historic debacle that will echo politically for years.

A divided GOP Senate could not muster a majority even for a simple bill repealing the individual and employer mandates they had long opposed. Nor were they able to repeal the medical-device tax that some 70 Senators had gone on record wanting to repeal in previous Congresses.

The so-called skinny bill that failed in the Senate would have gone to a conference with the House, which had signaled its willingness to work out a compromise. That arduous process is the way the American legislative system works. A strong majority of the GOP caucuses on both chambers supported the effort to repeal and replace ObamaCare, but that was undone by an intransigent and petulant minority.

Where to begin in comprehending John McCain’s last-minute defection? Early Friday morning Senator McCain turned his thumb down on the bill, which doomed this long effort. Explaining that vote, Mr. McCain said the bill “offered no replacement to actually reform our health care system and deliver affordable, quality health care to our citizens.” This is hard to credit, because his “no” has left the American people with ObamaCare in toto.

On Thursday, with three other Senators, Mr. McCain said he wanted assurances that House Speaker Paul Ryan would negotiate in conference. Mr. Ryan said he would, and the other three voted yes. Senator McCain nonetheless chose to cast the decisive vote that broke the GOP promise.

The Arizona Senator’s politics has always been more personal than ideological. His baffling, 11th-hour vote makes us recall Donald Trump’s infamous campaign slight about Mr. McCain’s war imprisonment. Whatever his motives, the greater shame is that his vote keeps the edifice of ObamaCare in place with all of its harm to patients, the health-care system and the national fisc.

There were many other contributors to this debacle. The Freedom Caucus dragged out the process in the House, which created time for opposition to build. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski betrayed her many previous votes and public statements. Two GOP Governors, Ohio’s John Kasich and Nevada’s Brian Sandoval, grandiloquently assaulted the bill for their own political gain, which made life difficult for their states’ Senators, Rob Portman and Dean Heller.

The Senate’s GOP moderates conspired to kill both a historic Medicaid reform and repeal of ObamaCare’s myriad taxes. Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee worked to defeat Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s compromise draft to no good end. We cannot recall a similar effort by so many to subject their own party to such an abject public humiliation.

Mr. Trump in a tweet blamed the three GOP Senators who voted no, but he was also an architect of his own defeat. Mr. Trump was elected in no small part on his promise to do big deals like this one. In the end he couldn’t close. He never tried to sell the policy to the American public, in part because he knows nothing about health care and couldn’t bother to learn.

His chaos theory of White House management, on morbid public display this week, also means no one on Capitol Hill knows who is in charge. As his approval rating sinks below 40%, few in politics fear him and increasingly few will step forward to defend him.

What next? The Senate failure has burned the reconciliation process available from last year and thus the ability to pass anything with 50 votes. The next reconciliation bill is earmarked for tax reform, if the hapless GOP can first pass a budget outline. Meanwhile, the ObamaCare exchanges will continue to deteriorate. This means the Trump Administration will face a choice of how much money to spend to keep some of them from collapsing. HHS Secretary Tom Price can give insurers more flexibility, but premiums will keep rising while choices for consumers decline.

The Republicans who did so much to kill repeal and replace will now clamor for bipartisan action. And it would be nice to think Democrats would meet Mitch McConnell halfway. But Democratic leader Chuck Schumer knows he has Republicans on the run, and his price for 60 votes will be a costly bailout of ObamaCare, which liberal health-care academics are already proposing. Good luck repealing the law’s mandates and taxes, or deregulating insurance markets.

Mr. Schumer knows that a “bipartisan” Senate insurance bailout will further divide the GOP and put the House on the spot if it fails to go along. With the House majority in jeopardy in 2018, Speaker Ryan could face an excruciating choice: Attempt to save the seats of his party’s moderates by voting with Democrats to bail out the exchanges, or get blamed by Democrats and the press for all of ObamaCare’s ills.

Republicans will now try to salvage what is left of this Congress with tax reform. But the tragedy remains: Republicans in their selfish political and personal interests squandered a once in a generation chance to show that their principles can make life better for Americans.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

RUTHIE BLUM: A TALE OF TWO ISRAELI HEROES

Posted By on July 29th, 2017

Last Friday night, an Israeli soldier on leave for the weekend acted coolly and courageously, ‎rushing to the rescue of neighbors he heard screaming. “Sgt. O.,” whose full name cannot be ‎disclosed due to the sensitive nature of the elite IDF special forces unit in which he serves, ran to ‎the home of the nearby Salomon family to investigate. When he saw through their window that ‎they were being butchered, he promptly grabbed his rifle and shot the perpetrator.‎

By the time the scene was over, Yosef Salomon, 70, his daughter Chaya Salomon, 46, and son ‎Elad Salomon, 36, were lying in pools of blood on the kitchen floor. Tova Salomon, 68, would ‎only learn of the death of her husband and two of her children upon awakening from the surgery ‎she underwent to repair the multiple injuries she sustained in the knife attack.‎

The terrorist who maimed and murdered the Salomons was evacuated to an Israeli hospital, ‎where he was treated for the bullet wound from Sgt. O.’s weapon.‎

The Salomons had been celebrating the birth of a grandson when 19-year-old Omar al-Abed from ‎a neighboring Palestinian village entered their home through the front door, which was left open ‎for the guests arriving for dinner. As soon as al-Abed began his stabbing spree, Elad Salomon’s ‎wife (now widow) ushered all the children who were present into a bedroom, then locked the ‎door and called police.‎

Sgt. O.’s swift action prevented a far more extensive blood-bath. While al-Abed, who had ‎written a Facebook post about his plan to kill Israelis, is being hailed in the Palestinian Authority ‎as a “heroic martyr” — and will receive a salary of more than $3,000 per month for his actions — ‎Sgt. O.’s commanders are recommending that he receive an official citation for bravery from ‎the IDF chief of staff. ‎

Such an honor would be more than well-deserved, as this is the second time that Sgt. O. ‎risked his life to save a family in his community. Three years ago, he physically restrained a ‎terrorist who had infiltrated another home in Halamish, holding him until the arrival of security ‎forces.‎

Sgt. O. is an Israeli hero whose identity cannot be published, but whose life is intact. A ‎different Israeli hero — one who has been a household name in the country for his decades of ‎musical prowess and gay-rights activism — was not so fortunate last weekend.

Amir Fryszer Guttman, 41, died on Saturday of organ failure, after rescuing his 9-year-old ‎niece from drowning off the coast of Atlit. Fryszer Guttman held the flailing child, his brother’s ‎daughter, above the surface of the waves, forcing himself to stay conscious while bobbing up and ‎down in the water until help arrived. It was not until he was told that the little girl was safe that ‎he passed out for good. He was rushed to the hospital in a coma, and died the following day.

Fryszer Guttman’s story gripped the nation more profoundly than the international crisis ‎surrounding the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The ongoing chaos, sparked by an Arab terrorist ‎attack on July 14 — in which two Druze Israeli Border Police officers were killed outside Al-‎Aqsa mosque — feels like yet another chapter in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. By now, the ‎matter-of-fact heroism displayed by people like Sgt. O. is something that the public has ‎come to take for granted.‎

But Fryszer Guttman’s death caused everyone — even the most secular of his peers in the ‎entertainment industry and LGBT community — to gasp at its eerily divine significance. This is ‎because he lost his life on the very day that he and his friends and family were celebrating the ‎anniversary of the beginning of his new life.‎

A year ago last July, Fryszer Guttman, a married father of a young son, received the news that he ‎had been misdiagnosed three months earlier with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. After undergoing ‎heavy doses of chemotherapy for cancer he did not have, Fryszer Guttman — whose career ‎suffered along with his health — was told that a mistake had been made. His joy was mitigated ‎only by the fact that the treatment had managed to wreak havoc on his body. A couple of weeks ‎ahead of the beach party he held in honor of his “first birthday” with a clean bill of health, ‎Fryszer Guttman filed a NIS 5 million ($1.4 million) malpractice suit against Tel Aviv ‎Sourasky Medical Center for the travesty. ‎

At his funeral on Tuesday, his brother, Eyal Perry — whose daughter’s life was saved by Fryszer ‎Guttman — said, “You ascended in a storm to the heavens, as only you know how. We thank you ‎for every moment you were with us.” ‎

In her heartfelt eulogy, actress Gila Almagor, who had performed Fryszer Guttman’s wedding ‎ceremony to his husband, Yanai, also spoke in religious terms. “The ways of God are beyond my ‎comprehension,” she said, expressing the sentiment of a nation shaken by the sense that the ‎timing and method of our death is predetermined. The only control we may have — as the tales of ‎Sgt. O. and Fryszer Guttman illustrate — is over how we choose to live. On that score, Israel ‎is doing pretty well.‎

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Professor Who Called for ‘White Genocide’ Says Leftist Profs Are Being Targeted by Tom Knighton

Posted By on July 29th, 2017

You’d think someone who advocated for a “white genocide” on Twitter might feel an inkling of responsibility for the backlash he has faced. Unfortunately for George Ciccariello-Maher, a professor at Drexel, he clearly hasn’t.

After being blasted over his earlier comments, Ciccariello-Maher now claims sites like Campus Reform and The College Fix are part of a coordinated effort to unfairly attack left-leaning professors:

From Campus Reform:

George Ciccariello-Maher, an assistant professor of political science, told The Triangle that it is vital to note that conservative outlets are “targeting professors and looking for anything.”

“The bigger question we need to understand is the actual machinery behind what’s going on right now,” he told the publication.

“We’re living in a moment in which organized and coordinated groups are attacking professors. And I was sort of, maybe, on the early end of this in this year. There are cases in the past, many cases. But we’ve since had more than a dozen cases of groups like Campus Reform, Turning Point USA, The Campus Fix [sic] and all these websites — Breitbart — and then up into Fox News targeting professors and looking for anything,” he added.

Ciccariello-Maher also defended Trinity College professor Johnny Eric Williams who was put on leave after appearing to endorse the notion that first responders to June’s congressional baseball shooting should have let the GOP lawmakers “f***ing die.”

Talk about not getting the point.

As someone who spends a good bit of time on this topic, I can say that Ciccariello-Maher is giving us way too much credit. We’re not that coordinated.

What happens is a leftist professor says something that makes you scratch your head. Maybe it’s stupid, maybe it’s evil, but it’s always something that causes alarm among people with an interest in the education of young adults. Then sites like Campus Reform and The College Fix get wind of it and write about it. CONTINUE AT SITE

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump’s “America First” vs. McCain’s “America Last” David Goldman

Posted By on July 29th, 2017

Not the supposed protectionist Donald Trump, but the “free trade” wing of the Republican Party have taken the United States into a trade war that it can only lose. New sanctions against Russia passed by the House and Senate last week force Europe into a de facto alliance with Russia against the United States, and by extension with China as well. It is the dumbest and most self-destructive act of economic self-harm since the United States de-linked the dollar from gold on August 15, 1971, and it will have devastating consequences. The charade in the House and Senate may embarrass Trump, but it also poses a threat to European energy supplies as well as an extraterritorial intrusion into European governance. Berlin, Paris and Rome will conspire with Moscow to circumvent the sanctions while attacking the United States at the World Trade Organization and other international fora.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), and their counterparts in the House of Representatives allowed their dudgeon against a sometimes provocative president to overwhelm their sense of self-preservation. The sanctions will hurt Russia, but not nearly as much as they will hurt the United States over the long term. The White House envisioned sanctions as a bargaining chip, to be used to persuade Moscow to behave in the Ukraine and to limit the ambitions of its Iranian ally of convenience. In their present form, however, the president will have no authority to remove sanctions imposed by Congress. That turns a feint into a threat. Wars have been started over less.

The Democrats along with the McCain Republicans, it will be remembered, accused Trump of undermining the Atlantic Alliance, of isolating the United States, and of handing a diplomatic victory to Russia. Not Trump, but his detractors, have given Moscow a degree of leverage over Western Europe to which it has not aspired since the height of the Cold War in 1983, when Soviet premier Yuri Andropov considered a pre-emptive Russian attack in response to Western plans to deploy medium-range missiles in Germany.

Supposedly it was Trump who ignored the exigencies of international relations in favor of domestic political theater. Yet it is the Establishment wing of the Republican Party and its Democratic allies who combined to embarrass the president, without a moment’s consideration of the consequences of their actions. Among Washington’s elite, Trump Derangement Syndrome has nothing to do with ideology. It is about jobs and patronage. This is not hypocrisy. It is chutzpah.

Trump humiliated the Democrats and the Establishment rump of the Republican Party last November, who now face the prospect of permanent exile from political life. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement July 25, historian Edward Luttwakpredicted a Trump dynasty lasting sixteen years, in which Ivanka Trump Kushner would succeed her father. “No wonder that leading Democrats and non-Trumpers continue to act hysterically even eight months after the election. President Trump’s plan threatens to exclude them all from office until long past their retirement age,” Luttwak wrote. The hopes of high office of the defeated Establishment can be realized only by stifling the Trump Administration in its cradle.

That is the motivation behind the Black Legend of Russian collusion that continues to occupy the waking hours of the American media while putting most Americans to sleep. As Sen. McCain said after the Senate vote July 27, the sanctions “respond to Russia’s attack on American democracy…We will not tolerate attacks on our democracy. That’s what this bill is all about. We must take our own side in this fight, not as Republicans, not as Democrats, but as Americans.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

A sandcastle built on dunes: Amnon Lord

Posted By on July 29th, 2017

Even if a serious discussion about Israel’s relations with the increasingly ‘Palestinized’ Jordan could take place without causing a major international crisis, Israel might conclude that it shouldn’t lean too heavily on the shaky Hashemite kingdom.

For 24 hours earlier this week, Jordan was holding the Israeli Embassy and its staff hostage. There is no other way of describing the situation. All the thanks and smiles can’t hide the reality. The message from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conversation with respected Ambassador to Jordan Einat Schlein and the security guard who shot two Jordanians after he was attacked, known in the Israeli press only by his first name, Ziv, when they returned to Israel via the Allenby Crossing was clear: We can breathe easy.

It’s lucky that during the fog of tensions that knocked many people off kilter, Netanyahu and Jordan’s King Abdullah were allies. Jared Kushner, son-in-law and adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, led them though a diplomatic minefield.

Abdullah made a mistake at the beginning. When there was still a media blackout in Israel about the embassy shooting, the king should have allowed Israel to extract the guard from Jordanian territory and bring him home. Once again, it was clear that any conflict with a Muslim official comes close to blowing up. The Muslims don’t like to see Jews using force and killing those who attack them. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Sheikh Raed Salah of the outlaw Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and the Jordanians don’t like to witness scenarios like that — a Jew defending himself though force. But Abdullah’s mistake stemmed from the fact that he first had to pacify his own intelligence and security services, so that his guard dogs wouldn’t turn on him “in error.” And there are also the Bedouin tribes of Jordan, who pose a much greater danger to the Hashemite kingdom than the Palestinians who make up the vast majority of its population.

Only a few weeks ago, a Jordanian army officer was sentenced to death for murdering three members of the U.S. “special forces” (the CIA, apparently). The incident took place in November 2016 on a U.S. air force base in Jordan and apparently provided the background for this week’s incident involving the embassy guard shooting the furniture delivery guy.

Some of the Bedouin tribes have been in a state of semi-rebellion against King Abdullah for quite a while. The man who murdered the three Americans belonged to one of them. They demanded his release. The Islamic State brainwashing is taking root over there, as it has among certain sectors of the Israeli Arab public. Kushner and Special Representative for International Negotiations Jason Greenblatt were doubtlessly well-briefed by the CIA on the affair before they helped Netanyahu and Abdullah out of the minefield that stretched between Amman and the Temple Mount. The incident needed to come to a quick end before it snowballed into a Benghazi-like mess.

King Abdullah has been “Abbas-ized.” He spends a lot of time outside his kingdom. He no longer has any strong men in the Jordanian government though whom he can govern. His government is becoming more and more western and Palestinian, made up of individuals who know how to curry favor with Washington and Brussels, but not the Bedouin at home.