NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Interrupting Whiteness’: National Education Conference to Blame White Teachers and Students for School Woes By Zombie

Posted By on October 8th, 2015

A major national conference for teachers and school administrators starting on Saturday, October 10, in Baltimore will focus exclusively on race and racism, featuring workshops on “interrupting whiteness” in American schools, the “dominance of White supremacy” in society, “White privilege” enjoyed by Caucasian students, “white domination of thought,” and how to “decenter whiteness.”

The conference, officially titled The National Summit for Courageous Conversation 2015, is organized by the Pacific Educational Group (PEG), a large and influential consulting firm hired by hundreds of school districts nationwide — often under pressure from the federal government — to address “racial gaps” in scholastic performance and behavior problems in the classroom.

But don’t take my word for it.

Below are excerpts taken from the official program of the upcoming National Summit for Courageous Conversation 2015, as well as examples taken from earlier Summits in 2014 and 2011, accompanied by direct screenshots of the text as it appears in the programs. You can confirm this by viewing the official 2015 program itself as uploaded by Pacific Educational Group, as well as pdfs of the 2014 Summit program and the 2011 program still archived at the Summit’s own Web site.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Four Terror Stabbing Attacks in One Day in Jerusalem: Is ‘ISIS Intifada’ Here? By Jonathan Spyer

Posted By on October 8th, 2015

The first rains that follow the High Holy Days have come to Jerusalem. As always, a blessed relief. But no relief seems imminent from the renewed tensions that have descended on the city. A series of brutal murders and attempted murders of Israeli Jewish civilians by Palestinian Arab Muslims have taken place over the last two weeks [1]. These have occurred against a backdrop of violent demonstrations and protests in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and increasingly among Israel’s Arab citizens.

For five years, Israel has lived a strange and contradictory reality. The Arab world is in an advanced state of meltdown. A number of formerly strong states have effectively ceased to exist. Syria, Iraq, Yemen are today merely names for areas in which sectarian militias battle one another. These states have collapsed along their ethnic and sectarian fault lines. The results have been bloody and are not yet over.

Yet on the edge of all this, the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea has remained quiet. An anomaly. This is the only place of non-Muslim sovereignty between Europe and India. The existence of a sovereign area successfully defended by the Jews — a group traditionally despised and ridiculed by Muslims — has long been a source of rage and humiliation for both Sunni and Shia.

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ISIS Executes Three Assyrian Christians, Threatens More Executions if Ransom not Paid By Patrick Poole

Posted By on October 8th, 2015

An ISIS video apparently taken several weeks ago has emerged of the terror group executing three Assyrian Christian men with bullets to the back of the head and then showing three more hostages demanding payment of $50,000 for each additional captive. There are an estimated 280+ additional Assyrian Christian hostages held by ISIS.

As each man identifies himself, he says: “I am a Nazarene (Christian).”

I reported here at PJ Media back in February of the ISIS offensive in the Khabur River valley in northeast Syria, where a number of Assyrian Christian villages were attacked. Reports at the time indicated that churches were systematically burned and hundreds of hostages taken.

An article from Al-Masdar News reports:

POLITICS Comments turned off

Hillary’s Having Another Bad Week Posted By Debra Heine

Posted By on October 8th, 2015

It’s been over seven months since Hillary Clinton’s email scandal broke, but the scandal remains in the news, chipping away at her credibility and trustworthiness every day.

It takes only three to six months for one of Barack Obama’s scandals to be reduced to a “phony scandal,” and dropped by the media. But for some strange reason, the poor woman can not catch a break.

As the Washington Free Beacon reported Wednesday, the FBI seized four State Department computer servers as part of its probe into Clinton’s “unique email arrangement,” which somehow allowed highly classified material from a secure government network to make it to her private email system.

The State Department uses two separate networks, one for classified information and one for unclassified information. The two networks are kept separate for security reasons. Most classified networks are equipped with audit systems that allow security managers to check who has accessed intelligence or foreign policy secrets.

The FBI is trying to determine the origin of the highly classified information that was found in Clinton emails.

However, the task is said to be complicated because those with authority to create classified information have broad authority to label information in one of three categories: Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Putin’s Holy War vs. Obama’s Jihad in Syria By Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on October 8th, 2015

The Christian Orthodox Church, which holds an important place in an insurgent Russia, has described its government’s fight against the Islamic State and other jihadi opposition groups in Syria as a “holy war.”

According to Vsevolod Chaplin, head of the Church’s Public Affairs Department:

The fight with terrorism is a holy battle and today our country is perhaps the most active force in the world fighting it. The Russian Federation has made a responsible decision on the use of armed forces to defend the People of Syria from the sorrows caused by the arbitrariness of terrorists. Christians are suffering in the region with the kidnapping of clerics and the destruction of churches. Muslims are suffering no less.

This is not some new gimmick to justify intervention in Syria. For years, Russia’s Orthodox leaders have been voicing their concern for persecuted Christians. Back in February 2012, Vladimir Putin met with representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church. They described to him the horrific treatment Christians are experiencing around the world, especially the Muslim world:

The head of External Church Relations, Metropolitan Illarion, said that every five minutes one Christian was dying for his or her faith in some part of the world, specifying that he was talking about such countries as Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan and India. The cleric asked Putin to make the protection of Christians one of the foreign policy directions in future.

“This is how it will be, have no doubt,” Putin answered.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

This Is What Escalation Looks Like Russia mobilizes in Syria while China militarizes the South China Sea, filling a power vacuum created by an absent America.By Michael Auslin

Posted By on October 8th, 2015

Vladimir Putin’s air forces are deliberately targeting U.S.-backed Syrian rebels. China is building islands in disputed waters in the South China Sea and militarizing them with airfields, ports and antiaircraft and radar sites. This is what escalation looks like. Either the Obama administration responds to the danger of aggressive powers undermining or directly attacking U.S. interests, or it will risk the erosion of America’s position abroad and invite conflict with Moscow and Beijing.

Escalation takes many forms. In the 1930s, Hitler nibbled and carved away parts of Central Europe for several years before invading Poland. The Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931 and China proper in 1937 before deciding on a coordinated attack on Southeast Asia and Pearl Harbor. During the 1990s, al Qaeda escalated from bombing U.S. naval vessels and embassies to preparing for 9/11. What these cases have in common is that the great powers failed to deter the aggressors, emboldening them to ever larger actions.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Hillary the Strongman? A fantasy for the authoritarian left.By James Taranto

Posted By on October 8th, 2015

“Vox.com is a general interest news site for the 21st century,” the Vox Media website informs us. “Its mission is simple: Explain the News. Vox is where you go to understand the news and the world around you. It treats serious topics seriously, candidly shepherding people through complex topics.”

By some measures, Vox.com has been a success. A corporate vice president, Jonathan Hunt, “said the company broke even in 2014 and will be profitable this year,” Advertising Age reported in March. And Vox gets attention, as evidenced by this column.

But its “mission” is to be authoritative, and in that it has failed. It’s just another opinion site, albeit one with an unusually earnest tone. Liberals may cite it as an authority, but they are no less apt to cite sources like ThinkProgress, the Puffington Host and even the New York Times. Nonliberals, especially conservatives, don’t view Vox as any more credible than other liberal sources.

Much of Vox’s content consists of strange, contrarian arguments of the sort that could just as easily appear at Slate. A case in point: “Emailgate Is a Political Problem for Hillary Clinton, but It Also Reveals Why She’d Be an Effective President” by Matt Yglesias, a former Slate writer.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Putin Turns to Ukraine Playbook in Syria Russia keeps West guessing as it moves militarily to shore up an ally By James Marson and Nathan Hodge

Posted By on October 8th, 2015

MOSCOW—In Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to take a page from his Ukraine playbook by keeping the West guessing about his plans, employing the military art of deception known in Russia as maskirovka, or camouflage.
Analysis

Last year he surreptitiously sent Russia’s army into Ukraine, reversing the advance of Ukrainian government forces and bringing pro-Russia rebels a more-favorable peace settlement. Now, he’s repeating the gambit in Syria: shoring up his ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and ensuring the Kremlin will have a central role in deciding the country’s future.

Russia stepped up its attack on Mr. Assad’s opponents Wednesday, firing cruise missiles into Syria from warships in the far-off Caspian Sea. At North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters, the U.S. ambassador said Russia had built up a battalion-sized ground force in Syria, one equipped to take on a bigger mission than just defending Russian military bases there.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Hillary Trades Places With Clinton She opposes the Pacific trade deal she called ‘the gold standard.’

Posted By on October 8th, 2015

This is supposed to be the year when voters want authenticity in a candidate, but Hillary Clinton seems determined to test that proposition. On Wednesday President Obama’s former Secretary of State came out against her former boss’s Pacific trade agreement only two days after it was completed.

Mrs. Clinton was asked on PBS’s NewsHour whether the trade deal is “something you could support?”

Her reply: “What I know about it, as of today, I am not in favor of what I have learned about it. And there is one other element I want to make, because I think it’s important. Trade agreements don’t happen in a vacuum, and in order for us to have a competitive economy in the global marketplace, there are things we need to do here at home that help raise wages. And the Republicans have blocked everything President Obama tried to do on that front. So for the larger issues, and then what I know, and again, I don’t have the text, we don’t yet have all the details, I don’t believe it’s going to meet the high bar I have set.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

Those Assimilating Immigrants A new study finds they commit less crime and they learn English.

Posted By on October 8th, 2015

Sorry to break the good news to some of our conservative friends, but it turns out that most immigrants to America are assimilating as their forebears did. That’s the gist of a new 400-page report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which looks at everything from English proficiency, education levels and family structure to health, crime and employment.

Here’s the money sentence: “Across all measurable outcomes, integration increases over time, with immigrants becoming more like the native-born with more time in the country, and with the second and third generations becoming more like other native-born Americans than their parents were.”

Across all measurable outcomes. That bears repeating, especially when so many are painting immigrants who come here to work as criminals or welfare mooches. To take one example, the Donald Trump brain trust at the Center for Immigration Studies recently found “significantly higher welfare use associated with immigrants.”