RUTHFULLY YOURS

This week, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu struck a deal with an Israeli opposition party to expand his parliamentary majority from one to six — a substantial victory for the stability of the government. Unlike Netanyahu’s dominant Likud party, the new coalition party — called “Yisrael Beiteinu,” which means “Israel Is Our Home” — supports a two-state solution as part of its platform. Surely the Obama administration, which has made a two-state solution a singular focus of its Israel policy, welcomed the news as a major step toward its long-term vision for peace in the Middle East?

No, it didn’t. Through a State Department spokesman, the administration said the new coalition deal “raises legitimate questions” about the Israeli government’s commitment to a two-state solution, adding that, “ultimately, we’re going to judge this government based on its actions.”

The spokesman in question, a Mr. Mark Toner, also said that the administration “had seen reports from Israel describing [the new government] as the most right-wing coalition in Israel’s history.” What has Yisrael Beiteinu done to earn so abhorrent a reputation? (I assume that the comment was an attempt to link Israel’s new coalition government with Europe’s recent boom of successful far-right and neo-fascist populist parties.)

When Yisrael Beiteinu published its platform a few years ago — it’s a relatively new party — there was an outcry that it wanted to strip Israeli Arabs of their citizenship. The allegation circulated through the European and Arab popular press, and made it all the way up the media chain to CBS News (which ran an absurdly misleading piece on the subject).

If stepped-up spending on schools actually produced better results, as a self-serving educational establishment never tires of claiming, Australia’s students would be among the world’s best and brightest. Instead, performance levels aren’t just dropping, they’re plummeting
Is spending more the best way to raise standards and to improve Australia’s education system? Based on the ALP’s election promise to throw $37.3 billion at school education over the years 2015-16 to 2025-26 – including $4.5 billion to fund the final two years of the mythical Gonski funding model – the answer is ‘yes’.

Even though the nation is facing a fiscal debt tsunami and the ALP’s record in delivering education promises is abysmal, Bill Shorten boasts that if the ALP forms government the non-existent cash will flow like rivers of gold. Ignored, in relation to advanced economies like Australia and as argued by the OECD’ Universal Basic Skills report is that higher spending doesn’t guarantee stronger standards.

Authors of the report, Ludger Woessmann and Eric Hanushek, argue “in many countries that invest at least USD 50,000 per student between the age of 6 and 15 – and that include all high income and many middle income countries – the data no longer show a relationship between spending and the quality of learning outcomes.”

A second OECD report, titled PISA Low Performing Students, makes the same point when it concludes:

“Despite the conventional wisdom that higher investment leads to greater gains, there is no clear evidence that increasing public spending on education guarantees better student performance once a minimum level of expenditure is reached.”

As noted by the ALP member for Fraser, Andrew Leigh, when an academic at the ANU, notwithstanding the additional billions spent on education in Australia over the last 30 to 40 years, literacy and numeracy levels, on the whole, have either flat-lined or gone backwards. Given the consensus that throwing additional billions at education is not the solution the question remains: what can be done to improve educational outcomes, both in terms of equity and improved standards? One approach, exemplified by the ACER’s Geoff Masters in his recent paper Five Challenges in Australian School Education, argues that if Australia is to be in the top five countries in reading, mathematics and science by 2025 then the strategies he recommends must be implemented. These involve: better resourcing low socioeconomic status (SES) students and reducing Australia’s long tail of underachieving students (similar arguments are put by the Julia Gillard inspired Gonski funding report); ensuring that pre-school children are school ready; only accepting top performers into teacher training and adopting a 21st century curriculum.

Two wars today are being waged against Jewish students on American university campuses. One is substantive, the other is institutional. The plight of the Jews at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island is emblematic of both.

The purpose of the substantive war is to deny Jews their freedom as Jews. As the guarantor of Jewish freedom, Israel is the subject of a systematic, multidimensional assault, carried out everywhere on campuses.

On a growing number of campuses in the United States, the only Jews who can safely express their views on Israel are those who champion Israel’s destruction.

Those who support Israel are subjected to continuous harassment by their fellow students.

The substantive battle is being led by Students for Justice in Palestine. SJP is a phantom organization with no national organization. As Jonathan Schanzer from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies testified before the US Congress last month, it is directed by former officials from non-profits including the Holy Foundation, KindHearts and the Islamic Association for Palestine that were forced to shut down after they were implicated in financing terrorist groups including Hamas and al-Qaida.

A professor at Santa Monica College took a group of students on an “EcoSexual Sextravaganza” trip earlier this month, during which they “married the ocean” and were encouraged to “consummate” that marriage.

Why? Well, as one of its organizers, a professor named Amber Katherine, told Campus Reform, it was to get students to love the environment more through “exocentric passion and even lust.”

Oh, right. Duh.

The leaders of the trip were UC–Santa Cruz professor Elizabeth Stephens and pornographic actress/writer/sex educator Annie Sprinkle — both of whom are “the effective leaders of the ecosexual movement,” according to a writeup on the event in the school’s student newspaper, the Corsair.

Yeah, that’s right — “ecosexual movement.” This is an actual movement, and, not wanting to be behind the fray, SMC has its own Ecosexual Club.

Its president, Diego Martinez, told The Corsair that this was actually his second marriage to the ocean:

“It was actually our second marriage so it was kind of like renewing my vows for me,” Marquez said.

The students were specifically instructed to think of this marriage as one involving sex, and encouraged to “consummate” the marriage and “make love to the water” by sticking parts of their bodies into it, according to Campus Reform.

According to the Corsair, the attendees were handed plastic rings and gave their own personal vows to the sea before Sprinkle stated, “With this ring, I thee wed, and bestow upon the sea, the treasures of my mind, heart and hands.” Stephens added, “As well as our body and soul,” and Sprinkle concluded, “And with that, I now pronounce you one with the sea” — officially making all of the participants married to the sea, apparently.

[Israel’s] security advantage means cooperation with moderate nations…our partners could gain very nice inputs. And there’s also the economic sphere. I am convinced that one day, we’ll have embassies in Riyadh, in Kuwait, in the Gulf States and other places. The combination of our initiative, technology and knowledge with their tremendous financial reserves can together change the world.

Who said that? Shimon Peres, Israel’s premier “peace” exponent over the past quarter-century? Isaac Herzog, current leader of Israel’s left-wing opposition?

No, the man who said that a year and a half ago was Avigdor Lieberman—Israel’s newly sworn-in, much-reviled defense minister.

The New York Times has recoiled in horror at this development. It bemoans Lieberman’s “ultranationalist positions” and says his “appointment would make a mockery of any possible Israeli overtures to the Palestinians.”

The State Department, too, is unhappy. In what The Times of Israel calls a “rare comment on the internal politics of a US ally”—rare, that is, except in the case of Israel, which the State Department raps publicly with numbing frequency—spokesman Mark Toner said Washington had “seen reports from Israel describing it as the most right-wing coalition in Israel’s history…. This raises legitimate questions about the direction it may be headed in.”

As for the abovementioned Herzog, he exemplified the Israeli left-wing lamentations with: “I’m sorry Netanyahu chose to blink and move the leadership helm in an extremist direction. The citizens of Israel should be concerned about a right-wing coalition that will lead Israel to dangerous places.”

It’s reminiscent of when, back in 2001, Ariel Sharon took the helm as prime minister. Sharon, of course, was then a demonic figure for the Israeli left, and viewed with much trepidation abroad.

Yet it was Sharon who, four years later, ended up taking the dovish step—which these days appears to be proving itself—of pulling Israel out of Gaza. How could that have been?

It could be because—as anyone who bothered looking at the facts, and regarded Sharon as a complex human being rather than a demon, could see—his record was actually far from monolithically hawkish. He had come out in favor of his predecessor, Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s, withdrawal from Lebanon (2000). Before that, as foreign minister in Netanyahu’s first government (1996-1999), Sharon had gotten along well with Jordan’s King Hussein and succeeded in smoothing out an Israeli-Jordanian crisis.

There are certain things those who “know and understand the world” purport to know and understand. These things are the seeds for most opinion journalism and “news” reporting in the current era.

The perils of climate change are certainly near the top for the informed commentariat, despite the fact that most people, certainly most Americans, rate this a virtual nonissue, not even among their top 10 issues of concern. The planet may have experienced an average temperature increase of one degree centigrade or less over the last 165 years since the start of the industrial revolution. But supposedly, according to the media, catastrophe is at hand.

The need for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is another one of those “big” stories that are never far from the news lead, on which the groupthink consensus is never challenged. This week, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman managed in one column to repeat pretty much every accepted wisdom about Israel today that counts as opinion journalism among the “well informed.” This is no particular achievement for Friedman, who has been recycling his columns on Israel for decades, always with the same sage advice for Israel, a country he is trying to save from itself.

According to Friedman, the government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is destroying Israel by building settlements in the West Bank and by including ministers who happen to represent segments of the population that agree with Netanyahu on security issues. Netanyahu has shifted Israel hard to the right and is thereby closing off chances for peace with the Palestinians, Friedman claims. In time, he adds, the window to achieve a two-state solution will close (as it has presumably closed after every prior unsuccessful peace processing period, until it reopened with the next one).

One of the highlights of the annual report released on Tuesday by Israeli State Comptroller Judge Yosef Shapira is the government’s failure to combat the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and other attempts at delegitimizing the Jewish state.

According to Shapira, no significant victories have been won in this battle, because the two ministries charged with waging it — Foreign Affairs and Strategic Affairs — have been too busy bickering with each other over purviews and powers to join forces in what should be a common war with a shared goal.

One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry about such a critique.

Though it’s healthy to have an independent body monitoring government activities, certain phenomena are so inherent, self-evident and redundant that they’re not worth wasting paper to expose. Two of these can’t be stressed enough.

The first is that democratic governments by their nature are bureaucracies whose biggest claim to fame is inefficiency. This is true in general and of countries like Israel in particular. Though headed by a highly savvy, free-market maven, it continues to operate like a socialist apparatus. And though its citizens have ample evidence at their disposal to grasp that private endeavors always get things done better and more cheaply, they still can’t get it through their simultaneously innovative and thick skulls that the government is a necessary pill to swallow, not some doctor capable of curing all ills. This is an irrefutable truth.

Another is that no amount of quality “hasbara” — an untranslatable Hebrew word for public diplomacy, the field of Israel’s making a case for itself in the international arena — can prevent or eliminate anti-Semitism.

‘Progressive” government officials have launched an Orwellian effort to outlaw research that dares question the soundness of computer-predicted climate catastrophes or costly policy proposals aimed at mitigating climate change.

Much has been written about how this attempt to criminalize inquiry and debate threatens fundamental First Amendment and due process rights. But how they are going about it is equally troubling.

Some state attorneys general are hiring profit-seeking, private-sector personal-injury lawyers to do their legal dirty work. Moreover, any contingency fees collected by these lawyers through settlements arising from these cases could be used, in part, to fund the campaigns of allied politicians who embrace the “one, true belief” of man-made global warming.

This is more than an attempt to suppress political and scientific dissent. Deputizing self-interested personal-injury lawyers with the awesome power of the state subverts the public interest.

We have seen this unseemly dynamic in action before. Two years ago, a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times series focused on the business model of the class-action specialists at Cohen Milstein, a law firm that seeks to create “big paydays by coaxing attorneys general to sue” large, sometimes politically unpopular corporations or industries. The firm brags about being the “most effective law firm in the United States for lawsuits with a strong social and political component.”

By e-mail, a Cohen Milstein spokeswoman said the firm did not participate in a then-secret but now widely reported Manhattan meeting of climate-change activists and political operatives in January. But it certainly appears as though the class-action bar’s interests were well represented during the discussions.

A draft agenda for the meeting obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, shows a determination to use their powers to push a political agenda. Among their goals: “To establish in public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos,” and “To drive Exxon and climate into center of 2016 election cycle.” But money is a big motivator as well.

A bitter divide over the Middle East could threaten Democratic Party unity as representatives of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont vowed to upend what they see as the party’s lopsided support of Israel.http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/us/politics/bernie-sanders-israel-democratic-convention.html

Two of the senator’s appointees to the party’s platform drafting committee, Cornel West and James Zogby, on Wednesday denounced Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza and said they believed that rank-and-file Democrats no longer hewed to the party’s staunch support of the Israeli government. They said they would try to get their views incorporated into the platform, the party’s statement of core beliefs, at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July.

“Justice for Palestinians cannot be attained without the lifting of the occupation,” Dr. West, one of Mr. Sanders’s five representatives on the platform committee, said in an interview. Dr. West said that while he recognized the necessity to provide for the security of Jews, who for thousands of years have been a “hated people,” he thought that the platform needed to bring more balance to “the plight of an occupied people.”

The presence of Dr. Zogby and Dr. West on the 15-member panel, which also has six appointees of Hillary Clinton and four from the party chairwoman, does not guarantee their views will prevail. But it raises the prospect that one of the party’s most sensitive issues will be open to public debate while Mrs. Clinton is in a fight to unify her party and appeal to voters turned off by Donald J. Trump.

It also laid bare a steady shift in the Democratic Party, whose members have been less willing to back Israel’s government than in years past. According to a Pew Research Center survey in April, self-described liberal Democrats were twice as likely to sympathize with Palestinians over Israel than they were only two years ago. Forty percent of liberals sympathized more with Palestinians, the most since 2001, while 33 percent sympathized more with Israel.

This month, a British feminist historian, Dr. Catharine Hall, refused a half a million dollars because the money is connected to an Israel-based foundation.

The Dan David Foundation had absolutely no trouble finding two other European feminist historians (Drs. Arlette Farge and Dr. Inga Clendinnen) and awarding them the distinguished prize.

The matter is a curious one. First, because Hall herself not only declined the prize; her supporters, the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine, released the news of her rejection. Hall and her supporters/handlers clearly want credit for her “politically correct” sacrifice. Perhaps a pro-Islamic or a British anti-Zionist foundation will soon find a way to reward her. Perhaps others will then follow suit.

The British Committee for the Universities of Palestine described Hall’s decision as “a significant endorsement of the campaign to end ties with Israeli institutions.”

The matter is also curious because the Committee posted a press release on May 10th—andHa’aretz did not report this until May 22nd. Ha’aretz states that Hall declines this prize “after many discussions with those who are deeply involved with the politics of Israel-Palestine.”

The Dan David Prize was founded in 2000 with a one hundred million dollar endowment and awards were given for the first time in 2002. It seems to be an end-of-career or a later-in-one’s-career kind of award. Scientists, novelists, musicians, thinkers, and academics, mainly historians, have been recipients of this largesse. Many undeniably great historians have received this prize such as Sir Martin Gilbert and Robert Conquest, who shared the prize in 2012.