RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you heard that a group of philanthropists came together to donate millions of dollars to schools, you would probably consider it good news. Indeed, thousands of underprivileged kids will be helped by the $35 million raised for Success Academy charter schools at a charity gala earlier this month. But teachers unions detect a nefarious purpose.

This $35 million donation was “part of a coordinated national effort to decimate public schooling,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote in an April 13 article at the Huffington Post. “Wealthy donors and their political allies,” she warned, are “pushing unaccountable charter growth in urban centers while stripping communities of a voice in their children’s education.”

Regardless of the political attacks, politicians and philanthropists must remain committed. Charter schools serve many underprivileged students: 56% are on free or reduced lunch and 65% are minorities, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Because they are run independently of school districts and city bureaucracies, they have the flexibility to be innovative in the choices they offer to parents, providing services like extended-learning schedules and language immersion.

Charter schools are also closing achievement gaps. At Success Academy schools in New York, three-quarters of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch and nearly all are minorities. In 2015, 68% of students scored proficient in reading and 93% ranked proficient in math. For contrast, only 35% of New York City students overall scored proficient in math. Their reading abilities were even worse.

This success translates to broad-based support. About two-thirds of public-school parents favor charter schools, according to a 2015 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll. Support is especially high among low-income parents, according to a March survey commissioned by the organization I lead. Some 88% of parents who earn less than $50,000 a year would like to see more charter schools in their communities. CONTINUE AT SITE

As senior party members said to mull resignation over handling of anti-Semitism row, leader says he will continue to engage Palestinian groups, declares Labour ‘absolutely against anti-Semitism’

British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn rebuffed calls Sunday to denounce contacts with terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah, while declaring that his party is against anti-Semitism, amid a roiling scandal over accusations of widespread anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiments among Labourites.

Corbyn used a May Day rally to say the party “is absolutely against anti-Semitism in any form” after a tumultuous week that focused attention on the party’s attitude toward Jews instead of its campaigning efforts ahead of London’s mayoral race.

But as Labour attempted to push back against efforts to label it anti-Semitic, it also came under fire for Corbyn’s past contacts with Hamas and Hezbollah, both sworn to Israel’s destruction.

A statement from Corbyn’s spokesperson said he would continue to engage such groups, while denying that doing so was tantamount to an endorsement.

“Jeremy Corbyn has been a longstanding supporter of Palestinian rights and the pursuit of peace and justice in the Middle East through dialogue and negotiation,” the statement read, according to the Telegraph newspaper. “He has met many people with whom he profoundly disagrees in order to promote peace and reconciliation processes, including in South Africa, Latin American, Ireland and the Middle East. He believes it is essential to speak to people with whom there is disagreement, particularly when they have large-scale support or democratic mandates.”

Seventy years ago this month, a committee of 12 scholars and statesmen completed an 80-page report that is all but forgotten today. The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry Regarding the Problems of European Jewry and Palestine, consisting of six British and six American members, was a British idea.

Under pressure from President Harry Truman to allow 100,000 Jewish survivors in Europe’s DP camps to emigrate to the British Mandate, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin proposed the joint committee as a way to outflank the White House. Between January and March 1946, the Committee heard testimony in Washington, London, numerous sites in Europe, the Arab capitals, and Jerusalem. Bevin was sure that a sense of Britain’s strategic realities in the Middle East — its dependence on bases and oil for instance — would bring the US members to shy away from antagonizing the Arab world. To ensure the desired outcome, however, the British helped to establish a global anti-Zionist narrative that bled into anti-Semitism, all in the shadow of the Jewish world’s greatest catastrophe.

Jewish witnesses in Washington, London, Europe, and Jerusalem were aggressively cross-examined by British committee members. It was pointless, the British argued, for the Jews to rehash the recent history of pogroms or the Shoah. These were irrelevant. Rather, Jewish speakers had to show how more Jews could be put in Palestine without causing an uproar, and why most could not simply return to Poland, Romania, and so on. Thus in Washington, when Joseph Schwartz of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee discussed the recent Krakow pogrom to demonstrate that the Jewish place in Poland was over, British committee chairman Sir John Singleton laconically countered, “History shows, doesn’t it, that in every country where there has been persecution, the people have come back.” Even in Poland, after speaking with Adolf Berman, a former Warsaw Ghetto leader, British committee members asked “whether friction was being caused by returning Jews asking for restitution of their property.”

Similarly, British committee members lost patience with Jews who insisted that Palestine had the space and economic potential such that Arabs and Jews could live at peace. Economist Robert Nathan argued that a properly developed economy in Palestine could accommodate up to a million Jews, thus raising the living standard of everyone. “Is it your view,” Singleton asked, “that the acquisition of more land by the Jews would increase the friendship between Arabs and Jews? . . . [It] doesn’t seem that it would tend toward a solution.”

Author David Kilcullen “Blood Year” is scathing of Barack Obama’s deer-in-the-headlights response to the rise of ISIS. The last thing Vladimir Putin had to fear on the eve of his bold intervention in the Syrian civil war, was the reaction of a supine US president

Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror
by David Kilcullen
Black Inc, 2016, 304 pages, $29.99

The United States will remain in a kind of purgatory until it unlocks the full meaning of 9/11. Without the right understanding of what that terrorist attack signified, there cannot be an effective response to it. David Kilcullen’s Blood Year makes the case that the administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have badly misjudged the nature of the challenge to America and the wider world in general. As a direct consequence of this, asserts Kilcullen, the power and reach of militant jihadism appear much stronger now than when President Bush first launched the Global War On Terrorism (GWOT) in 2001.

The Australian David Kilcullen has been, amongst other things, senior adviser to General David Petraeus during the Surge (2007-08) and chief strategist in the Counter-Terrorism Bureau of the US State Department. He currently runs a private agency that has advised everyone from the UK and Australian governments to Nato. Blood Year is that rare thing, an insider’s knowledge of Western policy-making in the twenty-first century combined with the frankness of an independent-minded questioner. Yet even Kilcullen—a veritable expert on counter-terrorism—appears, at times, not to grasp in its entirety the genesis of Islamic militancy and the comprehensive nature of its war against modernity.

Kilcullen contrasts George W. Bush’s second term in office (2005 to 2009) with his first (2001 to 2005). Stung into action by the destruction of the Twin Towers and the strike on the Pentagon, the forty-third President launched “Operation Enduring Freedom—Afghanistan”. On the hundredth day of his GWOT—some time after the initial success in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda and more than a year before the commencement of the Iraq War—President Bush could not unreasonably make the claim: “We are supported by the collective will of the world.”

There were two big pieces of news out of NASA this week. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and scientists at the Southwest Research Institute discovered a new moon, orbiting a dwarf planet named Makemake (one of the many Pluto-esque bodies that live in the far reaches of the solar system). And NASA announced that the Earth is getting greener. Literally greener. Plant growth is way up.

Why is plant growth way up? Because of all the extra carbon dioxide in the air. According to the study, which was published this week in the scientific journal Nature, the total area of the planet that’s covered by plants has increased by more than 11 million square miles in the last 33 years. For perspective: North America, including Greenland, is a little less than nine and a half million square miles. Of course, not all of this increase is due to CO2 and global warming. But 78 percent of it is. (Says the study.)

This is very good news. Plants feed the world. It is not, however, unexpected news. Wall Street Journal readers may recall a piece published in May of 2013 called “In Defense of Carbon Dioxide,” by William Happer, one of Princeton’s top-flight physicists, and Harrison Schmitt, a geologist, a former Republican senator from New Mexico, and an Apollo astronaut who walked on the moon.

“In Defense of Carbon Dioxide” criticized the “conventional wisdom” about CO2 and the “single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas.” “Contrary to what some would have us believe,” wrote Schmitt and Happer, “increased carbon dioxide will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.”

Needless to say, they were right on the money.

Here are some questions for the man-made or Anthropogenic Global Warmers. Since I have taken up the cudgels on various Facebook pages I am screamed at by numerous sycophants who declare that I am a simpleton and totally ignorant. I confess! But here are some questions for the man-made Global Warmers:

Do you deny that the Sun’s radiation causes the surfaces of the Earth to warm?

Do you deny that we are travelling round the Sun at over 66,000 miles per hour in an ellipse?

Do you deny that the Sun is one million three hundred thousand times as big as Planet Earth by volume?

Do you deny that the Sun on it corona is approximately 6,500C?

Do you deny that the Sun is between 91 to 95 million miles away?

Do you deny that the whole Solar system is within an arm of the Milky Way?

Do you deny that Outer Space is a vacuum?

Do you deny the 1st Law of Thermodynamics? That all heat has to be generated by work done?

Do you deny the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, that all heat by itself flows from hot to cold and never versa?

Do you deny that evaporation causes cooling?

Do you deny that Conduction demonstrates heat flowing from hot to cold?

Do you deny that Convection carries heat upwards and away towards Outer Space?

Do you deny that only Radiation can pass heat into or through a vacuum?

Do you deny that the Atmosphere is warmed at the bottom by conduction from the Earth’s surfaces?

Do you deny that the atmosphere cools by 2 degrees centigrade for every 1,000 feet of altitude?

Do you deny that 99% of the Atmosphere is composed of Nitrogen and Oxygen?

Do you deny that the Greenhouse Gases only occupy 1% and that Carbon Dioxide a mere 0.04%?

Do you deny that the gases of the Atmosphere do not generate heat?

Do you deny that at 10,000 feet the gases are cold, including CO2?

Sometimes we wonder if we’re still living in the land of the free. Witness the subpoena from Claude Walker, attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands, demanding that the Competitive Enterprise Institute cough up a decade of emails and policy work, as well as a list of private donors.

Mr. Walker is frustrated that the free-market think tank won’t join the modern church of climatology, so he has joined the rapidly expanding club of Democratic politicians and prosecutors harassing dissenters.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman started the assault last autumn with a subpoena barrage on Exxon Mobil. His demand for documents followed reports by Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times that claimed Exxon scientists had known for years that greenhouse gases cause global warming but hid the truth from the public and shareholders.

Those reports selectively quoted from Exxon documents, which in any case were publicly available and often peer-reviewed in academic journals. Some Exxon scientists changed their views over the years, and several years ago the company even endorsed a carbon tax. CONTINUE AT SITE

As a young boy, I used to think my grandma very strange. In her bedroom she kept a suitcase, packed and ready for use at a moment’s notice. “Just in case,” she’d tell me when I asked where it was that she was always waiting to go to. “You never know when they’ll turn on the Jews.”

Her house in Northwood was epitome of suburban comfort, and I couldn’t understand what on earth she meant. Until, that is, I learned some history – including the history of the Jews. Which is, in short, that pretty much everywhere, they have turned on the Jews.

From my teens through my twenties and thirties, the fact that I am Jewish meant little to me beyond the Jonathan Miller sense of being Jew-ish. I adored beigels, matzoh balls, Seinfeld and Woody Allen more than your average gentile would think they deserved. And that was about it. If you’d asked me, I’d have told you that after the Holocaust, real, serious anti-Semitism – the sort where Jews were killed for being Jews, rather than the odd nasty comment – was a thing of the past, in civilised Europe, at least.
Then something happened. 9/11, to be specific. I realised something was up that I didn’t really understand. So I read and read and read. And then read some more – especially the words of the terrorists and their fellow Islamists. They were explicit and open. Jews were the enemy. All their “issues” with the West pivoted, in the end, on their Jew hate. So I immersed myself even more in the issues around terrorism and Islamism. Because, you see, it mattered.

It matters, of course, to all of us, because – as we have seen both on 9/11 and ever since, Islamist terrorism is not specific in its targeting. But it matters to me more, I would say, than anything else I can think of. Because although these maniacs will happily kill anyone, they say, andtheir subsequent murders show, that – quite specifically – they want to kill me. A Jew. So on level I am not in the least bit shocked, or even surprised, by the reemergence of Jew hatred as a thing in recent years. By what arrogance would we think that our generation, alone in history, would be free of the oldest hatred?
But on another, more visceral level, it chills me to the bone. And it’s not the terrorists. They threaten me, of course, as they threaten us all. Yet to me, the real chill comes from their fellow travelers – the useful idiots of the terrorists and Jew-murderers who say they do not have a racist bone in their body, but when it comes to Jews, a blind spot emerges. The likes, to be blunt, of the now suspended Ken Livingstone, who claims never to have come across a single example of Anti-semitism in the Labour Party. He clearly has never looked in the mirror. Much has been written – especially by the brilliant Nick Cohen – on the “Red/Green Alliance”; the phenomenon by which a swathe of the Left has linked up with radical Islam, leading to the bizarre spectacle of Leftist feminists supporting Islamists who would cut off the hands of women who read books.

Why does the Left hate the Jews?

The Labour party in the United Kingdom is being convulsed at the moment with a public reckoning of the anti-Semitism of some of its most prominent members, including the former mayor of London, “Red” Ken Livingstone, who has just been suspended from the party for arguing that Adolf Hitler was, effectively, a Zionist. He was trying to explain away the anti-Semitic remarks of MP Naz Shah, who suggested that Israel be liquidated and its population forcibly resettled in the United States.

In the United States, the Harvard Law Record went to some lengths to conceal the identity of a law student who attacked a visiting Israeli dignitary as — in the classic anti-Semitic formulation — “smelly.” That student was Husam El-Qoulaq, a Palestinian leftist. The campus Left has, to no one’s surprise, rallied to his defense. Among those defending him were a number of Jewish law students, who insisted that El-Qoulaq couldn’t possibly have known the anti-Semitic history of “smelly Jew” rhetoric, in spite of his having been reared at the world center of such nonsense.

Others insisted that the Harvard case and the Labour cases are — this, too, will be familiar — not at all about anti-Semitism but about anti-Zionism.

That argument does not stand up to two seconds’ scrutiny, and never has. One of the fundamental stories of history is that people move around and bump into each other. It is true that most of the current Jewish population of Israel descends from people who were not precisely sons of the soil they now inhabit. But then, neither are the so-called Palestinians, who are Arabs. Arabs famously come from Arabia, but they are located all over the world. No one talks about the need to get the Arabs out of Egypt or Libya — or Palestine, for that matter — any more than anybody seriously thinks about returning the Americas to the descendants of the aboriginal population, which, of course, wasn’t aboriginal, either, but merely the first to emigrate. The Irish are descended of people not native to Ireland, as indeed ultimately is every population in the world, including those in the African cradle of humanity.

And it isn’t because the establishment of Israel is, relatively speaking, fresh in the historical memory, and therefore an open wound. Before the end of World War II, there was no Pakistan, and to the extent that there was an “India,” it was a geographical rather than a political term, much like “Palestine.” There was no independent Ireland until the 1920s and no Republic of Ireland until 1948. There was no People’s Republic of China until 1949. There was no Zimbabwe until 1980, no Czech Republic until 1993, and no modern Democratic Republic of the Congo until 1997. Israel is an ancient state compared with geopolitical newcomers such as the 30-odd countries created since 1990.

Yet it is the Jewish state, and the Jewish state alone, that is permanently marked for extermination. No one is throwing a fit about Timor-Leste or Serbia. The old saw about American racial politics was that in the South whites accepted blacks individually but rejected them corporately, whereas in the North it was the opposite, with the Yankees embracing integration and equality in theory while ensuring that they rarely encountered a black American in person. (Senator Bernie Sanders, proud son of diverse Brooklyn, now represents the whitest state in the Union.) And that’s the best that the Left can say for itself: “We don’t hate the Jews individually, just as a nation.”

That’s not much of a defense.

Harvard employs Gestapo tactics to track right-wing bloggers while shielding leftist hate group leader.

Unless you’ve been in hibernation for the last few days, you’ve almost certainly come across the name Husam El Qoulaq, the rabidly anti-Israeli, third-year Harvard Law School student who hurled an anti-Semitic trope at an Israeli parliamentarian during a question and answer session. What most of you may not be familiar with is the Orwellian-like hypocrisy employed by Harvard Law School to protect the identities of anti-Semitic agitators while at the same time utilizing all tools at their disposal to unmask the identities of bloggers, whose only crime was to expose a hoax committed by self-proclaimed “social justice warriors.”

On April 14, Husam El Qoulaq, whose name is also spelled El-Coolaq and El-Quolaq, asked Israel’s former minister of justice and current co-leader of the Zionist Union party, Tzipy Livni, why she was a “smelly” Jew. He went on to inquire about her “odor” and again referred to her as “very smelly.” The stereotype of the Jew as smelly or filthy is as old and banal as anti-Semitism itself and was also employed by the Nazis as a means to further demean and denigrate the Jewish people. His antics were performed in a packed hall filled with fellow Harvard colleagues. Also present and sitting beside Livni was U.S. diplomat Dennis Ross and Harvard Law professor, Robert Mnookin.

El Qoulaq represents the modern face of campus hate and fascism and embodies all that is wrong with the present state of academia. He is a leader in the hate group, Students for Justice in Palestine and a supporter of the Irvine 11, the group of hooligans and convicted criminals who, in 2010, disrupted a talk given by Israel’s then ambassador, Michael Oren. He is also a defender of Steven Salaita, the disgraced Judeophobic “academic” who was given the boot by the University of Illinois for posting rabidly anti-Semitic rants on Twitter.

El Qoulaq’a April 14 antics were unsurprising given his sordid past and current BDS-SJP affiliations. What is in fact surprising is the length to which Harvard Law School went to protect his identity, shielding it from any form of well-deserved scrutiny. HLS condemned his comments but then inexplicably censored that portion of the video featuring the disgraceful exchange. What’s more, the Harvard Law Record, a student newspaper, joined in this despicable charade, violating basic norms of journalistic integrity. They even went so far as to allow El Qoulaq to submit an anonymous and rather insincere “apology.”

The question on the minds of most rational thinking people is how Harvard Law School would have acted if such a hateful comment were directed at an African American dignitary. Of course, that is a rhetorical question. There would have been an indignant outcry with the culprit publicly shamed, humiliated and disciplined and rightfully so. Xenophobia and racism have no place in institutions of higher learning but at Harvard (as well as other institutions) there is an apparent exception for those who hurl vitriol at Jews.