RUTHFULLY YOURS

Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Tuesday soft-pedaled the “not great news” that scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress (i.e., the “nation’s report card”) declined this year for the first time since 1990. We once hoped that education would be a bright spot of the Obama Presidency, but it appears that student learning has stalled.

The Administration says the discouraging results on the NAEP exam, which tests a representative sample of students every two years in all 50 states, may be a blip. Perhaps, but the retrogression is troubling. Math proficiency in the fourth and eighth grades slipped two percentage points nationwide to 40% and 33% of students, respectively. Average scores fell across the board save for fourth-grade reading where progress was flat. Since 2007 fourth- and eighth-grade math, and fourth-grade reading, scores have plateaued.

Mr. Duncan says one culprit might be that schools are adjusting to new Common Core standards. Yet in 2013 he attributed modest gains in Michigan and seven other states to early implementation of Common Core. The handful of states that haven’t adopted Common Core have also sunk or are treading water.

For the past 15 years, retired Paris-area police commissioner Sammy Ghozlan has sounded the alarm over the rising tide of attacks on Jews in his beloved France. Now he’s relocated to Netanya.

When I enter Sammy Ghozlan’s apartment in Netanya, he’s at his computer, looking at an email. It features a photograph of the metal shutters of a Jewish-owned optician store in Paris. Freshly painted graffiti on the shutters shows a Der Sturmer-style purple and black caricature of a hook-nosed Jew. It looks pretty horrible to me, but Ghozlan is not hugely fazed. Routine, he calls it wearily. Unremarkable. Just one more sign of the times.

A former Paris-area police commissioner, Ghozlan in retirement established a liaison organization between French police and the Jewish community, the BNVCA (National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism), alerting both sides to attacks and threats against Jews. He made aliya this summer, but will be paying frequent return visits to France, he says, and is still running the BNVCA.

I’d arranged to meet Ghozlan after reading an August 2015 Vanity Fair profile of him, headlined “Paris is Burning,” which described him variously as a “Sephardic Columbo” and a “beat-up version of Yves Montand” and said he had made his police counter-terrorism reputation by identifying Palestinian sympathizers rather than neo-Nazis as the perpetrators of a 1980 synagogue bombing on Rue Copernic in which four people were killed. In retirement, it said, he has been “almost alone in his fight to protect the Jews of the banileues” — the suburbs surrounding Paris.

The question I most want to ask Ghozlan, 72, is whether his decision to move to Israel signals that there is no future for the Jews in France. And the answer he gives me is revelatory: “It’s not that there’s no future for the Jews in France. It’s that there is no future for the Jews in France that they want,” he says.

‘Unify Syria, Divide Israel’ Says Kerry in Major Middle East Policy Address
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry spoke about U.S. Policy Towards the Middle East on Wednesday, Oct. 28 at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Kerry touched on many topics during his hour-long talk, including the Nuclear Iran Deal, ISIS, the war in Syria and, of course, the Arab-Israeli conflict.

GENESIS OF ISIS

Kerry claimed that ISIS – which is apparently now to be known in U.S. Diplo-talk as Daesh – arose out of the chaos during the early days of the Syrian Revolution, when poor, disillusioned Syrians were protesting in the streets because they just wanted jobs and a future.

But Bassar al-Assad’s thugs, Kerry explained, beat up those young people. Then the parents of the young people went out in the streets to clash with Assad’s thugs, who in turn used bullets and bombs on the protesting parents.

“Having made peaceful change impossible, Assad made war inevitable,” Kerry said. And then Assad turned to Hezbollah for help, and then to Iran and Russia, and this exacerbated tensions between Sunni and Shiite communities, and this paved the way for Daesh.

As if Palestine domestic and social media incitement wasn’t enough, the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva convened a special session, giving Mahmoud Abbas a world stage to glorify Palestinian terrorism. Palestine is not a member of the organization and their request could have been easily turned down. But the UNHRC chose to hold it. Thus, “The role of the Council in fanning the flames of conflict and assisting in the dissemination of lies is now well established,” commented Israel’s Ambassador to the UNHRC Eviatar Manor.

Human rights is clearly not a priority among the UNHRC members who in September elected a Saudi to head the UN Human Rights panel, an appointment which, by the way was welcomed by the US Dept of State.

Why would anyone promote horrific Palestinian incitement to kill Israelis? See below some recent examples.

Today the UNHRC invites Abbas to promote killing of Jews in Israel. How long before the it will endorse the Killing of Americans by ISIS or other jihadist?

The following are examples of encouragement of terrorism in the Palestinian media and social media, as reported by the Meir Amit Terrorism and Information Center on October 27, 2015.

This week as well the Palestinian social networks posted propaganda inciting stabbing and vehicular attacks against IDF soldiers and Israeli civilians. It focused on the glorification of Palestinian terrorists from the Hebron region who carried out stabbing and vehicular attacks (Facebook pages of Khalil Online and Beit ‘Awwa, October 22-25, 2015).

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/10/29/round-2-muslim-refugee-mudar-zahran-vs-former-islamic-imam-mark-christian-on-the-glazov-gang/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined, for Round #2 of a previous heated exchange (See Part I HERE), by Dr. Mudar Zahran, the leader of the Jordanian Opposition and a Muslim refugee in Europe and Dr. Mark Christian, a former Islamic Imam who is the president of the Global Faith Institute.

The two guests debated The Jihad Against Israel and who is behind it, the Disposition of the King of Jordan Toward Israel, the Effort to Overthrow the King of Jordan, Where Palestinians Can Build a State, and much more.

The heated exchange gets hotter. Don’t miss the fireworks!

This column is about the epistemological epilepsy of our political elite. And the elite’s unreal metaphysics.

Or do they also suffer from schizophrenia? A collective neurosis? Group paranoia? Multiple personalities? Anxiety disorders? Bipolar mania? A potpourri of psychoses? Asperger’s syndrome?

A reader, whom I shall call Bridget, offered this comment on my Pax Germania vs. Pax Islamia column:

I don’t understand why the elites just don’t pay attention or understand that Muslim values are different from ours, as is their Shariah law. Crazy, because it’s so simple….People are so ignorant.

It isn’t so simple to the elites. The elites regard simplicity as a mark of insanity, of brutishness, of arrested epistemological development, or of retardation. They don’t think they need to pay attention or understand Islam except to claim that it’s a “beautiful religion” and that Westerners should not be judgmental of it. The elitists need nuances, and complexities, and shades of gray. Without them, they’d be just like everyone else, and no one would be willing to pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars or Euros to sit at fancy desks and lord it over everyone else, as though they were the guardians of Plato’s cave of the ignorant.

What follows is an elaboration of my original answer to the reader.

You see, Bridget, reality for you, me, and for other thinking people, is a pretty straightforward affair, not ever to be questioned or subjected to a mental tennis match. European and American political elites, however, and for the most part, refuse to grant reality any reality, because they’ve been taught that mind creates reality. They reject the primacy of existence. They reject an Aristotelian approach to reality. Reality must conform to their imaginings of what it should be, but isn’t, and can’t be, ever. They have never questioned their received wisdom, received, by the way, from a long line of philosophers like Kant and Schopenhauer and Hume, among others, a wisdom which claims that metaphysics is malleable, that it can be whatever one wants it to be, if one wants it badly enough, or if it displeases one.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=14165

Last week, a baby born in the Gaza Strip was named “Knife of Jerusalem” by his doting parents. Paying homage to terrorists is nothing new among Palestinians, but the parents in question wanted their tribute to be original.
Rather than imitating the common practice of immortalizing specific “martyrs” killed while committing atrocities, this family from Rafah decided to highlight the weapon of choice employed in the current jihad against the Jews.
In spite of its ongoing conflict with Hamas, which reigns in Gaza, the Fatah-dominated leadership of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah was tickled by the couple’s innovative gesture. After all, murdering Israelis is a shared goal, regardless of other points of contention. For this reason, a photo of the newborn and his birth certificate adorned Fatah’s official Facebook page on Friday.
This is but one tiny example of the way in which Palestinian children are raised and groomed to glorify violence. First they imbibe it with the milk of their mothers, most of whom were born after the signing of the Oslo Accords, or were young children during that period. Then their teachers take over, feeding them false material from hate-filled schoolbooks supplied by the very PA that came into existence through a phony peace process only the Left imagined was genuine.
It is this incitement that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been denouncing, in an effort to explain to the world that the current wave of terrorism, characterized mainly by stabbing attacks, has nothing to do with Al-Aqsa mosque. It has everything to do, he is arguing, with the lies pounded into Palestinian kids’ heads from the time they emerge from the womb.
Nothing illustrates this better than a baby called Knife of Jerusalem.

The last few weeks have given credence to the notion that Palestinian society has sunk to a level of depravity from which it can no longer emerge. The degeneracy starts with Palestinian President for Life, Mahmoud Abbas.

Echoing the sentiments expressed by his mentor and Nazi collaborator Haj Amin al-Husseini, Abbas in a televised speech in mid-September rambled on about how the Jews “defile the Al-Aqsa with their filthy feet.” He then issued a veiled call for holy war by proclaiming that “Each drop of blood that was spilled in Jerusalem is pure blood as long as it’s for the sake of Allah. Every martyr will be in heaven and every wounded person will be rewarded, by Allah’s will.”

As it frequently does, the Obama administration largely ignored Abbas’ repugnant, anti-Semitic comments and his veiled calls for violence but the Palestinian street paid heed. In the weeks that followed, Palestinian terrorists – or as Abbas refers to them, “martyrs” – engaged in an orgy of violence targeting women, children and the elderly. Just today, a 76 year old educator and US citizen– the grandfather of eight children – succumbed to wounds sustained two weeks ago in a cowardly Palestinian gun and knife attack in Jerusalem’s Armon Hanatziv neighborhood. There were also a number of attempted knife attacks though thankfully, the only fatalities were Palestinian Authority Arab terrorists.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2015/10/michel-houellebecqs-critique-of-western-anomie/

NOTE: Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission—recently translated into English—depicts a dystopian near future in which France undergoes Islamization. The protagonist, François, is a cynical and unhappy professor at the Sorbonne, which has recently become a Muslim institution. Although the book raised predictable cries of Islamophobia, not to mention death threats against the author, Benjamin Haddad argues that it is an attack not so much on Islam as on modern, secular, and liberal European society:

Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, flawed as it is, gets at the heart of some of the issues contorting the West—and liberalism writ large—at the turn of the 21st century.

Le monde, monotone et petit, aujourd’hui,
Hier, demain, toujours, nous fait voir son image:
Une oasis d’horreur dans un désert d’ennui!
—Baudelaire, “Le Voyage”, Les Fleurs du Mal
The existence of irrational economic agents had always been the dark ride, the secret fault in any economic theory
—Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the TerritoryFrance, 2022. After a disastrous second term for President Francois Hollande, France’s mainstream political parties suffer crippling losses in the first round of presidential elections. In the run-off, the Front National, led by Marine Le Pen, and the Muslim Brotherhood, a new party running on an Islamic platform led by Mohammed Ben Abbes, a savvy and charismatic politician, face off. The country is being convulsed by a wave of urban violence—violence that is largely being downplayed by a cowardly media afraid to play into the FN’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric. Paranoia and conspiracy theories dominate conversations. Is France headed towards a military coup? The center-right UMP and the Socialist Party decide to support Ben Abbes in a bid to block the FN from acceding to power. They negotiate a deal: the Muslim Brotherhood gets to keep only the Education Ministry while compromising on other portfolios.Islamists, it turns out, unlike the French political elite, understand the importance of education in deciding a country’s fate. French higher education progressively turns Islamic: the Sorbonne is bought out by Saudi Arabia, professors are required to convert, women are compelled to wear the hijab, and programs are rewritten to integrate Islamic teachings. Rimbaud’s rumored late conversion to Islam becomes official dogma.At the same time, security across the country is, almost magically, reinstated; unemployment drops dramatically, largely thanks to strong fiscal incentives for women to stay home. Like a Muslim De Gaulle, Ben Abbes reorients the European Union towards the Mediterranean Sea, integrating North African countries in its ambit. His policies are popular among the French. The country seems to have finally found a new driving force after decades of decline and doubt.All this provides the backdrop to the life of Francois, a disillusioned Sorbonne literature professor, the narrator of Michel Houellebecq’s futuristic novel, Submission—a novel that quickly became the number one bestseller in France, Germany and Italy upon its publication.

Democratic Senator Chris Coons from Delaware betrayed his backers and his voters when at the end of the summer, as the Senate returned from recess, he announced that he was supporting President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

Coons announced his decision in an address at the University of Delaware. There Coons acknowledged that the deal was terrible for America. He detailed all the ways the deal harms US national security and places US allies, including Israel at grave risk.

“Frankly, this is not the agreement I hoped for,” Coons began.

“I am troubled,” he explained, “that the parties to this agreement – particularly Iran – have differing interpretations of key terms, and I remain deeply concerned about our ability to hold Iran to the terms of this agreement as we understand them.

Coons continued, “Under this agreement, Iran retains a civilian nuclear enrichment program that grows steadily in scope and the hardened underground nuclear facility at Fordow continues to exist filled with centrifuges which, while sidelined from enrichment for fifteen years, are not permanently shelved.