RUTHFULLY YOURS

Members of Turkey’s National Education Council last week did not discuss Turkey’s extremely poor PISA rankings, or improving the curriculum in mathematics and science. Instead, a pro-government teachers’ union proposed making religion a required course in pre-school.

Turkey’s response to the European Court of Human Rights, which vehemently told Ankara to scrap all compulsory religious education, was to introduce Islamic teaching to six-year-olds.

Another casualty was the “human rights and democracy” classes that Turkish fourth-grade students must take.

Systematic Islamist indoctrination in Turkey is becoming less stealthy.

Education is the new battlefield. Turkey’s government is pushing to advance its declared policy goal of “raising devout (Muslim) generations.”

In 2012, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] released the findings of its prestigious education report, the “Program for International Student Assessment” [PISA], which experts view as the world’s most comprehensive education survey. PISA assesses the extent to which 15-year-old pupils from 65 OECD member nations have acquired key knowledge and skills in mathematics, reading, science and problem-solving (the PISA survey covers 510,000 students worldwide.)

In their overall performance, Turkish pupils ranked poorly: 44th out of 65 countries. Ironically, Turkey and six other predominantly Muslim member nations of the OECD all ranked in the bottom slice of the ranking: the United Arab Emirates, 48th; Malaysia, 52nd; Tunisia, 60th; Jordan 61st; Qatar, 63rd; and Indonesia, 64th.

Turkish universities did not perform any better. The acclaimed Quacquarelli Symonds [QS], a higher education surveyor, ranked only three Turkish universities in the world’s top 500 universities list. According to the findings of QS, only nine Turkish universities (out of 175 Turkish universities) were listed among the world’s 800 best universities — and the best ones appear in the modest 430-460 bracket.

As many Swedes have grown sick and tired of a political elite giving in to Islamic demands, it is generally expected that the anti-immigration party, the Sweden Democrats, will do well in the next elections.

It takes some time before voters realize what is going on, but in the end, they invariably do.

Last week, after having been in office for exactly two months and one day, Sweden’s government collapsed. Apart from the Palestinians, hardly anyone will regret the fall of Prime Minister Stefan Löfven’s government. The only thing Löfven’s cabinet will be remembered for is its slamming of Israel by recognizing the Palestinian state.

Following last September’s general elections, Mr. Löfven, a Social-Democrat, formed a minority government of the Social-Democrats and the Greens. Immediately after its formation, the Red-Green minority coalition recognized “Palestine.”

During the past decades, the arrival of thousands of radical Islamic immigrants has led to a rise of anti-Semitism in Sweden. The immigrants, having acquired Swedish citizenship, are catered to by Sweden’s leftist parties. Prominent Social-Democrats denounce Zionism as racism and declare that ISIS is being trained by the Mossad. Mr. Löfven’s Green Minister for Urban Development has even advocated the “liberation of Jerusalem” from Israel.

Once it had recognized “Palestine” as a state, the Löfven government turned to the urgent matter of Sweden’s 2015 budget. Unable to reach an agreement on the budget, the government collapsed and announced new general elections for next March. As many Swedes have grown sick and tired of a political elite giving in to Islamic demands, it is generally expected that the country’s anti-immigration party, the Sweden Democrats [SD], will do very well in the next elections.

The idea that we are all complicit in the Eric Garner grand-jury decision is false.

How did we get to the point in the United States where street protesters are treated as sainted figures, no matter what they do? How did it happen that important public leaders—the American president, the mayor of New York, college presidents—feel obliged to legitimize these protests, no matter what they do to a city, its citizens or owners of private property? Why is it that the leaders of America’s most important institutions are no longer capable of recognizing a mob when they see one?

On Wednesday last week, the day of the grand jury decision in the Eric Garner case on Staten Island, hundreds of people marched through New York City’s main streets and highways, blocked bridges, invaded the crowds of parents and kids gathered for the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, and spread themselves on the floor as “die-ins” amid commuters in Grand Central Terminal.

Despite the massive inconvenience, many New Yorkers, who like to think they live in a tolerant city, more or less accepted this venting. Message sent and absorbed. Whatever political course the controversial Garner case would take next, it was time for everyone to resume their lives on Thursday.

Petraeus’s last assignments in the Army were as commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A) from July 4, 2010, to July 18, 2011. And then this intel challenged general ran the CIA….rsk

KABUL—A Taliban suicide bomber Thursday targeted a bus carrying Afghan soldiers in Kabul, killing at least five troops in the latest of a string of deadly attacks that have shaken the capital.

The attacker approached on foot an Afghan National Army bus that had stopped on the side of the road to pick up troops early in the morning, said Hashmat Stanikzai, a spokesman for Kabul police. Ten soldiers and three civilians were injured in the attack.

More than 100 troops were on the bus at the time of the explosion, which partly charred the vehicle and blew out its windows.

Shortly after the blast, Afghan security forces cordoned off the area and the wounded were taken to a hospital.

The Taliban in a statement claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was aimed at military officers of the “puppet administration” in Kabul. The insurgent movement said it had been tracking the movements of the bus for a long time.

Targeting military vehicles is a tactic the Taliban have used many times before, especially in Kabul. A similar attack in October against a Ministry of Defense bus, for instance, killed eight people and injured more than 20 in the city.

Last month, a car bomb struck a British Embassy convoy, killing one British citizen and five Afghans.

The Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA interrogations fails to acknowledge the Pearl Harbor-esque emergency following the terror attack.

Seventy-three years ago this week, on a peaceful, sunny morning in Hawaii, a Japanese armada carried out a spectacular attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, killing 2,403, wounding 1,178 and damaging or destroying at least 20 ships. Washington immediately declared war and mobilized a peaceful nation. In another unfortunate Washington tendency, the government launched an investigation about who to blame for letting the devastating surprise attack happen. A hastily convened political tribunal found two senior military officers guilty of dereliction of duty, publicly humiliating them, as some political leaders sought to hold anyone but themselves accountable for the catastrophe.

With the Democratic members of the SenateIntelligence Committee this week releasing a report on their investigation holding the men and women of the Central Intelligence Agency accountable for the alleged “torture” of suspected terrorists after 9/11, some lessons from the Pearl Harbor history should be kept in mind.

First, let’s remember the context of the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when President George W. Bush and Congress put America on a war footing. While some critics in and out of government blamed the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation for failing to prevent the terrorist attack, the 9/11 Commission later concluded that part of the real reason the terrorists succeeded was Washington’s failure to put America on a war footing long before the attack. Sept. 11, 2001, was the final escalation of al Qaeda’s war-making after attacking the USS Cole in 2000 and U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998.

So far it looks like Mrs. Clinton would have at least as many problems in 2016 as she did in 2008.

There have generally been two reactions to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ’s Dec. 3 statement at Georgetown University that America should try to “empathize” with our nation’s “enemies.”

One camp holds that Mrs. Clinton simply chose the wrong word to express a banal thought—that the U.S. must understand its enemies. The other camp says her State Department record demonstrates she herself lacks the empathy to know how to deal with America’s adversaries or allies.

Both responses are true, yet I have another observation about her speech: It is further evidence Mrs. Clinton is at best a mediocre presidential candidate. She was lackluster in 2008 and worse today. The stiff, off-putting style is familiar. What’s more surprising is how sloppy, ill-prepared and tone-deaf she has become.

If Mrs. Clinton intended to say we must understand our adversaries—their motivations, methods and goals—she should have said so. If her speechwriter’s draft was unclear, she should have ordered a rewrite. If she can’t summon warmth and wit now, how will she display a winning personality in her umpteenth hundred event, assuming she becomes a candidate?

The empathy quote was

A Newsweek article contains 38 paragraphs, practically every one of which is replete with errors, glaring omissions and/or Arab propaganda.

A recent perusal of mainstream media’s coverage of Israel confirms the sad truth that blatant lies, lousy or non-existent fact-checking and efforts to paint the Jewish state as evil continues unabated.

Take Newsweek, for example. Please.

A 3000 word article dated Dec. 4, written by Sarah Helm, attempts to create a female Arab victim hero. Her lengthy article, “The Young Woman at the Forefront of Jerusalem’s New Holy War,” is replete with pathos, heroism and villains. But in the process of spinning her tale, truth becomes a victim and increased hatred, not peace, is the byproduct.

First, a brief summary of Helm’s doting narrative:

Latifa, a 24 year old Palestinian Arab woman, leads her Arab sisters in their noble effort to protect their holy places from destruction by the evil Jews. In the process, they are beaten and arrested by the armed Jewish guards, but these holy women will not be deterred from their mission. They are the “mosque’s protectors,” swathed in colorful veils. Helms hopefully suggests the name: Women’s Intifada. Fade out.

In this article of 38 paragraphs, there are fewer than four which do not contain either a sloppy error, a falsehood stated as fact, or bald propaganda; sometimes all three can be found in a single paragraph.

For instance, in the very first sentence, Helm refers to the “sister mosque, the Dome of the Rock.” That building, the one with the gilded dome, is not a mosque.

An acclaimed food writer and culinary historian knew that to understand Jewish food was to understand Judaism itself.

This past Sunday, Gil Marks, famed Jewish food writer, author of several acclaimed cookbooks and of the magisterial Encyclopedia of Jewish Food (2010), and an Orthodox rabbi, was laid to rest near his home in Alon Shvut, Israel. Marks has been widely and justly lauded for his sterling contributions to the field of culinary history. Yet he requires appreciation not only as a chef and a food writer but as an interpreter of Torah.

To read The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food is to encounter a smorgasbord of extraordinary insights, culinary and otherwise. Marks informs us, for example, that not until the 15th century did Ashkenazi Jews in Germany and Austria begin to apply the term hallah—which in the Bible designates only the bit of dough offered to the priest as a tithe—to their Sabbath loaves. It seems that, in those lands, Christians still perpetuated certain pre-Christian practices, one of which had been to prepare, around the time of the winter solstice, an attractively braided loaf to appease the pagan goddess Holle, an “ugly Teutonic crone with long matted hair.” In time, having replaced the pagan referent with a sacred one, Jews all over the globe, Ashkenazim and Sephardim alike, would be inaugurating their Sabbath meal with a blessing over two artfully braided loaves of “hallah.”

Marks has similarly fascinating stories to tell about other Sabbath foods. His Encyclopedia even features a cholent map, charting the historical spread and evolution of this Sabbath stew from the hamin cited in the Mishnah, to the adafina of Spain, to the slow-cooked, potato- and barley-based casserole of Ashkenaz that is relished by so many today. And his discussion of the holidays is no less enlightening. In this Hanukkah season, anyone who, like me, mourns the plummet of the potato latke from its former prominence will be amused and edified by Marks’s reconstruction of how that once-universal dish gave way, in Israel, to jelly doughnuts, known as sufganiyot. (Hint: it was all the result of a socialist plot.)

The elections offer the voter a choice between the delusional Left and the incompetent Right.

Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets would take seats in [the legislature] – Orson Welles

Elections are won… chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody – Franklin Pierce Adams

This Wednesday, the inevitable happened. The improbable coalition, cobbled together out of irreconcilably disparate components, finally disintegrated.

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

The disintegration of the coalition was virtually inevitable from the moment it was formed. From the get-go, it was the product of the puerile petulance of its principal participants and the perverse partnerships that this produced.

But even more fundamentally, the fatal friability of the coalition can be traced back to the pathetically poor electoral campaign run by Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud, in which almost every conceivable mistake was made: from purposefully refraining from presenting a policy platform to voters, essentially asking for support without stipulating what the support was for; through the predictably ill-fated union with Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu faction that, inevitably, reduced support for the combined electoral entity, to the needless attacks on Naftali Bennett, driving undecided voters to support neophyte Yair Lapid.

Thus, while at the start of the campaign for the last elections, most pundits widely predicted a decisive win for Netanyahu and the Right, the gross ineptitude with which the campaign was subsequently conducted led to severe erosion of voter support for the joint Likud-Beytenu list, which almost resulted in it snatching defeat from the jaws of certain victory.

http://acdemocracy.org/ The end of the Cold War brought many changes including the unification of Germany, the expansion of democracy into Eastern Europe, and the integration of Russia into the global economy. It also removed the previous five-decades-long worry about a nuclear war. “Thinking about the unthinkable,” that is, seriously contemplating nuclear war, has all but […]