RUTHFULLY YOURS

Arne Duncan blinked. After being hammered for much of the summer by the two main teacher’s unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), the Education Secretary said states could delay the use of test results in teacher performance evaluations by another year. It was disappointing, but understandable, as he and his Party have been financially reliant on Teachers’ unions. Let us hope he only blinked and not shut his eyes, as did so many of his predecessors. Teachers’ unions (and, in fact, all public sector unions) have Democrats in a chokehold. (Collectively, unions are the largest contributors to political campaigns.) Over the past twenty-five years the NEA and the AFT have given about $100 million to political campaigns, with 97% of that going to Democrats. The relationship has been symbiotic, as elected Democrats have ensured that the demands of union leaders are met.

Nevertheless, I have always thought Mr. Duncan a good Education Secretary. And positive developments are altering the public school landscape. Two of those were highlighted over the past weekend. In the Sunday magazine section of the New York Times, Daniel Bergner wrote of Eva Moskowitz’s battle with Mayor Bill de Blasio regarding Success Academy Charter Schools, which Ms. Moskowitz runs. In the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, Allysia Finley interviewed Kevin Chavous. Mr. Chavous is a founding board member and executive counsel for the nonprofit American Federation for Children (AFC). Both Ms. Moskowitz and Mr. Chavous are Democrats.

No one denies the success Ms. Moskowitz has had. There are roughly five applications for every seat available in her charter schools. Her students are among the top performers in the City and the State. She has achieved those results while operating in New York’s most challenging neighborhoods. However, Mayor de Blasio argues that all one million public school children must be “saved,” not simply the few thousand who attend charter schools – that money’s spent on charters is money that cannot be spent on other public schools. That argument is disingenuous, in that students in charter schools are public school students. And the success they have brought to minority students speaks for itself. The difference is that charter schools are non-unionized. Ms. Moskowitz can fire underperforming teachers and reward good ones. She can require dress and behavioral codes. She can demand longer hours on the part of students and teachers. Her standards are more exacting than what is permitted in traditional public schools. Diane Ravitch, a New York University professor and education historian fears that charters, with their wealthy Wall Street backers, are pulling the City and the Country toward the privatization of education. That may be the goal of some, but I believe most support charters simply because Traditional public schools are failing, in part because of a lack of competition, but more importantly due to union rules – tenure after eighteen months in some places, and the difficulty administrators have in firing bad teachers. Mayor de Blasio, while claiming to be supportive of children, acts as a front for the unions that helped put him in office.

The Huffington Post just raised some eyebrows in the journalism world last week by hiring an unusual political commentator to cover national security issues: ex-football player Donté Stallworth.

Stallworth, 33, played for the New Orleans Saints, Philadelphia Eagles, New England Patriots, Cleveland Browns, Baltimore Ravens, and Washington Redskins before being waived by the latter team a year ago (asked in an interview where he stood on the Redskins name controversy, Stallworth stalled for 330 words only to end up saying “I don’t know”). In 2009 he was charged with DUI manslaughter for striking a pedestrian with his Bentley Continental; he plea-bargained to a 30-day sentence, probation, and community service, and settled with the victim’s family out of court.

As for his transition from pro athlete to political pundit for the HuffPost, Stallworth, who describes himself on Twitter as a “Leonardo da Vinci wanna-be that reveres Frederick Douglass Love books, sports, history & politics Advocate for peace, truth & equality 10 year NFL vet,” became a political junkie after 9/11. In an interview with Mother Jones magazine, Stallworth said he set out to understand “why these people are terrorizing us, and who are they?”

He disagreed with Bush’s assessment that “they hate us because of our freedoms.” Stallworth didn’t elaborate in the interview on why he thinks the jihadists do hate us; he only stated that his attitude toward foreign policy sprang out of researching “9/11, the Patriot Act, the FISA/warrantless wiretapping, Gitmo, kidnapping, extrajudicial killings, all that… What other countries,” he wondered, “have the capability to do this? And what kind of precedent are we setting with other countries when they have the capabilities that we have?”

As he dug into all this, Stallworth developed a reputation as a 9/11 Truther. “I don’t know how to say this nicely,” a friend joked, “but everything’s a conspiracy to him,” as evidenced in assertions like this on Twitter, where Stallworth spends a lot of time issuing forth 140-character sports and political commentary to his 152,000 followers:

NO WAY 9/11 was carried out by ‘dying’ Bin Laden, 19 men who couldn’t fly a damn kite. STILL have NO EVIDENCE Osama was connected, like Iraq.

Gggrrrrrrrrrrrrr @ ppl who actually believe a plane hit the pentagon on 9/11… hole woulda been ASTRONOMICALLY bigger, God bless lost lives.

Asked about this, HuffPost’s Washington bureau chief Ryan Grim defended Stallworth:

“That doesn’t represent how he thinks today. You know, that was five years ago, and people say dumb things, but that shouldn’t define him.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obamas-manufactured-unwinnable-wars-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

Obama’s Manufactured Unwinnable Wars — on The Glazov Gang

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest hosted by Michael Hausam and joined by Mark Tapson, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, Mike Munzing, a Tea Party Activist and Jennifer Van Laar, a writer at Independent Journal Review.

The guests gathered to discuss Obama’s Manufactured Unwinnable Wars, analyzing how a Radical-in-Chief sets America up for defeat in the face of terror. The dialogue occurred within a focus on Obama’s ‘Managing’ of ISIS, which shed light on the administration’s discomfort with American victory:

Every week another lad or lass from St. Louis, Toronto or Sydney makes the trip through Turkey to the Islamic State. A reporter dispatched by a local paper to talk to the neighbors scribbles down the same recollections about how nice and normal Jihad Joe or Jihad Jane was.

Classmates remember a loud partier or a shy student. Neighbors mention that everything seemed normal until those last few years when he began wearing a robe and she began wearing a burka.

The Somali and Algerian immigrants, the German and American converts, the black burkas and dyed beards, headed into the dying summer to kill Christians and Kurds, Turkmen and Shiites, to behead babies and crucify critics, don’t seem like monsters.

They loved their parents. They posed for jokey snapshots on Facebook. They had dreams of becoming biologists or boxers. Until they began killing people, they seemed just like the rest of us.

And with one difference, they were.

The forensic examinations of their lives rarely reveal anything of significance. The extensive digging into the lives of the Boston bombers told us nothing about why they would plant a bomb near a little boy.

The answer lay in the topic that the media carefully avoided. As with the other Muslim terrorists, the meaning of their motives was in the little black book of their religion which commanded them to kill.

The Jihadist isn’t a serial killer. While there are some converts attracted to Islam for its violence, the Muslim convert usually doesn’t convert for the killing, he kills because he converted. Likewise the nice Muslim Jihadist next door might well be moderate by inclination and immoderate by faith.

IDF Saves Irish Troops from Jihadists

Ireland is one of the most consistently anti-Israel countries in Europe. So it was interesting to read in Ireland’s Sunday Independent yesterday that Israeli troops were instrumental in saving the lives of Irish peacekeepers on the Golan Heights last week. Citing “senior sources,” the newspaper reported that after the peacekeepers were attacked by a Syrian rebel group, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, “Irish soldiers would have been killed or taken hostage by Islamist extremists if it wasn’t for the military intervention of the Israeli army … The Israeli assistance was described as ‘decisive’ in the success of the mission.”

Specifically, the Israel Defense Forces used its precise intelligence about the area to guide the troops to safety along a route that avoided Nusra fighters. Additionally, there were “unconfirmed reports that the Israelis directed fire at the Islamists to stop them from attacking the Filipino and Irish soldiers.”

There’s nothing surprising about the IDF’s intervention. After all, Israel has consistently intervened to save Syrian lives even though it’s formally at war with Syria, providing food and other humanitarian assistance to besieged Syrian villages and offering medical care to everyone from wounded fighters to mothers in labor. (Safed’s Rebecca Sieff Hospital delivered its seventh Syrian baby earlier this month.) So intervening to save the nationals of a country it’s not at war with is a no-brainer.

What is surprising, however, is what this says about Ireland, and by extension, about Europe as a whole. For here you have the difference between Israel and its enemies in the starkest form: on one hand, radical jihadists who sought to kill or kidnap Irish soldiers; on the other, a stable country that intervened to save their lives. The choice between the two would seem self-evident. But in fact, Ireland has consistently chosen the jihadists.

As the media continues to pounce on the story of Ray Rice’s elevator assault on his fiancee last February, I wonder why there is no background story on who this woman is and why she married Rice after that knockout punch and rag doll drag that has the rest of us so appalled. It turns out that both Janay Palmer and Ray Rice were arrested on Feb 15, 2014 and charged with mutual assault at the Revel Casino. A month later, Rice alone was indicted by a grand jury for 3rd degree aggravated assault, the penalty for which is a possible 3-5 years in jail and a fine of $15,000. Janay Palmer married her assailant one day after this indictment.

The couple first met when Janay was 16 but started dating seriously in 2008, becoming engaged in 2012, months before their daughter Rayven was born. But Back in 2010, Janay was arrested for stealing a dress from a shopping center – a puzzling event given that she was already living with a star football player. Most of us assume that battered women are people without agency, women whose domestic lives are so complicated and fragile that they see no other options open to them. This case seems to fall into another category – a young woman whose batterer was her live-in multi-millionaire fiance and the father of her child. Had she decided to walk out after the knockout, she and her child would undoubtedly have remained financially secure for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, had she testified against Rice, he might have gone to jail or had his contract terminated even sooner than it eventually was. Marrying Rice was clearly a hedge against a possible big financial loss. Was Palmer given or promised a large monetary inducement to marry Rice immediately? Does that in any way color the way we consider her decision to marry the man who not only brutalized her but displayed no concern for her medical condition after she was unconscious?

Is the story of Ray Rice just one of another thuggish athlete who beats up on women? Or are the larger issues the huge amounts of money paid to athletes who live outside the moral constraints of most of us; the huge amounts of money made by owners of teams who try their best to ignore the players’ behavior; the refusal of fans to boycott over-priced athletic events and their concomitant merchandising; our squeamishness at criticizing women who have the wherewithal to make other choices but prefer to live and procreate with violent men whose actions are clearly mitigated by their enormous wealth. In the elevator incident, Rice’s casual indifference to his prostrate fiancee suggests that the odds are great that Janay had been punched or otherwise abused before and that neither she nor Rice was as shocked as we are. Though her sin of venality is not as great as the crime of assault, knowingly choosing to marry a wife-beater makes her complicit when she once again becomes his victim.

A leading human rights advocate accused the United Nations and its member nations of being “the leading global purveyor of anti-Semitism” and “inciting murderous intolerance towards” Jewish people during an unprecedented speech Monday at the international body’s headquarters in New York City.

Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust (IHRH), stood before the U.N. and lambasted it for fanning the flames of global anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel, according to a copy of her remarks.

Bayefsky delivered her rebuke during an informal briefing on the threat anti-Semitism poses to international peace and security that was organized on the sidelines of the U.N. by the permanent mission of Palau.

While the briefing took place within the U.N.’s walls—and was attended mainly by members of the public and outside organizations—it was not formally sponsored by the international organization, leading Bayefsky to launch a scathing criticism.

“The U.N. is not having a conference on the threat that global anti-Semitism poses to international peace and security,” she said. “This is lunch-time. The courageous organizer, assisted by the principled representatives of the small state of Palau, is independent of the U.N. The facilities are not free.”

“But why couldn’t the U.N., founded on the ashes of the Jewish people, and presently witnessing a widespread resurgence in anti-Semitism, sponsor a conference on combating global anti-Semitism?” Bayefsky asked. “The answer is clear: Because the United Nations itself is the leading global purveyor of anti-Semitism.”

Bayefsky went on to criticize top U.N. officials and the organization for “mass produci[ing] inequality for Jews and the Jewish nation.”

“Photo-ops of the U.N. secretary-general and the U.N. high commissioner for human rights at the gates of Auschwitz are not an alibi,” she said, dubbing these worthless public relations moves.

No authoritative system of law can allow or encourage accommodation between a proper national government and an unambiguously criminal organization. By definition, under pertinent rules, Hamas is an illegal organization.

Even if an insurgent group claims the legal right to wage violent conflict for “self-determination” — Hamas’s argument — the group does not have the right to use force against the innocent.

In no circumstances, under international law, are states permitted to characterize terrorists as “freedom fighters.”

Once again, Israel and Hamas have agreed upon a so-called “cease fire.” Once again, as Hamas regards all of Israel as “Occupied Palestine,” the agreement will inevitably fail. And once again, for Israel and the wider “international community,” there will be significantly dark consequences for international justice.

In specifically jurisprudential terms, the immediate effect of this latest cease-fire will be wrongfully to bestow upon the leading Palestinian terror organization (1) a generally enhanced position under international law; and (2) a status of formal legal equivalence with Israel, its beleaguered terror target.

The longer-term effect will be seriously to undermine the legitimacy and effectiveness of international law itself.

No authoritative system of law can allow or encourage accommodation between a proper national government and an unambiguously criminal organization. In this connection, however unintentionally, Israel should not further support its relentless terrorist adversary in Gaza by agreeing to any temporary cessation of hostilities. Instead, it should continue to do whatever is needed in tactical or operational terms, while reminding the world that the core conflict here is between an imperiled sovereign state (one that meets all codified criteria of legitimacy of the Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, 1934) and an insurgent organization that (a) meets none of these criteria, and (b) systematically violates all binding expectations of international humanitarian law.

By definition, under pertinent rules, Hamas is an illegal organization. This inherent illegality is readily deducible from the far-reaching criminalization of terrorism under authoritative international law; hence, it can never be correctly challenged by well-intentioned third parties (e.g., the United States), even in the presumably overriding interests of peace.

President Obama continues to dawdle in staking out a strategy to deal with the threat from ISIS which has been readily apparent for at least a year. Some attribute his resistance to incompetence and/or a complete misunderstanding of the workings of the region and Islamic based terror; others to a lack of interest in foreign affairs generally. Some suggest he is waiting for his administration to give him options to choose from (and George W. Bush was derided for declaring himself “the decider”).Perhaps Obama’s need to blame everyone but himself is causing him to take extra time to work out a strategy that will take years to implement- transferring responsibility for any failure onto the next president.

Is it at all possible, however, that Obama’s foot-dragging is, at least in some small part, shaped by the possible collateral effect any strategy might have on his policy toward Israel? Could he be concerned about the potential loss of his self-proclaimed high ground with respect to Israel? Throughout his presidency, Obama and his two Secretaries of State have treated Israel with a puzzling particularity, or perhaps more accurately, disdain. Over simplified, America is entitled to defend itself in a multitude of ways but Israel, because it is deemed the “cause” of all discord in the Middle East, must change itself rather than forcibly change its Arab and Palestinian neighbors. Likely, Obama formed most of his approach to the Jewish state from the Israel hating academia, “clergy,” and Muslim Brotherhood associates he has surrounded himself with; polished by a corrupt elite media that for decades can only paint one picture of Israel- that of the oppressive “occupier” engaged in apartheid over innocent Palestinian victims whose natural homeland was illegally taken. Obama, heralded for his unmatched IQ which would finally restore the world to an intelligent footing, should, of course, know that each word in this description is patently false.

Apparently not, as his relationship with Israel and its Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu, has reflected a deep hatred, Obama’s rhetoric notwithstanding. Having shown his obsessive preoccupation with defanging Israel while keeping up appearances that he is a “friend,” Obama may be limiting his potential responses to ISIS to those he is comfortable approving for Israel. And that leaves him with little.

ISIS, for these purposes, is no different from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamic Republic of Iran or any number of other local Arab states that seek Israel’s destruction. (Even the supposed “secular” PLO/Fatah/Palestinian Authority that Western elites delude themselves are motivated not by Islamic supremacism and Jew hatred but by mere Western notions of money and corruption, are fully in line with the ultimate elimination of any Jewish state. One need only look at the media the PA for decades foisted upon Palestinian children to realize that generations will have to be rehabilitated if any notion resembling Western “peace” is to become acceptable). If Obama is to seek to destroy ISIS, can he really demand that Netanyahu act differently? If Obama is to arm the Kurds and others to fight ISIS, what right does he have to withhold arms and supplies from Israel to fight their Jihadic enemies? If he is trying to develop any nuanced differences between his policies for the US and Israel, time is surely required to bend common sense so far.

http://vimeo.com/54400569