The politics of educationhttp://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=16895 Leave it to the Palestinian Authority and the leaders of Israel’s haredi community never to miss an opportunity to hinder the populations they supposedly represent. On Sunday, after the announcement that extra funding was going to be funneled into east Jerusalem schools that offer the Israeli curriculum, the PA Education Ministry […]
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8656/anti-normalization-israel For many Arabs and Muslims, the conflict with Israel is not about a withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines. These opponents have no intention of recognizing Israel’s right to exist, even if it allows for the creation of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. A leading […]
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8618/turkey-coup-direction The more Ankara feels distant to Washington, the more it will want to feel closer to Moscow. As Western leaders call on President Erdogan to respect civil liberties and democracy, Erdogan insists he will consider reinstating the death penalty: “The people have the opinion that these terrorists [coup-plotters] should be killed. Why should I […]
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8643/palestinians-crime “[W]hoever was imprisoned for five years or more is entitled to a job in a PA [Palestinian Authority] institution. Thus, the PA gives priority in job placement to people who were involved in terrorist activity.” – Yigal Carmon, president of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), in testimony to the US House Committee […]
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8540/uk-radicalisation-hate-speech The review found that chaplains at some prisons encouraged inmates to raise money for Islamic charities linked to international terrorism. In June, a Muslim cleric told the BBC that a manual used by imams to teach prison inmates about Islam risks “turning people into jihadis.” A section of the program on jihad says that […]
First he exposed the History Channel’s miniseries “Roots” as root-and-brunch fiction. Now, the courageous epistolary warrior Kunta (Jack) Kerwick has turned his attention to correcting lies about slavery, promulgated in media and scholarly circles.
A point forcefully made by Kerwick is that although a vibrant, indigenous slave trade was conducted well into the nineteenth century in the interior of West Africa, slavery has become the White Man’s cross to bear.
Also omitted, in the course of the “honest” conversation about race directed by our political masters, is that credit for the demise of the slave trade in Africa belongs to Europeans. In his compact study, The Slave Trade, British historian Jeremy Black (London, 2006), highlights the “leading role Britain played in the abolition of slavery [as]… an example of an ethical foreign policy.” Britain agonized over this repugnant institution, failed to reconcile it with the Christian faith, and consequently abolished it.
Professor Black condemns the exclusive focus on the Atlantic—or transatlantic—slave trade to the exclusion of the robust slave trade conducted by Arabs across the Sahara Desert. Or, across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea to markets in the Middle East. This exclusive focus on westerners as slave owners and traders, notes Black, “fits with the [political] narrative of Western exploitation” of underdeveloped countries and their people.
The greatest development economist to live was Lord P.T. Bauer. As The Economist quipped, Bauer was to foreign aid what Friedrich Hayek was to socialism: a slayer. In his Dissent on Development (London, 1971), Bauer bolstered Black’s point well before the latter made it: “The slave trade between Africa and the Middle East antedated the Atlantic slave trade by centuries, and far outlasted it. Tens of millions of Africans were carried away—north through the Sahara, and from East Africa, by Arab and Muslim slave traders, well before Europeans took up the trade from West Africa.”
Recall when Donald Trump cast doubt on the intentions of many of the Syrian refugees by claiming a disproportionate number were “young, strong men”? Most media quickly attempted to debunk his claim.
Well, Trump’s claim now seems borne out by data from the Pew Research Center.
A shocking report released yesterday on European asylum applications in 2015 shows that, indeed, the refugees are disproportionately represented by “military-age” adult males — to an alarming degree.
A majority of the applicants came from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq in what has become the biggest demographic shift in Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union.
From the Pew report:
As a result, about four-in-ten asylum seekers in Europe in 2015 (42%) were young men ages 18 to 34. This was also true for most leading origin countries: 39% of those from Syria were young men, as were 38% of those from Afghanistan and 47% of those from Iraq. Young adult males made up a larger share of asylum seekers from some origin countries. For example, roughly three-fourths of asylum seekers from Gambia (80%), Pakistan (76%) and Bangladesh (76%) were young adult men in 2015.
The demographic profile of asylum seekers in destination countries varies considerably. About four-in-ten asylum seekers applying in Germany (39%) in 2015 were young adult males, about the same level as asylum seekers to Europe (42%) as a whole. In Hungary, about half (51%) of asylum seekers were more young adult men. In Sweden, just 28% of asylum seekers were young men in 2015. Meanwhile, young adult men made up 74% of asylum seekers in Italy, the highest share of any country in 2015.
Europe has also seen a spike in the number of unaccompanied minors (children under 18 who arrived in Europe without adult guardians) applying for asylum in recent years. Between 2008 and 2015, 198,500 unaccompanied minors applied for asylum in the European Union, Norway and Switzerland, of which nearly half (48% or about 96,000) arrived in 2015. Among all first-time asylum applications in 2015, nearly 7% were from unaccompanied minors, the highest share since data on unaccompanied minors became available in 2008.
For purposes of comparison, of the 4.8 million Syrian refugees the UN has registered, the population split is nearly even: 50.3 percent were men, 49.7 percent were women. And yet, the Syrian refugees who applied for asylum in Europe last year were 71 percent male to 29 percent female.
https://pjmedia.com/video/paris-bus-attacked-with-molotov-cocktails-men-shout-allahu-akbar/
The mainstream media haven’t been reporting this: men, who were shouting “Allahu Akbar,” destroyed a passenger bus in Paris this past week, using molotov cocktails and explosives. See video at site.
One year into the nuclear deal, two credible and timely intelligence reports reveal that Iran has no intention of honoring the terms of the deal, which, anyway, it never signed.
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency revealed that the Iranian government has pursued a “clandestine” path to obtain illicit nuclear technology and equipment from German companies “at what is, even by international standards, a quantitatively high level.”
A secret agreement, obtained by the Associated Press, discloses that Iran’s nuclear deal would not only lift constraints on Iran’s nuclear program after the nuclear deal, but it will also do so long before the deal expires — including the installation of thousands of centrifuges, five times more than what it currently possesses, as well enriching uranium at a much higher pace.
The more the White House ignores Iran’s violations of the nuclear accord, the more Iran will be emboldened to violate international laws and the terms of the nuclear agreement.
On July 14, 2015, Iran and the six world powers known as the P5+1 (China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) reached an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. The deal was intended to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions and put a hold on Tehran’s nuclear development.
President Obama promised that the deal is not based on trust rather anchored in verification. Nevertheless, the following revelations of confidential documents as well as the following breaches of the nuclear agreement by Iran, reveal otherwise.
On paper, the nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), stipulates a series of regulations, monitoring mechanisms, and restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities. But how can the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) maintain these transparency standards and follow through on the proposed regulations? How can the IAEA be sure to detect all illicit nuclear activities in the 18th largest country in the world?
Iran has a history of deceiving the IAEA by conducting clandestine nuclear activities, as it did in Arak, Natanz, and Ferdow.
It is clear based on this stage of political evolution in the West that democracy – to the extent it has meaning – is a form of inclusiveness, expanding the horizons of political participation. On one level it makes sense — why should anyone be denied participation when interests in the aggregate are why we employ the term “representative government”?
The issue as it has now developed is that extensive political involvement results in economic hazards. A government accountable to the electorate regulates to satisfy one constituency or another, borrows money for real and perceived needs, and debases the soundness of the currency for its own political advantage.
Extension of political involvement also means that a “servile” class of those who do not work, but must be supported, are part of the democratic mosaic. Recognizing the imperfections in a free market, compassion has become a moral anodyne. The moral life, in which virtue is a constraint on certain behavior, retreats before a relativism that abjures judgment. So far in the direction of relativism have we gone that it is freedom that must be defined, not slavery. Freedom once meant the capacity to choose along with facing the consequences of that choice. There are burdens attached to freedom. Now freedom is being able to do what one wants assuming the state accepts you as a member of the servile class.
There is a price to be paid for the condition. Every Western nation is in debt. The U.S. level is about to reach $20 trillion, with liabilities at least three times that sum. Deficits in fiscal budgets are the pattern, with the only question being the level of the deficit. The conditions are dicey but political inclusiveness militates against change. The politics of the era makes change a rhetorical claim, not a realistic policy option. Imagine the consequence of trying to reduce entitlement spending?
Senator Bernie Sanders campaigns on free tuition. The British take great pride in a single-payer health care system that has put great strain on national finances. Greece is effectively bankrupt because the state has assumed the role of parent and insurer. Even the once affluent Germany is facing financial hardship in its attempt to incorporate a million migrants into its governmental system.
