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.