Garbanzo Toons

More Idiocy from the U.N.

From a link at Atlas Shrugs, there is this article. Some "experts" at the U.N. decided that

The barrier Israel is building to seal off the West Bank is a violation of Israel's human rights obligations

No surprise there. According to the U.N. (You can't spell corruption without the U.N.-IMAO) the existance of Israel has become a violation of human rights. Here is the list of "experts"

The independent experts, who are appointed by the 53-nation UN Human Rights Commission, are Yakin Erturk, who reports on violence against women; Miloon Kothari, housing; Vernor Munoz Villalobos, education; Paul Hunt, health; Doudou Diene, racism; Leila Zerrougui, arbitrary detention; Sigma Huda, trafficking; and John Dugard, conditions in the Palestinian territories.

Let's see, we've got the experts on - violence against women, education, racism, health, arbritrary detention, and trafficking; yet they have nothing to say about conditions in any of the Muslim countries, or Zimbabwe? HEY, MILOON KOTHARI! Ain'tcha heard that Mugabe is bulldozing houses and gardens of the poor? The ones who won't leave are jailed. Of course the ones who do leave most likely starve. Shouldn't you be saying something about that? YO, YAKIN ERTURK! Don'tcha know about the tribulations faced by women in Muslim societies just because they're born as women? It begins with genital mutilation! And then there's rape and forced marriage! And there are more outrages, enough to keep a whole gaggle of U.N. experts busy for the rest of their useless lives. So if I've been too subtle, I'll repeat myself. Examine conditions in the Muslim world you dolts!

With this kind of entrenched idiocy, how much reforming can even John Bolton do?

Labels: Atlas Shrugs, Israel, separation barrier, U.N. Human Rights Commision

posted by Harry @ 7:43 AM 0 comments

The War Against Israel

From Atlas Shrugs comes this report.

New York – A senior leader of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, Ismail Haneya, has described the upcoming Israeli withdrawal/expulsion of 10,000 Jews from their homes, schools, synagogues, farms and businesses in Gaza and Northern Samaria as "a national achievement." In an interview, Haneya was quoted as saying, "Hamas sees in the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza Strip a national achievement by the Palestinian people. It is the fruit of the resistance and steadfastness of the Palestinian people. That is why Hamas is interested to see a full withdrawal from the Gaza Strip so the Palestinian people can enjoy freedom as a first stage on the path of liberating the rest of the occupied Palestinian territories"

I wonder if the Hamas supporters, that is, the governments and newspapers of Eurabia, the U.N., and the Vatican will also be celebrating this "achievement", since they all had a hand in it. It's the anti-semitism of all of these organizations and countries that will be the death of European civilization. They're too stupid to figure out that their best interest and best chance for survival against the Muslim barbarian hordes lie in an alliance with Israel. Notice also, the claim that ". . . the Palestinian people can enjoy freedom . . .". Obviously he's talking about freedom from prosperity, freedom of poverty, freedom from peace, and freedom from freedom. And just as they continue to attack European civilization, they will keep attacking Israel; further proof of the lie that "poverty and occupation are the root cause terrorism."

Labels: Atlas Shrugs, Gaza withdrawl, Hamas, Israel, Palestinians

posted by Harry @ 11:00 AM 0 comments

Israel and Iran, and their Priorities.

One country is working for the betterment of mankind, the other is steeped in the mire of hatred and bloodlust. Go to Atlas Shrugs to see which of the two is working toward life and which is fixated on death. (As if you didn't already know!)

Labels: Atlas Shrugs, Iran, Israel

posted by Harry @ 7:57 AM 0 comments

What We Can Do Instead of Bombing Mecca

I swiped the following, the entire thing, from Atlas Shrugs. I think she got it from Jihad Watch.

What We Can Do Instead Of Bombing Mecca
Jihad Watch.org

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald offers some suggestions of what we can do to defend human rights and resist the jihad threat, in the wake of Congressman Tancredo's remarks:

It would have been better to make the following point: during the Cold War, the Soviet rulers knew that if they did certain things, certain things would be done by NATO or the American government. And the knowledge of what might be done, would be done, in return, helped prevent the Soviet rulers from doing what they might otherwise have done.

So it would be helpful to make suggestions as to what would constitute deterrence.Target_1 These might include, not destroying Mecca, which would cause maddened Muslims everywhere to attack and kill Infidels -- and the problem with Islam is that it contains many elements of a violent cult that cannot be wished away, or hidden any longer. Are maddened millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of inconsolable Muslims, for whom Mecca no longer exists, and so with nothing further to lose, what we wish to bring into being? No. But the idea of discussing possible means of deterrence, not of the determined suicide-bomber, but of all those who have helped to fund mosques and madrasas, or to supply the emotional and financial and intellectual support system (including the continued smooth practitioners of taqiyya-and-kitman in the West), and who can be threatened in all sorts of ways.

More sober discussion of how, for example, points of entry and exit into Mecca, could systematically be reduced in number, or airfields used by pilgrims made unusable, is a different suggestion, one that has many advantages, in that it is an incremental response: first this quadrant is closed off, and now this one, and so on.

It is now clear to Muslims in the West, or to some of them, that their assumption about continued Western appeasement, based on continued misunderstanding of Islam by Infidels was wrong. The EU's foreign policy is still in place, but Bat Ye'or's "Eurabia" is circulating -- even at the highest levels of the Pentagon. Eventually, terror, used as an instrument of Jihad, will alert enough Infidels to the permanent problem of Jihad, of all the instruments of Jihad, including that of demographic conquest and Da'wa, and lead inexorably to an understanding that the Muslims in their midst, allowed in by political elites who were either indifferent, or mesmerized by the Idols of the Age, those unexamined assumptions about how Everyone Wants the Same Thing and All Religions Are Alike. Those Muslims may be "moderate" or "immoderate," and the "moderation" may be real, or feigned, permanent or temporary, immune to, or susceptible to, being jettisoned whenever setbacks or depressive fits or any of the ills that flesh and spirit are heir to, may cause a "moderate" Muslim, or even a "Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only" Muslim, to throw off that "moderation" and morph in Jekyll-into-Hyde fashion, into someone ready to blame the Infidels. There have been quite a few examples of such outwardly "moderate" people changing their beliefs and hence their behavior, as a response not so much to political or geopolitical events, but to personal setbacks, emotional disarray. When the universe is viewed through the prism of Islam, it is the Infidels who always wear black.

Discussion of measures that might truly curb, for example, the Saudi money that pours into the Western world, and funds mosques everywhere, all over that world, and madrasas all over the dar al-Islam, and that is furthermore used to buy an army of hirelings, non-Muslim apologists for islam, should be undertaken - out in the open so that Infidel publics can be made aware of the size of the problem.

Deterrent measures, that could be undertaken without waiting in some cases for any further attacks (but further attacks will help to justify the more far-reaching among them) might include, but not be limited to:



1) Seizure of Saudi-owned assets in the West, and sale of such assets to pay for the economic damage, including the cost of surveillance and other security measures, that are attributable to Saudi-funded mosques, madrasas, and propaganda all over the world.

2) Seizure of other Arab-owned or Muslim-owned assets in the West, for the same reasons. There need not be any distinction made between property owned by governments and those who are deemed to be enemy nationals -- no such distinction was made during World War II.

3) A complete ban on Muslim migration to the Western world (which needs to be undertaken in any case), and limits put on any contact between Muslims living in the West, who may already have obtained ciizenship and -- unless they are native-born converts -- their countries of origin.

4) Careful review of how citizenship is obtained, and what oaths of loyalty are administered, and if those oaths can possibly have been meant by those whose sole loyalty, by the very tenets of their belief-system, can only be to Islam and the Community of Believers, the umma al-islamiyya.

5) Government-sponsored centers to teach people about Islam outside of universities, which all over the Western world have been infiltrated, or rather captured by, apologists for Islam both Muslim and non-Muslim.

The study of Arabic under teachers whom the Infidel governments will deliberately find among Arabic-speaking non-Muslims, chiefly from those populations most likely not to supply subtle apologists for Islam - Maronites, Copts, disaffected Berbers, Arabic-speaking Jews. A knowledge of Arabic is not required for an understanding of Islam 80% of the world's Muslims do not speak or read Arabic but have no difficulty knowing what Islam is all about. But it can be of help in studying the history of Jihad-conquest, and certainly it can be of help in debates with Muslims who accuse one of "not understanding Islam without a knowledge of Arabic." Nonsense, of course, but nonsense more convincingly refused if someone has studied Arabic.

6) War-footing (i.e., Manhattan Project support) for solar and wind and nuclear energy projects, for conservation, and for mass transit, including that such as Amtrak which loses money, but should be cheerfully subsidized by an intelligent government bent, even hellbent, on diminishing OPEC oil revenues.

7) An end to all outward and visible signs of rhetorical "respect" for Islam, including the studied refusal to mention "Islmaic terrorism" or "Muslim terrorism" which has gone on for too long. Use these adjectives; never let them go. Use the word "jihad." Stop all attempts at verbal escamotage, where the listener is left, puzzled, dissatisfied with the deliberate vagueness.



8) End all access to Western education, not only for those Arabs and Muslims studying any kind of science, but in every area. Attempting the hopeless project of "educating them" out of their belief-system will not work. Many terrorists have lived in the West, seen the West, studied in the West, taught in the West. Dr. A. Q. Khan did "research" in the West - and we know the results of that research. Muslims in Western universities are dangerous to Infidel wellbeing, not only because of the women they marry and cause to convert (to the subsequent sorrow of many), but because they are, with the odd exception, likely to conduct Da'wa and promote the geopolitics of Islam. Past masters at taqiyya-and-kitman, they should be regarded as akin to enemy agents, promoting a belief-system that means Infidel political and social arrangements and assumptions no good.

Condemning them to the solitary confinement of dar al-Islam will cause a concentration of minds.

9) End all access to the Western world for the children of the ruling elites all over the Muslim world. Without this escape hatch, those rulers will have to begin to consider how to ameliorate things in their own countries.

10) End the jizyah of Infidel aid to Muslim states, such as Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, and whatever the latest political instrument of the shock troops of the Jihad against Israel, the "Palestinians," may be called. Call attention to the $10 trillion that has already been recdeived by the Muslim members of OPEC in the last 1/3 century, and continue to advise those Pakistanis, Egyptians, Jordanians and "Palestinians" to ask for that aid no longer from the Infidels, who suddenly have to pay higher prices for oil and hundreds of billions more for security all over the Western world, but to those Arab and Muslim states that, not coincidentally, are receiving those hundreds of billions more in oil revenues each year.

11) Keep the focus clearly on the belief-system of Islam and on Jihad. And after the next small terrorist attack on Infidels -- say, 10 killed - begin to legislate to make sure that some of the measures suggested above become not merely ideas but the law.

12) Clean out the taxpayer-funded government radio and television stations of those who have so misled us about Islam over the past 20-30 years. Begin, possibly, by firing John Simpson, the deeply, even conspiratorially, anti-Israel and islamophilic head of the BBC World Affairs broadcasting, the same John Simpson (a close friend of Peter Hounam, whose conspiracy book about Israel is the kind of thing that antisemites love to flog) who described the Muslim bombers in London as "misguided criminals." That should have been enough to cause his discharge. Why wasn't it? What will it take for the long-suffering British license-payers to demand a change in the BBC coverage and, even before that, iin the personnel in charge of reporting on the Middle East and Islam? This domestic Lord Haw-Haw and Tokyo Rose business, where one need not even bother to turn the dial to Radio Berlin or Radio Tokyo to hear the sly propaganda, has to stop.

These are things that can be done, should be done, long before suggestions about "bombing Mecca" need to be bruited about.

Talk of attacking Mecca, instead of concentrating on more plausible suggestions (which do include limiting easy access to Mecca, something which the Saudis already do in limiting the number of visitors), is not likely to be helpful.

Labels: Atlas Shrugs, islam, Jihad Watch, Mecca

posted by Harry @ 9:00 PM 0 comments

Double-Teaming against Education

First, we teachers had NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND thrust upon us. Good idea, bad bill. I'll tell you why in another post. It did encourage school districts to try harder to reach and teach our students, but most teachers have no idea how to, because, as I've said before, teachers aren't properly trained to teach. Now, some teacher colleges are atively trying to make things even worse.
From Atlas Shrugs I was led to this article by Jacob Gershman in the New York Sun.

Brooklyn College's School of Education has begun to base evaluations of aspiring teachers in part on their commitment to social justice, raising fears that the college is screening students for their political views.
The School of Education at the CUNY campus initiated last fall a new method of judging teacher candidates based on their "dispositions," a vogue in teacher training across the country that focuses on evaluating teachers' values, apart from their classroom performance.

Further into the article it gets even scarier:

To drive home the notion that education schools ought to evaluate teacher candidates on such parameters as attitude toward social justice, the council issued a revision of its accrediting policies in 2002 in a Board of Examiners Update. It encouraged schools to tailor their assessments of dispositions to the schools' guiding principles, which are known in the field as "conceptual frameworks." The council's policies say that if an education school "has described its vision for teacher preparation as 'Teachers as agents of change' and has indicated that a commitment to social justice is one disposition it expects of teachers who can become agents of change, then it is expected that unit assessments include some measure of a candidate's commitment to social justice."

Brooklyn College's School of Education, which is the only academic unit at the college with the status of school, is among dozens of education schools across the country that incorporate the notion of "social justice" in their guiding principles. At Brooklyn, "social justice" is one of the four main principles in its conceptual framework. The school's conceptual framework states that it develops in its students "a deeper understanding of the quest for social justice." In its explanation of that mission, the school states: "We educate teacher candidates and other school personnel about issues of social injustice such as institutionalized racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism."

So in order to become accepted as a teacher, political correctness and multiculturalism trump skills and content knowledge.

In this interview with Pamela R. Winnick by Bill Steigerwald on textbooks, we're told,

We get this ridiculous situation where there are all kinds of politically correct things made in the name of science. In one of the textbooks, for example, there's an emphasis on Native Americans. In the chapter that's supposed to be on the science of climate, they spend several pages talking about an Algonquin myth about how when the crows return that means it's spring. It takes several pages before they actually get to the science of why climate changes — the rotation of the Earth and so forth.

And that's only some of the stupidity that teachers are supposed to translate into knowledge.

When teachers are only allowed to teach multicultualism and political correctness, will standardized tests be changed to reflect this teaching? Will they be as devoid of content as the textbooks?

In the district I teach, most teachers are forced to use some textbooks containing misinformation. I've pointed out some of the distortions to administrators and they politely ignored me. The problem is, teachers are still held accountable. The consultants from the textbook companies insist that their product works, it's "research based". Except for me (because I've done the research), the teachers don't know enough to dispute the consultants, and everyone is tired of listening to me.

Because I taught my fourth graders phonetically this year, we were able to read, discuss, and do lots of writing on Macbeth. Now they are memorizing portions of the play and some of them are begging to read Hamlet. We may read part of it, but there isn't much time left in the school year. We did read Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut. We had an interesting discussion. They understand more than I thought.

Labels: Atlas Shrugs, Bill Steigerwald, education, Jacob Gershman, multiculturalism, NCLB, Pamela R. Winnick, teacher education

posted by Harry @ 1:35 PM 0 comments