Sunday, December 23, 2018



Florida Commission Votes to Arm Teachers

Sanity in response to the Parkland atrocity may yet prevail in South Florida.

The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission last week voted 13-1 in favor of allowing teachers who are willing to undergo background checks and training to carry concealed weapons on school campuses. The measure aims to prevent a recurrence of the massacre that killed 17 people last Feb. 14. The move would be a step beyond the current guardian program that allows school systems to arm security guards, administrators, or librarians, and it would require approval by the state legislature.

“We have to give people a fighting chance, we have to give them an opportunity to protect themselves,” said Pinellas County Sheriff and commission chairman Bob Gualtieri. Polk County Sheriff and commission member Grady Judd agreed, and further illumined why. “In the ideal world, we shouldn’t need anyone on campus with a gun, but that’s not the world we live in today,” he said. “One’s not enough. Two’s not enough. We need multiple people in order to protect the children.”

Unfortunately, dealing with the world we live in today is not American Left’s strong suit. Florida’s teachers union and PTA have voiced their opposition to such a measure, insisting teachers are hired to educate, not be law enforcement officers. Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL), whose district includes Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, echoed their assertions. “Teachers want to teach, not be armed for combat in their classrooms,” he stated. “Law enforcement cannot push their responsibilities to make our communities safer on to civilians that should be focused on educating their students.”

To be fair, Deutch’s argument has one legitimate aspect to it: The 407-page preliminary report addressed the massive failures by multiple law enforcement officers from Sheriff Scott Israel’s department to respond appropriately to the atrocity. It noted that Israel’s active-shooter policy, which states that officers “may” confront shooters as opposed to “shall” confront them, was a recipe for disaster.

“‘May’ gave them the out not to enter,” Judd explained. “They decided to be cowards instead of heroes.”

Scott Peterson, the lone armed deputy on duty at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when the atrocity occurred, tried to exploit that policy. In attempting to get a lawsuit filed against him by the family of murder victim Meadow Pollack dismissed, he asked Broward Circuit Judge Patti Englander Henning to rule that he had “no legal duty” to protect teachers and students.

Thankfully, Henning wasn’t buying it. In ruling against Peterson, Henning asserted that a school security guard has the “obligation to act reasonably.” She also found that Peterson was not protected by “sovereign immunity,” which prevents litigation from being filed against public employees based on their official conduct.

Peterson’s attorney, Michael Piper, has promised to appeal the decision. If he is unsuccessful, perhaps Pollack’s family will be able to attach some portion of Peterson’s $8,700 per month pension. The one the 55-year-old deputy began collecting after being initially suspended but ultimately allowed to resign and retire on Feb. 22 — one week after the shooting.

Sheriff Israel, who asserted shortly after the tragedy that he had provided “amazing leadership” to his department, remains as defiant as ever. “I have done nothing that would warrant my resignation and have absolutely no intentions of resigning,” he said in response to the report. “I am committed to BSO [Broward County Sheriff’s Office] and the safety of Broward County. I will remain sheriff for so long as the voters of Broward County want to have me.”

Maybe, maybe not. Governor-elect Ron DeSantis, who will be sworn in Jan. 8, repeatedly called for Israel’s removal during his campaign. Now, he sounds more like a politician, insisting he wants to see the final report and “if there’s corrective action that needs to be taken, then we can take corrective action.” Chairman Gualtieri insisted nothing Israel did could be construed as “malfeasance or misfeasance.” “He had some personnel that failed,” Gualtieri said. “Any law enforcement organization is going to have people that fail. And just because individuals fail doesn’t mean that the leader of the organization is a failure.”

Really? The report notes there were seven deputies who heard shots fired and failed to act, and it characterizes their conduct as “unacceptable and contrary to accepted protocol under which the deputies should have immediately moved towards the gunshots to confront the shooter.” As for organizational leadership, the report states there was “abundant confusion over the location of the command post and the role of the staging area,” which “stemmed from an absence of command and control and an ineffective radio system.” Nonetheless, it recommends that the BSO conduct an internal investigation into the incident.

An internal investigation? Shortly after the shooting, Israel stated his department had been contacted 23 times regarding the alleged murderer and his family. Records showed at least 45 calls were made between 2008 to 2017. When confronted about Peterson’s failures? “I gave him a gun. I gave him a badge. I gave him the training. If he didn’t have the heart to go in, that’s not my responsibility,” Israel stated. Moreover, Israel turned his office into an apparent patronage program, hiring six community affairs employees with salaries totaling $388,729, “from the ranks of his political supporters, building a community outreach wing his critics say doubles as a re-election team,” the Sun-Sentinel reported … in 2016.

Commissioner Max Schachter, whose 14-year-old son, Alex, was killed at the school, cast the lone vote against the motion. He would rather see the state hire police officers for campuses and allow non-teaching staff to carry guns. Allowing teachers to be armed “creates a host of problems,” he insisted.

Problems worse than the mass killer having the ability to reload five times?

Efforts are already afoot to undermine the commission’s recommendations. Duval County’s decision to put armed “school safety assistants” in its elementary schools was met with a lawsuit filed by filed by seven unnamed families and the League of Women Voters of Florida. According to the suit, they prefer an approach “designating unarmed guardians whose job would include implementing key elements of the consensus approach to school safety recommended by experts in the field.”

Unarmed guardians? How many victims who might otherwise be saved must be sacrificed to satisfy inane, anti-gun sensibilities?

The commission’s final report will be presented to Gov. DeSantis and the state legislature by Jan. 1. And in a one-two punch sure to outrage those who blame guns for everything, President Donald Trump’s commission on school safety has recommended revoking the Obama administration’s loathsome federal guidelines that directed schools to punish minority students at lesser rates, irrespective of the frequency of their misbehavior. That policy precipitated Broward’s “diversionary” PROMISE program that intentionally kept minority students out of the criminal justice system by ignoring certain crimes. County administrators and school superintendents, who directed cops to stop arresting such students, lauded the resultant “reduction” in crime rates.

Without that policy in place, the murderous psychopath who evinced highly troublesome behavior leading to expulsion would have likely been prevented from buying a gun. The rest is history — and reprehensibly politicized tragedy.

SOURCE 






Universities Took $600 Million Tied To Muslim Nations While Forming Grade School Curricula For US Students

A Department of Education program funds colleges to teach about the Arab world, but upcoming payments are going to colleges that have received millions of dollars from Arab countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, data shows.

One critic said that coupling the program with the foreign funding is “a back-door route to Saudi influence.”
Some of the universities employ faculty or have hosted guests who made anti-semitic remarks.

Universities funded by the Department of Education to help shape the way U.S. K-12 schools and colleges portray the Middle East and Israel are simultaneously bankrolled by $600 million tied to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Muslim-majority countries, a Daily Caller News Foundation data analysis found.

One critic called the payments “a back-door route to Saudi influence over America’s K-12 curriculum.”

The Cold War-era Higher Education Act of 1965 created a program called “Title VI” that pays colleges to help students better understand international relations and includes funds earmarked for studying the Middle East. It was intended to help prepare a cadre of intelligence agents and diplomats.

Instead, the money has funded anti-Americanism and anti-semitism in U.S. higher education, according to a November 2014 report by the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. There have been instances where some of the universities hosted or employed anti-semites, with some facing accusations of having ties to terror groups.

For 2019 through 2021, the Education Department has allocated nearly $7.5 million to 16 universities for Middle East studies and outreach, according to Title IV records. Twelve of those have recently received money affiliated with Muslim-majority nations in the Middle East, and in each case, that money dwarfed the U.S. funding, a DCNF data analysis found.

The nations included in TheDCNF’s analysis incorporate Islam or Sharia law in their governments or had an overwhelmingly Muslim population, such as in the case of Turkey. Lebanon was excluded, since Islam only holds a small majority and has a large Christian population, according to the CIA’s World Factbook.

The Education Department says that “In addition to supporting foreign language and area studies instruction and research, Title VI” recipients will “conduct outreach and develop programs that expand global opportunities for K-16 educators.”

A senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Stanley Kurtz, has been warning about the issue for years.

The system “has opened up a back-door route to Saudi influence over America’s K-12 curriculum,” he wrote in the National Review in 2007. “Believe it or not, the Saudis have figured out how to make an end-run around America’s K-12 curriculum safeguards, thereby gaining control over much of what children in the United States learn about the Middle East.”

The Muslim nations awarded $603 million to the 12 universities from 2011 to 2016 — 80 times more than the allocated Title VI funding, TheDCNF found. Israeli interests donated a total of $13 million to eight of the schools, but in every case, their funding was only a fraction of the Muslim nations’.

“As a U.S. Department of Education-sponsored National Resource Center on the Middle East and North Africa (NRC-MENA), the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown conducts workshops for educators throughout the year,” Georgetown University notes on its website. “The K-14 Education Outreach program focuses on the needs of K-14 educators in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia, and beyond.”

“The program helps teachers convey a nuanced and realistic view of Arabs and Islam to overcome stereotypes and shallow media presentations, supplementing the often inadequate treatment in curriculum and textbooks,” it continues. (RELATED: Before Killing Of Journalist, Elite Universities Took $600M From Saudis)

But Kurtz wrote: “Outreach coordinators or teacher-trainers at a number of university Middle East Studies centers have themselves been trained by the very same Saudi-funded foundations that design K-12 course materials.”

Below are examples of anti-semitism from colleges or their faculty that received funding from the Muslim nations.

The University of California, Berkeley, which is the second-highest recipient of Title IV funding and has received $19 million in funding from Middle Eastern countries, hosted a 2011 event where a lecturer said that “Holocaust denial is a form of protest.” In its report, the Brandeis Center wrote that he “downplayed the atrocities of the Holocaust.”

At Columbia University, which received $14 million from the Muslim countries, $600,000 from Title VI, and none from Israel, Iranian Studies professor Hamid Dabashi said in May that the Jewish state is behind “[e]very dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world.”

The University of California, Los Angeles, held a 2009 panel comprised of four critics of Israel’s existence, according to the Brandeis Center. One described Israeli soldiers as war criminals, and another said they target civilians. The panel “riled up the largely non-student audience into chants such as ‘Zionism is racism,’ ‘Zionism is Nazism,’ and ‘F- Israel,'” according to the Brandeis Center. UCLA received $12 million from the Muslim nations. It also received $6 million from Israel, far more than any other school, but most of that money came from Israeli biotech firms, while only $980 came from a group dedicated to boosting ties with Israel, the Yahel Foundation.

In October 2015, “Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies hosted a teach-in for K-14 teachers and the public on Gaza featuring speakers who have defended Hamas and support the BDS movement,” according to the Endowment for Middle East Truth. “The event was co-sponsored by the World Affairs Council and the Jerusalem Fund.” Also at Georgetown, a Saudi-funded entity uses social justice rhetoric popular among liberal college students to advance a Saudi agenda, likening Muslims to Hispanic “Dreamers,” invoking “white supremacy” and using hip-hop.

At the University of Michigan, which has received $16 million from the Muslim countries and $1.8 million from Israel, two instructors refused to help students study abroad in Israel in 2018.

The countries whose governments and foundations — and, to a lesser extent, companies and citizens — have donated to the latest Title VI recipients are Qatar ($343 million), Saudi Arabia ($131 million), United Arab Emirates ($87 million), Kuwait ($16 million), Turkey ($9 million), as well as Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, Bahrain and Iraq.

In 2006, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found “substantial evidence” that “many university departments of Middle East studies provide one-sided, highly polemical academic presentations and some may repress legitimate debate concerning Israel.”

In 2008, Congress required that the recipients offer a “wide range of views to generate debate on world regions and international affairs,” but the Education Department later acknowledged to Congress that it did not factor that in to its decision for awarding funding, according to the Brandeis Center.

Most of the colleges did not return a request for comment from TheDCNF, but some noted that a portion of the funds come from private biotech firms and other apolitical interests. Other schools underscored that they value academic freedom.

None provided data or policy information on how they ensure they offer a “wide range of views” on the Middle East. (RELATED: Universities Hide Info On Ties To Ultraconservative Nation of Qatar)

American Association of University Professors President Cary Nelson, wrote in a 2010 book that “faculty and students with sympathies for Israel encounter implacably pro-Palestinian attacks in multiple settings; these include departments where no candidates who has written in support of Israel in general or a two-state solution in particular would even be considered for a job.”

More recently, the University of California chancellors issued a statement on Dec. 13 in response to an academic boycott of Israel:

“We believe a boycott of this sort poses a direct and serious threat to the academic freedom of our students and faculty, as well as the unfettered exchange of ideas and perspectives on our campuses, including debate and discourse regarding conflicts in the Middle East,” they said.

SOURCE 






Modern Education: Activism Has Displaced Academics

Fascism in our schools is raising kids who are the antithesis of what the Founders stood for   

The first school in the United States, founded in 1635, was the Boston Latin School where five of the signers of our Constitution attended — John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Treat Paine, and William Hooper. The colonial home, however, was the place where the nation’s first teachers, mothers, taught their children to read by using the Bible.

In “A Place of Reading,” the American Antiquarian Society noted, “Mothers, entrusted with the care and well-being of their children’s souls, faithfully sat them down and taught them to read at home. … The Bible, however, was the staple instructional reading text. The most humble of homes usually possessed a Bible or two with which to instruct children and to engage in daily religious devotions.” The homes of the colonies taught reading to both girls and boys and, as the historical archive of printed material published through 1876, observed, “Children were considered ready for further educational instruction outside the home once they had mastered reading the Bible, but not before then.”

Once in a grammar school, the Holy Bible was supplemented by primers and horn books (wooden tablets with a handle that had a writings displayed) to expand literacy and prepare children able to progress to writing. Children were in classrooms for only about four months of the year and in a formalized curriculum for about four to five years total.


Horn book

Today, education is a massive system that has become bureaucratic, with more of a focus on the process rather than the result. What we’re seeing today, in very large measure, is a system influenced by “thought leaders” and individuals with more focus on political correctness and controlling behavior through constructing norms in the classroom that may be, and very often are, contrary to the norms taught in the home or faith community.

What better way to confirm a thesis than with real-time proof.

Let’s look at a couple of instances over the last few weeks in Virginia public schools. First, there’s the teacher who was unanimously fired by the West Point School Board for insubordination. Sounds pretty routine, right?

What was the insubordinate act? Peter Vlaming, a ninth-grade French teacher, was terminated because he said that his Christian faith prevented him from using male pronouns for a student who is biologically female. Vlaming, however, did agree to address the male-identifying female by his/her new name, who remains protected from public awareness. The 47-year-old teacher, who spent a decade studying in France and has been teaching at the Virginia school for almost seven years, is now unemployed and a public piñata for criticism due to his “discrimination,” as alleged by the family of the student “in transition.”

In the same state, just about 100 miles due north as the crow flies, in the Arlington Public Schools, a second-grader, excited to share a story about Daniel from the Bible during show-and-tell, was silenced among his peers by his teacher. As told by his dad, his enthusiastic son stowed away his Bible among his school supplies in his bag for the purpose of telling a story that was important to him that involved the Jewish man whose courage and determination was used by God.

The eight-year-old exclaimed to his dad, “The teacher stopped me from speaking and went on to the next person. I didn’t get to tell them about Daniel.”

Ah, there it is.

If a young person is suffering gender dysphoria in spite of their DNA, anatomy, and hormones, it matters that they are not offended and their conjured up “rights” are protected as speech under the First Amendment. But Christian faith doesn’t deserve to be protected, along with their own speech under that same First Amendment either as a teacher or even an eight-year-old.

Wake up parents, grandparents, and Patriots! We must reclaim our education system and stop the indoctrination. Our children deserve academics, not activism in the classroom. The colonial home, with family as the first teachers, raised the Founders of our nation. The fascism in our schools, deconstructing our families, is raising the socialists who’ll ruin it.

SOURCE 



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