Wednesday, July 25, 2007

APOLOGIA FOR HAMAS AT HARVARD

Post lifted from Dan Mandel. See the original for links

Sara Roy, a senior research scholar at Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, complained recently of censorship because her review of a book by the Washington Institute's Mathew Levitt, Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad, was rejected by a peer review panel at Tufts University's Fletcher Forum on World Affairs as one-sided and lacking in objectivity. (Apparently, peer review is regarded by Roy as a mere formality, something akin to the approval of a presidential decree by the Syrian parliament). Cinnamon Stillwell has a detailed account of the issue. Roy's review was in the end published elsewhere and upon reading it, the justification for its earlier rejection is readily apparent.

This is what Roy had to say in her review about Hamas, the Islamist movement whose innovation in Palestinian politics has been to move in its Charter beyond the customary call for Israel's extinction by violence to the general murder of Jews:

Since Hamas's victory in the January 2006 legislative elections, there has been a further evolution in its political thinking - as evidenced in some of its key political documents - characterized by a strong emphasis on state-building and programmatic work, greater refinement with regard to its position on a two-state solution and the role of resistance, and a progressive de-emphasis on religion.


Really? Here are some indicators of Hamas' record since January 2006: In February 2006, senior Hamas figures Mahmoud Zahar and Saed Siyam rejected any possible peace negotiations with Israel, with Zahar saying that Israel was an enemy, and thus not a partner for negotiations.

In April 2006, Musa Abu Marzouq, deputy head of Hamas' political bureau, reiterated in an interview that "One of Hamas's founding principals is that it does not recognize Israel. We [participated in] the elections and the people voted for us based on this platform. Therefore, the question of recognizing Israel is definitely not on the table unless it withdraws from ALL the Palestinian lands, not only to the 1967 borders."

In June 2006, Hamas blasted Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas for suggesting that it may accept a two-state solution and recognize Israel.

In September 2006, Marzouq said: "Hamas has serious reservations about the [Arab Peace] initiative since it involves acceptance of two states, Palestine and Israel. Hamas rejects this because it means recognition of Israel."

At a 20 October 2006 Hamas convention in Khan Yunis, Palestinian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Al-Zahar stated that "Israel is a vile entity that has been planted in our soil, and has no historical, religious or cultural legitimacy. We cannot normalize our relations with this entity ... [We say] no to recognizing Israel, regardless of the price we may have to pay [for our refusal]."

In March 2007, Hamas issued a statement reaffirming that it was still committed to Israel's destruction despite having signed a power-sharing agreement with Fatah in Mecca: "We will not betray promises we made to God to continue the path of Jihad and resistance until the liberation of Palestine, all of Palestine." Later that month, Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum stated, "We stress that we do not and will never recognize the right of Israel to exist on one inch of Palestinian land."

In April 2007, Hamas spokesman Ismail Radwan declared in a sermon televised on Palestinian television that "The Hour [Resurrection] will not take place until the Muslims fight the Jews and the Muslims kill them, and the rock and the tree will say: `Oh, Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, kill him!' We must remind our Arab and Muslim nation, its leaders and people, its scholars and students, remind them that Palestine and the Al Aqsa mosque will not be liberated through summits nor by international resolutions, but it will be liberated through the rifle."

Not particularly telling examples of "refinement" with regard to its position on a two-state solution (a defective euphemism for accepting Israel) or anything else. Roy's Orwellian apologia for Hamas is a telling instance of the corruption of academic standards in Middle East studies.





Australia: Back to basics for misguided educators

Public debate is the first step towards improving the nation's failing school systems, writes Kevin Donnelly

HOW successful is Australia's education system? Based on apparent high rates of illiteracy, automatic promotion of students without the necessary knowledge and skills, our second-rate performance in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study tests and a dumbed-down, outcomes-based approach to curriculum, the answer is: not very.

Unsurprisingly, as noted in the federal government-funded survey Parents' Attitudes to Schooling, on being asked to give their views about the quality of school education, only 58.3per cent of parents of primary school-aged children expressed satisfaction, while at the secondary level that figure was 39.9 per cent.

Two of the top three parental concerns are the quality of the curriculum and the standard of teaching. As may be expected, those responsible for falling standards and under-achievement argue that all is well and that any talk of a crisis is a media beat-up or a conservative political ploy.

Take the Australian Education Union's submission to the Senate committee's inquiry into education standards, which held hearings across Australia early this month. The AEU argues that "standards in Australian schooling compare favourably with those in most other countries and historically", and that the Howard Government's concerns about standards are simply "a means of diverting attention from the inequity of its funding mechanisms and attacking its critics". By making public the parlous state of our education system, commentators such as myself, in articles in The Australian, are condemned by the AEU as being involved in "reactionary witch hunting" and guilty of employing "myths, misconceptions and deceit".

The AEU is not alone in wanting to shoot the messenger. Last year the educrats from the Australian Curriculum Studies Association and the Australian Secondary Principals Association put out a media release arguing the education debate had been "hijacked by partisan political views and media commentators pushing their own barrows". The Australian Association for the Teaching of English is another organisation that argues all is well; it describes Australian education as "spectacularly successful". Australia's high ranking in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Program for International Student Assessment tests for 15-year-olds and the results of national literacy tests are used as evidence that our approach to education is world's best practice.

In opposition to public concerns about the way classic literature has been destroyed by politically correct theory and critical literacy, where students are taught to deconstruct texts in terms of power relationships and victim-hood, the AATE also argues that such theories represent the best way to teach English. Judging by other submissions to the Senate inquiry, it is obvious that fears about falling standards are not a media beat-up and that many respected and well-qualified teachers and educators argue that much needs to be done to strengthen and improve our education system.

As noted in the submission from the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute, advocates of the PISA test ignore that the test evaluates so-called real-life skills, not the school curriculum. The AMSI submission also argues that PISA "is not a valid assessment of the mathematics knowledge, as only a fragment of the curriculum is tested" and "some of the questions are effectively general aptitude tests rather than mathematical ones".

Based on the results of the TIMSS tests, Australian students are in the second XI when it comes to international mathematics and science performance, and we have a longer tail of under-performing students. According to AMSI, the reasons for Australia's under-performance include the inferior quality of our curriculum documents, lack of expertise and confidence among primary-school teachers caused by flaws in teacher training and, as a result of universities dropping prerequisite subjects, a decline in the numbers of students taking more difficult senior-school courses.

Notwithstanding the AATE's claim that Australia has "internationally acclaimed, rigorous, research-based and balanced curricula and teaching methodologies", literacy is another area where there is increasing evidence that teachers and schools are being let down.

Kerry Hempenstall, an academic specialising in literacy at RMIT University in Melbourne, argues in his submission that many of the curriculum innovations that regularly wash over Australian classrooms lack a rigorous research base. The reality is that fads such as whole language, where the assertion is made that learning to read is as natural as learning to talk, have bred generations of illiterate students. As noted by Hempenstall, "These assertions have influenced educational practice for the last 20 years, yet they have each been shown by research to be incorrect. The consequence has been an unnecessary burden on struggling students to manage the task of learning to read. Not only have they been denied helpful strategies but they have been encouraged to employ moribund strategies."

One of the most telling critiques of outcomes-based education has been developed by a group of teachers associated with the Perth-based People Lobbying Against Teaching Outcomes (www.platowa.com). PLATO members have worked tirelessly in opposition to extending outcomes-based education into years 11 and 12 and have been instrumental in the West Australian Government's efforts to ameliorate the worst excesses of the new certificate. In their submissions, PLATO members Igor Bray, professor of physics at Murdoch University, Stephen Kessell, a retired associate professor at Curtin University, and Marko Vojkovic, a teacher, suggest that standards have fallen, that more needs to be done to strengthen teacher education and that teachers need to be properly supported in their work with academically based, clear and succinct syllabus road maps.

While many of those responsible for the present malaise vilify the media for placing education firmly on the public and political agenda, ignored is the fact education is far too important to leave to the so-called experts, and the first stage of strengthening and improving the system is public debate.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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