PA leader supports Hamas kidnapping
of Israeli soldiers
"If Hamas wants to kidnap soldiers,
let them kidnap soldiers. Let them kidnap...
We encourage them.
When they kidnapped [Gilad] Shalit
we congratulated them"
By Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik
Senior PA official and Deputy-Secretary of Fatah's Central Committee Jibril Rajoub said last month that the Palestinian Authority encourages Hamas to kidnap Israeli soldiers and hold them hostage in order to exchange them for the release of Palestinian prisoners.
Israel holds about 5,000 Palestinian terrorists in prison, many of them murderers. The PA sees all Palestinian prisoners as heroes -- even those serving 67 and 54 life sentences for planning suicide bombings and murder of civilians -- and demands their freedom.
Hamas kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2006 and held him hostage for five years, until Israel achieved his release by freeing over 1,000 terrorists from prison. Palestinian Media Watch documented that the PA leadership supported and congratulated Hamas at the time.
PA Chairman Abbas himself praised the kidnapping:
"Hamas kidnapped a soldier, or captured a soldier, and managed to keep him for five years - that's a good thing, we don't deny it. On the contrary, it's good. Because in that small strip of 40 x 7 km [Gaza], they managed to guard him and hide him - that's a good thing."
[Official PA TV, Oct. 24, 2011]
Representing Mahmoud Abbas, Rajoub "saluted" the terrorist kidnappers:
"I say in the name of the Fatah movement -- we salute those who dug the tunnel [to capture the Israeli soldier]; we salute those who captured the captive (Gilad Shalit), and salute those who guarded the captive until this deal was completed [Applause]."
[Official PA TV, Oct. 30, 2011]
The PA has committed to distancing itself from violence in order to be accepted as a peace partner. PMW has documented that the PA continues to violate this commitment, even during the current peace talks, and continues to actively support and glorify violence and terror.
The following is a longer excerpt of Jibril Rajoub's statement:
Deputy-Secretary of Fatah Central Committee, Jibril Rajoub:
"If Hamas wants to kidnap soldiers, let them kidnap soldiers. Let them kidnap. Let them kidnap if they [the Israelis] don't want to release prisoners, but want them as prisoners forever, so [the prisoners] will come out as ghosts and skeletons. The Israelis need to understand. It's clear that kidnapping is the language they understand. On the contrary, we encourage them [Hamas]. When they kidnapped [Gilad] Shalit, we congratulated them. When they concluded the Shalit [exchange] deal, in spite of our having a few reservations about it, we also congratulated them."
[Official PA TV, Jan. 2, 2014]
In October 2011, the Israeli government agreed to release 1,027 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prison in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been held hostage by Hamas for more than 5 years.
By Zach Pontz.
This year’s valedictorian at the Technion University, known as “the MIT of Israel,” would likely displease those intent on framing Israel in the most unflattering of terms, writes Diana Bletter forThe Huffington Post. That’s because the Valedictorian is an Islamic woman named Mais Ali-Saleh who grew up in a small Arab village outside of Nazareth, in Israel’s Galilee.
Ali-Selah not only disproves claims made by Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movements, that Israel is an apartheid state and that its academic institutions should be boycotted, but she put it best when she said, “An academic boycott of Israel is a passive move, and it doesn’t achieve any of its purported objectives.”
Ali-Selah’s success almost didn’t happen. After her first class at the Technion, in Haifa, northern Israel, she was ready to call it quits. Though she had studied Hebrew from elementary school through high school, her grasp of the language was tenuous at best, having spoken mostly Arabic while growing up.
However, she decided to persevere, and is currently doing an Obstetrics/Gynecology residency at Carmel Hospital in Haifa. She decided to take on the field, despite its demanding hours, because she knew that many Arab women are more comfortable going to a female doctor rather than a male.
On trips to Europe, Ali-Selah said that people she met were surprised to learn that Israeli Arabs studied engineering and medicine in Israel, and that they lived among Jews. She points to this lack of awareness as helping to perpetuate the falsehood strengthened by BDS and Boycotters like Roger Waters that Israel is an apartheid state which denies a fundamental truth: Arabs, and in particular Arab women, have more freedom, liberties and academic opportunities in Israel than in any Arab country.
Rather than an academic boycott which negatively impacts researchers who want to disseminate knowledge rather than restrict it Ali-Selah suggests a more active stance: encouraging academic life within the Palestinian Authority, strengthening academic ties with Palestinian universities, and planning joint research projects with Palestinian scientists.
Furthermore, Ali-Selah says that those interested in advancing the cause of peace in the Middle East should focus their energies on supporting more of Israel’s success stories like her own, and pressuring Arab countries to emulate Israel’s academic freedoms and democracy.
1b)Your daily dose of angst: The White House tapped former Arafat apologist Robert Malley to mend frazzled friendships with the Persian Gulf states. Malley was a former adviser to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama forced out of Washington’s power games in 2008 over his meetings with Hamas. The NY Times explains:
In 2008, Mr. Malley was forced to sever his ties as an informal adviser to the campaign of Barack Obama when it was reported that he had met with members of Hamas, the militant Palestinian group, which the State Department classifies as a terrorist organization.
The meeting, Mr. Malley said in a letter to The New York Times, was hardly a secret and came in the course of his work with the I.C.G., a nonprofit group focused on preventing conflict. Still, he felt obliged to distance himself from Mr. Obama to avoid misperceptions of the “candidate’s position regarding the Islamist movement.”
Mr. Malley also came under fire for writing an article, with Hussein Agha, that argued that some of the blame for the failure of the Camp David talks lay with the Israeli leader at the time, Ehud Barak, and not just with the uncompromising position of the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, which was the conventional wisdom then.
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2) Cruz Control?
By Thomas Sowell
Freshman Senator Ted Cruz says many things that need to be said and says them well. Moreover, some of these things are what many, if not most, Americans believe wholeheartedly. Yet we need to remember that the same was true of another freshman Senator, just a relatively few years ago, who parlayed his ability to say things that resonated with the voters into two terms in the White House. Who would disagree that if you want your doctor, you should be able to keep your doctor? Who would disagree with the idea of a more transparent administration in Washington, or a President of the United States being a uniter instead of a divider?
There are many things like this that freshman Senator Barack Obama said that the overwhelming majority of Americans -- whether liberal or conservative -- would agree with. The only problem is that what he has actually done as President has repeatedly turned out to be the direct opposite of what he said as a candidate.
Senator Ted Cruz has not yet reached the point where he can make policy, rather than just make political trouble. But there are already disquieting signs that he is looking out for Ted Cruz -- even if that sets back the causes he claims to be serving.
Those causes are not being served when Senator Cruz undermines the election chances of the only political party that has any chance of undoing the disasters that Barack Obama has already inflicted on the nation -- and forestalling new disasters that are visible on the horizon.
ObamaCare is not just an issue about money or even an issue about something as important as medical care. ObamaCare represents a quantum leap in the power of the federal government over the private lives of individual Americans.
Chief Justice Roberts' decision declaring ObamaCare constitutional essentially repeals the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which declares that powers not given to the federal government belong to the states "or to the people."
That central support of personal freedom has now been removed. The rest of the structure may not last very long, now that the Obama administration is busy quietly dismantling other bulwarks against the unbridled power of the government in general, and the unbridled power of the presidency in particular.
The Federal Communications Commission, for example, is already floating the idea of placing observers in newspaper editorial offices to "study" how decisions are made there. Nothing in the Constitution grants the FCC this dangerous power, nor is there any legislation authorizing any such activity.
But what the federal government can do is not dependent on what the Constitution authorizes it to do or what Congressional legislation gives them the power to do.
The basic, brutal reality is that the federal government can do whatever it wants to do, if nobody stops them. The Supreme Court's ObamaCare decision shows that we cannot depend on them to protect our freedom. Nor will Congress, as long as the Democrats control the Senate.
The most charitable interpretation of Ted Cruz and his supporters is that they are willing to see the Republican Party weakened in the short run, in hopes that they will be able to take it over in the long run, and set it on a different path as a more purified conservative party.
Like many political ideas, this one is not new. It represents a political strategy that was tried long ago -- and failed long ago.
In the German elections of 1932, the Nazi party received 37 percent of the vote. They became part of a democratically elected coalition government, in which Hitler became chancellor. Only step by step did the Nazis dismantle democratic freedoms and turn the country into a complete dictatorship.
The political majority could have united to stop Hitler from becoming a dictator. But they did not unite. They fought each other over their differences. Some figured that they would take over after the Nazis were discredited and defeated.
Many who plotted this clever strategy died in Nazi concentration camps. Unfortunately, so did millions of others.
What such clever strategies overlook is that there can be a point of no return. We may be close to that point of no return, not only with ObamaCare, but also with the larger erosion of personal freedom, of which ObamaCare is just the most visible part.
2a) QUARTERBACKING FOR THE GREEN BAY PACKERS
In a news conference Deanna Favre announced she will be the starting QB for the Packers next season.
Deanna asserts that she is qualified to be the starting QB because she has spent the past 16 years married to Brett while he played QB for the Packers.
During this period of time, she became familiar with the definition of a corner blitz, the nickel package, and man-to-man coverage,
so she is now completely comfortable with all the other terminology involving the Packers offense.
A survey of Packers fans shows that 50% of those polled supported the move.
Does this sounds idiotic and unbelievable or familiar to you?
Hillary Clinton makes the same claims as to why she is qualified to be President and 50% of Democrats polled agreed.
She has never run a City, County, or State during her "career" of being Bill Clinton's wife.
When told Hillary Clinton has experience because she has 8 years in the white house, my immediate thought was "So has the pastry chef".
When it comes to running the state department, her biggest achievement was getting a US Ambassador and 3 other Americans killed by pretending terrorism had been defeated.
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3) Barton: A Star who's reborn
By Tom Barton
Syndicated columnist Star Parker, who started writing for this newspaper last month on Saturdays, got her conservative credentials the hard way:
She earned them.
So when she speaks — as she did Monday night at the annual Skidaway Island Republican Club’s President’s Day Dinner — this fiery, former welfare recipient comes across as the voice of hard-won experience. A person who’s been there, done that, got the battle scars. Someone who knows what’s wrong and how to fix it.
“The government is supposed to protect our interests, not exploit them,” Parker told a rapt audience of about 400 of the local GOP faithful. “But too many people believe the lies of the left, that the poor are poor because the wealthy are wealthy. But we’re at a point in this country now where we have too many takers and not enough makers. We can’t go on like that.”
Speaking of taking — channelling an inner Mitt — she was once a “taker” herself.
Parker, who works in Washington but commutes to her home near Los Angeles, got mixed up with crime and drugs as a teenager. She ended up as a single mom who could barely read, living on welfare in Southern California and learning how to milk the system by working jobs that paid under the table. Then she became a born-again Christian.
She ditched welfare. She went to college and got a degree. She got married and started a small magazine — only to lose it when black-owned businesses that bought advertising in her publication went up in flames during the Rodney King riots.
Undeterred, she picked herself up and moved on to the next chapter. She launched the Coalition on Urban Affairs, a non-profit think tank that addresses issues of race and poverty through principles of faith, freedom and personal responsibility.
She wrote three books whose blunt titles sum up her outlook on public policy: “Pimps, Whores and Welfare Brats: From Welfare Cheat to Conservative Messenger,” “White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay,” and “Uncle Sam’s Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America’s Poor and What We Can Do About It.”
Such words got her noticed, as she’s one of the rarest of political creatures: An outspoken conservative who happens to be black. It got her invitations to appear on TV.
And a few death threats.
Now 57, Parker is fearless and passionate. On Monday, she pointed to three “wars” that she believes have weakened the country and left people less free. They include the “war on religion” (Supreme Court decisions banning school-initiated prayer, Bible readings and displays of the 10 Commandments), the “war on marriage” (responsible for the alarming rise in the percentage of children born out of wedlock over the past 50 years — from just 3 percent to 30 percent of white children from 22 percent to 72 percent of black children) and the “war on poverty.”
“This became an equal opportunity destroyer that created a culture where you don’t have to work, don’t have to get married to have children and keeps you on the poverty plantation,” she said.
Parker sees school choice and business entrepreneurship as ways out of this swamp, along with the dismantling of entitlement programs that make a bad situation worse. This born-again crusader has little tolerance for politicians who pander. “We need people in Washington who are warriors,” she said. “I want to see what’s on their night stand. I don’t want to see ‘Golf Digest.’ I want to see ‘War and Peace.’”
Tom Barton is the editorial page editor of the Savannah Morning News.
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4) A MINORITY VIEW
BY WALTER E. WILLIAMS
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Schoolteacher Cheating
Philadelphia’s public school system has joined several other big-city school systems, such as those in Atlanta, Detroit and Washington, D.C., in widespread teacher-led cheating on standardized academic achievement tests. So far, the city has fired three school principals, and The Wall Street Journal reports, “Nearly 140 teachers and administrators in Philadelphia public schools have been implicated in one of the nation's largest cheating scandals.” (1/23/14) (http://tinyurl.com/q5makm3). Investigators found that teachers got together after tests to erase the students’ incorrect answers and replace them with correct answers. In some cases, they went as far as to give or show students answers during the test.
Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, identifies the problem as district officials focusing too heavily on test scores to judge teacher performance, and they’ve converted low-performing schools to charters run by independent groups that typically hire nonunion teachers. But William Hite, superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia, said cheating by adults harms students because schools use test scores to determine which students need remedial help, saying, "There is no circumstance, no matter how pressured the cooker, that adults should be cheating students."
While there’s widespread teacher test cheating to conceal education failure, most notably among black children, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, published by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics and sometimes referred to as the Nation's Report Card, measures student performance in the fourth and eighth grades. In 2013, 46 percent of Philadelphia eighth-graders scored below basic, and 35 percent scored basic. Below basic is a score meaning that a student is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for proficient work at his grade level. Basic indicates only partial mastery. It’s a similar story in reading, with 42 percent below basic and 41 percent basic. With this kind of performance, no one should be surprised that of the state of Pennsylvania’s 27 most poorly performing schools on the SAT, 25 are in Philadelphia.
Philadelphia’s four-year high-school graduation rate in 2012 was 64 percent, well below the national rate of 78 percent. Even if a student graduates from high school, what does it mean? What a high-school diploma means for white students is nothing to write home about, as suggested by the fact that every year, nearly 60 percent of first-year college students must take remedial courses in English or mathematics. What a high-school diploma means for black students is nothing less than a disaster, as pointed out by Drs. Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom in their 2009 book, "No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning." They state that “blacks nearing the end of their high school education perform a little worse than white eighth-graders in both reading and U.S. history, and a lot worse in math and geography.” Little has changed since the book’s publication.
Hite rightfully said that test cheating by adults harms students, but that harm pales in comparison with the harm done by teachers awarding fraudulent grades and conferring fraudulent high-school diplomas, particularly to black students. You say, “Williams, what do you mean by fraudulent diplomas?” When a student is given a high-school diploma, that attests that he can read, write and compute at a 12th-grade level, and when he can’t do so at the eighth-grade level, that diploma is fraudulent. What makes it so tragic is that neither the student nor his parents are aware that he has a fraudulent diploma. When a black person is not admitted to college, flunks out of college, can’t pass a civil service test or doesn’t get job promotions, he is likelier to blame racial discrimination than his poor education.
Politicians, civil rights organizations and the education establishment will do nothing about the fraud. In fact, they give their full allegiance to the perpetrators.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
4a) Excerpted from Townhall Magazine's March's cover story, "How Government Broke Education" by Joel Gehrke:
The United States is suffering from a crisis in higher education. Our economy desperately needs highly skilled workers to stay competitive in today’s global economy. But while our existing system of four-year higher education institutions is working well for some highly talented and wealthy students, millions more are graduating without the skills employers want and saddled with tens of thousands in debt.
Collectively, Americans owe more than $1 trillion in student loan debt. That is far more than they owe in credit card or car loan debt. And the youngest Americans owe the most since tuitions have skyrocketed as the amount of federal financial aid for higher education has increased.
Higher debt at an early age means kids moving back in with their parents, cars not bought, marriages not joined, and new homes not built. It is a huge drag on the entire economy.
Something must change.
There are people trying to change higher education. Some of them are even backed by millions in venture capital funding. But, with help from the federal government, the current cartel of higher education providers are shutting them out.
Take Ivy Bridge College, for example, an institution created through a partnership between Tiffin University in Ohio and Altius Education, Inc. Founded in 2008, Ivy Bridge College expanded access to four-year higher ed institutions by first offering traditionally undeserving students a shot at an associate’s degree. By offering extensive support services, including not just tutoring but life-coaching as well, Ivy Bridge established a strong associate’s degree graduation track record, and then, depending on their grades, guaranteed them a transfer to a partnered traditional four-year institution, including household brand names like Arizona State.
Because of its relationship with Tiffin, Ivy Bridge students could pay their tuition with federal loans, which would generate revenue for the university and Altius Education, which financed the company.
Altius and Tiffin worked well together. The Higher Learning Commission, which accredits Tiffin, praised Ivy Bridge in 2010 for “deliver[ing] education to a relatively underserved population,” according to documents obtained by Townhall. By August of 2012, Ivy Bridge had almost 2,200 students. That same year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded the for-profit/non-profit college a Next Generation Learning grant. A year later, HLC told Tiffin that the university must cut ties with Ivy Bridge or risk the loss of its accreditation. Tiffin complied, which has effectively killed Ivy Bridge by cutting it off from federal funding.
“The thing that changed was the political environment that the accreditors were in,” Altius CEO Paul Freedman told Town- hall. And that political environment changed when Higher Learning Commission President Sylvia Manning was hauled before the Senate Education Committee by Chairman Tom Harkin (D-IA) to explain the rise of for-profit colleges such as Kaplan University and the University of Phoenix.
Harkin and his colleagues based their criticism of Manning and HLC on the case of Ashford University, a for-profit institu- tion in Iowa once known as the Franciscan University of the Prairies. With the college on its last legs in 2005, HLC, under the leadership of its previous president, allowed a company called Bridgepoint Education, Inc., to purchase the accred- ited religious school without putting the new for-profit model through an accreditation review.
Six years later, Ashford enrolled 78,000 students receiving more than $600 million in federal subsidies annually. Sixty- three percent of the people seeking four-year bachelor’s degrees dropped out in the first year, according to Harkin, which looks good compared to the 84 percent dropout rate among students pursuing a two-year associate’s degree.
“I think this is a scam, an absolute scam,” Harkin said.
Manning left that hearing having promised that HLC would cut off the shortcut to accreditation (and thus federal dollars) that Bridgepoint had taken. “What happened in 2005 could not happen today,” she said.
When Ivy Bridge College’s for-profit parent company, Altius, tried to operate independently from Tiffin two years later as part of a joint venture, HLC blocked the change and reversed its earlier approval of Tiffin’s relationship with the for-profit institution.
“They’ve boxed the innovators out of higher education,” Freedman told Buzzfeed in an August report on the demise of Ivy Bridge. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5)Closing the Productivity and Pay Gap
Companies should either share productivity gains or contribute to public programs instead.
By William A. Galston
The Great Decoupling of wages and benefits from productivity, the biggest economic story of the past 40 years, shows no signs of ending. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report on Feb. 6, nonfarm business productivity rose 1.7% between the fourth quarter of 2012 and the fourth quarter of 2013. During the same period, hourly compensation (corrected for inflation) fell 0.9%. Since the end of 2010, real compensation has hardly budged.
Why does this matter? Between the end of World War II and 1973, the rise of compensation in line with productivity fueled the growth of a middle-class society. A growing, prosperous, self-confident middle class strengthened social mobility and anchored democratic trust. According to the Pew Research Center, in 1971 middle-income adults made up 61% of all U.S. adults. By 2011, they made up only 51%. Not by accident, mobility has stalled, political polarization has spiked and confidence in government has collapsed.
The erosion of the compensation/productivity link has also made it harder to sustain robust domestic demand for goods and services, which constitutes more than two-thirds of our entire economy. As the gap widened, U.S. households responded by sending more women into the paid workforce, expanding the numbers of hours worked and taking on a greater burden of debt.
All of these strategies have hit a wall. Unless total compensation rises more rapidly, stagnant domestic demand will depress economic growth as far as the eye can see.
We have a choice. We can sit back and hope for the best, which is what our gridlocked political system is doing by default. Or we can expand our political imagination to equal the scope of the challenge.
To explain the compensation/productivity gap, mainstream economists focus on globalization and technological change. The emergence of world markets for labor and capital has put downward pressure on wages for routine and middle-skill jobs. Technological innovation has reduced the number of manufacturing jobs and is poised to do the same in many service sectors.
If Oxford's Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne are correct, automation could eliminate jobs in nearly half of all standard occupational categories. Unless other sectors—including many that do not yet exist—pick up the pace of job creation, we could be in for an extended period of slack labor markets.
Left-leaning analysts play down the role of globalization and technology, emphasizing instead the impact of political choices. Over the past four decades, they argue, corporations and their political allies have done their best to decrease the rate of unionization and weaken workers' bargaining. (The all-out mobilization that turned back the UAW's effort to represent workers in VW's Chattanooga, Tenn., plant is the most recent example of this strategy.) The left also emphasizes the corporate shift from balancing a wide range of stakeholders' interests—including those of workers and local communities—to single-mindedly focusing on maximizing shareholder value.
In the past few years, scholars have proposed another possible explanation for the compensation/productivity gap—namely, the extraordinary expansion of finance to about 9% of GDP, up from less than 5% in 1980. The International Labor Organization's "Global Wage Report 2012/13" assesses the relative impact of globalization, technological and institutional change, and the growth of the financial sector on workers' share of the national income. Across the most developed economies, the ILO found, financial expansion accounted for 46% of the decline in workers' share since 1990, almost twice the impact of institutional factors such as unionization, and far more than globalization and technological change combined.
For the sake of economic growth, social mobility and political stability, we must think more boldly about reforging the connection between compensation and productivity. That connection must be accepted as a goal—and norm—across the economy. And to make it real, we should link the tax rates individual firms pay to the compensation strategies they adopt. The point is simple: Firms can either share productivity gains with their workers—or contribute to the public programs made necessary by their failure to do so.
Any program of this sort will elicit howls of protest. We live in a hypercompetitive global economy, many private-sector leaders will say, and the slow growth of compensation is a necessary response to it.
But the facts do not support this argument. According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, corporate profits have reached their highest point as a share of GDP in the entire postwar period, and maybe ever. Meanwhile, unable to identify productive new investments, many firms are using their profits to buy back their stock.
Our problem isn't a shortage of capital; it's the weakness of demand. We'd all be better off in the long run if workers' compensation grew along with productivity. And so would our country.
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