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As I have said innumerable times - 'bring Arabs together for a unity meeting and you create disunity.' It is in their hot blooded temperament and tribal culture to hate each other and to argue. (See 1 below.)
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As I just wrote in a previous memo. (See 2 below.)
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More crappy give away ideas from a president who just cannot stop dispensing your money to others in order to buy votes and popularity from those 'Stupid Americans." (See 3 below.)
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One French Prime Minister has guts! (See 4 Below.)
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Roubini on oil prices. (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1) IN GAZA, HAMAS AND THE PA ARE AT EACH OTHER'S THROATS AGAIN
The non-payment of salaries and poor economic conditions are fueling unrest in the Strip, while Israel’s withholding of PA tax revenue isn’t helping in the West Bank either
By the end of last week, dozens of houses throughout the Gaza Strip were flooded by rainwater. Three babies froze to death. The humanitarian conditions continue to be bad, perhaps the worst in the past two decades, due to the withholding of the salaries of PA and Hamas employees. And yet, amid all the tumult, Hamas (the same organization that condemned the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris) found the time to clash with the Palestinian Authority and Fatah
It started before the last rainfall, with a visit of the Palestinian unity government ministers to Gaza that ended in bitter disappointment for the residents there. Senior Hamas official Moussa Abu Marzouk promised that all disputes between Hamas and the PA were resolved. However, immediately afterward, a PA statement declared that nothing had been decided. From there on, things began to deteriorate quickly.
The transfer of authority at an Israel-Gaza checkpoint is a case in point. Up until last week, Hamas administered its own checkpoint, called Arba-Arba (4-4), a kilometer south of the official Palestinian checkpoint near the Erez Crossing with Israel. The official checkpoint, which is called Hamsa-Hamsa (5-5), has been manned by PA representatives working under the Palestinian Civil Affairs Ministry. According to the arrangement, Hamas would check every Palestinian arriving from or leaving to Israel, as would the PA.
Last week, though, Hamas decided to open another checkpoint at Hamsa-Hamsa and erected a makeshift office there staffed by members of Hamas. The PA then decided to evacuate the site, and since then, only patients seeking urgent medical care in Israel or the West Bank are allowed to cross at Erez.
Meanwhile, Hamas has launched a comprehensive campaign to arrest Fatah members in the Gaza Strip. Over the weekend, several ATMs were smashed in several branches of the Bank of Palestine — intended as a warning to the PA lest it seek to pay the salaries of PA employees without paying the workers of the Hamas government as well.
In addition, a bomb went off next to the home of Ihab Bsiso, the spokesman for the nominal Hamas-Fatas unity government who currently resides in the West Bank (and is originally from Gaza), and the offices of a PA media company were torched.
Residents of Gaza told The Times of Israel that the situation was similar to the one that immediately preceded the 50-day summer conflict. They meant that just like then, there have no salary payments, Hamas has demolished and closed down ATMs to prevent the payments to PA workers, and the humanitarian situation is in decline.
With that, Hamas has told the press in no uncertain terms that it is not seeking confrontation with Israel. At this juncture, when the transfer of construction building materials into the Gaza Strip is advancing, as are the exports of produce, it’s doubtful Hamas has any real interest in another war. The Gaza organization’s problem is primarily with the PA, which is not prepared to take dramatic steps so long as Hamas won’t give up its leadership of the Strip.
The potential of an escalation with Israel exists, but it’s possible that right now, the danger is more immediate in the West Bank. Israel’s decision to freeze the transfer of tax funds to the PA — in response to Mahmoud Abbas’s move to join the International Criminal Court — is preventing the payment of salaries to its workers, primarily in the West Bank, but in Gaza as well.
These salaries are the dominant driving force of the Palestinian economy in the West Bank, and withholding the funds only exacerbates the crisis. It’s conceivable that the PA will ultimately find a temporary solution, perhaps by borrowing the money from one of the Gulf states. But if the funds continue to be withheld, it will certainly not quell the tensions. Among the Palestinian public, animosity toward Israel is only getting worse, and the PA’s motivation to cooperate with Israeli security forces is faltering.
For now, the security cooperation has been upheld, despite threats to call it off following the death of a Palestinian official after a demonstration in early December, but in the long term, Israel has many causes for concern, even as elections here loom.
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2) Immigration and Islam: Europe’s Crisis of Faith
France and the rest of Western Europe have never honestly confronted the is
sues raised by Muslim immigration
Two women talk as police officers stand in front of the courthouse in Meaux, near Paris, on Sept. 22, 2011. The court convicted two other women for publicly wearing Islamic veils; France banned face coverings earlier that year. EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY
The terrorist assault on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Jan. 7 may have been organized by al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. But the attack, along with another at a Paris kosher market days later, was carried out by French Muslims descended from recent waves of North African and West African immigration. Well before the attacks, which left 17 dead, the French were discussing the possibility that tensions with the country’s own Muslim community were leading France toward some kind of armed confrontation.
Consider Éric Zemmour, a slashing television debater and a gifted polemicist. His history of the collapse of France’s postwar political order, “Le suicide français,” was No. 1 on the best-seller lists for several weeks this fall. “Today, our elites think it’s France that needs to change to suit Islam, and not the other way around,” Mr. Zemmour said on a late-night talk show in October, “and I think that with this system, we’re headed toward civil war.”
More recently, Michel Houellebecq published “Submission,” a novel set in the near future. In it, the re-election of France’s current president, François Hollande, has drawn recruits to a shadowy group proclaiming its European identity. “Sooner or later, civil war between Muslims and the rest of the population is inevitable,” a sympathizer explains. “They draw the conclusion that the sooner this war begins, the better chance they’ll have of winning it.” Published, as it happened, on the morning of the attacks, Mr. Houellebecq’s novel replaced Mr. Zemmour’s at the top of the best-seller list, where it remains.
Two days after the Charlie Hebdo killings, there was a disturbing indication on Le Monde’s website of how French people were thinking. One item about the killing vastly outpaced all others in popularity. The reactions of Europe’s leaders was shared about 5,000 times, tales of Muslim schoolchildren with mixed feelings about 6,000, a detailed account of the Charlie Hebdo editorial meeting ended by the attack, 9,000. Topping them all, shared 28,000 times, was a story about reprisals: “Mosques become targets, French Muslims uneasy.” Those clicks are the sound of French fear that something larger may be under way.
Marine Le Pen of France’s Front National acknowledges supporters on Nov. 30. Populist parties are rising across Europe as voters feel abandoned by the mainstream political class. GETTY IMAGES
France’s problem has elements of a military threat, a religious conflict and a violent civil-rights movement. It is not unique. Every country of Western Europe has a version. For a half-century, millions of immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa have arrived, lured by work, welfare, marriage and a refuge from war. There are about 20 million Muslims in Europe, with some 5 million of them in France, according to the demographer Michèle Tribalat. That amounts to roughly 8% of the population of France, compared with about 5% of both the U.K. and Germany.
Europeans drew the wrong lessons from the American civil-rights movement. In the U.S., there was race and there was immigration. They were separate matters that could (at least until recently) be disentangled by people of good faith. In Europe, the two problems have long been inseparable. Voters who worried about immigration were widely accused of racism, or later of “Islamophobia.”
In France, antiracism set itself squarely against freedom of speech. The passage of the 1990 Gayssot Law, which punished denial of the Holocaust, was a watershed. Activist lobbies sought to expand such protections by limiting discussion of a variety of historical events—the slave trade, colonialism, foreign genocides. This was backed up by institutional muscle. In the 1980s, President François Mitterrand’s Socialist party created a nongovernmental organization called SOS Racisme to rally minority voters and to hound those who worked against their interests.
Older bodies such as the communist-inspired Movement against Racism and for Friendship Among the Peoples made a specialty of threatening (and sometimes carrying out) lawsuits against European intellectuals for the slightest trespasses against political correctness: the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci for her post-9/11 lament “The Rage and the Pride,” the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut for doubting that the 2005 riots in France’s suburban ghettos were due to unemployment, the Russia scholar Hélène Carrère d’Encausse for speculating about the role of polygamy in the problems of West African immigrants.
Speech codes have done little to facilitate entry into the workforce for immigrants and their children or to reduce crime. But they have intimidated European voting publics, insulated politicians from criticism and turned certain crucial matters into taboos. Immigrant and ethnic issues have become tightly bound to the issue of building the multinational European Union, which has removed vast areas of policy from voter accountability. “Anti-European” sentiments continue to rise.
A woman holds up a sign that says, ‘I am Charlie, I am Jewish, I am a Muslim, I am French’ during a rally in Paris on Jan. 11. AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
So impressed were the Europeans with their own generosity that they failed to notice that the population of second- and third-generation immigrants was growing bigger, stronger, more unified and less inclined to take moral instruction. This is partly a demographic problem. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Western Europe has had some of the lowest birthrates of any civilization on record. Without immigration, Europe’s population would fall by a hundred million by midcentury, according to U.N. estimates.
When mass immigration began, Europeans did not give much thought to the influence of Islam. In the 1960s, there might have been worries that a North African was, say, a Nasserite Arab nationalist, but not that he was a would-be jihadist. Too many Europeans forgot that people carry a long past within them—and that, even when they do not, they sometimes wish to. Materialistic, acquisitive, averse to God and family, Europe’s culture appeared cold, dead and unsatisfying to many Muslims. It failed to satisfy a lot of non-Muslims too, but until they ran out of borrowed money with the 2008 crash, they could avoid facing it squarely.
Europeans didn’t know enough about the cultural background of Muslims to browbeat them the same way they did the native-born. Muslims felt none of the historic guilt over fascism and colonialism that so affected non-Muslim Europeans. They had a freedom of political action that Europeans lacked.
As European politics grew duller and the stakes lower, many political romantics looked enviously at the aspirations of the Muslim poor, particularly regarding Palestine. You could see a hint of this last weekend in the BBC journalist who interrupted a mourning Frenchwoman, distraught about the targeting of Jews for murder at a kosher supermarket, to say that “the Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands.”
In a world that prized “identity,” Muslim immigrants were aristocrats. Those who became radicalized developed the most monstrous kind of self-regard. A chilling moment in the most recent terrorist drama came when the TV network RTL phoned the kosher supermarket where the Malian-French hostage-taker, Amedy Coulibaly, was holding his victims at gunpoint. He refused to talk but hung up the phone carelessly. The newspaper Le Monde was able to publish a transcript of the strutting stupidity to which he then gave expression:
“They’re always trying to make you believe that Muslims are terrorists. Me, I’m born in France. If they hadn’t been attacked elsewhere, I wouldn’t be here…Think of the people who had Bashar al-Assad in Syria. They were torturing people…We didn’t intervene for years…Then bombers, coalition of 50,000 countries, all that…Why did they do that?”
The Muslim community is not to be confused with the terrorists it produces. But left to its own, it probably lacks the means, the inclination and the courage to stand up to the faction, however small, that supports terrorism. In 1995, there were riots among French Muslims after the arrest of Khalid Kelkal of Lyon, who had planted several bombs—in a train station, near a Jewish school, on a high-speed rail track. In 2012, when Mohamed Merah of Toulouse was killed by police after having gunned down soldiers, a rabbi and three Jewish elementary-school children, his brother professed himself “proud,” and his father threatened to file a wrongful-death suit against the government.
Populist parties like the U.K. Independence Party wind up, by voter demand, placing immigration and multiculturalism at the center of their concerns. PA WIRE/ZUMA PRESS
And when Charlie Hebdo printed a memorial cover this week that had a picture of its controversial cartoon character “Muhammad” on it, it was as if the attacks had never happened: Muslim community spokesmen, even moderate ones, issued dire warnings about the insult to them and their coreligionists. To many Muslims in France and the rest of Europe, the new drawings were evidence not that the terrorists had failed to kill a magazine but that the French had failed to heed a warning. Impressive though the post-attack memorial marches were, “the working classes and the North African and West African immigrant kids weren’t there,” as the president of France’s Young Socialists told the newspaper Le Temps.
It may seem harsh to criticize the French in their time of grief, but they are responding today with tools that have failed them in previous crises. They reflexively look at their own supposed bigotry as always, somehow, the ultimate cause of Islamist terrorism, and they limit their efforts to making minority communities feel more at home.
The mysterious riots of 2005 in France—which lasted for almost three weeks, during which the rioters made no claims and put forward no leaders—were chalked up to deprivation. The French media responded with an effort to hire more nonwhite news anchors and reporters, and the government promised to spend more in the suburbs. Now, after the murders in Paris, the contradictions continue to accumulate:
• On religion: Mr. Hollande has insisted that the attacks have “nothing to do with Islam.” At the same time, Prime Minister Manuel Valls speaks of “moderate Islam” and rails against “conservatism and obscurantism”—as if the violence had everything to do with Islam, and even with religious devotion in general.
• On spying: Some in the French government blame intelligence failures, since the secret services tracked the Charlie Hebdo killers Said and Chérif Kouachi until last summer. But government officials boast of about their principled unwillingness to legislate a “Patriot Act a la française”—even as they draw daily on intelligence gathered by the U.S.
• On religious hatred: Justice Minister Christiane Taubira has announced an all-out assault on “racism and anti-Semitism,” promising that those who attack others because of their religion will be fought “with rigor and resolve.” In theory, this sounds like a promise to protect Jewish shoppers from getting killed at their neighborhood grocery stores. In practice, it will mean placing limits on any inquiry into the inner dynamics of Muslim communities and may wind up increasing the terrorist threat rather than diminishing it.
What continues is the deafness of France’s government and mainstream parties to public opinion (and popular suffrage) on the issues of immigration and a multiethnic society. Mr. Hollande’s approval ratings have risen since the attacks, but they are still below 30%. In January 2013, according to the newsweekly L’Express, 74% of the French said that Islam “is not compatible with French society.” Though that number fell last year, it is almost certain to be higher now.
Voters all across Europe feel abandoned by the mainstream political class, which is why populist parties are everywhere on the rise. Whatever the biggest initial grievance of these parties—opposition to the European Union for the U.K. Independence Party, opposition to the euro for Alternative für Deutschland, corruption for Italy’s 5 Star Movement—all wind up, by voter demand, placing immigration and multiculturalism at the center of their concerns.
In France, it is the Front National, a party with antecedents on the far right, that has been the big beneficiary. In the last national election, for seats in the European Parliament, the FN, led by Marine Le Pen (daughter of the party’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen), topped the polls. But the ruling Socialists froze the Front National out of the recent national ceremonies of mourning, limiting participation in the Paris rally to those parties it deemed “republican.” This risks damaging the cause of republicanism more than the cause of Le Pen and her followers.
Acts of terrorism can occur without shaking a country to its core. These latest attacks, awful as they were, could be taken in stride if the majority in France felt itself secure. But it does not. Thanks to wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, thousands of young people who share the indignation of the Kouachis and Coulibaly are now battle-hardened and heavily armed.
France, like Europe more broadly, has been careless for decades. It has not recognized that free countries are for peoples strong enough to defend them. A willingness to join hands and to march in solidarity is a good first response to the awful events of early January. It will not be enough.
Mr. Caldwell is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West.”
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3) Obama's Bogus Community College Giveaway
President Barack Obama can’t resist the temptation to gin up new entitlements that chase votes but make problems worse — free tuition at community colleges would be no exception.
The president proposes to offer states 75 percent in matching federal money to refund tuition.
Community colleges would have to offer programs that permit students to either transfer to four-year colleges with half the credits needed for a bachelor’s degree or award a vocational certificate in demand by employers. Students would have to maintain a C average.
This would simply pour money onto failing diploma mills. The three-year graduation rates at public two-year institutions is 21 percent — about one-third the rate for two-year non-profit and for profit schools, and much less than the 59 percent six-year graduation rate at four-year institutions.
Many community colleges do provide good job training in areas such as nursing, information technology and security. However, too many have been starved for funds as states have devoted more resources to K-12 education and entitlements like Medicaid. And community colleges are staffed by bureaucrats, who too often are not particularly adroit at identifying private sector needs and fashioning classrooms to jobs programs.
Too many students are ushered into less-expensive to staff programs aimed at transferring into four-year colleges — but the standards are often not high enough.
Many state universities are required to honor credits awarded at community colleges when the course numbers match up, but many transfer students are simply not competitive. Colleges either must create special programs to accommodate them, or professors must look the other way and award passing grades for quite marginal work — and less.
Top students at universities like mine — as measured by graduate school entrance tests and performance — are as well educated as most Ivy League students — but processing too many community college transfers depreciates the value of our diplomas.
Community colleges admit too many students with deficient high school records and preparation, intractable personal problems, and poor study habits and executive skills.
Marginal students — for example, those with a gap in math, writing or study skills — can be helped. However, remedial programs and counseling won’t do much for a 19-year old mother — who receives no child support — reads at the sixth grade level, can’t do algebra and has significant emotional and self-esteem issues. Yet, that is exactly who the president proposes to send to college.
Too many job seekers don’t have the skills businesses need but pushing more dysfunctional students into community college won’t help.
Starved for funds, those institutions will simply game the system — enroll more students in programs aimed at transferring to four-year colleges and award more B’s and C’s in watered-down courses. Universities like mine will face enormous political pressure from “progressive” state lawmakers to accept the transfers, award questionable degrees and generally join in the fraud.
Historically, some of the best jobs training programs have been offered by businesses through industry apprenticeship programs — most notably in manufacturing and construction.
However, buffeted by the Great Recession and tough competition from Asia, those have dwindled and businesses increasingly expect community colleges to perform in ways they can’t.
Less noticed in the president’s proposal is an American Technical Training Fund that would subsidize partnerships between businesses and community colleges and private training institutions that demonstrate they move students from classrooms into good jobs.
Such hands-on programs are often more helpful to students with spotty high school records.
Those have more structure and don’t require students to write essays about Chaucer or affirm a left-wing professor’s feminist critique of capitalism. They simply impart skills.
Rather than expanding useless liberal arts programs, ATTF grants could improve the quality of what goes on in both community colleges and private training institutions at a lot less cost.
America doesn’t need any more bogus BAs in art history, but it could sure use a few more welders.
Peter Morici is an economist and professor at the University of Maryland and a national columnist. He tweets @pmorici1
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4)
THE ONE RIGHTEOUS MAN
French Prime Minister smashes European denial
with a ferocious call to arms against antisemitism
For 15 years, Europe has denied, obfuscated, and ignored the rise of virulent antisemitism on the continent. As its Jews struggled against hatred, violence, and murder, governments and authorities looked the other way.
That era is now over. One man has smashed European denial into a thousand pieces.
Manuel Valls, the prime minister of France, in an addressto the French National Assembly, has issued a ferocious and unprecedented call to arms against antisemitism.
"The first question that has to be clearly dealt with is the struggle against antisemitism," he told the Assembly,
History has taught us that the awakening of antisemitism is the symptom of a crisis for democracy and of a crisis for the Republic. That is why we must respond with force. Since Ilan Halimi in 2006, after the crimes of Toulouse, antisemitic acts in France have grown to an intolerable degree. The words, the insults, the gestures, the shameful attacks ... did not not produce the national outrage that our Jewish compatriots expected.
Valls connected the problem to the entirety of modern French and European history, including the Holocaust, asking,
How can we accept that in France, where the Jews were emancipated two centuries ago, but which was also where they were martyred 70 years ago, how can we accept that cries of “death to the Jews” can be heard on the streets? ... This is not acceptable and I say to the people in general who perhaps have not reacted sufficiently up to now, and to our Jewish compatriots, that this time it cannot be accepted, that we must stand up and say what’s really going on.
Even more astounding was the fact that Valls refused to shy away from the fact that antisemitism under the guise of anti-Israel activism is still antisemitism, something European authorities have refused to acknowledge for decades.
"There is a historical antisemitism that goes back centuries," he said,
but there is also a new antsemitism that is born in our neighborhoods, coming through the internet, satellite dishes, against the backdrop of the loathing of the State of Israel, and which advocates hatred of the Jews and all the Jews. It has to be spelled out, the right words must be used to fight this unacceptable antisemitism.
He also did not shy away from the source of much of this antisemitism - the Muslim community - asking, "How can we accept that in certain schools and colleges the Holocaust can’t be taught? How can we accept that when a child is asked, 'Who is your enemy' the response is 'the Jew?'"
To allow the Jews to be exiled from France because of antisemitic violence, said Valls, would destroy France itself; and he broke the final taboo by blasting his fellow countrymen - and himself - for failing to act effectively against such an outcome.
"Without its Jews," he asserted,
France would not be France, this is the message we have to communicate loud and clear. We haven’t done so. We haven’t shown enough outrage. When the Jews of France are attacked France is attacked, the conscience of humanity is attacked. Let us never forget it.
Valls' speech is simply unprecedented in its clarity, intensity, and - yes - courage. The question now is
whether France and all of Europe will heed his words.
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5)Roubini: Oil Prices Likely to Rebound in 12 to 18 Months
By Dan Weil
Oil prices have plunged 55 percent since late June, but New York University economist Nouriel Roubini doesn't expect the slump to last too long.
He says Saudi Arabia's strategy of refraining from production cuts makes sense. "Their behavior is like a typical oligopoly using predatory pricing," he said at a conference Tuesday, Fortune reports.
"If you keep prices low for long enough, you get rid of those who are high marginal-cost producers, whether it's shale gas and oil, or Russia, or Venezuela, you name it." Experts say U.S. shale oil production is uneconomical below $60 to $70 a barrel.
"You . . . continue to increase capacity," Roubini said of Saudi Arabia. "That's going to lead to everybody else to under invest in increasing capacity."
The result?
"In the short term, you have lower oil prices, but in the medium term you've flushed out your competition," he explained. "You take the pain for the next 12 to 18 months, but the result is higher prices and market share down the road."
The price will have mixed effects on economies, says Bill Greiner, chief investment strategist of Mariner Holdings.
"The economic growth of nations consuming oil will benefit mightily at the expense of oil-producing nations," he wrote in an article for Forbes.
The effects will be mixed within some economies too, Greiner noted.
"Segments of our domestic economy will struggle. Capital spending growth will be stunted. Segments of the high-yield fixed income market will struggle," he explained.
But consumers will benefit, as falling gasoline prices boost their spending power. U.S. families on average spend 4 percent of their income on gas, Greiner notes.
"The bonus of falling gasoline prices (and heating oil, and natural gas) should provide stimulus to overall consumption patterns in 2015."
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