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Stuck Between All Sides: A Young Woman Reflects on the War in Gaza

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2023 //
8

I discovered this post by a young Jewish woman about her reaction to the conflict in the Middle East. This was the post that helped me formulate my own views because I resonated with hers.

Rose Win is a blogger and digital nomad. She recently settled in Boulder, Colorado after two years of writing and traveling solo around the country. She grew up in Seattle and lived in Israel as a child and young adult. She shares here her reflections on the state of the war in Gaza.

She writes:

I wrote in my last post that I have been plagued by writer’s block. That is true, to an extent. There have been a lot of stories in the past couple of months I’ve wanted to write about. My parents came for Thanksgiving. Karina visited. I went back to San Marcos to see Kasey and Evie. I joined a rock climbing gym. I got deathly ill. One subject, however, has stood in my way like a giant, impenetrable barrier. War.

I can’t get past it. Everything else seems ridiculous, and trivial, and out of touch in comparison.

Specifically, I’m talking about the war in Gaza. I don’t know how many drafts I’ve written trying to cohere my thoughts, distill my feelings. My head swims and my heart aches, but I can’t find ethical, or intellectual, or emotional clarity. I keep getting stuck in a labyrinth of contradiction, locked between layers of devastation. So this post is a mishmash, a dumping, a meandering reflection of the competing and overlapping circles in my head.

The foundational layer of devastation, as I wrote before, is the sadistic slaughter of Jewish lives. The maiming, the raping, the abducting, the wholesale massacring. From there emerge the layers wrought by the world’s response. The mindboggling, Orwellian universe where murder becomes a “justified act of resistance,” where killers are “victims of oppression,” and rapists are “freedom fighters.” Or maybe they’re not rapists at all, because for some reason, violence against Jewish women isn’t believable. For some reason, Jewish women need to make their own pathetic hashtag to be heard: #MeTooUnlessYoureAJew.

There’s a new layer of consciousness: the sickening realization that the antisemitism of the 20th century never went away. It just lay dormant, hidden under the surface – waiting for the right opportunity to shapeshift and rear its ugly head. “The Jews are parasites living on other people’s lands. They deserve to die,” said the antisemites of the 20th century. “The Jews are occupiers of other people’s lands. They deserve to die,” say the antisemites of the 21st century.

There’s the hubris of the left which, using the lens of intersectionality, casts the war in racialized terms, white people oppressing brown people. Never mind that more than half of Israel’s Jews are “brown,” hailing from Arab counties that expelled, or, “ethnically cleansed” their Jewish populations in the late 1940s and 1950s following Israel’s creation.

Today’s liberal college campuses preach “language is violence.” Students police speech to minimize “harm.” Except speech against Jews. Because for some reason saying “genocide to Jews” is not violent, or hateful, or harmful. For some reason, chanting genocide to Jews is okay “depending on the context.”

I watch people condemn Israel for committing genocide against Palestinians. I’d like to know why Hamas’ charter, which, in no uncertain terms calls for the annihilation of the Jews and the establishment of an Islamist state in Israel, is not also condemned as genocidal? Why are the Palestinians seen as the rightful, indigenous inhabitants of the land when the Jews, whose presence predates the Palestinians, are not? Why is it that, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Jews were the world’s refugees, but following the creation of the state of Israel, they are the world’s most reviled colonizers? Why is a Jewish state with a Palestinian minority deemed racist, but a Palestinian state with a Jewish minority deemed righteous?

The questions seem simple. The answers are anything but. I want to defend Israel. I want to rage at the hypocrisy and blatant double standards. But I’m stopped. I can’t. Because look at Gaza. Neighborhoods razed to the ground. Wholesale cities decimated. Thousands and upon thousands of women and children dead. Eighty percent of the population displaced – facing polluted water, starvation, overcrowding, flooding, freezing, and rampant disease.

Israel told over a million people in northern Gaza to flee to the south. Then they bombed the south. “Gaza becomes a graveyard for children” reads one headline. “Nowhere is safe” says the next. Here’s another: “We have the right to live.”

I want to demand “ceasefire now!” because this level of humanitarian catastrophe is so breathtakingly horrific it’s hard to even fathom. Because this level of collective punishment cannot be justified. Because this destruction, this sheer loss of civilian life, cannot go on.

I want to demand “ceasefire now” because I despise Benjamin Netanyahu and the thugs and zealots that rule his repulsive right-wing government. Netanyahu is cut from the same cloth as Putin. He knows Israel holds him responsible for the attacks on Oct 7. The end of the war spells his demise. So, the war will wage on. Because narcissistic demagogues never willingly cede power.

I want to demand “ceasefire now.” But I haven’t.

Does a ceasefire mean Hamas will remilitarize – rearm and resume its genocidal charter to wipe out the Jews? Does a ceasefire leave Hamas’ sprawling tunnel system – built underneath hospitals, grocery stores, schools, universities, private homes, and graveyards – intact so they can infiltrate Israel and terrorize its citizens again? Does a ceasefire condemn the remaining 115 Israeli hostages to death? Does a ceasefire send a message to other Arab countries, waiting in the wings, that Israel is weak, and the Jewish state can be destroyed?

Are any of these questions justifiable? I don’t know. I don’t know.

When the world accuses Israel of being an apartheid state, I want to push back. Apartheid refers to the brutal system of institutionalized racial segregation in South Africa. Israel, albeit flawed, is a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, muti-cultural democratic state, where a fifth of the population isn’t Jewish yet has the same civil and legal rights as every other citizen.

But. That only rings true for those living within Israel’s green line – the 1949 armistice border. Following the war of 1967, Israel gained the Golan Heights from Syria, Gaza from Egypt, and the West Bank from Jordan. With the exception of Gaza, where Israel pulled out in 2005, those territories have been occupied ever since (though Israel, along with Egypt, maintained control over Gaza’s borders).

Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is illegal under international law. It never annexed the West Bank, because giving Palestinians Israeli citizenship would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state. So one Israeli government after the next left Palestinians in stateless limbo, while sanctioning illegal Jewish settlement construction that zig-zagged through contiguous territory and punctured holes through the dream of Palestinian statehood. All the while Israel offered Jewish settlers – often messianic, often self-righteous, often violent – full rights of Israeli citizenship and subjected Palestinians to military rule.

So, yes, Israel can claim it’s the only pluralistic democracy in the Middle East. But also, no, it cannot.

In his book documenting bereaved families of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, author Colum McCann talked about his decision to title his book Apeirogon:

“Apeirogon is a weird word, I know. An apeirogon can’t really be drawn, it can only be suggested… But I loved it from the moment I heard about it. The idea that it had an infinite number of sides was attractive to me because I knew it wasn’t a two-sided situation, that it wasn’t balanced.”

This is how I feel when I write and think about Israel. Sides upon sides upon sides upon sides. Overlapping truths. Overlapping contradictions. Questions without answers. Problems without solutions.

There’s a reason why I’ve written draft after draft after draft. Everywhere I turn I’m stuck. I want to take a stand, but every stand I take conflicts with another. That’s why I haven’t written. That’s why I must write.

Categories Injustice, International, Justice, Personal

An Israeli Professor at Yale Denounces Efforts to Squelch Palestinian Protests and Harass University Leaders

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2023 //
31

Naftali Kaminski is a professor of medicine at Yale University and an Israeli. He speaks out here in the Israeli publication Haaretz against efforts to shut down Palestinian protests, as well as the vilification of university presidents who insist on free speech.

Dr. Kaminski writes:

In the flurry of denouncements, op-eds, and social media posts that followed the testimony in Congress by three elite university presidents’, the subsequent resignation of Elizabeth MaGill president of the University of Pennsylvania, and the unprecedented congressional resolution calling on Harvard President Claudine Gay and MIT President Sally Kornbluth to also resign, a picture began to emerge, one that eerily reminded me of a poem we read when I was a boy in Israel.

The poem, written in 1943 by Nathan Alterman, one of Israel’s most beloved poets, uses the Greek philosopher Archimedes’ statement about the law of the lever “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth” as a metaphor for the role of antisemitism in politics. He suggests demagogues and tyrants use antisemitism as the ultimate “Archimedean Point”, a leverage point allowing them to achieve their most outrageous goals.

This, I think, is what we are experiencing, but now the Archimedean Point is the claim that university presidents are “not doing enough about antisemitism”. It is used with the immediate aim of suppressing pro-Palestinian voices as well as the strategic and, as now is being more explicitly stated, long- term ominous aim of reversing progress towards diversity, equity and inclusion at American universities.

I am aware this is a far-reaching statement. As an Israeli, a son to Holocaust survivors, my family history is one of oppression, discrimination, and genocide. Before joining Yale, my family lived in Pittsburgh and were members of the Tree of Life congregation in Pittsburgh, site of the deadliest attack ever on Jews on American soil.

The Hamas atrocities of October 7 triggered fears and thoughts I never thought I had. I find displays of support or efforts to minimize them despicable. I fear the rise of antisemitism in the U.S. and believe it should be fought. I also feel that the current rage against university presidents of elite institutions is not indeed targeting antisemitism. And this feeling is colored by my own experiences in the last few months.

Waking up on that cursed morning in October and hearing about the Hamas attacks, I was immediately caught up in a flood of communication as I frantically sought to confirm that friends and family in Israel were safe, offer help, sympathy, horror and support.

But then I received a different kind of message myself. It was from an American Jewish faculty member at Yale. There was no expression of concern or empathy, no check-in about my well-being or the safety of my friends and family. Instead, it spoke about “Yale antisemites” and requested we “act preemptively” to “alert” Yale leaders. The message suggested a campaign of letter writing. It was obvious to me its intention to help foster an atmosphere that would label any pro-Palestinian expressions as antisemitic.

That message and those that followed were deeply distressing to me. They sounded as if they assumed that the president of Yale, himself Jewish with strong ties to Israel, would not do anything unless cajoled and pressed. There was never an expression of concern about me, or other Israelis on campus, except in one context – fighting the perceived threat of antisemitism by using the horrors to score ideological points.

In the following days, as the unfathomable extent of Hamas atrocities was coming to light, my attention was all on the suffering and killing in the region. I helped the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Office at Yale School of Medicine organize a solidarity event in which Israeli members of the Yale community who had family or friends who were victims of October 7 attack spoke, and shared their experiences. The event was well publicized and attended and supported by leadership.

On subsequent days, I was on a previously scheduled lecture tour — five talks in ten days at different institutions and venues. I felt I could not simply speak about science and medicine, and decided to start each talk by introducing myself as a Jewish Israeli, and saying “I am shocked and infuriated by the atrocities launched last week in southern Israel, I am also deeply concerned and horrified by the ongoing violence and exponentially escalating threat to civilians in the region. I hope and pray that violence ends, those abducted are released and threats to civilians are stopped and that all people in the region, regardless of ethnic or religious identity, will finally be allowed to live in peace, freedom, and dignity.” The statement was accepted nearly universally with applause.

In the meantime, at Yale, there were pro-Palestinian demonstrations, pro-Israeli vigils, as well as educational events; I did not attend most, and if I did, I might have probably not agreed with everything said, but I doubt I would feel unsafe. Indeed, despite the attempts by some provocateurs, the events were decidedly non-violent. On one Friday, at the Beinecke Plaza at Yale, there were three contrasting events, including an Israeli Palestinian Humanity vigil, attended by Israelis and Palestinians on campus, but there were no conflicts or arguments. There were no calls for genocide or threats of violence.

At the Yale-Harvard football game, I was walking to my seat, when a pro-Palestinian protest erupted; the students waved flags, chanted their slogans, but there was no sense of threat. There was definitely no call for genocide for Jews. Some in the crowd cursed the protesters and one even spit at them, but they did not respond, and the protest ended with the opposing students staging a walk out.

On that day I also saw the infamous doxing van, showing photos of young students, naming them as Harvard or Yale’s top antisemites. I felt it was a blatant and despicable “attempt to intimidate and harass” students as Yale’s president said.

At a panel discussion on the Public Health Implications of the Israeli-Gaza war, at Yale’s School of Public Health, discussions were concrete, professional and somber. One heckler was quickly silenced, and the rest of the event was very civil. This past Saturday, a pro-Palestinian protester hung briefly a Palestinian flag on a public Hanukkah Menorah in New Haven. The protester quickly removed it at the urging of other participants in the protest. This event met with wide condemnation by the organizers of the protest, Yale president and local officials, and local vigils were held in response

On social media, I have received multiple solidarity notices from colleagues and friends, Jewish and Muslim, Israeli and Palestinian. I have gotten some antisemitic responses, but mostly from bots. Notably, most of the personal attacks I experienced were from self-proclaimed friends of Israel, even colleagues of mine, especially when I expressed support for the first ceasefire and hostages release, when I expressed concerns about the toll on Gazan civilians from Israel’s response or when I mentioned that Palestinians in the West Bank were targets of an unprecedented wave of violent attacks by Jewish settlers.

When one such acquaintance attacked me, I did not hold back, and reminded them that unlike them, I had served in the Israel Defense Forces, and had saved Israeli lives as a physician. The argument ended there, but I couldn’t help but reflect, if this was how I was treated as an Israeli, a tenured professor, how are Palestinians being treated? Are they silenced by the fear of being tagged as antisemitic, for expressing their anguish?

I am not making this digression to dismiss or minimize the rise of antisemitism or threat and isolation of Jewish faculty, staff and students feel, but to highlight how my own experience allowed me to realize that the anguish experienced by Jewish students and communities has been weaponized to suppress and delegitimize pro-Palestinian voices.

Moreover, and worse, for some groups this looked like the perfect opportunity to reverse the progress American Academia has made towards more diversity, inclusion and equity. And now this coalition of populists, rich donors, politicians known to be enemies of science and democracy and other bigots, is feverishly hoping that their Archimedean point will bring them a first achievement: the reversal of one of most impressive achievements for equity for women in recent American academic life – by forcing the presidents of Penn, Harvard and MIT to resign.

Watching that congressional hearing felt like revisiting the public hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the McCarthy Years. The presidents made powerful statements, expressed shock at Hamas atrocities, denounced antisemitism and described actions they took on campus. But what followed was a highly orchestrated circus, with targeted questions, aimed to trap them into indefensible answers. In the public eye, the five-hour hearing, crystalized into 30-second viral clips, based on misrepresentations and lack of nuance made the university presidents look indecisive and equivocal, while their previous statements and actions were not.

And when I watched the public shaming of these amazingly accomplished women, one voice kept ringing in my head, that of Counsel Joseph Welch words to Joseph McCarthy “Have you no sense of decency?”.

I hope the decision by Harvard to retain President Claudine Gay, despite the powerful campaign and false allegations against her, will once be remembered the same way Joseph Welch’s statement is now remembered, a turning point. A moment in which voices of reason, rejected the use of the justified fear of antisemitism as an Archimedean Point, and allowed all of us to focus on continuing making our universities and colleges more diverse, equitable, inclusive, and safe for all.

Naftali Kaminski MD is an Israeli Physician-Scientist and Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology at Yale University School of Medicine. On Twitter/X @KaminskiMed 

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Education Reform, Higher Education, International

John Thompson: Why Does the Media Love to Publish Bad News about our Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2023 //
20

John Thompson, retired teacher and historian in Oklahoma, noticed that the mainstream media loves bad news about public schools. Even when the news is good, the media somehow twist it into an indictment of public schools, teachers, and/or kids today. This drumbeat of negative coverage feeds into the narrative of the privatizers like DeVos and Koch. The latest example, he notes, are the recently reported scores from an international test.

He writes:

I recently wrote about the two tales of the Oklahoma school Report Card – the alt facts used by State Superintendent Ryan Walters to disparage public education, and the more nuanced view of a serious journalist. This is about the more subtle, but more important, two tales of the OECD’s PISA test scores.

I have become more worried that the newspapers I most respect are paying more attention to winners and losers of edu-political horse races, as opposed to the complexities of public schooling. Then, it was called to my attention by The Grade that “big international wire services tended to emphasize the dismal overall results (Reuters, A.P.). Mainstream national outlets tended to highlight the poor showing from U.S. kids, especially when it comes to math (New York Times, Washington Post, Axios).”So, I followed its links.

I also worry that this might be part of a larger pattern where the press is paying relatively more attention to polling data and attention-grabbing bad news for the Biden administration, such as inflation, immigration, and populist anger, and under-reporting the often more upsetting, complex, problems in other affluent nations.

Starting with the A.P. coverage, it began with “the average international math score [which] fell by the equivalent of three-quarters of a year of learning. Reading scores fell by the equivalent of half a year.” Granted, there are flaws in the way that those numbers are reached, but these “setbacks spanned nations rich and poor, big and small, with few making progress.” And the A.P. quickly noted that Germany, Iceland and the Netherlands “saw drops of 25 points or more in math scores.”

Then, it reported, “In the U.S., which historically has lagged in math, the average math score fell by 13 points.” But its reading and science “stayed mostly even, in contrast to an international drop of 10 points.” The A.P. then explained that the U.S. “improved to No. 26 in math, up three spots from 2018. It ranked No. 6 in reading and 10th in science, up two and one spots, respectively.”

Moreover, the A.P. addressed the endless headlines about learning loss during Covid, which are continually used as weapons against educators; School closures “didn’t always lead to lower scores.” There was “no clear difference” in performance trends between countries that had limited closures, including Iceland and Sweden, and those with longer closures, including Brazil and Ireland, according to the report.” And the A.P. quoted the OECD, “Many other factors impacted learning during this period, such as the quality of remote teaching and levels of support granted to struggling students.”

Similarly, Reuters quoted OECD director of education Andreas Schleicher who said, “Covid probably played some role but I would not overrate it.” Moreover, “Poorer results tended to be more associated with higher rates of mobile phone use for leisure and where schools reported teacher shortages.”

The New York Times began with, “The math performance of U.S. teenagers has sharply declined since 2018, with scores lower than 20 years ago, and with American students continuing to trail global competitors.” Two paragraphs later, it reported, “The bleak math results were offset by a stronger performance in reading and science, where the United States scored above average internationally.” But for the next 5 paragraphs, the Times focused on the bad news for U.S. schools, as well as saying “Countries that kept schools closed longer generally saw bigger declines.”(In fairness, however, the Times also reported, “In a surprising result, the PISA test did not find a growing gap in math and reading between the highest and lowest U.S. performers during the pandemic.”)

The article briefly reported:

The United States lost less ground than some European countries that prioritized opening schools more quickly. And the United States held steady in reading and science.

The United States even moved up in world rankings — largely because of the declines of other nations.

However, the next 15 paragraphs focused on math declines, which admittedly are extremely upsetting, while often implicitly criticizing schools. It wasn’t until the last paragraph that this context was added:

On other measures, the United States stood out for having more children living with food insecurity (13 percent, compared with an average of 8 percent in other O.E.C.D. countries), more students who are lonely at school (22 percent, versus 16 percent) and more students who do not feel safe at school (13 percent, versus 10 percent).

I also agree with criticism of Axios’ coverage, but I’d push back on the complaint about the Washington Post, at least for now. The Post’s headline, justifiably, was alarming, “Math scores for U.S, students hit all-time low on International exam,” but its subtitle was, “Even so, U.S. students performed better relative to their peers than in past years.” Its article was shorter, not leaving room for details about European declines, but it quoted Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics on the math declines, “Only now can we see that it is a global concern.”

The most balanced report was published in Chalkbeat, which gave equal space to how “The U.S. ranked sixth in reading and 10th in science among the 81 school systems that gave the PISA last year. In 2018, the U.S. ranked eighth in reading and 11th in science.” Moreover:

The steady reading results among U.S. high schoolers run counter to the significant reading declines observed last year for younger students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. Academic recovery in reading has also been uneven. Carr said that could indicate that the NAEP has a higher difficulty level than the PISA.

Chalkbeat also quoted U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona who:

Pointed to the results as an indicator of the impact of the federal investments made in schools during the pandemic, much of which was spent on academic recovery initiatives, such as tutoring and mental health support for students.

That spending “kept the United States in the game,” Cardona said. Without it, he said, the U.S. would be “in the same boat” as other countries that didn’t spend as much and saw steeper declines. .

And that brings me back to my wider worry that the press, in a time when the presidential race could determine whether our democracy survives, is headlining American problems, without revealing that affluent European nations are doing worse in many areas where President Biden is being blamed for not solving long term challenges, ranging from inflation to anti-immigrant-driven populism.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Fake News, International, Media, Standardized Testing

David Wallace-Wells: The Headlines Are Wrong! U.S. Students Outperformed Their Peers in Rest of World on PISA Test

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2023 //
13

The news media keep a set of stock headlines at the ready whenever national or international test scores are posted: SCORES DECLINE! U.S. STUDENTS FAILING! A SPUTNIK MOMENT! OUR SCHOOLS ARE FAILING!

All these cries of “failure” feed the phony narrative of the privatization movement. Organizations funded by rightwing billionaires promote the idea that students will get higher scores in charters or voucher schools (we now know that this claim is not true, that charter schools are no better (and often worse) than public schools, and that vouchers subsidize wealthy families and do not save poor kids.

It is a fact that U.S. students have never performed well on international tests, as I explained in my book REIGN OF ERROR. Since the 1960s, when the first international tests were administered, our scores on these tests were mediocre to awful. Nonetheless, our economy has outperformed nations whose students got higher scores decades ago.

Now for the good news.

The latest international test scores were released a few days ago, and scores went down everywhere due to the pandemic. David Wallace-Wells, an opinion writer for The New York Times, reported that even with dropping scores, U.S. students outperformed the rest of the world!

He writes:

By now, you’ve probably registered the alarm that pandemic learning loss has produced a “lost generation” of American students.

This self-lacerating story has formed the heart of an indictment of American school policies during the pandemic, increasingly cited by critics of the country’s mitigation policies as the clearest example of pandemic overreach.

But we keep getting more data about American student performance over the last few years, and the top lines suggest a pretty modest setback, even compared to how well the country’s students performed, in recent years, in the absence of any pandemic disruption.

Now, for the first time, we have good international data and can compare American students’ performance with students’ in peer countries that, in many cases, made different choices about whether and when to close schools and whether and when to open them.

This data comes from the Program for International Student Assessment, coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in almost 80 countries typically every three years — a long-running, unimpeachable, nearly global standardized test measure of student achievement among the world’s 15-year-olds in math, reading and science.

And what it shows is quite eye-opening. American students improved their standing among their international peers in all three areas during the pandemic, the data says. Some countries did better than the United States, and the American results do show some areas of concern. But U.S. school policies do not seem to have pushed American kids into their own academic black hole. In fact, Americans did better in relation to their peers in the aftermath of school closures than they did before the pandemic.

The performance looks even stronger once you get into the weeds a bit. In reading, the average U.S. score dropped just one point from 505 in 2018 to just 504 in 2022. Across the rest of the O.E.C.D., the average loss was 11 times as large. In Germany, which looked early in the pandemic to have mounted an enviable good-government response, the average reading score fell 18 points; in Britain, the country most often compared with the United States, it fell 10 points. In Iceland, which had, by many metrics, the best pandemic performance in Europe, it fell 38 points. In Sweden, the darling of mitigation skeptics, it fell 19 points.

In science, the United States lost three points, about the same decline as the O.E.C.D. average and still above the level Americans reached in 2016 and 2013. On the same test, German students lost 11 points, and British and Swedish students dropped five; performance by students in Iceland fell by 28 points.

In math, the United States had a more significant and worrying drop: 13 points. But across the other nations of the O.E.C.D., the average decline from 2018 to 2022 was still larger: 16 points. And in historical context, even the 13-point American drop is not that remarkable — just two points larger than the drop the country experienced between the 2012 and 2015 math tests, suggesting that longer-term trajectories in math may be more concerning than the short-term pandemic setback. Break the scores out to see the trajectories for higher-performing and lower-performing subgroups, and you can hardly see the impact of the pandemic at all.

Of course, the Program for International Student Assessment is just one test, with all the limitations of any standardized measure. It is not good news, in general, if the world is struggling academically. And none of this is an argument for American educational excellence or never-ending remote learning or a claim there was no impact from closures on American kids or a suggestion that the country’s schools should have stayed closed as long as they did.

It is simply a call to assess the legacy of those closures in the proper context: a pandemic that killed 25 million people globally and more than a million in the United States and brought more than a billion children around the world home from school in 2020. In the 18 months that followed, American schools were not choosing between universal closures and an experience entirely undisturbed by Covid-19. They were choosing different ways of navigating the pandemic landscape, as was every other school system in the world. A good first test of whether the country bungled school closures is probably whether peer countries, in general, did better. The test scores imply that they didn’t.

So why do we keep telling ourselves the self-lacerating story of our pandemic educational failure?

One reason could be that while some state-level testing data shows no correlation between school closures and learning loss, some analysis of district-level data has shown a closer correlation. But this suggests that learning loss is not a national problem but a narrower one, requiring a narrower response.

Another is that testing is blind to other markers of well-being. Chronic absenteeism, for instance, is up significantly since before the pandemic and may prove a far more lasting and concerning legacy of school closure than learning loss. And the American Academy of Pediatrics declared a national mental health emergency — language that has been echoed by the American Medical Association.

But while American teenagers have reported higher levels of emotional distress in several high-profile surveys, here, too, the details yield a subtler picture. In the first year of the pandemic, according to a study supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, 17 percent fewer American teens made mental-health visits to emergency rooms than in the year before; in the second year, they made nearly 7 percent more. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the proportion of teenage girls reporting persistent feelings of hopelessness and sadness rose from 47 percent in 2019 to 57 percent in 2021 — a concerning rise, though only slightly larger than the six-point increase from 2017 to 2019. The number of male teens reporting the same barely grew, from 27 percent to 29 percent, having risen much faster from 2017 to 2019.

Each of these data points should probably be understood in the context of mental health surveys of older Americans, such as the General Social Survey, which found that the percentage of American adults describing themselves as “very happy” fell from 31 percent in 2018 to 19 percent in 2021 and those describing themselves as “not too happy” nearly doubled to 24 percent. It is hard to disentangle the effects of school closure here from the experience of simply living through an anxious and disruptive time. To judge by the bleakest standard, youth suicide declined during the period of school closure and returned to prepandemic levels only after schools reopened.

Overall, American adults lost some confidence in the country’s school system in those years, with national approval dropping from 50 percent to 42 percent. But the drop is not from current parents of kids in school, whose approval rose throughout the pandemic, according to Gallup, from 72 percent in 2020 to 73 percent in 2021 to 80 percent in 2022. (Other recent surveys, including ones from Pew and The Times, have found similar postpandemic parental approval, between 77 percent and 90 percent.) Instead, as Matt Barnum suggested on ChalkBeat, the decline has been driven by the perspective of people without kids in those schools today — by childless adults and those who’ve opted out of the public school system for a variety of personal and ideological reasons. [Ed.: bold added]

Could we have done better? Surely. We might have done more to open all American schools in the fall of 2020 and to make doing so safe enough — through frequent pooled and rapid testing, more outdoor learning and better indoor ventilation, among other measures — to reassure parents, 71 percent of whom said that summer that in-person school was a large or moderate risk to their children and a majority of whom said that schools should remain closed until there was no Covid risk at all. We could have provided more educational and emotional support through the darkest troughs of the pandemic and probably been clearer, throughout the pandemic, that the risk of serious illness to individual kids was relatively low.

But we could do better now, too, by sidestepping pandemic blame games that require us both to exaggerate the effect of school closures on educational achievement and the degree to which policymakers, rather than the pandemic, were responsible.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Education Reform, Failure, Fake News, Hoax, International, Standardized Testing

Politico Interviews Fiona Hill About the Stakes in Ukraine

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2023 //
18

You may recall watching Fiona Hill testify in the first Trump impeachment. He was impeached for withholding Congressionally-approved aid to Ukraine unless President Zelensky agreed to dig up dirt on Joe Biden. Hill is a former official at the U.S. National Security Council, specializing in Russian and European affairs. Maura Reynolds of POLITICO interviewed Hill about what happens if the U.S. withholds aid and Putin wins.

It was nearly two years ago that Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and in recent months, the fighting appears to have ground to a stalemate. Aid from the United States has helped Ukraine get this far — but now Americans are asking, how long should they continue to support Ukraine in its war against Russia? At this point, just what are the stakes for the United States?

Since the war began, I’ve turned to Fiona Hill periodically for insight into what’s driving Russian President Vladimir Putin, and where America’s interests lie. She’s a keen observer not just of Russia and its leader, but also of American politics, having served in the White House as a top adviser to both Democrats and Republicans, including President Donald Trump. Since she left the Trump administration (and after a star turn testifying in his first impeachment), she’s become a highly sought-out voice on global affairs as well as the domestic roots of authoritarianism in countries around the world.

When we spoke this week, she made clear that the decision of whether Ukraine wins or loses is now on us — almost entirely. As Congress debates how much more money to authorize for Ukraine’s assistance amid growing Republican opposition, she says that what we are really debating is our own future. Do we want to live in the kind of world that will result if Ukraine loses?

Hill is clear about her answer. A world in which Putin chalks up a win in Ukraine is one where the U.S.’s standing in the world is diminished, where Iran and North Korea are emboldened, where China dominates the Indo-Pacific, where the Middle East becomes more unstable and where nuclear proliferation takes off, among allies as well as enemies.

“Ukraine has become a battlefield now for America and America’s own future — whether we see it or not — for our own defensive posture and preparedness, for our reputation and our leadership,” she told me. “For Putin, Ukraine is a proxy war against the United States, to remove the United States from the world stage.”

Hill sees U.S. domestic politics as the main obstacle to Ukraine’s ability to win. She has long warned, including in a book published after she left the White House, that high levels of partisanship in the United States promote authoritarianism both at home and around the world. She’s been talking to some lawmakers about Ukraine, and she’s worried that their partisanship has blinded them to the dangers the country faces if Putin gets his way.

“The problem is that many members of Congress don’t want to see President Biden win on any front,” she said. “People are incapable now of separating off ‘giving Biden a win’ from actually allowing Ukraine to win. They are thinking less about U.S. national security, European security, international security and foreign policy, and much more about how they can humiliate Biden.”

“In that regard,” she continued, “whether they like it or not, members of Congress are doing exactly the same thing as Vladimir Putin. They hate that. They want to refute that. But Vladimir Putin wants Biden to lose, and they want Biden to be seen to lose as well.”

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Ukraine is fighting the Russian invasion on several fronts: military, financial, political. In each of those areas, is Ukraine winning, or is Russia?

We have to think about where we would have been in February of 2022. Russia’s intent was to decapitate the Ukrainian government so it could take over the country. That’s what we all anticipated. We anticipated that [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy would have gone into exile, the Ukrainians would have capitulated, then there would be a very messy insurgency against the Russian forces. So if we start from that point, militarily, and we look at what’s happened over the last two years, we can actually say that Ukraine has won in terms of securing its independence, and has won by fighting Russia to a standstill.

But then we get into the details. Because, of course, the standstill is the main issue at hand. The Ukrainians were initially able to take back quite a lot of the territory that the Russians seized in the early phases of the invasion, but then the Russians dug in. We had all the hype around a counteroffensive this past summer, a lot of expectations built up inside and outside of Ukraine, especially here in the United States. If we look at other wars, major wars, often these much-anticipated individual battles don’t turn out the way that the planners or the fighters actually anticipate. Now we are in a scenario where having not succeeded in reaching the stated goals of the counteroffensive, we’re basically positing that Ukraine has somehow lost the entire war.

Ukraine has succeeded so far because of massive military support from European allies and other partners. So in that regard, we’ve now reached a tipping point between whether Ukraine continues to win in terms of having sufficient fighting power to stave Russia off, or whether it actually starts to lose because it doesn’t have the equipment, the heavy weaponry, the ammunition. That external support is going to be determinative.

So it’s maybe too soon to answer the question of has Ukraine won or lost militarily.

How about in the financial and diplomatic arenas?

It’s a question of whether Ukraine has enough resources, financial resources, not just to keep going on the battlefield, but also to keep the country together at home. And up until now you’re still seeing a lot of European countries stepping up. Not just you know, the United States, but definitely the EU, Japan, South Korea and others. Japan recently made an offer of additional major financial support. The Germans have said that they’ll make sure that the Ukrainian economy will continue to not just survive, but thrive, and over the longer term, they’ll help rebuild. This is still somewhat positive.

On the political side, however, we’ve got the problems of the policy battlefields on the domestic front. Ukraine has now become a domestic political issue in a whole range of countries, not just here in the United States, but in countries like Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Germany and many more. And that’s an issue where it’s going to be very hard for Ukraine to win. Because when you get into the transactional issues of domestic politics, and you’re no longer thinking about national security, or these larger imperatives, then Ukraine dies a thousand deaths from all of the transactional efforts that domestic politicians engage in. Most political constituents, no matter the country, can’t really see beyond their own narrow interests.

So Ukraine isn’t losing yet. But depending on the domestic situation in the United States, and with its European allies, it could? It could start losing very soon?

That’s right, we’re at a pivotal point. There’s a lot of detail, but the bottom line is that we are at an inflection point, a juncture where it could very rapidly tip, in fact this month — December and January — into a losing proposition for Ukraine.

What do you think Putin sees when he’s watching the debate taking place in the United States right now?

He does see the entire battlefield of the military, financial and political arenas tipping to his benefit. Putin really thinks that he is on the winning side. We’ve just seen in the last few weeks, something that looks rather suspiciously like a preparatory victory tour [by Putin] around the Middle East, visiting the UAE and Saudi Arabia, stepping out again in “polite company,” preparing to go to other major meetings. And then the coverage in the Russian press — their commentators are crowing with glee at the predicament of the Ukrainians, clapping their hands, literally and figuratively, about the peril for Ukraine in the U.S. Congress.

One thing that we need to bear in mind here is that Putin turned for assistance to two countries that should give Americans and members of Congress pause — Iran and North Korea. Russia has had significant shortfalls of ammunition and sophisticated technology because of sanctions and other constraints. Ammunition has come from North Korea, which continues to provide Russia with all kinds of rounds for shells, and Iran has stepped up with the production of drones. Iran and North Korea both see this as a kind of international opening for them. If Russia prevails on the battlefield, you can be sure that Iran and North Korea will get benefits from this. We already see Russia shifting its position on the Iranian nuclear front, and we also see Russia making a major shift in its relationship with Israel. Putin has gone from being a major supporter of Israel, to now an opponent, and has switched from what was always very careful public rhetoric about Israel to pretty antisemitic statements. Putin never denigrated Jews in the past. On the contrary, he presented himself as a supporter of the Jewish population. This is a dramatic shift and clearly because of Iran. Now, whether Iran asked Putin to do this, I honestly can’t say, but we can all see this deepening relationship between Russia and Iran. That is a real problem for the administration and for others who are now looking at the Middle East and trying to figure out how to stop a broader war with Lebanon, with the Houthis in Yemen, and all of the Iranian proxies, because Iran and Russia have become fused together now in two conflicts.

Please open the link to finish reading the interview.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Extremism, International, Republicans

Max Boot: The GOP Abandonment of Ukraine is Disgraceful

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2023 //
100

Max Boot left the Republican Party when Trump became President. He now contributes to the Washington Post. He recently wrote that the GOP is returning to its 1930s policy of isolationism, egged on by MAGA and Trump, who never faults Putin. He is outraged that the Republicans are now blocking aid to Ukraine, using it as a chip to barter for a new border policy. Spending for Ukraine weapons is spent in the United States. More important, cutting Ukraine adrift would be a huge victory for Putin.

He writes:

It’s not often that I feel ashamed to be an American. But I was ashamed this week when the Senate refused to support a supplemental spending bill that would provide about $61 billion in urgently needed aid for Ukraine (along with $14 billion for Israel and $20 billion for border security). All of the Senate Republicans, even those who have previously supported Ukraine funding, voted to filibuster the bill. Their stated position: They won’t provide a penny for Ukraine unless Democrats agree to a sweeping, draconian overhaul of the United States’ immigration laws.


I’m sorry, that’s not how a serious political party — or a serious country — behaves during a world crisis. It’s like saying to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941: We won’t support aid to Britain as it battles the Nazis unless Democrats repeal the Social Security Act or rewrite the labor laws.


Of course, most Republicans in those days were opposed to aiding Britain: A majority of Republicans in both houses voted against the Lend-Lease Act, enacted in early 1941, which allowed the U.S. government to provide critically needed war supplies to Britain and other nations deemed “vital to the defense of the United States” without demanding payment in cash. Thank goodness that in those days both houses were controlled by Democrats — and Senate rules did not require a 60-vote supermajority to get anything done.


Most Republicans abandoned their isolationism after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The GOP commitment to internationalism was renewed after 1945 because of postwar Soviet aggression and then, after the end of the Cold War, by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But since the end of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Republicans have been increasingly returning to their pre-Pearl Harbor roots.

The party’s leader, former president Donald Trump, has even embraced the “America First” slogan used by the original isolationists. And, just as so many of the 1930s isolationists, such as Charles Lindbergh, were sympathetic to Nazi Germany, Trump is sympathetic to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Public opinion surveys have reflected a sharp drop-off in Republican support for Ukraine: In a Gallup poll published on Nov. 2, 62 percent of Republicans said the United States was doing too much to aid Ukraine, up from 50 percent in June.
Yet I confess that, until last week, I had remained naively hopeful that Congress would still do the right thing. After all, strong majorities in both houses had supported Ukraine funding bills in the past. Moreover, the current aid request is a pittance in the context of a $6.1 trillion federal budget (0.98 percent, to be exact), and most of the funds would be spent in the United States to support our own defense industry.


The new House speaker, Mike Johnson (R-La.), had initially voted for Ukraine aid before turning against it, but in recent weeks he sounded much more supportive of Ukraine, saying, “We can’t allow Vladimir Putin to march through Europe and we understand the necessity of assisting there.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), whose father was a U.S. Army soldier in Europe during World War II, has been a staunch supporter of Ukraine. “Honestly, I think Ronald Reagan would turn over in his grave if he saw we were not going to help Ukraine,” he said last month.


Yet now both leaders have taken the position that — as Johnson wrote this week — “supplemental Ukraine funding is dependent upon enactment of transformative change to our nation’s border security laws.” Good luck with that. The last time Congress enacted a major, bipartisan immigration bill was in 1986, when Reagan was in the White House. Lawmakers from both parties have been laboring for decades to craft another major bill. A decade ago, the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” thought they were close, only to have the deal fall apart. So it’s hard to take Republicans at face value when they insist on making aid to Ukraine dependent on breaking through decades of legislative logjams on immigration.

Why are they linking the two? The excuse heard from Republicans is that they can’t in good conscience support funding to defend Ukraine’s borders when our own borders are so insecure. They think that by invoking the common word “borders” they can pretend that the United States and Ukraine are in analogous situations. That would be true only if the Mexican Army were invading the southwestern United States to annex Arizona, New Mexico and Texas while announcing plans to march on Washington and destroy the United States as a sovereign country.


Needless to say, that hasn’t happened. What is happening is that millions of desperate immigrants are trying to enter the United States, legally and illegally, in pursuit of freedom and economic opportunity, just like the ancestors of most native-born Americans. The spike in undocumented immigration is a serious problem that needs to be addressed, but it can hardly be said to threaten the United States’ survival in the same way the Russian invasion threatens Ukraine’s.


By linking the two issues, Republicans are engaging in a bait-and-switch that gives them an excuse to do what their base wants — abandon Ukraine — while trying to blame Democrats for “jeopardizing security around the world,” as McConnell has charged.


As Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told the New York Times: “You can’t say ‘I’m for Ukraine, but only if I get this wholly unrelated policy enacted.’ You can’t be for stopping Putin from taking over a country by force and then vote against providing Ukraine the resources to do just that.”

It is still possible that Democrats and Republicans will reach agreement on Ukraine funding. But the odds of Ukraine aid being approved look dimmer today than at any point since the Russian invasion, even as the Office of Management and Budget warns that U.S. support for Kyiv is running out: “We are out of money — and nearly out of time.”

Ukrainians will fight on regardless, and they will look for help to Europe, which has already committed twice as much funding as the United States. But, even working together, Europe and the United States have struggled to keep up with Ukraine’s need for ammunition. There is no way that Europe alone can carry the whole load, especially not when Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban — MAGA Republicans’ favorite foreign leader — is trying to block a $55 billion European Union aid package for Ukraine.


The United States has abandoned allies, such as South Vietnam and Afghanistan, before. But this time the costs of support are much lower (no U.S. soldiers are engaged in combat in Ukraine), and the stakes are far higher. Ukraine is fighting the largest war that Europe has seen since 1945. If it loses, Vladimir Putin may be emboldened to attack other neighboring states, such as the Baltic republics and even Poland, which are members of NATO. Other despots may be emboldened to aggression of their own, beginning with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Taiwan. And then we really will be back to the pre-Pearl Harbor world — all thanks to the Republican Party returning to its isolationist roots.

Unless Congress reverses course, and soon, it could be consigning our democratic allies to slaughter — and making the world a far more dangerous place.

Categories Biden, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Funding, International, Republicans, Trump

Israeli Peace Activist: Teach Compassion, Not Hate

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2023 //
55

Christiane Amanpour interviewed Robi Damelin, an Israeli peace activist, about her organization’s work to replace hatred with compassion. Damelin’s teenage son was killed by a Palestinian sniper 21 years ago, and she has dedicated her life since then to building a parents group of both Israelis and Palestinians.

She advocates listening to the stories of others. She recognizes the terrible suffering of Palestinians, and she works with Palestinian friends to foster understanding.

The hope for the future of both Israelis and Palestinians lies with enlightened leadership, which neither side has now. Damelin remains steadfast in believing that change will come, built on a mutual desire to end the cycle of fear and death.

Damelin speaks for me, and I hope, for most people. She wants peace and dignity for all sides, and an end to shouting and hatred, which only breeds more shouting and hatred.

Please watch the interview. It is inspiring.

Categories Equity, History, Hope, International, Love

The Netherlands: Party of Far-Right Islamophobe Wins Parliamentary Elections

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2023 //
19

Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician who has espoused anti-Islamic views for many years. He has campaigned on a platform of putting Dutch people first and blocking immigration from Muslim countries. He has been called the Dutch Trump. In the recent parliamentary elections, his party came in first among a field of 15 parties. It won 37 of 150 seats and will need to persuade other parties to join in a coalition in order to govern. In the past, Wilders has promised to close mosques and Islamic schools, but he is already moderating his hardline views to win over partners. Wilders will need 76 votes—39 more than he has now— to form a new government.

The BBC reported:

Veteran anti-Islam populist leader Geert Wilders has won a dramatic victory in the Dutch general election, with almost all votes counted.

After 25 years in parliament, his Freedom party (PVV) is set to win 37 seats, well ahead of his nearest rival, a left-wing alliance.

“The PVV can no longer be ignored,” he said. “We will govern.”

His win has shaken Dutch politics and it will send a shock across Europe too…

He told the BBC that “of course” he was willing to negotiate and compromise with other parties to become prime minister.

The PVV leader won after harnessing widespread frustration about migration, promising “borders closed” and putting on hold his promise to ban the Koran…

A Wilders victory will send shockwaves around Europe, as the Netherlands is one of the founding members of what became the European Union.

Nationalist and far-right leaders around Europe praised his achievement. In France, Marine Le Pen said it “confirms the growing attachment to the defence of national identities”.

Mr Wilders wants to hold a “Nexit” referendum to leave the EU, although he recognises there is no national mood to do so. He will have a hard time convincing any major prospective coalition partner to sign up to that.

He tempered his anti-Islam rhetoric in the run-up to the vote, saying there were more pressing issues at the moment and he was prepared to “put in the fridge” his policies on banning mosques and Islamic schools.

The strategy was a success, more than doubling his PVV party’s numbers in parliament.

For Americans, the elections in the Netherlands and Argentina raise an urgent question: are these elections a portent of the persistence of far-right politics or are they the after-effects of the Trump era? Are they the future or an echo of the past?

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, International, Trump

Thom Hartmann: Argentina Elects Wild-Eyed Libertarian as Its New President

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2023 //
16

Thom Hartmann analyzes the implications of the recent presidential election in Argentina. The victor was an unconventional candidate with bizarre ideas and minimal experience in office. We have already had our Trump. Now it’s Argentina’s turn.

Hartmann writes:

I hope I’m wrong, but I think I just saw the future of America if Republicans manage to sweep the 2024 elections, Trump or no Trump.

Argentina just embarked on a Grand Experiment, untried before in any developed country in the world; it’s one that multiple American billionaires have been pushing in the US ever since David Koch ran for VP on the Libertarian ticket in 1980.
When I arrived at the airport in Buenos Aires on Sunday morning this week, Election Day, I asked my cab driver who he’d be voting for and why.

The cab driver said he would assuredly vote for Javier Milei, because inglation was out of control and things couldn’t get worse.

I asked him about the Libertarian Congressman’s (and now newly elected president’s) plans to replace the national “Medicare for All” type of healthcare system Argentina has with American-style private, for-profit health insurance plans that people must finance out of their paychecks (if they have a job, otherwise they’re SOL); to end the nation’s free colleges; and his plan to turn all the nation’s public schools and prisons over to “entrepreneurs” to run for profit.

And what about his promise to end all government support for average people, including disability payments, unemployment insurance, and all forms of welfare? His saying that abortion is murder and he’ll re-criminalize it, along with ending women’s and queer rights?

He shrugged.

“Things can’t get any worse,” was his terse reply, adding that he’s driving an airport car as a second job because inflation has wiped out the income from his regular job. This working two and three jobs, he said, has become common across the country.

Argentina has been suffering from an ongoing economic crisis for decades, but it got really bad when the “currency crisis” hit the nation in 2018 after they complied with IMF demands, wiping out half the purchasing power of the peso virtually overnight.

Much like the United States, up until the 1960s Argentina had a top income tax bracket of 90%, which stabilized the economy and prevented massive wealth inequality. Subsequent administrations, including the military dictatorship, cut that down to 35%, like today’s US, with enough loopholes that, like America, most billionaires pay virtually nothing.

Like the US, they also cut taxation on capital gains (although they’ve taken them all the way down to zero), giving a huge boost to Argentina’s morbidly rich and stripping massive amounts of revenue from the federal government.

Their draconian tax cuts, like Reagan’s, drove huge federal deficits. Right wingers, citing the deficits, demanded cuts in social programs, but, until now, weren’t successful in gutting Social Security and other social programs in either country.

In part, because the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency, we can sell debt (treasuries) to finance our deficits; Argentina has a much harder time, because nobody else uses the peso and international investors are wary, so they’ve been pursuing a policy of printing money and borrowing from the IMF, which has debased their currency leading, in part, to today’s massive inflation.
Inflation this year has been over 100%, exacerbated by previous presidents experimenting with neoliberalism as demanded by the IMF, irresponsible borrowing, along with several years of climate change-induced drought which have badly damaged Argentina’s agricultural production, driving up food prices.

Milei’s opponent in Sunday’s runoff election was the nation’s finance minister, so he took much of the blame for the state of things while Milei — often referred to as “Argentina’s Trump” because he’s a wealthy former TV star, tantric sex instructor, and crackpot economist with no governmental experience other than his first year in parliament — promised to dump the rapidly devaluing peso and replace it with the US dollar. (He campaigned carrying around a chainsaw, saying he was going to take it to “welfare,” the “deep state,” and the nation’s social programs.)

When Milei won the top slot in the runoff election a few months ago, his victory caused the peso to fall further, as markets anticipated mass chaos resulting from the possible implementation of his plan to abandon the Argentinian currency if he won the general election. (It’s going to require huge cooperation from the IMF, and they don’t seem inclined to want to help.)

His primary win set off a run on the peso and produced a further currency devaluation (inflation is at 143% today) which, in turn, caused greater voter discontent. Ironically, that funneled more votes to Milei, who overwhelmingly (55%) won Sunday’s election.

The Libertarianism that Milei and American politicians like Rand Paul and Mike Lee embrace, as I’ve noted previously, is a political/economic system that was invented and named in the 1950s by a front group for the real estate lobby to rationalize their opposition to rent control, which was then spreading out of New York City and across America.

It basically argues, as Koch did in his 1980 campaign, that the only “commons” (things publicly owned and administered) a country can legitimately claim are the police and the courts.
They, in turn, have the primary job of making sure that property rights of wealthy people supersede all other rights, including the rights to healthcare, education, clean air and water, protection from abuse by employers, housing, and anti-poverty programs (including Social Security). All of these, Libertarians will tell you, are simply vestigial forms of socialism (or communism) and should be turned over to billionaires or giant corporations.
Libertarians’ key rationalization for this is that “private industry is always more efficient than government,” an argument that, while false, anybody who’s ever stood in line for an hour at the DMV can understand.

Ever since the 1980s, when Reagan embraced the libertarian worldview claiming that, “The nine most frightening words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help,’” the GOP has increasingly embraced Libertarian policies. Republican presidential candidates now compete for who can gut or shut down the most federal government agencies, from the EPA to the DOE to, well, ask Rick Perry.
Milei haș taken it so far as to say that poor people should feel free to sell their body parts, children, and organs to wealthy people on private, unregulated exchanges to pay their rent and medical expenses.

Billionaires and big corporations love Libertarianism because they end up with all the formerly-government-run sectors that they can then turn into profit centers to rip off the public. And shutting down regulatory agencies like the EPA, Interior, and USDA means they no longer have to pay for pollution controls, food safety systems, and other pesky protections for the “little people.”

Probably the example most Americans would recognize is Medicare Advantage, a privatized health insurance scam for seniors that makes billions in profits every week for our largest insurance companies while routinely refusing to pay for doctor’s visits, procedures, and even hospitalizations. It’s literally killing people by denying them care.

Milei ran on the promise of shutting down 10 of Argentina’s 18 federal agencies, throwing most of his countrymen, women, and children into the arms of the nation’s largest and richest corporations and the billionaires who own them.
He’s also a climate change denier, winning him — like Trump — the support of the nation’s fossil fuel industry, claiming the country’s drought and wildfire problems are part of natural climate variations.

Milei is a climate change denier, so count on Argentina to do nothing to mitigate climate change.

Milei claims that any attempts to “fix the problem of hunger” or “fix the problem of poverty,” or even deal with unemployment is “communism or socialism”; all of these problems should be left to billionaires and giant corporations to solve through private charity or minimum wage work.

Programs like public schools, the free college system that Argentina has that allows any capable student to become a doctor or lawyer at no cost, their national healthcare system, housing supports, Social Security, and even a minimum wage and unemployment insurance are “abhorrent,” Milei says. He claims that “social justice” is simply another word for “theft from rich people.”

Rightwing Republicans were giddy about Argentina’s new president.

Trump posted to his vanity Nazi-infested social media site, “MAKE ARGENTINA GREAT AGAIN!” while Vivek Ramaswamy tweeted, “May the spirits of {neoliberalism’s founders] Mises & Hayek be with you…”

Because Milei doesn’t have a parliamentary majority, it’s unlikely any effort to replace the peso with the dollar will to go anywhere, but all bets are off on his reconfiguring the federal government to trash the poor, gut social services, and privatize the nation’s schools, colleges, and medical system. Converting the country to dollars, however, would require a massive stock of the US currency that is simply unavailable within the country; the World Bank is suggesting they are unlikely to finance necessary reserves…

His victory is an international marker, of sorts, for America’s billionaires and largest corporations who share Milei’s desire to end liberal democracy and the so-called “welfare state” both in Argentina and around the world.

In its wake, expect to see the GOP double down on Milei-like language and policies as they try to drive America back toward their own libertarian ideal, which hundreds of years ago in Europe was simply known as “feudalism.”

Categories Accountability, Elections, Extremism, International, Trump

Jeffrey Herf: How Hamas Fooled the Left in the U.S. and Europe

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2023 //
44

Jeffrey Herf is a distinguished university professor of modern European history at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the author of Israel’s Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945-1949 (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Since I am posting this exposé of Hamas, let me make clear that I oppose the Netanyahu government. I oppose the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza. I deplore the wanton killing of civilians. I was sickened by the barbaric murders, rapes, pillage, and hostage-taking on October 7. I support a two-state solution (Hamas does not). I pray for a time when two self-governing states live side by side in peace.

In this article, Herf explores the sympathy of leftists and liberals in the West for Hamas, a terrorist organization. He analyzes the Hamas charter of 1988 and its revision in 2017, whose language was intended to place Hamas in the mainstream of leftist ideology about resistance to colonialism and to obscure its historic anti-Semitism and its determination to extinguish the state of Israel.

He begins:

The mass murders by Hamas on October 7 were the outcome of its core ideology, clearly expressed in its founding charter of 1988. That “ideology of mass murder” has its origins in the fusion of Nazism and Islamism that first took place in the 1930s and 40s, and then persisted in the Islamist politics of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, of which Hamas is an offshoot. Hamas’ ability to gain supporters, first in the universities, now in the streets, rests as well on its revised charter of 2017, which draws on the anti-Zionism of the secular Left. Hence a close reading of the revised charter, whose language and arguments now echo on campuses and in the streets, is in order.

The authors of the Hamas charter of 1988 were explicit about their ideological connections to the radical antisemitic conspiracy theories that had emerged in 20th-century Europe, and to the virulent hatred of Jews, Judaism, and therefore Israel that they derived from their anti-modernist Islamist interpretation of Islam. Yet the deadly implications of this document received far too little attention in the mainstream media of the West, despite being easily accessible online in English and German translations. Instead, an objectively pro-Hamas Left began developing among academics in Europe, Britain, and the United States, as became apparent in 2014 during one of Hamas’ attacks on Israel. They found themselves in the peculiar position as leftists of repeating Hamas’ arguments.

They did so because they had adopted the view of Israel that had become the common coin of the international Left since the 1960s. According to that view, the Jewish state is in reality a colonialist and racist endeavor built on the expulsion of the indigenous population in 1948. Relying on that profound misinterpretation of the events surrounding Israel’s founding, they were willing to make common cause with an organization that is profoundly hostile to the modernist values that had long been associated with at least some segments of leftist politics.

Seventy years of Soviet and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) propaganda mischaracterizing Zionism and Israel, equally unbalanced UN resolutions, and New Left romance about third-world revolutions had placed Israel on the “wrong” side and the Palestinians on the “right” side of the global divide between oppressors and oppressed. In the course of doing so, a distinctive leftist form of antisemitism, expressed in the language of anti-Zionism and support for armed attacks on Israel, fostered an opening to support not only the secular PLO but also Hamas. In Britain, that support and leftist antisemitism gained political influence in 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn won election as the leader of the Labour Party. This bizarre fusion of the Islamist Right and the secular Left was the first time since the Hitler-Stalin pact that leftist organizations made common cause with a movement of the extreme right, and the only time I can recall when they supported a group rooted in religious fanaticism. Their shared antagonism to Israel surmounted the contrasting ideological starting points.

At the same time, the Hamas charter of 1988 remained an embarrassment at least for some leftist and liberal academics and intellectuals, for the anti-Zionist Left in the universities, and for activist organizations of the left. Its celebration of antisemitic conspiracy theories voiced by the Nazi regime was impossible to deny or justify, and its calls to take up arms against the Jews were unequivocal. Its selective quotations from the Koran offered very uncomfortable evidence that Hamas—in the tradition of Islamists from Haj Amin al-Husseini, Hassan al-Banna, and Sayyid Qutb, all associated with the Muslim Brotherhood—defined Islam as an inherently anti-Jewish religion. For those who thought like Karl Marx that religion was the opiate of the people, the Hamas charter of 1988 revealed that such a theologically induced drug had an Islamic component as well.

The revisions in the 2017 Hamas charter were intended to resolve those issues and present Hamas as a humanitarian organization that opposed Zionism, not Jews. The new language succeeded to the extent that leftist groups were celebrating the massacre of October 7, 2023, as soon as it happened.

Please open the link to read the rest of the article.

Categories Extremism, Fascism, History, International, Religion
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