Tuesday, October 03, 2006
The Grieving Mother of Smadar
1. Why Junior is Pink - from the WSJ:
October 3, 2006
All in the Family
By ARTHUR C. BROOKS
October 3, 2006; Page A26
Parents have just sent their kids off to college, full of hope that the
knowledge and enlightenment they acquire will prepare them for the rigors
of the modern economy. But a worrying possibility is keeping some of these
parents -- especially the conservative ones -- up at night: the prospect
that their children will be hopelessly corrupted by the faculty.
In one popular book about campus politics, the author writes, "We all know
that left-wing radicals from the 1960s have hung around academia and hired
people like themselves. . . . [T]hey spew violent anti-Americanism, preach
anti-Semitism, and cheer on the killing of American soldiers and civilians
-- all the while collecting tax dollars and tuition fees to indoctrinate
our children." If the author is right, then the fears about the minds of
our children might seem like a lot more than just right-wing paranoia.
Most studies of the subject have indicated that, indeed, upward of 90% of
college professors at many universities hold liberal political views. In
some schools and departments, faculties are virtually 100% left-wing. It
is one thing to lament this ideological lopsidedness in the academy. But
it is quite another to assume that professors actually bend the little
minds in their care toward a liberal point of view, or even a radical one.
Imagine a student with God-fearing Republican parents exposed to the
depredations of an English professor aiming to use his class as a
Bolshevik training camp. Will the professor succeed in turning the kid
into a Red? The evidence says, probably not: When it comes to politics,
people from conservative families follow their parents, not their
professors.
The most recent evidence on this subject comes from the mid-1990s, in the
University of Michigan's National Election Studies. These survey data
uncover two facts. First, people who go to college are more likely to vote
Republican than those who don't go to college. Adults 25 and under from
Republican homes are, for example, 11 percentage points more likely to
vote Republican if they attended college than if they didn't. And young
adults from Democratic households are 11 percentage points less likely to
vote Democrat if they've gone to college than if not.
Second, nearly everybody grows more likely to vote Republican as they age
-- but especially college graduates. It is no shock that the vast majority
of people of all educational backgrounds from Republican homes vote
Republican by age 40. It may come as more of a surprise that 40-year-olds
with Democrat parents are far less likely to vote Democrat if they've gone
to college than if they haven't. In fact, while three-quarters of the
uneducated group still vote Democrat, the odds are only about 50-50 that
the college graduates vote this way. And they've not all become skeptical
political independents: Fully a third are registered Republicans.
Obviously, some kids turn left in college -- but this appears to be the
exception, not the rule. Does all this mean that our colleges and
universities are actually breeding grounds for conservatism? Hardly. What
the statistics really show is that higher education by itself doesn't
affect political views very much. Rather, in addition to the strong
influence of parents, it is higher incomes -- which typically reward a
college education in America -- that push people to the right politically.
In Republican families, the income effect reinforces parents' influence on
their kids. In Democratic families, the two effects work against each
other.
To fearful Republican parents, then: Sleep tight. When it comes to
politics, your kids are in good hands -- yours.
Mr. Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Public
Affairs, is the author of "Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About
Compassionate Conservatism," forthcoming in November from Basic Books.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115984030264280759.html
2. Maariv's Ben Dror Yemini on the axis of evil:
http://imshin.net/?p=448
3. A neo-nazi Holocaust Denial web site calls Neve Gordon "a righteous
Jew":
http://codoh.blogspot.com/2006/07/steven-plaut-eats-words-pays-out-20000.html
4. Hassidic wars on the web:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=769535
5. The Grieving Mom from the Hebrew University
The following is a talk given by one Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a Lecturer
in Language Education at Hebrew University in Jerusalem
(http://education.huji.ac.il/eng/staff_academic_one.asp?id=298). In
September 1997, Nurit's daughter Smadar was killed by a Palestinian
suicide bomber:
http://www.qumsiyeh.org/nuritpeledelhanan/
A poor grieving mother of a girl murdered by Arab barbarism, right? Well,
not exactly, she is a bit more than that.
Here is Peled-Elhanan assigning blame:
"In the so-called Western enlightened world
everyone feels very well-founded when they blame Islam for suicide bombing
and terror. But who would ever blame Judaism for murder? And yet, Ulta
Orthodox Jewish children who have never left Brooklyn know that to kill
Arabs is a 'mitzva' (holy commandment) for they are 'vilde hayeths' (wild
beasts). And Israeli children actually commit the crimes of slaughter and
tporture. Neither Judaism nor Islam nor any religion for that matter are
the cause for murder and terror. Racist education is. American imperialism
is, and Israeli ruthless regime of occupation is....The people who are
destroying the world today are not muslim. The people who are using the
most sophisticated disastrous weapons to kill thousand of innocent
civilians are not Muslim. They are Christian, and Jewish. "
What she does not mention here is that she is the sister of
communist Tel Aviv University political science lecturer Yoav Peled and
daughter of the late anti-Israel far leftist extremist Matti Peled, and
that at the funeral for her own murdered daughter, a spokesman for the PLO
was invited to speak and tell everyone how the death of Smadar was all
the fault of the Israeli government. Smadar was murdered when she was 13.
See http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16844
Peled-Elhanan is active in the leftist extremist anti-Israel Gush
Shalom organization of Uri Avnery
(http://www.dasbistro.com/pipermail/clarkgreen/2003-April/001218.html) and
the vicious "Women in Black
(http://www.nimn.org/Perspectives/international/000132.php?section=International%20Voices)
She was one of the people urging the British to boycott Israel and Israeli
universities
(http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=17876), and is
active in dozens of other Israel-bashing groups (e.g.,
http://www.workingtv.com/26jun06mideast-wpf.html). Because she only
blames Israel for Middle East violence, she is the darling of Israel
bashers, down to and including the European Parliament
(http://blogs.albawaba.com/Alexanderjames/2067/2006/06/02/47916-2005_intl_womens_day_address_israeli_mother_says_palestinian_women_have_suffered_the_most_at_the_hands_of_israeli_army),
In the above cited article, the grieving mom adds: "Not only American
soldiers but also Israeli soldiers who actually perform massacres of
'Arabs' - Palestinian or
Lebanese - may never see an Arab human face until they are drafted to the
army, but they learn, for 12 long years, that these people are primitive,
bear children in order to send them to the streets and throw stones at our
peace-keeping soldiers, uneducated because they don.t receive our
education, conniving and dirty because they have different notions about
politeness, they dress differently and cover their heads with different
pieces of cloth." See http://www.qumsiyeh.org/nuritpeledelhanan/ for more
of her deep thoughts.
Let me say that it gives me no pleasure when the children of leftist
Israeli extremists are murdered by Arab terrorists. But I am simply
incapable of understanding howpeople like this person learn absolutely
nothing from their own personal tragedy and continue to promote policies
that, if adopted, would result in a new genocide of Jews.
