Gaza's ruling Islamist movement Hamas has resisted suggestions that Palestinian children should be taught about the Holocaust in UN-run schools.
The head of its education committee in Gaza, Abdul Rahman el-Jamal, told the BBC that the Holocaust was a "big lie".
He said that to teach it would be to "grant a big favour" to Israel, which has been fighting Hamas for years.
The UN, which runs most Gazan schools, recently asked local groups whether the Holocaust should be taught.
It uses local textbooks and, in Gaza, that means using material from neighbouring Egypt, the BBC's Tim Franks reports.
But over the past seven years the UN has added its own coursework about human rights.
Mr Jamal told the BBC that the UN should, instead, teach about the Naqba, the term Palestinians use to describe the establishment of the state of Israel and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees.
A spokesman for the UN said that no final decision on this year's curriculum had yet been made. Some 200,000 children are taught in schools run through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
During the Holocaust, Nazi Germany murdered some six million Jews.
However, the event's significance is often disputed in parts of the Middle East where Israel is seen as the enemy and the Holocaust is seen as a tool used by Israel to justify its actions.
Happy family: Elise with dad Edward and mum Louise
Of course it is. I should have known. But then I'm not a child genius with a startlingly high IQ.
And Elise Tan-Roberts - aged two years, four months and two weeks - is.
She has just become the youngest member of Mensa, with an estimated IQ of 156.
That puts her two points higher on the scoreboard than Carol Vorderman, and comfortably in the top 0.2 per cent of children her age.
Here's the best bit, though. She seems to be a sweet little girl with charming parents who simply want her to be happy.
Elise was little more than five months when she looked her father Edward in the eyes and called him Dada.
She was walking three months later and running two months after that.
Before her first birthday she could recognise her written name and by 16 months she could count to ten. Yesterday she did it again - in Spanish. 'What's the capital of Russia?' asks her mother Louise, 28. 'Moscow!' comes the instant reply.
Indonesia? 'Jakarta!' It is tempting for outsiders to speculate whether this is a well-rehearsed performance instilled by pushy parents to show off their daughter's extraordinary talent.
But it seems to have taken Louise and Edward, from North London, as much by surprise as anyone else. Until she started to communicate, all they noticed was a tendency for her to stare at things and at people, as if soaking up information.
Later, at her playgroup, a mother gave her a toy animal and told her it was a rhinoceros.
'That's not a rhinoceros,' said Elise. It's a triceratops.'
Other parents convinced Louise and Edward they should have Elise's intelligence assessed.
Inspired by the story of Georgia Brown, who also joined Mensa when she was two, they took her last month to see Professor Joan Freeman, a specialist education psychologist.
After subjecting her to a complex, 45-minute IQ test, she concluded in a written report that Elise was 'more than very bright and capable - she is gifted'.
Bubbly: Elise and mum Louise. 'Our main aim is to make sure she keeps learning at an advanced pace,' says her father, Edward
Bright spark: Carol Vorderman who is also a member of Mensa predicts an exiting future for Elise
She was recommended for Mensa and accepted. Only those with an IQ of 148 and above - the top two percent - qualify. The average IQ is 100.
Professor Freeman concluded that Elise's 'superb memory' was the source for her 'excellent learning and progress'.
Reassuringly for mum and dad, she added that they were doing everything right.
Yesterday as Elise danced happily in the sunshine at her local park, Edward, a 34-year-old motor consultant and car-buyer, told me: 'Our main aim is to make sure she keeps learning at an advanced pace.
'We don't want to make her have to dumb down and stop learning just to fit in. But she's still my baby. I just want her to be happy and enjoy herself.'
So what's next - quantum physics maybe? 'Give her another couple of weeks.'
Elise was born in London in December 2006 and can boast influences from England, Malaysia, China, Nigeria and Sierra Leone in her background.
There are doctors and lawyers in the couple's extended family but none was a child genius, as far as anyone knows.
Louise works part time as an account manager for Pickfords removals.
Elise's love of music and dance has encouraged the couple to put her name down for education in that area.
They have added her to the long waiting list for the Young Actors' Theatre, formerly the Anna Scher school, which produced a string of celebrated actors; and for Chickenshed, which specialises in music, ballet, mime and dance.
Their major disappointment has been that none of the local state schools they contacted wanted anything to do with Elise until she reaches four and a half.
So what might the future hold? Carol Vorderman told me: 'If she's lucky enough to go to a school where she's encouraged and stretched, she'll continue to enjoy learning and she'll have a fantastic time.
At the request of the White House, Georgetown University covered up all the symbols in Gaston Hall, before the Great Man spoke, including IHS, the millennia-old monogram for the name of Jesus Christ. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, had adopted the monogram in his seal and it became an emblem of the Jesuit order.
When it comes to rendering unto Caesar, Georgetown is not going to be outshone by Notre Dame, which stole a march by offering the nation’s avatar of abortion a doctorate of laws degree, honoris causa.
Actually, it is regrettable the IHS in Gaston Hall was not covered up in shame the first week of Lent. For that week Georgetown’s feminist and homosexual clubs, such as GU Pride, put on a Gomorrah festival about alternative lifestyles called “Sex Positive Week.”
Monday, according to The Newman Club, featured a speaker for Black Rose, which “provides a forum for many different expressions of power in love and play. This can include dominance & submission, bondage and discipline, fetishism, cross-dressing, to name a few.”
Ash Wednesday’s talk was “Torn About Porn,” advertised as a “discussion about arguably alternative forms of pornography that are not supposed to be exploitative, but rather radical and empowering.”
Saturday’s talk was by a pornographic film director and was titled “Relationships Beyond Monogamy.”
At Loyola of Chicago that week, the Student Diversity and Cultural Affairs Office presented “Brother to Brother,” a film the Newman Society reports, about “a homosexual African-American who is transported in time to cavort with the allegedly homosexual Langston Hughes.”
The movie is said to be part of “a semester-long ‘Color of Queer Film Series,’ sponsored by the university.
At Catholic Seattle University, that first week of Lent was “Transgender Awareness Week,” featuring a “session on allegedly transgender Bible heroes and heroines and ‘Criss-Cross Day’ where students are encouraged to ‘come dressed for the day in your best gender-bending outfit.”
This is surely anecdotal evidence to confirm Newsweek in the conclusion reached in its cover story of Holy Week, “The End of Christian America.”
Indeed, not only are many once-Catholic colleges and universities now wandering in what Pope Benedict XVI calls a “desert of godlessness,” Catholic belief and practice are not remotely what they were before Vatican II. Where three-fourth of Catholics attended mass weekly in the 1950s, today it is one-fourth. A third of all Catholics raised in the Faith have fallen away.
One in ten American adults is a lapsed Catholic. Catholicism’s quarter of the population is maintained only by mass immigration and, secondarily, by conversions.
Self-identified Christians in the United States have fallen from 86 percent of the population in 1990 to 76 percent today. Those who say they have no religion have doubled as a share of the nation from 8 to 16 percent. Where 69 percent of Americans said we are a Christian country in 1990, only 62 percent say that today.
America is being systematically de-Christianized and secularized.
For the social, moral and cultural revolution of the 1960s, rooted in non- and anti-Christian beliefs and values, has captured the culture, and converted many of the young. Among Americans 18 to 29, a fourth profess to be atheist, agnostic, or of no religious faith.
The figure is surely higher among the college young.
Second reason for the triumph of secularism is that it long ago captured the Supreme Court. Since the Everson decision of 1947, justices have expunged Christianity and all its books and symbols from the public square and public schools.
Voluntary prayer, the Ten Commandments, Bible reading, Christmas plays and carols, Nativity scenes, Easter vacation, before-game prayers, benedictions at graduations—all have been ordered terminated by unelected judges—against the will of the majority.
Abortion on demand, too, was imposed by judicial fiat.
Thus, as America ceases to be a Christian country, it is ceasing to be a democratic one.
Consider. In every referendum in 16 states, where homosexual marriage has been on the ballot, majorities ranging from 52 to 86 percent have voted to outlaw it as an absurdity and an abomination.
Yet, in Massachusetts, California and Iowa, unelected judges have imposed it, as they will in other states, regardless of what the people want or how the people vote. For secularism has become the established religion of the American state and judges are the high priests of the new order.
Yet, one wonders if they know what lies at the end of the road upon which they have set the nation.
For five decades, Americans resisted Godless Communism. If they come to realize they did so to save Godless Capitalism, or Godless Socialism, what happens to loyalty and love of country?
To love one’s country, said Edmund Burke, one’s country ought to be lovely. If this is not God’s country anymore, whose country is it?
SOUTH BEND, Ind. – Ten priests from the order that founded the University of Notre Dame say the school risks its "true soul" and could distance itself from the Roman Catholic Church by inviting President Barack Obama to campus next month.
The members of the Congregation of the Holy Cross, which helps run the university, asked the Rev. John Jenkins, the Holy Cross priest who is Notre Dame's president, and the university's board of fellows to reconsider the invitation to Obama because he supports abortion rights.
"Failure to do so will damage the integrity of the institution," said the letter published Wednesday in Notre Dame Observer.
Notre Dame announced last month that Obama would deliver the university's May 17 commencement address and receive an honorary degree. The decision by the nation's best-known Catholic university sparked widespread anger among many Catholics who said Notre Dame should not honor someone whose policies on abortion and embryonic stem-cell research clash with core church teachings on human life.
Hundreds of abortion opponents protested on campus Sunday, and the priests said the invitation has opened a "fissure" between Notre Dame and many bishops. More than a dozen bishops have denounced Obama's appearance, including Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Jenkins has said the university does not condone all of Obama's policies, and spokesman Dennis Brown has said Notre Dame does not plan to rescind the invitation.
"We respect the opinions of members of the Holy Cross community and others," Brown said.
Obama would be the ninth U.S. president to receive an honorary degree from Notre Dame and sixth sitting president to address graduates. Other commencement speakers have included Dwight Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.
Cecilia Prinster, president of the Notre Dame Alumni Association, noted in a column also published in the campus newspaper that Obama's policies in areas such as health care reform, economic security and environmental stewardship are in line with Catholic social teaching.
"Although we disagree with Mr. Obama on some core issues, we must not condemn," Prinster wrote.
Four days before his Notre Dame speech, Obama is set to deliver a much less controversial commencement address at Arizona State University. But the public school in Tempe is denying the president something he's getting at South Bend: an honorary degree.
"It's our practice to recognize an individual for his body of work, somebody who's been in their position for a long time," Sharon Keeler, an ASU spokeswoman, told The Associated Press. "His body of work is yet to come. That's why we're not recognizing him with a degree at the beginning of his presidency."
Recent recipients of honorary degrees at ASU include J. Craig Venter, an internationally known scientist credited for developing high-volume genome sequencing, and Wu Qidi, vice minister of education of the People's Republic of China.
The university's policy is different from the one at Notre Dame, where Brown said it's customary to confer a degree on every guest speaker.
By KEN KUSMER, Associated Press Writer Ken Kusmer, Associated Press Writer
The ink is black The page is white Together we learn to read and write The child is black The child is white The whole world looks upon the sight The beautiful sight
And now a child can understand That this is the law of all the land All the land…
Even sober legal scholars lapse into religious language when dealing with Brown vs. the Board of Education.“The justices of the Supreme Court,” according to Law Professor Michael J. Perry [Email him]as cited by historian Raymond Wolters in his new book Race and Education 1954-2007, “were modern ‘prophets’ selected by an ‘American Israel’ and authorized to strike down laws they deemed mistaken.” [The Constitution, the Courts, and Human Rights, 1982]
Others quoted by Wolters liken desegregation’s crusaders to Joshua—making walls tumble down and leading people into the Promised Land of American public schools. So sacrosanct has the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision become that no judge can be confirmed for a federal appointment today without paying it lip service.
Even Wolters reassures the average reader with a few conventional phrases: Brown“condemned an entrenched injustice [and] reconciled the nation’s official policies with its basic principles”. ()But he demonstrates conclusively that the legal reasoning behind the decision was spurious and many of its later outgrowths problematic or negative.
Before deciding the Brown case, the Supreme Court asked the NAACP’s lawyers for evidence that the framers of the 14th Amendment had contemplated school desegregation. The Court, it seems, wanted to rule against segregation but feared being accused of the sort of judicial activism which several of the justices had denounced during the years of the New Deal.
The NAACP commissioned historian Alfred H. Kelly, who quickly discovered that the very Congress which submitted the 14th Amendment to the States had itself established segregated schools in the District of Columbia! Kelly later described how he had
“manipulated history…carefully marshalling every scrap of evidence in favor of the desired interpretation and just as carefully doctoring all the evidence to the contrary, either by suppressing it when that seemed plausible, or by distorting it when suppression was not possible.” [Clio and the Court: An Illicit Love Affair, by Alfred H. Kelly, Supreme Court Review, 119 (1965)]
Afraid bad history would be insufficient, the NAACP mixed in some bad social science. Black psychologist Kenneth B. Clark reported that nine out of sixteen Black children from segregated schools in South Carolina preferred to play with a white rather than a black doll. Clark did not mention that his study of desegregated black children found the same phenomenon. But citing this crude experiment as “modern authority,” the Supreme Court decided that the segregation of Black pupils imposed upon them “a feeling of inferiority… that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”
In actual fact, segregation had served to spare blacks invidious comparisons with whites. Later studies, reported by Wolters, confirmed that black children in segregated schools had higher self-esteem than those in majority-white schools.
By its appeal to sociology, Brown set a precedent for deciding cases on extralegal grounds. Segregationists, who had at first based their case on eighty years of legal precedent, soon responded with scientific evidence of their own. (Wolters reports that a reviewer for his publisher, the University of Missouri Press, was so disturbed by the objective tone in which Prof. Wolters recounted these segregationist arguments that he recommended not publishing the book unless the author disavowed them!)
In Stell v. Savannah (1963), segregationists produced expert witnesses to testify that
Wesley Critz George, a distinguished professor of anatomy explained to the court that
the average weight of the brains of Caucasians was about 1,380 grams, that of Negroes about 1,240 grams, with the difference especially pronounced in the prefrontal area where abstract thought occurred.[Wolters, p. 36]
This evidence was powerful enough, Wolters reports, to cause NAACP attorney Constance Motley “to weep audibly in the courtroom.” [Race and Reality, by Carleton Putnam, Chapter IV]
Despite having won Brown on the basis of extralegal evidence, the NAACP now did an about-face and tried (unsuccessfully) to get scientific testimony excluded from the case as irrelevant. The presiding judge in Stell v. Savannah ruled in favor of the segregationists. (His ruling was overturned on appeal.)
The quest for “integration” now entered its second phase. For more than a decade after Brown, “desegregation” was not understood to require integration. Well-established residential patterns meant that many schools would continue to be virtually all-white or all-black even without practicing racial discrimination. Desegregation meant merely that a child could not be excluded from the local public school on the grounds of race. But it did not mandate racial mixture in schools.
This distinction between desegregation and integration was made explicitly and repeatedly by the courts, and was written into the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Prof. Wolters considers it both clear and valid. But most legal scholars now disagree; they reject or ignore the distinction and (at least nominally) interpret Brown to require racial mixing. How did this change come about?
After ten years of resistance, the South grudgingly accepted Brown in the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which tied federal funding to desegregation. Most districts adopted a “freedom of choice” policy, allowing students to attend any school they wished. Typically, this resulted in a few Negro children transferring to previously all-White schools; transfers in the opposite direction were almost unheard of.
However, a significant faction within the Civil Rights movement (and increasingly within the government bureaucracy) was unsatisfied with these modest changes. It would settle for nothing less than full integration. Some were inspired by Equality of Educational Opportunity, a seven-hundred page study produced under the direction of sociologist James S. Coleman and commonly called the“Coleman report.” This document, issued in 1966, was interpreted to imply (among other things) that when blacks attended majority white schools, their academic performance improved without the performance of whites declining.
That same year, the federal Office of Education issued a new set of guidelines for enforcing desegregation. The guidelines stated:
“The single most substantial indication as to whether a free-choice plan is actually working is the extent to which Negro or other minority group students have in fact transferred from segregated schools.” [United States Commission on Civil Rights, Federal Rights Under School Desegregation Law, June 1966,PDF]
The document went on to specify that a school would not be considered desegregated unless the amount of racial mixing doubled each year until racial balance was achieved! One southern Senator, Richard B. Russell, described the new guidelines as “fanaticism at its very zenith”. Wolters argues that the Office of Education knew perfectly well that it was changing the meaning of the law.
Court challenges quickly followed, with the Fourth Circuit rejecting the guidelines and the Fifth Circuit upholding them. Then, in the case of Green v. New Kent County(1968), the Supreme Court unanimously sided with the Fifth Circuit and ordered southern school districts to assign students by race in order to achieve substantial integration. The court had overturned Brown while claiming to uphold it.
It was in response to the Green decision that a judge in Charlotte, North Carolina imposed a busing program to disperse the races until no school was recognizably black or white. The Supreme Court reviewed the case and upheld the ruling in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg(1971). The justices specifically endorsed means such as busing and the gerrymandering of school districts to bring about integration. But they also cautioned that such integration was mandated only in order to remedy past segregation, rather than as an end in itself. As a result, the ruling applied mainly to the South.
Nevertheless, within two years the Supreme Court was requiring integration in Denver in order to “remedy”de facto segregation determined by residential patterns (Keyes v. School District No. 1).
In Detroit plans were soon afoot to combine the black city districts with fifty-three white suburban districts. The new consolidated school district was so large that some children would have been bused three hours each day.
At this point, finally, the Supreme Court flinched before the monster it had wrought—and possibly “followed the election returns”, in the shape of the George Wallace phenomenon and the Nixon presidency. In Milliken v. Bradley (1974), a 5-4 majority voted to reverse and censure the lower courts for having mandated the Detroit integration program.
As Prof. Wolters summarizes:
“Brown had been the watershed of school desegregation. Green, Swann and Keyes represented the high tide for integration. Milliken marked the water’s edge.”
Integration was a failure. It did nothing to improve the performance of black schoolchildren (as even James S. Coleman came to concede in a 1978 paper noted by Wolters). It wasted untold money and time. It sparked massive white flight. And it created deep resentment among both blacks and whites. Blacks perceived white academic achievement as a form of “showing off” intended to make them feel inferior. The minority of blacks who did keep up with whites got accused of being “sellouts.” Whites were put off by black rowdiness, profanity and—sometimes—misconduct toward white girls. Prof. Wolters documents the entire fiasco with a wealth of detail I can only hint at here.
In integration’s third phase, which still continues, the Supreme Court in a series of rulings issued between 1991 and 2007 has moved gradually back toward the original understanding of Brown. But by this time, there were fewer whites left in many public school districts for blacks to integrate with anyway—and those remaining were disproportionately poorer and disadvantaged.
Prof. Wolters shares a common tendency to identify education with public education.Private schools receive passing mention in his narrative only to explain the otherwise mysterious disappearance of wealthier white students following Brown.
Yet judicial meddling in education was only made possible by that great egalitarian reform of a previous era, public schooling. Race in education became a political issue because education itself had long since been politicized by governmental takeover. This might be a matter worth Prof. Wolters’ attention in writing his promised next book on the subject of educational reform.
, “were modern ‘prophets’ selected by an ‘American Israel’ and authorized to strike down laws they deemed mistaken.”
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