Majorityrights News > Category: Social Sciences

New Observer, “Jews Force 11,000 Pro-Israel Changes to US School Textbooks”, 16 April 2018:

The Jewish lobby in America has forced through more than 11,000 changes to US school textbooks issued by National Geographic, Prentice Hall, Five Ponds Press, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and McGraw-Hill over the past several years, it has emerged.

According to a press release issued by the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep) and posted at the Israel Lobby Archive, the latest changes were revealed in a set of changes demanded by the Jews in textbooks and teaching guides used in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Requested changes include:

– Deletion of references to Israel “occupying” territories captured during the 1967 Six-Day War and substituting “controlled.” International conventions clearly outline the responsibility of occupying powers and the illegality of collective punishment and population transfers.

– Changes to maps to recognize Israel’s declared “annexation” of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. The U.S. and most other countries do not officially recognize Israeli annexation of either territory.

– Substitution of references to “occupied territories” to “captured areas.”

–  Substitution of references to “Jewish settlers” and “settlements” with “building of homes and communities.”

– Deletion of a lesson reviewing a video documentary by Iranian-American religious studies scholar, author, producer and television host Reza Aslan.

– Deletion of an activity based on reading the biography and work of Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi.

– Substitution of an editorial cartoon titled “The Mideast Peace Game Rules” with a cartoon of an Arab suicide terrorist holding a “Road Map to Peace” game hostage.

California-based Institute for Curriculum Services (ICS) proposed changes were submitted to the Virginia Department of Education on February 28 on behalf of the Jewish Community Federation of Richmond, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, the Jewish Community Relations Committee (JCRC) of Richmond, and the JCRC of Tidewater.

In a January webcast on YouTube, ICS chief Aliza Craimer Elias claimed that “working behind the scenes” through state advocacy organizations ICS had successfully made more than 11,000 changes to U.S. textbooks.

Publishers of the textbooks targeted for changes include National Geographic, Prentice Hall, Five Ponds Press, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and McGraw-Hill.

Common themes in ICS requests to make changes to Virginia textbooks.

1. Qualify claims of Islam as “expressing Muslim religious belief” while referencing those of Judaism as “God’s covenant.”

2. Replace Christian versions of key texts (such as the Ten Commandments) with Judaic versions.

3. Emphasize the “Jewish ethnicity”“ of major American historical figures.

4. Eliminate terms such as “settlers,” “occupation,” “land theft” and “wall” or replace with more neutral terms such as “disputed,” “captured areas,” “security fence” and “controlled.”

5. Emphasize Arab culpability for crisis initiation (Israel’s 1948 War of Independence) leading to military action, but not Israeli culpability (e.g. surprise Israeli airstrikes on Egypt commencing the 1967 Six-Day War).

6. Discourage students from conducting open internet research on current events lest they run into controversial content. Instead recommend approved websites such as the ADL and the JewishVirtualLibrary.org

7. Eliminate or replace historical artwork created for predominately Christian audiences.

8. Add content that augments Israeli claims to occupied territory in the Middle East, such as changing maps of the Golan Heights as belonging to Israel rather than Syria.

9. Reference Israeli claims such as “Israel annexed East Jerusalem” as settled fact, without referencing lack of official recognition by other nation states.

10. Delete all references to “Palestinian Territories.”

11.Where ICS has already successfully lobbied for changes in national editions of textbooks, it demands that these changes also be made to State of Virginia editions.

TV: postmortem on passivity induced runaway destruction, including speculation on zombie effects despite the new dawn of interactive media. It’s being a retrospective gives me an excuse to post this older show which I’ve only seen today for the first time. It’s funny as hell. Charlie Brooker is clever. I don’t vouch for his politics, am unfamiliar with that.

But as we say goodbye to the hegemonic days of television and the passive acceptance of its audiences of a world they could not interact with nor hope to change, it is worthwhile to take another look back on the days of how the Televitz shaped and manipulated our attention; and to speculate on some of its lingering effects, both on runaway systems in a world unchallenged, and its parallel tropisms in the computer screen, exponentially better though it is in the choice and interaction the mechanisms attached may provide…

“How Television Ruined Your Life”

Parts 1-6, BBC production, 2012, under Youtube license:

Episode 1 - Fear

Episode 2 - Life Cycle

Episode 3 - Aspiration

Episode 4 - Love

Episode 5 - Progress

Episode 6 - Knowledge

Link corrected

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Donald Trump gives a thumbs up as his son Donald Trump, Jr. speaks at a campaign rally at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia February 29, 2016 Reuters.

NPR, “Donald Trump Jr. Had Direct Contact With WikiLeaks During Campaign”, 14 Nov 2017:

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump Jr. was in direct contact with WikiLeaks at the same time the muckraking website was publishing hacked emails from Democratic officials that proved damaging to the Clinton campaign, according to several major publications.

Following the reports, Trump Jr. acknowledged the contact in a tweet detailing one exchange with the radical transparency organization.

The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, in articles published late Monday, said that then-candidate Donald Trump’s eldest son used the messaging feature on Twitter to communicate with WikiLeaks, which in turn alerted the campaign to the impending release of the hacked emails.

The publications report that the messages between Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks were among thousands of documents turned over to Congress as part of its ongoing investigation into claims that Russia interfered in the November election — a finding backed unanimously by U.S. intelligence agencies, which have said that the Kremlin aimed to aid Donald Trump’s campaign.

New Observer, “Nonwhites Majority of UK School Population within 20 Years”, 15 July 2017:

Nonwhites will make up the majority population in British schools within the next twenty years, the direct result of decades of mass Third World immigration and their natural reproduction rates, an analysis of new data issued by the UK’s Department of Education has revealed.

       
        School class in Newham, London.

According to the report, titled “Schools, pupils and their characteristics: January 2017” and issued at the beginning of July 2017, nonwhites already make up over 25 percent of all school pupils in primary and secondary schools combined, and have increased their numbers by more than 10 percent in the last ten years.

According to the report, there are a total of 8.67 million pupils in all schools in England—which means that there are already in excess of 2.167 million nonwhite pupils.

The total number of pupils has grown every year since 2009 and there are now 577,000 more pupils The report reveals that the proportion of pupils from “minority ethnic origins,” has “been rising steadily since 2006. In primary schools, 32.1% of pupils of compulsory school age are of minority ethnic origins, an increase from 31.4% in January 2016.

“Minority ethnic pupils made up 66.3% of the increase in pupil numbers in primary schools between 2016 and 2017.

“In secondary schools, 29.1% of pupils are of minority ethnic origins, an increase from 27.9% in 2016.”

The Department of Education’s figures however, include white children of “non-British origin”—in other words, those of Polish or Eastern European origin.

The report goes on to a specific breakdown of pupils by ethnic origin in State funded schools in England;

State-funded primary schools

White British 67.2

White Non-British 7.5

Asian 10.7

Black 5.6

Mixed 5.9

Chinese 0.4

Any other 1.9

Unclassified 0.7

State-funded secondary schools

White British 69.5

White Non-British 5.7

Asian 10.7

Black 5.6

Mixed 5.0

Chinese 0.4

Any other 1.7

Unclassified 1.5

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Darwin Digest: North, East and West Africa. ...“We” was Not Kangs.

Express, “All 22 victims of Manchester terror attack named and identified”, 25 May 2017:

The full list of the victims:

  Saffie Rose Roussos, 8
  Nell Jones, 14
  Sorrell Leczkowski, 14
  Eilidh MacLeod, 14
  Olivia Campbell, 15
  Megan Hurley, 15
  Chloe Rutherford, 17
  Georgina Callander, 18
  Courtney Boyle, 19
  Liam Curry, 19
  John Atkinson, 28
  Martyn Hett, 29
  Kelly Brewster, 32
  Philip Tron, 32
  Angelika Klis, 40
  Marcin Kils, 42
  Elaine McIver 43
  Alison Howe, 45
  Michelle Kiss, 45
  Lisa Lees, 47
  Wendy Fawell, 50
  Jane Tweddle-Taylor, 51

NPR,“A ‘Forgotten History’ Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America”, 3 May 2017:

Federal housing policies created after the Depression ensured that African-Americans and other people of color were left out of new suburban communities - and pushed instead into urban housing projects, such as Detroit’s Brewster-Douglass towers. Paul Sancya/AP

In 1933, faced with a housing shortage, the federal government began a program explicitly designed to increase — and segregate — America’s housing stock. Author Richard Rothstein says the housing programs begun under the New Deal were tantamount to a “state-sponsored system of segregation.”

Race: Historian Says Don’t ‘Sanitize’ How Our Government Created Ghettos

Code Switch: Everyone Pays A Hefty Price For Segregation, Study Says

The government’s efforts were “primarily designed to provide housing to white, middle-class, lower-middle-class families,” he says. African-Americans and other people of color were left out of the new suburban communities — and pushed instead into urban housing projects.

Rothstein’s new book, The Color of Law, examines the local, state and federal housing policies that mandated segregation. He notes that the Federal Housing Administration, which was established in 1934, furthered the segregation efforts by refusing to insure mortgages in and near African-American neighborhoods — a policy known as “redlining.” At the same time, the FHA was subsidizing builders who were mass-producing entire subdivisions for whites — with the requirement that none of the homes be sold to African-Americans.

Rothstein says these decades-old housing policies have had a lasting effect on American society. “The segregation of our metropolitan areas today leads ... to stagnant inequality, because families are much less able to be upwardly mobile when they’re living in segregated neighborhoods where opportunity is absent,” he says. “If we want greater equality in this society, if we want lowering of hostility between police and young African-American men, we need to take steps to desegregate.”

Interview Highlights

On how the Federal Housing Administration justified discrimination

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America - by Richard Rothstein

The Federal Housing Administration’s justification was that if African-Americans bought homes in these suburbs, or even if they bought homes near these suburbs, the property values of the homes they were insuring, the white homes they were insuring, would decline. And therefore their loans would be at risk.

There was no basis for this claim on the part of the Federal Housing Administration. In fact, when African-Americans tried to buy homes in all-white neighborhoods or in mostly white neighborhoods, property values rose because African-Americans were more willing to pay more for properties than whites were, simply because their housing supply was so restricted and they had so many fewer choices. So the rationale that the Federal Housing Administration used was never based on any kind of study. It was never based on any reality.

On how federal agencies used redlining to segregate African-Americans

The term “redlining” comes from a development by the New Deal, by the federal government of maps of every metropolitan area in the country. And those maps were color-coded by first the Home Owners Loan Corp. and then the Federal Housing Administration and then adopted by the Veterans Administration, and these color codes were designed to indicate where it was safe to insure mortgages. And anywhere where African-Americans lived, anywhere where African-Americans lived nearby were colored red to indicate to appraisers that these neighborhoods were too risky to insure mortgages.

On the FHA manual that explicitly laid out segregationist policies

The Two-Way: Interactive Redlining Map Zooms In On America’s History Of Discrimination

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