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Reporting on the Middle East, Science, and Education for October 5, 2008 - ו' תשרי תשס"ט
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What can save Israel and Iran from destroying each other? Only the seeds of peace lying dormant in both countries. These seeds lie in the Iranian and Israeli people. They need to be cultivated with civil society exchanges – between students and intellectuals, scientists, doctors, engineers, university professors, and even clerics – where both sides share their experiences in fighting common challenges.
WASHINGTON – On its 60th anniversary, Israel is still concerned about survival. Even with nuclear weapons and the strongest military in the Middle East, the Jewish state remains anxious. Iranian leaders are similarly concerned about the future of their administrations, even as the country approaches the 30th anniversary of its Islamic Revolution.Israel fears any potential threat, whether it comes from Hamas, Hezbollah, or political Islamic groups. Israel also has begun to fear its shifting demographics, where birth rates are significantly higher among Palestinians than Jews. But above all, Israel perceives a threat from Iran
In a similar vein, Iran is threatened by an outside force that would roll back its revolution. The religious conservatives in Iran are resistant to perceived reformists, which at various times have been supported by the United States, and stands alone as one of the only Shia majority countries in the region.
Yet the conservatives of Iran, heirs to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution, also face the possibility of seeing their regime replaced by the followers of former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami.
Iran and Israel share a sense of isolation: Israel is comprised of an ethnic and religious minority (Jewish) in a largely Arab and Muslim Middle East. Likewise, Iran’s government is an ethno-religious minority (Shi’a Persians) surrounded by Sunni countries. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Education Report, Islam, Judaism, Middle East, Middle East Report, Monotheistic Religions, Opinion, Recent Posts on October 5, 2008 - ו' תשרי תשס"ט at 10:39 am
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By Ali Sina, Faithfreedom.org, September 22, 2008
A cult of personality is excessive adulation, admiration and exaltation of a charismatic leader, often with unproven merits or achievements. It is similar to hero worship except that it is created specifically for political leaders.
I must confess I was not impressed by Sen. Barack Obama from the first time I saw him. At first I was excited to see a black candidate. He looked youthful, spoke well, appeared to be confident – a wholesome presidential package. It is so instinctive for most people to want to see blacks succeed. It is as if all humanity is carrying a collective guilt for what the ancestors of blacks endured. However, despite my initial interest in him, I was put off soon, not just because of his shallowness but also because there was an air of haughtiness in his demeanor that was unsettling. His posture and his body language were louder than his empty words.
It is surreal to see the level of hysteria in his admirers. This phenomenon is unprecedented in American politics. Women scream and swoon during his speeches. They yell and shout to Obama, “I love you.” Never did George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt. Martin Luther King Jr. or Ronald Reagan arouse so much raw emotion. Despite their achievements, none of them was raised to the rank of Messiah. The Illinois senator has no history of service to the country. He has done nothing outstanding except giving promises of change and hyping his audience with hope. It’s only his words, not his achievements that is causing this much uproar.
When cheering for someone turns into adulation, something is wrong. Excessive adulation is indicative of a personality cult. The cult of personality is often created when the general population is discontent. A charismatic leader can seize the opportunity and project himself as an agent of change and a revolutionary leader. Often, people, tired of the status quo, do not have the patience to examine the nature of the proposed change. All they want is change. During 1979, when the Iranians were tired of the dictatorial regime of the late Shah, they embraced Khomeini, not because they wanted Islam, but because he promised them change. The word in the street was, “anything is better than the Shah.” They found their error when it was too late. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Education Report, Mental Health, Middle East Report, Opinion, Recent Posts on September 28, 2008 - כ"ח אלול תשס"ח at 5:58 am
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By Scott J. Cech, Education Week, September 16, 2008
There’s a war of sorts going on within the normally staid assessment industry, and it’s a war over the definition of a type of assessment that many educators understand in only the sketchiest fashion.
Formative assessments, also known as “classroom assessments,” are in some ways easier to define by what they are not. They’re not like the long, year-end, state-administered, standardized, No Child Left Behind Act-required exams that testing professionals call “summative.” Nor are they like the shorter, middle-of-the-year assessments referred to as “benchmark” or “interim” assessments.
Or they shouldn’t be, at least according to experts inside and outside the testing industry, who believe that truly “formative” assessments must blend seamlessly into classroom instruction itself.
“It makes me want to scream and run out of the room,” said Ray Wilson, the executive director of assessment and accountability for the 33,000-student Poway Unified School District in Poway, Calif., referring to off-the-shelf commercial products labeled “formative assessment” that major test-makers try to sell him. “I still contend that so long as a teacher doesn’t have primary control [over assessment content],” he added, “you will never have truly formative assessment.”
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Education Report, Recent Posts, Special Education on September 16, 2008 - ט"ז אלול תשס"ח at 6:18 pm
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Reprinted from NCSE, August 24, 2008
"A Teacher on the Front Line as Faith and Science Clash" — a story on the front page of The New York Times (August 24, 2008) — examines the creationism/evolution controversy as it plays out in the classroom of David Campbell, a biology teacher in Orange Park, Florida. The Times’s reporter Amy Harmon writes, "in a nation where evangelical Protestantism and other religious traditions stress a literal reading of the biblical description of God’s individually creating each species, students often arrive at school fearing that evolution, and perhaps science itself, is hostile to their faith." Campbell’s students are a case in point, and "their abiding mistrust in evolution, he feared, jeopardized their belief in the basic power of science to explain the natural world — and their ability to make sense of it themselves."
In addition to helping his own students, Campbell also helped to improve the treatment of evolution throughout Florida by co-founding the grassroots organization Florida Citizens for Science blog) and by serving on the committee that revised Florida’s state science standards in 2007. The new standards describe evolution as a "fundamental concept underlying all of biology" — a far cry from their predecessors, which sedulously avoided even using the e-word. Harmon writes, "Campbell defended his fellow writers against complaints that they had not included alternative explanations for life’s diversity, like intelligent design. His attempt at humor came with an edge: ‘We also failed to include astrology, alchemy and the concept of the moon being made of green cheese,’ he said. ‘Because those aren’t science, either.’”
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Education Report, Evolutionary Biology, Recent Posts, Science on August 25, 2008 - כ"ד אב תשס"ח at 2:21 pm
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By Karin Kloosterman, Israel 21C, August 18, 2008
Spellcheckers on computer software did to language what calculators have done to math, unless you are one of the 15 percent of Americans who suffer from dyslexia. While Microsoft Word’s spellchecker can tell you how to spell your words properly, it can’t handle the complex language problems that dyslexics face on a daily basis.
"The problem they have is connecting the sounds of letters to the symbols of the written language," says Yael Karov, the CEO of Ginger Software who co-founded the Israeli company with her husband Avner Zangvil. They aim to give dyslexics software that can reduce spelling errors and improve their learning and communication skills dramatically.
Based in Tel Aviv, the company employs 15 and come October its software will be ready for Americans. Currently undergoing a Beta test, Ginger is available online for a free trial, or as a download, and will seamlessly connect to Microsoft Word as an add-on. After typing sentences, a screen will show users correct alternatives. They will also get an option to hear their sentences aloud.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Education Report, Recent Posts, Science and Technology, Special Education on August 19, 2008 - י"ח אב תשס"ח at 6:35 pm
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Published for Tisha B’Av 5768.
See Also: Jews, Go Away!
By Richard L. Cravatts, History News Network, August 4, 2008
“You fund Middle Eastern Studies centers on university campuses and use them as anti-Israel, anti-American “think tanks” where scholarship is tainted with ideology and singularly focused on the Palestinian cause. You fund the active and vocal Muslim Students Association on campuses across the country that hold “Israel Apartheid Week” and “Holocaust in the Holy Land” festivals at which propaganda, Jew-hatred, apologies for terrorism, and further demonizing of Israel takes place.”
As part of evaluating the competitive landscape of the popularity of nations, in a process referred to in marketing circles as ‘place branding,’ Israel, to no one’s great surprise, comes up short in brand likeability, ranking last out of 35 nations included in an August 2006 survey conducted by nation branding expert Simon Anholt, even less attractive to respondents than Indonesia, Estonia, and Turkey.
How could this have happened to a country that is the Middle East’s only thriving democracy and enjoys a remarkably robust economy that has spawned some 1000 startup high tech companies, for example, second only to the U.S.? How, in short, would you go about making the world hate Israel?
Even after 60 years of its existence, you question the fundamental right of Israel to even exist and regularly, though falsely, condemn it for being created “illegally”—through the “theft” of Palestinian lands and property—and thus decide, because of its original sin, it has no “right to exist.” You accuse the government of a “brutal,” illegal “occupation” of Palestinian lands, especially Gaza and the West Bank (but for many, all of Israel), of being a “colonial settler state,” a Zionist “regime” or “project,” a land-hungry nation, a usurper of property that was lived on and owned by a Palestinian “people” “from time immemorial.”
You describe the very existence of the country as being the “greatest threat to world peace,” the core cause of all Muslim anger toward the West, the root of all of the Palestinians’ suffering and economic plight, and describe Israel as a nation that has even been referred to publicly as a “shitty little country” by the French ambassador to Britain.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Education Report, Judaism, Middle East Report, Opinion, Recent Posts on August 5, 2008 - ד' אב תשס"ח at 8:37 am
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by Asaf Romirowsky, Washington Times, August 4, 2008
http://www.meforum.org/article/1965
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict long ago spilled over into America’s departments of Middle East studies. In an attempt to appear balanced in the face of charges of anti-Israel biases, some departments or programs of Middle East studies have added Israeli scholars to their ranks—a move that at first glance appears welcome.
Yet many of these Israeli academics have built their reputation on scholarship that is harshly critical not only of Israeli policy, but of Israel’s very existence. Anti-Israel scholars who hail from Israel are cited favorably by the entire range of Israel’s critics, from pro-Palestinian groups like PSM, the Committee to Stop Demolition of Houses in Palestine, the Committee to Stop Torture, and Breaking the Silence to Jewish anti-Zionist groups like the American Council for Judaism, from neo-Nazis to Islamists.
The international standing of such scholars received a boost in the mid-1980s with the rise of the so-called “new historians” in Israeli universities. These scholars sought to debunk what they claim is a distorted “Zionist narrative” in Israeli historiography. In practice, they twisted the history of Israel’s rebirth by, among other tricks, dismissing the efforts of the Arab states to destroy the new-born Jewish state as a Zionist myth, and claiming that Israel is built on ethnic cleansing and brutality towards the Palestinians.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Education Report, Judaism, Middle East, Middle East Report, Opinion, Recent Posts on August 4, 2008 - ג' אב תשס"ח at 10:21 am
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Reprinted from News-Medical.net, July 29, 2008
The article from the National Birth Defects Prevention Study (NBDPS), “Diabetes Mellitus and Birth Defects,” shows that pregnant women with pre-gestational diabetes mellitus (pre-pregnancy diagnosis of diabetes, such as type 1 or type 2 diabetes) are more likely than a mother with no diabetes or a mother with gestational diabetes mellitus (pregnancy-induced diabetes) to have a child with various types of individual or multiple birth defects. This includes heart defects, defects of the brain and spine, oral clefts, defects of the kidneys and gastrointestinal tract and limb deficiencies. This study is the first to show the broad range and severity of birth defects associated with type 1 and type 2 diabetes.
“The continued association of diabetes with a number of birth defects highlights the importance of increasing the number of women who receive the best possible preconception care, especially for those women diagnosed with diabetes,” says Adolfo Correa, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., lead author and epidemiologist at CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. “Early and effective management of diabetes for pregnant women is critical in helping to not only prevent birth defects, but also to reduce the risk for other health complications for them and their children.”
Researchers also found that some of the pregnant women with gestational diabetes were more likely to have a child with birth defects. Because birth defects associated with diabetes are more likely to occur during the first trimester of pregnancy and before a diagnosis of gestational diabetes is made, the observed associations suggest that some of the mothers with it probably had undiagnosed diabetes before they became pregnant. However symptoms went unnoticed until pregnancy.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Health Sciences, Special Education on July 30, 2008 - כ"ז תמוז תשס"ח at 10:54 am
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By RYAN JONES, Israel Today, July 28, 2008
The growing number of Israeli Arabs buying into the Palestinian narrative of a cruel and heartless Israel is further evidence of why there will never be true peace in this region as a result of man’s efforts.
Oh sure, pieces of paper headlined “Peace Agreement” will be signed, but on the ground there will be no peace.
Former US President John F. Kennedy said it best in an address to the UN General Assembly in 1963:
“But peace does not rest in the charters and covenants alone. It lies in the hearts and minds of all people. So let us not rest all our hopes on parchment and on paper, let us strive to build peace, a desire for peace, a willingness to work for peace in the hearts and minds of all of our people.”
If that is true, then Arab officials who are today pushing for written peace agreements are at the same time ensuring that true peace will remain elusive by training their people to hate.
An entire generation of Palestinian and Israeli Arabs today believes even the most unsubstantiated lies taught to them by their elders, educators and media. And these lies are not formulated to be temporary tactics in a short-lived conflict, but rather to engender life-long animosity toward Israeli Jews.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Education Report, Middle East Report, Monotheistic Religions, Opinion, Recent Posts on July 29, 2008 - כ"ו תמוז תשס"ח at 2:23 am
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By Ralph Dannheiser, America.gov, July 17, 2008
Muslim and Jewish girls volunteer at a New Jersey homeless shelter, where they also are able to learn about each other’s cultures.
Washington — Interfaith movements hold the key to resolving conflicts rampant in today’s world, but focusing those efforts on youth is critical to their success, panelists at a June forum sponsored by the United States Institute of Peace agree.
That emphasis on the young is especially vital when extremist groups like al-Qaida are concentrating their own recruitment efforts on young people searching for a meaningful identity, they contended.
Pushing the case for interfaith engagement, panel member Eboo Patel told an audience of 80 — most of them directly involved with the interfaith youth movement through policy research group, nongovernmental organization (NGO), university or governmental roles — that religion “is an identity issue that in too many cases is causing division.”
Patel, an Indian-American Muslim who founded and directs the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), recalled feeling in the 1990s that “every time I turned around, there was some young person killing people to the soundtrack of prayer” on the news.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Education Report, Middle East Report, Monotheistic Religions, Recent Posts on July 19, 2008 - ט"ז תמוז תשס"ח at 10:43 pm
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