“The women’s rights movement had three goals. First, it got women into the workplace where their labor could be taxed….So, with more women entering the workforce the supply of labor increases and wages are depressed….
“Now couples need to have two careers to support a typical modern lifestyle. We can’t tax the labor in a home-cooked meal. We can tax the labor in takeout food, or the higher cost of a microwave dinner. The economic potential of both halves of the adult population now largely flows into the government where it can serve noble ends instead of petty private interests….
“The second reason is to get children out of the potentially antisocial environment of the home and into educational settings where we can be sure they’ll get the right values and learn the right lessons to be happy and productive members of society. Working mothers need to send their children to daycare and after-school care where we can be sure they get exposed to the right lessons, or at least not to bad ideas….
“They are going to assign homework to their students: enough homework to guarantee that even elementary school students are spending all their spare time doing homework. Their poor parents, eager to see that Junior stays up with the rest of the class, will be spending all their time helping their kids get incrementally more proficient on the tests we have designed. They’ll be too busy doing homework to pick up on any antisocial messages at home….
“Children will be too busy to learn independence at home, too busy to do chores, to learn how to take care of themselves, to be responsible for their own cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Their parents will have to cater to their little darlings’ every need, and their little darlings will be utterly dependent on their parents. When the kids grow up, they will be used to having someone else take care of them. They will shift that spirit of dependence from their parents to their university professors, and ultimately to their government. The next generation will be psychologically prepared to accept a government that would be intrusive even by today’s relaxed standards – a government that will tell them exactly how to behave and what to think. Not a Big Brother government, but a Mommy-State….
The United Arab Emirates has announced plans to officially introduce the Holocaust as a subject in classrooms — a rare decision in the Middle East. However, details about what will be taught and when remain unclear.
Earlier peace treaties were signed by Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994. However, many other Arab countries reject any official contact with Israel to this day.
Now, the UAE is apparently taking a leading role in dealing with the Holocaust. The Holocaust as a regular school subject is rare in the Arab world.
Last November in Washington, Ali al-Nuaimi, a member of the UAE Federal National Council, had already declared that "memorializing the victims of the Holocaust is crucial."
The Israeli Foreign Ministry reacted positively to the news from the UAE. It praised the "historic decision" in an Arabic-language tweet.
The US' special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt, also highlighted the plan on Twitter, saying she expected other countries to follow suit soon.
Further details still unknown
So far little is known about the content that might go into the school lessons.
According to a report in the UAE-based newspaper The National, the concept is being developed in cooperation with Jerusalem's Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center and the Israeli-British Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, or IMPACT-SE.
Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum is advising the UAE on course contentImage: Nir Alon/ ZUMAPRESS.com/picture alliance
But not many details have been made public. In an interview with DW, Marcus Sheff, head of IMPACT-SE, said they were happy to provide advice and information that they hoped would be useful in teaching about the Holocaust. And, he added, a review of the teaching materials on the Holocaust that have been made available to them so far has shown that they meet the standards for peace and tolerance defined by UNESCO.
The institute has not yet seen the final draft of the teaching materials.The final draft is not yet available to Yad Vashem either.
UAE newspaper The National stated that a final version of the curriculum is in the process of being drafted, but a publication date is yet to be announced.
Nobody knows when any school lessons with Holocaust learning materials might begin, either. A proposed interview with the UAE's embassy in Berlin on this issue did not take place, and it was not possible to obtain information from other sources at the time of publication.
Dubai's Crossroads of Civilizations Museum hosts an exhibition on the HolocaustImage: Karim Sahib/AFP
Jewish community 'proud'
The small Jewish community in the UAE has welcomed the project. It is "proud" of the plans, Alex Peterfreund, head of the community, told news agency AFP.
"By teaching the Holocaust, the UAE wants to show what can happen when people of different religions and cultures cannot live together," said Peterfreund, a Belgian who has lived in the UAE since 2014 and whose grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust.
It is also encouraging that Hebrew courses in the UAE and other Gulf states have been in much higher demand in recent years.
Jewish people have lived in what is now the UAE for more than 1,000 years. Today's Jewish community — estimated at around 3,000 people — is made up of their descendants and immigrants who moved there for professional reasons.
The Jewish community is quite visible in the UAE. There are several synagogues and kosher restaurants, and a Jewish center has opened. "Jewish life here is flourishing," Levi Duchman, the UAE's chief rabbi, told Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post in September. A few years ago, the UAE even had Yemeni Jews arriving who had been persecuted by the Houthi group . They took refuge with relatives in the UAE.
Rabbi Duchman welcomed the UAE's plans to include the Holocaust in Emirati schoolsImage: Andrea DiCenzo/Getty Images
Never again
Ebtesam al-Ketbi, director of the think tank Emirates Policy Center in Abu Dhabi, praised the decision. "The initiative is part of the Emirates' efforts to promote tolerance and coexistence," al-Ketbi told DW. "It is important to teach students about such an event to prevent the repetition of such painful historical experiences."
The Holocaust, she said, is the "most significant example of racism against people who are different, whether religiously or ethnically."
Ahmed al-Mansoori, founder of the Crossroads of Civilizations Museum Group in Dubai, which includes a historical exhibition on the Holocaust, has a similar view. The Holocaust is still widely denied, al-Mansoori said in a recent interview with AFP: "If we want people to sympathize with us, we have to sympathize with others."
Not everyone agrees. According to AFP, the exhibition's guestbook also contains negative comments, including slogans such as "Down with Zionist imperialism."
A tweet by Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a prominent Emirati political scientist, also gained attention. The Holocaust has "neither national nor educational value" as a subject, he wrote on Twitter. Abdulla said he hoped the announced plans were not real.
The Palestinian organization Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip and is classified by the European Union as a terrorist organization, also made a statement. Teaching the topic was an "endorsement of the Zionist narrative," a spokesman said. In 2009, Hamas said the Holocaust was "a lie invented by the Zionists" after the group suspected that the United Nations was going to teach Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip about the Holocaust.
It remains to be seen to what extent school-based education will be able to counter Holocaust denial or relativization in the future.
Matt Taibbi just published installment number 15 in the Twitter files series. This one is about a bogus media fraud known asHamilton 68.
If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as the single greatest case of media fabulism in American history. Virtually every major news organization in America is implicated, including NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and the Washington Post. Mother Jones alone did at least 14 stories pegged to the group’s “research.” Even fact-checking sites like Politifact and Snopes cited Hamilton 68 as sources.
Hamilton 68 was and is a computerized “dashboard” designed to be used by reporters and academics to measure “Russian disinformation”. It was the brainchild of former FBI agent (and current MSNBC “disinformation expert”) Clint Watts, and backed by the German Marshall Fund and the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan think-tank. The latter’s advisory panel includes former acting CIA chief Michael Morell, former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, former Hillary for America chair John Podesta, and onetime Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol.Their influence was everywhere:
What was Hamilton 68? It was a secret list of 644 Twitter accounts which were supposedly linked to Russian activity online. While no one in the media or on Twitter knew which accounts Hamilton 68 was looking at, Twitter was able to reverse-engineer it because Hamilton 68 was using their API to look at those accounts. What Twitter found was a bunch of junk and a bunch of English language accounts not based in Russia:
Twitter was checking to see how many of Hamilton’s accounts were spammy, phony, or bot-like. Note that out of 644 accounts, just 36 were registered in Russia, and many of those were associated with RT.
Examining further, Twitter execs were shocked. The accounts Hamilton 68 claimed were linked to “Russian influence activities online” were not only overwhelmingly English-language (86%), but mostly “legitimate people,” largely in the U.S., Canada, and Britain. Grasping right away that Twitter might be implicated in a moral outrage, they wrote that these account-holders “need to know they’ve been unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse.”
Twitter’s Yoel Roth called the effort “bulls**t” and pointed out it was falsely accusing right-wing sites of being “Russian bots.”
Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) named Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Friday, despite House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's (R-CA) vow toblockher from sitting on the panel over past antisemitic comments.
The clash willtrigger a floor votein which McCarthy will need the support of the majority of the House to keep Omar off the committee. He unilaterally blocked two Democrats from sitting on the House Intelligence Committee since it's a select panel and is populated at the speaker's discretion.
As if you needed anything to seal the deal about the fraudiness of green and socially conscious investments, Barron's has a report (free version here) about investors now fleeing wokester Environment, Social, Governance (ESG) investment funds, which bill themselves as "sustainable investments."
Investors yanked the most money out of U.S. sustainable funds in more than five years last quarter, withdrawing a net nearly $6.2 billion to round out a tough year for environmental, social, and governance strategies.
The net flow of money into U.S. sustainable mutual and exchange-traded funds has diminished steadily since it hit a record high in the first quarter of 2021, according to a new report from Morningstar.
The decline comes as inflation, rising interest rates, and lingering fears of recession have weighed on markets and investor sentiment.
But that doesn’t explain the whole shift. The increasing politicization of ESG investing also hurt investment strategies that prioritize social and environmental issues, said Alyssa Stankiewicz, associate director of sustainability research at Morningstar and a co-author of the report.
The Treasury Department on Wednesday denied the House Oversight Committee’s request to disclose 150 suspicious reports flagged by U.S. banks concerning Biden family business transactions, causing the committee’s chairman to threaten a subpoena.
U.S. banks have flagged over 150 suspicious financial transactions from Hunter and James Biden, Rep. James Comer (R-KY), House Oversight Committee chair, told Breitbart News. The wire transfers included “large” amounts of money tripped for further review by American banks.
Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.
The Goals of Communism
(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.