CANADIAN JEWISH STUDENTS FLEE FROM MOB

York University saw the worst antisemitic display ever on that campus last week, said Ben Feferman, senior campus coordinator for the Canadian region of Hasbara Fellowships, an Israel advocacy organization spearheaded by Aish Hatorah. The Betar-supported Campus Coalition of Zionists (CCZ), together with Hasbarah, manned a table in Vari Hall, with permission from the university, with pamphlets and brochures about the danger emanating from Iran. However, the situation became very difficult for the students who participated. They were vastly outnumbered by pro-Arab students who surrounded them, and eventually the pro-Israel activists fled. As they left, there was cheering by the pro-Arab mob.

According to Feferman, "I've never seen anything like this at York. We weren't even discussing the issues anymore. It was pure Jew hatred. That's what it's come to."In fact, Feferman noticed an acquaintance there and said hello, but received no acknowledgement. She emailed him later that day to apologize, explaining that she didn't want everyone to know she was Jewish. To Feferman, this episode is a red light. "We know there's a crisis when a student on campus is afraid to reveal she's Jewish and feels unsafe," he said.

Another disturbing issue that day, according to Feferman, was that a Hillel executive was standing nearby, watching. Feferman can't understand why he didn't take action or get his students to help out.

When asked why they didn't offer to support Hasbarah and CCZ, Tilly Shames, associate director, Hillel of Greater Toronto, did not answer the question directly referencing a program Hillel had held previously that experienced no protest.

Shames said, "Hillel @ York ran an extremely successful Israel program in a very public space (Vari Hall) on campus last Thursday. The Israel program was received positively and embraced by the student body. Hillel experienced no protest for running a public Israel program."

"This is one of the first issues we've moved forward with in a pro-advocacy way, rather than being put in a reactive situation later on," said Orna Hollander, executive director of Betar Canada.

The following day, Palestinian Media Watch's Itamar Marcus addressed York students on the daily indoctrination of children living under the Palestinian Authority to hate Jews. "It was absolute chaos," Hollander declared. "It was impossible to moderate. People would ask loaded questions. Marcus wasn't given an opportunity to respond. He refused to get into a screaming match. One girl, raised in Canada, said she herself would gladly be a suicide bomber and would have no qualms raising her daughter to become a shahid."

A couple of weeks ago, when US-based anti-Israel professor of linguistics Noam Chomsky was scheduled to address York students via satellite, CCZ and Hasbarah joined forces to provide information about what Chomsky stands for.

"We wanted to do a protest," Feferman said, "but the university administration wouldn't allow it, saying they didn't want a lot of noise and they were afraid that signs could be used as weapons." The students settled for a table with handouts about Chomsky and two large posters, one depicting Chomsky with [Hezbollah leader] Nasrallah. One poster quoted Chomsky's statement: "I see no antisemitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even in denial of the Holocaust."

The event was successful in providing information, Feferman said. "Over the course of four hours, a few hundred people came by. About half of them were moderate people who said they had heard about Chomsky in their English class and didn't know he had these views. The other half were people who condemned Israel and insisted Hezbollah isn't a terrorist organization. At one point they came together and surrounded us, argued about issues and blamed America and Israel. We had good security, including non-uniformed security guards. We succeeded in raising awareness of Chomsky's worldviews, although at times it was confrontational. We're now organizing a protest for the Finkelstein event at U of T on Thursday."

Hasbarah and CCZ are making plans to launch a presence at Ryerson University, where the vice-president of the student union has made several unsuccessful attempts in recent months to impose a boycott, divestment and sanctions motion against Israel and has organized a number of anti-Israel programs on campus.

(Last week, when a couple of Ryerson Student Union leaders tried to introduce a boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel at the annual congress of the Canadian Federation of Students, more than two-thirds of the voting plenary rejected the call. B'nai Brith had called on the Federation to reject categorically the boycott proposal.)

"Two [Ryerson] students in the past few weeks called me and said they need help doing something," Feferman said. "We're going to try to find the students there and hope to start advocating properly on campus."

After the anti-Jewish near-rioting at York last week, one student representing the "Independent Body and Advocates of Peace and Humanity," handed out flyers stating its opposition to any comparison of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmanidejad with Hitler and claiming that CCZ was marginalizing Iranians by attacking Iran's leader. It should be noted that the same students who resent any criticism of Ahmanidejad and worry about a negative impact on Iranian students are active proponents of anti-Israel activity. "Freedom of speech is only for them," Feferman said. "The right to censure a country's leader is only for them."

At the senate meeting, no discussion followed the statement in favour of removing CCZ from campus. However, in a Facebook chat room later that evening, a member of the Independent Body and Advocates of Peace and Humanity wrote: "I just wanted the top authorities of the university to be informed.. Right after the meeting, other senators approached me and showed me their FULL support, whom of which [sic] control many things at the university."

According to Feferman, "that group wanted to use its freedom of speech in their anti-Israel campaign. Now they're adding a new element: Pursuing political and administrative means. They feel they have had success in reaching so many people over the years for their cause. They feel they can succeed further. Because of a lack of overall pro-Israel advocacy on campus, they have been `educated' by them. "At the end of the day, there's the issue of dignity," he added. "We have soldiers dying to protect us in Israel. We have to protect Israel's image on campus."

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American Education Fails Because It Isn't Education

The debate over public education grows more heated. Regularly, reports are released showing that the academic abilities of American students continue to fall when compared to those in other countries.

Twenty years ago the U.S. ranked first in the world in the number of young adults who had high school diplomas and college degrees. Today we rank ninth and seventh, respectively, among industrialized nations. Compared to Europe and Asia, 15-year-olds in the United States are below average in applying math skills to real-life tasks. The United States ranks 18 out of 24 industrialized nations in terms of relative effectiveness of its education system. Knowledge in history, geography, grammar, civics and literature are all in decline in terms of academic understanding and achievement.

To solve the crisis, politicians, community leaders, and the education community all preach the same mantra. Students fail, they tell us, because "expectations haven't been set high enough." We need more "accountability," they say. And every education leader and nearly every politician presents the same "solution" to the education crisis: more money, better pay for teachers, and smaller classroom numbers so the children get enough attention from the teachers.

Consequently, there are two specific categories in which the U.S. excels, compared to the rest of the world. First, the U.S. ranks second in the world in the amount we spend per student per year on education = $11,152. The U.S. is also a leader in having some of the smallest classroom numbers in the world. Yet the slide continues. American students grow more illiterate by the year. How can that be? We're doing everything the "experts" tell us to do. We're spending the money. We're building more and more schools. We're raising teachers' pay.

Every American should understand that these three items: higher pay, smaller classrooms and more money for schools are the specific agenda of the National Education Association (NEA). The NEA is not a professional organization for teachers. It is a labor union and its sole job is to get more money into the education system, and more pay for its members. It also seeks to make work easier for its members - smaller classrooms. Clearly the NEA is not about education - it's about money and a political agenda.

Clearly the nation's education system is not teaching the children. They can't read or work math problems without a calculator. They can't spell, find their own country on a map, name the president of the United States or quote a single founding father. America's children are becoming just plain dumb.

Yet we have been focusing on a massive national campaign to "fix" the schools for the past decade or more. Now we have ultra high-tech, carpeted, air-conditioned school buildings with computers and television sets. We have education programs full of new ideas, new methods, and new directions. In the 1990's we set "national standards," accountability through "national testing" through Goals 2000. Through that program we declared that every child would come to school "ready to learn," "no child would be left behind," and pledged that our kids would be "second to none" in the world. Above all, we've spent money, money and more money. The result, American students have fallen further behind, placing 19th out of 21 nations in math, 16th in science, and dead last in physics.

With all the programs and attention on education, how can that be? To coin a well-worn cliche - "it's the programs, stupid." More precisely, it's the federal programs and the education bureaucracy that run them. It is simply a fact that over the past twenty years America's education system has been completely restructured to deliberately move away from teaching basic academics to a system that focuses on little more than training students for menial jobs. The fact is, the restructured education system has been designed to deliberately dumb-down the children. (Note: the NEA hates that phrase!)

Most Americans find that statement to be astonishing and, in fact, to be beyond belief. Parents don't want to let go of their child-like faith that the American education system is the best in the world, designed to give their children the academic strength to make them the smartest in the world. Politicians continue to offer old solutions of more money and more federal attention, almost stamping their feet, demanding that kids learn something. Programs are being proposed that call for teacher testing to hold them accountable for producing educated children. More programs call for annual tests to find out if children have learned anything. The nation is in panic. But none of these hysterical responses will improve education - because none of them address the very root of the problem.

The truth is, none of the problems will go away, nor will children learn until both parents and politicians stop trusting the education establishment and start ridding the system of its failed ideas and programs. Parents and politicians must stop believing the propaganda handed down by the education establishment that says teaching a child in the twenty-first century is different and must be more high tech than in days past. It simply isn't so.

THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM

Today's education system is driven by money from the federal government and private foundations, both working hand-in-hand with the education establishment headquartered in the federal Department of Education and manned by the National Education Association (NEA). These forces have combined with psychologists, huge textbook publishers, teacher colleges, the healthcare profession, government bureaucrats, big corporations, pharmaceutical companies and social workers to invade local school boards, classrooms and private homes in the name of "fixing" education.

The record shows that each of these entities has benefited from this alliance through enriched coffers and increased political power. In fact, the new education restructuring is working wonders for everyone involved - except for the children and their parents. As a result of this combined invasion force, today's classroom is a very different place from only a few years ago.

There is simply not enough room on these pages to tell the entire history of education restructuring and transformation. It dates back to the early efforts by psychologists like John Dewey, whose work began to change how teachers were taught to teach in the nation's teacher colleges. The changes were drastic as education moved away from an age-old system that taught teachers how to motivate students to accept the whole scope of academic information available. Instead the new system explored methods to maneuver students through psychological behavior modification processes. Rather than to instill knowledge, once such a power was established the education process became more of a method to instill specific agendas into the minds of children.

As fantastic as it seems, the entire history of the education restructuring effort is carefully and thoroughly documented in a book called The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. The book was written by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, a former official at the Department of Education in the Reagan Administration. While there in 1981 - 1982, Charlotte found the "mother lode" hidden away at the Department. In short, she found all of the education establishment's plans for restructuring America's classrooms. Not only did she find the plans for what they intended to do, she discovered how they were going to do it and most importantly why. Since uncovering this monstrous plan, Charlotte Iserbyt has dedicated her life to getting that information into the hands of parents, politicians and the news media....

Professor Benjamin Bloom, called the Father of Outcome-based Education (OBE) said: "The purpose of education and the schools is to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students." B.F. Skinner determined that applied psychology in the class curriculum was the means to bring about such changes in the students values and beliefs simply by relentlessly inputting specific programmed messages. Skinner once bragged: "I could make a pigeon a high achiever by reinforcing it on a proper schedule." Whole psychological studies were produced to prove that individuals could be made to believe anything, even to accept that black was white, given the proper programming.

The education system is now a captive of the Skinner model of behavior modification programming. In 1990, Dr. M. Donald Thomas perfectly outlined the new education system in an article in "The Effective School Report" entitled "Education 90: A Framework for the Future." Thomas said: "From Washington to modern times, literacy has meant the ability to read and write, the ability to understand numbers, and the capacity to appreciate factual material. The world, however, has changed dramatically in the last 30 years. The introduction of technology in information processing, the compression of the world into a single economic system, and the revolution in political organizations are influences never imagined to be possible in our lifetime. Literacy, therefore, will be different in the year 2000. It will mean that students will need to follow

*Appreciation of different cultures, differences in belief systems and differences in political structures.

* An understanding of communications and the ability of people to live in one world as one community of nations.

* In a compressed world with one economic system...it is especially important that all our people be more highly educated and that the differences between low and high socio-economic students be significantly narrowed.

* Education begins at birth and ends at death.

* Education is a responsibility to be assumed by the whole community.

* Learning how to learn is more important than memorizing facts

* Schools form partnerships with community agencies for public service projects to be a part of schooling.

* Rewards are provided for encouraging young people to perform community service."

In this one outline, Dr. Thomas provides the blueprint for today's education system that is designed to de-emphasis academic knowledge; establish the one-world agenda with the United Nations as its center and away from belief in national sovereignty; replace individual achievement with collectivist group-think ideology and invade the family with an "It takes a village" mind-set. Dr. Thomas' outline for education is the root of why today's children aren't learning. These ideas permeate every federal program, every national standard, every textbook and every moment of your child's school day.

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