FROM THE FOLKS WHO BROUGHT US EBONICS
Over the last several years, we have become accustomed to all manner of pedagogical malpractice from the Oakland Unified School District. In 1996, they introduced the world to Ebonics, angering white and black parents alike who didn’t want their children sounding as if they’d learned the queen’s English from an episode of “Good Times.” The following year, a single parent who was an amputee and widower living on disability was forced to sue the district when he found out that, unbeknownst to him, his 5-year-old son had been enrolled in a bilingual education class conducted almost entirely in Cantonese (neither father nor son was Chinese).
Now OpinionJournal.com’s James Taranto directs our attention to a Contra Costa Times report that gives us new reason for dismay–as if we needed more reasons beyond the 25 percent dropout rate. Oakland has launched a School of Social Justice and Community Development. According to the Times, in a culture and resistance class taught by rapper Boots Riley (who penned the memorable “5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO,” not to mention “Me and Jesus the Pimp in a ’79 Granada Last Night”), students are given the assignment of composing raps about the city’s addition of 100 police to their force. “Why they want to bring more police in the town / Just for them to attack the black and the brown,” went one child’s effort.
In English class, students discuss patriarchy and sexism. In science, students are taught about the periodic table by writing a letter to President Bush, pretending they are kidnappers holding an element for ransom, and then listing its chemical and physical properties–along with their demands.
Operating under the district’s new autonomous school policy, the social justice school’s 124-member student body is largely drawn from group homes, juvenile halls, and dropouts from other public schools. The Contra Costa Times reports that what students like best–better even than the “systems of oppression” lesson plan on capitalism and white supremacy–is the average class size of 20 students per room.
School director Kali Akuno-Williams says, “We’re trying to engage them with education that’s relevant to their direct lives.” If the faculty really want to teach the students something relevant to their lives, how about a seminar in how to get the hell out of the Oakland Unified School District?
YEAR OF THE DITZ
It took Republicans about three weeks to rid themselves of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott after he made his foolish and obnoxious comments about Strom Thurmond. For the most part, elected Republicans were initially tepid in their criticism of Lott and willing to excuse the stupidity of their colleague.
But consider the Democrats. At about the same time as the Lott brouhaha, Washington senator Patty Murray took to a local high school to praise Osama bin Laden. “Osama bin Laden has been very, very effective being–we’ve got to ask, why is this man so popular around the world? Why are people so supportive of him in many countries? He has been in many countries that are riddled with poverty.
“People don’t have phones, no sewers, no roads, no schools, no health care, no facilities just to make sure their daily lives are OK. He’s been out in these countries for decades building roads, building schools, building infrastructure, building day care facilities, building health care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful. It made their lives better. We have not done that. We haven’t been out in many of these countries helping them build infrastructure.
“How would they look at us today if we had been there helping them with some of that rather than just being the people who are going to bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan?”
In their political stupidity and general offensiveness, Murray’s comments are at least in the same league as Lott’s. But comparisons aside, Murray claimed to be imparting facts, and on those she was dead wrong about nearly everything. To pick just one relevant example, look at her assertion that “we have not done that.” Consider the U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Virtually everyone in-country today is engaged in some form of infrastructure-building. Indeed, many of them are doing exactly the kinds of things Murray found so laudable in Osama bin Laden. It’s also worth noting that many of our troops are headquartered at an airport in Kandahar financed largely by the U.S. government in the 1950s, when Afghanistan was a major recipient–a showcase even–of U.S. development aid.
No matter. Her colleagues were silent. And while Lott was eventually contrite, Murray was not. In a clarification issued after her initial remarks, she allowed that bin Laden is “evil” but couldn’t find any good words for the Americans doing good deeds abroad–many of whom are doing humanitarian work in parts of the world where they are daily threatened with murder by followers of bin Laden. Instead, she attacked those who criticized her. “Having a challenging and thoughtful discussion about America’s future reflects the best values of a free democracy; to sensationalize and distort in an attempt to divide does not.”
We’ll leave it to SCRAPBOOK readers to decide who’s sensationalizing and distorting. But we won’t look to Patty Murray or her silent Democratic colleagues for a “thoughtful” discussion of terrorism.
MURDER AND OTHER ‘HUMAN FAILINGS’
In his article elsewhere in this issue, Max Boot notes, “Whenever the serious issues of the Middle East are raised, from oppression in Saudi Arabia to nuclear weapons development in Iran, the answer one hears from Europeans, Arabs, United Nations functionaries, all sorts of supposedly serious people, is invariably the same: The real issue is the Palestinians. Until we resolve their horrible plight, peace will never come to the Middle East.”
The same refrain is sung, too, whenever there is an outbreak of terrorism in need of excusing. And it’s nothing new. Last week, the London Telegraph published the recently declassified 1972 cable traffic among British diplomats following the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics by the PLO’s Black September movement. It will surprise no one familiar with the prejudices of the Foreign Office to learn that it was quite blasé about the massacre; indeed, that it found a way to blame Israel for the murder of its athletes.
Here’s the September 12, 1972, cable to London from Gayford Woodrow, British consul general in Jerusalem, less than a week after the terrorists had murdered 11 Israeli Olympians during a shootout at a NATO airbase outside Munich between the PLO terrorists and German police:
“Before we reproach the Arabs too much, perhaps we might try to put ourselves in their shoes. They are, after all, human beings with normal human failings. The Palestinians in particular have seen their land taken away from them by a group of mainly European invaders equipped with superior armed force and modern technology.
“Whatever one’s moral criticism, it must be agreed that the Munich operation was well planned and that the Arabs there carried it out to the bitter end. It is said that lives were really lost because of Israel and West German bungling incompetence.”
Ah, yes: Have to doff our hats to those expert Black September planners–real craftsmen. Woodrow’s boss, James Craig, noted of this dispatch, “Not bad but he goes just a little too far”–which, mild as it is, is more disapprobation than either could summon up for the killers.
