Egyptian Salafi Cleric Weighs in on the Boston Bombing

Cleric Murgan Salem has some pretty dire revelations for America, seen in the video below.



There is much in this chilling clip that is revealing, and first and foremost is the obvious reminder that, even if the attack in Boston was not an act of Islamic jihad, jihadists see such attacks as a victory.  Clearly, he sees the attack as too "amateurish" to have been the work of al-Qaeda and posits that it could have likely been an American who is dissatisfied with American policy, but nonetheless, the bombing sends a message that we Americans can be attacked anywhere, anytime, and by anyone.

Second, we notice that his appraisal of jihad runs in clear conflict with the standard leftist mantra about armed jihad being a fringe phenomenon, only embraced by those who follow the twisted perversion of Islam practiced by the late Osama bin Laden, for example.  He assures the world that it is not bin Laden or al-Zawahiri that gave the world the notion that violent jihad is a religious imperative -- that honor belongs with Allah and the Quran.  While many Muslims, particularly in the West, have evolved a more progressive view of jihad, the more archaic brand of jihad still courses in the veins of Islamic fundamentalism, pumped by various hearts like al Qaeda.  Hence, Islamic fundamentalism remains a global scourge, not a fairy tale made up by right-wing conservatives.

Third, and I thought most interesting (considering the above mentioned items are not necessarily news to me, but reminders), we notice that he believes America to be finished.  What is his reasoning, beyond the fact that Islamic fundamentalists will be emboldened and increasingly take the jihad to America's back yard?  He cites America's bloated debt and Americans' increased dependence on welfare.  In America, millions of the usefully dim refuse to see this as a problem, believing our unfathomable debt to be sustainable, and steadily increasing welfare dependence to be a good thing.  In the Islamic world, fundamentalists cheer at our willingness to commit to economic self-atrophy, thereby assisting the jihadists who long for America's demise.

Barack Obama sought to improve relations with the Islamic world through dialogue, insisting that with the right leadership, the Islamic world would respect and accept a relationship peaceful relationship with America.  But it appears that our president's candor and domestic policies have done little more than assure the Islamic world that we are weaker than ever, and ripe for destruction.

William Sullivan

How Public Educators Subvert Education

In a chilling video (apparently sponsored by MSNBC), Melissa Harris-Perry suggests that your children do not belong to you, but to the collective.  And the sooner we realize that and relegate ourselves to dumping more money into public education, she says, the better off we'll all be. 

I provided some commentary for the American Thinker blog regarding the reasons Americans should find this video frightening.  Suffice it to say, her ignorant mindset, however well-intentioned, is universally the framework of ruthless socialistic and fascistic dictatorship.  See: History.

Harris-Perry isn't about driving success, any more than education unions are about academic success, or "No Child Left Behind" is about academic success.  It seems, rather, that the goal of our current education system is to hamstring any who get further ahead of the pack because they might be differently advantaged. 

It's the equivalent of requiring a Kenyan marathon runner to carry weights, because thin Kenyans seem to be just too damn good at marathons and it's making the other, slower marathon runners feel bad.

That's just not how success is driven, and it's an absolute travesty that there is a need to explain that.  This, like many of the problems we face today, is a result of American ignorance of the fact that collectivism does not nurture progress, but regression. 

Here's an example to explain why, courtesy of the recently deceased Margaret Thatcher.  In her last appearance in Britain's House of Commons in 1990, she was confronted by a socialist who laments that, sure, Britain thrived for the most part during her tenure as Prime Minister, but the gap between the richest 10% and the poorest 10% increased during that time.  Thatcher reminded him that even the poor had it better in 1990 than they did in 1979, and by focusing on the discrepancy rather than the more important result -- prosperity -- the member was admitting that "he would rather that the poor get poorer, provided that the rich become less rich."  That's it.  In a nutshell.  Why socialism fails.  Watch this, it really is thing of beauty:



And we see it in our education system.  In Wisconsin (patient zero for the corrupt unionism disease), Racine Unified superintendent Dr. Ann Laing had this to say:

I think Milwaukee is a good example of what will happen on a smaller scale here. In Milwaukee, it’s pretty much been white families who’ve taken advantage of private schools, with a few African-American families. The African-American families are the ones who are most prone to enroll their kids in the fly-by-night schools that cropped up after vouchers existed.

They don’t know how to make good choices for their children. They really don’t. They didn’t have parents who made good choices for them or help them learn how to make good choices, so they don’t know how to do that.

First of all, the racism is in-your-face.  For her to sit there and suggest that black people are just bad parents in such broad terms should be shocking.  If anyone without union protection, who is not toeing the line for the progressive agenda, were to make such a comment, he or she would be tarred and feathered by the media.  But no, this flies undert the radar for the most part, because it advances the narrative of collectivism.

Mikel Holt exposed these comments in the Milwaukee Community Journal, and in response, Laing said the comments were "taken out of context."  "Many parents," she says, "don't have access to the information or tools" necessary to make good decisions. 

Funny.  It doesn't seem like she was taken out of context at all, because her later comments-- that a lack of resources is the problem, not a lack of ability-- sound nothing the previous statements -- that black people just don't know how to make good decisions because black people's parents didn't make good decisions.

If it were really about "information or tools" to help people make good decisions, wouldn't the school district try to provide "information and tools" to people, so parents and children can make good decisions?

That's precisely what the school district would do if it were about grooming successful academics.  But no, the point is to demonize those parents who have worked to have the means to pay for a better investment in their children's education.  Additionally, she is trying to eliminate competition to the public school option by delegitimizing the "fly-by-night" schools that some parents are exercising via the voucher system, which is the bane of public education unions.

It does beg the question... if the public school option is so wonderful for these children, why are so many exercising the voucher system?

Dr. Laing suggests that it's because they're incapable of making good decisions because they're black, or they had  bad parents, what have you.  But I think the truth is that parents who care are seeking other options for their children, because they know well enough that many public schools are dangerous, and that their children are not getting a good result from public education.

So public schools are so bad that everyone is seeking alternatives.  But advocates of expanding public education, like Harris-Perry, like Dr. Laing, think that we should increase federal funding to public education and that these alternatives should be limited to the public, because the state knows better than parents what is good for their children.

Essentially, the suggestion is that when free-market principles are applied to education and there is competition with public education, there is discrepancy between those who go to good schools (often alternatives to public schools) and those who go to bad schools (often public schools).  So since we've more than doubled the investment in public education since 1970 and the results have been regressive (ie, kids are less educated today than in 1970), we should eliminate those alternatives and just have everyone go to public schools to eliminate the discrepancy.

In other words, these social engineers would rather the dumb become dumber, provided the educated become less educated.  Just another example of why collectivism fails.

William Sullivan