In 2001, when Israel started killing militant Palestinian enemies (and, often, innocent bystanders) with missiles fired from helicopters hovering so high you could barely see them, foreign reporters were urged by the Israeli government to call the practice “targeted killing.”
A wide swath of Canada’s political, corporate and media elite want Canada turned into what former senator and constitutional scholar Eugene Forsey once called “a boneless wonder.” And they are fast achieving their goal.
New York politicians are threatening to cut funding to Brooklyn College
if the school hosts a forum Thursday night about the Palestinian-led
campaign to boycott and divest from Israel. The Brooklyn College
Political Science Department is among the event’s co-sponsors. In
response, a group of New York City Council members has raised the
possibility of Brooklyn College losing taxpayer support. The council
members’ threat is just one of several efforts by local lawmakers, from
Congress on down, to pressure Brooklyn College to remove its sponsorship
or even cancel the event. As the school vows to proceed with the event,
we’re joined by one of its featured speakers, author and activist Omar
Barghouti, a founding member of the BDS movement and author of "Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights." On BDS,
Barghouti says, "It follows in the steps of the civil rights movement
in this country, in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. … It’s
just when we talk about Palestinian rights, that some people are trying
to criminalize and make it completely unacceptable speech to address
Palestinian rights under international law." We’re also joined by Glenn
Greenwald, columnist for The Guardian and author of "With Liberty and
Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect
the Powerful."
An interesting book on education, How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching (John Wiley & Sons 2010), is a recent formalist attempt at improving pedagogy. The seven principles mentioned in the book are prior knowledge, the organization of knowledge, motivation, mastery, feedback, course climate and self-direction. The most compelling chapter is the second: "How does the way students organize knowledge affect their learning?" The section notes that the difference between the teacher and the learner is that the latter lacks a sophisticated framework by which to organize information. In the study of physiology, for example, a student may consider knowledge in terms of understanding significant systems -- such as the skeletal, the digestive, and the circulatory -- but lacks the ability to explain how these discrete elements work together to affect blood pressure. The study of sub-systems can lead to some understanding, but the interconnected organization of knowledge enables more effective explanation.
The ASSE, parent organization to the Maple Spring's CLASSE, had been remarkably quiet of late, staying largely out of the media spotlight and explaining that they were preoccupied with preparations for the Quebec government's summit on the future of higher education. On Monday morning the other shoe dropped, as spokesperson Jérémie Bédard-Wien delivered an incendiary message to media assembled at an ASSE organized press conference.
Stephen Harper is moving back into safe territory.
Ten years ago this week, a defining moment occurred in the Bush
administration’s push to invade Iraq. On February 5, 2003, then
Secretary of State General Colin Powell addressed the United Nations
Security Council. His message was clear: Iraq possessed extremely
dangerous weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein was
systematically trying to deceive U.N. inspectors by hiding prohibited
weapons. A decade late, we host a debate between Powell’s former aide,
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson — who prepared the UN speech, only to later
renounce it — and media critic Norman Solomon, author of "War Made
Easy." "I don’t believe the hype about that having been the ultimate
presentation that led us to war with Iraq," Wilkerson says of Powell’s
speech. "George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and others had decided to go to
war with Iraq long before Colin Powell gave the presentation. It added
to the momentum of the war. ... Frankly, we were all wrong. Was the
intelligence politicized in addition to being wrong at its roots?
Absolutely." In response, Solomon says, "We were not all wrong. Many
experts and activists and researchers from the get go in 2002 were
saying that the administration case for weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq was full of holes. … So now to say, ‘Well it wasn’t just us at the
administration, other people believed it’ — people believed it because
they were propagandized by the administration with massive assistance
from the mass media."
