The Gift of Remembrance : Renouncing God : Holocaust Tourism

"In the summer of 2017, I took my family -- my wife and six of our nine children, ages eight to 22 -- on a trip to hell. Rather than tour the beautiful sites of Europe, our mission was to explore the darkest places in Jewish history. Where Adolf Hitler was born, where he and his aides had formulated the Final Solution, where Nazis had ghettoized, deported and exterminated six million Jews and where the last remnants of Eastern European Jewry subsist."

"I'd been watching this tragedy slowly fade into the background of our collective consciousness. A modern, not an ancient, catastrophe, and yet the last witnesses were dying off. A year earlier, my friend and mentor Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor, was lost to us, too. People were losing a connection to the most important object lesson, the greatest evil, that history had ever shown us. It was becoming academic, a question for films and books, not something told in the anguished voices of tormented victims. And as a matter of mere history, it was becoming obscure."

Orthodox Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Los Angeles, California

Elie Wiesel, visiting Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Jerusalem in 1986, stands in front of a photo of himself (bottom right corner) and other inmates at the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945. (Sven Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images)

"I am forced to stretch out my hands and to beg. ... Fathers and mothers, give me your children ... I must carry out this difficult and bloody operation, I must cut off limbs in order to save the body!"

"I must take away children, [imploring ghetto parents to hand over their children for deportation and slaughter] and if I do not, others too will be taken, God forbid."

Head, Jewish Council of Elders Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, Lodz Ghetto, Poland

Yad Vashem ... Mordechai Rumkowski speaking to a crowd in the Lodz Ghetto, Poland, June 15, 1940

"It [Tykoein, Polish shtetl now a museum with a synagogue dating to 1642] was like a ghost town. It hurt because all the stories I grew up with about the shtetl of course acknowledged that there were persecutions and pogroms. But they were framed within an overall context of close-knit and passionate Jewish life."

"The Jewish baker, the Jewish butcher, the Rabbi, the Synagogue, the Jewish market. The whole shtetl coming together every Shabbos for community prayers."

"Here, there was nothing. You get there and you're like, 'Where are all these people'? Oh, they were taken to a forest and shot. I remember thinking, 'Wow, all these happy moments came to an end, and I'm standing here at that end'."

"We are here to remember the 1.5 million children of the Holocaust even if it leaves us incensed at God. We're here becquse the six million don't want to be forgotten."

Shaina Boteach, 22, post-family-European trip to Holocaust sites

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and his family at Treblinka, a Nazi concentration camp in Poland. (Courtesy of the family)

 

The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany released findings from their 2018 study that informed the public of the fact that 11 percent of the adult American public and 22 percent of millennials had not heard or were uncertain they had heard of the Holocaust; 31 percent of adults and 41 percent of millennials believed two million Jews or fewer had been killed; while 41 percent of adults and 66 percent of millennials were unable to identify Auschwitz as a Nazi extermination camp.

Rabbi Boteach cites these numbers as the impetus for his decision to travel to Europe with the younger of his children for the express purpose of seeking out sites in Europe ineradicably linked to the Holocaust. To confer upon them the gift of a lasting memory. To refresh, replenish and restore while enlarging whatever they had learned up to the time of their departure of the momentous disaster that extinguished the lives of six million Jews. While the population of Germany knew absolutely nothing of what was transpiring.

And while the world looked on, unbelieving that a plot so diabolically nefarious, so wide-spread, so without protest at the inhumanity of the lead-up to the carefully engineered plan to destroy an uncountable number of lives by first degrading them as human, likening them to a global disease, a pestilence, so that tormenting them in public, demeaning, threatening, violating their human rights would arouse no particular backlash among Germans, even as disinterested Europe looked on with boredom, no governments and their populations sufficiently invested to react.

Rabbi Boteach would teach his family a lesson in history that would have sticking power; none of his children would forget what their own eyes witnessed, what their ancestry boded, what modern history would retch up for posterity. What he hadn't reckoned on was that exposure to the sites where these atrocities and links to them took place did impact on his impressionable children a bit of the immediacy of the horror, but nothing, no after-effect exposure could come close to the degradation and despair those who lived it felt.

At a memorial in Budapest, iron shoes represent Jews who were shot and thrown into the Danube River during World War II. (Peter Kohalmi/AFP/Getty Images)

 

His children would be left haunted by what they had seen with the links to the horrors, indelibly marking them for life. But who is to say that other children guided by their parents at a remove in exposure to the deliberate eradication of European Jewry and the global inaction in response to open genocide would not be similarly haunted, retaining those facts, circumstances and realities throughout their lives? The decision was his to make and his children's to bear. And after the fact, he second-guesses his choice.

Impacted by his children's wavering in their belief of an Almighty, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. Other than God chose to go off duty at that time in history, to set aside his omnipotence and just allow humanity to prove what it is capable of. So, it's a tossup, did the decision to expose his children directly to the sites and haunting visions of Europe's surrender of its Jews to an ideology of genocidal hatred accomplish what he meant it to, or did it move his children to denounce God's absence and absent him from their lives? And which scenario would disturb him as a failure of his intent?

Three of the Boteach family's eldest children failed to accompany their parents on this tour of Europe's dismal failure as a civilization. He describes them as being 'conversant in Jewish history'. Would that be insufficient, necessitating direct exposure to historical sites of colossal, well-earned infamy? He acknowledges that his younger children accompanying him would have "wanted to have more fun", and assuredly fun and Holocaust redux do not match.

 

The Boteach family outside the Reichstag, home of Germany's parliament, in Berlin. (Courtesy of the family)

Once arrived in Germany they headed for Wannsee, where the planning was initiated to launch the mass murder of Europe's Jews. His children were, in his description "horrified and riveted". It is a horrifying and riveting reality, reactions they would have expressed being informed of the situation while remaining at home. Rabbi Boteach speaks of the dissonance of visiting a concentration camp during the day and a movie at night. Yes, that might be incongruous, but the latter is far more judicious for children than hauling them to the remains of a concentration camp.

He describes his children's unease at the arrival of a German high school group with a guide at the site, while understanding the need for young Germans to be exposed to their history. At home. And after that Wannsee trip the recommendation by an Israeli security guard accompanying an American Jewish group at the major Holocaust memorial in Berlin suggesting they remove their yarmulkes to avoid the risk of assault, and his refusal to do so.

His partial sympathy with his youngest child who begged "don't make me spend my ninth birthday in Birkenau", leading to his decision to take the family to the Lodz ghetto instead where over 245,000 Polish Jews had been caged until they were finally eradicated. The birthday girl was presented with Polish dumplings from a nearby kosher kitchen takeout which failed to cheer her up while they hunted for the precise location where the-then ghetto head appealed to parents to surrender their children to be murdered so they could work for the Nazi war effort and be themselves (temporarily) spared.

Afterward the birthday girl informed her father before bed that this would be a birthday she would never forget. He will himself perhaps never forget his 19=year-old daughter having "a crisis of faith". She felt overwhelmed with emotion and said: "How can you still believe in God after seeing Dachau and all the other horrible places?"

Three years after that fated trip with his family, he reconsiders: "In Vienna, we should have seen a Mozart or Strauss concert. In Warsaw, we should have visited the shops. In Krakow, we should have seen the Wawei Castle. At times, my kids thought me obsessed and mad." As a good father, sensitive to the needs of his children, he claims not to have taken them on that journey to hell "because I thought it would make them more empathetic or humble. I've always wanted my kids to have happy childhoods and sought to protect them from unnecessary trauma".

Precisely. Will he ever realize that the trip was his, was for him,  not for his children, all of whom he has with perhaps good intentions, traumatized...?

German troops carrying a Nazi flag enter the Polish town of Lodz on Oct. 9, 1939. Over the next several years, almost all of the city's Jews were sent to concentration camps where they perished. (Paramount News/Pool/AP)

Dangerously Cloistered Religion-Obsessed Minds

"[In order to] prevent future generations from having to suffer what they suffered [Yohanan and Shifra Lowen await a judgement against the Province of Quebec and Boisbriand Hasidic schools]."
"These illegal schools still exist and several hundred students attend them, in full view of government authorities."
"The plaintiffs finished their high school education without knowing about the St. Lawrence River of the theory of evolution."
Court motion

"When he left the community, he [Yohanan Lowen] could not speak French and could not speak English very well."
"They [the former Hasidic couple are not seeking damages but a declaratory judgement; they] don’t want this to be the case for children in Hasidic schools today, even in Montreal."
Lawyer Bruce Johnston

Clara Wasserstein and Yochonon Lowen arrive at the Montreal courthouse Monday. The former Hasidic Jews claim they completed their secondary education without knowing what the St. Lawrence River is or ever hearing about the theory of evolution. Graham Hughes / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Like any other people who leave a cult, finding its strictures and aversion to the greater society around them stifling and incompatible with a larger social contract, diminishing their pride in their ethnic and religious roots as a result of the severity of the constraints, and ultimately finding themselves unable to fit into the larger community in which they live and work; finding above all that the education they received as children ill-prepared them for life anywhere outside the community, a couple in Montreal who decided to leave an Orthodox Hasidic community has launched a court case.

Clearly the education they describe and which had undergone examination by provincial education authorities for its results in adequately preparing children to embark into the world as adults found the curriculum beyond wanting; inadequate and painfully close-minded. The children who graduated alongside the now-adult married couple were barely functional in either English or French, were almost, on graduation, illiterate and innumerate. They knew nothing about their immediate geography, much less world history past and present.

The couple appeared in Quebec Superior Court to seek a judgement against the Province of Quebec, accusing it of failing to ensure they and other Hasidic children taught in private parochial schools entirely in Yiddish, with no secular subjects on the curriculum whatever, were adequately prepared for responsible independence. The schools, moreover, had no license to recognition as educational institutes. The children attending them had no exposure to subjects in history, geography, science or art, much less the official languages of the country.

The couple was unprepared on graduation to integrate into Quebec society, despite being born in the province. Since leaving the Hasidic community in 2010 they have found it a struggle without possessing recognized high school diplomas, and equipped with the utterly lacking education they received at one of the Hasidic community's Boisbriand Hasidic schools in Montreal to qualify for employment anywhere. The kind of parochial school they attended should have been an after-hours addition to attending a regular public school where approved curricula would have formed the basis of their education.

Perhaps a good question to be put to this pair of rightly disaffected people is where lies the responsibility of parents within the Hasidic community who obviously felt their obligations to their children had been met when they received a distinctly sub-par education through this kind of schooling? Only fundamentalist fanatics might consider that as parents they have provided their children with the opportunity through a thorough, basic education to take their place in adult society when they have in fact, failed so spectacularly.

An educational assessment of 320 boys of the community found 280 among them acutely lacking in math and reading and writing in English. A youth protection agency was called in 2014 to assess a girls' school operated by the Hasidic community, discovering the students could speak English and received secular education at a somewhat lower level of difficulty than in comparison to other schools. A subsequent assessment of the boys' school found another situation altogether.

Of the boys, many among them educated in Yiddish only, were unable to speak or understand enough English to take tests without the help of an interpreter; in addition, speaking virtually no French whatever. Many of the boys were products of educational neglect; their knowledge identified as "below the minimum of what's needed to be functional and autonomous in Quebec society".

Once the families entered into an agreement with the school board to regularize education, the situation saw a marked improvement and by 2017 fewer than 100 of the boys were considered educationally "compromised", even while their education level was still below that of other students of their age group. By shielding children of the Lowy Hasidic community from 'contamination' by the social mores and values of the greater society, the community endowed their children with academic ignorance ill-preparing them for life in the modern world of today.

In order to protect the community from what he perceived as the moral decay of the outside community, Rebbe Lowy put together a set of by-laws "to govern the behavior of all the residents" of Kiryas Tosh.^[7] To live in this community, residents need to abide by these by-laws.^[7]

1. No book, newspaper, or magazine is permitted in the buildings of the community, unless their content is in conformity to strictly Orthodox Judaism.
2. All male members of the community must attend religious services, three times per day, at the synagogue.
3. No radio, television, record, or cassette is allowed in the buildings of the community.
4. No members of the community may attend the cinema or be present at any theatrical performance under the penalty of immediate expulsion.
5. All women residing in the community must dress in accordance with the Orthodox laws of modesty, as follows:
6. All dresses must be at least four inches below the knees, no trousers or panty-hose may be worn by women and girls 3 years of age or older.
7. Married women's hair must be completely covered in public, by a scarf or by a wig.
8. It is forbidden for unrelated men and women to walk together in the street.
9. Men and women must be separated by a wall (at least 7 feet high), when attending any gathering of a social or religious nature.
10. All food consumed in the buildings of the community must conform to the dietary laws of the Code of Laws and be approved by the chief Rabbi or his second in command.
11. No car may be driven by an unmarried man.
12. The members must submit any interpersonal conflict to the arbitration of a rabbinical court.
13. The Sabbath must be observed in strict conformity to Jewish law.
14. Male members of the community must study the Torah and other religious texts for at least two hours a day.

Teachers of secular subjects who come into the community must follow guidelines of their own:

1. All textbooks and literature to be used by the students in class or at home... must first be approved by the principal.
2. No stencil or photo-copy of any other book may be used without approval.
3. Students are not permitted to go to the public library nor is the teacher permitted to bring into the school, for the students, any such books.
4. No newspaper or magazine may be read in school or hung up. Students are not permitted to read the above at home either.
5. No records or tape may be used in the classroom without approval.
6. No extra subjects, books, magazine supplement or other information which is not on the required curriculum of the school may be taught.
7. For extra credit work or for class projects, students should not be told to write away for such material. The teacher should supply them with the material with approval.
8. No discussion on boyfriends.
9. No discussions of reproduction.
10. No discussion about radio, television or movies.
11. No discussion on religion.
12. No discussion about Women's Liberation
13. No homework on Thursdays.

Legitimizing China's Global Influence

"He told me about how the Confucius Institute had nothing at all to do with [the] Chinese government, then very strongly expressed concerns this might adversely impact trade relationships with China and the Chinese government."
"It also turned out his translator was someone who was a teacher for the Confucius Institute."
"I was concerned when I saw that same playbook being operated here in Canada, and our school system being used as a conduit for extending that influence."
"It gets to a point where we in Canada and in New Brunswick, we have to start playing hardball back. The world is getting to be a much rougher place and if we don't stand up in it, we get pushed over."
"In this case we stood up, and we're still standing."
Dominic Cardy, New Brunswick Education Minister

"We hope New Brunswick could grasp the opportunity of pragmatic cooperation with China instead of letting it slip from hands, meet each other half way and make joint efforts to promote the healthy development of the bilateral exchanges and cooperation in various fields."
"[New Brunswick could be imperilling the] rapid development [in trade and educational coooperation that New Brunswick and China have seen in recent years]."
Embassy of China, Ottawa

Musicians with the Confucius Institute play dulcimers during Global Confucius Institute Day at the Centre for Education in Edmonton on Sept. 27, 2014. The Edmonton school board recently renewed its Confucius contract for another five years.  Codie McLachlan/Postmedia/File

Dominic Cardy once was associated with the National Democratic Institute, a democracy-promotion agency based in the United States where, in the early 2000s, he was a close witness in Nepal and Cambodia to China's escalating influence. That experience echoed more recent events involving him as provincial minister of education in New Brunswick, where reports have been received from parents respecting the Confucius Institute currently installed in the provincial school system, ostensibly to deliver Chinese language lessons and cultural lessons in elementary and middle schools.

The province through its ministry of education was preparing itself not to renew the contract to permit the extra curricular Mandarin and Chinese cultural lessons after a decade of contract renewals. It is a commonplace contract subsidized by the Communist Party of China, installed in universities, colleges and other institutes of education throughout Canada -- and just incidentally throughout the world at large. Mr. Cardy was surprised when in his official capacity as his province's education minister he was confronted by a Chinese diplomat stationed in eastern Canada.

Without so much as a heads-up, his unannounced visitor, the Chinese consul-general in Montreal sought out Mr. Cardy to urge him in his capacity as education minister to refrain from releasing the Confucius Institute and its programs from the New Brunswick school system. With that urging came dire warning that should he chose to proceed with contract non-renewal he would be responsible for placing in peril the province's growing and remunerative trade with China.

Typically, a Liberal-appointed Canadian ambassador to Beijing forced to resign his position after he appeared to support Beijing's position in its outrage over the detention of Huawei's CFO last December by the RCMP at Vancouver's international airport -- on an extradition request from the U.S. State Department for interference in U.S. sanctions against Iran which led to the arrest of two Canadians under bogus charges of espionage, a death sentence imposed on another Canadian and an embargo of Canadian Canola products to China -- attempted to intervene, to no avail.

Singers from Meyonohk School perform during Global Confucius Institute Day at the Centre for Education in Edmonton on Sept. 27, 2014. Codie McLachlan/Postmedia/File

Neither the advice of the former ambassador nor the strenuously threatening lobbying of the Chinese diplomat served to change New Brunswick's position. The Liberal opposition in the province also criticized the decision but the announcement proceeded that the province is prepared to end the school system's contract with the Confucius Institute, cancelling cultural lessons in elementary and middle schools, while permitting the continuation of language courses in high school until the current contract runs out.

Reports from parents complain that the Institute restricts or distorts discussions of China; its teachers bar discussions about Tiananmen Square, and insist Taiwan is part of the People's Republic. Maps showing China includes Taiwan have also been used as Chinese propaganda. Now Mr. Cardy,  his government a progressive conservative one, faces ongoing criticism from the opposition Liberals claiming $137 million in export business has been endangered as a result of geopolitical dabbling.

It is no secret that the Confucius Institute has an agenda as an arm of the Chinese government, to strike partnerships with educational institutions abroad, offering funding to support extra-curricular Mandarin instruction and cultural courses to students. Establishing a base, in other words, among an emerging population demographic, sympathetic to and supportive of the government of China. In the final analysis seeking to buy recognition and support from the international community through outreach and indebtedness.

This stealth infiltration is a distant but distinct partner of the "one road, one belt" initiative where China invests hugely in countries abroad, lending out impressive sums for national building projects of roads, bridges and other communication infrastructures to benefit the loan nation and make it indebted to China whose benefit is control and command and enhanced trade opportunities. Chinese infiltration of other nations' business with establishing contacts at all levels of government, of persuading Chinese expatriates living abroad of their duty to support the government is devious.

Its expertise in subterfuge and espionage and its aggressive policies of embedding its communications industries' technologies in those of other countries gives it entry to state, military and industrial secrets meant to be shielded from unsanctioned eyes. While the Chinese Communist Party excels at portraying itself as a neutral, non-threatening bridge between societies, its assertive campaign for influence and command  has been well recognized globally.

In Canada, some agencies are beginning finally to respond; shutting out the Chinese overtures to protect themselves from undue influence and certain surveillance.

Islamicizing Turkish Children

"Do you expect that a [political] party with a conservative, democratic identity would raise an atheist youth?"
"You may have such an aim, but we [Turkey's governing Justice and Development Party] don't."
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey speaks with supporters in Ankara. (Murat Cetinmuhurdar/AP)

"The [controversially violent demons] film teaches [vulnerable young students that] if you renounce your faith you will have this horror [visited upon you as punishment from on high]."
"They [the current government] are stealing the children's future."
Erdogan Delioglu, Istanbul parent

"....Turkish officials have broken with decades of precedent in what is still, at least nominally, a secular republic: they have begun describing the country’s military deployment in Syria as 'jihad.' During the first two days of the operation, which began on Jan. 20, the government’s Directorate of Religious Affairs ordered all of Turkey’s nearly 90,000 mosques to broadcast the 'Al-Fath' verse from the Koran — 'the prayer of conquest' — through the loudspeakers on their minarets. Mainstreaming jihad, which sanctions violence against those who “offend Islam,” is a crucial step in draping the sheath of sharia over a society. Sadly, Turkey seems to be slowly moving along that path."
"In recent years, the government led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been limiting individual freedoms, as well as sanctioning individuals who “insult Islam” or neglect Islamic practices. Since November 2017, the national police — controlled by the central government — has been monitoring online commentary on religion and suppressing freedom of expression when they find such commentary 'offensive to Islam'."

"Education is a prime pillar in Erdogan’s efforts to throw a membrane of sharia over the country. Turkey’s education system, like the police, falls under control of the central government, and the Ministry of Education has been pressuring citizens to conform to conservative Islamic practices in public schools."

"The government is formally inserting religious practices into the public education system by requiring all newly-built schools in Turkey to house Islamic prayer rooms. Recently, for instance, a local education official in Istanbul demanded that teachers bring pupils to attend morning prayers at local mosques."

Soner Cagaptay, senior fellow, Washington Institute for Near East Policy

'The bottom line is: generations who ask questions, that's what the government fears'

REUTERS/Umit Bektas

There can be little doubt that Recep Tayyip Erdogan was disappointed in the results of the last election when his Islamist party lost clout in their majority status, and so did he, which he made up for by attaining a majority government only with the aid of an alliance with another Turkish Islamist party, but acting as though the people of Turkey had given him and his party carte blanche to completely change Turkey's traditional secularist, democratic politics from the Kemalist model to the new, vibrant and triumphant Erdogan model.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, historically the hero of Turkey who turned his country away from Islamic backwardness to face Europe and constitutionally adapt to democracy is now a has-been model, with Erdogan's vision of a Sharia-based Islamist Turkey in the ascendancy. The country remains locked in the national emergency situation that Erdogan imposed on it in the wake of the unsuccessful attempt at removing him and his government through a military coup. Tens of thousands of Turkish police, justices, lawyers, journalists, teachers, unionists, military and others accused of plotting to overthrow his government have been imprisoned.

  
Public schools are being closed without warning, replaced by religious schools. Presidential diktat has scrapped exams, and tens of thousands of public teachers have been dismissed while religious groups have been enabled without teaching certificates to teach in schools completely lacking parental consent. Erdogan's June 24 re-election gives him the confidence to continue apace with his plan to continue the state of emergency and institute wholesale changes in the nation's constitution; its political, social, educational and religious character.

His indomitable will to completely remake Turkey in his own image, and his steady transfer of authority into his own hands now unchallenged sees him moving forward to that end, to create a population steeped in religious devotion from an early academic stage to his fundamentalist view of Islam and its place in every aspect of Turkish life. Leading parents around the country to protest his changes, while doing whatever they can to find schools of their choice to entrust the future of their children with in a standard, Western-style curriculum.

Turkey is destined to become Erdogan's private republic in homage to Islamist ideals. He intends to "raise a pious generation", claiming that religious schools represent a democratization of education, reversing "discrimination" that prevailed under the secular republic. It should be pointed out that the main presidential challenger, Muharrem Ince himself, sought to make the issue of religious schools his own, considering them to be important to the nation, but that attendance should be optional, in hopes of uniting the electorate in his favour.

Imam Hatip religious schools are now replacing secular public schools. While they make use of the national curriculum, half of the educational courses are religious in nature, core classes remain the Quran and Arabic. All of which more than explains just how and why it is that Muslim countries remain backward, failing to advance socially, educationally, technologically, with an emphasis on basic human rights and equality. Under Erdogan these religious schools have expanded from the 450 that existed fifteen years ago to the 4,500 that currently exist nationwide.

Among the aspiring middle class of Istanbul and other major Turkish cities parents complain of Erdogan's aggressive agenda to push religious instruction for their children, identifying that very instruction as deceptive, and damaging to normal educational standards. As a result, parents withdraw their children from religious schools to send them to private schools or alternately make do with technical and vocational schools. And according to the Education Ministry, 69 percent of places in Imam Hatip schools are unfilled, yet the schools keep proliferating.

A class of twelve-year-olds was exposed to a film in the Imam Hatip school so violent and frightening, with an abundance of punishing demons that parents said their children had nightmares. Despite the complaints, the film remains on the curriculum ostensibly to 'teach' children the punishment that demons mete out to insufficiently pious children failing to take their Koranic lessons seriously enough.

Protestors march with placards reading "enough! Don't turn our schools to Imam Hatips" in Kadikoy in Istanbul (AFP)

Saudi Arabia invested in madrassas, religious schools built with vast oil reserve profits all over the Muslim world to teach impressionable young Muslims Islamist values. Often in a language they could neither speak nor understand; Arabic. But these schools' alumnae formed the basis for the jihadi groups later formed to torment the world as terrorist groups, from al-Qaeda to the Taliban, Al Shabab to Islamic State. Turkey is planning on its own home-made jihadi graduates to spread the word of Islam and glorify it.

Spurning The New Normal

"Here in Britain, as in some other Western countries, we now live in a swirl of public doctrine, expressed in words such as 'inclusion', 'diversity', and 'tolerance'. "
These are commingled into something called 'British values'."
"For too long, groups who hate our country, its history and culture, have been allowed to grab the microphone. The aim of 'British values' is to wrest it back from the maniacs and start talking about what binds us together."
"On top of this [civics] get piled the doctrines enshrined in our 'Equality Act', preventing discrimination on grounds of race, religion, sexual orientation and so on."
"Age-old force of circumstance has ensured that Jews have developed the most careful ways of living peacefully in host countries that do not share their faith. If pupils emerge from Yesodey Hatorah and start trying to bomb London, I will eat my kippah [if I had one]."
Charles Moore, The Daily Telegraph

Ofsted rating: My child is taught well at this school

"Our core values and ethos ... discourage the use of online communication and Internet use wherever possible."
"This site therefore holds only statutory and other basic information about the school."
"Yesodey Hatorah Girls School is a three form entry, Charedi orthodox Jewish maintained Voluntary Aided girls secondary school located in Stamford Hill, in the London Borough of Hackney. We serve the Jewish communities of Stamford Hill and its wider area. On this site you will find key information about the School."
Yesodey Hatorah girls' school website, Stamford Hill, north London

Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls' School (Screen capture: Google Maps)

"This policy [of redacting textbooks] has nothing to do homophobia or misogyny, but is to protect our girls from sexualisation in line with our parents' wishes and religious beliefs."
Yesodey Hatorah spokesperson

"In the past, Ofsted has said schools that take this approach, if they are ignoring different sexual orientations and the beliefs of groups … [then they] are not meeting their obligation under the Equality Act … You cannot teach kids to be tolerant to people who are different if you are ignorant of those people."
"It is simply not acceptable for a state-funded school to take such a censorious, homophobic and misogynistic approach to 'education'."
Jay Harman, education campaigns manager, Humanists UK

Now who is intolerant? A religious-based curriculum that seeks to shelter girls from sexualization, preferring to teach them standard educational curricula stands to lose their public funding, but more important to the school and the Jewish community, their sense of comfort in acceptance by the larger community. Britain's Equality Act is meant, among other things, to protect religious devotion and belief, but in this instance is being shunted aside in the presumably greater interest of promoting
sexual orientation. Clearly a greater-values-priority has been established here.

Britain has long viewed the idea that one of the primary purposes of religion is in promoting and providing education, or to be more precise, long-established religions have their own particular views of what constitutes a sound, formative education for young minds. The kind of education that pays due attention to the fundamentals of exposing children to the basics of science, mathematics, history but also including culture, heritage, and the values represented by that religion.

An understanding that Britain accepts and supports by respecting those religious institutions and offering public funding to help in their operation rather than insisting on purely secular educational institutes since the greater interests and values in liberty and educational quality alongside respect for religion would be deleteriously impacted.

But while that may be the traditional view, Britain's Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), the inspectorate for British schools, has focused on other matters, such as sex education and teaching about, and promoting tolerance for other-gendered segments within society. A laudable enough goal, but one that should be placed in perspective. Charles Moore touched upon, but failed to elaborate that it is within the fundamentalist Muslim population of Britain that suspicion, hatred and violence has arisen.

Where the rule of law, the basics of democracy, freedom of speech are not quite given the respect they should be accorded in a pluralist society.The Yesodey Hatorah school (translation: "the Laws which are the Foundation of the Torah"), operated by the orthodox Haredic Jewish community, has always received a "good" rating by the inspectorate based on results for math and English placing it respectively in the top 2  and ten percent nationwide.

It does not, furthermore, have any problems with gang violence, drugs and teen pregnancy. But the inspectorate appears more interested that the pupils are not taught about sex. The school's library was raided where it was discovered some books with sex passages have been blacked out, and nor are the girls taught anything about homosexuality. The school has been placed on warning that it may be punished through withdrawal of state funding.

References to ‘homosexuals’ censored from a section of a textbook about Nazi policies. The word ‘prostitute’ has also been redacted. Photograph: PR

Should that occur on the basis of the inspectorate's findings it would serve quite nicely to isolate that community that considers itself to have been accepted by the wider culture. There are some 38 Jewish Orthodox schools operating with the assistance of public funds in Britain among thousands of state-supported church schools. Is the Jewish interpretation of when children should be subjected to learning about sex and homosexuality to set them apart as educational pariahs in Britain?

Among a people who pride themselves on their capacity to live in peace with others? People whom history has taught to comport themselves with care lest they offend others. A people cognizant that host countries view their faith with suspicion. An ethnic, social, cultural and religious identity that has never posed a threat to others, but whom others have conventionally viewed as threats to world order, even while within that same country a much larger religious demographic has proven itself a simmering, volatile threat to world order.

Turkey, Re-Entering the 19th Century

"This is no less than a revolution to alter public education and assure that a conservative, religious view of the world prevails."
"The reason Turkey is not Pakistan is that generations have been exposed to a secular public education. But for Erdogan, who comes from the other side of the tracks and feels religion was marginalized for decades, this is his revenge."
Soner Cagaptay, director, Turkish Research Program, Washington Institute for Near East Policy

"Turkish school students are currently taught to value Western civilization."
"[The new changes demonstrate that] Turkey is changing its direction and is no longer, by default, a Western state."
Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak, Impact-se research institute, Jerusalem

'The bottom line is: generations who ask questions, that's what the government fears' (file image) REUTERS/Umit Bektas

"You go and give an 18-year old student the right to elect and be elected, but don't give him the right to learn about the theory of evolution...This is being close minded and ignorant."
Mustafa Balbay, opposition Republican People's Party

"[The decision to exclude the theory of evolution was] because it is above the students' level and not directly relevant."
"It is also our duty to fix what has been perceived as wrong. This is why the Islamic law class and basic fundamental religion lectures will include [lessons on] jihad. The real meaning of jihad is loving your nation."
"Jihad is an element in our religion; it is in our religion… The duty of the Education Ministry is to teach every concept deservedly, in a correct way. It is also our job to correct things that are wrongly perceived, seen or taught."
"In this manner, in the lessons on Islamic law and basic religion sciences, there will be [the concept of] jihad. But what is this jihad? What our Prophet [Muhammad] says is that while returning from a war, we are going from a small jihad to a big jihad. What is this big jihad? It is to serve our society, to increase welfare, to ensure peace in society, to serve the society’s needs. The easiest thing is to wage war, to fight. The skill is the difficult one, which is to ensure peace and tranquility."
Ismet Yilmaz, Turkish Minister of Education

"The new policies that ban the teaching of evolution and requiring all schools to have a prayer room, these actions destroy the principle of secularism and the scientific principles of education."
"The bottom line is: generations who ask questions, that's what the government fears."
Mehhmet Balik, chairman, Union of Education and Science Workers, Turkey

Objections to Recep Tayyip Erdogan's initiatives in leading Turkey to a bold new direction in line with his favourite motto: "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers...", are rife. But how else to make faithful soldiers of the upcoming generation than to starve their minds of enquiry and force-feed them the duty of jihad, since after all, it does represent a major tenet of the Koran?

Elementary school children will now have their curricula enriched with the new religion classes where teachers must promote jihad as "love of homeland". Where's the violence in that? It will evolve; they have but to witness how their president-for-life, the noble, regal, honourable Khalif  Erdogan has decreed that dissent, questioning the Koran, much less the will of the president, is punishable by swift and violent repercussions as he defends Islam through jihad.

And high school students? The closing of their minds will henceforth proceed with new textbooks absenting the Darwinian theory of evolution from biology classes. Reckless critics of the forward-looking Justice and Development Party observe an overhaul of over 170 topics the once-secular education system covered in line with its Western orientation. But the 1920s modernization of Turkey by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk is now in full backlash mode, returning it to the days of the Ottoman Empire.

Since the failed military coup of the summer before last, that event itself has become a new topic to be studied by Turkey's students as "a legendary, heroic story". The July 2015 coup attempt led to the summary firing of over 33,000 teachers throughout Turkey. The hundreds of schools that were closed, linked to the Gulenist movement have further impoverished the minds of future Turkish students.

While the Turkish political opposition may be furious at this turn of events, Turks themselves gifted Erdogan with the very special powers he is now using.

The presence of religious schools have proliferated in lock-step with the closure of secular-based education systems. The imam hatip schools indoctrinating Turkish students with the refurbished Turkish Islamist values are more than prepared to promote Erdogan's goal to raise a "pious generation" of education-deficient Turks.

Minister Yılmaz has helpfully pointed out that the new curriculum will also include topics on the Fethullahist Terrorist Organization, the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Not that the Turkish government initially supported ISIL, nor that Turkey's Kurds are struggling to achieve sovereignty for their persecuted people, or that Fethullah Gulen is a former colleague and a loyal Turk.

Darwin’s theory of evolution has been excluded from the most recent draft of Turkey’s new national curriculum, which will be released following the Eid al-Fitr holiday  Hurriyet Daily News

“The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers...”
Read more at http://izquotes.com/quote/227625

"Keep Religion Out of Public Schools"

"It is deeply troubling to see elected officials participate in meetings where they do not challenge people advocating to deny the human rights of fellow Canadians based on irrational fear and hatred."
Ihsaan Gardee, executive director, National Council of Canadian Muslims

"This meeting was about the place of religion in public schools. That meeting was attended by a number of people from a number of different groups, including people from Rise Canada."
"Kellie does not believe that this longstanding Canadian practice [of keeping religion separate from education in public schools] should be changed to accommodate one group.”
"She is committed to building a country that promotes the shared values of hard work, generosity, freedom, tolerance, equality of opportunity and equality of the individual. That includes the freedom to practise your religion and the responsibility to be tolerant of other people's religions."
Michael Diamond, spokesperson, Conservative leadership candidate Leitch

A YouTube video shows Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch at an event with members of Rise Canada in Brampton on Sunday.  (RISE CANADA/YOUTUBE)

"We don't support or promote activities/dialogue against any religion or faith. We respect all."
"This was a free event and everyone was free to ask questions."
Concerned Parents of Canada

"This was an open public meeting where anyone could attend. We and many others heard about this meeting and attended. Other groups and individuals were present and spoke before Dr. Leitch arrived."
"And of course at the meeting anyone could raise their hand and ask questions."
Jennifer Bushmill, Rise Canada

Ihsaan Gardee speaks of irrational fear and hatred as a backlash by non-Muslims that people like him like to label "Islamophobia". There is nothing irrational about being inspired to fear terrorism, and terrorist acts that take place all over the globe as are all connected to Islam for the most part; at least the vast preponderance are, and the linkage of Islam and its sectarian and jihadist violence against other Muslims as well as non-Muslims through conflicts and blood-letting throughout the Middle East and North Africa and southwestern Asia is indisputable.

The spillovers of violently aggressive Islamist jihad into Europe and North America and elsewhere represent issues that non-Muslims deal with in obvious connections with Islam and terrorism. So it is hardly irrational to react to all these manifestations of Islam-inspired violence. And nor does that reaction or questioning of Islam denote unreasoning hatred or the label of "Islamophobic", a term which fundamentalist Islamist groups themselves favour in an effort to turn the tables on critics of Islam as biased racists to silence them for fear of earning such a label.

Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch appeared at a site in Brampton, Ontario last Sunday where she interacted with other people who had decided to show up at a rally whose purpose was to decry that public schools were becoming sites where Islamic prayer sessions were being conducted to service Muslim children and youth. Canada has no such tradition of turning over public schools for multiple use as prayer sites, and nor should any such public institution of a secular government paid for through universal taxes become such a site.

Present at the gathering was a controversial organization which considers Islam "a barbaric ideology" and in a democratic society free to express opinions of this sort, it is hardly surprising that citizens, based on what can be seen and attributed to Islam, feel its practices deserve that description. The Rise Canada group has taken it upon itself to counter mosque construction in Mississauga, Ontario. It was Concerned Parents of Canada, however, that arranged for this event to discuss their opposition to religious events taking place in Canadian schools.

Ron Banerjee, director of the Canadian Hindu Advocacy group introduced himself to Kellie Leitch on this occasion. He happened also to address the gathering, speaking of "Sharia creep". Indeed, a decade or so ago, Muslim groups in Ontario were intent on persuading the province to legitimize Sharia; in the end this was averted because of public backlash, but the effort continues, with both Muslim MPPs and MPs advancing the Islamist agenda by introducing motions to their legislatures condemning "Islamophobia".

That absurd labelling and its connotations are now so well engrained in people's consciousness, making them squeamish about wearing such a label imposed should they question anything about Islam, that it has become popular to support a motion such as this in the House of Commons, despite that a majority of Canadians, put to a vote would reject it.

As for promulgating hatred, and failing in the Canadian equality and pluralism values of respecting other religions, Islam fails on both counts. It was only last month that it was revealed that a mosque in Toronto and another in Montreal preached division and hatred and violence at Friday sermons, which were also posted in videos online. And where was the protesting Mr. Gardee then, let alone other Muslims choosing to defend the rights of others?

On February 18, 2017 CIJnews exposed excerpts from supplications (originally in Arabic) recited by Aymen Elkasrawy and Shaykh Abdool Hamid at Masjid Toronto mosque in 2016:

O Allah! We ask you… [to give us] victory over the enemies. O Allah! Raise the standing of Islam and the Muslims. O Allah! Give victory (help) to your oppressed slaves all over the world, east to west. O Allah! Give victory (help) to your slaves who believe in the oneness of Allah, O the Lord of the Worlds! O Allah! Destroy the criminals. O Allah! Destroy anyone who inflicts injustice on your slaves, O the Lord of the Worlds! O Allah! Count their number; slay them one by one and spare not one of them. O Allah! Do not defer [it] on them.O Allah! Seize them with the seizure of One Mighty, Omnipotent [referring to a Quranic verse that deals with the punishment Allah inflicted on Pharaoh and his people].

[O Allah!] Give us victory over the disbelieving people… O Allah! Give victory to Islam and raise the standing the Muslims. And humiliate the polytheism and polytheists. O Allah! Give victory (help) to your slaves who believe in the oneness of Allah, O the Lord of the Worlds!O Allah! Give them victory over the criminal people. O Allah! Destroy anyone who killed Muslims. O Allah! Destroy anyone who displaced the sons of the Muslims. O Allah! Count their number; slay them one by one and spare not one of them. O Allah! Purify Al-Aqsa Mosque from the filth of the Jews! O Allah! Purify Al-Aqsa Mosque from the filth of the Jews!

O Allah! Raise the standing of Islam and the Muslims.And humiliate the polytheism, the polytheists, the infidels and the atheists. And Give victory (help) to your slaves who believe in the oneness of Allah.O Allah! Give victory to our oppressed and deprived Muslim brothers and the mujahideen (those who engage in jihad) everywhere.O Allah! Pour on them patience and steadfast their feet. And give them victory over the disbelieving people. And give them victory over the evildoersAnd give them victory over the criminals.

See also:

• Supplications at Masjid Toronto Mosque: “Slay them one by one and spare not one of them” (click HERE)

Images on social media showed protesters carrying signs with anti-Muslim slogans as worshippers were entering a Toronto mosque.  Facebook

The photograph shown above represents reaction to the hate-mongering at Canadian mosques and the selective conscience of human-rights-demanding Muslims who fail to regard that fundamental right as reflecting universal rights, not rights specific to Muslims.

Cuba, Then and Now

1958

A Havana casino.

Image: Francis Miller/TimeLife Pictures/Getty Images

"We suspect that overall health-care outcomes would not have been much different given the remarkably low levels of infant mortality in Republican Cuba."
"Since current living standards appear to be below the levels of the late republic, it is hard to visualize any scenario where the republic would not have out-performed the revolutionary economy by a considerable margin in terms of living standards."
Marianne Ward-Peradoza, John Devereux, researchers

By the late 1950s, Cuban drove American cars, owned TVs, watched Hollywood movies and shopped at Woolworth's Department Store [Cuba today]. All the while, though, a revolution brewed. Teresa Eng

These [above] two researchers put together a comprehension picture of social development for Cuba after the Cuban revolution, using data relating to Costa Rica and Argentina for comparison. They calculated that consumption levels in 2000 for Cuba were 52 percent of 1955 levels at a time when Cuba was reeling from the collapse of the Soviet Union and suffered a significant loss of support, as a result. Cuba's per-capita consumption by 2007 arrived at 72 percent of its 1955 pre-revolution level.

Cuba was known to be close to the top of development in its geographic region before the revolution. It, in fact, led the region in low infant mortality from 1953 to 1958, according to data gathered by Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Cuba specialist and professor emeritus, University of Pittsburgh. As for life expectancy, Cuba was in fourth place in the mid-1950s, advancing to third place from 2005 to 2007. Literacy was high; in the 1950s it stood in fourth place, advancing to second place from 2005 to 2007.

"Cuba probably has the best-educated population in the region, but the considerable investment in human resources is partly lost due to the low wages paid and lack of incentives that force professionals to emigrate or stay but abandon their state work and shift to private non-professional activities that allow them to survive", wrote Mesa-Lago.

Published in the Journal of Economic History in 2012, a research paper found that Cuba lagged significantly behind its counterparts in the region during the rule of Fidel Castro. Roads, railways and hotels were built with U.S. investments, pre-revolution. The per capita income in 1955 was between 50 to 60 percent of western European levels, roughly equal to Italy's per capita income at the time. As a share of gross domestic product, Cuba's consumption was rated fairly high.

September 1958

President Batista's palace in Havana.

Image: Central Press/Getty Images

Income and wealth gaps between the rich and the poor after the revolution were narrowed. There was an expansion, not a new introduction, of free national public education and the same held true for the already-existing free public-health system with the number of rural hospitals increasing from one to 62, a substantial improvement. Cubans enjoy opportunities for regular health check-ups thanks to the emphasis that the Cuban health-care system places on preventive medicine.

But capital formation, industrial production and key measures such as cars per person, for example, saw Cuba falling from the top ranks to last place in terms of GDP, post-revolution. Cuban hospitals are ill-equipped and pharmacies have sparse stock, with antibiotics available only through the black market. Reality reflects that Cuba's revolutionary education and health care were already well established before Fidel Castro came to power. Greater access has been given to the poor.

But another reality that cannot be overlooked is that without resorting to dictatorship or communism, other Latin American countries succeeded in establishing even more dramatic improvements in their societies in the past six decades. Overall living standards, measured by GDP, calorie consumption and allied measures declined notably under Cuba's communist rule.

1944

A cane cutter and his family standing in front of their home.

Image: George Skadding/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images