Westerners are panicking:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/hamas-historical-ignorance-074500924.htmlThe shocking support among young adults for Hamas’ assault draws on historic ignorance and crude postmodern notions of justice and victimhood, in which torture and kidnapping were rebranded a justifiable response to “colonial privilege.”
Why should retaliatory violence not be a justifiable response to initiated violence?
(Also, punishment is not "torture". The aim of torture is to alter behaviour via inflicting pain. The aim of punishment is simply to inflict pain because that is what the targets deserve.)
In 1978, alarmed by test results from poor, minority students at a Richmond community college who were ignorant of foundational historic figures and events, scholar E.D. Hirsch began researching the role of background knowledge in reading comprehension.
...
Those engaged in preparing a new generation of teachers rejected Hirsch’s belief in the importance of knowledge as “elitist, Eurocentric and focused too heavily on rote memorization,” as a Virginia magazine profile of the famed UVA professor described. Indeed, a decade later, one of us taught alongside the genial, soft-spoken Hirsch, only to see fellow UVA education school faculty quietly steer their students away from this dangerous figure.
About Hirsch:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._D._HirschCategories: ... Jewish American academics
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/jews-have-nothing-in-common-with-us!/Well done Counterculture-era teachers for rejecting Hirsch!
Back to first link:
As a teacher said to one of us recently regarding developments in Israel and Gaza: “Many kids have little to no understanding of the historical context. I feel overwhelmed trying to explain things to them in a side comment here or there.”
Here is all the historical context involved. They stole the land the first time:
http://aryanism.net/blog/aryan-sanctuary/reminder-we-exist/ Daniel Gordis, senior vice president at the Shalem College in Jerusalem
…
the history of Jews and Israel should not be viewed through the same lens as the racial and political history of the United States. Israel’s experience is distinct, he said, because of Judaism’s biblical ties to its land
Translation: “Because we stole the land the first time, we should be allowed to steal it a second time.” Yes, really:
Book of Joshua – Wikipedia
A powerful multi-national (or more accurately, multi-ethnic) coalition headed by the king of Hazor, the most important northern city, is defeated with Yahweh’s help. Hazor itself is then captured and destroyed.
…
Joshua “carries out a systematic campaign against the civilians of Canaan — men, women and children — that amounts to genocide.”[61] In doing this he is carrying out herem as commanded by Yahweh in Deuteronomy 20:17: “You shall not leave alive anything that breathes”. The purpose is to drive out and dispossess the Canaanites, with the implication that there are to be no treaties with the enemy, no mercy, and no intermarriage.[7]:175 “The extermination of the nations glorifies Yahweh as a warrior and promotes Israel’s claim to the land,” while their continued survival “explores the themes of disobedience and penalty and looks forward to the story told in Judges and Kings.”[42]:18–19
…
Joshua has become an iconic figure for the Jewish Zionist movement,[78] and many Israeli settlements sit on land taken by force from Palestinians.[79] David Ben-Gurion saw in the war narrative of Joshua an ideal basis for a unifying national myth for his new State of Israel, framed against a common enemy, the Arabs.[80] He met with politicians and scholars such as Bible scholar Shemaryahu Talmon to discuss Joshua’s supposed conquests and later published a book of the meeting transcripts; in a lecture at Ben-Gurion’s home, archaeologist Yigael Yadin argued for the historicity of the Israelite military campaign pointing to the conquests of Hazor, Bethel, and Lachish.[80] Zionism thus presented the 1948 war (the war which saw the creation of the State of Israel) as a “miraculous” clearing of the land based on Joshua, and the Bible as a mandate for the expulsion of the Palestinians.[81]
and then they stole it a second time with British assistance:
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/enemies/israel/msg352/#msg352To recap, the territory bequeathed to Israel by the Balfour Declaration:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration
was from the territory covered by the British Mandate for Palestine:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Mandate_for_Palestine_(legal_instrument)
which itself refers to British colonial territory of Mandatory Palestine:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_Palestine
If property belongs to A, but is stolen by B who then gives it to C, C has no just ownership of it. On the contrary, if C is aware that it is stolen property and yet accepts it (without immediately returning it to A), C is complicit in the theft.
Back to first link:
This teacher knows that geography, history, religion, economics, and philosophy are essential to understanding the context of these attacks. But these are subjects that too few schools teach coherently or consistently. Last year K-12 teachers told RAND that it’s more important for civics education to promote environmental activism than “knowledge of social, political, and civic institutions.”
Environmental activism also helps to understand Israel vs Palestine:
Who should be genocided first on environmental considerations?
As academic rigor and traditional norms have retreated, the space has increasingly been filled by moral relativism and contempt for Western civilization.
It is you who lack academic rigour. Moral relativists would logically not have contempt for Western civilization as they would find it impossible to consider Western civilization either better or worse than any other civilization. It is anti-Western moral absolutists (a.k.a. True Leftists) who are able to clearly say that Western civilization is by far the most inferior civilization in all of history, and hence have contempt for it.
The result is progressive students who hail Hamas as an ally
No, these are regressive students:
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/leftists-against-progressivism/Progressive students are the ones who look forward to quantum computing, AI and space travel. No one thinks Hamas is contributing to any of these fields. We like Hamas precisely because they are
not contributing to these fields!