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The Sins of the Fathers: Thoughts on the Fulbright Snafu in Gaza

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Here’s the gist of it: because Palestinians in Gaza chose Hamas, Gaza has been turned into a concentration camp, and even the children of those naughty voters must be punished, according to Israel and its primary financial and moral (ahem!) backers in the Bush administration. As a result, Palestinian students can’t count on exit visas to study abroad, even when they’re awarded the full scholarships they need to do so. Not even when those scholarships are sponsored by Israel’s official friends in the U.S.

So, Palestinian children are to be punished for the sins of their fathers even unto the umpteenth generation. This sort of thinking goes back to the Bible. It’s purpose, several millenia ago, was to account for the baffling cosmic injustice by which good people suffered very bad things. The explanation: God designed it that way. You’re in trouble because you had a bad daddy or mommy ad infinitum.

Well, that explanation may work, sort of, for some people, to account for the consequences of natural phenomena like tsunamis and earthquakes and tornadoes. Unavertable catastrophes kill a lot of innocent people and even some saints, no doubt. Such premature mortality doesn’t seem fair, but people often feel better if they can find a “good reason” for the horror.

Actually death by typhoon, etc., isn’t fair, because fairness has nothing to do with nature.

But the Israeli exit visa policy has nothing to do with god or nature. It’s a political decision, and it’s hubris or sacrilege for humans to think they may act like god. On the human level, meanwhile, the notion of punishing children for the sins of their fathers is not only unjust inhuman and unjust, it’s ludicrous. It assumes that a person’s future can be predicted at a very early age. It also assumes that children always or mostly turn out like their parents.

On what sage-worthy grounds might an Israeli security staffer deny an exit visa? The kid threw stones at Israeli soldiers when he/she was 12 or 14? He/she shouted anti-Israeli slogans or scribbled anti-Israeli graffiti? He/she has a father, mother, cousin, uncle who is/was a Hamas member or supporter?

In practice, no such factors reliably predict anyone's future philosophy or behavior. For example, when I entered college, I was a Christian, a Republican and an ardent Israel supporter. I am none of these now, and I have changed no more than many people do over a lifetime.

Sometimes children adopt the parental religious orientation or profession; sometimes they don’t. Some children get more liberal as a result of travel and education. Some get more conservative. Furthermore, we all know that siblings can be as different as night and day. Thus, there is no way to know how a young or inexperienced person will react when exposed to foreign countries and cultures.

To give the devil his due, it’s true that some foreign-educated engineers and doctors have become terrorists. Yet most turn out to be beneficial members of society. Is it reasonable to punish 1000 potential agents of good in order to avert the minuscule risk of one (or less) going amok? The Israeli policy of denying foreign education to Gazans is a crude and vicious business of punishing children for the supposed sins of their fathers, a policy of totally gratuitous cruelty.

It’s cruel in another way, too. It assumes that parents will do anything you want them to do if you make life hard for their children. It assumes, in this case, that Gazans, at a certain point of deprivation and humiliation, will hug their babies, fall on their knees and beg for forgiveness, after which they will humbly vote as Israelis want them to vote. By now, it should be clear that such self-negation will not happen. Not even the Bush administration is willing to let Gazans starve.

Fortunately, then, most of the trapped children will grow up, but there’s a consequence to consider. Although the principle of non-predictability applies across the board, I strongly suspect that a larger proportion of those who never experience a more benign environment will be angrier and more vindictive than those who left to study at Harvard or Michigan State or Bryn Mawr. Or Oxford. Or Heidelberg.

How could the U.S. have slavishly acquiesced in this policy of punishing youth for the sins of the grown ups? I don’t understand it, but I am deeply grateful to those who spilled the beans and hope (not very optimistically) they will not be punished for disclosing this injustice. There is nothing like public humiliation to cause policy change. The Palestinian Fulbrighters will travel.

I am no less happy to see that exit visas will also be issued to hundreds of Gazans who had been denied the opportunity to travel to other countries for education.

However, nothing can be taken for granted. Vigilance will be required, lest the prison gates be locked again, after this little brouhaha dies down. And should an administrative “bottleneck” occur again, I suggest that the proper U.S. response should not be to revoke Palestinian grants or to plead for reversal, but to immediately reassign all Israeli Fulbright grants to Muslim students elsewhere in the world.

Not all Fulbright awards go to young students, of course, but visas for older scholars are equally defensible. Surely no Israeli official in his or her right mind can believe that a Palestine without professionals and academics will be good for Israel’s future security. Unless, of course, Israel’s true goal really is the genocide, total expropriation or perpetual serfdom that some Israelis, at least, seem to envision for the Palestinians.

Innovation Nation - Updated 1/6/08

by CKR

John Kao’s subtitle is “How America is losing its innovation edge, why it matters, and what we can do to get it back.” America’s economy now depends on how much we’re willing to buy of not-entirely-necessary goodies in innumerable variants. How long did it take you to find the designed-just-for you toothpaste in the twelve feet of shelf space devoted to dental cleaning products? We’ve just been through the breathless news and advertising coverage of the opportunities to buy at Christmas sales that begin at three in the morning, and the agonizing over the possibility that Americans will learn to share other kinds of gifts than those that must be bought in the store.

Can we return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when America provided the world with truly new products originated and produced here, when our GDP depended on something other than shopping until we drop? Do we need to? Better yet, can we come up with societal innovations to solve our problems?

The answers to those questions are not clear to me. I have to admit that I seldom do my consumerish duty in buying ready-made food or DVDs, not to mention clothing, which I hang on to for as long as it’s presentable. I’d rather see more suet for the birds in the meat counter, and less pre-soaked stuff for me that tastes all the same. I’d like to see America as the nation that I feel I helped to bring out of the Sputnik doldrums.

But people don’t innovate when they’re scared. They don’t innovate when they have to work 90 hours a week because their livelihood depends on it.

The trouble with John Kao’s book, for me anyway, is that it’s another business book. Kao follows the conventions: a bright optimism that if we follow his prescriptions all will be well; some neologisms to sprinkle into one’s vocabulary (wicked problems, dream spaces), the internet as a model. His recommendations may make sense, but they will never be realized whole. One wonders if he really expects that they could, because he ignores some significant political realities.

US Education and the Testing Industry: Past time to rethink multiple guess

By PHK

I suppose it’s heartening to read that Charles Murray, the author of the 1994 controversial book “The Bell Curve” in which he – and coauthor Richard Herrnstein – argued that “those who get ahead in America (mostly whites) are genetically endowed with more intelligence than those who do not (disproportionately African-Americans)," is having second thoughts about the SAT as a reliable measure of college aptitude, e.g. from their perspective more or less "genetically endowed intelligence."

Frankly, I thought it was almost conventional wisdom the SATs are one of the least reliable measurements of a student’s future success in college and that high school grades, activities and recommendations are the best. Murray and others including the wonderful people who have amassed fortunes inflicting the SATs (and other multiple-guess “IQ” exams) on college bound American teenagers, however, have still not entirely given up on these kinds of supposedly “objective” tests as predictors of an individual’s future success.

They now say, according to The New York Times on September 19, that the SAT’s Subject Tests are the single most important indicator.

Oh, come on. Who’s kidding whom?

Or if these still mostly multiple choice question based tests are, in fact, accurate predictors, then something’s wrong with U.S. undergraduate education today because even these kinds of subject matter tests mostly demonstrate that some people are better able to play the College Board’s test-taking-timed-guessing game than others. This, after all, is also what the lucrative SAT cram course industry and books teach.

The problem at the university level – particularly for first and second year students in large classes – is that the same form of guesswork exams are used in too many classes by too many professors and graduate teaching assistants because correcting even short essays takes thought, time and the ability to explain to the student why he, or she, didn’t get the inflated grade he, or she thought he or she deserved. Besides that, the textbook publishers make this even easier by providing text banks from which test questions can be drawn. Multiple choice questions are the fastest and least controversial to correct.

So in a perverted sense, the American testing industry is right: if a student has learned how to ace multiple choice exams without really trying in high school or even earlier – thanks to “no child left behind”- then SAT type exams should be excellent predictors of a student’s ability to succeed through the first couple of years of large college classes as well as to go on to ace the LSATS, the MCATs and the GREs – all also brought to us as screening devices by our wonderful private sector testing industry.

Where things break down, however, is when students are required to write in-class, closed book, essays. Or to give in-class oral presentations based on out of class research. Both skills are required for success in the professional world. This includes entry into and advancement in the U.S. Foreign Service. Written and oral skills are also required for successful PhD candidacy. Multiple guess exams don’t test or train for either.

Reply to John Brown on YEP program

By Dan Sreebny, Guest Contributor

[WV Note: This contribution is in response to John Brown's post on the Youth Enrichment Program. PHK and PLS also wrote on that program. We welcome further discussion and more information on the YEP.]

Dear John,

A colleague recently sent me your August 22 column on Karen Hughes’ Youth Enrichment Program initiative (“Karen Hughes’ Youth Enrichment Camps: Indoctrination at an Early Age?). I read your comments with a sense of befuddlement, for clearly the experiences you were portraying were quite different from what I saw with our YEP projects in Turkey.

As an experienced public diplomacy officer, I’m sure you realize that successful programs are a partnership between Washington offices and our overseas posts. In the case of YEP, Washington provided the general outline (and the ever-important funding) – but it permitted posts to match design specific events which matched the local environment and bilateral relationship.

In Turkey, we did have a (very successful) English/sports camp – but we also had other programs that were developed with local partners. In Ankara, we brought basketball and swimming coaches to work with children and local counterparts in a summer program that reached hundreds of boys and girls from various economic and social backgrounds. We also partnered with the Turkish Basketball Federation to provide American coaches to their summer camp projects, and for a University of Delaware basketball tour that worked mostly with young girls across Turkey. I invite you to visit the Fighting Blue Hen’s trip blog to get the facts on one YEP program.

In your column you asked, “Why this emphasis on American sports at the camp,” referring to baseball and basketball. Actually, basketball is BIG in Turkey and many other nations – and our Turkish counterparts welcomed the opportunity to work with American coaches in basketball and swimming. But this was by no means a one-way street. All of the Americans who took part left with great appreciation for Turkey and the Turks they met during their programs.

You also suggested that Karen Hughes’ YEP programs are “separated from the reality of the societies surrounding them.” In the case of Turkey, at least, you’re simply wrong on this point – we often partnered with existing organizations and programs, to create joint efforts that worked well for all involved.

You asked whether there might be something “spookily totalitarian” about these programs. Perhaps you could direct this question to swimming coach Lee Willing, or the English-teachers who worked at the summer camp, or the University of Delaware coaches and athletes who came to Turkey. I highly doubt they would share your perspective towards the activities they did with hundreds of eager and enthusiastic Turkish youth across Turkey.

Finally, I’m sure you recall how certain public diplomacy audiences fall in and out of favor as US administrations come and go. A while ago, we devoted time, energy, and resource to reaching younger audiences – then we were told, “Ignore the youth and focus on the critical audience of opinion-leaders.” I, for one, always thought this either/or approach was a big mistake, and I am delighted that Karen Hughes is supporting new efforts to work with youngsters around the world. I hope you might agree.

Sincerely,

Dan Sreebny

Public Affairs Officer

Ankara, Turkey

[Dan Sreebny has been the Counselor for Public Affairs at the United States Embassy in Ankara, Turkey since August 1, 2006. Prior to that, he served four years as Minister Counselor for Public Affairs at the United States Embassy in London. Before London, he was Director of the Near Eastern Bureau's Office of Press and Public Diplomacy in the Department of State in Washington.]

The Presidential Candidates’ Foreign Policy Statements: Bill Richardson

by CKR

I’m continuing my series boiling down the presidential candidates’ statements on foreign policy to readable points (Obama, Romney). I’m a bit late with Bill Richardson. James Joyner has already done something like this, but I like to do these things myself. At some point in the future, I’ll do some analysis. For now, I’m just trying to see what they’re saying. As I did earlier, I’ll mostly use the candidate’s words, but I’ll edit for coherence. And I urge you to read Richardson's own words.

Richardson frames his statement with

a new realism adapted to the facts of a new century. Such a policy will require a bipartisan paradigm shift as profound as that which occurred in the middle of the last century, when thinkers like George Kennan and Hans Morgenthau saw that the world had changed, that isolation was no longer an option, and that the United States needed to assume a role as global leader.

It’s easy to say we need a change, much harder to provide that paradigm shift. Here’s what Richardson offers as an outline:

Such a new realism must harbor no illusions about the importance of a strong military in a dangerous world, but it must also understand the importance of diplomacy and multilateral cooperation in a world in which what goes on inside of one country has profound impacts on other countries.

Also,

Today, leadership by the world’s only superpower is needed more than ever, but such leadership cannot disregard what goes on inside other societies. No nation can defend its own interests without blending them with the interests of others and seeking common solutions to common problems.

Berkeley Chem Engineering Department Discovers Gender Inequity

by CKR

I am a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, chemistry department. The chemistry and chemical engineering departments jointly publish a very slick magazine, Catalyst, for their alumni. The chairs of both departments write short opinion pieces for the magazine.

Jeffrey A. Reimer is chair of the chemical engineering department. He seems to have discovered Virginia Valian’s book, Why So Slow. Of course, Valian’s book is hardly the first to discuss the lack of women on prestigious science faculties. Reimer cites the atmosphere of 1977, when he was a graduate student and all things seemed possible, even that stereotypes of race and sex might fall.

He is puzzled that one-fifth of the Ph.D. students recently admitted to the ChE department are women, and only three of the seventeen faculty are women. He pats himself on the back that the national percentage of women on ChE faculties is half that of Cal’s, but notes that the department has no African-American professors.

Surely there have been no overt policies and practices of sexism.

Too bad he didn’t read the rest of that Spring 2007 issue of Catalyst.

“To be of use: Research in Pasteur’s Quadrant” is the theme of the issue. Four faculty and alumni are featured...

four very different individuals. Three were born in the United States—two in the east and one in the west—and the fourth was born in Asia. Their fields are different—one chemical engineer, one physical chemist, one synthetic chemist, and one chemical biologist.

They are all male, the one non-white having won the Nobel Prize, which may be what is required to be noticed by the reigning white guys.

In the short topics, we find four male professors (two white, one African-American, one Asian) honored with “prestigious national awards,” four articles focusing on technical advances, a two-page spread of alumni event photos (31 men pictured, 23 women, although eight of the women are in a single picture, apparently doing a dance routine), and then of course the class notes, which I will not attempt to quantify.

So hello, Dr. Reimer! Would you consider an alumni magazine almost totally devoted to men an “overt practice of sexism”? Ah yes the usual explanation: there has been such a predominance of men in the previous classes that of course the balance is tipped in their direction. We’re working on that, just like we were back in 1977. And working and working. But not too hard.

BTW: The cover on the Spring 2007 Catalyst is the famous portrait of Louis Pasteur in his laboratory by Albert Edelfelt. I didn't realize that Edelfelt was Finnish until I read this issue. It's a portrait that inspired me as a child who wanted to become a scientist. But still, another couple of dead white guys.

Crabby Note on Getting Bomb Stories Right

by CKR

Time Magazine, in its 16 July issue, reported on the exploding Jeep Cherokee at Glasgow Airport and other vehicles loaded with gasoline and propane tanks.

The London car bombs were fuel-air explosive bombs—designed to produce a huge fireball by igniting aerated liquid gasoline. Had they worked, scores of people could have been severely burned.

The discussion of fuel-air explosives from the Federation of American Scientists gives some idea of the difficulty of making this happen, but it’s a fairly technical explanation, so probably the Time reporters didn’t bother with it.

The bottom line is that it’s difficult to get a proper mixture of fuel and air to produce an explosion. Serious fuel-air mechanisms have dispersal mechanisms and close timing on the detonators. The British car bombs had none of this. It’s not even clear to me that a fuel-air explosive was what was intended, but perhaps the Time reporters are privy to terrorist secrets or are better at mind-reading than I am.

It looks more to me like the intention was to ignite a fire with the gasoline that would explode the propane tanks in a boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion (BLEVE). If the propane could be heated to a pressure that would breach the tank, all the propane would effectively vaporize instantly, releasing a great deal of energy and, for good measure, ignite or explode.

Gasoline itself is a pretty good explosive when properly mixed with air. My father once decided to use gasoline as a thermobaric weapon against gophers, much as such weapons were proposed for killing al-Qaeda members in Afghan caves. My father, however, thought of this twenty or so years ago.

The procedure was to pour a few ounces of gasoline into the gopher hole, properly excavated, wait thirty seconds or so for it to evaporate into the proper mixture with air, and ignite it with a match. Ignition is best done from a distance, some tens of yards away in my estimation. My father stood within easy match-flipping distance. The bang disturbed the neighbors and frightened my father sufficiently that he never used that method against gophers again.

Looks like the MD wannabe bombers didn’t even do that well.

Probability and Determinism – Continued

by CKR

Fewer women are getting mammograms. Nobody knows why, but the Washington Post and the New York Times are willing to speculate.

Over the past couple of years, there have been conflicting news stories about the advisability of getting mammograms, at what age they should first be done, how often.

One argument has been that mammograms, like any diagnostic, give some number of false positives. There is a financial cost—to insurance companies and individuals—of dealing with these false positives. They may require further x-rays, including CAT scannning, or a biopsy. There is also an emotional cost to the women who will worry about having cancer unnecessarily.

But the only way an individual can know if she has breast cancer is to have the diagnostics done. Without a mammogram, she is whistling past the graveyard. Some number of women who don’t have mammograms will turn out to have cancer.

Our society does not know how to balance the women who have false positives against the women who have cancer and don’t know it. Some of the articles have shared the condescension of Anthony Kennedy’s decision on late-term abortion: women are fragile dears, and we mustn’t inflict emotional stress on them; add in the cost of mammograms and further diagnostics for the false positives, it is better for the country as a whole that not every woman have a mammogram regularly. But, of course, we don’t know which women have cancer until they have the mammogram and possibly additional diagnostics.

Breast cancer usually strikes later in life, so the suggestion that regular mammograms start, say, around forty years of age makes some sense. But after that, unless a woman feels as frail as Kennedy believes we are, it makes sense for every individual to have these checkups. The individual is not a statistic; either she has breast cancer or she does not. A mammogram is the best screening method to find out. It may not be necessary to have one every year; that depends on individual circumstances.

I was forty-two when I had my first (“baseline,” my doctor called it) mammogram. It showed a suspicious pattern of microcalcifications. The biopsy said it was cancer, and we dealt with it. More than twenty years later, I have no sign of cancer.

I think women are strong enough to know what’s going on in their bodies. They’re even strong enough to have a sample taken out and to deal with the consequences, good or bad, of that.

Adolescent Boy Culture and Don Imus

by CKR

I know, I know, enough with Don Imus already. But while listening to the discussion on Meet the Press this morning, some things came together.

In at least one article I’ve read, Imus’s program (which I don’t listen to) was referred to as having a fraternity atmosphere.

The President of the United States is reported to welcome new staffers with fart jokes, including performance.

Imus got those words from rap music.

The next show after Meet the Press was some sort of poker championship (I don’t watch that either).

By my count, twelve out of twenty-nine films playing locally feature wars, car chases, and physical humor.

The common denominator is adolescent boy culture. This is the highly desirable demographic for many advertisers: impulsive and willing to spend their money on transient fun.

I’m not diminishing any of the difficulties adolescent boys face; on the contrary, the culture springs from those difficulties. Maturing later than girls, zits, dealing with feelings engendered by a torrent of hormones, all those can make a human being feel off balance, envious, in need of something to hang on to. This can lead to putting down girls and sexualizing them, emphasizing body functions and trying to shock one’s elders by using bad language, losing oneself in movie and computer-game violence.

If our culture amplifies this reaction via shock jocks, rap music and violent movies, older men (up to and including 67 years of age) can replay the defeats of their adolescence. Them nappy-haired hos have no right to be such good athletes! Yeah, and this is our guy who has invited us to his show, so he must be a good guy, right?

So the men whose chronological age suggests they might show the adolescents a way forward fall back into that unhappiness they couldn’t resolve during their adolescence.

I’m wondering if all this doesn’t have something to do with the fact that fewer and fewer adolescent boys are choosing to go to college. Why should they? They see far too many supposedly adult men sharing their values, where humor resides in a well-timed fart. College means work and possibly more academic defeat by the girls who are getting their act together. Not very appealing.

And I promise a post on another topic soon, maybe this afternoon.

What We Forget

by CKR

Verlyn Klinkenborg today notes that his students, born after 1988, didn’t grow up with the threat of nuclear war hanging over their heads. It’s not in their emotional vocabulary as it is for those of us who had fire drills and air-raid drills in school, different sirens, different behaviors. Or who read the literature of nuclear annihilation: On the Beach, A Canticle for Leibowitz, John Hersey’s Hiroshima. For the lucky few, even an eyewitness spot.

Beloit College publishes a Mindset List every year to remind its professors of how the world is different for the freshmen they’ll be teaching. Number 1 on the list for the class of 2010 is

The Soviet Union has never existed and therefore is about as scary as the student union.

This is a softer way of putting Klinkenborg’s observation.