If 99 percent of public schools in California will fail to meet the academic targets stipulated by the No Child Left Behind program, could the underlying principles of No Child Left Behind be fundamentally flawed?

According to a study referenced in today’s LA Times, a staggering number of schools — 1,200 campuses, or 13 percent of the state’s public schools — may be classified as “failures” by the end of this academic year. By 2013-2014, 99 percent of the state’s schools may be classified as failures.  

No Child Left Behind is one of President Bush’s pet programs, and its aim is to revitalize schools by threatening to punish them with the ousting of principals and teachers and the importation of external managers if the schools fail to achieve designated levels of math and English proficiency. The law, enacted nation-wide two years ago, requires all public schools to have every student to test as proficient in English and math by 2013-2014. President Bush insisted that the status quo in public schools perpetuates the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” and that, through his program, no child would be left behind. But if fully 99 percent of California’s public schools will be failures by 2013-2014, could it be that there is something flawed with the program itself? With the perennial lack of funds and stringent testing requirements, every child, it seems, is being left behind. President Bush may well just be replacing the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” with a belligerent refusal to realistically consider — and thereby improve — the status quo.

Mimi Hanaoka

While President Bush has spent the summer insisting that “the American people are safer,” it seems that America and the world are still free falling down the rabbit hole of terror.

Juan Cole, a professor of history with an expertise in Middle Eastern history and Shiite Islam at the University of Michigan, has roundly condemned the war that President Bush has been waging on terror. Writing on the series of bombs that, on Thursday, October 7th, rocked the Sheraton Hotel in Baghdad, a meeting of radical Sunni Muslims in the Pakistani city of Multan, and the Hilton Hotel — packed with Israelis — in the Egyptian resort town of Taba, Juan Cole asserts:

If we analyze these violent, destabilizing attacks, one thing becomes abundantly clear: The Bush administration is losing the war on terror. If, 3 years after September 11, Ayman al-Zawahiri can arrange for al-Qaeda to blow up yet another building, this time in Egypt, killing scores, that is a sign of failure. If an al-Qaeda-aligned group like the Army of the Prophet’s Companions is permitted by the Pakistani state to gather freely in Multan, to blow up Shiite mosques, and to incur a violent Shiite counter-strike, that is a sign of failure. If radical Sunni groups, or ex-Baathists aligned with them, are able at will to fire Katyusha rockets into the Baghdad Sheraton at a time when the US has militarily occupied Iraq, that is a sign of failure.

If a certain brand of belligerent and pig-headed optimism is failing to see us through, perhaps, Mr. Bush, it is time for a change of strategy.  

Mimi Hanaoka

“To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two.”

— Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s response to a question posed about the relationship between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Mr. Rumsfeld was speaking today at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.  

In contrast, Mr. Rumsfeld declared in November of 2002 that “there is no question but that there have been interactions between the Iraqi government, Iraqi officials and Al Qaeda operatives.”

It looks like the boy who cried “flip-flop!” might be getting his comeuppance.  

Mimi Hanaoka

According to Naoto Amaki, the former Japanese ambassador to Lebanon, the WWII Japanese kamikaze bombers — pilots who were sent on suicide missions, particularly during the final year of combat, against the Allied forces — have served as an inadvertent inspiration to Islamist suicide bombers. In a recent LA Times article, Amaki recounted the conversation that he had in 2001 with Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah. Amaki quotes Nasrallah as stating: “We learned how to do suicide missions from the kamikazes … the Shiites all commend the Japanese samurai spirit.”

The question should be whether it is appropriate to compare Islamist suicide bombers with the Japanese kamikaze pilots, and if we are to adopt a historical perspective, the answer is no. The historical context for the Japanese nationalism that encouraged the kamikaze pilots is certainly not analogous to Hezbollah’s Shiite Islamist context. The Japanese kamikaze pilots — their planes weighted down with bombs or additional gasoline tanks — were told to crash into their targets primarily during the hellish last year of WWII. The collective national fatigue was reaching a state of panic, and the death toll was mounting and would, by the end of the war, reach approximately 1.97 million, although such a statistic is open to debate. As Hideo Den, an 81-year-old who attempted but survived a kamikaze suicide mission, explained, “It was desperation that made us do it.”

The single disturbing and poignant point of intersection between the kamikaze pilots and their Islamist counterparts is, apparently, love. Speaking about the kamikaze operations, Shigeyoshi Hamazono, a kamikaze pilot who survived his three attempted kamikaze missions, recently stated: “I still don’t think it was a mistake. I’m proud that I flew as a kamikaze. And I’m glad I came back. We did what we did out of a love for our parents, for the nation … Just like suicide bombers … We did it out of love for something.”

Mimi Hanaoka

“It would impose on society a virus, something false, which will have negative consequences for social life.” — Juan Antonio Martinez Camino, Secretary and Spokesman for the Bishops Conference of Spain, commenting on the Spanish government’s plans to pass a bill that would allow same-sex marriage.  

In contrast, the socialist Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has stated his belief that same-sex marriage is a feature of a “modern and tolerant society,” and the bill permitting such marriages is likely to be passed by the cabinet this week.  

Mimi Hanaoka

“Imagine a fairly drunk housewife stuck in front of CNN, growing hornier as the day wears on. The Wonkette reads like a diary of that day,” is how Matthew Klam of The New York Times Magazine describes one of the most widely read policy blogs in this week’s cover story.

The catchiness or the sluttishness of Wonkette aside, blogs are now highly visible, influential (apparently James P. Rubin, John Kerry’s foreign-policy adviser, begins and ends each day by trawling through blogs), and seemingly everywhere. While blogs have some critics lamenting the demise of journalistic integrity, a large number of political blogs are both effective and popular precisely because they are explicitly partisan. Only a handful of people make their living blogging (Nick Denton, who owns both blogs and a porn site, leads the pack); freed from the pressure and obligations of generating advertisement revenues and increasing traffic to their sites, almost all blogs are fueled by passion, personal commitment, and, if we are to believe the NYT Magazine article, terrifying amounts of caffeine.  

The popularity and effectiveness of blogs, however, does not sound the death knell of more traditional forms of journalism. Avid blogger and former editor of The New Republic Andrew Sullivan writes in this week’s Time magazine:

Blogs depend on the journalistic resources of big media to do the bulk of reporting and analysis. What blogs do is provide the best scrutiny of big media imaginable — ratcheting up the standards of the professionals, adding new voices, new perspectives and new facts every minute. The genius lies not so much in the bloggers themselves but in the transparent system they have created. In an era of polarized debate, the truth has never been more available.

The democratization of journalism need not be synonymous with the watering down of credibility, whatever that problematic term may mean. Indeed, with fabulists like Jayson Blair, formerly of the NYT, and Stephen Glass, formerly of The New Republic, the efficacy of the current system of internal editorial oversight at major media organizations has been called into question. While individual blogs are not held to uniform standards of accuracy or non-partisanship, the community of bloggers and their readers functions as a team of driven, curious, and personally invested fact-checkers for both the high-profile and overlooked stories.  

Mimi Hanaoka

With the Bush administration’s lingering hysteria over those elusive weapons of mass destruction, it is both timely and prudent to revisit the original weapon of mass destruction pioneered in the 20th century: The atomic bomb.

Original Child Bomb is a documentary — a mélange of declassified footage, animation, spoken word, media clips, still footage, statistics, interviews with current high school students, and assorted contemporary footage — that takes its inspiration and its name from the Thomas Merton poem of the same title.  

The film functions, as the original poem’s subtitle indicates, as “points for meditation,” about the nuclear age “to be scratched on the walls of a cave.” Director Carey Schonegevel’s film focuses on the bombs that America rained on Hiroshima and Nagasaki almost 60 years ago, and it examines how America has portrayed — through journalism, schooling, and the nebulous but powerful collective consciousness — America’s development of the atomic bomb and its lethal deployment in Japan.

Original Child Bomb also speaks to the lingering threat of nuclear armaments and the attendant misinformation that circulates around subject; it is, then, a heart-breakingly relevant reminder of and meditation on the nuclear age and the harrowing traumas of war.

Mimi Hanaoka

Religious oppression and the communist party’s stranglehold on power may not sound like the ideal conditions for religious innovation, but it seems that some of the most remarkable innovations in Islam are coming from just such a place: The Ningxia province of China.  
  
The Islam that has developed in the Ningxia province of China is notable both because it has been isolated from the trends and developments of the wider Muslim world and because its historical and political position has made it an unusual space for social and religious innovation.

Richard Bulliet, in his book Islam: The View from the Edge, offers a remarkable social historian’s reading of Islamic history. Instead of relying on the “view from the center,” and understanding Islamic history by charting the course of the caliphal dynasties, Bulliet contends that we should also examine the “view from the edge,” and ask how and why Islam became woven into the social structure of the citizens who were neither literally nor figuratively at the political center of the Islamic empire. The Ningxia province of China lies on the literal and figurative edges of Islam, and it provides just such a “view from the edge.”

Jin Meihua is 40, a mother, and, extraordinarily, a female imam. While her mosque is attached to a more traditional male mosque, other women have established independent women-only mosques.

Noting the uniqueness of Islam in Ningxia, Maria Jaschok, Ph.D., research scholar at the Institute for Chinese Studies and member of the International Gender Studies Center at Oxford University, states that “these are sites led by women for women, not overseen by male religious leaders … they’re independent, even autonomous. This is simply not the case anywhere else in Muslim countries.”

Additionally, as Dr. Khaled Abou el Fadl from UCLA notes, “the Wahhabi and Salafis have not been able to penetrate areas like China and establish their puritanical creed there … that’s a good thing, as it means that perhaps from the margins of Islam the great tradition of women jurists might be rekindled.”

Religious oppression coupled with communism may not sound the death knell for religious development, after all; such a place is, in fact, one of the very significant edges of Islam. The Ningxia province will be a region to observe both for the innovative interpretations of Islam it will provide and because it will be a window into a changing China’s experiment with Islam and with its 20 million Chinese Muslims.

Mimi Hanaoka

South East Asian Buddhists were not amused to see an image of the Buddha placed on the crotch and breast of a Victoria’s Secret bikini, and they are now most definitely displeased to see a poster of an actor sitting astride the Buddha’s head.  

Sri Lanka, a largely Buddhist nation, protested the now infamous Buddha bikini, and now Thailand, another predominantly Buddhist nation, is apoplectic with rage and deeply insulted by what it perceives to be the insensitivity of the poster for the new film Hollywood Buddha. In a film that ostensibly portrays a new spin on the “Hollywood hustle,” Philippe Caland, the film’s writer, producer, director, and lead actor all rolled into one, plays an unsuccessful filmmaker whose luck improves subsequent to his prayers to the Buddha. The poster in question depicts Caland sitting astride the head of a statue of the Buddha and gazing, perhaps contemplatively, off into the distance. The Thais, who believe that the head — not to mention the head of the Buddha — is almost sacred, find the image to be particularly abrasive.

Caland has obliged his insulted critics and has consented to withdraw the poster, but he may have already inflicted some lasting damage; hoping to curb cultural faux pas, the Thai government is now writing a book, directed at culturally insensitive foreigners, that outlines Thai etiquette. There are even unrealistic but furious calls that “malicious” foreigners be banned from entering the nation.    

Mimi Hanaoka

In the midst of a mid-life crisis, separated from her long-time partner, and becoming tiresome and freakish to the public eye, Barbie has finally been shoved out of her position as the best selling fashion doll in the United Kingdom — a welcome event for adolescent girls around the world.  

Barbie has been hobbling around with her improbable proportions — she’s a seven-footer with a voluptuous 38-inch chest, miniscule 18-inch waist, and curvaceous 40-inch hips — since 1959, and consumers have happily acquired over one billion Barbies in 150 countries. Despite the fact that such a blond behemoth would have to crawl on all fours to carry such an unlikely frame, she has been both a staple of the toy chest and accused of fostering devastating body-image problems for adolescent girls. It seems, that at the ripe age of 45, Barbie is crawling on all fours out of the spotlight.
  
Barbie’s successor, however, isn’t all that much better than Barbie; Bratz dolls have now replaced Barbie in the UK as the top selling fashion doll, and they are a set of strangely hydrocephalic, enormously-eyed dolls with the screechy slogan, “the girls with a passion for fashion!” One of the line of products is a duo of dolls called Bratz Secret Date, a package advertised with the promise that it is “a night you’re sure to never forget as you share a first date with the Bratz and Bratz Boyz as they laugh over a midnight smoothie, slow dance under a full moon, and find themselves getting closer than ever…”

Wholesome midnight smoothie or no, the acquisitive little Bratz characters will likely inspire ideals that are different, although not necessarily better, than Barbie’s bizarre wardrobe full of personalities. Even if the emphasis of the Bratz is as vacuous as Barbie’s, perhaps a Barbie-inspired era — complete with its consequent body-image trauma — is becoming outdated, unfashionable, and ultimately unpopular.  

Mimi Hanaoka

“We [Muslims] cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise …”  

Abdelrahman al-Rashid, managing editor of the extremely popular Arabic language satellite television channel al-Arabiyya, in his editorial published in Saturday’s al-Sharq al-Awsat. Al-Rashid wrote his editorial in response to last week’s bloody hostage crisis that occurred in the town of Beslan, which may be linked to separatist movements in Chechnya. While some radical Islamic clerics justify civilian deaths as a consequence of legitimate jihad, al-Rashid holds such Muslim clerics responsible for distorting the message of Islam and encouraging Islamist violence.

While many other critics of radical Islamist movements have voiced similar criticisms, al-Rashid’s condemnation is notable both because he is a leading Saudi journalist and because he directed his sharp criticism at Yousef al-Qaradawi, an influential but controversial Egyptian cleric. Al-Jazeera, another leading satellite channel in the Arabic-speaking world, frequently airs al-Qaradawi’s opinions.

Mimi Hanaoka

One of the increasingly evident differences between the liberals and the conservatives is, apparently, crudely simple: Democrats aren’t breeding fast enough while Republicans are happily procreating.  

High fertility appears to be an indicator of religious conviction and conservatism. According to Phillip Longman’s article in The Washington Post, a robust 47 percent of consistent churchgoers claim that they would ideally have a family with three or more children, while only 27 percent of their more secular counterparts want such large families. The religiously minded voters in these larger families tend to support the conservatives, and Longman, who is a senior fellow at the New America Institute (an independent, non-partisan, non-profit public policy institute) continues:

Of the top 10 most fertile states, all but one voted for Bush in 2000. Among the 17 states that still produce enough children to replace their populations, all but two — Iowa and Minnesota — voted for Bush in the last election. Conversely, the least fertile states — a list that includes Maine, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Connecticut — went overwhelmingly for Al Gore. Women living in Gore states on average have 12 percent fewer babies than women living in Bush states.

Longman’s work is interesting for its predictive value, but his conclusion seems a bit panicky; he suggests that with Republicans filling both cradles and ballot boxes, the Democrats have a dwindling future — in his words, “if ‘Metros’ don’t start having more children, America’s future is ‘Retro.’” Such analysis neglects to take into consideration the voting patterns of immigrants and the changing loyalties of certain voting blocks, such as American Muslims and Arab Americans. Furthermore, Longman’s data is indicative not only of the political inclinations of Republicans and Democrats but also of levels of voter participation; fertility levels of conservatives and liberals may have ramifications on future generations, but the more immediate and ultimately important factor is voter participation.

Mimi Hanaoka