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A sea change has occurred in the education of American women: young girls often academically out-perform boys, are more likely to succeed in college and have flooded once all-male professional schools, notably law and business. For example, U.S. Census Bureau figures show that while the male and female population is about equal, males comprise some 58 percent of all high school drop-outs. Similarly, the number of females entering college between 1967 and 2000 increased by 20 percent, while the proportion of men declined by 4 percent. The American Council on Education’s statistics revealed that in 2005 women earned 57 percent...

With Western Civilization under such vicious attack by secular humanism, it is extremely important to understand how Western Civilization came into being. And more importantly -- what civilization is being left to our children.

Losing a beachhead Back to School: Rob Koons, a University of Texas at Austin philosophy professor and a Christian, poured six years into development of a UT Program in Western Civilization and American Institutions. Then administrators yanked it away from him | Marvin Olasky AUSTIN, Texas —"And Jesus said to His disciples . . . 'it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.' When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished, saying, 'Who then can be saved?'" (Matthew 19:23-25). "Work your fingers...

Review: How the Byzantines Saved Europe Posted by JOHN COURETAS on MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 2009 The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies. Edited by Elizabeth Jeffreys, John Haldon, Robin Cormack. Oxford University Press (2008)Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire by Judith Herrin. Princeton University Press (2008) Ask the average college student to identify the 1,100 year old empire that was, at various points in its history, the political, commercial, artistic and ecclesiastical center of Europe and, indeed, was responsible for the very survival and flourishing of what we know today as Europe and you’re not likely to get the...

While the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding was good cinema, it was also a big fat Hollywood fiction.  With Greece's fertility rate of 1.36 children per woman  -- well below the replacement level of 2.1 -- "big" is not a modifier demographers would associate with today's Greek families.  In fact, a more accurate film might be called My Big Fat Muslim Wedding.  Worse still, Greece is no anomaly.  Long ago the cradle of Western civilization and more recently one of its backwaters, it's now part of a phalanx of Western demographic failures.  In fact, while it may seem counterintuitive...

A student group that bills itself as "America's right wing youth movement" focused on countering radical multiculturism, socialism and mass immigration is causing a stir on a growing number of college campuses across the country. The ultra-conservative political group Youth for Western Civilization is currently organized on at least seven university campuses. According to its Web site, the group hopes to inspire Western youth on the "basis of pride in their American and Western heritage," counter and ultimately defeat "leftism on campus" and create a social movement in which a right-wing subculture is an alternative to what it calls a...

ritain is leading the way (and has been for quite some time as I point out here and here) for the rest of Europe in committing cultural suicide. This is but just the latest example of Britain’s rabid determination to break one of the most distinguishable and binding links to their former greatness and hegemony in the Western World. Of course, they are not alone. Several other countries in Europe seem just as eager to pass out the razor blades. I wonder what C.S. Lewis would think of his country today? Probably something along the lines of this, “A man...

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - Critics say the freedom to criticize Islam in Europe has been put in jeopardy after Dutch politician Geert Wilders was banned last week from entering Britain because of his attacks on Islam. But while the controversial politician may have failed to enter the United Kingdom, the Dutch public has rallied around Wilders, and support for his party has exploded.

So the inevitable has now come about in the teetering civilisation of Europe, and it has happened first in the Netherlands. One of the supposedly most liberal societies on the planet wants to criminalise someone for telling the truth. The BBC reports that Dutch Freedom Party MP Geert Wilders is to be put on trial ‘...for for inciting hatred and discrimination, based on comments by him in various media on Muslims and their beliefs’...In March 2008, Mr Wilders posted a film about the Koran on the internet, prompting angry protests across the Muslim World. The opening scenes of Fitna -...

From The Times January 22, 2009 President Obama's first call 'was to President Abbas' President Obama placed the Middle East at the forefront of his first hours in office yesterday as he sought to make good on his promise of “ushering in a new era of peace”. In a flurry of telephone calls from the Oval Office, he reached out to leaders in the region and vowed to engage immediately in pursuit of a permanent Arab-Israeli settlement. The spokesman for President Abbas revealed that Mr Obama had told the Palestinian leader that their conversation was his first with a foreign...

President Obama placed the Middle East at the forefront of his first hours in office yesterday as he sought to make good on his promise of “ushering in a new era of peace”. In a flurry of telephone calls from the Oval Office, he reached out to leaders in the region and vowed to engage immediately in pursuit of a permanent Arab-Israeli settlement. The spokesman for President Abbas revealed that Mr Obama had told the Palestinian leader that their conversation was his first with a foreign statesman since taking office. Mr Obama also spoke to President Mubarak of Egypt, Ehud...

You are a freshman university student on the first day of a philosophy course. Your professor poses this ethical dilemma: A devoutly religious man is shooting at you with an AK-47. He is determined to kill you and your family. Is it moral to shoot back? Before you answer; consider that he is shielded by his pregnant wife and three young children. Ordinary Israelis know what any undergraduate not suffering from a death-wish intuitively appreciates - namely, that human beings should not intentionally injure other human beings but may sometimes need to resort to violence to keep themselves and others...

The world must be wondering, 17 days into Operation Cast Lead, why it is taking so long for Jerusalem to cave into pressure for a cease-fire in Gaza. From the UN Security Council, that renowned bastion of international probity, and the constellation of Muslim, Arab and non-aligned states to our unwavering European allies, the international community - and much of the media - wants Israel to stop fighting. Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations Gabriela Shalev and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at a Security Council meeting about the situation in Gaza, UN headquarters in New York, Tuesday. Photo:...

Iran is exerting heavy pressure on Hamas not to accept the Egyptian proposal for a cease-fire with Israel, an Egyptian government official said on Sunday. The official told The Jerusalem Post by phone that two senior Iranian officials who visited Damascus recently warned Hamas leaders against accepting the proposal.

The war of aggression waged by Hamas, against which Israel has commenced a robust response, must not be seen in a vacuum. Hamas is an agent of radical Islam's revolutionary jihad. Israel, the "little Satan," is a proxy of Western modernity. The conflict in Gaza is merely the latest round: a continuation of the war which flared up during the summer of 2006 and which rages still in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, and other theaters. So what can the big Satan do to help? Obviously, we are not going to contribute military force. We already subsidize Israel's defense, and,...

Israel’s Worst Fears Its U.S. ambassador says the big threat is that Iran has almost enough fuel for its first nuclear weapon. NEWSWEEK Jan 12, 2009 Sallai Meridor has been Israel's ambassador to the United States since 2006. During that time, his government's main strategic worry has been Iran, and that remains so today despite the fighting in Gaza. Israel warns that Iran is making rapid progress toward a nuclear bomb—Meridor calculates that Tehran should have enough fuel for its first bomb sometime in 2009—and that Israel will take military action unless the United States and other allies step in.

Good evening!We're down to the last few days of the Bush Presidency. Who among us doesn't have some concern about our nation's security in the months ahead? And will those who criticized the President so constantly on this front not come to recognize the margin of safety he gave us?Israel continues to destroy Hamas terrorist sites and agents in Gaza,sadly, much to the world's apparent dismay and loathing.

Israel's continued offensive in Gaza - now in its third week - is drawing many Palestinians in the West Bank to support Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza. They accuse the government of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of not doing enough to defend the Palestinians of Gaza.

Prague - Twenty years following the fall of communism the Czech Republic is at EU's helm. But so far the EU member states have failed to agree on the form of the EU constitution. Cardinal Miloslav Vlk, the head of the Czech Roman Catholic Church, is adamant that behind the failure to adopt the euro-treaty is the absence of what Europe feels natural about - Christian values. "When the Irish said No to the Lisbon Treaty, they said it because the European Union and Lisbon Treaty have dropped the Christian roots," said Cardinal Vlk in an interview for Aktuálně.cz. Cardinal...

Mideast: Proponents of a French-Egyptian plan for a cease-fire in Gaza say it might stop the fighting. But for any chance at peace, Hamas must be defeated decisively.The idea behind French President Nicholas Sarkozy's plan was to call an immediate cease-fire to permit humanitarian aid into Gaza — which Israel did — then to hold urgent talks to stop the violence. Israel, with reservations, agreed; Hamas, however, rejected the idea. Don't worry. Israel will get blamed. Watching the world's reaction as a small nation surrounded by enemies defends itself from attack is a sickening thing. Along with celebrity Israel-haters such...

From The Times Israel acts because the world won't defend it The scenes from Gaza are heartbreaking. But the whole conflict could be avoided if the Palestinians said one small thingDaniel Finkelstein It was strictly forbidden to have a notebook in Belsen, but my Aunt Ruth had one anyway. Just a little pocket diary - an appointment book with one of those tiny pencils. And in it, in the autumn of 1944, she noted that Anne Frank and Anne's sister, Ruth's schoolfriend Margot, had arrived in the concentration camp. My mother and my aunt had been watching through the camp...

A Prophecy Fulfilled Fr. Stanislas de Lestapis, a French Jesuit, died in 1999 at the age of 94. He had been a member of the Papal Commission on Birth Control and was one of the signatories of its so-called Minority Report. He had published a book on Birth Control, of which the third edition appeared in 1962, long before Humanae Vitae (1968). In Chapter 7, on The Contraceptive Civilization, he made the following bold prophecies: 'We do not hesitate to say that the acceptance of contraception will produce profound changes in our civilization. These changes are already taking place in...

The Israeli war against Hamas terrorists in Gaza begs the question: what should a sovereign state do in response to terrorists? Well, we could listen to anti-Israel words. Or we could listen to deeds. For example, we could look at how Russia dealt with its Islamist threat in Grozny. In the mid-nineties, Russia basically shelled the city until it turned to rubble -- killing 27,000 Chechens. Oh -- and that was just one of three Russian attacks on the city. You can tool around on Google maps, satellite view, and still see flattened areas of the city. I'm sure the...

Israeli tanks and infantry battalions swept up to the edges of Gaza City yesterday, battling Hamas fighters and sealing off the bomb-scarred capital city from the rest of the coastal territory. With the civilian death toll rising by the hour and diplomatic efforts to halt the fighting making no headway, the head of the UN refugee agency called the situation a catastrophe. Israel made clear that it was not about to heed calls for a swift ceasefire. It insisted that it needed to smash Hamas and destroy its weapons stockpile to ensure a lasting peace not just for its citizens,...

What's unfortunate about the world-wide condemnation of Israel for invading Gaza is that there was so little condemnation of Hamas during its years of firing rockets into Israel. Had international outrage been directed at Hamas provocations, it might have dissuaded Hamas from thinking it was invulnerable to Israel's displeasure. It was the thousands of rockets fired indiscriminately at civilian targets in Israel over the years -- intensified since mid-December when the Egyptian-brokered six month ceasefire was terminated by Hamas -- that led to the air attacks and now land invasion by Israel. Despite urgings by the Pope, the UN and...

Sunday Jan 04, 2009 Rosner's Domain: Republicans support Gaza op, Democrats much less so Posted by SHMUEL ROSNER Comments: 54 Updated!!! Election 2009: Rosner's Poll Trend Rasmussen polled Americans on the Gaza War and found this: Forty-four percent (44%) say Israel should have taken military action against the Palestinians, but 41% say it should have tried to find a diplomatic solution to the problems there, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Fifteen percent (15%) are undecided. This striking split might be explained in terms of two factors. First: for America, this is the era of diplomacy. Obama...

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert spoke Sunday with the Quartet's Middle East envoy Tony Blair, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, in view of the international community's efforts to achieve an armistice in the Gaza Strip. The Prime Minister's Office said that Olmert presented the three with Israel's demands for a truce: The end of all projectile fire on Israel, the end of all terror acts, international monitoring of Gaza and the complete disarmament of Hamas. Olmert stressed that Israel will continue its operation in Gaza until its conditions are met.

President George W Bush, in his last fortnight in office, is providing Israel with the diplomatic support the country needs to continue its offensive in the Gaza Strip. Late on Saturday, America prevented the United Nations Security Council from passing a statement urging an immediate ceasefire on both sides and expressing deep concern at the escalation of violence between Israel and Hamas. Britain has moved away from America and joined the consensus of European governments, who favour a ceasefire. Deprived of Britain's support, America was isolated on the 15-member Council. Alejandro Wolff, the deputy US Ambassador at the UN, said...

Israel's attempt to wipe out Hamas is understandable, but stupid. No country in the world is going to ignore the provocation of rockets being launched from neighbouring territory day after day. If Mexico had a group of anti-imperialists bombing Texas, imagine how long it would take for America to mobilise a counterattack. Israel has every right to respond. But the kind of response matters. Killing 500 Palestinians and wounding 2,000 others (at the time of writing) is disproportionate. Hamas can harass, but it cannot pose any threat to the existence of Israel. And just as Hamas's indiscriminate bombing of population...

For pacifists who believe that all wars are immoral, Israel's self-defense operation against Hamas in Gaza is necessarily wrong. To such people we invoke the 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Confronted by a movement that amalgamates fascism with religious extremism and a genocidal platform, our moral imperative demands Jewish self-defense. Few of the voices slamming Israel for conducting an "immoral" war in Gaza are those of pacifists. Take Riyad Mansour, Mahmoud Abbas's man at the UN. He claimed on CNN that "3,000 Palestinians had been killed...

You know you are biased when the NY Times coverage is compared favorably to yours. But such is the case of the LA Times, the Newspaper made famous during the campaign for protecting Barack Obama's anti-Israel feelings. Now the newspaper is protecting terrorist Nizar Rayan and the people who were killed with him at the expense of the truth. LA Times reporter/propagandists Ashraf Khalid wrote about the targeted killing of the terrorist and neglected to mention a few salient facts, such as Israel warned people to get out of the house and the basment of the residence contained a Hamas...

A week of aerial bombardment of Gaza left no doubt about Israel's ability to inflict serious physical damage to the Hamas leadership and its arsenals of weaponry. On Thursday, militant Hamas leader Nizar Rayan - who reportedly once sent his own son on a suicide mission that left two Israelis dead - was killed when a one-ton bomb crashed into his home, also claiming the lives of four of his wives and 11 of his children. On Friday, Israel bombed the homes of a dozen more Hamas operatives and leveled a mosque that was believed to be a weapons storage...

Just days ago we had read about the Islamic hatred of Jews in the UK and Denmark. Now like a life threatening disease it has spread to Belgium. As an Islamic group was caught with a mafia style hit list of prominent Jews in Belgium.

His controversial book Liberal Fascism has already divided his own country. Now, as American political columnist JONAH GOLDBERG's bestseller is published in Britain, he explains why he believes that - contrary to conventional wisdom - fascism and left-wing philosophy are inextricably linked ... Hallelujah! The Bush nightmare is over. The dark night of American fascism is giving way to the dawn of hope, the Age of Obama. The forces of truth will once again prevail and the crypto-Nazis will be banished to their caves. That pretty much captures a large segment of current liberal conventional wisdom

Hamas cannot bomb Israel out of existence. Hamas has dropped ten thousand rockets on civilian targets in Sderot since 2001. Hamas' suicide bombers have killed hundreds of Israelis eating in restaurants, dancing in discos, and riding on buses. None of this has or will remotely achieve Hamas' avowed goal of destroying Israel. On December 19, Hamas declared an end to a temporary and frequently breached truce with Israel and launched a major rocket attack on Sderot timed to coincide with the end of the school day. In response, Israel did what any nation state would be expected to do; it...

Granted, we are in a recession and all media outlets have trimmed staff, but CNN REALLY Needs a fact checker. Since Israel began the bombing of Gaza last week, the Cable Nonsense Network has been doing its best to spread misinformation about Gaza War. CNN's Lies included blaming Israel for breaking the cease fire and accusing Israel of not letting necessary medical supplies into Gaza. But then again, CNN has never been big on the truth:

Jan 03, 2009 (UPI via COMTEX) -- GAZA, Jan. 3 (UPI) -- Israeli ground troops forged into Gaza with bulldozers, tanks and armored vehicles Saturday evening, as the military vowed to destroy Hamas' infrastructure. Defense Minister Ehud Barak predicted a long conflict as he announced the ground campaign, CNN reported. But he said the country could not abandon Israelis living in areas bordering Gaza. "This will not be short, this will not be easy," he said. "I don't wish to delude anyone. And the coming days will be difficult also for the residents of the south. We have bitten our...

A thought experiment — Imagine that Hamas announces it will immediately cease and desist from firing missiles into Israel, that there will be no more such attacks in the future, and that it will release Gilad Shalit, the Israel soldier kidnapped two-and-a-half years ago and held incommunicado ever since - with not even the Red Cross allowed to see him. What would happen then? Moderate Israelis would pressure their government to make a reciprocal gesture — to stop the air attacks on Hamas' command and control centers, release Palestinian terrorists from Israeli jails and get serious peace talks under...

Far more than needed for Gaza alone. Israel's government has approved the call-up of tens of thousands of reservist soldiers, it was annnounced Saturday, almost simultaneously with the launch of a Gaza ground incursion aimed at halting rocket fire on Israel's southern communities. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office said in a statement that, in accordance with a secret cabinet discussion Friday, the government ordered the armed forces "to draft the necessary reservists, on a scale of tens of thousands of troops." The Gaza ground operation launched Saturday had actually been approved last week, but Olmert promised his ministers that when...

THERE were bloody clashes outside the Israeli embassy in London today as protesters threw fireworks, stones, shoes and glass bottles at riot police. Around 200 police confronted protesters with batons, leaving several wounded, as masked men raced towards the gates of the Israeli embassy carrying Palestinian and Hezbollah flags. Earlier, thousands of demonstrators - including human rights activist Bianca Jagger and Respect MP George Galloway - marched through the capital, as protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza intensified. The London rally was mirrored in towns and cities across the UK and locations around the world. They followed similar protests in...

At least 30 Hamas gunmen were reported killed as IDF troops swept into the northern Gaza Strip on Saturday night, encountering fierce resistance from Hamas forces entrenched in fortifications just over the border. IDF sources said that the goal was to conquer territory in northern Gaza, including rocket launch sites. Soldiers from the Armored Corps, Engineering Corps, and Paratroopers, Givati, Golani brigades were participating in the fighting, with at least four brigades' worth of troops inside the Gaza Strip. The sources said that a majority of the rockets fired into Beersheba and Ashdod were launched from the northern Gaza Strip....

As Israel continues its strikes on the Hamas terrorists, we see more and more Muslims across the world coming out in support of Hamas. Many of them are getting violent and attacking Jews in countries across Europe.

EU President Czech Republic: Israeli ground incursion defensive, not offensive actionEurope backs IDF incursion EU President Czech Republic: Israeli ground incursion defensive, not offensive action European Union president, the Czech Republic, said on Saturday an Israeli ground incursion in Gaza was "defensive, not offensive" action. "At the moment, from the perspective of the last days, we understand this step as a defensive, not offensive, action," Czech EU presidency spokesman Jiri Potuznik said. Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg is leading an EU delegation to the region on Sunday, and Potuznik said the presidency will wait to see the results of that...

The Israeli military said in a statement that the objective of the ground campaign was “to destroy the terrorist infrastructure of Hamas,” the militant Islamic group that controls the area, “while taking control of some of the rocket launching sites” that Hamas uses to fire at southern Israel

After a week of air assaults on Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Palestinian retaliatory rocketing of Israel’s southern cities, the Israeli leadership was at a crossroads. It had to decide whether to embark on a ground offensive or to call it quits and find a face-saving diplomatic endgame (which would leave Hamas with most of its military manpower and firepower intact). A third alternative was to continue the air campaign while sending in ground forces with limited objectives, designed to curtail Hamas rocketing in specific sectors and to interdict Hamas resupply from Egypt through the tunnels under the Philadelphi...

While much of the world engages in hand-wringing, placard-waving, teeth-gnashing, and rocket-launching over Israel’s “disproportionate” response to Hamas attacks from Gaza, it’s worth looking at what the doctrines of “proportionality” actually say. Making the rounds is a two-year old quote from Lionel Beehner’s paper for the Council on Foreign Relations in which he summarizes the principle of proportionality as laid out by the 1907 Hague Conventions. “According to the doctrine, a state is legally allowed to unilaterally defend itself and right a wrong provided the response is proportional to the injury suffered. The response must also be immediate and necessary,...

Sam Huntington Was Plainly Correct If 2008 taught us anything, it was the danger of listening to people who tell us what we want to hear. Anybody with a lick of sense should have seen that we were living inside a bubble of Panglossian optimism that had little basis in observable fact. But as George Orwell quipped, "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." Samuel P. Huntington, the eminent Harvard political scientist who died on Christmas Eve, was used to being derided for his ability to see what was in front of our collective...

"For the Palestinian people death became an industry, at which women excel and so do all people on this land: the elderly excel, the Jihad fighters excel, and the children excel. Accordingly [Palestinians] created a human shield of women, children, the elderly and the Jihad fighters against the Zionist bombing machine, as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: We desire death as you desire life." --Hamas Legislator Fathi Hamad: There's the rub, Israel is fighting an enemy who wants her destroyed and the entire nation replaced by a radical Islamic state. How can you "make peace" with people...

EREZ CROSSING, on the Israel-Gaza border — As Israel’s tanks and troops poured into Gaza on Saturday, the next phase in its fierce attempt to end rocket attacks, a question hung over the operation: can the rockets really be stopped for any length of time while Hamas remains in power in Gaza? And if the answer is determined to be no, then is the real aim of the operation to remove Hamas entirely, no matter the cost? After her visit to Paris on Thursday to explain to French authorities why she thought this was not the time for a quick...

As I watch the war versus Hamas develop and the ground invasion roll out I am thinking to myself, what is the purpose of all this? Some of the effects are quite clear, others are a bit muddied. Clear effects are the easily tangible and observable ones. A most striking and obvious phenomenon is that everyone has an opinion. The blogosphere is rife with opinions some angry and passionate some muted and somber. Coverage is non-stop and the pundits offer a bouquet of insight and opinions. What is clear to me at least, is that this particular war that started...