Gallant Maggie; Letter from Palestine; Ramadan; Standardized Tests and Racialist Scoundrels

Letter from Palestine Ramallah, West Bank ? Most afternoons, the boys head from their schools down to the edge of town where Israeli tanks and soldiers are standing by to watch unarmed children wage war. A wide road heads from the center of Ramallah downhill toward a hotel, the City Inn, where the Israeli army has set up shop. From there, it rises again toward a settlement, an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) base and the military court at Beit El. The kids, whose ages range from 12 to 28, mill around until a few of the bolder ones walk toward the line that demarcates the Israeli zone. When they are about 80 yards from the Israeli troops, they throw a few stones. The Israeli soldiers in tanks or on foot in riot gear ignore them. Then a few more boys join the stone-throwing, although the greater number of them hold back. In the midst of the crowd, a man with a huge brass pot sells coffee. We could have brought picnics. Stones fly through the air without hitting the soldiers, who are, anyway, out of range. The boys return in triumph to those who lagged behind. People talk, drink coffee and watch the occupation army down the road. Then a few more lads go forth for another bout of rock-throwing. The Israelis, apparently bored and impatient with the Palestinians' afternoon entertainment, fire heavy machine gun bursts. The stone-throwers run back into the crowd, which itself retreats up the road to hide behind the taller buildings. No one is hit. A little later, when the young men venture back onto the exposed road, one or two are felled by live rounds. Ambulances, which are parked near the crowd every day, rush the boys to a hospital in town.

In the first month of this Palestinian rebellion, the Israeli soldiers, police and settlers reportedly wounded 7000 Palestinians. During the entire seven years of the first intifada that ended in 1993, the total number of Palestinian wounded was 18,000. At the present rate of injury, the Israelis could wound 84,000 people in a year?or an astounding 588,000 if this intifada lasts as long as the first. So far, nearly 300 people have died, of whom about 30 are Israeli. Lest this battle seem about body counts and kill ratios, neither side is killing or maiming the other with the objective of annihilation. Violence is a way of sending messages to the other side. The Palestinians are saying they want independence within the pre-1967 borders of the West Bank and Gaza, without settlements and soldiers robbing their independence of meaning. The Israelis are clearly stating, with every round they fire into a crowd, that they cannot have it. At this stage, the deus should fly in on his machina and force the two sides to accept peace. However, the world's deus lives in Washington and is not imposing full decolonization of the occupied territories. Anything else seems unlikely to stop the blood draining from Palestinian and, in smaller numbers, Israeli veins.

One evening, I am sitting in a house in Ramallah with friends. Their 12-year-old son tells me in fluent English about his school, then drifts off to watch television. Many cups of tea and coffee later, his father asks the family where the boy is. He has gone to one of the confrontation points, either to throw stones or to watch his friends throw stones across an open field through a barbed-wire fence at Israeli soldiers in a tin and sandbag bunker. Later, he comes home unhurt. On another evening, they tell me, the local leader of Yasir Arafat's al-Fateh group, a 41-year-old man named Marwan Barghouti, came himself to order young men in a house nearby to stop shooting at an Israeli settlement on the hill above Ramallah. Reluctantly, they obeyed. Yet another night, someone set up a machine gun on a neighbor's roof and fired into the air. Everyone rushed out to tell him to stop, lest the Israelis in the settlement above rocket their houses. The young man folded up the gun and left.

Things are worse in Beit Jalla, a Christian village next to Bethlehem. Above it sits Gilo, which the Palestinians call a settlement and the Israelis a neighborhood. The IDF closed the town, so I leave my car and walk over concrete barriers to get in. I visit the Amaya family, whose three-story house wears bullet holes to show it is one of the closest to Gilo. The children become terrified after dark. Elias Amaya, who is 38 and runs a cellphone business, tells me that if anyone shoots at Gilo near his house, he tells him to stop. Not only because it invites Israeli tank and rocket fire, but because it is useless. Elias' sister-in-law said that, while some of her neighbors have died, she retains friendships with Israelis. Some have called offering to take her children in until the shooting stops.

Amnesty International issued a report on Oct. 19, and things are worse now, saying that "Israeli security forces have repeatedly resorted to excessive use of lethal force...resulting in unlawful killings." Yet, Amnesty wrote, the Israelis have experience in effective nonlethal crowd control. In 1999, riots in Jerusalem "were policed without resort to firearms." Those demonstrators were Ultra-Orthodox Jews. Amnesty noted that in 50 years of Israeli history "no demonstration organized by a Jewish group has ever been fired on, even by rubber bullets."

  Petra Dickenson Feature

Unfair Advantage When students fail standardized tests, it never occurs to anyone in the ed biz that lousy schools and incompetent teachers might possibly be responsible for the dismal performance. Rather, the establishment goes into a full defense mode, deflecting any accountability from itself and creating a new culprit?the demands for excellence and the tests that measure it. In that mind-set, asking students to do well is, as Alfie Kohn put it in a Dec. 9 New York Times op-ed, "heavy-handed...[and] cheat[ing] children out of opportunities for meaningful learning." And God forbid?well, the ACLU actually?that members of some ethnic groups should work harder or do better on achievement tests than others. When they do, the ACLU is ready to sue, claiming that the unequal outcome is proof enough that the tests are discriminatory and that fairness requires that merit not be used as a criterion in rewarding academic success.

Representing high school graduates who failed to meet the necessary standards required to qualify for college scholarships, the ACLU, in a coalition with other civil rights groups, has indeed filed such a lawsuit, naming the governor of Michigan and other state officials as the defendants. Michigan has scandalized the education and grievance industries by becoming the first state to base college tuition scholarship on?scholarship!

To qualify, high school seniors must pass four state tests in reading, writing, math and sciences, or pass two of the tests and score in the 75th percentile on the SAT or ACT college entrance exams. Students may retake the tests if they need to. About 40 percent, or 42,000 students, in the class of 2000 have qualified for the scholarship, which awards $2500 for in-state colleges or technical schools, or $1000 for approved out-of-state institutions. The Michigan Merit Award program is being funded from the nearly $10 billion settlement the government had squeezed out of the tobacco manufacturers. As before, however, student financial aid will continue to be available to anyone needing it and colleges may determine their own admission policies.

Racial body count being more important than academic excellence, the lawsuit alleges that the Michigan tests are discriminatory because the four ethnic groups it has singled out?whites, blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans?have not achieved statistically comparable results, with some groups scoring better than others. Michigan has the largest Arab population outside of the Middle East, but the lawsuit cites no test scores for Arab-Americans and is equally silent on the results achieved by Asian students. Providing no evidence that the defendants had any "race-based motive" in promulgating the tests, the plaintiffs' lawyers nevertheless assert that "there is no question that the governor and the legislature knew there was going to be disparate results." The complainants seek an injunction against awarding scholarships on the basis of the four merit examinations and ask that the state adopt new criteria for selection to include "a more fair method," such as grade point averages, teacher recommendations and school rankings. Ironically, the very teachers who had been incapable or too lazy to equip their pupils with enough knowledge to pass the statewide or the SAT tests in the first place will then be considered qualified to assess their students' accomplishments.

Unwilling to grasp that there is a direct connection between education and income, the plaintiffs also resent the fact that merit-based scholarships tend to favor middle-class and wealthy students whose parents, as one Detroit newspaper columnist helpfully explained, are "most likely to vote Republican." In their scheme of things, students who come from homes that encourage learning have an unfair advantage and must not be rewarded for their hard work. Yet in their search for utopia, the plaintiffs, in effect, make the astonishing argument that some minorities should not take standardized tests because they aren't good enough to do well on them.

Before public schools turned into the disaster they are today, it was unthinkable to accept the proposition that some children should be exempt from high standards of performance, and that entire schools be allowed to fail. Today, confronted by the unnerving statistics that some children will learn despite bad teaching while others may not, the education and the civil rights lobbies' solution to underperforming schools is not to fix them and equalize opportunity, but to abolish all tests reflecting any differences. Their effort may succeed.

It will be a Pyrrhic victory. Admittedly, when the belief in egalitarian dogma becomes compulsory and America is papered with bumperstickers boasting that "All Our Children Are Honor Students," there will be many who will use the lack of objective standards as a way not to do their best and to coast along. Human nature being what it is, however, there will always be others who will strive to succeed and get as big a slice of the economy as their superior learning will allow. Since modern economy rewards knowledge, the malcontents will then have to wage a new war against achievement, claiming that disparity in income among different groups proves that the system is unfair and should be reconstructed along more equitable lines. That ideology has done wonders for Cuba and North Korea.

Taki LEMAÎTRE Gallant Maggie Ten years ago last week, on Nov. 22 to be exact, I happened to be in London's Harry's Bar, probably the world's most expensive but also most beautiful restaurant. The owner, Mark Birley, is a good friend of mine and a perfectionist. He is an old Etonian from a grand family who chose to go into the restaurant business for a living. The service in his establishments is impeccable, and that's an understatement. Now here's my point. On that particular night I happened to be with two friends, Alexander Hesketh and Alistair McAlpine. All three of us were drunk, and Alexander was swearing rather loudly. That's when a friend of mine, a lady of a certain age, signaled me to come over to her table. She was sitting with Mark Birley. "Your father did not bring you up in the manner that he did in order for you to be sitting down with such bums," said my lady friend. I made my excuses for them, and explained to her why my two friends were as bitter as they were. "Incidentally," I said, "one of them, Lord Hesketh, is the chief whip in the House of Lords, and the other, Lord McAlpine, one of the heads of the Conservative Party."

The reason for our rowdy behavior was the political assassination by party pygmies of Margaret Thatcher, Britain's greatest peacetime prime minister. She fell four votes short of an outright win as leader of her party, and although she would have easily won a run-off as required by the rules, she chose to step down. She had been in Paris when a modern Judas, Michael Heseltine, chose to challenge her as leader. Another snake, Geoffrey Howe (both men were nonentities until Maggie made them ministers), had also done damage by speaking against her in the House of Commons. After 11 years and three successful electoral victories Margaret Thatcher, daughter of a grocery store owner, chose to fall on her sword. All three of us happened to be at party headquarters when the news was flashed, so we chose to drown our sorrows at a classy establishment that serves the best of wines.

Needless to say, I am hardly an objective observer. I have always loved Maggie, ever since, as leader of the opposition, she refused to suck up to the unions that were holding the country for ransom, and announced that her first priority as premier would be to curtail their power. And that is exactly what she did. And there is still an air of embarrassment and guilt within the Conservative Party over the brutal and unceremonious way that Margaret Thatcher was ousted as prime minister.

As it turned out, the Tories destroyed themselves by getting rid of her. Her successor, John Major, proved a weak leader of a divided, ineffectual government and a corrupt party. The opposition Labor Party reinvented itself under Tony Blair, a Bill Clinton clone and almost as big a liar, and now it looks as if Labor may rule for years to come. This is a tragedy for middle England and the Tory party, and it emanates from those few days in November 1990, when Thatcher loyalists stood aside and allowed enemies to stab the gallant lady in the back.

But what turned out to be a disaster for the Tories has been a boon for the country. Baroness Thatcher, as she is now, may have been struck down, but her ideas live on. In fact, they have seeped into the minds of her Labor Party opponents, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and they're now called the Third Way. In other words, no more socialism a la the past, no more nationalization, but privatization; no more throwing billions of pounds at chronically inefficient public utilities, no more trade unions imposing their will on the government at all levels.

To appreciate what Maggie Thatcher actually achieved, one has to remember what Britain was like when she became prime minister in 1979. I was living in London at the time and I remember that hospitals could not get enough power to use equipment on patients because of trade union slowdowns to extort more money from the National Health Service. The country was in terminal decline, known as the sick man of Europe. Enterprise and wealth were taxed to the hilt, productivity was low and mismanagement endemic. In the rest of Europe strikes were known as the "English disease."

Indeed, perhaps the greatest irony of Thatcherism is that she compelled the Labor Party to ditch full-blooded socialism, thereby making itself electable. The other great part of Lady Thatcher's legacy was in the restoration of national pride. She achieved that not only through victory in the Falklands, but also in her willingness to stand up to the EU juggernaut. "No, no, no," she famously said when the bureaucrooks of Brussels demanded that Britain pay for an exorbitant share of the EU bureaucracy. Although Maggie's Parliamentary constituency was heavily Jewish, and she was herself philosemitic, shortly after her election in 1979 Menachem Begin made an unscheduled and uninvited trip to London to see her. At the meeting, he chided her for appointing Peter Carrington as Foreign Secretary, because he was critical of Israel. Far from going all contrite and Clintonesque, she raged back at him for daring to tell her whom to appoint to a British cabinet. This is not the United States, she scolded him (which as you know would have no problem letting an Israeli prime minister or Marty Peretz appoint a cabinet).

Last week I went by her office to pay my respects. "Have you found any peace, dear boy?" she asked me. She remembered that last summer I was drinking too much and being foolish. How typical. A great woman, a great leader, finding the time to ask a drunk like me if things were okay. As the Daily Telegraph wrote just after the matricide, "We shall not see her like again."

  Melik Kaylan The Spy

Ramadan No doubt some of you have regrettably allowed the afterglow of Thanksgiving bacchanalias to obscure an important moment in the spiritual calendar. Ramadan began this week. The holy month of fasting from dawn to dusk was marked forever in my memory some 10 years ago by a preposterous opera bouffe experience. I was filming a documentary for Brit tv about the trade in contraband antiquities. One part of the program dealt with a treasure of ornate silver and gold objects dating back to the sixth century BC?ram's head ewers, scepters, candlesticks, earrings and the like.

These priceless artifacts ended up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art after being unearthed from a tomb in Turkey and smuggled out illicitly. I'd tracked this and other such stories over some years, and nearly got killed by the smugglers as a result. The tombs dated back to the time of Midas and Croesus, the immemorially wealthy rulers of the kingdom of Lydia, which is located in present-day Turkey. Hence many dubbed it the Lydian Hoard. The Met preferred to call it "The East Greek Treasure" in a ham-fisted attempt to hide its provenance.

Plunderers had found and tried to enter the tombs in early 1966. They then recruited a local blacksmith named Osman to blow the tomb gates open with gunpowder. On the sixth hour of the sixth day of the sixth month of 1966 Osman entered the tomb. He found two body-shaped columns of dust lying on white biers and the flash of treasure all around. The air in the place had not moved in millennia.

Cut to 10 years ago. I speak Turkish, and I located Osman in his tiny Turkish village, showed him photos of the objects and persuaded him to come to the Met in New York to identify the treasure. Osman had made no money from his find. Instead, he'd done time for tomb-robbing. He'd lost friends in a shootout over the spoils. Plus he'd had six children?all girls. Osman had never left his village except for a rural prison. He believed in the curse of the tomb. And he'd become very religious.

In New York, we planned a tight shooting schedule. On the day he set out from his village to come to Istanbul to board a plane to New York, he was expected to go straight from JFK to the museum to identify the pieces. We paid him handsomely, along with a handler from Turkey, but still Osman was over 70. A tough itinerary for him under any conditions.

Museum authorities allowed us everywhere except the corridor with the treasure display. So we sent a decoy crew with full paraphernalia to a nearby area to create some distraction and keep the public away. But we really needed to distract the guard who stood near the entrance to the adjacent bookshop. So we knocked over some books and while he stepped in to help tidy up we used a small camera to film Osman and the correspondent identifying the objects.

Except Osman didn't. He kept staring through his clunky spectacles under his seedy wool cap and shaking his head, saying, "No no, take me to the next display. I don't know these." Naturally, the correspondent grew furious at me, so I grew furious with Osman. Finally, we ran outside fuming, everybody shouting and pushing each other. I took Osman back to the hotel, showered and shaved him and pushed the photos of the objects in his face. He kept blinking moronically through his glasses and shaking his head. And he kept trying to lie down on the floor. Finally I asked him if he'd eaten or drunk anything. Again he shook his head mutely. "Why the hell not?" I yelled. "It's Ramadan," said his handler. Poor Osman had not eaten since dawn, when he'd left his village on the long trek, and he knew nothing about time differences between countries or the time warp of jet travel. He had boarded a flight at noon and arrived a world away only a couple of hours or so later. The sun just would not set on this monster of a day.

I forced bread and tea down his throat in the hotel room, though he resisted like an obstinate child because the sun remained serenely aloft. Finally, he grew a little less dazed. Again I showed him the photos. Again he blinked and blinked. Finally, I yanked off the eyeglasses and, presto, he began to recognize an incense holder and a silver bowl. The glasses! I asked him about them. His ordeal had begun early with his own glasses falling and breaking when he reached the bus station in Istanbul. Solution? Buy a secondhand pair at a flea market and not tell us guys in suits at the other end.

So I took him to an optician near Columbus Circle and got him fitted up with a new pair, though again he resisted like a mule when the robotic metal lens arm approached his face. The next day we conducted an emergency repeat maneuver at the museum. No decoy team this time, but the same commotion in the bookshop. Osman spotted the treasure instantly and identified each piece. "Yes I saw this and this and this, and all of it should be returned to its country of origin," he said, entirely unprompted. Osman proved to be a canny old peasant, but a devious one. He begged me afterward in a whisper not to tell anyone that he'd broken his fast before sundown.