Libertarian: Time for Anger, Not Just Tears
In the wake of the Manchester terrorist bombing, Brendan O’Neill at Spiked says he has no patience for “the platitudes. And the hashtags. And the candlelit vigils.” Because “vapidity abounds” and “a shallow fetishization of ‘togetherness’ takes the place of any articulation of what we should be together for — and against.” Fact is, “the top-down promotion of a hollow ‘togetherness’ in response to terrorism is about cultivating passivity” and “suppressing strong public feeling.” Officialdom and the media “prefer us as a lonely crowd of dutiful, disconnected mourners rather than a real collective of citizens demanding to know why our fellow citizens died and how we might prevent others from dying” So, he says, “we should stop playing the role they’ve allotted us.”
Conservative: Trump Midjudges Palestinian Peace Wish
President Trump “thinks he can convince Sunni Arab countries to make common cause with Israel against Iran, and maybe he can,” suggests John Daniel Davidson at The Federalist. But “as part of that larger regional realignment, he wants to settle the Palestinian question” — which suggests “Trump doesn’t quite realize what he’s getting into.” As Bill Clinton learned, “the Palestinians are not really willing to make a deal,” which is why George W. Bush and Barack Obama “largely avoided the peace process.” Trump “shouldn’t suppose that things have fundamentally changed.” Palestinian leaders know “their hold on power means perpetuating the grievances that have kept the Israeli-Palestinian question an open wound for the last 70 years.”
Policy wonk: A Deliberate Insult to Terror Victims
As corporate sponsors and police groups continue dropping out of the Puerto Rican Day Parade, City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito held a rally “to defend” the march — though, as Seth Barron notes at City Journal, the only thing that needs defending is “the inclusion of a convicted terrorist as guest of honor.” If the FALN’s Oscar Lopez Rivera is “the George Washington of his country,” as she claims, he should be saluted in Puerto Rico. “But it stretches credulity to demand that New York City celebrate the man [whose group] actually blew up Fraunces Tavern (where George Washington bade his officers farewell), and [which] in fact murdered and mutilated New Yorkers.”
Education writer: Broken Promises on College Remediation
At Manhattan Community College, the largest of CUNY’s seven such institutions, “80 percent of the school’s incoming students each year are assigned to remedial classes,” notes David Cantor at The 74. And “from that moment, if averages hold, their chances of earning a degree — or even passing a college course — sink.” Indeed, “the more remedial classes they need, the dimmer their academic future.” Nationally, he reports, only about 40 percent of those “who started community college in 2010” earned a degree “in six years” and enrollees in remedial programs skew “poor and minority.” Plain and simple, “remediation doesn’t work, or not very well, except with the most unprepared students who complete their entire sequence of remedial courses.” After all, “if students are already behind in early elementary grades, how can a college be expected to elevate them over a year or two in their late teens?”
From the right: Pence Message Lost on Protesters
The Weekly Standard’s Alice B. Lloyd notes that even as Vice President Mike Pence was condemning “the censorious habits of mind endemic to campuses these days” at Notre Dame’s commencement, “students and families filed silently out of their own graduation ceremony” in protest. But Pence “knew what he was walking into,” which is why he used the occasion to cite Notre Dame’s general “commitment to free speech and liberal-democratic dissent,” calling it “a vanguard of freedom of expression and the free exchange of ideas at a time, sadly, when free speech and civility are waning on campuses across America.” In time, she says, “the deeper shame of overshadowing the ceremony with attention-seeking antics and plain old bad manners may come in time to haunt some students’ memories of their graduation.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann