[CTRL] Low expectations for Sharm summit
-Caveat Lector- WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! Low expectations for Sharm summit By Janine Zacharia and Lamia Lahoud JERUSALEM (October 15) - Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat will meet US President Bill Clinton, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and other world leaders in Sharm e-Sheikh tomorrow in an effort to end clashes that have raged for more than two weeks, killing scores. The leaders agreed to meet as Israelis and Palestinians yesterday largely took a breather from fighting, with few skirmishes and casualties reported. Barak and Arafat agreed to attend the summit after a weekend of shuttle diplomacy by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and intensive prodding by Clinton. Annan said both leaders had dropped preconditions for the meeting, whose limited goal is to reach a cease-fire agreement and restore some sort of joint Israeli-Palestinian security mechanism. Barak reportedly has low expectations for the summit and only agreed to attend at Clinton's request. "Our main target is to reach an immediate truce," UN special peace envoy Terje Larsen told The Jerusalem Post. PA Planning Minister Nabil Shaath said the Palestinians agreed to attend the summit after Annan assured them that Barak would allow medical supplies and food to enter the Palestinian areas, which have been sealed off by Israeli forces, and would pull Israeli forces back to their original positions. But another senior PA official, who declined to be identified, said that international pressure from all sides from the US, UN, Russia, and the EU led to the breakthrough. PA officials say Arafat, who traveled to Egypt yesterday to consult with Mubarak, was reluctant to attend such a reconciliation meeting with Israel ahead of the first Arab summit in 11 years, scheduled to take place in Cairo this coming Saturday. Arafat hopes there to solidify Arab backing for Palestinian demands of sovereignty over east Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, something he failed to do in a whirlwind tour of Arab capitals following the collapse of the July Camp David summit. Clinton was concerned that wider military confrontations could erupt if the Arab summit preceded a cease-fire agreement. The US president, who has labored intensively throughout his term to strike an historic peace deal, would also like to use the meeting to set a time frame for resuming final-status negotiations, but officials and analysts say the trust necessary for such talks has completely eroded. Pressure on Barak from potential coalition mates like Likud leader Ariel Sharon to reject a new round of talks, and Arafat's desire to maintain some friction with Israel at least until the Arab summit, also make a declaration of a resumption of peace negotiations unlikely. "Our central objectives must now be to stop the violence, to restore calm and safety, to agree on a fact-finding mechanism concerning how this began and how it can be prevented from occurring again, and to find a way back to dialogue and negotiations," Clinton told reporters in Washington yesterday. Clinton, who was burned three times in recent peacemaking summit efforts - at Geneva, Camp David, and Paris - warned that there is no guarantee of success. "We should be under no illusions. The good news is the parties have agreed to meet and the situation appears to be calmer. But the path ahead is difficult. After the terrible events of the last few days, the situation is quite tense. But President Mubarak and I are convinced that we must make every effort to break the cycle of violence." Israeli and US officials warned last night that a new round of violence today or a surprise development could torpedo the summit plans. Clinton called for both sides to "do all in their power to cease hostilities and halt the violence,"in the two days leading up to the summit. Speaking later in Denver, Clinton asked for the "prayers" of the American public as leaders "attempt to try to put things back together" in Sharm e-Sheikh. The most worrisome unknown for the US is whether Arafat will agree to a cease-fire agreement drafted in Paris and endorsed by Israel, which calls for a US-led commission to examine the events of the last two weeks and make recommendations to the UN secretary-general. The body, however, would not be authorized to condemn or initiate proceedings against either side. Palestinian officials say privately that Arafat has dropped his demand for a UN-appointed international commission of inquiry. But Shaath said Arafat agreed to the summit "to end all Israeli hostilities against the Palestinians and form an international investigation committee," without specifying what kind. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told CNN the Palestinians also wanted assurances "that Israel will never repeat what it did with the missiles, and choppers, and tanks." In return, Justice Minister Yossi Beilin said Israel would de
[CTRL] Low Expectations
-Caveat Lector- >From LM (url at bottom) "" There was a time when university students were challenged to question their commonsense view of the world. A good university education sought to equip students with an ability to think critically, to acquire an understanding of the world that would be inaccessible through their direct personal experience. Today such an education is denounced as elitist and, worse still, as irrelevant to people's lives. On the contrary, students are encouraged to talk about their experience and tutors are instructed to offer courses that are relevant to their teenage customers' experience. Instead of learning to question their commonsense assumptions, students are taught to become sceptical about the wider claims of truth, objectivity or of any big idea. "" A culture of low expectations All the fuss about 'dumbing down' appears to assume that people are becoming more stupid. On the contrary, says Frank Furedi; it is society's elites that have lowered their standards and embraced the banal 'Dumbing down' is one of those confusing concepts that obscures as much as it reveals. People in general are probably no less interested in ideas than they were three or four generations ago. Although there is a lot of crass culture about, it is possible to find great books, watch inspiring films and even encounter great music. Visit a decent bookshop and you will see dozens of customers leafing through heavy-looking tomes. Most kids you meet are curious, imaginative and open to new ideas. At least when they begin their courses, the first-year university students I teach are passionate about learning and aspire to a first-class education. In as much as it means anything, dumbing down does not refer to the intelligence of most people. Rather it is about culture - or more specifically about the elites who influence and regulate the flow of cultural ideas. Strictly speaking one should not even call these people an elite today, since they self-consciously instruct the rest of society that elitism is wrong and that the institutions of culture and education should be made more relevant to everybody's concerns. That might sound admirably egalitarian. But in many respects an elite that refuses to acknowledge its status is even worse than one that revels in it. The old elitist snobbery has been replaced by one that masquerades as anti-elitism. This new snobbery regards anything that is truly challenging and demanding as way beyond the capacity of 'ordinary people'. The new snobs demand that people should be taught only what is deemed to be relevant to their little lives. Their message is that we should not expect too much of ordinary people. Competition and examinations are often indicted for being divisive, by which they mean that it is wrong to stigmatise failure or praise achievement. The elitism of the new breed of cultural populist is strikingly manifested in the conviction that they know what is best for others. Dumbing down in contemporary society is not simply about the lowering of standards. Its distinctive feature is the transformation of knowledge into a commodity that can do little more than serve the self. Knowledge is no longer really seen as a means of understanding the world outside yourself. Instead it serves no purpose higher than that of personal coping and survival. That is why, sadly, many of the people leafing through the latest publications in bookshops are probably searching self-help books for answers to their personal problems. Since ideas need serve no cause that transcends the individual self, it is perhaps unsurprising that we are not living through a period of bold intellectual experimentation or a renaissance in culture. The individuation of knowledge, like the reduction of understanding to 'self-awareness', renders it utterly banal. In one sense the current debate about dumbing down represents a recurrent theme in modern Western culture. It seems that every generation discovers a new education crisis and examples of falling standards. Throughout this century the cultural elites of one generation have reacted to those of the previous era, and declared that their view of the world offered a better way forward than the old-fashioned ways of their predecessors. Conservative critics of mass society have always been particularly sensitive to manifestations of cultural decline. In turn, radical thinkers have persuasively argued that the traditionalist defence of standards is often nothing more than a self-serving argument for protecting the unearned privileges of a powerful minority. So at least superficially nothing has changed. However, look more closely and the debate about dumbing down today has little in common with those of the past. Critics of tradition focused their attack on a system of education which was unfair because it excluded those who were potentially more able than its mediocre beneficiaries. They criticised the dominant culture on the grounds tha
