Top Of The Tree

In the Quran, chapter number 9, verse number 29, Allah orders the Muslims to kill the Christians, Jews and if they do not surrender, then they have to pay Jizya.

Jizya is basically protection money. Jizya is a tax. In the time of the holy prophet and after him, when Islam was spreading and the Muslim government was spreading and the Islamic state was spreading. So wherever there were Jews and Christians and people who were not believers, for them, there was a rule that they have to pay this tax.

Since in Islam, according to the Islamic rules, they will be free to worship whoever they want, they will be free, they will have free movement, worship their god, they will be able to build churches, they will be able to build their religious institutes. However, they will have to pay some tax.

––

https://quranx.com/9.29

By: Robert Pondiscio

Published: Jun 11, 2026

Last week, I spoke to a group of young education policy professionals about literacy, the “science of reading,” and knowledge-rich education. It’s a talk I’ve given in one form or another for years. I walk audiences through a series of demonstrations showing that reading comprehension is not simply a matter of decoding words on a page. Background knowledge matters. Vocabulary matters. Context matters. What readers already know largely determines what they can understand.

This isn’t an original argument; E.D. Hirsch, Jr., has been making it for over 40 years. I became a convert teaching 5th grade in the South Bronx years ago in a classroom full of kids who could decode but struggled with comprehension. I’ve said countless times that Hirsch alone among theorists uncannily described and diagnosed my students’ struggles as if he’d been standing in my classroom.

Twenty years later, acceptance of evidence supporting knowledge as a driver of language comprehension has never been stronger. The science of reading movement, cognitive science, and research on reading comprehension have only strengthened the case for knowledge-rich education. Even artificial intelligence, unexpectedly, bolsters the argument: The better AI gets, the more obvious it becomes that people who possess broad knowledge, vocabulary, context, and judgment are able to use these tools more effectively than those who do not.

Recently, Chad Aldeman made precisely this point. For years, educators argued that students no longer needed to know things because information was readily available. AI exposes the weakness of that argument. Looking something up is not the same thing as understanding it. Nor is asking a chatbot a good question possible without already knowing quite a lot.

Curriculum advocates tend to speak as though the argument is over and the evidence is finally on their side. It is. But evidence was never the main obstacle. The obstacles are ideological, professional, structural, and political. Many are deeply embedded in the culture of American education. Some are embedded in American society itself. And to be brutally frank, many obstacles to knowledge-rich education are not viewed as obstacles at all: They are intellectual and even moral commitments that many school leaders and education advocates believe more important to defend and protect than knowledge-rich curriculum. Let me enumerate them. And brace yourself, it’s a long and daunting list.

Ideological Obstacles

1. The Skills Myth No single idea has done more to marginalize knowledge in American education than the belief that schools should focus on teaching critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity, and other “skills.” Critical thinking is not a generic skill that can be taught independently of content. The ability to think critically about the American Revolution does not automatically transfer to genetics, economics, or constitutional law. Thinking depends on knowing. If critical thinking is largely domain-specific, then knowledge is not merely one educational goal among many. It becomes the foundation upon which nearly every other goal or intellectual accomplishment rests. Yet much of American education continues to treat knowledge as negotiable and skills as the goal. Hirsch, Dan Willingham, and others have spent decades arguing that the relationship works in the opposite direction.

2. Child-Centered Learning Knowledge-rich education assumes that adults have an obligation to introduce children to a world larger than themselves. Much of modern education assumes that learning should be driven by students’ interests, experiences, and preferences. These are competing and largely incompatible visions of education. The child-centered impulse animates everything from “culturally relevant” pedagogy to the popular notion that books should serve primarily as “mirrors” in which students see their own identities, cultures, and experiences reflected. There is obvious value in helping students feel seen and connected to what they learn. But much of what educated adults know was not acquired because it felt personally relevant at the time. It was acquired because schools deliberately introduced students to people, places, ideas, and events beyond their own experience. The promise of education is to encounter the larger world. A curriculum built primarily around mirrors will inevitably devalue windows.

3. Project-Based Learning Knowledge-rich education assumes that domain-specific knowledge is the primary purpose of schooling and that it must be built deliberately, systematically, and cumulatively over time. History is best taught chronologically, science concepts build upon one another, and so on. In all subjects, vocabulary and background knowledge accumulate year after year, creating the “schemas” that make comprehension, reasoning, and critical thinking possible. Project-based learning treats knowledge not as body of content to be mastered but a tool acquired “just in time” to solve a problem or answer a question. Students learn what they need when they need it. It’s fundamentally a different theory of how knowledge is acquired and organized.

4. Anti-Canon Sentiment A coherent curriculum requires somebody to decide what is worth knowing. For many educators, that immediately raises concerns about representation, exclusion, and power. Arguments about who should be included in the curriculum frequently overwhelm arguments about the importance of having one at all.

5. Individualism Knowledge-rich education rests on an unfashionable proposition: There are some things everyone should know. Contemporary educational thought and practice, with its emphasis on personalization and student voice, moves in the opposite direction. But the tension runs even deeper than classroom practice: Individualism is woven into the fabric of American culture. From the founding period onward, Americans have celebrated independence, self-direction, and resistance to authority. Alexis de Tocqueville observed it nearly two centuries ago. Irving Kristol described Americans as possessing an “amiable philistinism“ toward books and intellectual life—a democratic suspicion that no small group of cultural authorities should decide what everyone ought to know. The notion that that schools have an obligation to transmit a common intellectual inheritance can sound uncomfortably elitist. For Hirsch and his followers, it sounds like the very purpose of schooling.

Professional Obstacles

6. Teacher Autonomy Teacher autonomy is a cherished norm in American education. Many teachers view lesson planning—selecting texts, adapting materials, and crafting instructional experiences—as essential expressions of their professionalism. This creates an obvious challenge for knowledge-rich education, because a coherent, cumulative curriculum depends on consistency across classrooms and grade levels; what students learn in one year should deliberately prepare them for what comes next. But that level of coordination inevitably places limits on individual discretion. Teachers are asked to see themselves not primarily as independent instructional designers, but as participants in a larger enterprise of knowledge-building. Curriculum advocates see this as a support for teachers. But teachers may perceive it as a loss of status.

7. Curriculum as Resource Rather Than Roadmap American educators have long treated curriculum as merely a resource rather than well-designed, coherent and cumulative course of study. Teachers are expected and encouraged to adapt, supplement, curate, and modify the curriculum, which often amounts to writing lessons from scratch. Published curricula are often held in low regard and viewed as raw materials in need of significant revisions. Walk into many schools and you will find teachers drawing lessons from multiple programs, websites, trade books, and self-created materials in pursuit of student engagement or instructional novelty. It makes sense that that curriculum should be malleable if one views it primarily as a tool for delivering skills and doesn’t care about delivering a sequenced body of knowledge. But for coherent knowledge-building, this practice is fatal.

Similarly, when districts adopt strong curricula, they often fail to implement them intentionally, rigorously, or with stamina. Teachers modify them. Administrators layer additional initiatives onto them. Supplemental materials crowd them out. Professional development reframes them. Over time, coherent curricula are often diluted into something much less coherent.

8. Weak Teacher Content Preparation Many teachers receive extensive training in pedagogical theory but relatively little in history, science, geography, literature, or civics. Knowledge-rich education assumes content expertise that teacher preparation programs have not always prioritized or valued.

9. The Myth of the Heroic Teacher Many educators continue to believe that exceptional teaching can compensate for weak curriculum. Advocates of knowledge-rich education tend to view the relationship differently. The point of a coherent curriculum is not to replace excellent teachers. It is to make success more achievable for ordinary teachers working under ordinary conditions.

Structural Obstacles

10. Local Control Many Americans rightly value local control. But local control inevitably produces variation. A nation that allows thousands of districts to make independent curricular decisions is unlikely to arrive upon a coherent sequence of knowledge shared by all students. Students pay the cost of this school-to-school variation in curriculum. After all, U.S. students are among the most mobile in the world: A University of Michigan study found that by the time children were in the third grade, only 55 percent were in the same school where they began kindergarten. Another study showed that fewer than one in five (18 percent) of students remain in the same residence between kindergarten and twelfth grade. Knowledge-rich curricula depend on sequence. Sequence depends on continuity. Students who move frequently between schools and districts without a common curriculum inevitably encounter gaps, repetition, and inconsistencies.

11. Leadership Churn Knowledge-building requires patience. School systems often lack it. Even where superintendents, principals, and school boards are persuaded by the evidence for a knowledge-rich approach, frequent leadership changes mean that schools adopt instructional changes long before a curriculum has had time to take root and bear fruit.

12. Innovation and Initiative Overload Knowledge-building is cumulative, repetitive, and often unglamorous. By contrast, education’s culture and career paths tend to reward novelty and “innovation.” School leaders are constantly searching for the next breakthrough while neglecting the slow work of building knowledge over time. For these reasons, schools rarely stop doing new things. New initiatives accumulate without old ones disappearing: SEL. Personalized learning. Project-based learning. Competency-based education. AI integration. Restorative practices. Curriculum becomes one priority among many rather than the central mission of schooling.

13. Accountability Knowledge-rich education is cumulative, particularly in literacy. As Hirsch observes, language proficiency is “a slow-growing plant.” By contrast, accountability systems are annual and impatient. Schools and teachers are judged on short-term performance indicators, making it difficult to sustain long-term investments in knowledge-building. Moreover, annual reading tests often explicitly encourage skills-based approaches to reading comprehension—find the main idea, make interferences, compare and contrast—that either thwart or rob time from coherent knowledge-building.

14. Educational Pluralism I support school choice. I want to see broad, diverse, and effective school models from classical and experiential schools to microschools and homeschooling. I unequivocally support the right of families to choose among different educational models and philosophies—including some I might not personally hold in high regard. But honesty requires acknowledging the tradeoff: The more successful educational pluralism becomes, the harder it becomes to maintain a common body of knowledge. Choice sits uneasily alongside coherence.

15. The U.S. Constitution Obviously, the Constitution does not explicitly prohibit knowledge-rich curriculum, but the word “education” does not appear in the document. And under the 10th Amendment, any powers not explicitly granted to the federal government by the Constitution are reserved for the states or the people. The result is the most decentralized education system in the world. Countries that successfully implement coherent curricula tend to do so through national systems. The United States has no comparable mechanism and never will. Whatever virtues this arrangement may have—and there are many—50 states and 14,000 school districts make coherence more difficult. As battles over Common Core reminded us, Americans prefer state and local control over uniformity. We should simply be honest that we have made that choice.

Political Obstacles

16. Curriculum Wars History, literature, civics, race, gender, religion—every subject can become a political battlefield. The result is that many leaders avoid ambitious curricular decisions altogether. Conflict becomes a deterrent to coherence.

17. Equity Concerns Ironically, one of the strongest arguments for knowledge-rich curriculum is an equity argument. Hirsch’s central insight was that schools often assume knowledge that many children have never had the opportunity to acquire. Middle-class and affluent students are more likely to absorb broad vocabulary, historical references, scientific concepts, geographic knowledge, and cultural literacy through conversation, travel, books, media, and family experiences. Less advantaged students are often expected to infer this knowledge as they go. When schools focus primarily on skills while treating knowledge as incidental, they inadvertently widen these disparities. A coherent, cumulative curriculum seeks to ensure that all students—not just the fortunate—have access to the shared knowledge that underpins reading comprehension, academic success, and civic participation. Yet critics often view common content as exclusionary or inequitable, creating one of the great paradoxes of modern education: A reform designed in part to promote equity is frequently opposed in the name of equity. Knowledge-rich education does not eliminate inequality, but it refuses to assume that schools are powerless to address it.

18. Distrust of Authority Knowledge-rich education requires somebody to decide what children should know. While Americans have a congenital aversion to technocracy and rule by experts, our present era is notable for its particularly steep declines in trust in institutions, experts, universities, and public authority.

Technology

19. Artificial Intelligence This may be the newest obstacle and the most paradoxical. AI demonstrates the importance of knowledge because knowledgeable people use it better. Yet it also creates the illusion that knowledge acquisition can be bypassed. Students can summarize books they have not read, explain concepts they do not understand, and write polished essays on subjects they know little about. The technology simultaneously validates Hirsch’s argument and tempts us to ignore it.

* * *

Notice something about this list: None of these obstacles are disputes about cognitive science. Most analysts and advocates now accept that knowledge matters. There is nearly universal acceptance that reading comprehension depends heavily on what readers already know. Said differently, the obstacles to knowledge-rich education are not scientific; they are ideological, professional, structural, political, cultural, and increasingly technological. That should be sobering for curriculum advocates. It is a profound misunderstanding of the current moment to assume that knowledge-rich education is merely a matter of implementation.

The reality is far more daunting. Knowledge-rich education does not confront a single opposing ideology. It confronts a sprawling coalition of competing values: autonomy, personalization, local control, choice, relevance, pluralism, innovation, flexibility, and distrust of authority. Many of these values are worthy. Some of them I support myself. Yet every one of them makes it harder to organize a single school—let alone the nation’s schools—around the deliberate accumulation of shared knowledge.

––

By: Mark Zlochin

Published: Aug 3, 2026

The UNICEF-led survey found child malnutrition in Gaza to be exceptionally low by regional and even Western standards. The findings also undermine the key argument used to justify last year’s famine declaration.

newly released UN-led nutrition survey of Gaza's children completely shatters the narrative promoted by advocacy organisations that continue to claim that its population – and children, in particular – is being deliberately starved. Equally important, it also deals a final blow to the highly controversial "famine" designation issued one year ago by the Famine Review Committee of the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system.

The survey, carried out under the coordination of the Nutrition Cluster – the UNICEF-led body that runs Gaza’s nutrition-surveillance system – measured the children’s weight, height and mid-upper-arm circumference. The data were then used to calculate the weight-for-height z-score, or WHZ – the standard indicator used by the World Health Organisation and other bodies to compare levels of acute malnutrition across populations and over time.

Contrary to the prevailing narrative, the survey found that acute malnutrition measured by WHZ ranged from merely 0.2 to 0.8 per cent across Gaza’s regions. For comparison, Gaza’s pre-war rate was 0.8 per cent – an already relatively low rate comparable to those seen in developed countries and well below those reported in nearby countries such as Egypt (2.9 per cent) or Jordan (2.0 per cent). In other words, the measured level of acute malnutrition is not only well below critical levels – it is exceptionally low by both regional and even Western standards.

The new findings don’t just completely debunk the latest iteration of the relentless narrative claiming Israel isn’t allowing enough food into Gaza – they also undermine the key argument used to justify the original famine declaration, which advocacy groups still cite as their evidentiary anchor.

To formally declare a Phase 5 "Famine", as the IPC did in August 2025, one required key condition is that at least 30 per cent of children under the age of five show acute malnutrition as measured by WHZ. Since WHZ data were not available for Gaza when famine was declared last year, the IPC relied instead on the more readily available mid-upper-arm circumference (MUAC) measurement. It further argued, on the basis of earlier global comparisons between the two indicators, that WHZ generally identifies roughly twice as many cases of acute malnutrition as MUAC, and hence that a much lower MUAC prevalence of 15 per cent could supposedly be treated as equivalent to the 30 per cent WHZ famine threshold.

As I wrote at the time in the Jewish Chronicle, this assumption was questionable even before any new data came out. The approximately 2-to-1 relationship between the two indicators invoked by the IPC was derived largely from comparisons involving countries in Africa, where WHZ frequently produces substantially higher malnutrition estimates than MUAC. However, evidence from the Middle East suggested that this relationship did not generally hold in the region. Moreover, some limited earlier data from Gaza itself indicated that it might actually be reversed there, with MUAC rates higher than WHZ rates rather than lower. In other words, there was no justification for treating a 15 per cent MUAC figure as “equivalent” to the 30 per cent WHZ famine threshold.

The new Nutrition Cluster survey now supplies the conclusive local comparison between the two malnutrition indicators and shows that the IPC’s central assumption was indeed wrong: WHZ rates in Gaza are not twice the MUAC rates – in fact, in this survey, they are consistently lower than MUAC rates in every area measured.

The 2-to-1 ratio on which the IPC relied to justify its controversial 15 per cent “famine” threshold simply does not hold. And once that assumption collapses, so does the statistical basis for concluding that Gaza had crossed the catastrophic malnutrition threshold – a claim that was key to the August 2025 famine classification.

Advocacy groups continue to describe Gaza's children as facing a starvation crisis engineered by deliberate policy. The new nutritional data – collected under UN supervision using the same rigorous methodology applied in humanitarian settings worldwide – flatly contradict that narrative.

Malnutrition in Gaza today is not just low; it is at or below where it stood before the war and much lower than in nearby Egypt or Jordan. Moreover, the same findings also completely destroy the already shaky foundation on which last year’s “famine” designation was built.

Many researchers, including myself, argued at the time that the famine label was incompatible with what the data actually showed. Now, the UN’s own findings show unequivocally that our criticism was, indeed, correct.

––

Every single video clip you are seeing on screen right now was uploaded to social media directly by Gazans. This is 100% authentic, first-hand footage, and all of it is from 2026.

Look closely at how Gazans have supposedly survived the famine, a famine that, in reality, never actually exists. I assume you have never seen this side of Gaza anywhere else.

Now wait a second. I know exactly what you might be thinking. Just because there are a few isolated videos of markets and restaurants and people who, how to put it gently, are not so thin doesn't prove anything; it is not representative. But here is the thing: it is representative.

For months, global headlines claimed Israel was intentionally starving Gaza, but the raw footage tells a completely different story. Bustling markets, open restaurants, fully stocked shelves. The mainstream media simply choose to ignore it.

But what about those viral images of starving children that shocked the world? When you look into these cases, the truth comes out. These children were suffering from severe pre-existing genetic and metabolic conditions. In Gaza, 40% married their own cousins, but the BBC or The Guardian will never tell you that.

The UN hypocrisy makes this worse. The UN Security Council met over 60 times regarding Gaza. Meanwhile, in Sudan, where a real, massive famine threatened 24 million people, the Council just met 19 times. In Yemen and Somalia, just twice.

When millions starve and there is no way to blame the Jews, I mean Israel, the international community completely loses interest. Don't take my word for it. Prove me wrong.

And make sure to follow Gazawood on Instagram and X. All the footage in this video comes directly from them. They show the real Gaza that the mainstream media refuses to show you. Please share this video. Yalla bye.

––

"Balestine" is #29 on the world obesity rankings for adults, just 9 down from the United States and ahead of New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Greece and the United Kingdom. Israel is at #102.

For children, it's at #90, just behind the United Kingdom and Sweden and head of Germany and Israel.

==

Of course it was a lie. It was always a lie.

Beautiful Pernstejn Castle 🇨🇿

Pernštejn Castle is one of the best-preserved medieval castles in Czech Republic. Built on a rocky hill surrounded by forests, it is famous for its impressive Gothic architecture and fairy-tale appearance.

The castle was founded in the 13th century by the powerful House of Pernštejn. During the 15th and 16th centuries, it was expanded and transformed into a sophisticated Gothic-Renaissance fortress.

Its thick walls, towers, hidden passages, and defensive features allowed Pernštejn to withstand several attacks. Unlike many European castles, it was never conquered by force, which helped preserve much of its medieval character.