POLITICS: A rush to use school choice, Al Jazeera in bed with Hamas and other commentary

Libertarian: A Rush To Use School Choice

Public-school enrollment is falling not just because of “the declining birth rate, but also because a growing share of the population prefers alternatives like private schools and homeschooling,” cheers Reason’s J.D. Tuccille. And those families are “increasingly assisted with funding from education choice programs.” Across the country, students have been opting out of public schools and into “charter, private schools and homeschooling” options. One reason: “Families were horrified by learning losses they saw in their children when schools bungled remote learning during pandemic lockdowns.” Also, participation in “private school choice programs” is surging due in part to “Education Savings Accounts,” which “make education funding portable.” Childhood education “will be better, since the schools will be chosen by families, not assigned by default.”

From the right: Is the UN Worth Anything?

UN General Assembly delegates meet this month to “celebrate with dignity the eight decades of global concord that their body represents,” notes Seth Barron at Tablet. But more Americans are wondering why “their tax dollars are funding . . . programs, efforts, and positions of power” for “dictatorships” that are then given “a global platform to fulminate about the past and present crimes of the West.” Meantime, the United Nations has failed grotesquely in its peacekeeping missions as time and again a “force was already on the ground when horrible massacres were conducted.” Sen. Ted Cruz suggests, “If this is what it means to participate in international institutions, we need to fundamentally reassess our involvement.”

Media watch: Al Jazeera In Bed With Hamas

A “Gazan journalist” was “brutally tortured” in a “Hamas interrogation center in al-Shifa hospital” in June, — simply because he’d been “reporting for a media outlet” critical of Hamas, reports The Free Press’ Tanya Lukyanova. Worse, “Al Jazeera staff were complicit in such repressions”: Hamas determines who may report in Gaza, and “during anti-Hamas protests this spring, Al Jazeera staff allegedly helped identify dissidents” to Hamas operatives. This complicity has caused the Qatari network to “become a target of public anger in Gaza.” Though admired by many in the West, Al Jazeera acts as “an arm of Hamas’s repressive machinery,” helping “not only to broadcast the group’s message” but also to “enforce its rule through intimidation, arrests, and torture.”

Iconoclast: Britain’s Illiberal Speech Policing

“I am horrified” that UK “law enforcement has come down like a ton of bricks on Graham Linehan for expressing hostility on X towards rabid male trans activists,” fumes Lionel Shriver at Spiked, noting that his arrest at Heathrow Airport is “potentially ominous news for me personally,” since “if the Met is stalking airports for anyone who’s published a discouraging word” about the “deeply disturbing social obsession with transgenderism,” then “I am at risk of arrest and detention if not imprisonment” upon visiting the United Kingdom. “The British state is not only policing what views we may express — it has also advanced to policing our feelings.” “Is this what the British state wants?” To scare away tourists and “court a reputation as an oppressive pariah in what was once traditionally designated ‘the free world’?”

Foreign desk: Time To Have Ukraine’s Back

Mark Toth & Jonathan Sweet at The Hill cheer President Trump’s recognition that “China, Russia, and North Korea are actively colluding to globally weaken U.S. interests.” Indeed, defeating Russia “is Europe’s best defense and, by extension, Washington’s own best defense in the Western hemisphere and Taiwan.” Unlike President Barack Obama, Trump “was willing during his first administration to provide Ukraine with lethal weapons” and poking “Putin by delivering Javelins for storage in Western Ukraine.” In return, Ukrainian President Volodymyr “Zelensky has had Trump’s back [in] making it clear Putin’s war in Ukraine is part of a global assault against the West.” “It is now time for Trump to have Ukraine’s back.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board