Category Archives: USA

School brainwashing kids into Islam with vocabulary exercises, angry Florida woman says in viral video

Posted on by Bob Pitt

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10203566777422544

 

Farmville Central High School in North Carolina is coming under fire for what conservatives believe is an attempt to indoctrinate children into the Muslim faith using Common Core vocabulary exercises.

Fox News commentator Todd Starnes attacked the school on behalf of anonymous parents he spoke to. “What if right after Pearl Harbor our educational system was talking about how great the Japanese emperor was?” one such parent asked. “What if during the Cold War our educational system was telling students how wonderful Russia was?”

The exercises in question are designed to broaden students’ vocabulary while also teaching them about the Islamic faith. For example, the word “mosque” is defined in one sentence, and students are later asked to use the word in a fill-in-the-blank exercise.

In a statement, the Pitt County School District stated that “[t]he course is designed to accompany the world literature text, which emphasizes culture in literature.”

But that was not enough for one friend of a mother of a student at Farmville High, Floridian Dianne Lynn Savage, who posted a video about the assignment on Facebook that went viral over the weekend.

“Can you see my rage?” Savage asked as she read from the vocabulary building exercise. “This is not made up, this isn’t paranoia, this isn’t Islamophobia – this is just fact.”

“You all understand what they’re doing?” she asked. “Bringing in this type of worksheet and this particular lesson, it’s very subliminal. And the fact that you’re using words like, ‘exciting’ and ‘imaginary,’ and that you’re trying to look like it’s a wonderful thing. They’re infiltrating our children’s minds!”

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CAIR-NY ‘disappointed’ by DA’s handling of bias attack

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-NY) today expressed deep disappointment at the Brooklyn District Attorney’s (DA) office for its failure to secure a hate crimes plea and jail time in a bias motivated gang assault perpetrated against a Muslim man in Brooklyn last October.

Four of the five assailants, one of whom used brass knuckles to beat 24-year-old Shahid Amber, pled guilty to either first degree assault or second degree assault charges with probation and no jail time.

In a letter to Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes, CAIR-NY Civil Rights Director Aliya Latif referenced the Hate Crimes Act 2000, which states: “Crimes motivated by invidious hatred toward particular groups not only harm individual victims but send a powerful message of intolerance and discrimination to all members of the group to which the victim belongs. Hate crimes can and do intimidate and disrupt entire communities and vitiate the civility that is essential to healthy democratic processes.”

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Appeasement of Muslims in Detroit

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“In the Detroit-area, where a festering and metastasizing Muslim minority has managed to co-opt the media, every time a Muslim hiccups, it makes the news. And every time kids at a Muslim school celebrate a holiday, that makes the news, too. Christmas parties at a Catholic or Evangelical school, who cares? And a lot of these stories are – predictably – meant to impress upon us various areas of disinformation, such as how pro-female Islam is or how peaceful.”

Right-wing US pundit Debbie Schlussel takes issue with the Detroit Free Press over its favourable coverage of the hajj celebration at a local Muslim school, the Muslim American Youth Academy.

debbieschlussel.com, 19 December 2007

On Romney, Mormonism and Islam

Posted on by Eddie Truman

“While the urgency of ‘responding’ to Islamic fundamentalism has been consistently highlighted in the ongoing presidential campaign, very little has been said about Christian, Jewish or other religious fundamentalisms. Rarely has a candidate – with the exception of Democrat Dennis Kucinich – dared to examine the relationship between Christian fundamentalism and the Iraq war, or Jewish fundamentalism and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Religious fanaticism and fundamentalism are rarely discussed as perilous phenomena in their own right; if it’s not ‘Islamic’ it simply doesn’t count.”

Ramzy Baroud at Middle East Online, 15 December 2007

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: neocon in black face

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Ayaan Hirsi Ali first came to fame in the Netherlands, after emigrating there from Somalia. She was elected to the Dutch parliament and became known for criticizing that nation’s Muslim immigrant communities, especially for their treatment of women and girls. The story of a young, pretty, African woman finding success and prestige in a foreign land was tailor made for Hollywood, or for right-wingers looking for the perfect person to excuse government sponsored mass murder…. She has become well paid and famous because she demonizes her fellow Muslims. As with black Americans or any other group of despised people, the self haters, the Uncle Toms, are given a clear path to fortune and favor.”

Margaret Kimberley in Black Agenda Report, 12 December 2007

The rights of women

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“It was Katha Pollitt, writing in The Nation last month, who made me see it. Pollitt, a noted feminist writer, wondered why the American liberal-turned-neocon David Horowitz – founder of the bizarrely named Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week – had suddenly developed an interest in the rights of women. Specifically, Muslim women. ‘Life is not a picnic for women in China, India, Africa and Latin America’, wrote Pollitt. ‘Why no interest in them?’ She speculated that by focusing on the oppression of women, Horowitz had found an easy way to target the Muslim world.

“In his ‘age of horrorism’ essay last year, Martin Amis also developed a feminist sensibility. Amis, whose novels so often feature flat, cartoon-like women, connected the failure of Islamic states with the ‘obscure logic that denies the Islamic world the talent and energy of half its people … the suppression of its women’. Well, there is definitely work to be done regarding the rights of Muslim women, but a lot also needs to be done for all the non-Muslim women oppressed around the globe.”

Noorjehan Barmania in the Guardian, 14 December 2007

‘Gut-wrenching bigotry’ at the WSJ

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Juan ColeJuan Cole responds to Mitt Romney’s speech arguing that his adherence to Mormonism was no obstacle to standing for the US presidency:

“The unsavory aspects of this entire discourse are apparent in the op-ed of Naomi Schaeffer Riley for the Wall Street Journal. While she depicts Mormons in a positive light, she displays the most gut-wrenching bigotry toward Muslims. She writes: ‘A recent Pew poll shows that only 53% of Americans have a favorable opinion of Mormons. That’s roughly the same percentage who feel that way toward Muslims. By contrast, more than three-quarters of Americans have a favorable opinion of Jews and Catholics. Whatever the validity of such judgments, one has to wonder: Why does a faith professed by the 9/11 hijackers rank alongside that of a peaceful, productive, highly educated religious group founded within our own borders?’

“I just wanted literally to puke on my living room carpet when I read this bilge. Islam is not ‘the faith professed by the 9/11 hijackers’. Islam is the religion of probably 1.3 billion persons, a fifth of humankind, which will probably be a third of humankind by 2050. Islam existed for 1400 years before the 9/11 hijackers, and will exist for a very long time after them. Riley has engaged in the most visceral sort of smear, associating all Muslims with the tiny, extremist al-Qaeda cult.

“We could play this game with any human group. Some Catholics were responsible for the Inquisition. Shall we blame Catholicism for that, or all Catholics? Of course not. Jewish Zionists expelled hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians from their homes in 1948. Is that Judaism’s fault or that of Jews in general? Of course not.”

AlterNet, 9 December 2007