Posted on 08/24/2016 3:11:12 AM PDT by Benny Huang
Does it matter what our kids learn about Islam in public schools? Jenny McKeigue of Olmsted Falls, Ohio thinks so. This small town mother has battled her local school board for about four years to get them to remove parts of the curriculum that seem to promote Islam.
In 2012, McKeigue learned that her son had been shown a video in his seventh grade social studies class that she considered to be blatant Muslim propaganda. The video, an episode of the discontinued "30 Days" reality TV series, featured a "regular American" (the host's terminology, not mine) spending thirty days immersing himself in the culture and faith of America's most Muslim city--Dearborn, Michigan. The regular American's name is Dave Stacy and according to the host he's "a husband and father, a practicing Christian, and a red-blooded, beer-drinking, pork-eating American." He also hails from (surprise!) West Virginia and strikes me as southern in his manner. Though Dave is not an actor, he plays the "role" of the provincial hayseed in need of reform.
The episode's central message is that Americans are uncomfortable with Islam because they know so little about it. This snub may be what perturbed Jenny McKeigue so much; it certainly angered me. But those Americans who will admit to being uncomfortable with the rising Islamic tide are neither irrational nor uninformed. Wherever large Muslim communities take root, non-Muslims end up dying or at least having their rights curtailed because Islam will settle for nothing less than dominance. Dearborn is no exception. That reality was not expressed in the video and if it had been it would not have been screened in a public school.
The race is on to educate your children about Islam and the result will have great implications for the future. My personal experience, I believe, offers some insight into how education prepares (or fails to prepare) young adults for the world they live in.
In the fall of 1995 I was a high school freshmen looking to fill a hole in my class schedule when I stumbled upon a world history course from a good teacher who happened to be a very opinionated liberal. I learned a lot that year but not all of it was actually true.
One unit concerned itself with major world religions--Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and several eastern religions. I recall the portion on Christianity being the shortest and shallowest, which may have been because the teacher assumed we were already familiar with that religion--an unfounded assumption even twenty years ago. When the focus turned to Islam we learned about the five pillars of Islam, that Islam has two main denominations (Sunnis and Shiites), and that Islam considers Jesus to be a great prophet though not divine. The teacher taught us that Muslims invented algebra and the concept of zero, two "facts" that I later discovered to be falsehoods. Neither concept was truly "invented" and both pre-date Islam by centuries.
Then the teacher mentioned that Islam has a slight problem with radicalism. Although the vast majority of the world's Muslims are peaceful, he explained, Islam has a few bad apples who give the religion a bad rap. He claimed that the bad apples are mostly Shiites and even within that subset they represent only a small minority. The lesson we were supposed to internalize is that every religion has its zealots. It hardly seemed fair that our society singled out one particular religion for scorn.
Three years later, al-Qaeda struck American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. I chalked it up to those few bad apples I'd heard about in class. In 2000, when I was a private in the Army, I learned that jihadists had blown a hole in the side of the USS Cole as it docked in Yemen. More bad apples.
Then came the mother of all terrorist attacks: 9/11. The only way I knew how to make sense of the slaughter was to refer to my ninth grade history course. I assumed that the attackers must have been Shiites (they weren't) and that their cause and tactics were anathema to most Muslims. It took me years to discover just how wrong I was about this.
Unlike most Americans, I was not glued to my television in the hours and days after 9/11. The entire US military was on high alert and I had to stand guard in case of copycat attacks. Later on I heard that Muslims had been seen on television dancing in the streets. I hadn't seen the revelry with my own eyes so I dismissed the story as a rumor. I found it difficult to accept that anyone would celebrate the attacks because it implied that the hijackers enjoyed at least some popular support, an idea that ran contrary to everything I had been told. But in fact it had happened--from East Jerusalem to New Jersey, Muslims rejoiced that the bully America had gotten her nose bloodied.
My "few bad apples" assumption also meant that I had no idea in the fall of 2001 just what a long and difficult struggle my country was undertaking. I believed that the vast majority of Muslims hated Osama bin Laden as much as I did and that most would gladly assist us in taking out their trash. I also assumed that the number of people we were going to war with was relatively small--perhaps a few hundred fighters holed up in the caves of Afghanistan. It wouldn't take the world's unchallenged superpower long to flush out a few reprobates from Tora Bora, would it?
How wrong I was. Take Pakistan, for example, a country that almost certainly gave Osama bin Laden shelter. A 2007 poll found that 46% of Pakistanis had a favorable opinion of bin Laden and 43% had a favorable opinion of al-Qaeda. Almost half the population admires the late terror mastermind! Is it any wonder the country exploded with rage when we finally killed him? Osama bin Laden is very much a hero in the Muslim world, something like Nelson Mandela to black South Africans. Until we come to terms with this fact, we will never have a clear picture of the times we live in.
As the years went by I learned that this thing called the "War on Terror" was bigger than I could have imagined. It wasn't just about hunting down a few guys in Afghan caves and we weren't going to receive any assistance from that "vast majority" of Muslims I kept hearing about. Some Muslim countries offered their assistance, of course, though mostly because the US government has deep pockets. Some of those "allies" were also double-dealing, including Pakistan.
I've learned a lot in the fifteen years since 9/11. I was not surprised, for example, to learn that Belgian Muslims celebrated in the streets after last March's terror attack in Brussels, or that Muslims refused to help Belgian police locate fugitive terrorists. It was like 9/11 all over again--many rejoiced in the carnage and none wanted to help the infidels root out the bad guys.
I have often wondered how my perceptions of the post-9/11 world might have been different if I had never taken that world history class. Might it have been better to be uninformed than partially misinformed? I don't know. I do know, however, that the public schools could have better equipped me to understand the world that awaited me after graduation.
This is why it matters what we teach our children about Islam. A world religions unit in a high school history class might seem trivial but it's all some people will ever learn about Islam. We've got to do better than we've been doing, with our ludicrous "bad apples" theory of Islamic terrorism and our constant drawing of false equivalences. Our lessons should not be polemical of course, because that would mean replacing pro-Islamic propaganda with anti-Islamic propaganda. But they should at least be honest. We've been lying to ourselves for at least twenty years about the extent of popular support that Muslim terrorists enjoy within their communities, and it's time we stopped. We won't stop telling that lie, of course, because without it we'd forced admit that there's broader culpability for the scourge of Islamic terror.
It’s the golden rule: He who has the gold, makes the rules. I believe Middle East oil money is pouring into every aspect of western society (mostly political donations), to fundamentally change it.
What about the liberals vaunted , Separation of Church and State. ?
Are they admitting Islam is Theocracy?
Good article. The author points out how naïve a lot of us were.
Mohammed was Charlie Manson without the humanity, only with more money and less musical talent. Except that Charlie Manson, as far as we know, never raped any children.
And to those who respond by saying "violence has been committed in the name of all religions through the centuries," I ask: "How many people did Jesus kill? How many slaves did Jesus own? How many women did Jesus rape?"
The Five Pillars of Islam:
Murder
Slavery
Rape
Torture
War
Sorry, liberals. There's only 1 interpretation of Islam — Muhammad's
I hate this propaganda.
You are indisputably correct.
This is really strange. An hour or more before I logged onto FR a few minutes ago for some reason I decided to look up some info about Islam being taught in schools. I remember wseeing an article with a photocopy of a high school kid coming home with a homework assignment in Calligraphy that alerted his parents, he was assigned to write, in proper calligraphy:
Allah is the only god and Mohammad is his prophet.
I’ve seen other articles in the past year, and out of nowhere decided to look it up...an hour or so later I log on to FR and find this thread...weird...
This page is still open in another tab
Here are some others I looked up.
http://www.islaminourschools.com/
http://www.wnd.com/2014/01/islam-in-a-public-school/
http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Islam-in-America-s-public-schools-Education-or-2482820.php
Note - Watch out for the black pop up video panel at bottom, it will “run” from your mouse. You cannot click on it. Look for a small barely seen block at the top right, it will close it.
http://www.wnd.com/2006/10/38269/
That’s a few of those I looked up earlier this morning. Still seems really weird that I looked this up, then come here and find a thread about it...
Based on my investigation of Islam those so-called "bad apples" are the true Muslims who follow the Koran and the examples set by Allah's perfect man, the prophet Muhammad.
Many of the "peaceful Muslims" are killed by these "bad actors" because the fundamentalists (salafis , Wahabbis etc.) know these peaceful Muslims are Heretics and Muslim slackers, and are more interested in worldly things than in doing what Allah and Muhammad want done. (convert the world to Islam and put it under Sharia law, and do it by violent force if necessary, like Muhammad did.) - tom
It is “whatever gets the job done” for Liberals. I think
they just assume they can just assassinate whomever they
wish once they are in power (behind high “security” walls),
of course. - They never learn from the fate of other
fascists that there comes a time when no wall is high
enough and no security guard is guaranteed to guard them
forever.
Over 50 yrs. ago, we got a Muslim exchange student from
Turkey. I’d never heard of that religion. We were told
beforehand that they called “their” god, Allah.
She was a polite person; but the pork thing was a strain
on her as well as some of the lodging arrangements. One of
the girls whose family she lived with was spoiled and threw
a fit until they moved her to another family’s home.
She returned to Turkey at the end of the school year and
married her assigned suitor (a Muslim Turk). Had a family
and died of cancer several years ago. She was, of course,
from one of the privileged families; dated some American
kids, but rejected Christian churches at that time. Hope
she did not reject Christ at some point later.
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