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Britain’s Northern School of Contemporary Dance (NSCD) because it is “built around white European ideas” and is too “gendered”. The school has dropped ballet from its auditions process because of its “potentially contentious nature”, according to The Telegraph. “It is essentially an elitist form. Young people need to pay to take ballet classes as a general rule and for a vast number of potential students, they’ve not had access to ballet,” explained the head of undergraduate studies at the dance school, Francesca McCarthy, in comments to the notionally right-leaning newspaper. “It is a very specific form that is built around...

Cancel culture has now reached President Abraham Lincoln, the man who wrote the Emancipation Proclamation declaring enslaved people “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Democrat Rep. Jamie Becker-Finn (DFL-Roseville) complained about Lincoln’s presence on the House floor this week during a debate on an education bill. “We are asked to serve, we serve in this body, we have to look at President Lincoln every day we are in this space.”

In prayer, Jews face Jerusalem but Muslims face Mecca Victor Sharpe  Sunday, May 29, 2011 The late Israeli Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren Sounds the Shofar (Ram’s Horn) upon the Recapture in June, 1967 of Jerusalem’s holy Jewish site, the Western Wall, from Jordanian Muslim occupation Jerusalem Unification Day has again been celebrated in Israel and throughout the world with the exception of that 7th century alternate universe: the Muslim world.It marks 44 years since the amazing and miraculous event took place when the Jewish people’s 3,000 year old capital city was restored to the Jewish state in the 1967 Six-Day War....

Last week, Saudi Twitter pages began to promote the message that ‘the direction of Jewish prayers do not matter to me”. The campaign, designed to emphasize the importance of Mecca and Medina as the holy places of Islam, and to eliminate the importance of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, has caused considerable controversy online. Among the most prominent messages in the campaign were those who wrote that "the direction of the prayers of the Jews is not important to us, what is important to us is only our homeland," referring to Saudi Arabia. This tweet was written by a well-known...

The newly revealed structure consists of a 184-by-161-foot (about 56-by-49-meter) platform that encloses a slightly smaller platform originally paved with flagstones. The east side of the interior platform had been lined with a row of columns that once crowned a monumental staircase. A small 28-by-28-foot (8.5-by-8.5-meter) building was centered north-south atop the interior platform and opened to the east, facing the staircase. This enormous open platform, topped with a relatively small building and approached by a monumental facade, has no known parallels to any other structure in Petra. It most likely had a public, ceremonial function, which may make it...

An overhead image of the monument photographed from a drone, and a detail overlay of the surface features in which the image is rotated 90 degrees clockwise. Photograph by I. LaBianca (Left) and Photograph by I. LaBianca; graphics by J. Blanzy (Right) ============================================================================================== Satellites and drones helped reveal huge ceremonial platform near the ancient city’s center. An enormous monument has been hiding in plain sight at the World Heritage site of Petra, according to a study recently published in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Archaeologists Sarah Parcak, a National Geographic fellow, and Christopher Tuttle, executive director...

Islamic Places in Petra Dan Gibson 43.9K subscribers Dan Gibson introduces a new on-line tool that takes visitors on a tour through the Islamic places in Petra. Gibson explains that the original place names in Petra have been lost over the centuries, and that most of the place names are from the last several hundred years. Then using the descriptions of the earliest Islamic places, this tool takes the viewers through the Islamic places in Petra, including AlAqsa in Jiranah, Zamzam, the Ka'ba, the Cave of Hira, Arafat mountain, the Plains of Arafat, Muzdalifah , Mina, Jumrat, and the temple...

"The Sacred City presents compelling evidence that suggests the holy city of Mecca is in the wrong location and that the worlds 1.6 billion Muslims are praying in the direction of the wrong city. Compiling evidence from both historic sources and new technologies point to the correct location in this seismic, revelatory new film.

AS THE governor of Mecca, Prince Khalid bin Faisal Al Saud has been able to compensate for earlier failings. He came to his role in 2007 from Asir province, where his plans to erect modern tower blocks in the city of Abha were largely unfulfilled. He successfully erased Abha’s quaint old town, with its beehive houses made of wattle, only to replace them with squat breeze-block bungalows. Not a high-rise was to be seen.

Saudi Arabia is reportedly planning to modernise Mecca by building a retractable roof over the Kaaba - the most sacred site in Islam - in what critics fear will 'destroy the cradle' of the religion. Although the new roof has not been officially confirmed, a video of the 'umbrella project' circulating on social media shows a scale model on display in the holy city demonstrating how the retractable roof would operate.

Millions of hajj pilgrims are preparing to head home, after five days performing ancient rites, revering a God omnipresent in the city of Mecca. They have stoned figurative devils, they have slept in the world’s largest tent city, they have drunk water from the Zamzam well together: a heaving throng of nearly two million people from all over the world. Circling the Kaaba, the black cubic epicentre of this sanctuary city, pilgrims would have looked up to see one of the minarets of the Grand Mosque, dwarfed by Abraj al-Bait clocktower, a much-maligned luxury hotel and commercial complex and the...

Saudi Arabian authorities have detained an Indian national for posting a controversial photo of Mecca's Grand Mosque juxtaposed with Hindu religious symbols on Facebook. The photo depicts Al Masjid Al Haram mosque as a temple, photoshopped with Hindu symbols over the Kaaba, the holy building at the centre of the mosque, according to Gulf News, which cited a local daily's report on Tuesday.  A Saudi citizen who saw the post brought it to the notice of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the kingdom's religious police. The Indian was detained when he was at an...

Egyptian Ministry of Culture Publication: The Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock were Built to Divert the Pilgrimage from Mecca; Jerusalem was Not the Center of Worship for the Followers of the Prophet Muhammad On August 5, 2003 Ahmad Muhammad 'Arafa, a columnist for the Egyptian weekly Al- Qahira, which is published by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, wrote an article rejecting the established Islamic doctrine that the Prophet Muhammad's celebrated "Night Journey" (Koran 17:1) took him from Mecca to Jerusalem. 'Arafa, presenting a new analysis of the Koranic text, asserts that the Night Journey in Surat Al-Isra' (that...

By Jack Wheeler jwheeler@politicalusa.com9/27/2001   The most sacred spot on earth to all members of the Islamic religion is the Holy City of Mecca, revered as the birthplace of Mohammed. It is one of the five basic requirements incumbent upon all Moslems that they make (if their health will allow it) a pilgrimage to Mecca once in their lives (the other four: recognize that there is no god but Allah, that Mohammed is Allah's prophet, ritually pray five times a day, and give alms to the poor). The founding events of Islam are Mohammed's activities in Mecca and Medina,...

MINA, Saudi Arabia - Millions of white-robed pilgrims threw pebbles at pillars yesterday, symbolically stoning the devil in an act of purification - a ritual made safer this year because of remodeling that widened bridges and reduced congestion. The construction work was undertaken to prevent the crushes of people that have led to fatal stampedes in the past - such as the ones that killed 1,426 pilgrims in 1990 and 244 last year. The stoning, which lasts several days, is one of the main rituals in the annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Across the Muslim world, the faithful marked the...

Historic Mecca, the cradle of Islam, is being buried in an unprecedented onslaught by religious zealots.Just a link.

The New Yorker interview with San Francisco's school board president reveals how political ideology has replaced knowledge among especially younger American leftists.Last week, The New Yorker ran an interview with San Francisco school board President Gabriela López, a 30-year-old former teacher leading the district’s charge to bury American history. It’s eye-opening, to say the least.López was elected on a campaign to cancel history. Under her leadership, the nation’s seventh-largest school district has spent its time not teaching its 57,000 students — who have been “learning” online for nearly a full year — but plotting to take the names of historic...

Absolutely arrogant. For Timothy P. Schmalz, an Ontario-based sculptor, that’s really the only way to describe the renewed push to tear down statues that commemorate people who are now deemed out of step with modern morals. When a Confederate figure gets toppled in the U.S., or a prime minister who was part of brutal treatment of Indigenous people is destroyed in Canada, it says more than just disagreeing, Mr. Schmalz said. It’s a claim that we would have known better, acted otherwise. And that’s the hubris. “When one destroys or puts a Confederate statue in a museum, out of sight,...

A colorful Black Lives Matter mural was defaced this week, with vandals attempting to obscure "Black" with red, white and blue paint. The 140-foot mural is on the side of a building in downtown Spokane, Washington -- sponsored in part by Terrain, a local arts nonprofit. Terrain, along with digital advertising agencies 14Four and Seven2, hired 16 artists to decorate and paint each letter in Black Lives Matter, according to CNN affiliate KXLY.

statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee and busts of seven other confederate leaders were quietly removed from the Virginia State Capitol under the cover of night Thursday by order of its Democratic House Leader. The 900-pound, bronze Lee statue and busts of Gen. Stonewall Jackson and Confederate President Jefferson Davis and other members of the Confederacy were removed from the old House chamber under orders from House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn, a Democrat from Fairfax. The additional monuments removed were of Fitzhugh Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, Matthew Fontaine Maury, Joseph E. Johnston and Alexander Stephens, plus a plaque honoring Thomas Bocock. All...