Posted on 11/10/2003 6:07:03 PM PST by Stultis
Dear Mr. Elliott:
I have been reviewing schoolbooks and other instructional publications for about eighteen years, and during that time I have developed three general observations. Writing an analysis of a good publication is enjoyable and usually is easy. Writing an analysis of a weak publication is typically a more difficult task, requiring much explication of the publication's failures and follies. Writing an analysis of a patently fraudulent publication is the most demanding task of all, for this reason: Although one can see immediately that the publication is a hoax, one still must give an extraordinary amount of time to studying it and to demonstrating its deceitfulness in some detail. Such work -- requiring that a great deal of time be devoted to dissecting the antics of tricksters who deserve only contempt -- can be exasperating.
My inquiry into the Arab World Studies Notebook, the publication that you called to my attention a few weeks ago, has been exasperating indeed, and I am happy to say that the inquiry is nearing its end. My review of the Notebook now exists as a draft that has about 4,700 words. I will not be able to finish my writing, however, until I do some further library work and until I receive some items of information and documentation that I have requested from one of my colleagues. Hence I am going to lay the draft aside for a while -- but before I do so, I want to give you an idea of how my inquiry has been going. In the rest of this message, I shall sketch some of my findings. For the sake of brevity, I shall keep the number of quotations and citations in this message to a minimum. In my review I shall use quotations and citations abundantly.
The Middle East Policy Council, a pressure group based in Washington, D.C., formerly called itself the Arab American Affairs Council. It adopted its present name in 1991. The MEPC's activities include the sponsoring of "teacher workshops" that allegedly equip educators to teach about "the Arab World and Islam."
AWAIR, which operates from Abiquiu, New Mexico, distributes printed items and videos for "ALL LEVELS - Elementary to College" and runs the "teacher workshops" sponsored by the MEPC. The director of AWAIR, Audrey Shabbas, is also the editor of the Arab World Studies Notebook, and her name appears on many of the readings and other items that the Notebook contains.
In AWAIR's current catalogue, the Notebook is described as "An anthology of secondary curriculum level materials." I take that to mean that the Notebook is chiefly intended for use by high-school teachers. AWAIR sells the Notebook for $49.95. (The MEPC doesn't sell the Notebook as such, but the MEPC provides a copy of the Notebook to each participant in the "teacher workshops.")
On its Web site, the MEPC displays claims about the extent and success of its "workshops" program, as well as alleged testimonials from participants in past "workshops," but the claims are too vague to be checked, and all of the testimonials are anonymous and unverifiable. The MEPC's Web site also carries promotional claims for the Notebook, and one of those claims is a gross falsehood, as I now shall explain.
I immediately recognized that claim to be false. The Curriculum Framework and Instructional Resources Office (CFIRO) of the California State Department of Education does grant approvals to certain pedagogic publications, clearing the way for local school districts to buy those publications with state money -- but the approval process does not entail any appraisal of any publication's content or pedagogic merit, and the granting of an approval does not mean that the approved publication is "highly regarded" by anyone.
On 8 September 2003, in an e-mail message, I brought the MEPC's claim to the attention of Suzanne C. Rios, the administrator of the CFIRO. Since then, Rios has informed me that her office has no record of any approval covering "the Arab World Notebook." She further has informed me that she called the MEPC's executive director on 22 September, told him that the claim in question was false advertising, and told him that the CFIRO "wanted it taken off IMMEDIATELY!"
At this writing, the false claim still is being displayed on the MEPC's site.
The Notebook is a vehicle for disseminating disinformation, including a multitude of false, distorted or utterly absurd claims that are presented as historical facts. I infer that the Notebook has three principal purposes: inducing teachers to embrace Islamic religious beliefs; inducing teachers to embrace political views that are favored by the MEPC and AWAIR; and impelling teachers to disseminate those religious beliefs and political views in schools.
The promotion of Islam in the Notebook is unrestrained, and the religious-indoctrination material that the Notebook dispenses is virulent. Muslim myths, including myths about how Islam and the Koran originated, are retailed as matters of fact, while legitimate historical appraisals of the origins of Islam and the Koran are excluded. Shabbas wants to turn teachers into agents who, in their classrooms, will present Muslim myths as "history," will endorse Muslim religious claims, and will propagate Islamic fundamentalism.
In a public-school setting, the religious-indoctrination work which Shabbas wants teachers to perform would clearly be illegal. I shall say more about this in my review.
Whether Jesus is an "important figure" in Islam is debatable, but there is no doubt that Jesus appears in various verses of the Koran, and there is no doubt that Muslims "recognize" Jesus. They certainly recognize him well enough to deny and denounce basic perceptions of Jesus that are held by a huge majority of today's Christians. Muslims deny that Jesus was an aspect of a triune god, they reject the very concept of the Trinity, and they deny that Jesus was divine. (Indeed, in the Koran 9:30 -- i.e., sura 9, verse 30 -- we read that Muhammad wanted Christians to be damned because they said that Jesus was the son of God.) On instructions from the Koran, Muslims even deny that Jesus died by crucifixion. (See the Koran 4:157.)
Muslim propagandists who operate in America (where about 80% of the adult population consists of persons who identify themselves as Christians) routinely and dishonestly exploit Jesus in their promotional material. Striving to create the impression that Islam is similar to Christianity and congenial to Christianity, these propagandists project palatable, grossly distorted impressions of how Jesus figures in the Koran and in Muslim religious doctrines -- and at the same time, they conceal the Koranic passages which explicitly reject essential Christian beliefs about Jesus, and they conceal the Koran's depiction of both Christians and Jews as people who are unfit to be accepted by Muslims as allies or friends. (See the Koran 5:51 -- "O believers, do not hold Jews and Christians as your allies. They are allies of one another; and anyone who makes them his friends is surely one of them; and God does not guide the unjust.")
The distorted, disingenuous stuff about Jesus in Shabbas's Notebook is formulaic and unremarkable. I have seen similar tripe in other publications that purvey Muslim propaganda.
In the context of the Notebook, Quick and Shabbas's unsupported claims about Muslims in the pre-Columbian New World amount to business as usual. The tactic of spewing forth bizarre claims without any documentation or support (or even a pretense thereof) appears early and is used often -- and this leads me to say a little about the audience for which the Notebook has been fashioned.
The Notebook isn't aimed at our entire population of high-school history teachers or at high-school history teachers in general. Rather, it is aimed at that sorry subpopulation of teachers who, for want of education or want of intelligence, will believe almost anything and will question nothing. It is aimed at teachers who never have absorbed the concepts of evidence and reason, who know nothing of historiography, and who can be treated as dupes.
Hence the Notebook teems with fake "facts" that are simply tossed forth as glib one-liners. For example: In an article that starts on page 27 of the Notebook, one Thomas Cleary nonchalantly flings this tidbit to Shabbas's victims: "As is well known, the Qur'an was revealed through the Prophet Muhammad, . . . ." Well known? By whom is that well known? And how is it known? Cleary doesn't bother to say. In truth, what Cleary depicts as a "well known" fact isn't well known, isn't known at all, and isn't a fact. It is an Islamic-fundamentalist myth. The origin of the Koran has been the subject of much scholarly speculation, but historians haven't been able to determine when the Koran's various parts were written, or who may have written them, or how many versions of the Koran were written and rewritten before the canonical version was assembled. (See, for example, Toby Lester's article "What Is the Koran" in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1999.)
By the way: Cleary also announces that the Koran is "the last link in a chain of revelation going back to time immemorial, even to the very origin of humankind." Any reader who has an IQ above the freezing point (if I may borrow a phrase used by the business writer Tom Peters) will ask, "How in the world was that ascertained?" Shabbas is manifestly confident that this question will never occur to readers of the Notebook.
One more example: Shabbas's dupes learn from the Notebook that the Koran condemns wars of "territorical [sic] conquest" -- and they also learn that, from the 8th to the 13th centuries, Arabian Muslims built a great empire that "extended across North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, from Spain to the borders of China." Does this mean that those Arabian Muslims spurned the Koran? Does it mean that they assembled their empire without fighting wars of conquest? Exactly how did they do that? You may well ask the questions, but you won't find any answers in the Notebook.
Muslim propagandists in America fabricate wildly inflated claims about the size of America's Muslim population, presumably because the Muslims think that such claims can be transformed into political influence. (In one notorious instance, an outfit known as the American Muslim Council announced that -- according to the Census of 2000 -- the number of Muslims dwelling in America was between 6 million and 7 million. Alas, the Council's liars had failed to notice that the Bureau of the Census doesn't collect information about Americans' religious affiliations!) Respectable studies conducted in 2001 have indicated that the United States has about 2 million Muslims, and accounts of those studies have been published widely. See, for example, "How many U.S. Muslims?" in The Christian Science Monitor, 29 November 2001, and "Studies Suggest Lower Count for Number of U.S. Muslims" in The New York Times, 25 October 2001.
On 23 September 2003 I dispatched this query to Audrey Shabbas, by e-mail:
I have been reading your Arab World Studies Notebook (1998). On page 4, in the unsigned section titled "An Introduction to Islam," I find this statement: "There are six million Muslims in America." I'll be grateful if you will send me a citation of the source from which that number was acquired.
Shabbas replied, but she didn't send me any citation. She made some evasive claims about some published "works," and then she wrote:
The U.S. media since 9/11 has [sic] been using the number of "seven million" and so I am now using that number. In an April 1996 ABC/Nightline program with Ted Koeppel [sic], he uses [sic] the figure 5 million.
I had to laugh. Did she imagine that her vague allusion to the "U.S. media" would dignify the six-million claim? And how about the many "U.S. media" articles -- e.g., the two that I've cited above -- which have reported estimates of 2 million or so, and which (very importantly) have explained how those estimates were developed? Shabbas evidently assumed that I was unaware of any such reports, and that she therefore could bamboozle me. She was wrong.
You'll learn more about Shabbas and her antics when I send you my full review of the Arab World Studies Notebook. (You'll also learn more about Thomas Cleary, for I shall describe how Cleary uses specious "history" in a strikingly bold denigration of Christianity.) I hope that, in the meantime, you will read the articles that I have cited from The Atlantic Monthly, The Christian Science Monitor and The New York Times.
William J. Bennetta
BTW anybody know who, if anyone, keeps education or curricula ping lists?
"Anywhere we are, Us is."That looks like a line from an Amos 'N Andy show. One can easily imagine that it served as the motto of the Mystic Knights of the Sea, and that it was recited by such characters as The Kingfish, Andy Brown and Algonquin J. Calhoun.
In fact, however, the line that I have quoted is the motto of a real organization -- a real organization that was originally named United Slaves but now calls itself The Organization Us (or simply Us or US). It was created some 40 years ago, in Southern California, by a black racist who had begun life as Ron N. Everett but later had assumed the name Maulana Karenga.
[...] He emerged from prison in 1974, and a few years later -- in a maneuver that even The Kingfish might have found difficult -- he got himself installed as the chairman of the Department of Black Studies at California State University at Long Beach. CSULB wasn't the only American university that got the racial willies during the 1970s and set up a tin-pot black-studies department, but CSULB (as far as I know) was the only one that hired a chairman who was a violent felon.
Karenga is still working at CSULB and is still running The Organization Us, and he and Us are still promoting his proprietary holiday, Kwanzaa. Prentice Hall is promoting it too, so The American Nation displays a picture of "an American family's celebration of Kwanzaa"
.
I really love people who say Jesus was a great man or a great philosopher but deny that Jesus was an aspect of a triune god. This goes to alot of non-Muslims as well.
Jesus taught that:
(1) He was the Son of God
(2) That no one goes to Heaven except through him
So for people who say he was a just "great man" must either believe he was a pathological liar or mentally unstable. And if he was a pathological liar or mentally unstable how could he be a great man?
Editor's Introduction -- Among fraudulent "biology" textbooks, Scott Foresman - Addison Wesley Biology: The Web of Life is hard to beat. The original version of this book, dated in 1998, was a hodgepodge of fictitious "science," phony "history," incomprehensible throwaway lines, ignorant guesses disguised as information, and bogus "activities" that had no connection with reality. It was published by Addison Wesley Longman, which was a subsidiary of the British corporation Pearson PLC. A second version, dated in 2000, has been published by Prentice Hall, which is a part of Pearson Education, which is another company owned by Pearson PLC. Like the 1998 version, the 2000 is a sustained exercise in ignorance and fakery. Indeed, the 2000 version is virtually identical with its predecessor.Even the title Scott Foresman - Addison Wesley Biology: The Web of Life is a fake. "Scott Foresman" and "Addison Wesley" are vestiges of the names of two publishing companies that no longer exist, and the phrase "The Web of Life" embodies a gross fraud. That fraud was exposed in "Beavis and Butt-Head Do Biology," a TTL review of the 1998 version. Here is the pertinent passage from the review:
"The Web of Life"! That catchy subtitle looks as if it may actually mean something -- and we soon learn where it allegedly originated, because [Addison Wesley Longman's] writers have put this epigraph on their book's title page: " 'We did not weave the web of life, we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.' -- CHIEF SEATTLE"Yes, folks, he has returned again -- old Chief Seattle, the silver- tongued spokesman for the Eco-Freak Brigade of the Noble Savages. Readers who keep track of phony-Injun lore will recall that the Chief is famously associated with a splurge of mawkish rhetoric titled "Chief Seattle's Speech," though there is no evidence to suggest that he uttered any of it. In short, the speech is bogus. Fanciers of phony-Injun stuff will also know that the so-called speech doesn't contain the sentences that the [Addison Wesley Longman] writers have used for their epigraph. The writers have taken two lines from the bogus speech and have doctored them to make them politically correct. In short, the writers have concocted a fake "quotation" from a speech that was phony to begin with, and their epigraph is fakery squared.
.
Obviously an entire continent didn't popped out of the ocean a few hundred years ago. Yeah, so it wasn't called "America" before the Europeans named it, but so what. It's not like the inhabitants at the time had a name for it. They didn't even have a concept of continents.
There was still a continent that (as a whole continent) had never been called anything else. You would say there wasn't an "Anarctica" before it was named. Not that it's a big deal. Names and definitions are trivial so long as they don't lead to misunderstanding of what is being said.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.