Posted on 02/22/2007 4:45:44 PM PST by WBL 1952
Thursday , February 22, 2007
The father of a North Carolina ninth grader who was given 'anti-Muslim' literature in class says the material handed out is not an issue of free speech, but of slander and defamation.
A representative from the Kamil International Ministries Organization, a Christian group based in Raleigh, was invited by a teacher to come and speak to the class. He handed out literature class that compared the teachings of Jesus with accusations against Islam's Prophet Muhammad; Muslims Jesus as a prophet of God equal to the prophet Muhammad.
Among the materials handed out was a pamphlet called "Jesus not Muhammad," as well as one entitled, "Do Not Marry a Muslim Man." The latter pamphlet compares parts of the Koran with those of the Bible, such as:
—Husband, beat your wives and deny them sex." (The book of Islam, Koran 4:34)
—"Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the Church and gave Himself for her." (The Holy Bible, Ephesians 5:25)
It warns women to not be lured into marrying a Muslim man, even for his "dark good looks, education, financial means, and the interest he shows in you."
"You may be excited that you found the 'tall, dark, and handsome man' you have been looking for. His sweet words and attention may blind you regarding the power, importance, and influence of his culture and Islamic faith," the pamphlet says. "Because in the United States, we have freedom of religion, he may agree that you can remain a Christian and you may think there will be no problem with such a marriage. But do not be fooled and become a victim of his religion, Islam, which has very oppressive rules regarding women's status and rights. Such marriages will never be out of trouble."
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
BINGO! That's why it is false comfort to cheer the occasional anti-muslim pro-judeo christian teacher who takes it upon herself to indulge in religious propaganda.The overwhelming majority of gov't schoolteachers are anti-Christian. Conservatives who give permission to the three American schoolteachers who are willing to champion judeo-christian values & condemn Islam in front of your children, are unwittingly giving permission for 800,000 schoolteachers to champion Islam & condemn Christianity in front of our children. THAT's the real cultural suicide & THAT's why shortsighted, knee-jerk thinking is so very very dangerous. Be careful what you ask for, FReepers!
If you support this teacher's right to preach one way, you have no moral or intellectual standing to fight against the teachers preaching secular humanism in the schools. And given our lack of representation in the field, conservative judeo-christians should just let ourselves get steamrolled here? That's an utterly self-defeating position.
Too many of these guys are like modern Liberals ~ they want to be victims.
Never found one who, with a little booze or cocaine under his belt who could keep from belting out the foulest racial bigotry imagineable.
They blame this on the Mongol invasion from centuries past. Of course none of the people they are insulting are from Mongolia.
What we need is a standard for immigrants and refugees alike is something that keeps out people who are going to hate the folks already here.
That's why girls shouldn't be in there either.
Period. Amen.
I'm not sure you are aware of the current world situation. History in the making.
The enemy is among us and we need to be aware of it.
What was shown happens to be the objective provable truth. I see nothing wrong with being aware of current threats and Islam is certainly a threat as is written in the Koran and practiced around the world.
Is the world being threatened by lefthanded Lithuanian Lutherans? Are we in a shooting war with LLL's who want to rule us with exactly what was said to those students?
Your strawman just doesn't hold water.
It is a known fact that muslims do exactly what the students were told. That is not propagnada it is preparedness.
It is a known fact how women are treated in Islam according to the Koran.
The fact that many Americans are misled by media in this country for political reasons is going to get us killed and/or wiped out as a society.
Should we ignore that?
Or should we be aware of that?
I vote for awareness.
You know I am not for preaching and indoctrinating children in any religion.
But teaching what differenet religions are about is only common sense.
The more aware we are of the world and what is in it the better we can choose for ourselves.
Islam is about lying, coercion, submission, control, and many other evil qualities. Should we ignore that?
Only at our peril.
>> What if anti-Christian literature were handed out?
Unfortunately, it's not an issue of speculation.
Umm...you might want to consider the accuracy of what's being stated. It's not hatred, it's an objective comparison, using text from the muzzies' "holy" book. It's matching text with text, not making unsupported statements. Think of it as a debate. The kids have almost certainly heard one side; why not let them hear the other? It's no different than the debates we all had to do in school (i.e. is gun control good or bad?, should slavery be abolished or upheld? (for history class)).
More importantly, there are far too many stories of some non-muzzie woman marrying a muzzie she thought was "secular" and having serious problems afterwards. Think of it like all the STD and "safe sex" seminars kids are forced to go through. Its a matter of health and safety, both physically, mentally, and psychologically. Sadly, with so many "Christians" being unequally yoked, it's becoming a priority to warn people of the consequences of their actions.
I don't know what people say about indoctrination on this forum, but the fact of the matter is it exists, it always has as far as I know, and probably always will. All you can hope for is a semi-balanced presentation of the opposing sides.
It ain't a double standard at all. The fact is that the global warming, darwinist, liberal, et al camps are already in the schools, period. The question is whether you want you kids exposed solely to the mindless rantings of the left, or whether you want them to be able to form their own opinions using the logic they, hopefully, have learned both in the classroom and from their parents.
I'd say especially at the university level. I guess it matters what school you attended, though.
Absolutely I understand the threat to our culture, our heritage & our self-government that islamofascism as well as secular humanism present. I think that's pretty much a given for anybody posting on FR, but perhaps I should have been more emphatic about that.
Again, nobody is suggesting we ignore islamic & secular humanist agression & the role both play in the erosion of judeo-christian values in the US - at least I'm sure as hell not. Quite the contrary! It's a very real threat which must be vigorously challenged & ultimately defeated, intelligently, so that our side ultimately prevails. However, teaching our children about all this is the job for parents, relatives, preachers, rabbis, friends, politicians, writers & freepers & indeed everyone else. Just not the government-paid teachers of our minor children trapped in our compulsory education system!
Again, what I am questioning is the long-term wisdom of giving carte blanche to government teachers to serve as the ones to inculcate our children with religious values and not just on grounds of constitutional principle, but on grounds of practical exigencies & the laws of unintended consequences.
Since most government teachers in this country are increasingly hostile to conservative judeo-christian values, and seemingly more so every generation, it would be profoundly self-sabotaging to say "Because most teachers preach anti-christian secular humanism & pro-islamism to american kids, it's a good thing if one or two teachers here & there take our side with our kids once in a while."
We live in dangerous times, right? It's not smart to allow ourselves to be seduced with false victories here, to cheerfully settle for winning a battle at the expense of winning the war.
If we are going to abandon the prohibition against government schools indoctrinating everyone's kids about religion, and it then devolves into an anything-goes-free-for-all, there is no question that we will lose & secular humanism & evenually islamo-fascism will win. It's a question of numbers. The other side has overwhelmingly more troops on the ground in our schools.
How self-defeating is it to give up the only tool we have to try to contain the enemy?
Strangely enough, it is actually in the best interest of those conservative judeo-christian peoples who love this country & the religious principles upon which it was founded to hold on to the prohibition against government schools indoctrinating our kids with any religious values for all it is worth, to fight all the violations against it with everything we have, because strategically it is in our best long-term interest to do so. It is indeed WE, & the generations who will come after us, who are ironically the ones who will ultimately benefit from the prohibition most.
To paraphrase a dead white guy named Oscar : "Sometimes when God needs to punish us, all he's gotta do is answer our prayers." IOW, be careful what you ask for, conservatives?
What seems reflexively like a good thing on the surface & in the short-term (i.e., a public school teacher in some small county allowing a preacher to come in & tell her students about the evils of islam ) ain't such a good thing, if giving her permission to do that means that the something-million other teachers hostile to judeo-christian values out there can then be allowed to inculcate our kids with their values unimpeded because we blithely gave up the prohibition entirely just to win a couple of quick, cheap points here & there.
At this point in our country's cultural history & with the threat it now faces, it is conservative judeo-christians who cherish the principles upon which this nation was founded and who seek to preserve our freedoms who benefit most from the prohibition against government teachers preaching religious values to the children of the citizenry. If you say it's ok for this particular teacher to do it this isolated instance, you are simultaneously giving permission to millions of secular humanists & radical imams to do it, & ultimately, there is no question, we will lose the war under those rules of engagement.
So, in a nutshell, smoketree, all we differ is on strategy fighting the threats to our culture & country which, we can both agree, secular humanism & islamic fascism pose. I just don't happen to think it's very wise to abandon our most important piece of armor to settle for pyrrhic victories in a couple of superficial battles in the short term at the expense of winning this very important war in the long term, that's all.
OK. Now I gotta go pick the shards of sheetrock out my scalp, lol! ;-) Sorry this is so long & if I weren't going out for lunch today I'd try to do an edit. May I say I've really enjoyed debating this with you? It's great when freepers can try to persuade each other without reflexively falling into the same ol' "Rinos & Paleos & Libs, oh my!" snarkfest. So thanks!
"I sincerely hope he is "the man" in 08."
You and me both. I've donated to his campaign and am telling anyone and everyone I know to check him out.
90% that come back to me like what they see, and in my job I talk to folks all over this country.
"conservativism sure isn't what it used to be"
Quite so. When the public debate is over which faction seeking power in Rome-on-the-Potomac gets to control the agenda of the State mandated schools, one has to wonder what is left in all of this that is worth conserving.
The answer I keep getting is "not much", and the inference is that educational efforts are best concentrated elsewhere.
You present a good argument, and I agree with much of what you've said. But, I think it's the same logic that can be used to take the "one nation, under God" out of our pledge of allegience - that can take the pledge of allegience itself out of our schools.
I am not nearly as articulate as you are, but I'll try my best to outline my views here.
I see nothing wrong with discussion of religion in school as long as it is presented in a manner of "this is what these people believe" and no one is prejudiced against or for because of a certain belief. Christians believe x, muslims believe y, jews believe z. In fact, I think that especially in a World History class, it's necessary to teach these things.
How do you explain the crusades without mentioning religion? How much more effective would it be to discuss exactly what each side believed and what they did to each other because of those beliefs. How do you explain why the pilgrims came to America without discussing religion? How do you adequately describe the holocaust without mentioning what Jews believed, compared to Nazis?
I think it should not be taboo to discuss any religions in the classroom in an objective way, so as to learn about that religion and how it affects the world and world-views. How do your kids know how stupid liberals are if they've never seen or learned about what liberals believe and the cause/effect of it?
But if you read what was handed out to those students in this particular instance, that was not at all the context in which this pastor was characterizing Islam. Please go back & re-read up at the top of the thread. He was admonishing girls not to marry Muslims, etc. That's not teaching history, that's making a very opinionated value judgement about that religion, & that's pure propagandizing.
Now, there may be good reason to do that elsewhere. Strike that. There IS a compelling reason to educate our kids about religion in that way,& in particular, about Islam in that context, impressing upon them our value judgements as we see fit & commensurate with our own beliefs. Indeed, parents have an obligation to do that if they care anything at all about their kids.
My objection is to teachers in state schools making the unilateral decision which value judgements about which religions they can impress upon everybody else's kids at their own discretion.There is a huge difference between a teacher instructing her class in a factually historical context about religion on the one hand and passing along her own religious opinions & personally derived judgements of other religions as fact to her students on the other.
I think we're just on very dangerous ground allowing him or anybody to do that kind of proselytizing in a public school, because what we let out of that Pandora's box will eventually come back to bite us on our rear ends the hardest, I'm afraid.
Pt II: In a nutshell as to what should or shouldn't be allowed in public school classrooms? I think it just comes down to the difference between opinion-laden subjective characterizations about religions versus fact-based objective characterizations as a means of explicating the historical record. Tell our kids about religion in their historical contexts,teachers, but just check your own religious opinions & agendas at the door.
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