Posted on 06/07/2002 6:54:13 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
It contains no foul language or sexual innuendo. In fact, it aims to instill reverence for God and obedience to His commands. Nevertheless, one educational CD-ROM marketed to children aged five and up is one of the most disquieting products ever aimed at pre-teens.
The Islamic Fun! CD-ROM teaches Muslim children about a smorgasbord of Islamic topics. On the surface it's bright and breezy. The graphics are skillfully executed and appealing to children. Its games have names such as "Fishing Bear," "Tree Hop," and "Two Bunny Race." In "Tree Hop," a tiger bounds atop a series of trees in pursuit of a beach ball. "Fishing Bear" features a bear sporting green pajamas (complete with nightcap) and a wide grin. If players correctly answer questions such as "Where did the Prophet Muhammad receive the first revelation of the Holy Qur'an?" they can advance the causes of these friendly animals.
But nestled among the happy tigers, bears, and kitty cats is a game called "The Resistance." This game's object: "You are a farmer in South Lebanon who has joined the Islamic Resistance to defend your land and family from the invading zionists." Players do so by blowing up Israeli tanks.
Zionists aren't the only target. A principal aim of Islamic Fun! seems to be to instill ancient Islamic resentments in today's youth. As the tiger cavorts among the trees in "Tree Hop," the game asks its players to identify the Mosque of Cordoba from among three inset photos. The accompanying question: "Ignoring the hand over agreement, the Christians turned the beautiful Mosque of Cordoba, in Muslim Spain, into a Cathedral (1238). Which one is it?"
As one might expect, the creators of Islamic Fun! are also zealous for the purity of their religion. Another question takes aim at Turkey, the lodestar of moderate Islam. Picturing three mosques, it asks: "Mustafa Kemal, the hater of Islam, forbade the use of Arabic in Turkey, banned the hijab [head scarf] and closed down the Aya Sofya Mosque in Istanbul. Which is it?"
Of course, Islamic Fun! is not necessarily the last word in the struggle for the Muslim soul. Zayed Yasin, an American Muslim student at Harvard University, was compelled under pressure to drop the word jihad from his commencement speech (originally called "Of Faith and Citizenship: My American Jihad").
Yasin agreed to change the title, but not the substance of his address, and used his time in the national spotlight as a teaching moment: "Most literally, 'jihad' means struggle, and it's a struggle to do the right thing. It's a struggle for the refinement of self, for perfecting one's own inner morality. There's a sense of it also as a struggle for social justice."
Yasin is right. Islamic thought has for centuries distinguished between the greater jihad, which does indeed refer to the individual's spiritual battle to bring his life into conformity with Allah's commands, from the lesser jihad, which Yasin refers to as the "struggle for social justice." In published reports about his speech, it's not clear whether he mentions that Islam has always allowed for this struggle to take a violent turn. Islamic Fun! is an indication of this violent element at Islam's heart.
Indeed, non-Muslims have come to associate the word jihad with violence for good reasons. Muslims themselves have, in Yasin's view, "abused" the word for centuries. Osama bin Laden, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the rest are by no means innovators in this "abuse." Islamic warriors, struggling against Christendom for ten centuries, fought under the banner of jihad. Today, the word has been trumpeted by radical Islamic terror groups from Spain to Indonesia - and from within the United States itself. One of the most notorious Palestinian terrorist groups calls itself Islamic Jihad. Its Indonesian counterpart is Laskar Jihad. The extremist Muslim Brotherhood group, which operates clandestinely in Egypt, recently held a demonstration at Cairo's venerable Al-Azhar University in which eight masked men showed off martial arts techniques while wearing headbands proclaiming, "Jihad is our way."
In contrast to all this, Harvard's dean of continuing education, Michael Shinagel, characterized Yasin's message as a "light of hope and reason in a world often darkened by distrust and conflict." God willing, Yasin's moderate and nuanced approach will ultimately win out in the Islamic world. But with Muslims producing games like Islamic Fun! to indoctrinate even the smallest children in the rage and fury of Islamic radicalism, he faces a hard struggle - or, in Arabic, jihad.
Robert Spencer is an adjunct fellow with the Free Congress Foundation. He is the author of Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith, coming this summer from Encounter Books.
Free Congress Foundation
Which, before the mohammedans desecrated it, was a Byzantine Christian Chruch in Constantinople.
Q: Why are there no Islamists in the TV show Star Trek?
A: Because Star Trek is supposed to take place in the future.....
Bwhahahaha....(I know, I know, bad joke...)
NeverGore :^)
<sarcasm>Only if you consider fourteen centuries of savage brutality enough time to make a valid judgment. Sheesh, give them a chance. Islam is peace.</sarcasm>
excerpt: Here Allah mentions the Hoor Al`Een because in most cases men pursue women and not vice versa. As for women, Allah Almighty may marry them to any of the believers in Paradise, if they did not get married during worldly life, or He may compensate them by making them feel content with their position. It is also said that Allah may grant women some kind of beauty with which they will feel that they are better than the Hoor Al-`Een and that they are their mistress, so they will not love anyone other than their own husbands nor will they feel jealous of the Hoor Al-'Een.
Figure that nonsense out.
"Ignoring the hand over agreement, the Christians turned the beautiful Mosque of Cordoba, in Muslim Spain, into a Cathedral (1238)."
From this site:
Córdoba was the capital of the Spanish Muslim dynasty of the Ummayads (756-1031). The Great Mosque of Córdoba (La Mezquita) was founded 785 CE. It was added to and expanded over the next two hundred years to make the third largest structure in the Islamic world.
The prayer hall (23,400 square meters) is filled with almost 500 hundred slender columns and superimposed striped arches; a forest sprouting from the marble floor.
Previously the site had been occupied by a Christian church dedicated to Saint Vincent that had been built by the Visigoths around 500 CE. Before that, when Córdoba was a provincial capital in the Roman Empire, the site was occupied by a temple dedicated to Janus, the double-headed god of doorways and gates.
When Córdoba was captured by the Christian Spanish king of Castile, Ferdinand III, in the 13th century, the mosque reverted to a Christian sanctuary. Then in 1523, the local clergy, with the support of Emperor Charles V, built a cathedral in the middle of the mosque
So, following typical muslim "thinking", it is okay to change a Church into a mosque, but a crime to change that mosque back into a Church. I wonder what type of "hand over agreement" was arranged when the muslims took over the Church. Something like, "hand it over, you stinking infidels, or we'll slaughter the rest of your women and children"
The site of La Mezquita originally bore a church. Then, after the Moors conquered Cordoba in the 8th century, they demolished the church and built the Mezquita (mosque).
Hagia Sophia [aya sofya] stands on the site of an earlier basilican church erected by Constantius II in 360, some 30 years after Byzantium had become the capital of the Roman Empire. This church was burned in 404 and rebuilt by Theodosius II in 415, only to be again destroyed by fire in 532. The present structure, which is entirely fireproof, was built in 532-37 by Emperor Justinian from designs of his imperial architects Anthemius of Tralles and Isidorus of Miletus . As a result of severe earthquakes, the dome collapsed in 558, but it was rebuilt by 563 on a somewhat higher curve.
With the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Hagia Sophia became a mosque, and in subsequent years all the interior figure mosaics were obscured under coatings of plaster and painted ornament; most of the Christian symbols elsewhere were obliterated. The four slender minarets, which rise so strikingly at the outer corners of the structure, were added singly and at different times; the crescent supplanted the cross on the summit of the dome, and the altar and the pulpit were replaced by the customary Muslim furnishings.
So the site was a Christian Church for nearly 1100 years - 300 of those years being before the invention of islam. They stole the Church and intentionally desecrated it.
Second, contrary to the whitewashing, Jihad means Holy War and is aimed at conquering the infidels and converting them to Islam under threat of death.
Third, the word 'jihad' was kept in the title of Yasin's speech, just moved to the subtitle.
Fourth, Yasin was recruited by the small group, who choose the speaker, presumably expressly FOR his pro-terror views. This is at Harvard remember.
This article doesn't give me more confidence in the CNS, if they can blow it this badly.
Unfortunately, there is nothing but wishful thinking on which to base that belief.
Mothers speak with pride of their suicidal sons; crowds dance in the streets celebrating the death of the "infidel"; schools teach hatred for the Jews to little children ...
We have yet to hear from peaceful "majority". It seems that any man on the street who is asked about his views spews venom and hatred. I tend to believe that if the "islamists" got out of the neighborhood, they'd leave a ghost town behind.
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