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French Scholar Urges Training Courses for Imams PARIS, December 2 (IslamOnline.net) - Most French imams lack the necessary religious, social and legal background to carry on with their duties, said a French Muslim scholar. “No more than 10 per cent of imams are religiously qualified for the job,” Daw Meskine, Secretary General of the French council for imams, told IslamOnline.net. He also admitted that some imams are unfamiliar with the social culture and laws of the French society. Meskine said he proposed, in his capacity as a member of the state-supervised committee on training imams, upgrading existent imams schools. “Institutes...

BERKELEY, Calif. - At the birthplace of the free speech movement, campus radicals have a new target: the faculty that came of age in the 60's. They say their professors have been preaching multiculturalism and diversity while creating a political monoculture on campus. Conservatism is becoming more visible at the University of California here, where students put out a feisty magazine called The California Patriot and have made the Berkeley Republicans one of the largest groups on campus. But here, as at schools nationwide, the professors seem to be moving in the other direction, as evidenced by their campaign contributions...

Editors' preface: A noted historian of the Middle East has said the following about the legacy of scholars who devoted their careers to the study of the region: The giants of the recent past tend to be largely forgotten as soon as they are dead if not before, especially if what they have written isn't what is now considered fashionable or central … They are criticized when they are in error, but their achievements are forgotten.[1] While this is largely true in the English-speaking countries, it is not true in France, where a few French "giants" of Islamic and Arab...

www.VetsforBush.NET BOSTON MANIFESTO: Veterans & Vietnam Scholars Declare Overwhelming Opposition to Kerry >> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- UNIQUE STUDY, BY VIETNAM VETERANS, SETS THE VIETNAM RECORD STRAIGHT A recent poll of military personnel shows that those fighting the war in Iraq overwhelmingly support President Bush over John Kerry. The American public is almost evenly divided on the issue of Iraq. What do the soldiers know that the rest of the public doesn't understand? In the same vein, Vietnam Veterans overwhelmingly oppose Kerry. About two and a half million servicemen and women actually went to Vietnam in the ten years of major American involvement....

SPOKANE, Wash. - Scholars who want to know why people hate are gathering at Gonzaga University in hopes of shaping a new academic discipline to study a prime motivator of people's behavior. "Hatred is the most destructive aspect of human history," said Ken Stern, an organizer of the conference and the American Jewish Committee's expert on anti-Semitism. Hate is not a new problem nor is it confined to one region, he said. And too little is known about why people are disposed to hate others. "It impacts all aspects of our lives, and is not just a matter of a...

Turbans of the mind are disallowing and disavowing proper intellectual engagement with Islam. Aldous Huxley once defined an intellectual as someone who had found something in life more important than sex: a witty but inadequate definition, since it would make all impotent men and frigid women intellectuals. A better definition would be a freethinker, not in the narrow sense of someone who does not accept the dogmas of traditional religion, but in the wider sense of someone who has the will to find out, who exhibits rational doubt about prevailing intellectual fashions, and who is unafraid to apply critical thought...

From the issue dated October 4, 2002 http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i06/06a01801.htm A Lost Buddhist Literary Tradition Is Found Scholars decipher a stunning findan unknown canon in an ancient dialect By PETER MONAGHAN Seattle In certain cliffhangers on late-night television, dashing and strangely underdressed archaeologists in faraway places unearth artifacts of uncertain provenance. The discoveries cast new light on an ancient civilization. In reality, archaeologists are less swashbuckling, but once in a great while they do turn up objects -- ancient manuscripts, say, inscribed in little-known languages -- that have that effect. Through some stunning finds over the last decade, researchers studying early Buddhist manuscripts here...

WASHINGTON- Pinch-hitting for the boss, Vice President Dick Cheney awarded medallions Tuesday to 141 Presidential Scholars from high schools across the nation and saluted the students as post-Sept. 11 symbols of American pride. Cheney presided over the medal ceremony at the Daughters of the American Revolution auditorium after President Bush bowed out in order to fly to Arizona and survey wildfire damage. Being vice president, "is not that bad a job" - except that "it takes a while to get used to being a character on 'Saturday Night Live,'" Cheney quipped to the students. They were selected by the Education...

Two and one-half hour panel/Q&A session on "Is Higher Education Compatible with Patriotism?" just concluded on C-Span2 but will be repeated at 5:20 AMEDT. Panel was sponsored by the pretty-much-conservative National Association of Scholars. A promising tone was set by the moderator, Gertrude Himmelfarb, who began by observing that the title of the program brought to mind a more fundamental question - "Is Higher Education Compatible with Education?" - then answered her own question - "No". A couple of like-minded speakers including Walter Berns followed, but unfortunately, for balance apparently, the panel also included a couple of leftwingers - William...