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December, 2006

2006: Muslim year of perpetual outrage

It began with the Danish cartoons. It ended with the flying imams. The year 2006 was a banner year for the Religion of Perpetual Outrage. Twelve turbulent months of fist-waving, embassy-burning, fatwa-issuing mayhem, intimidation and murder resounded with the ululations of the aggrieved. All this in the name of defending Islam from "insult." Let's review.

In late January, masked Palestinian gunmen took over a European Union office in Gaza City to protest the publication of a dozen cartoons about Islam, Muhammad and self-censorship in the Danish newspaper the Jyllands-Posten. They stormed the building, burned Danish flags, and spearheaded an international boycott of Denmark's products across the Muslim world.

The rage was manufactured pretext. The cartoons had been published four months earlier with little fanfare. It wasn't until a delegation of instigating Danish imams toured Egypt with the cartoons – plus a few inflammatory fake ones, including an old image of a French hog-calling contest participant deceptively portrayed as "anti-Muslim" – that the fire started burning. Think the mainstream media will remember that? Not likely. They fell for the ruse and were slow to acknowledge it after American bloggers and Danish television exposed the scheme.

What was really behind Cartoon Rage? Muslim bullies were attempting to pressure Denmark over the International Atomic Energy Agency's decision to report Iran to the U.N. Security Council for continuing with its nuclear research program. The chairmanship of the council was passing to Denmark at the time.

Alas, Western journalists, analysts and apologists were too clouded by their cowardice and conciliation to see through the smoke. More than 800 were injured in the ensuing riots, and 130 people paid with their lives. The innocents included Italian Catholic priest Andrea Santoro, who was shot to death in Turkey on Feb. 5 by a teenage boy enraged by the illustrations. The Muslim gunman shouted, "Allahu Akbar!" as he murdered Father Santoro while the priest knelt praying in his church. Several brave moderate Muslim editors who stood up to the madness were jailed, fined and convicted of crimes related to insulting Islam. The Danish cartoonists remain in hiding.

The world soon tired of Cartoon Rage, but the "peaceful" Muslim ragers were just warming up. They found excuses large and small to riot and threaten Western infidels. In India, they protested the magazine publication of a picture of a playing card showing an image of Mecca and also burned Valentine's Day cards. An insult to Islam, they screamed. In Spain, they protested a Madrid store for selling a postcard with a mosque on it with the words "We slept here." An insult to Islam, they protested. In Pakistan, they burned down a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, a Pizza Hut, and toppled Ronald McDonald. In Jakarta, they smashed the offices of Playboy magazine. You know why.

In June, the trial against lioness journalist Oriana Fallaci for insulting Islam commenced in Bergamo, Italy. She had been charged by professional Muslim rager Adel Smith of the Muslim Union of Italy of "vilipendio" – vilifying Islam – in her post-9/11 books slamming jihad. A judge had refused to throw out the case. She faced a pile of death threats and accusations of "Islamophobia" for speaking truth to Islamo-power.

Fallaci's death from cancer during the fifth anniversary week of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks pre-empted the trial in Italy, but her passing did nothing to pre-empt the eternal rage of the perpetually outraged. The day she died, the grievance-mongers were shaking their fists and calling for the head of Pope Benedict XVI for his speech that made reference to a 14th-century conversation touching on holy war and jihad. For engaging in open, honest intellectual and spiritual debate, he was condemned, lit afire in effigy and targeted anew. The ragers bombed Christian churches in Gaza City and Nablus. They murdered Italian Sister Leonella Sgorbati, an elderly Catholic nun shot in the back by a Somalian jihadist stoked by Pope Rage. "Whoever offends our Prophet Muhammad should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim," a Somalian cleric had declared. The Vatican made nice with Muslim leaders.

New outrages are always in bloom. In late September, it was a Berlin production of Mozart's "Idomeneo" that featured the decapitated head of Muhammad. A week later, it was a banyan tree attacked by Indonesian Muslims who wanted to disprove its mystical powers. A few days after that, it was former British foreign secretary Jack Straw, who had the audacity to make the very obvious observation that full Muslim veils impede communications between women and Westerners. Offensive! Disturbing! An insult to Islam!

Not to be outdone, a delegation of extortionist imams boarded a US Airways flight in Minneapolis in November and tried to manufacture an international human-rights incident. They clamored for a boycott and threatened to sue.

The good news: The fire did not catch here this time. The bad news: As Oriana Fallaci warned before her death: "The hate for the West swells like a fire fed by the wind. The clash between us and them is not a military one. It is a cultural one, a religious one, and the worst is still to come."

World Net Daily
December, 2006

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HOMELAND INSECURITY
Quantico mosque leader promoted
Pentagon honors Wahhabi-trained Muslim chaplain

In a special ceremony, the Pentagon recently promoted a Wahhabi-trained Muslim chaplain who catered to al-Qaida detainees at Guantanamo and fought to establish the first mosque in Marine Corps history.

Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England personally promoted Navy chaplain Abuhena Mohammed Saifulislam from lieutenant to lieutenant commander. Saifulislam also received a Joint Service Commendation Medal at the Pentagon ceremony held on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Pentagon officials say the ceremony was unprecedented.

"It's unusual for a deputy secretary to personally promote an officer of that rank," said one official who wished to go unnamed. "No one has known of such a high-level dignitary doing that."

England also earlier this year personally dedicated a new Islamic center at Marine headquarters in Quantico, Va., on the advice of Saifulislam, a Bangladesh immigrant who became a U.S. citizen in 1995.

The Muslim chaplain, who is stationed at Quantico, recited verses from the Quran in Arabic and English at the summer dedication ceremony, which included representatives from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, several leaders of which have been convicted on terrorism-related charges.

Saifulislam, which is Arabic for "Sword of Islam," received his religious training at a radical Islamic school raided by federal agents after 9/11. The Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences, based in Leesburg, Va., is run by Taha Jaber Al-Alwani, an unindicted co-conspirator in the Sami al-Arian terror case. A federal affidavit used to obtain a warrant to search the school alleges Al-Alwani gave at least $50,000 in jihad money "to support suicide bombings."

Saifulislam insists he is moderate and condemns "terrorism," but critics say his Wahhabi background and associations should give the Pentagon pause.

"The Pentagon is giving him a permanent, taxpayer-supported platform from which to convert grunts to Islam," said terror expert Paul Sperry, a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington."

"With the Quantico mosque, the Pentagon is facilitating the study of the holy text the enemy uses, heretically or not, as their manual of warfare."

Saifulislam's promotion along with the dedication of his new Quantico mosque – the first of its kind in the 230-year history of the Corps – comes on the heels of a Muslim spy scandal at Gitmo involving another Muslim chaplain.

Army Capt. James "Yousef" Yee, who ministered to al-Qaida detainees, was charged with mishandling classified information. Yee, a convert to Islam, quit the Army and the charges were dropped. But two of his Muslim military friends at Gitmo were convicted of espionage-related crimes.

Yee's predecessor at Gitmo was Saifulislam, who was first assigned to the terrorist prison camp after 9/11. While at the Cuban base, the Navy imam privately counseled al-Qaida prisoners in their native tongues of Urdu and Arabic. "I must give hope for them to cope," Saifulislam said at the time.

He set up the diet and prayer regimes for the detainees, recommending they be served halal meals – including traditional dates and lamb – prepared according to Islamic dietary law. Gitmo detainees can now choose from a menu of 113 Muslim-appropriate meals.

In addition, Saifulislam saw to it that detainees receive copies of the Quran and have access to prayer beads and skull caps. Saifulislam also set up a program to train guards to be more sensitive to the religious customs of their Muslim prisoners.

West Point bows to Mecca

Multiculturalism appears to trump concerns about Islamist infiltration of the military. Following the Marine's lead, the Army in October dedicated a new mosque at West Point.

The U.S. Military Academy's first worship hall for Muslims boasts green carpets, shoe racks and a pulpit facing Mecca. Officials agreed to set up the mosque, large enough for dozens of followers, after Muslim leaders complained that the office where Muslim cadets gathered for Friday prayers had become too crowded.

The Army has been recruiting international cadets from Muslim countries such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. Muslim enrollment at the academy in New York has jumped to 32 from just two in 2001.

"We live in a world where everyone is looking at the United States saying, 'You're anti-Islam,'" explained West Point Chaplain Col. John Cook. "But here at West Point, that's not what we do."

The U.S. military now boasts more than 10,000 Muslim soldiers, many of them black converts. On the eve of the Army's push into Iraq, Army Sgt. Hasan Akbar, a black Muslim convert, fragged commanding officers at a military camp in Kuwait. He killed two of them and wounded 15 others.

Akbar, recently convicted of murder and given the death sentence, said at the time he did it out of loyalty to the umma, or global community of Muslims.

"You guys are coming into our countries," he said, "and you're going to rape our women and kill our children."

Within months of Akbar's traitorous 2003 attacks, the Defense Intelligence Agency issued an internal report warning that Muslim soldiers pose a possible security threat, according to national security reporter Bill Gertz in his new book "Enemies."

It was also in 2003 that Yee was accused of spying for the enemy while serving as a Muslim chaplain at Gitmo. Yee graduated from West Point, site of the Army's new mosque.

World Net Daily
December, 2006

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Muslim Ellison should not sit in Congress

Last month Keith (Hakim Mohammad) Ellison of Minnesota became the first Muslim elected to serve in the United States Congress and shocked many Americans by declaring that he would take his oath of office by placing his hand on the Quran rather than the Bible. Can a true believer in the Islamic doctrine found in the Quran swear allegiance to our Constitution? Those who profess a sincere belief in Allah say "no!"

In 1789, George Washington, our first president under the Constitution, took his oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. So help me God." Placing his hand on the Holy Scriptures, Washington recognized the God who had led our Pilgrim fathers on their journey across the Atlantic in 1620 and who gave our Founding Fathers the impetus to begin a new nation in 1776. Soon after Washington's oath, Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1789, which required all judges of the federal courts to "faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties" incumbent upon them "agreeably to the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God." Placing their hand on the Bible, the members of Congress had already sworn to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States ... So help me God."

Thus began a long tradition that extended both to state and federal government of acknowledging the Judeo-Christian God as the source of our law and liberty. Today, some believe that it does not matter what we believe or before Whom we take our oath. But as Keith Ellison is demonstrating, it does matter.

To support the Constitution of the United States one must uphold an underlying principle of that document, liberty of conscience, which is the right of every person to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience, without interference by the government. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, in his "Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States" in 1833, observed concerning the First Amendment that "The rights of conscience are, indeed, beyond the just reach of any human power. They are given by God and cannot be encroached upon by human authority without a criminal disobedience of the precepts of natural, as well as revealed religion." Justice Story echoed the sentiments of Thomas Jefferson in his Bill for Religious Freedom in 1777 in which he stated that "Almighty God" (El Shaddai in Hebrew) "hath created the mind free and manifested His supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint." It was a specific God who endowed us with a freedom of conscience with which government could not interfere.

The Islamic faith rejects our God and believes that the state must mandate the worship of its own god, Allah. Last week, the Associated Press reported that the Islamic Court in Bulo Burto, a small town in southern Somalia, had ordered that residents would be beheaded "according to Islamic law" if they failed to pray five times a day. Sheik Hussein Barre Rage, chairman of the Islamic court, stated, "As Muslims, we should practice Islam fully ... and that is what our religion enjoins us to do." In other regions of Somalia, Islamic courts have introduced flogging, public execution and other punishments for those who deny Quranic law or refuse to worship Allah.

Islamic law is simply incompatible with our law. Jaafar Sheikh Idris, founder and chairman of American Open University, a radical Islamic school that has received funding from suspected al-Qaida sources and which supports Islamic law, recently stated that "Islam cannot be separated from the state," and that no Muslim elected to Congress or the White House can swear to uphold the United States Constitution and still be a Muslim, because the law of Allah as expressed in the Quran is supreme. Idris was recently deported for his illegal activities. While we certainly disagree with Idris' radical extremism, he at least knows what Islam is all about!

According to a Dec. 6, 2006, WorldNetDaily article, Keith Ellison's campaign was not only backed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which shares the views of American Open University, but he also spoke to the North American Islamic Federation in November in Minneapolis with American Open University on the same program. Perhaps Ellison is confused about what he believes, or else he has another agenda. In either event, according to Idris, Ellison cannot swear an oath on the Quran and an allegiance to our Constitution at the same time.

Our Constitution states, "Each House [of Congress] shall be the judge ... of the qualifications of its own members." Enough evidence exists for Congress to question Ellison's qualifications to be a member of Congress as well as his commitment to the Constitution in view of his apparent determination to embrace the Quran and an Islamic philosophy directly contrary to the principles of the Constitution. But common sense alone dictates that in the midst of a war with Islamic terrorists we should not place someone in a position of great power who shares their doctrine. In 1943, we would never have allowed a member of Congress to take their oath on "Mein Kampf," or someone in the 1950s to swear allegiance to the "Communist Manifesto." Congress has the authority and should act to prohibit Ellison from taking the congressional oath today!

World Net Daily
December, 2006

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ELECTION 2006
'They just don't get it' is why Republicans lost
Dobson, Bauer, Minnery, Perkins
say GOP ignored voters' values

The so-called "values voters" who handed both houses of Congress and the White House to Republicans in 2000 and 2004 were at this year's election, they just didn't see anybody promising to represent them, according to several leaders influential to that group of Americans.

"The unfortunate thing is that Republican leaders still don't appear to get it. Sen. Arlen Spector, R-Pa., said on Wednesday that the election results represented a 'seismic earthquake' and that his party must become 'a lot more progressive and a lot less ideological,'" said James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and director of its dozens of publications and broadcast service that reaches about five million Americans daily.

"Dick Armey emerged from four years in the wilderness to blame conservative Christians for Tuesday's defeat. They were, he said, 'too involved' with the party. He can't be serious! Someone should tell him that without the support of that specific constituency, John Kerry would be president and the Republicans would have fallen into a black hole in '04," he said.

"In fact, that is where they are headed if they continue to abandon their pro-moral, pro-family and pro-life base. The big tent will turn into a three-ring circus," Dobson said.

"Values Voters are not going to carry the water for the Republican Party if it ignores their deeply held convictions and beliefs," he said.

Dobson was joined on his radio program by Gary Bauer, Tony Perkins, Tom Minnery and Carrie Gordon Earll.

Bauer directs Our American Values, Perkins heads the Family Research Council, Minnery is the Focus on the Family vice president, and Earll is in the public policy division at Focus.

Minnery pointed out that in 2004, 11 out of 11 state constitutional amendments defining marriage as being between one man and one woman were passed by voters on one night. This year the record was just about as good, at seven out of eight, and the one that lost failed by only a few percentage points in Arizona, where the pro-marriage campaign had suffered several serious difficulties, including the death in an auto accident of a key leader.

"In 2004 voters handed them a 10-seat majority in the Senate and a 29-seat advantage in the House. What did they do with this advantage? Very little that values voters are concerned about," Minnery said.

"We thought there finally was a Congress that was going to nail down the definition of marriage. It was like pulling teeth (to get them to talk about it)," he said.

Bauer noted that in Virginia, where a heavily-favored George Allen was expected to win a Senate seat easily but relinquished the battle to Democratic challenger James Webb, the marriage amendment ran hundreds of thousands of votes better than Allen.

But instead of emphasizing his support for marriage being limited to between one man and one woman, Allen spent money attacking his opponent on the concept of women in combat.

Dobson noted that the U.S. economy is as high, and unemployment as low as ever, so it couldn't have been reaction to economics.

"There are people who have these values, values voters haven't vanished," said Minnery. "What they're looking for is someone who will articulate their values, and then really importantly, to get them to come back, to act on those promises they made during the campaign."

Perkins said exit polling showed two-thirds of the voters expressed concern over Iraq, but three-fourths of all voters said scandals were a major concern.

"That's the values gap, the values voters. The values voters of 2004 have become the integrity voters of 2006. Values are not something you can just talk about at election time. They should guide your conduct. The Republicans failed to do that and they lost," he said.

Bauer noted that 60 percent of the voters responded that America is headed in the wrong direction. "The evidence is overwhelming what most Americans are thinking about is not the economy. Some may be thinking about the war. A good deal are thinking about the breakdown in values, the attack on marriage," he said.

Meanwhile, several Democrats had won great support campaigning on values: One cited was Barack Obama, who said in a recent speech about gangs that the problem is moral, that there is a "hole in that young man's heart, a hole that government cannot fill," said Minnery.

"Republican leaders in Congress during this term apparently never understood, or they forgot, why Ronald Reagan was so loved and why he is considered one of our greatest presidents. If they hope to return to power in '08, they must rediscover the conservative principles that resonated with the majority of Americans in the 1980s – and still resonate with them today. Failure to do so will be catastrophic," Dobson said.

Earll noted confirmation of the presence of values voters came in South Dakota and Missouri, even though those abortion and cloning issues were decided wrong, from a pro-life perspective.

Almost half of the voters in South Dakota voted for a total abortion ban, a measure that pro-life organizations in the United States have only been able to dream about since the 1973 "Roe" decision. In Missouri, even though outspent 10-1, pro-life groups very nearly defeated the constitutional amendment that will now create the "right" to clone human embryos, she said.

The voters weren't looking at party, Dobson said, they were looking for an endorsement of their values. In many cases, they were able to vote on issues, but failed to find a candidate worthy, he noted.

Earll noted the divide was stark in Colorado. Voters chose a Democratic governor and constitutionally protected marriage between one man and one woman and at the same time torpedoed a "gay partnership" proposal that that same gubernatorial candidate endorsed.

"The way it's being spun by the media, and some Republicans, is that this is a rejection of the pro-family agenda, the values voters perspective," said Dobson. "That's simply not true when you look at the individual races. What is happening is we're seeing values embraced and the parties being rejected."

Focus spokesman Gary Schneeberger told WND the election can be described easily: voters rejected what the Republicans did after they were given a mandate to run the country on faith and values.

Dobson noted he'd been interviewed by U.S. News and World Report after the 2004 elections and warned if Republicans squandered their opportunity, they would pay a price at the polls in either 2008 or 2006.

Dobson's predictions about values and the Republican Party go back even further than that, too.

In 1998 he told a reporter that the GOP was in danger of losing its ability to "claim to speak for those of us with deep moral convictions."

He said at that time the party has "ignored the moral issues year after year, term after term" and said at that time it was "time to fish or cut bait."

Eight years ago he warned the GOP Christians and conservatives "will abandon them if they continue to ignore the most important issues."

Even before he made that forecast, Dobson said that Christians should tell the GOP leadership – at that time Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey and Trent Lott – that "the ground is shifting underneath their feet; that they are aware that they have been ignored … and if that lack of commitment to the things in which they believe continues then they will abandon the Republican Party."

World Net Daily
November, 2006

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FAITH UNDER FIRE
Muslim insurgents behead 14-year-old Christian boy
Attack happened at Iraq plant where victim was running electric generator

A website in Assyria is confirming that a 14-year-old Christian boy who was working a 12-hour shift maintaining an electric generator has been murdered by Muslim insurgents.

The Assyrian International News Agency said the tragedy was reported by an Assyrian language web page at www.ankawa.com.

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The youth was identified as Ayad Tariq, who lived in Baqouba, Iraq, and was at work on Oct. 21 when a group of "disguised Muslim insurgents" went into the power plant shortly after his shift began at 6 a.m.

The website reported the insurgents asked him for his identification and, according to other witnesses who hid and stayed alive to report on the attack, questioned his identification card's reference to him as a "Christian."

Are you truly a "Christian sinner," they asked.

"Yes, I am Christian but I am not a sinner," he replied.

The insurgents then called him a "dirty Christian sinner," grabbed his limbs and held them while beheading him, the witnesses reported.

They were shouting, "Allahu akbar! Allahu Akbar!" during the murder, witnesses said.

An organization called AssyrianChristians.com said they are the indigenous people of Iraq, with a population that has been in the Middle East from the time of Christ.

However, they have faced a number of purges by the region's rulers over time, including the present attacks by powerful Islamic factions across Iran, Iraq and neighboring nations, officials said.

Only two generations back, Assyrian Christians made up 20 percent of the population of the Middle East, but during the Assyrian Genocide of 1915, an estimated three million Christians were slaughtered there, the organization said.

Current estimates are that there are about 2.5 million Assyrian Christians in Iraq.

Kenneth Scott LaTourette wrote in "A History of Christianity" that the Assyrian Christians became the first nation to accept Christianity, and one of the largest missionary-sending peoples in Christian history.

"The Assyrian Christians are one of the last remaining Christian communities in the Middle East," said Rev. Ken Joseph Jr., of the Assyrian Christians organization.

Tens of thousands of Assyrian Christians have fled their traditional homelands in recent months, officials confirmed.

World Net Daily
November, 2006

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FAITH UNDER FIRE
Teen's testimony of faith unstopped by death
Missionary into Kim Jong-Il's kingdom of religious oppression martyred

A new report from a ministry with a longtime record of support for members of the persecuted Christian church has described the torture and death, and ultimate surviving ministry, of a Christian in North Korea, one the most restrictive nations in the world regarding people of faith.

The report from The Voice of the Martyrs tells of four young men who chose pseudonyms – Pencil, Eraser, Pen and Paper Clip – while training for a Christian mission expedition into North Korea.

They were trained by "Andrew," a Christian worker in China, for the work that would face them after crossing the Tumen River into North Korea.

While three were studious in their work, the VOM report said, the young man who chose the name "Pencil" seemed to pay little attention, but all four were dispatched into the kingdom of Kim Jong-Il a short time later.

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Reports from within North Korea several months later came to VOM that three – Eraser, Pen and Paper Clip – had been arrested by North Korean police and beaten, thrown into vehicles and taken away. Reports came back the three were in a concentration camp, but "Pencil," who had watched the arrests, never saw them again.

"Pencil," who feared a similar arrest, lived as a beggar to avoid detection, then returned to Andrew in China.

"With tears in his eyes, 'Pencil' told Andrew the fate of his three friends. He shared how they had been bold witnesses for Christ, and how he had hid in fear as his best friends were taken away," the report said.

"What do you want to do with the rest of your life?" Andrew asked, and "Pencil" told him, "I want to learn how to be brave like my friends, and unafraid to share Jesus."

"The boy whose mind always seemed to wander was now a young man completely committed to Christ," the VOM report said. "When 'Pencil' was ready to return to North Korea, he looked into the eyes of his friend and mentor, and said, 'I need nothing more.'"

He immediately connected with a Christian couple inside North Korea, and together they worked on their ministry. For five months, they planted seeds of faith and prayed, VOM said.

"One day the three of them were sharing with a small group of beggars and gave them some tracts and a Bible. One of the young beggars went home and proudly showed the Bible to his mother," VOM's report, written by P. Todd Nettleton, said.

The mother promptly grabbed it and marched into a police station, where commanders dispatched officers to arrest the couple and "Pencil."

His following interrogation quickly turned to torture, VOM said, as officers demanded to know the source of the Bible, and that "Pencil" recant.

Instead, he told them of his friends and their fearless witness.

"There was a time when I couldn't be like them," he said. "I was too afraid. But now I can be since Jesus is with me."

Beatings and torture, including pulling out his fingernails, followed.

"If you kill me, someday you will become a Christian," "Pencil" told the officers.

Eventually, the officers gave up, ordering him to a labor camp but with instructions that he not be fed. For two months, "Pencil" told the other prisoners and the camp guards, "Jesus is the reason I am able to go on."

"Because of his endurance and how he shared the love of Jesus, many in the camp turned to Christ," the VOM report said. "After two months in the camp, Pencil died. He never saw his 20th birthday. His body was removed from the camp, but the fruit of his short ministry there lived on."

VOM is a non-profit, interdenominational ministry working worldwide to help Christians who are persecuted for their faith, and to educate the world about that persecution. Its headquarters are in Bartlesville, Okla., and it has 30 affiliated international offices.

It was launched by the late Richard and Sabina Wurmbrand, who started smuggling Russian Gospels into Russia in 1947, just months before Richard was abducted and imprisoned in Romania where he was tortured for his refusal to recant Christianity.

He eventually was released in 1964 and the next year he testified about the persecution of Christians before the U.S. Senate's Internal Security Subcommittee, stripping to the waist to show the deep torture wound scars on his body.

The group that later was renamed The Voice of the Martyrs was organized in 1967, when his book, "Tortured for Christ," was released.

World Net Daily
October, 2006

For more information on this topic, Click Here

BRAVE NEW SCHOOLS
Why Johnny is reading
Islamist propoganda
Critics charge Muslim radicals
determining textbook content

Islam is being taught in the nation's public schools as a religion to be embraced because "organized Islamists have gained control of textbook content," according to an organization that analyzes textbooks.

The American Textbook Council has concluded that the situation is the consequence of "the interplay of determined Islamic political activists, textbook editors, and multiculturally minded social studies curriculum planners."

It has gone so far that correcting the situation now becomes a problem, because "educational publishers and educational organizations have bought into claims propounded by Islamists – and have themselves become agents of misinformation."

That comes from Gilbert T. Sewall, who not only wrote the organization's report on Islam and textbooks, but also generated a response to the flood of criticism he encountered.

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William J. Bennetta, author of The Textbook Letter and a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, also has documented dozens of instances of advocacy for or against a belief system, and has produced a list of books where the "religion preaching" leaves them "unfit for use."

Indeed, Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes even has repeatedly expressed concern about the "privileging of Islam in the United States" and warns the stakes go well beyond 7th-grade texts. His opinion of Houghton Mifflin's "Across the Centuries? Full of "apologetics" and "distortions."

WND recently reported on a case in Oregon, where parent Kendalee Garner objected to having her son being taught Islam, including the memorization of the "Five Pillars" of Islam and dressing up as a Muslim.

That episode followed a U.S. Supreme Court decision just a few weeks ago not to review a lower court's ruling that a similar class requirement in the Byron Union School District in California, where students were instructed to "become Muslims" was "cultural education."

WND also has reported that a man arrested as a terror suspect for allegedly trying to transport $340,000 from a group tied to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, and who reputedly had connections to Osama bin Laden, helped write the "Religious Expression in Public Schools" guidelines issued by President Clinton during his tenure in office.

Abdurahman Alamoudi, who was president of the American Muslim Council and a supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, worked with President Clinton and the American Civil Liberties Union when the guidelines, guidelines later used by a federal judge to conclude such teaching was legal, were compiled.

Sewall said in his elaboration that his study showed world history textbooks "hold Islam and other non-Western civilizations to different standards than those that apply to the West" even while "Islamic pressure groups and their allies seek to suppress the critical analysis of Islam inside and outside classrooms."

Such textbooks result when "nervous publishers" obey educational fashion and rely more heavily on diversity experts than on trustworthy scholarship, he said.

"Textbook editors seem not to recognize that a school-related Islamic agenda in the U.S. uses multiculturalism as a device to guarantee a purely favorable and uncritical view of all things Muslim. At extremes, the report suggested, multiculturalism contributes to a form of peaceable cultural jihad meant to discredit or 'problematize' European civilization in favor of non-Western cultures," he wrote.

The ATC describes itself as an independent national research organization set up in 1989 to review the history and social studies textbooks used in the nation's schools.

Also contributing to the criticism is the work of Bennetta, whose conclusions are available at TextbookLeague.org. He finds that textbooks from a wide range of many of the best-known publishing houses used in public schools today simply shouldn't be there.

"When we examine the textbooks that major publishers try to sell to public schools, we sometimes find fraudulent passages that function as instruments of religious indoctrination: Religious myths are depicted as accounts of real people and events, religious superstitions are depicted as matters of fact, and the origins of religious writings are obscured or are wrapped in outright lies," Bennetta wrote.

"These passages of religious propaganda have been devised by individuals or groups that seek to use the public schools for spreading their own sectarian doctrines and for recruiting converts. In various cases, publishers evidently have accepted material from religious pressure groups and have put the material into textbooks, even though it is laden with blatant preaching, miracle-mongering and fake 'history,'" he wrote.

Bennetta, who is equally adamant that no religious beliefs be included as preaching in textbooks, cites a Houghton Mifflin book "Across the Centuries" as having a lot of Muslim "propaganda." He said the 1999 version has one thing an earlier edition didn't: an apparent source.

Listed as a consultant is "Shabbir Mansuri, Founding Director, Council on Islamic Education, Fountain Valley, California."

Bennetta said the CIE is "a conspicuous Muslim outfit that evidently specializes in inducing schoolbook-writers to sanitize and eulogize Islam, to retail Muslim religious claims as facts, to retail Muslim woo-woo as history, and to depict Islam as an amicable religion that resembles, and is compatible with, Judaism and Christianity."

He said other texts and publishers for which he's found a basis for criticism include "Human Heritage: A World History" by Glencoe/McGraw-Hill; "A Message of "Ancient Days" by Houghton Mifflin; "Across the Centuries" by Houghton Mifflin; "Heath World History: Perspectives on the Past" by McDougal Littell; "Ancient World" by McGraw-Hill School Division; "Making Thirteen Colonies" by Oxford University Press, "World History: Continuity and Change" by Holt, Rinehart and Winston; and "World Cultures: A Global Mosaic" by Prentice Hall, among others.

Sewall said in his treatise that older textbooks didn't so much misrepresent Islam as neglected and ignored it. Now, those same textbook publishers have moved from ignorance to "self-censorship."

For example, a concern raised by Swarthmore historian James Kurth notes "the possibility of structural incompatibility between Islam and the American polity" because of the resistance of American Muslims to assimilate.

"These scholars should at least obtain a fair hearing. They do not," Sewall concluded.

And, he said, the California-based Council on Islamic Education director Shabbir Mansuri concluded the ATC was an "extremist" organization for issuing a report on such concerns, even though there's no evidence of that.

Houghton Mifflin's chief publicist, Collin Earnst, also criticized the report, suggesting that such "bias has misled the public into believing that Islam is a barbaric and murderous religion."

Earnst told WND that his company has a careful process for obtaining input on books, reviewing that input, and then deciding what should be published. Where issues of "belief" by a religious group are involved, reasonable citations and attribution are included, he told WND.

He said among the groups used for comment in the past have been Hadassah and the Christian Educators Association.

But Sewall said there were no such conclusions in his report. "The publisher made these cynical claims to deflect attention from the source of the problem: the textbooks themselves."

He cited one passage from Houghton Mifflin's "Patterns of Interaction":

"In Islam, following the law is a religious obligation. Muslims do not separate their personal life from their religious life, and Islamic law regulates almost all areas of human life. Because of this, Islamic law helped to bring order to Muslim states. It provided the state with a set of values that shaped a common identity. In addition to unifying individual states, law helped to unify the Muslim world. Even though various Muslim states might have ethnic or cultural differences, they lived under a common law."

That, Sewall said, "conveys nothing." Further, it never explains that sharia bears "no resemblance to U.S. law, which grew out of the British constitution."

Other criticism came from the report's concerns over why Muslims so often don't get along with neighbors. "Looking at Algeria, Nigeria, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the Philippines, for example, where religious wars are being conducted today against infidels, this proposition is more than plausible," Sewall wrote.

In the California case that was litigated, Edward White III, of the Thomas More Law Center wondered, "Would it have been 'just cultural education' if students were in simulated baptisms, wearing a crucifix, having taken the name of St. John and with praise banners saying 'Praise be to Jesus Christ' on classroom walls?"

From Nyssa, Ore., where one parent raised objections to the Islamic teachings, Supt. Don Grotting, said the text includes assignments for students to learn the "Five Pillars" and study Ramadan.

Grotting acknowledged to WND that textbooks do "take a slant" on some issues, because publishers "are wanting to sell a textbook that is meeting the needs of the state and federal mandates."

And in the California case, school officials also blamed the "possible cant" of the textbook.

Sewall said textbooks in America should "explain the historically potent strain of Islam that promotes separatism and theocracy. Instead, they are trying to trim history to please Islamic pressure groups and allied ideologues.

"The implications for U.S. civic education are immense, especially if students are unaware of or even accept the idea that for politically esthetic reasons they are being lied to or emotionally manipulated."

"If our nation's cultural underpinnings are in conflict with religious dogma and values that are intent on replacing or even eradicating them, should not children and their teachers be made aware? Just as pro-Soviet enthusiasms, Mao worship, and Cold War revisionism seem naïve today, currently prescribed views of Islam may also some day seem like dangerous nonsense. And what key points might replace the obvious flaws in the current generation of textbooks? That militant Islam is a real force in the world today, an insurgency that is a real threat to the nation's democratic way of life and freedoms that its citizens often take for granted."

"Today, Christmas and Nativity scenes are outlawed while Clinton's nominee, U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton, recently approved 'Islam: A Simulation' where children learn to become Muslim, recite the Quran, fast for Ramadan and pray to Allah including this prayer: 'In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful. Praise be to Allah, Lord of Creation, The Compassionate, the Merciful, King of Judgment-day! You alone we worship, and to You alone we pray for help, Guide us to the straight path,'" wrote Jen Shroder, on her BlessedCause.org website.

"America does not comprehend Muslim resolve to make America Islam," Shroder wrote. "Suicide bombers have already demonstrated their willingness to kill and die for it."