“Islamic Indoctrination vs. Education - Front Page” plus 3 more |
- Islamic Indoctrination vs. Education - Front Page
- White Takes Gold in Snowboard Halfpipe - New York Times
- China 'bridge blogs' translating web views - YAHOO!
- White defends his Olympic gold in men's halfpipe - CBS Sports
| Islamic Indoctrination vs. Education - Front Page Posted: 17 Feb 2010 09:05 PM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it.
Remember the Muslim Television executive, Muzzammil Hassan, who decapitated his wife near Buffalo, New York? His TV station, Bridges TV, was created to promote the idea that Islam is a religion of peace and friendship. This station's goals perfectly fit with the intense Saudi PR machine, which is spending tons of money to change the image of Islam in the West — even if it takes denials, fabrications and outright lies. Several years ago, I debated Othman Shibly, a U.S. citizen of Syrian origin and a Sharia expert, on a Bridges TV program directed by his son, Hassan Shibly. Both bearded men are fierce apologists for Radical Islam and defend Sharia. Dr. Shibly holds a Sufi/Radical Islamist ideology and hides behind a thin veneer of "moderate" Islam, but that façade does not fool someone like myself from the same background. The Shiblys make no attempt to repudiate the claims of men like Hizbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, or other radical Islamists like Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro, the Mufti of the Syrian Ministry of Religion under the regimes of both Hafiz and Bashar Assad and Kuftaro's protégé, Sheikh Rajab Deeb. My interview with the two men was never aired and the Shiblys never sent me a copy of the taped interview as they promised. That brings me to an email I recently received from a concerned American mother, who said that she was horrified at what her child is being taught by Islamic guest speakers at her child's high school, Clarence High School in Clarence, New York. The speakers are none other than Hassan and Othman Shibly, who are now lecturing our kids on Islam at New York state public schools. That is done with the help of politically correct apologist educators. Under their curriculum on the Ancient World, the New York State public schools as well as many other states around the country, require students to be taught about Islam, the spread of Islam, the Golden Age of Islam and the conflict between Muslims and Christians as part of the Crusades. That topic almost always turns political and accusatory when Muslims get very emotional about their history, jihad and religion. Islam by nature is extremely political and promotes a very elaborate legal system that Muslims must live under. To accommodate Islamic education with Western principals of freedom and the Bill of Rights is an impossible task. The two ideologies are at opposite poles in terms of the role of government, human rights, as well as women and minority rights. Thus, the two systems must eventually become villains. To avoid being politically incorrect, public schools prefer to use Muslims experts or clerics rather than public school teachers to teach the topic of Islam. Our educational hierarchy refuses to see that many devout Muslim experts have a political agenda and are themselves indoctrinated and thus always on the defensive or offensive. I can only imagine what the poor American kids are subjected to. I was on the receiving end of such indoctrination when I was a young Muslim girl. This is what the mother wrote to me:
She added that Hassan Shibly's father, Othman, also came to speak at the school but to a different class. She expressed her outrage that these men were invited into a school to indoctrinate underage, impressionable minds with hate a filled ideology and a hidden agenda. She stated that she alerted the principal to a few links that show Shibly's affiliations and added that she doesn't think the principal is convinced. She concluded by saying that so far a decision has not been made whether to bring the Shilbys back to teach or not. I was speechless after reading this woman's e-mail. That is outrageous and what is worse is that I have heard similar claims from mothers in California where I live. I wanted to tell all the concerned mothers of America to stand up against this kind of "education" and never feel helpless. We must all speak out before the indoctrination strikes America at the heart. Perhaps this can be one of the causes of the Tea Party Movement. There are powerful forces trying to indoctrinate American children when it comes to Islam. Like I was as a Muslim kid, our kids are being discouraged and shamed from thinking for themselves when it comes to 9/11 or finding out the truth about Islamic terrorism. Their minds must never wander or, Allah forbid, blame Muslim culture or Islam for producing a never ending flow of terrorists. Muslim propaganda is relentless in trying to misportray Islam in the eyes of the West. While mainstream mosques and Muslim leaders across the globe are shouting jihad, death to America, death to the Jews, and encouraging Muslims to take over the West, our children are told if you fear such threats you are an Islamophobe. When mainstream Muslim schools and universities teach that apostates must be killed and that jihad means "to war with non-Muslims to establish the religion" and that jihad is a permanent war institution against Jews Christians and pagans, we are told to never dare misinterpret this as encouraging violence. Islamic education, like communism and Fascism, must control children's minds, which is the best system to produce adults who will submit. I am not the one who compared Islam to communism and fascism; this comparison was made by none other than the most prominent Muslim scholar of the 20th century, Sheikh Abu Ala Maududi, who stated in his book, "Islamic Law and Constitution," on p. 262, that the Islamic State:
I wonder if the Shiblys will condemn this popular Muslim scholar to their students or perhaps call him an atheist.
Muslim petro-dollar powers have penetrated our educational system with permission and support from the highest levels of our governments. I cannot blame many teachers and school principles forced to teach this garbage and who are themselves subjected to demeaning sensitivity training on Islam. I blame the people on the top who are hell-bent on promoting Muslim propaganda with the blessings of Saudi Arabia. If such propaganda continues, future generations in America will gradually become confused. They will doubt their instincts and their sense of good judgment will be weakened. Like the restless and confused populations of the Middle East, they will build tolerance to violence, extremism, hatred, discrimination, anti-Semitism and oppression of women and minorities. Because of my background, I can smell and taste Muslim propaganda. It is coming to a school near you. The danger is, believe it or not, if you grow up with such propaganda, it can feel and sound normal and even holy. Intentionally or unintentionally, in the name of tolerance, we are bringing up a generation of Americans who will tolerate Islamic Jihad, in the name of cultural relativism and compassion. Islamic tyranny, like all tyrannies, must use lies, propaganda and fabrications to justify the Muslim duty of jihadist violence to expand and conquer the world for Islam and Sharia. That is why the Arab world is having great difficulty in modifying its hate-filled educational system. Instead of changing, it is trying to change us and desensitize us to its violence. If this is not immediately corrected, it will be one of the biggest mistakes in American history. What Mr. Shibly was teaching our kids is outright Arab propaganda justifying jihad, 9/11, retaliation as self-defense, and conspiracy theories against Israel. How monumentally foolish and dangerous it is to allow the likes of the Shiblys to have access to American high school kids. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| White Takes Gold in Snowboard Halfpipe - New York Times Posted: 17 Feb 2010 08:29 PM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. WEST VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Shaun White won the gold medal in the men's halfpipe competition Wednesday at Cypress Mountain with a first run score of 46.8 that routed the competition and a second that was even better — a coronation for back-to-back Olympic gold medals. Peetu Piiroinen of Finland was the only one to put serious pressure on White, with a second run score of 45.0. He finished with the silver medal. Scotty Lago of the United States finished third, using a big first run to capture a somewhat surprising bronze medal. White, whose best trick of the past few years has been fusing countercultural cool with mass appeal, arrived at the Olympics as one of the bigger celebrities. He was a star inside the athletes' village, where White and the halfpipe team stayed for a few nights through the opening ceremony before moving to houses closer to Cypress Mountain. His famous face and red hair had been plastered across magazines and television promos for months in anticipation for this night. He proved the hype was deserved on the first of his two runs in the finals. He began with a seemingly simple big-air trick that made it look as if he might get hung up on the crescent moon that hovered overhead on a crisp night. He followed with back-to-back double corks, the double-flipping, triple-twisting trick he almost single-handedly turned into the must-have trick of the season. Judges awarded him with a score of 46.8, 4 points higher than anyone else. White rejoiced as if he knew he would be nearly impossible to catch. There had been concern about the condition of the 550-foot-long halfpipe for weeks. A lack of snow and temperatures too warm to manufacture it forced builders to use hay bales at the start and to give shape to the pipe at the bottom. Rain and warm temperatures in recent days left the steep walls of the pipe soft and crumbly, and the floor of it was quickly rutted and filled with granular snow. The soft conditions did lead to a higher-than-usual number of spills, mostly when riders landed too low on the walls and into what sometimes felt like a bowl of sugar. But concerns that tricks might be toned down markedly were quashed quickly in qualifying by White, when he did a double cork, a sort of corkscrewing double back flip, and back-to-back 1080s, which are three rotations. It was rather ordinary by White's standards, but it earned 45.8 out of 50 points from the judges and held up as the top qualifying score. And it told the competition that the world's best halfpipe rider had no major plans to scale down his routine. White, Louie Vito, and the Japanese riders Ryo Aono and Kazuhiro Kokubo were among the six riders out of the original 40 that advanced straight to the evening's finals. White won the gold medal at the Turin Games in 2006 with a run featuring back-to-back 1080s, three spinning revolutions in the air that were considered the must-have trick of the era. That same run might not have made the finals in 2010. Progress for bigger tricks was slow over the past few years. But the game-changer may have come in the Colorado backcountry, where sponsors built White a full-size halfpipe, accessible by helicopter, that included a foam pit at the bottom for him to rehearse the more dangerous tricks. In an impromptu arms race, sponsors built one for Kevin Pearce in California. He shared it with some of his closest friends, a group effort to keep pace with White. When the season began, most top riders had infused their runs with at least one double cork. White and Vito were the rare riders able to string them back-to-back. White won four of the five United States Olympic qualifying events, but he upped the ante at the last one, in Park City, Utah, in January. That is where he unveiled a Double McTwist 1260 — a double-flipping, three-and-a-half twisting cousin of the double cork. With three tricks practically not in the snowboarding vocabulary a year earlier — never mind in 2006 — White solidified his spot as the rider to beat. Yet hopes for a dominating American team appeared to crash after midseason injuries to the top-tier riders Kevin Pearce and Danny Davis. Pearce, one of the few athletes to have beaten White in the past couple of years, sustained a severe brain injury when he fell on Dec. 31 while practicing his version of the double cork. Now in a brain-rehabilitation hospital in Colorado, he is struggling to learn to walk again. Davis, one of Pearce's best friends, hurt his back and pelvis in an early-morning accident while riding an all-terrain vehicle hours after winning an Olympic qualifying event in January. He had a couple of operations and was left using a walker, but hopes to be riding next season. But another chance at the Olympics will have to wait four years. White, despite seemingly being famous for a decade, is still only 23, and he has said he had no plans to stop competing. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| China 'bridge blogs' translating web views - YAHOO! Posted: 17 Feb 2010 09:05 PM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. SHANGHAI (AFP) – Whether it is about US arms sales to Taiwan or how the film epic "Confucius" stacks up to "Avatar", the world's first snapshot of Chinese opinion often comes from chinaSMACK.com. The website combs China's rowdy web forums, translating popular topics into English to provide a glimpse of what is on people's minds on the other side of the "Great Firewall" of government censorship. "Chinese people see the Internet as one of the only real tools they may have," chinaSMACK's founder, who goes by the pseudonym Fauna, said in an e-mail interview. China is home to the world's largest web population, with 384 million people online, but experts fear censorship and language barriers mean it is growing isolated from the global Internet. With 1.3 million page views and more than 500,000 visitors in January, according to the site's figures, chinaSMACK has become a leading "bridge blog" -- a site that translates Chinese content for an international audience. Fauna, who keeps her identity secret to avoid the wrath of Internet users and authorities alike, said she started the site 18 months ago to improve her English. She describes herself as a typical Shanghainese woman, "very far" from her 30s, who likes music, movies and TV -- but one with a serious Internet habit. She spends four to six hours daily on the site, plus time reading forums throughout the day. The items and comments she translates are often lurid, salacious and sensational, but Fauna said she and her four-person team of contributors do not intentionally seek out racy posts. Their formula is to simply translate the most active forum discussions -- avoiding overtly political topics. "The material that becomes popular on the Chinese Internet is usually very shocking or controversial," Fauna said, explaining the "SMACK" in the site's name captures what she imagines first time visitors feel. Recent postings featured Chinese netizens sounding off on how the "50 Cent Party" -- civil servants are allegedly paid 0.5 yuan (seven US cents) for each pro-government web comment they post -- seems to be working overtime. Others include a man marrying his fiancee at her funeral, soldiers being buried half-naked in snow to train for the cold and "Leopard Print Man" who is enjoying 15 minutes of fame for wearing strange outfits on Shanghai's subway. Some postings such as the racist reaction to Lou Jing -- a black Chinese girl who performed on an American Idol-style reality show -- have gained national and international media attention after appearing on chinaSMACK. About a third of chinaSMACK's readers are in the United States, 18 percent are in China, while Britain, Canada and Singapore each account for roughly five percent of traffic, Fauna said. At a time when Google is considering pulling out of China over censorship and only a fraction of Internet content is being translated from Chinese to English -- and vice versa -- experts say bridge blogs like chinaSMACK play a vital role. Other similar sites are Danwei.org, ChinaHush.com and ChinaGeeks. "Bridge blogs have become an incredibly precious resource," said Kaiser Kuo, a Beijing-based Internet consultant. "I just wish there were more of them and they covered a broader range of what people are talking about online. "The hype-worthy is just the tip of the iceberg, there's a lot down there," he said. Although far from weighty, chinaSMACK captures the "Internet memes" -- jokes, concepts and catchphrases that are shaping Chinese culture online and beyond, Kuo said. "The Chinese Internet for some reason seems to be a lot more tightly integrated. A meme will start in one corner and will bounce its way up to every corner a whole lot faster in China," Kuo said. Like the US celebrity news site TMZ.com, chinaSMACK is a cultural weather vane, said Shaun Rein, managing director of the China Market Research Group. "It's one of my must-reads everyday," Rein said, adding it captures youth and digital culture well. "It has a great finger on the pulse of the Internet culture in China that is a lot more vibrant than Americans think," he said. Fauna said part of her goal was to dispel misconceptions that Chinese people are united in their opinions. "I hope chinaSMACK can show the world there are many Chinese netizens and they are not all the same ... Chinese netizens are nice, sympathetic, funny, silly, mean and hateful. Chinese netizens are people like everyone else." Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| White defends his Olympic gold in men's halfpipe - CBS Sports Posted: 17 Feb 2010 09:05 PM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. WEST VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- How 'bout that! Putting on a show when he didn't even have to, Shaun White capped his gold-medal night on the halfpipe with his signature trick Wednesday -- the dangerous, spiraling Double McTwist 1260 during a victory lap that will go down as nothing short of epic. The redheaded shredder scored a 48.4 on the final run, even though he was already assured of defending his Olympic title with a score of 46.8 on his first trip. Getting ready to close the night, he debated with his coaches for a minute, then made the decision to go for it. And he did -- jerking his body around to milk the last half of the 3½ twists he crams into two head-over-heels flips. An exclamation point on a spectacular day for the Americans at the Olympics, who already had golds from Alpine skier Lindsey Vonn and speedskater Shani Davis in the bag. Wearing a white and blue bandanna that goes perfect with the red hair, White easily outdistanced Finland's Peetu Piiroinen. American Scotty Lago took bronze to give the United States multiple medals on the halfpipe for the last three Olympics. Including the women, the U.S. halfpipe team has won 12 of the 21 medals awarded since the sport came to the games in 1998. But has there ever been a bigger snowboarding star than White? He's the multimillionaire who somehow flashes a businessman's smarts without losing touch with the culture that defines snowboarding -- the only sport that would think of bringing snow pants designed to look like torn-up jeans to the Olympic Games. He keeps it fresh and keeps people guessing. He skipped the Double McTwist on the first run down the mountain, saying in an interview, "I know I have it in me, but the Olympics is pretty heavy. I was sweating it a little." But if he were nervous on the first run, it didn't show. And it certainly wasn't anything to apologize for. Soaring through the crisp, clear, Canadian sky, he flew 25 feet above the halfpipe at the top, linked a pair of spiraling, double-flipping moves in the middle and stayed on his feet the whole way down. Why does he win? NBC spelled it out in living color, transposing the shots of White's straight air and that of one of the medal contenders, Iouri Podladtchikov -- the "I-Pod." Suffice to say that had they actually been jumping at the same time, White would have landed on I-Pod's head. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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