Islam Gets Nice-Washed For The Children
You'll surely be pleased to learn that taxpayer dollars are being used to disseminate Muslim propaganda to American schoolchildren. Leah Fabel writes on Examiner.com that "jihad" has been redefined in new textbooks used in Montgomery County schools:
A new report issued by the American Textbook Council says books approved for use in local school districts for teaching middle and high school students about Islam caved in to political correctness and dumbed down the topic at a critical moment in its history."Textbook editors try to avoid any subject that could turn into a political grenade," wrote Gilbert Sewall, director of the council, who railed against five popular history texts for "adjust[ing] the definition of jihad or sharia or remov[ing] these words from lessons to avoid inconvenient truths."
Sewall complains the word jihad has gone through an "amazing cultural reorchestration" in textbooks, losing any connotation of violence. He cites Houghton Mifflin's popular middle school text, "Across the Centuries," which has been approved for use in Montgomery County Schools. It defines "jihad" as a struggle "to do one's best to resist temptation and overcome evil."
"But that is, literally, the translation of jihad," said Reza Aslan, a religion scholar and acclaimed author of "No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam." Aslan explained that the definition does not preclude a militant interpretation.
"How you interpret [jihad] is based on whatever your particular ideology, or world viewpoint, or even prejudice is," Aslan said. "But how you define jihad is set in stone."
So...how is it defined? This guy, Al-Kafir Akbar! turned to an Arabic dictionary to find out:
Arabic, for an English speaker, is like a language from another planet - the Islamists are aware of this language barrier and are exploiting it by planting disinformation about Arabic words and concepts in the minds of non-Arabic speakers. They, however, will not pull the wool over my eyes because I am learning their language.Very briefly setting some context for the non-Arabic speaker: Arabic words are based on a root of consonants arranged in a pattern; adding letters to the initial root and changing the vowels changes the pattern and the word's meaning, as the words below illustrate. "Jihad' is a transliteration, so I figured out the Arabic-letter root and pattern and then looked it up and from there found 'jihad.' FYI, while looking at the Arabic words below: Arabic reads right to left and has short vowel markings which are generally not shown in print (meaning, I cannot type them in, but they are shown in dictionaries).
From aforementioned Arabic dictionary (p.131):
جهد to strive, endeavor, exert oneself, labor; to overwork, fatigue, exhaustTwo points to make:
1)Those three letters are the basic root. Adding to it more letters and shifting the vowels makes words that have broadly related, yet specifically different meanings.
2)There is that definition we constantly hear - and that the Shaykh used. Well and good. Guess what? That word is not pronounced 'jihad.' It is pronounced 'jahada.' Hmmm.... now that's interesting....In the next column, same page, we have under the Form III pattern:
جهاد fight(ing); jihad, holy warThere is the same root in a new pattern of a different (unseen) short vowel and an added long vowel. Guess how that word is pronounced? - 'jihad.' How about that - even the transliteration is in the definition! That sure answers the question: does the jihad doctrine accurately follow from the word itself? !!!
...The Arabic word for 'striving' and the Arabic word for 'fighting'/'holy war'' have a common consonantal root, which hardly makes them synonymous. That, however is exactly what the likes of Shaykh Rashid - to English-speakers - pretend is the case.
"Jihad does not mean holy war," is the myth.
Here's more from an authority on the subject -- JihadWatch's Robert Spencer -- quoted by Deroy Murdoch on NRO (subsequent quotes from Muslims are from Spencer's What Americans Need To KNow About Jihad):
As Spencer details, jihad is an Islamofascist struggle for global domination, not just withdrawal of American troops from Baghdad or Israeli soldiers from Bethlehem."Islam is a revolutionary ideology and program which seeks to alter the social order of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals," said Syed Abul Ala Maududi, founder of Pakistan's radical Jamaat-e-Islami party. "Islam wishes to destroy all States and Governments anywhere on the face of the Earth which are opposed to the ideology and program of Islam, regardless of the country or the Nation which rules it." Maududi said this at Lahore, Pakistan's Town Hall in April 1939, nine years before Israel's independence and seven years before President Bush's birth.
...Islamism requires that infidels submit to Islam.
A 1991 manual of Islamic law, approved by Cairo's influential Al-Azhar University, called jihad a "war against non-Muslims." Reliance of the Traveler, as it is titled, added: "The caliph makes war upon Jews [and] Christians...until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax."
...Al-Qaeda's Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's right-hand man, rejects the Mid-East "peace process." "War with Israel is not subject to a treaty, cease-fire, Sykes-Picot Treaty agreements, patriotism or disputed borders," he said last summer, "but it is jihad for the cause of God until the entire region is for Him only."
Indeed, today's Islamofascists, the most diabolical anti-Semites since Auschwitz, are downright Hitlerian in their Jew hatred.
"Where did they come from? Are they human beings?" Iran's Ahmadinejad has wondered about Jews. "They are like cattle, nay, more misguided...Next to them, all the criminals of the world seem righteous."
Hamas' charter cites the prophet Mohammed's prediction in Sahih Muslim, book 41, No. 6985 that someday Jews will "hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: 'O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!'"
"Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country," Sheik Ahmad Abu Halabiya said in an October 2000 Gaza sermon broadcast on Palestine Authority TV. "Fight them wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them. Wherever you are, kill those Jews and those Americans who are like them..."
Check out this other film on the evil stuff people of this totalitarian system masquerading as a religion say about the Jews -- while the Jews care for Muslim children in Israeli hospitals...the children of people who cheer and pray for the Israelis' death. Here are more Israelis -- caring for Muslim refugees in Somalia. And here, black Muslim refugees in Sudan are being taken in by, of all places, Israel.
And there you have the main problem with the "peace process." True Muslims don't want peace -- and why would they? Their religion that directs every moment of their lives mandates violence and death to the "infidel." (Oh, P.S., kiddies -- that would be us.)
Here's an idea, why don't all those kind, gentle, peace loving muslims, pick up a broom and clean up thier own mosques.
teebone at June 9, 2008 6:09 AM
I think those who speak out against the death cult thing don't fare too well.
Amy Alkon at June 9, 2008 6:49 AM
that's because those who speak out against them don't take the fight to the streets. That will change in time...
j.d. at June 9, 2008 7:52 AM
The day will come when Christians learn that they too can influence policy with threats of violence.
Then the goverment will respond.
By outlawing Christianity.
brian at June 9, 2008 8:34 AM
brian, that's a rather absurd conclusion. lawmakers will be paralyzed: thier constituencies are predominantly christian. it would never happen. Likely, the opposite would occur. Bowing to the will of the majority, and infringing upon the rights of the minority. It's already happened...why would it not continue?
j.d. at June 9, 2008 9:18 AM
When's the last time an art exhibit or a movie preview was canceled on account of offended Christians?
Contrast that with the last time such a thing happened on account of offended muslims.
Now who, exactly, is infringing upon whom here?
The muslims complain about pigs being unclean, and some government office in England bans Piglet (the character from Winnie the Pooh), and some bank in England stops giving out piggy banks.
The muslim cabbies in Minneapolis refuse to take passengers with service dogs, or passengers carrying alcohol, and the person responsible for issuing cab licenses actually proposes marking their cars so they don't have to take these passengers until a whole shitload of people made a larger ruckus about it.
Face it. Terrorism works.
brian at June 9, 2008 9:36 PM
Um, I have to wonder how people with seeing-eye dogs were even supposed to "see" the markings. What the dogs should know to avoid them?
This is absurd. And what I'm massively wondering is where are the PC police correcting the Muslim's asshole attitude? I mean, c'mon, can you imagine hiding behind religion to be racist etc. without the PC police getting on you? Yet, it's working in reverse for the Muslim -- any sicko prejudice they want to cater to in the name of religion is okay because that's their belief/culture? Huh!?
Donna at June 10, 2008 8:55 AM
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