It's OK, it's Multiculturalism
Near the end of
the article we are informed:
The practice crosses ethnic and cultural lines and is not tied to a particular religion.
And yet, my inner "islamophobe" has to ask, which other cultures besides some Islamic cultures practice this hidious rite?
LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. - An Ethiopian immigrant was convicted Wednesday of the genital mutilation of his 2-year-old daughter and was sentenced to 10 years in prison in what was believed to be the first such criminal case in the United States.
Khalid Adem, 30, was found guilty of aggravated battery and cruelty to children. Prosecutors said he used scissors to remove his daughter's clitoris in his family's Atlanta-area apartment in 2001. The child's mother, Fortunate Adem, said she did not discover it until more than a year later.
The father, of course, maintains his innocence and blames his ex-wife's family. Who cares?
The important point here, is that female genital mutilation has been imported to the United States. We aren't told the religion of the family, but just the fact that there is a prominent disclaimer in the article, tells us that they are Muslim, the most coddled religion in the West.
Will women's rights groups protest this practice before it gets a chance to spread here? Or has it already taken root but kept quiet? Or does multiculturalism trump women's rights? What other Islamic dysfuntions will we be asked to ignore in the future? Will Muslims be allowed to
practice slavery in the U.S.? After all, (disclaimer) slavery has been practiced throughout history and around the world, including in parts of the United States. We will have to ignore the fact that slavery is still practiced in parts of the Muslim world. We are only allowed to focus on past sins of the West.
This episode should serve to remind us that Islamic supremecists do want to inflict their beliefs on the rest of the world. Usually they institute a small challange against Western sensibilities. It could be something as simple as demanding to be able to
wear a veil in court or on a
driver's license photo. It could be Muslim cab drivers
refusing service to people carrying alcohol or a
blind person with a leader dog. Or it could be tacit acceptance of female genital mutilation and slavery because feminist leaders who demand that women have equal access to college sports ignore those little girls being forced to undergo ritual genital mutilation. It could also be cowardly newspapers whitewashing the problem to avoid having to face the truth that Islamic supremecists are out to recreate our society into their own totalitarian dream culture.
Labels: female genital mutilation, islam, multiculturalism
More Thoughts by Mark Steyn on the Idiocy Known as Multiculturalism
Go
here. Read more intelligent commentary about why the self-destructive religion of Multiculturalism is helping our enemies to kill us.
WITH hindsight, the defining encounter of the age was not between Mohammed Atta's jet and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but that between Mohammed Atta and Johnelle Bryant a year earlier. Bryant is an official with the US Department of Agriculture in Florida, and the late Atta had gone to see her about getting a $US650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world's largest crop-duster. A novel idea.
The meeting got off to a rocky start when Atta refused to deal with Bryant because she was but a woman. But, after this unpleasantness had been smoothed out, things went swimmingly. When it was explained to him that, alas, he wouldn't get the 650 grand in cash that day, Atta threatened to cut Bryant's throat. He then pointed to a picture behind her desk showing an aerial view of downtown Washington - the White House, the Pentagon et al - and asked: "How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it?"
Fortunately, Bryant's been on the training course and knows an opportunity for multicultural outreach when she sees one. "I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from," she recalled. "I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could."
So a few weeks later, when fellow 9/11 terrorist Marwan al-Shehhi arrived to request another half-million dollar farm subsidy and Atta showed up cunningly disguised with a pair of glasses and claiming to be another person entirely - to whit, al-Shehhi's accountant - Bryant sportingly pretended not to recognise him and went along with the wheeze. The fake specs, like the threat to slit her throat and blow up the Pentagon, were just another example of the multicultural diversity that so enriches our society.
For four years, much of the western world behaved like Bryant. Bomb us, and we agonise over the "root causes" (that is, what we did wrong). Decapitate us, and our politicians rush to the nearest mosque to declare that "Islam is a religion of peace". Issue bloodcurdling calls at Friday prayers to kill all the Jews and infidels, and we fret that it may cause a backlash against Muslims. Behead sodomites and mutilate female genitalia, and gay groups and feminist groups can't wait to march alongside you denouncing Bush, Blair and Howard. Murder a schoolful of children, and our scholars explain that to the "vast majority" of Muslims "jihad" is a harmless concept meaning "decaf latte with skimmed milk and cinnamon sprinkles".
Until the London bombings. Something about this particular set of circumstances - British subjects, born and bred, weaned on chips, fond of cricket, but willing to slaughter dozens of their fellow citizens - seems to have momentarily shaken the multiculturalists out of their reveries. Hitherto, they've taken a relaxed view of the more, ah, robust forms of cultural diversity - Sydney gang rapes, German honour killings - but Her Britannic Majesty's suicide bombers have apparently stiffened even the most jelly-spined lefties.
At The Age, Terry Lane, last heard blaming John Howard for the "end of democracy as we know it" and calling for "the army of my country ... to be defeated" in Iraq, now says multiculturalism is a "repulsive word" whereas "assimilation is a beaut" and should be commended. In the sense that he seems to have personally assimilated with Pauline Hanson, he's at least leading by example.
Where Lane leads, Melbourne's finest have been rushing to follow, lining up to sign on to the New Butchness. "There is something wrong with multiculturalism," warns Pamela Bone. "Perhaps it is time to say, you are welcome, but this is the way it is here." Tony Parkinson - The Age's resident voice of sanity - quotes approvingly France's Jean-Francois Revel: "Clearly, a civilisation that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."
And yet, The Age's editor Andrew Jaspan still lives in another world. You'll recall that it was Jaspan who objected to the energy and conviction of certain freed Australian hostage, at least when it comes to disrespecting their captors: "I was, I have to say, shocked by Douglas Wood's use of the 'arsehole' word, if I can put it like that, which I just thought was coarse and very ill-thought through ... As I understand it, he was treated well there. He says he was fed every day, and as such to turn around and use that kind of language I think is just insensitive."
And heaven forbid we're insensitive about terrorists. True, a blindfolded Wood had to listen to his jailers murder two of his colleagues a few inches away, but how boorish would one have to be to hold that against one's captors? A few months after 9/11, National Review's John Derbyshire dusted off the old Cold War mantra "Better dead than red" and modified it to mock the squeamishness of politically correct warfare: "Better dead than rude". But even he would be surprised to see it taken up quite so literally by Andrew Jaspan.
Usually it's the hostage who gets Stockholm Syndrome, but the newly liberated Wood must occasionally reflect that in this instance the entire culture seems to have caught a dose. And, in a sense, we have: multiculturalism is a kind of societal Stockholm Syndrome. Atta's meetings with Bryant are emblematic: He wasn't a genius, a master of disguise in deep cover; indeed, he was barely covered at all, he was the Leslie Nielsen of terrorist masterminds - but the more he stuck out, the more Bryant was trained not to notice, or to put it all down to his vibrant cultural tradition.
Read it and weep.
Labels: Mark Steyn, multiculturalism
More on Ebonics and the Racial Achievement Gap
Here is a
short piece by someone who "gets it" when it comes to how to get an education.
It has not been helpful that LAUSD officials, as well as members of the school board, have allowed the district to become a sounding board for all sorts of suspect theories related to children "of color." Just one of those theories that have gained traction is that "black learners" react in different and unique ways to teaching -- different, that is, from the way other students react. This argument makes the claim that black students think in ways that are distinct from ways white students, in particular, think.
But isn't this a twist on the pseudo-science of old, which claimed that efforts to educate blacks would be fruitless because their capacity to learn was different from that of whites? Why is this argument acceptable today simply because it is being advanced by minority "multiculturalists"? The view that blacks and whites somehow interpret learning differently is -- in part -- a holdover from the silly debates surrounding "ebonics" that raged throughout the 1990s and that continue to handicap discussions of urban education to this very day.
Some 20 years after an onslaught of multicultural teaching techniques and the obsessive celebration of racial and cultural differences, are we actually supposed to believe that today's L.A. schools are inhospitable environments for virtually every ethnic group with the exception of the district's few remaining non-Latino white students? That seems hardly believable.
Evidence of the tendency to make use of crackpot theories was graphically displayed recently when one local high school attempted to hold a discussion about the achievement gap. The discussion went fairly well until one of the many downtown minions of the LAUSD, who had been invited to speak, announced that the problem of the achievement gap was -- drum roll, please -- mainly that of insensitive, uncaring white teachers.
There's more and it all makes sense.
Labels: ebonics, education, multiculturalism
Multiculturalism and Its Discontents
Multiculturalism is a popular topic these days. I can remember, many years ago, arguing in favor of Multiculturalism. This was before I understood how far the Multiculturalists are willing to go to destroy Western culture. My thinking moved to Multiculturalism as stupid, now I see it as evil. Other commentators have weighed in. Here is
Diana West.
Only one faith on Earth may be more messianic than Islam: multiculturalism. Without it — without its fanatics who believe all civilizations are the same — the engine that projects Islam into the unprotected heart of Western civilization would stall and fail.
It's as simple as that. To live among the believers — the multiculturalists — is to watch the assault, the jihad, take place un-repulsed by our suicidal societies. These societies are not doomed to submit; rather, they are eager to do so in the name of a masochistic brand of tolerance that, short of drastic measures, is surely terminal.
And then there's
Melanie Phillip's take:
Muslims have been presented not as the community which must take responsibility for this horror, but as its principal victims.
This moral inversion is the result of the cultural brainwashing that has been going on in Britain for years in the pursuit of the disastrous doctrine of multiculturalism. This has refused to teach Muslims — along with other minorities — the core of British culture and values. Instead, it has promoted a lethally divisive culture of separateness, in which minority cultures are held to be equal if not superior to the values and traditions of the indigenous majority.
Even worse, multiculturalism causes the moral paralysis of ‘victim culture’, whereby to say an ethnic minority is at fault is to invite immediate accusations of racism. When Lord Ouseley reported on the 1999 race riots in Bradford, he concluded that many local people did not dare challenge wrongdoing among young ethnic minority people because they feared being labelled 'racist'.
When Ray Honeyford, the Bradford headmaster, warned strongly against multiculturalism in the schools in the eighties, he was branded a racist and hounded from his job. Now those Yorkshire chickens have lethally come home to roost.
The moral bankruptcy of this victim culture is all around us. Thus the BBC instructed its journalists not to refer to the London bombings as ‘terrorism’ because this was a subjective value judgment. And yet it allowed John Simpson, its World Affairs editor, to call these terrorists ‘misguided criminals’ an astounding value judgment which diminished the nature of the atrocity.
The problem is that this inversion of morality can be lethal. Such is the ethos of political correctness in our public services that librarians who want to complain about the potential danger of young Muslims logging onto websites instructing them in making bombs or nerve gas are told to say nothing for fear of being accused of prejudice.
Bruce Thornton has this to say:
For years now we in the West have indulged a whole set of destructive ideas whose bitter fruit we will all continue to harvest, as more and more unassimilated and disaffected immigrant children turn against the countries that welcomed their parents and provided them with a prosperity and freedom unknown in their countries of origin.
This baneful idea goes by the name of multiculturalism. Don't be fooled by marketing: multiculturalism is not simply a call to respect cultures different from one's own. In reality multiculturalism is a therapeutic melodrama of Western crimes against peaceful peoples “of color” who were subjected to racism, sexism, slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and environmental degradation. Given its record of evil, the West owes reparations to all those victims, especially those who emigrate to the West. There these victims will be given public assistance and soothed with repeated public assertions and recognitions of their culture's superiority, coupled with ritualistic confessions of Western guilt and dysfunction.
Some consider this “cultural relativism,” but it isn't really. A genuine cultural relativism would hold that there are no universal standards by which to judge any culture. But most of the time, those who claim that cultures can be judged only in their own terms have no compunction in judging and condemning the West. Nor will they accept that Nazi Germany or the antebellum South or apartheid South Africa were just “different” and so beyond our judgment. And of course, if you pin them down on the standards and values and principles on which they base their condemnations, these will all turn out to be ideals like freedom or human rights or equality that have their origins and most complete development in the West.
This intellectual contradiction suggests that something other than coherent principle lies behind “Occidentalism,” the multicultural caricature of Western culture. Mythic ideas like the Noble Savage account for some of multiculturalism's allure: ever since the Greeks, visions of peoples living simpler, more spontaneous lives have attracted those living in more complex and sophisticated societies. The Romantic fascination with the exotic explains too the West's relentless appropriation of non-Western cultural artifacts.
So, in conclusion, Multiculturalism is an ideology of self-defeat, self-loathing, and suicide. And it's been forced upon us. No matter how they dress is up, or make excuses for it, Multiculturalism is an evil ideology.
Labels: Bruce Thornton, Diana West, Melanie Phillips, multiculturalism, Muslims
The beginning of the reckoning
You have to read
this piece by Caroline Glick on the history of Islamic/Nazi cooperation. Make sure you watch the video. It's ugly, but informative. After seeing it, I have to ask, why haven't the Muslim terror masters, terror preachers, and terror supporters embraced Multiculturalism?
Answer: Because they're not stupidly suicidal, like the Left and MSM, they're homicidal.
Labels: Carolyn Glick, islam, multiculturalism, Nazis
Multiculturalism, Another Anti-Western Religion
Diana West offers an excellent assessment of multiculturalism and how it's allied with radical Islam in a quest to crush Western Civilization
here at the Washington Times.
Only one faith on earth may be more messianic than Islam: multiculturalism. Without it — without its fanatics who believe all civilizations are the same — the engine that projects Islam into the unprotected heart of Western civilization would stall and fail. It's as simple as that. To live among the believers — the multiculturalists — is to watch the assault, the jihad, take place, unrepulsed by our suicidal societies. These societies are not doomed to submit; rather, they are eager to do so in the name of a masochistic brand of tolerance that, short of drastic measures, is surely terminal.
I'm not talking about our soldiers, policemen, rescue workers and, now, even train conductors who bravely and steadfastly risk their lives for civilization abroad and at home. I'm instead thinking about who we are as a society at this somewhat advanced stage of war. It is a strange, tentative civilization we have become, with leaders who strut their promises of "no surrender" even as they flinch at identifying the foe. Four years past September 11, we continue to shadow-box "terror," even as we go on about "an ideology of hate." It's a script that smacks of sci-fi fantasy more than realpolitik.
Yes, you should read it all.
Labels: Diana West, islam, multiculturalism
Double-Teaming against Education
First, we teachers had NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND thrust upon us. Good idea, bad bill. I'll tell you why in another post. It did encourage school districts to try harder to reach and teach our students, but most teachers have no idea how to, because, as I've said before, teachers aren't properly trained to teach. Now, some teacher colleges are atively trying to make things even worse.
From
Atlas Shrugs I was led to
this article by Jacob Gershman in the New York Sun.
Brooklyn College's School of Education has begun to base evaluations of aspiring teachers in part on their commitment to social justice, raising fears that the college is screening students for their political views.
The School of Education at the CUNY campus initiated last fall a new method of judging teacher candidates based on their "dispositions," a vogue in teacher training across the country that focuses on evaluating teachers' values, apart from their classroom performance.
Further into the article it gets even scarier:
To drive home the notion that education schools ought to evaluate teacher candidates on such parameters as attitude toward social justice, the council issued a revision of its accrediting policies in 2002 in a Board of Examiners Update. It encouraged schools to tailor their assessments of dispositions to the schools' guiding principles, which are known in the field as "conceptual frameworks." The council's policies say that if an education school "has described its vision for teacher preparation as 'Teachers as agents of change' and has indicated that a commitment to social justice is one disposition it expects of teachers who can become agents of change, then it is expected that unit assessments include some measure of a candidate's commitment to social justice."
Brooklyn College's School of Education, which is the only academic unit at the college with the status of school, is among dozens of education schools across the country that incorporate the notion of "social justice" in their guiding principles. At Brooklyn, "social justice" is one of the four main principles in its conceptual framework. The school's conceptual framework states that it develops in its students "a deeper understanding of the quest for social justice." In its explanation of that mission, the school states: "We educate teacher candidates and other school personnel about issues of social injustice such as institutionalized racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism."
So in order to become accepted as a teacher, political correctness and multiculturalism trump skills and content knowledge.
In this
interview with Pamela R. Winnick by Bill Steigerwald on textbooks, we're told,
We get this ridiculous situation where there are all kinds of politically correct things made in the name of science. In one of the textbooks, for example, there's an emphasis on Native Americans. In the chapter that's supposed to be on the science of climate, they spend several pages talking about an Algonquin myth about how when the crows return that means it's spring. It takes several pages before they actually get to the science of why climate changes — the rotation of the Earth and so forth.
And that's only some of the stupidity that teachers are supposed to translate into knowledge.
When teachers are only allowed to teach multicultualism and political correctness, will standardized tests be changed to reflect this teaching? Will they be as devoid of content as the textbooks?
In the district I teach, most teachers are forced to use some textbooks containing misinformation. I've pointed out some of the distortions to administrators and they politely ignored me. The problem is, teachers are still held accountable. The consultants from the textbook companies insist that their product works, it's "research based". Except for me (because I've done the research), the teachers don't know enough to dispute the consultants, and everyone is tired of listening to me.
Because I taught my fourth graders phonetically this year, we were able to read, discuss, and do lots of writing on Macbeth. Now they are memorizing portions of the play and some of them are begging to read Hamlet. We may read part of it, but there isn't much time left in the school year. We did read
Harrison Bergeron by
Kurt Vonnegut. We had an interesting discussion. They understand more than I thought.
Labels: Atlas Shrugs, Bill Steigerwald, education, Jacob Gershman, multiculturalism, NCLB, Pamela R. Winnick, teacher education
War's legitimate object is more perfect peace. Flavius Vegitius Renatus
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CHALLAH AKBAR
