Authors Warn That Many Textbooks Distort Religion

Saturday, March 07, 2009
By Lauren Green

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Jesus was a Palestinian? That’s what one public school textbook says.

Although Jesus lived in a region known in his time as Palestine, the use of the term “Palestinian,” with its modern connotations, is among the hundreds of textbook flaws cited in a recent five-year study of educational anti-Semitism detailed in the book “The Trouble with Textbooks: Distorting History and Religion.”

Authors Gary Tobin and Dennis Ybarra of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research found some 500 imperfections and distortions concerning religion in 28 of the most widely used social studies and history textbooks in the United States.

Ybarra, a research associate at the institute, called the above example “shocking.”

A “true or false” question on the origins of Christianity asserted that “Christianity was started by a young Palestinian named Jesus.” The teacher’s edition says this is “true.”

But even though Jesus is the founder of Christianity, the question ignores the fact that he was Jewish. And Ybarra said, “The Christian scriptures say that he preached in Judea and Galilee, not Palestine,” a term that was used at the time as a less specific description of the broader region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

Ybarra says part of the problem is that publishers employ or contract with writers who are not experts in the subject, or they may use out-of-date information. Or they may bow to special interest groups.

“They’re under pressure from all kinds of minority groups, religious groups, and they try to satisfy everyone and that results in content that is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator,” he said. “And so, in that process, things can be missed. Errors can survive.”

Ybarra also claims that the textbooks tend not to treat Christianity, Judaism and Islam equally.

“Islam has a privileged position,” he said. “It’s not critiqued or criticized or qualified, whereas Judaism and Christianity are.”

One example is in the glossary of “World History: Continuity and Change.” It calls the Ten Commandments “moral laws Moses claimed to have received from the Hebrew God,” while the entry for the Koran contains no such qualifier in saying it is the “Holy Book of Islam containing revelations received by Muhammad from God.”

But First Amendment scholar Dr. Charles Haynes, who has written extensively on the subject of public schools and religion, says he thinks sometimes the criticisms go a little too far.

“There’s no conspiracy in the textbook industry to favor one religion over another. … I think the group that bangs the pot the loudest gets the most attention,” he said.

“Having said all that, I think the textbooks are working at trying to treat everybody the same way,” he added. “They made mistakes. They’ve got to work on it.”

Experts agree, though, that part of the problem rests in the fact that there are so few textbook publishers.

Seventy-five percent of public school books are published by just three companies: Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill and Pearson Education. None responded to requests for comment for this story.

“It’s a big problem right now that we have so few choices in our textbooks,” Haynes said. “This is an industry. … It’s a marketplace. They’re trying to sell their textbooks.”

But Ybarra said it goes deeper than pure economics. He thinks the school books are being used as tools for propaganda, particularly to perpetuate negative attitudes towards Christianity, Israel and pro-Palestinian views concerning the Middle East.

“We fear that this is creating a generation of biased school children,” he said. “Some of our projects in the higher education realm with some of these same subject matters, we find that students do show up at universities with these prejudices.”

Ybarra maintains that, ultimately, parents and communities need to get involved and demand accountability from school boards, publishers and scholars on what goes into the materials being used to teach fresh, young minds.

Hardly the worst of what Ted Kennedy has done in his life

By Mary Ellen Synon
Last updated at 8:19 AM on 06th March 2009

Conservative MPs are right to rage that Ted Kennedy, the senior US senator from Massachusetts who is dying of cancer, is going to be given an honorary knighthood. But one has to ask if they are furious for quite the right reason.

So far, all one has heard from the Tories is anger that the Queen must now honour a politician who has for decades been allied to the Irish republican movement.

Certainly, Kennedy has a history of taking the Provisional Sinn Fein line. But being friendly with Gerry Adams and the other Shinners is hardly the worst of what Ted Kennedy has done in his life. Examine Kennedy’s personal history and you will see that it is inexcusable that the prime minister should force the Queen to honour such a man.

Tragic: Passenger Mary Jo Kopechne might have survived if Ted Kennedy had gone for help after he drove his car off a bridge after a late night party

Kennedy’s character has been flawed from the start, but then he came from bad stock. His father Joe Kennedy made no secret of the fortune he made from bootlegging during Prohibition or his decades-long close connections with the heavies of organised crime. Nor did he make any secret of his adulterous affairs with such women as the Hollywood star Gloria Swanson, at a time when such affairs were scandalous.

Ted Kennedy, the spoilt baby of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s vast brood, was a poor student at his private school, but his family ensured he was admitted to Harvard University.

Ted couldn’t manage the work. In order to avoid certain failure on a Spanish exam, he paid another, brighter student to sit the exam for him. Both students were caught and expelled. Family pressure ensured Ted was eventually readmitted.

When he was then manoeuvred by his rich family into the prestigious University of Virginia Law School, he was cited four times by local police for reckless driving. On one occasion he was stopped by police late at night driving at 90 miles an hour through a suburban street with his headlights off.

How did a cheating knucklehead end up, aged 30, with a seat in the Senate? Easy. His older brother Jack vacated one of the seats in the Kennedy home state of Massachusetts when he was elected US President in 1960.

Since in 1960 Teddy was not yet old enough to take a seat in the Senate – Article One of the US Constitution bars anyone under the age of 30 – his father had the governor of Massachusetts appoint a tame family friend to occupy the seat until Ted (or ‘Teddy’ as he was still known at that time) was old enough to take it in 1962. Then the friend stepped down.

Or as Joe was reported to have said about the seat, ‘It’s mine, I bought it.’

All of which tells you a lot about what sort of man Ted Kennedy was. But the key moment of his life, the moment which crystallised his character is known by one word: Chappaquiddick.

Most people in Britain, if they know Chappaquiddick at all, only know something about Kennedy and a car accident in which a girl died. But it was far worse than just some accident.

In August 1969 Kennedy abandoned Mary Jo Kopechne, a 28-year old campaign worker, to drown at midnight in a car he had driven over the side of a wooden bridge on Chappaquiddick, a small holiday island near Martha’s Vineyard.

The married senator and Mary Jo had left a party together in his mother’s Oldsmobile. They got as far as Dyke’s Bridge, which leads over Poucha Pond to a deserted beach, but Kennedy ran the car over the side into the water.

Kennedy got himself out of the submerged car, but he didn’t go back for Mary Jo. He didn’t even ring for the police or the rescue squad, though there were four cottages nearby and he could have rung from any one of them.

Instead he ran away to find a lawyer. The police only heard about the accident the next day, after some fishermen found the overturned car in the water.

At the inquest it was estimated that Mary Jo had stayed alive for about 25 minutes as she sucked the last oxygen out of the air bubble in the car.  That would have been enough time to rescue her, if Kennedy had called for help.

The worst sanction Kennedy received for the death of Mary Jo was a conviction for the misdemeanour of leaving the scene of an accident, with a two-month suspended sentence.

As critics pointed out, since Chappaquiddick is in Massachusetts, there was little chance of justice being done. In almost any other state, Kennedy would have served a prison sentence.

However, the death of Mary Jo meant that Kennedy could never secure his party’s nomination for President. Despite his support among Democrats, the party’s leaders knew that, no matter how many years passed, the word ‘Chappaquiddick’ would taint any campaign.

So Kennedy instead built up his power in the Senate. He based his power on following the dogma of the hard left of the Democratic party.

For example, he has given unwavering support for the most ruthless and cruel form of abortion, a procedure known as partial-birth abortion: in other words, Kennedy has been a consistent supporter of the law that allows a full-term baby to be killed in the birth canal – without anaesthetic.

Or a 29-year old woman to be killed in his car – without hope.

Madrid, Spain (CNN)- An Iranian woman living in Spain is welcoming a Tehran court ruling that awards her eye-for-an-eye justice against a suitor who blinded her.

In a Spanish radio interview, she says her aim isn’t revenge — it’s to make sure her suffering isn’t repeated.

Ameneh Bahrami was blinded and disfigured in 2004 when a man she had spurned threw acid on her. Late last year, an Iranian court reportedly ruled that Islamic justice calls for the attacker to be blinded with acid, too.

But the victim says she is entitled to blind Majid Movahedi in only one eye, because under Iranian law “each man is worth two women.”

She also says he would be blinded by having several drops of acid put into one eye, whereas she had acid splashed all over her face and other parts of her body.

She says she’s waiting for a letter from the court telling her to go back to Iran for the punishment to be carried out.

Bahrami tells CNN she first crossed paths with her attacker Movahedi in 2002, when they attended the same university. She was a 24-year-old electronics student. He was 19. She never noticed him until they shared a class. He sat next to her one day and brushed up against her. Bahrami says she knew it wasn’t an accident.

“I moved away from him,” she said, “but he brushed up against me again.” When Bahrami stood up in class and screamed for him to stop, Movahedi just looked at her in stunned silence. Bahrami said that over the next two years, Movahedi kept harassing her and making threats, even as he asked her to marry him.

Then one day she was leaving work and he snuck up behind her. When she turned around he threw acid on her face.

GrigoriERasputin wrote:

Should the media’s focus be the First Lady’s arms, trousers or hair or the tanking of the DOW and the collapse of GM?

Catholic college bars student’s free condoms

Frustrated that her college does not distribute birth control, Stonehill College senior Katie Freitas decided she would do it herself.

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After collecting hundreds of free condoms from two family-planning agencies, she and about 20 classmates placed boxes of the contraceptives in student dormitories across the Easton campus last month.

But when administrators at the Catholic school learned of the effort, they quickly intervened and collected the condoms, citing the college’s ban against distributing birth control on campus.

“We’re a private Catholic college,” Martin McGovern, Stonehill’s spokesman, said yesterday. “We make no secret of our religious affiliation, and our belief system is fairly straightforward. We don’t expect everyone on campus to agree with our beliefs, but we would ask people, and students in particular, to respect them.”

McGovern said the college’s policy follows church teachings, which op pose use of artificial contraception. Most Catholic colleges do not distribute birth control on campus.

“This is not a shocking revelation,” that the college does not permit condom distribution, he said.

Freitas, who said she is not Catholic, said she decided to make condoms available because she was concerned about the consequences of students having unprotected sex.

“Abstinence can be part of sex-ed, and should be,” she said. “But college students are going to have sex, and they should be encouraged to have safe sex. In certain moments, students aren’t going to stop to run to CVS, so I think they should be available on campus.”

The dispute at Stonehill echoes debates on access to birth control on other Catholic campuses in the region.

For example, students at Boston College recently passed a referendum urging the college to offer affordable testing for sexually transmitted infections and access to contraception.

Freitas, of Danbury, Conn., said that before distributing the condoms, she tried to start a campus group called the Sexual Health and Awareness Group to educate students about safe-sex practices.

But college administrators, she said, urged her to work with an existing student health group, Active Concerned Educated Students.

Freitas said she was frustrated the condoms were removed, so she decided to make her grievance public. Freitas notified the Brockton Enterprise, which wrote about the matter yesterday.

“I expected some resistance, but I think this is a debate that should be out in the open,” she said.

Freitas said she will continue to hang a bag of condoms on her dormitory door, although McGovern warned otherwise.

“She has taken a position that differs from college policy,” he said. “I would hope she would remove them.”

TYSONS CORNER, Va. (AP)- A Montgomery County, Md. man and a Miami man are charged in a federal indictment with running a nationwide prostitution ring that hired immigrant women.

The indictment filed in federal court in Michigan alleges that Michael Porru of Boyds, Md., and Rafael Bernabe-Caballero of Miami, set up trysts through the Web site MiamiUltimate.com, and that they initially told the women they would work as escorts. The story was first reported in The Washington Examiner. The indictment says that the women were later ordered to have their first meetings with clients in Tysons Corner, Va., and told they were expected to perform sexual acts. The women were sent around the country to work. The indictment also says Bernabe-Caballero threatened to kill the women or have them handed over to immigration officials if they refused to work.

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Were Queen Victoria and Prince Albert both illegitimate?

By A N Wilson
Last updated at 1:56 AM on 04th March 2009

A film premiered last night shows the many plots to kill the young Queen Victoria. But her biographer reveals the real story behind this remarkable couple is even more sensational…

The day is bright and sunny, and the youthful Queen Victoria, with the handsome young Prince Albert at her side, is trotting through a London park in an open carriage, when – BANG! A gun is fired.

Prince Albert slumps over his wife, with blood pouring from him. Victoria and the British Crown have been saved through his noble action, though he is wounded.

This is a scene from the film The Young Victoria, which will be released this week, with Emily Blunt as the Queen and Rupert Friend as the Prince Consort. It is not an invented scene, but it is grossly exaggerated.

Emily Blunt and Rupert Friend in The Young Victoria

What actually happened was that Prince Albert saw a ‘theatrical little man’ wielding a pistol in the crowd as he and the Queen drove down Constitution Hill in London in her open droshky (low-wheeled carriage). To protect her, he bravely flung himself over his wife, turning his back to the gunman. In fact, the man pointing his gun was quickly overwhelmed by the crowds. There was no bloodshed and no one was hit by a bullet.

On another occasion, when Prince Albert and the Queen were out driving, the Prince saw a different man pointing a gun at them, but it misfired. He told Sir Robert Peel (the Prime Minister) that evening, that he had seen ‘a man of the age from 26 to 30, with a shabby hat and of dirty appearance, stretch out his hand and snap a small pistol at the carriage window’ from a distance of three or four feet.

With what might seem insane bravery (it would not be allowed by security forces today), the Queen resolved to ride out again the following day to see if her would-be assassin might return. He did.

The man was the son of a stage carpenter from Covent Garden, and his name was John Francis. And he did indeed pull the trigger, but it misfired once again. There was now enough evidence to arrest him. When it was suggested that he was mad, the Queen said: ‘He was not in the least mad, but very cunning.’ He was condemned to death, a sentence which was commuted to penal servitude.

Two days later, the Queen was again shot at on her way to the Chapel Royal, this time by a hunchbacked dwarf named John Bean. In the event, he never posed any danger – his pistol was loaded with tobacco and paper.

These were only some of the attempts made upon the life of the young Queen Victoria. The last such attack was in 1850, when she was visiting her uncle Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge. As her carriage squeezed through the gateway of his house in Piccadilly, her assailant, an officer in the 10th Hussars, Robert Pate, hit her with his walking stick.

An illustration from 1840 titled ‘Leap Year’ shows Queen Victoria proposing to Prince Albert at Windsor Castle in 1839

He, too, was immediately set upon by the crowds, but this time she had been badly bruised and she bore a scar on her neck for ten years. It was suggested that she cancel a proposed visit to the opera that evening. She retorted: ‘If I do not go, it will be thought I am seriously hurt.’

‘But you are hurt, ma’am.’ ‘Very well, then, every one shall see how little I mind it.’

It is an extraordinary fact, as the great Victorian statesman Lord Shaftesbury noted in his journal, that ‘the profligate George IV [Victoria's uncle] passed through a life of selfishness and sin without a single proved attempt to take it. This mild and virtuous young woman has, four times already, been exposed to imminent peril’.

And although the screenplay of the new film (written by Julian Fellowes) invents the fact that Prince Albert was wounded, the incident in the droshky gives him the opportunity to explain to Victoria why he risked his life for hers.

Of course it was a demonstration of his love – and that thrilled her above anything. But more than that, Albert told his young Queen that, while he was replaceable, she was not.

For the truth is that, if anyone had succeeded in killing Queen Victoria before she gave birth, it is highly questionable whether the British monarchy would have survived at all.

Not one of her grandfather George III’s fat, dissolute sons had managed to produce a robust heir. Her uncle George IV’s daughter, Princess Charlotte, died aged 21 in 1817.

King William IV, George IV’s younger brother who inherited the throne, had ten children by the actress Mrs Jordan.

Unfortunately, although they were a strapping, vigorous brood, who went on themselves to breed many an interesting descendant (such as John Julius Norwich the historian and even David Cameron who is the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Mrs Jordan), none was legitimate.

Another scene from The Young Victoria. Was there more to the Queen than meets the eye?

It meant everything really hung on the dumpling-daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Kent – the princess who would become Queen Victoria.

Her father died when she was in her infancy and it is almost impossible to conceive of the paranoia in court circles when she was young that she – and therefore the monarchy – might not survive.

Her childhood was a nightmare – her mother kept Victoria under more or less constant supervision. Even aged 18 she was still not allowed to go up and down stairs without someone holding her hand, and all her food was tasted for poison before she ate it. For a strong-minded girl and young woman, the constraints were all but intolerable.

Victoria was kept prisoner by her mother in Kensington Palace. They shared a bedroom until the day she became Queen. She was supervised at every turn either by the Duchess of Kent or by her Governess, the Baroness Lehzen.

She was never allowed out to play on her own. In fact, for Victoria, even to have visitors was all but unknown. Like a princess in a German fairy story, she was kept immured in case someone tried to kill her – there was, after all, an air of revolution in Europe and the immense poverty after the Napoleonic Wars made her an even more likely target. In reality, the charming Emily Blunt is not only too pretty to convey what the young Victoria was like; she is too mild-tempered. The actual Victoria was all but bursting with understandable frustration at the hour-by-hour supervision she was forced to endure.

Moreover, the future Queen was dominated by the evil genius of Sir John Conroy, Comptroller of the Duchess’s household. Members of William IV’s court joked about the ‘Conroyal Family’ at Kensington Palace, and in later life Queen Victoria told the Duke of Wellington that one reason she hated Sir John was that she had witnessed ‘some familiarities’ between the Irish soldier and her mother.

Victoria was an intelligent – if maddening – woman. Surely she guessed, or feared, that she was Conroy’s daughter? The old Duke of Kent, her supposed father, was well ‘past it’ by the time Victoria was conceived. Moreover, there is the family’s curious medical history which we now know, and which surely requires some explanation.

Her grandfather, George III, notoriously suffered from the condition known as porphyria, whose symptoms included madness, flatulence, itchy skin and discoloured urine. When the present Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, saw the film of Alan Bennett’s play The Madness Of King George, she asked: ‘Isn’t it hereditary?’

A photograph of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert taken in May 1854

Well, the answer is, yes it is, yet not one of Queen Victoria’s descendants has ever been recorded as having it.

There is another curious medical fact. We know Queen Victoria passed on haemophilia to her descendants. Seventeen generations of the family on Queen Victoria’s mother’s side have been investigated by scientists at the Royal Society of Medicine. Not one has haemophilia.

Nor was there any haemophilia in the Royal Family before Victoria, so the finger really does point to Queen Victoria’s father having been someone other than the Duke of Kent. It must have been the awful Sir John Conroy with that haemophiliac gene.

The new film rightly shows his attempts to get Victoria to sign a deed making him the Regent, and her doughty resistance. Did he actually, as in the film, use physical violence on her?

The scenes seemed horribly plausible to me, yet her courage in resisting him again reinforced my sense of the extraordinary providence which led us to possessing the matchless blessing of Victoria and Albert and the extraordinary legacy they left us.

Strangely enough, there are interesting medical details on the side of Prince Albert, the German cousin Queen Victoria married, which suggest that he, too, may have been illegitimate. His mother had been dismissed from the court of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha for having an affair with the Jewish chamberlain, the Baron von Mayern, a cultivated, musical, intelligent man.

Both Albert’s stupid, lecherous, drunken and supposed father, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg, and his brother Ernst had hereditary syphilis, but there is no trace of this in the life of Albert who, like the Baron von Mayern, was intelligent, musical and cultivated. Unlike his own Saxe-Coburg relations, he was also a pillar of family rectitude and marital loyalty.

But it is not just this extraordinary genetic inheritance of the young Victoria and her prince by which we can see what a slender thread the destiny of our British monarchy hangs.

There were also the assassins. It would only have taken one accurate assassin to bring the line more or less to an end. I say more or less, since the crown would have passed to Ernest Augustus Duke of Cumberland, later King of Hanover, and it is hard to imagine that the English monarchy would have survived.

Emily Blunt arriving for the world premiere of the film in London

Indeed, I believe that there are good genetic reasons for the survival of the British Royal Family – namely their good mixture of Irish and Jewish stock. Queen Victoria inherited the physical strength and political deviousness of her real father, the Irish Sir John Conroy, and Prince Albert inherited the cleverness of the Baron von Mayern. But even if you do not accept this rather basic genetic explanation of how the royal bloodline proved so resiliently adaptable – something phenomenal happened when the young Victoria chose as her husband one of the best things that ever happened to Britain: Prince Albert.

That the monarchy survived the assassins can be attributed to God, or luck.

That it survived the changing political climate of the 19th century when so many others went down must be down to Queen Victoria, and her remarkable relationship with Albert – the man who taught her so much.

In the opening years of her reign, when she was an unmarried teenager, she made some silly mistakes, thinking for example that she could insult the Tory Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, by refusing his suggestions that a few members of his political persuasion should be represented at court.

She was booed in public and someone cruelly called out ‘Mrs Melbourne’ when she went to the opera with ‘Lord M’, the Whig Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, whom she adored in a besotted teenaged-crush.

Melbourne, however, was a man of the old Regency days, whose aristocratic hauteur made him a charming dinner companion but a rotten adviser about the condition of England in the late 1830s.

Victoria was going to rule over a country which was the first great industrial power in the world. She needed to know about mill towns and coal mines and railways. She needed to be sympathetic to the aspirations of the middle classes.

Albert, when he had married her, had great difficulty persuading his headstrong young Queen to adapt to the times, however obsessed she was with him sexually. But eventually he was able to persuade her to mould the constitutional monarchy to the changing politics of Britain.

Robert Peel was the inventor of One Nation Toryism. His concern for the middle class, his desire to expand the franchise, and his worries about the conditions of the working classes were shared by Albert.

In the 20th century, when Europe was dominated by crazed dictatorships of Right and Left, the British monarchy stood for all its people. In times of war and in times of national crisis, the monarchy was a source of national unity, rather than being the source of bitter division as it was in Russia.

That was very largely the political achievement of Prince Albert, who was also a true Renaissance man, a good composer, a keen sportsman and a patron of the arts.

Who would have thought that such a man could have emerged from the tiny, tinpot Duchy of Coburg?

From Victoria and Albert and their nine children descended the royal families of Prussia (later Germany), Russia, Spain, Denmark, Greece and Sweden. In so far as monarchy survives at all in Europe, it survives among those of their descendants who learned the lessons of Prince Albert’s constitutional liberalism.

The eldest child of Victoria and Albert, Crown Princess Vicky, became the mother of German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose militarist policies and determination to build up the German navy led to the outbreak of World War I. Victoria’s letters to her daughter, when Vicky went to Germany and got married, reveal the extent of Prince Albert’s vision of a modern federalist Germany, based on democracy.

It is one of the great political tragedies of history that Prince Albert died aged 42 and was unable to influence events in Germany and to control his mad grandson Kaiser Bill.

I believe that if Prince Albert had lived as long as his wife, until the 20th century, there would have been no World War I, and the tragedies of the 20th century – its genocides, its Bolshevik and fascist tyrannies – would never have happened.

The film, The Young Victoria, is a reminder of how incredibly lucky we all were that he lived at all, and of what an irreparable loss was caused by his death.

Victoria was mocked for her everlasting mourning for her husband, but even today, most people have failed to see quite what a genius he was.

Six killed in Pishin girls’ madrassa suicide blast

* Witnesses say bomber wanted to target senior JUI-F leader Maulana Sherani
* Police arrest two suspects

QUETTA: A suicide bomber killed five and injured 12 people at a girls’ religious school in Pishin district of Balochistan on Monday.

District Police Officer Akbar Raisani confirmed the incident saying that the blast had occurred at a girls’ madrassa in Kili Karbala, where a senior leader of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F), Maulana Sherani, was scheduled to address the school’s convocation.

Witnesses said the suicide bomber was a teenager who wanted to get close to the JUI-F leader as soon as he ended his speech.

Three of the victims were identified as Muhammad Nasim, Jalath Khan and Hafiz Abdul Zahir, while the names of the other two could not be ascertained.

Protest: JUI-F supporters burnt tyres on the Jinnah Road and shouted slogans against the government for being unable to arrest the elements behind the blast.

JUI-F leader Maulana Abdul Wasay, who is also a senior provincial minister, condemned the incident. He said the JUI would observe a strike across the province today (Tuesday).

The police said it was investigating the matter.

According to the witnesses, two men had come to the religious school for the bombing but one of them escaped immediately after the first explosion.

Quoting police sources, the JUI leaders said two alleged suspects had been arrested in connection with the blast.

Balochistan Chief Minister Aslam Raisani expressed sorrow over the blast and assured the bereaved families that the government would investigate into the matter to expose those behind the blast.

Sindh Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah and Sindh Governor Dr Ishratul Ebad also condemned the blast and offered condolences to the families of the victims, APP reported. malik siraj akbar/app

Pakistan recently gave in to the pressure of Islamist militants. Indeed to buy off peace, Pakistani authorities allowed the imposition of Sharia (Islamic law) in the Swat valley.

How long the cease-fire will last is anyone’s guess. But in any case, Pakistan has allowed a precedent that could extend to other provinces; in fact the Swat valley is only about 100 miles away from Islamabad, the capital. But Sharia is not just making inroads in Pakistan but actually creeping in the West and in particular in Europe.

One area particularly touched by this phenomenon is the judicial system in Europe. Two recent cases in Italy and France are particularly troublesome. First, in Italy, three members of a Brescia-based Maghrebi family (father, mother and eldest son) were accused of beating up and sequestering their daughter/sister Fatima because she wanted to live a “Western” life.

In the first trial, the three were sentenced for sequestration and bad treatment. The court acknowledged that the teenager was “brutally beaten up” for having “dated” a non-Muslim and in general for “living a life not conforming with the culture” of her family. But on appeal, the family was acquitted because the court deemed that the young woman was beaten up for “her own good.” The Bologna public prosecutor’s office then disputed the acquittal of the three accused parties, but the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation dismissed it and ruled in favor of the charged parties.

Interestingly two Italian political leaders on the opposite side of the political spectrum, Isabella Bertolini, vice president of the MPs of the right-wing party Forza Italia, and Barbara Pollastrini, a post-communist former minister agreed to condemn the Supreme Court decision: “This verdict writes one of the darkest pages of history of the law in our country.”

Isabella Bertolini was upset that the court “allied itself with radical Islam” and Barbara Pollastrini is pushing for parliament to pass as soon as possible a law condemning violence against women: “Now more than ever, it is urgent to defend the rights of a large number of immigrant women victims of an intolerable patriarchal culture.”

Muslim women were quick to denounce the supreme court’s decision. Among them, Souad Sbai, president of the Organization of Moroccan Women in Italy.

She said, “It is a shame, this verdict is worthy of an Arab country where the Sharia would be in vigor. In the name of multiculturalism and respect of traditions, the judges apply two kinds of rules: one for the Italians and one for the immigrants. A Catholic father that would have acted this way would have been severely sentenced.”

According to her organization, recently at least nine Muslim women have been killed in Italy by one of their close relatives. The number of young girls forced to wear the hijab “as early as eight or 12″ is on the rise as is the number of female teenagers fleeing home and “lots of them are looking to flee to France.”

But France might not be the panacea either. Indeed in one very publicized case, last June, a French judge ruled in favor of a Muslim man who wanted the annulment of his marriage because his wife turned out not to be a virgin. What this decision amounted to was the endorsement of the repudiation concept.

This decision triggered a huge outcry from politicians, and various organizations. In November, a French court of appeal overturned the decision. Interestingly, a large majority of French Muslims, about 80 percent are very secular and totally reject any kind of Sharia law being implemented in the homeland of human rights.

But the United Kingdom is a different story, indeed there close to 40 percent of young Muslims are in favor of Sharia law being implemented in Britain. The idea seems to be also making headway among non-Muslims. So, last year, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, gave his support for the courts in Britain, saying that the legal recognition of them “seems unavoidable.” He added, the United Kingdom has to “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.

Williams argued that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion. For example, Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt within a Sharia court.

But contrary to what Williams advanced, Sadiq Khan, a British Muslim MP said that Sharia courts would discourage Muslims from developing links with other cultural and ethnic groups. He feared also that women could be “abused” by Sharia courts, which may give unequal bargaining power to the sexes.

In Switzerland, echoing Williams, Christian Giordano, an anthropology professor at the Fribourg university wrote that a special jurisdiction for Muslims could be envisioned in Switzerland. He added that including elements from Islamic law could allow to better manage the multiculturalism issue.

Other occurrences of Sharia law taking precedence over the law of the country have been reported: For example, in Denmark, some imams have allegedly sentenced delinquent Muslims, hence bypassing Denmark’s judicial system.

Islamists, much to the detriment of the majority of Muslims in Europe seem to be making headway in Europe in pushing Sharia law into the judicial system.

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Olivier Guitta is an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a foreign affairs and counterterrorism consultant. You can read his latest work at www.thecroissant.com/about.html

Joe Biden, champion of common folks, shops at Home Depot. Guess the little guy who owns the local hardware store doesn’t get “Uncle Joe’s” business. Mrs. Palin could’ve pounced on this one Thursday had she not been under strict instructions to follow her script. How about Joe Danko? I’m not sure I’m spelling the guy’s name the right way but in my notes it’s how it appears. He’s the man “Uncle Joe” talks with at the gas station. When Biden goes to fill up his 350 he talks with Joe Danko and asks how much it costs to fill up the Danko truck. Danko doesn’t know because he has never been able to afford a fill-up. Guess “Uncle Joe” could always recommend the train but it probably doesn’t pass near the Danko home or business. Palin should have pounced at that point. It was early in the debate and she could’ve replied Danko could afford gasoline if Biden would get on board with offshore drilling.

The candidates played for a tie. Apparently the instructions were to be as cautious as possible in a still relatively close race. McCain needed a knockout punch. Palin had the opportunities. It makes me wonder if Bobby Jindal would’ve followed instructions or vamped when the opportunity arrived. If nothing changes from now until November Obama will be in The White House and Americans will be buffeted by the storm. Then, again, McCain is proving he isn’t the tonic. Most of this year’s GOP candidates didn’t have much more to offer.

So where do we go from here? Start storing the canned goods and dried beans but most importantly keep your powder dry. I believe the positive is the military will side with Middle America. It mirrors our values. This isn’t the end. Jefferson offered a blueprint. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” he not only warned but also suggested. Jefferson’s modern counterpart was an earlier Arizonan. “ I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” spoke Barry Goldwater. McCain may be missing his mentor’s words but I haven’t.

My parents weren’t the easiest people to live with when I was growing up. It always appeared they were making things more difficult for us than need be. At a young age I was handling firearms and fishing poles and no one ever offered a “time out” when I wasn’t a good boy. The approach helped me survive some very lean years as a young broadcaster making 200 dollars a week while paying rent and a student loan.

There are a great many people sending me tips about survival. Yes, I agree debt loads should be reduced and I agree we need an ample supply of non-perishable foods but mostly survival requires wit and grit.

I’m fully confident the nation will come out of the tumult with a restoration of traditional virtues as well as an original sense of liberty. The folks who never heard the word no, experienced a paddling or who don’t have the brains to head for higher ground during a flood won’t have a clue. God help them.

MARCH IS WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH.

HAS ANYONE NOTICED ?

Last month the country had wonderful celebrations and remembrances to honor Black History Month. It was great.

All the local schools had something . One college had marching bands, amateur choirs, movie festivals, vendors and inspirational speakers. It was fun as well as instructive.

Even the local Acme had a display to note the month with a big display dedicated to the new president.  Fair enough.

Now it is the time to honor women, their struggles and achievements.Let’s take a look at the festivities being held to acknowledge more than 50% of humanity.

…….. ……. …….. ……. …… …… …… …… …… …… …… …… …… ….. ….. …… …… …… …..

That’s the way it is in my community as well.

At my own college it came as a shock to the powers that be that there even was someone who would remember  a Women’s History Month.  OOPS!

Then as they scrambled to “throw something together” they wanted to focus on “the positive”

by having guitar playing and pleasant art work displays. Discussions regarding Domestic violence (which is exploding), rape (also exploding) Human Trafficking aka slavery,child care issues , economic problems peculiar to women.

And while this is not, nor should it be, a contest between siblings, “His slice is bigger than mine, Mommy,” there is something to be said for the amount of attention paid and respect given.

So on that score it is Black History Month 95% and Women’s History Month 2%.

Some of that is our own fault.

Women are notorious for letting men off the hook.

But that is not good for us, our daughters or even the guys.

So here’s what I want you to do:

Contact your local schools and ask what programs they will be holding to honor Women’s History. Focus on the women of your own locality.

Call your community media – radio, TV local paper. Pay special attention to your PBS station.

Ask your place of worship, or fraternal organization to “remember the ladies,” to quote Abigal Adams.

Read up on some history yourself. Start with Abigal A., Betsy R., Martha W., Sally H.,Sojoourner T.,Katherine,Susan B.,Elizabeth Ann S, Alice Paul etc Or read one of the wonderful books written by the first women Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Tell a story about the women in your own family to the young people you know.

History is not dead. it is all around us and within us. We ignore it at our peril.

WASHINGTON (AP) – An arrest warrant was issued Tuesday for an imprisoned Salvadoran immigrant in the killing of federal intern Chandra Levy, nearly eight years after the case captivated the nation’s capital and ended the career of a congressman.

The warrant accuses Ingmar Guandique (gwan-DEE’-kay) of killing Levy on May 1, 2001, as she walked her dog through Washington’s Rock Creek Park, said U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Taylor. Guandique, 27, is already serving time in a federal prison in Adelanto, Calif., for attacking two women in the same park.

“It dawned on me that there’s very little I can do or anyone else can do for the Levys other than to offer them justice,” District of Columbia Police Chief Cathy Lanier said at a news conference. “This has been a long time coming.”

The warrant is the latest development in an investigation that had gone cold for years after destroying the career of former U.S. Rep. Gary Condit of California.

Investigators in 2002 questioned Guandique in Levy’s slaying after he was convicted in the other attacks, but he was not charged at the time.

Levy was 24 and had just completed an internship with the U.S. Bureau of Prisons when she disappeared in May 2001 after leaving her Washington, D.C., apartment. The Modesto, Calif., woman was wearing jogging clothes when she vanished, and a man walking his dog found her skull and bones in the park a year later.

Authorities questioned Condit, her congressman, in the disappearance, but he was never a suspect in her death. Condit, a popular Democrat for a dozen years in his district, was reportedly having an affair with Levy, and the negative publicity from the case was cited as the main reason for his overwhelming primary loss in 2002.

On Feb. 20, Levy’s parents, Robert and Susan, said Lanier had told them an arrest was coming within days. Investigators spent last week interviewing two inmates Guandique spoke to while in prison, according to a person close to the Levy investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the investigation.

Levy’s parents did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment Tuesday morning, and their spokeswoman Judy Smith said she could not immediately comment on the news. No one answered the door at the Levys’ tan, split-level home in Modesto, Calif.

Authorities said they hoped Guandique would be brought to Washington sometime in the next two months to face a charge of first-degree murder. He was set to be released from prison on Oct. 5, 2001. If convicted in Levy’s death, he could face up to 60 years more behind bars.

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Associated Press Writer Matt Apuzzo in Washington and Garance Burke in Modesto, Calif., contributed to this report.

The neocon Fox television network has violated decency standards by broadcasting the “s-word” and the “f-word” in family-viewing time slots. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled in March that broadcasting such vulgarities was “indecent.” The FCC, however, did not impose a fine on Fox. Nevertheless, Fox appealed the FCC ruling, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York decided in Fox’s favor. The Court said that it is “arbitrary and capricious” for the FCC to prohibit primetime profanity, in essence saying it violates free-speech protections. A spokesman for Fox said that “government regulation of content serves no purpose other than to chill artistic expression in violation of the First Amendment” (Reuters, June 4).

Your Editor remembers the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964, which was about civil rights. In its wake, the Filthy Speech Movement was devised as a mockery by beatniks and bohemians. It primarily consisted of homosexual beat poet Allen Ginsberg and his buddies standing on campus and shouting random obscenities at passersby — you know, “artistic expression.” The Free Speech Movement didn’t want to have anything to do with them, at least not officially.

The Filthy Speech Movement can now be declared victorious. When the Fox television network, which brownnoses for the Bush Administration, sues for its “right” to curse, you know obscene language has won.

DOSSIER: Language & its Destruction