Posted by Dr. Demarche
Those readers who know me from my days at the Daily Demarche know that public diplomacy (PD), the practice of getting our message out into the world, is one of my primary concerns. As a Foreign Service Officer I constantly come into contact with people from around the world who echo the same message: “It’s not Americans I dislike, it is your policies, the way you insist on interfering on the global stage, and the way your “culture” is imposed on the rest of the world.” And yes, you can actually hear the quotations on the word culture in that sentence. In fact, many folks point to our PD programs as examples of our “interference” and cultural assault- an article entitled ” Real Men Moisturize” for a Department of State Arabic language magazine being a prime example (see my old post here about that fiasco). Many people, including myself, have at times been highly critical of our PD efforts, but what might be even worse than our paltry and often pathetic attempts at outreach is the amount of foreign PD that we put up with at home.
As the sole superpower and world leader it is only reasonable that our actions are highly scrutinized on the world stage. The actions, and inactions, of our government have a ripple effect around the globe. Having said that, should we allow, let alone welcome, foreign governments and non-state actors (everything from al-Qaeda to Bono) to interject themselves into our system of governance? Because, whether you realize it or not, we do. Over the course of my next few posts I plan to examine topics ranging from the Islamic influence in our grade schools and Universities to the blatant interference of the Mexican government in our politics to the hold the Bonos of the world have over our consciousness.
Let’s start with former President Clinton’s favorite special interest: the children.
Everyone in the United States has at one time or another seen the commercials exhorting you to talk to your kids about drugs before the drug dealers do. Those commercials, of course, do not exist for topics such as religion, or history. But have you ever asked your kids what they know about the Middle East, Islam and terrorism? Ever looked at their history or social studies books? You jut might be surprised- many of the sponsors of hatred, if not outright terrorism, have beaten you to the punch. Much ado has been made about radical mosques in America, and the movement of many violent criminals towards Islam in our prisons. Very little has been mentioned about what our children are taught, or who underwrites the continuing education classes their teachers attend.
In October of last year JTA: Global News Service of the Jewish People ran a four part series entitled Tainted Teachings: What your kids are learning about Israel, America and Islam. Ignored by the MSM, this series focuses on the influence of Saudi Arabia (hence Wahhabi Islam) in education, detailing three methods by which the Haus of Saud enters into our classrooms:
The first is through teacher-training seminars that provide teachers with graduate or continuing-education credits.
The second is through the dissemination of supplementary teaching materials designed and distributed with Saudi support. Such materials flood the educational system and are available online.
The third is through school textbooks paid for by taxpayers, some of them vetted by activists with Saudi ties, who advise and influence major textbook companies about the books’ Islamic, Arab, Palestinian, Israeli and Middle Eastern content.
In 2004 Daniel Pipes published Spreading Islam in American Public Schools , which provided a link to DawaNet.com’s (da’wa meaning to proselytize) Dawa in public schools page. This site emphasizes:
Students of all grades and their parents should regularly scan textbooks to detect any biased material on Islam. If any is found, it should be brought to the attention of the teachers and the school authorities, providing them with the correct information with evidence, and have the teacher announce to the students the correct information.
This is of course, valid advice for all parents. Our children should learn that the world is a place of wondrous variety, but just as they learn to look both ways before crossing the street, or not to touch a hot stove, they should learn to think critically when approaching any subject, and it is up to us to teach them that. Read your kid’s textbooks and talk to their teachers- find out what they are learning, and whenever possible, who is backing their education.
The folks at DawaNet.com know that young minds are indeed impressionable:
Students are routinely exposed in their classroom to new information and opinions, hence they tend to be more receptive to new beliefs and ideas.
Schools are therefore fertile grounds where the seeds of Islam can be sowed inside the hearts of non-Muslim students. Muslim students should take ample advantage of this opportunity and present to their schoolmates the beautiful beliefs of Islam.
It is 2006, do you know what your kids are studying?
(Part two of this series will look at the President’s announcement of the National Security Language Initiative and what college students are learning about the world today, and from whom.)
At last, someone is starting to notice the extent of foreign PD influence in our classrooms! At the college level, it’s almost as if we’ve outsourced our humanities education abroad. At home, foreign governments support favored candidates for local school boards (D.C.), who then push specific textbooks and policies—and eventually, I expect, influence the teacher hiring process.
This is spreading because, of course, foreign supporters offer to pick up part of the tab for school expenses, just like our government does. Unlike our government, however, this support is discretionary, dependent both on the subject matter and how it is taught. Oil-gorged governments now have the resources to increase these efforts.
Critical thinking thus takes a back seat to raw indoctrination. If you tell your child to stick to the Enlightenment spirit of inquiry, proof, and reasoning you may discover that you are doing him or her a grave disservice, as the result may be low grades from the teacher or professor. The retreat to rote and regurgitation meshes perfect with the leftist need to avoid their failures in the twentieth century.
Appeals that the teacher is being “unreasonable” (or even false!) may be quashed on “academic freedom” grounds, or the appeals process simply halted without explanation. Schools refer to such procedures as “good governance”.
The DawaNet appeal to indoctrinate students is especially pernicious because the emphasis is to tell potential converts anything to get them to convert, then point out the penalty for “apostasy” afterwards. (I recall a prize-winning Jordanian author died last year, a fellow renowned for writing a book advising his co-religionists to do exactly that.) Not too long ago, I met a recent convert to Islam. He was busy learning Arabic from an English-Arabic dictionary. I asked if he had looked up what was Arabic for “black man” and “slave”. He did not like the answers. The next day, his manner was different, as if he was struggling with some emotional distress – but he did not speak to me again.
[...] . . . is here. [...]
Trivial and a non-problem. When they get to university, they will learn that there is no god, period. The Catholics have been doing this for thousands of years and it is not very effective, judged by the numbers of Catholics then vs the numbers of Catholics now. As further evidence I offer the current crop of professors, who for the most part went thru religous training of this sort at that age. Look how ‘religous’ they are. That would make a rational person wonder how effective the training is. As the father of three and the grandfather of 2, my opinion is that the educational establishment greatly over-estimates it’s effect on children. The Mullahs think that it will work for them despite not working for christians because they have the ‘perfect’ and only ‘true’ religion. ROFLMAO.
If you want to see a REAL Islamic threat, look down the corridor at foggy bottom. Rumor is that a cabal of mooruhuns there are advocating MAD as the policy to deal with Iran becoming a nuclear power.
Somewhere in the bowels of the Dirkson Building ( is that the name, it’s been so long since I was there that I forget which dead white guy it was named after, Dulles got the airport, and it was foggy bottom waaaay before anything was built there) there is bound to be a copy of “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy” (Library of Congress Card Number 58-12048) Kissinger’s little book that shaped US policy for the ‘Cold War’. In that book he gave the world several new terms, ‘Third World’ and MAD being foremost among them. I bring this up because if you were to peruse that book, you would see that Henry da K’s base premise is that MAD requires ‘rational actors’ to work.
I submit to you that anyone who hears voices and thinks GOD ( ALLAH) is talking to them is not rational, at least by how rational is understood by western civilization. Back in more enlightened times, people that heard voices were put where they could not harm them selves or anyone else and medicated while the P-shrink tried to cure them. Now days they run nations and work at the state department. I cannot help but conclude that anyone who advocates a MAD strategy with the Iranians is as insane as the Mullahs are.
So be thankfull that the Islamists are blowing funds on textbooks instead fissil material or delivery systems.
Just a note to “stehpinkeln.” I agree with your point that the educational establishment can over-estimate its influence. But I’d like to remind you that atheism is just as much a religion as anything else. I’ve known folks who were raised atheists, taught atheism in their public schools, and went to secular public universities and emerged as passionate believers in the faith, defending all arguments against it with impressive intellectual force. Ever heard of C.S. Lewis? G.K Chesterton? The idea that religious faith is “cured” by the “grown- ups” at the university is laughable. Write a book that debunks Lewis’ “The Problem of Pain” or Chesterton’s “The Everlasting Man” and then I might consider your notion that faith in God is not for responsible or intellectually honest adults. Besides the intellectual giants who have articulated the practical and spiritual wisdom of Christian faith, try ignoring the experiential knowledge that has led people to faith. Try not believing in God when you’re miraculously healed of a boating accident that permanently scars your entire face and blows your hand off. Try not believing in God when a little old lady walks into your hospital room and prays for you in Jesus’ Name, and suddenly the scars on your face are gone and replaced by perfectly healthy skin, and there is a healthy fully functioning hand where there was no hand before. Try not believing in God when after being miraculously healed you realize that when YOU pray for people in Jesus’ Name THEY are getting healed too. Also, I thought your use of the Catholic church as a standard to measure Christianity’s effectiveness in education was a little fool-hardy. The Catholic church has been in trouble ever since the Reformation. However, the pentecostal/charismatic Christian movement is growing around the world (including the US and Europe) at such a rapid pace per year that some people joke that by 2050 there will be more Christians than people on earth.
There is professional help available. You just have to seek it. And atheism is NOT a belief, despite what your dictionary says. It is the lack of belief in a devine Being. It is also the single largest ‘religious’ catagory on this planet. And getting larger. Every relion shares some elements with all other religions. Foremost is the Belif that they are the only ‘true faith’ and all others are false, that only they know the “truth”. Obviously that cannot be correct.
I seriously doubt your christian sect is the fastest growing ‘religion’ in the world. Gal Fung, Islam and the Sciencetologists (sp? Fooking wakkos is more accurate) all make the same clkaim, with a similar lack of supporting evidence. And for your C.S. Lewis, who was a clever wordsmith, but not much else, I give you Albert Einstein, who when asked about religion said he didn’t believ god plays dice with the universe, or words to that effect. He said if he was forced to choose a religion, he would choose Buddism, since it was the most logical. I’m not sure where the fine line between religion and philosophy lies, or which side of it Buddah was on. Notice Buddah NEVER claimed godhood, it was his followers that made those claims. Buddah was an atheist. That rings me to the second thing all religons have in common. A parasitic class that feeds off the suckers/worshipers.
Lets agree on something. You are free to worship snakes and talk in tongues as long as I am free to laugh at you and worship nothing.
While attempts to give students in our schools anything but an objective picture of Islam are to be identified and snuffed out, I think the much larger danger posed to our students is the steady encroachment of Chistian fundamentalists who, among other things, are working very hard to have “Creationsim” taught along side evolution. The number of students truly in danger of becoming Islamic jihadists is very small, but unless we are vigilant, a large number of students could graduate our educational system not understading the difference between faith and science. And isn’t the confusion of faith and fact the most powerful weapon in the hands of religious fundamentalists of all stripes?
This story broke in 2002 in the Washington Post of all places. To my knowledge nothing substantial has been done to change things. I hope somebody can show me that’s wrong or else help to change it.
I remembered the details and googled for it. This is the first thing I found:
The real question is how much of a problem is this really? Have these materials found their way into classrooms all across the United States? Likely not, but I don’t really know. Thus Stehpinkeln’s “trivial and non-problem” ring true to to me, barring some statistical evidence to the contrary. But, regarding religion, believing that there is no supreme being, however you slice it, is a belief (as opposed to agnosticism). It therefore requires as much faith as any belief in some supreme being, however cleverly the proposition is phrased. One does not just a “lack” of belief in a supreme being, it is the belief that no such being exists! It is true that the historical Buddha never claimed godhood. It is entirely mistaken to label either Sakyamuni or any other practicing Buddhist as an atheist. Buddhism may not define a supreme universal being, but the very practice acknowledges its existence. And the vast majority of lay Buddhists do actively believe in “all things visible and invisible” as much as any lay Christian.
Dr. D’s article about the Wahhabi PD onslaught on American soil makes me curious about the schools in my area. I’ll have to ask some of my friends who teach if they’ve seen anything that might resemble Wahhabi PD material. Now, to continue the tangent about God and atheism (if the moderators allow – this might be long-winded), here is a response to comments about the growth rate of charismatic Christianity. Many years ago I would’ve shared your skepticism about the Christian charismatic movement (which is an umbrella term referring usually to the charismatic Christian house church mvement) being the fastest growing religious movement. But when I came across some data that pointed in that direction it got me considering the possibility. When my experiences backed up the data I was convinced. The data from Barna Report ( which specializes in measuring growth rates of religions) is what caught my attention. In recent decades they’ve had to add a new category that looks at the house church movement (particularly the underground house churches in China and the Middle East). The numbers show the worldwide charismatic house church movement at seven hundred million with a growth rate of 8% per year. Until 1960, Western evangelicals outnumbered non-Western evangelicals by two to one. As of 2000, non-Western evangelicals outnumbered Westerners by four to one. By 2010, it will likely be seven to one. Non-Western nations are now sending more missionaries out than Western nations. The underground church in China is growing so fast that there is a good chance the nation will be Christianized in the next 50 years. The Chinese Christians are so passionate about their faith that they have pledged to send out 100,000 missionaries by 2010 to go “back to Jerusalem†and evangelize the Middle East. Islamofascism’s greatest enemy might not be the US. It might be the tidal wave of Chinese Christians who are unhesitant about risking their lives to share the teachings of Christ with radical Muslims. You can see it for yourself at http://www.backtojerusalem.com. The charismatic house movement is characterized by being a bare bones Christianity – no steeples, no liturgies, no pews, no “churchy†traditional stuff – just Christians going out into the streets, sharing and living out the teachings of Christ, and then going back to meet and worship in their homes. And miracles like the one I described in my last “comment†are commonplace in the house churches. Then there’s Africa. Africa’s growth is a lot like China except the movement has more freedom in most of the nations. I have a friend who is a Ghana native as well as a pastor there. He has met with the president of Ghana and other officials several times. In recent years Ghana has decided to become a nation dedicated to Christian principles. My friend even convinced the government to hold a government sponsored national day of prayer. The stories he tells me about growth in the urban areas of Ghana as well as out in the bush are amazing. He actually witnessed a girl who had been long dead come back to life after someone prayed for her. There is much hope for Ghana and Africa as a whole. Uganda has done similar things. I’ve seen footage of the president of Uganda leading the nation in prayer at prayer rallies held in stadiums and declaring “We dedicate the nation of Uganda to Christ!†Uganda’s government has changed dramatically in the last few decades. There are good reasons why Uganda’s HIV rate has dramatically dropped to be one of the lowest in Africa. South America – beginning with the student revivals of 1951 in Argentina – has had amazing growth spurts of the charismatic movement as well. The numbers are staggering. We’re talking about single churches exploding to sizes of 100,000 or more all over South America. Entire cities are being transformed by it (i.e. Cali, Columbia). I could go on and on. I’d recommend “Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power†by David Aikman and “Megashift†by Jim Rutz for some interesting commentaries on these movements. The irony of all this is that Non-Western nations are now sending multitudes of missionaries to America and Europe. They are trying to save us now. In the coming years you will see more and more evidence of this. To me this is good news. I think our nation needs more of the simple bare bones Spirit-filled teachings of Christ and less of the Americanized comfort culture Christianity. After the hope and joy that I’ve seen God spread in hopeless places throughout the world, I know that the Middle East can change as well.
[...] It was with great interest that I read the comments to my last post, regarding the influence of Islam in our children’s textbooks and in the continuing education classes that their teachers attend. Solomon2 cut right to the heart of my thesis: …foreign supporters offer to pick up part of the tab for school expenses, just like our government does. Unlike our government, however, this support is discretionary, dependent both on the subject matter and how it is taught. Oil-gorged governments now have the resources to increase these efforts. Critical thinking thus takes a back seat to raw indoctrination. If you tell your child to stick to the Enlightenment spirit of inquiry, proof, and reasoning you may discover that you are doing him or her a grave disservice, as the result may be low grades from the teacher or professor. The retreat to rote and regurgitation meshes perfect with the leftist need to avoid their failures in the twentieth century. [...]