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What They've Thought
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What They Thought March 5, 2006 Alan
Caruba Click here for columnist bios |
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If it hasn’t occurred to most Americans by now, Arabs don’t think like us. They see the world in very different terms. Rationality, logic, and common sense do not rate high among their priorities. Not long ago, I had the opportunity to briefly work with Edward V. Badolato, a retired U.S. Marine Colonel with a distinguished career in government and private enterprise. Col. Badolato is a graduate of the U.S. Naval War College with several tours of duty in the Middle East, beginning in 1967 shortly after the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War. His tours took him to nearly every country in the Middle East. Following his retirement, he served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy in both the Reagan and Bush administrations (1984-89). As such, he was the principal architect of the government’s readiness and response to terrorist threats to our energy infrastructure. In 1980, he wrote a white paper, “Learning to Think like an Arab Muslim: a Short Guide to Understanding the Arab Mentality.” I am going to provide a brief introduction to it. At only 14 pages, it is not a long document, but it succinctly explains why Americans and others in the West are encountering such difficulty understanding why Arab Muslims appear, by our standards, to be completely insane. Why, for example, would people who believe they have the one, true religion, not hesitate to blow up mosques and other holy places? Why would they attack weddings and funerals? Why is beheading so popular among terrorists? Why would a few cartoons set off rioting and killing? And what does all this mean to us in terms of the threat it represents? Badolato begins by describing Arabs as “a proud and sensitive people whose culture is mainly derived from three key factors: family, language, and religion.” The Arab cultural system has existed for centuries and predates the introduction of Islam around 610 AD and its rapid spread after the death of Muhammad in 632 AD. “An Arab’s commonly accepted view of the world (is) basically threatening and harsh.” Arab Muslims and presumably others because Islam has more than a billion adherents, divide the world between themselves and what they call Dar al Harb, literally, “the world of war.” So, you are either a Muslim or you are an infidel and, by definition, a threat to Islam until you convert or are killed. This may seem harsh, but true believers in Islam hold all other religions in contempt. The view of Judaism is psychopathic. Christians do not fare much better. The contempt for Hindus and Buddhists, religions deemed not to have “a book,” completes the utter certitude of Muslims that they alone are truly religious. You might feel that way, too, if you were compelled to pray five times a day, at dawn, midday, late afternoon, sunset, and nightfall. There are five prescribed prayers and all are in Arabic, a language Arabs will tell you is superior to all others. Verbal grandiosity is greatly applauded by Arabs. When facts are trumped by “ideas,” however, you have entered Alice’s bizarre Wonderland. Badolato writes that, “An Arab’s concept of the world has occasionally been described as a series of seven concentric circles with the individual Arab at the center. Thus, he has his family, an extended family or tribe, an immediate geographic region, and then his country. It is within the family that the psychology of the Muslim Arab is formed and observers have noted that, “the fluctuation between a loving mother and stern disciplinarian father can add to the complexity of growing up and often fosters schizoid personality traits.” To put it another way, Arabs can go from hot to cold and back again so fast that it is bewildering. Arabs live in a black and white world with no shadings of grey. Why do Arabs seem to be so violent? Conflict can be found in a family culture of competitiveness that is instilled at an early age. An old Arab saying aptly describes this. “I against my brother, my brother and I against our cousins, my brother, my cousins and I against the world.” Add to this the way Arab history has been dominated “by warfare, domestic upheaval, and struggles against invasions from outside the Arab world” and you begin to grasp a mindset that will resist anything that is not Arab. As Badolato describes it, it is an “almost visceral mistrust of any outside group or more specifically any Western state whose true ultimate intentions cannot readily be determined.” For Arabs, their wars such as the conflict between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s really began at the battle of Qaddisiya over a thousand years ago! The Islamic wars following the death of Mohammad led to the Sunni and Shiite divisions within Islam. It is a history of tension and conflict that literally dates back to the earliest years of Islam. Westerners might dismiss this by saying, “Get over it!” but the Arab mentality is totally rooted in the past. And why not? Not one single word of the 114 surahs (chapters) of the Quran has been changed in fourteen centuries and they describe in detail the conduct of every hour of every day of an Arab Muslim’s life. As Badolato describes it, “It is as if one single document contained our Constitution, our legal code, national education policy, business practices, inter-personal etiquette, and the Bible.” Welcome to the seventh century AD! What America and the West are up against are Islamic fundamentalists and countless sympathizers who would destroy us in a desperate effort to retain their Arab identity. Thus, when Palestinians elect Hamas, a terrorist organization, as their government, the West recoils, but the same is true throughout the Middle East and across northern Africa. In any election, Islamic fundamentalists would take control of the politics of these nations. Their very identity as Arabs and/or Muslims is at stake. The validity of Islam as the one, true faith is at stake. “Huge segments of the population simply cannot cope with modernity and the social and political changes taking place.” What we see as an improvement in the lives of millions of Arabs, changes in their educational system, women’s rights and their inclusion in the work force, improved literacy rates, better nutritional standards, advanced health and hygiene, all things that Westerners embrace, threaten Arabs. This explains why the Middle East has remained the most backward region of the world for centuries and why it now constitutes the greatest threat to the modern world. Arab Muslims are
not like us. They do not want to be like us. If they become more like
us they will have to let go of a culture that both stunts their humanity
and provides an odd, brutal security blanket at the same time. |
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Our society is not all that different from previous societies. That’s kind of sad isn’t it? There is a tendency for people to gravitate towards the exact same thing all of the time. We just can’t help ourselves. I’ve heard a large number of people comment on the absence of real men in our world these days. I thought I’d take the time to explain that to those who haven’t figured it out on their own. But before I begin let’s examine what a real man is. A real man is one of those people who strikes out on their own and finds their way in this world with little help from those around them. At one time men did things like become the robber barons of the old west and went on to form huge corporations. But something strange happened after they passed into the dusts of time: Those who came after them weren’t like the men who created that which they joined. They were a very different creature and adapted in a different world. We’re all shaped by the fires that forge us. We all work in a similar environment these days, if we have positions and not jobs. It is an environment that brings up memories of those old T-shirts that said, "Warning. Human. Do not fold spindle or mutilate." Does anyone ever wonder why we have to take all of those stupid diversity classes? How about the sexual harassment classes? They all have one thing in common. They came into existence because someone didn’t do something they were supposed to do. It really is that simple. Racist in the office? Shhh! Eventually, something happens and the company gets sued. The next thing you know you find yourself wasting more time in a class because someone didn’t take the time to do what they were supposed to do. It’s the same with sexual harassment cases. Rather than deal with the person in the office that’s causing all of the trouble a department head will try to internalize a problem. Eventually the problem becomes common knowledge and there is no way to fix it. Once again it’s back to court. But the lawyer and the corporation get together and decide what needs to be in a class so we will all know how to behave. In short they didn’t do their jobs so we have to waste our time. One has to wonder how it comes to this, but it is really quite obvious. We are becoming more and more interconnected. As we become more interconnected we need organizations that can handle the connectivity. The larger the organization the more it has to think in formulas. There is no time for actual thinking. The larger a group gets, no matter what its purpose, the less it feels, the less it thinks and the more like the Borg from Star Trek it becomes. Formulas fail to take into consideration that they are dealing with individuals, so the values they come up with have huge residuals. Those residuals are called humanity and understanding. It is for this reason that there is always a huge disconnect between the people and the system. It is a failure to communicate. Sometimes the results are tragic and they usually end up just being another class you have to take. That is because formulas are for science and machines not people. Something strange happen on the way to the top on the corporate, or political, ladder. I don’t think there are many people that plan to become what they become but there is no preventing it for those who don’t question their own motives. There is a sort of psychosis that leads to the personal sellout. It is a desire to belong to something greater than oneself. I think most individuals start out with a desire to change the world. They look up and see many things wrong but as they get higher and higher the details below them become indistinct and they begin to think a little differently. They conclude that the system actually does work because they managed to make it within it. The sad part is that humanity allows many things to get completely out of control. There will always be a few individuals that will manage to act like a black hole and draw all of the power to them. There is an old saw regarding that: “It is easier to seek forgiveness than permission.” That is the realm those people operate in. Those people are like the gangs that later become first insurgents and then legitimate power structures. This is true from the hood to the DNC to the UN. This is but one of the many reasons that history is a continuous loop. History is a record of the glowing successes that were dragged into oblivion by the lesser who followed and didn’t understand. R.A. Hawkins Web Site Contact Back to Top |
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Hi there, and welcome to another fine edition of the Conventional Wisdom Mailbag. I’m your host, Conventional Wisdom. You may remember me from such popular misconceptions as “Mariah Carey’s career is over,” “Saddam has weapons,” and “Don’t worry, those levees should hold back the water.” This week, I’ll be answering questions from several of JDM’s astute readers. As always, no topic is out of bounds — so, please, feel free to fire away. Ready? On we go. • • • Dear Conventional Wisdom, How come Dick Cheney didn’t get in trouble for shooting that guy a couple of weeks ago? I shot someone once, and I went to jail. What gives? Is there a double standard in play here? Or is this just another example of the Bush-Cheney White House rising above the law? Sincerely, Dear Someone, Um, hello? Have you read the Constitution? I have. It says a lot of things in it. But you know what it doesn’t say? It doesn’t say that a sitting vice president is forbidden from shooting a 78-year-old lawyer named Harry Whittington during a mid-February 2006 quail-hunting trip. So in answer to your question, sir, no, this isn’t just another example of Bush-Cheney rising above the law. Because, obviously, what Cheney did wasn’t against the law in the first place. If it was, it would be in the Constitution. Stop putting words in our Founding Fathers’ mouths. • • • Dear Conventional Wisdom, I find it interesting how you’re one letter into this mailbag and already defending the establishment at any and all costs. Well, here’s one for you: How come the White House is now referring to its domestic spying program as a “terrorist surveillance program?” If that’s really what it is, then how come it took six weeks for them to come up with a more appealing name for it? Stick that in your memory hole and smoke it. Sincerely,
Dear Orwell, What the hell are you talking about? Memory hole? Domestic spying? It’s like you’re spouting complete and utter nonsense here. If you’re on the phone with terrorists, we want to know about it. And if you’re on the phone with your Aunt Tillie, who happens to be backpacking through Afghanistan or, say, making a sandwich in her kitchen in Toledo — well, we want to know about that, too. We’re in the middle of a war on terror here. The president’s terrorist surveillance program has always been just that — a terrorist surveillance program. I don’t remember ever referring to it as domestic spying. In fact, I don’t even remember ever having this conversation. Where am I? Who am I talking to? What have you done with my shoes? • • • Dear Conventional Wisdom, What’s your take on this Dubai Ports World deal? Sincerely,
Dear Question, I’m glad you asked me that. People seem to think I’ll defend the president no matter what he does. But that’s simply untrue. Like most of America, I’m irrationally scared of Arabs. And like most of America, I’m irrationally opposed to six major American ports being owned by an Arab company. I mean, what’s next? Selling the White House to the Chinese? Or the Washington Monument to the guys who filmed Brokeback Mountain? This is America, damn it. I disagree with the president’s stance here for the same reason I disagree with his lax border policies. You see, it’s not that I love George W. Bush — it’s just that I hate anyone who isn’t like me. There’s a difference, and I really wish folks would give me credit for that. • • • Dear Conventional Wisdom, Settle a bet for me. I think we’re on the verge of World War III here, but my buddy says we’re actually on the verge of World War IV. How is this possible? Did I just sleep through World War III or something? Tell me my buddy is wrong. Sincerely,
Dear Confused, Your buddy is right when he says a third World War already happened. That was the Cold War, and the only reason we didn’t call it a World War at the time was because we weren’t sure if we were going to win it yet. However, looking back, we now realize we got the numbering system wrong from the very beginning. What we know as “World War I” was actually the fourth in a series of six World Wars. “World War II” was World War V, and the Cold War was World War VI. That represented the “End of History.” And that makes what we’re witnessing now — the growing unrest between the West and Islam — the first in a series of three exciting prequels. So you and your buddy are both wrong. This is neither World War III nor World War IV, but rather World War I: The Phantom Menace. Thanks for asking • • • Dear Conventional Wisdom, I’m trying to come up with an emoticon for the Prophet Mohammed, but I can’t figure out how to draw the turban. Any ideas? Sincerely,
Dear Dane, Thanks, but I’ll pass @:-) Jonathan David Morris Web Site Contact Back to Top |
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April 15th is once again approaching and with it the necessity of filling out your tax return. It is a good time to reflect on the taxes you do pay - and especially on the taxes you may soon be forced to pay. Throughout the year you paid federal taxes through withholding, including Social Security payroll taxes. You also paid state income taxes, unless you’re fortunate enough to live in Texas or another state without an income tax. You paid local property taxes. You paid local sales taxes and numerous miscellaneous taxes on your vehicles and gasoline and so many other things. Like most people, you probably feel taxed to death by all these layers of taxes. Well, hold on to your wallets, because the United Nations once again has launched a plan to impose a whole new level of global taxes on us. The latest UN tax scheme was revealed at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January. At this conference of the world’s financial elite, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) unveiled a UN plan to take seven trillion dollars from developed nations for use by the UN to save the rest of the world from all of its problems. The United Nations remains determined to rob from wealthy countries and, after taking a big cut for itself, send what’s left to the poor countries. Of course, most of this money will go to the very dictators whose reckless policies have impoverished their citizens. According to the international bureaucrats of the UN, wherever poverty exists in the rest of the world it is always our fault. According to them, our prosperity comes not from hard work, legal protection of property rights, and our capitalist system, but rather because we exploit the poor of the third world. Somehow, it’s always our fault. Where will the seven trillion dollars to fund the latest UN scheme come from? Much of it is to come from a UN-imposed fine on countries that in the UN’s judgment are polluting too much. This attack on productivity will slow our economy and lead to a loss of jobs in the United States. The UN global tax plan also resurrects the long-held dream of the “Tobin Tax,” and doubles the targeted income from such a tax to a whopping three trillion dollars. The "Tobin tax," named after the Yale professor who proposed it, would be imposed on all worldwide currency transactions. Such a tax could prove quite lucrative for the UN, given the vast amount of currency that trades hands at certain times. It also might be a politically acceptable starting point, because most average people do not engage in cross-border currency transactions. A dangerous precedent would be set, however: the idea that the UN possesses legitimate taxing authority to fund its operations. Since I was elected
to Congress I have been fighting continuously against these UN efforts
to pick your pocket. In the 109th Congress I successfully amended the
Foreign Operations Appropriations Act of 2005 to prohibit any of the
funds in the Act from being used by the U.N. to develop or publicize
any proposal concerning taxation or fees on any United States person
to raise revenue for the U.N. or any of its specialized or affiliated
agencies. Of course, my preference is that the United States end its participation in the corrupt UN entirely, and I introduce HR 1146 in every Congress to do just that. But until my colleagues are willing to take this important step, I will continue to offer measures like my amendment last year to help protect your hard-earned money from the greedy hands of the globalist United Nations. Rep. Ron Paul Web Site Back to Top |
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In response to inflammatory remarks made by Jay Bennish, a teacher at Overland High School in Aurora, Colo., Walter Williams penned a column entitled “Youth indoctrination” in which he ponders, “Regardless of whether you're pro-Bush or anti-Bush, pro-American or anti-American, I would like to know whether there's anyone who believes the teacher's remarks were appropriate for any classroom setting, much less a high school geography class. It's clear the students aren't being taught geography. They're getting socialist lies and propaganda.”1 The aforementioned teacher made provocative, anti-American statements to his 10th grade “Human Geography” class, such as; “The U.S. has engaged in ‘7,000 terrorist attacks against Cuba,’ and, ‘Capitalism is at odds with humanity, at odds with caring and compassion and at odds with human rights.’"2 Because court precedent can only point those who share his outrage in the general direction of how this lecture might be perceived by legal minds, there is no definitive answer to Mr. Williams’ question; there cannot be offered any foregone conclusions about whether or not Jay Bennish would be treated as a victim in this case or if his teaching would be considered in violation of the school curriculum. According to information available at www.enotes.com, K-12, “Teachers in public schools have limited freedoms in the classroom to teach without undue restrictions on the content or subjects for discussion.”3 When determining whether academic freedom has been violated, prior court rulings have taken into consideration factors such as, “age, experience, and grade level of students.”4 Furthermore, legal precedent has generally conceded that, “The content taught by a teacher must be relevant to and consistent with the teacher's responsibilities, and a teacher cannot promote a personal or political agenda in the classroom.”5 Curriculum guidelines generally fall under the local school board’s jurisdiction. Generally, teaching methods, books, and other educational tools fall under this domain. A teacher’s lesson plans should be, “designed to teach or convey particular knowledge or skills to students.”6 Moreover, “state laws have almost uniformly required the obedience of subordinate employees, including the classroom teacher, to follow the board's curriculum choices and related mandates.”7 Neither academic freedom nor the First Amendment “gives teachers the authority to disregard the curriculum directives of the board.” 8 School Boards have legitimate reasons to be concerned when a teacher promotes a political agenda. At the very least, any good teacher must present both sides and then leave it to the students to form any opinions with regards to the issue. Some states have statutes and regulations which define, "legitimate pedagogical concerns”9. Here is the catch, “Schools need to identify pedagogical concerns before making decisions about a curriculum.”10 Representing Jay Bennish, Attorney David Lane on the March 3, 2006 edition of “Dayside” said that this particular course curriculum had prior approval of the school district. The question is whether the teacher will want to sue the district over this possible “breach of contract”. Although the Tinker v. Des Moines (1969) ruling does not compel a public school to affirmatively sponsor speech that conflicts with its educational goals, clearly if Lane’s statement was accurate, then Bennish might have a case. From the sound of it, Bennish may have put together his own curriculum and received prior approval from the school’s administration to implement his educational goals and objectives. If his curriculum, as it was being taught, did not receive prior approval from his superiors and the school board, then it is likelier a court ruling would either reflect Boring v. Buncombe Board of Education (4th Cir. 1998) in which the plaintiff failed to, “show that their speech was a matter of public importance or public concern.”11 The majority determined that the teacher’s petition was “nothing more than an ordinary employment dispute,"12 which did not warrant First Amendment protection. Otherwise, because the teacher speech involves the curriculum and occurs in the classroom, a court is equally predisposed to apply precedent established in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier (1987) in which it was determined that school administrators could censor a school-sponsored newspaper and by extension –school sponsored curriculum. 13 The Supreme Court's Hazelwood ruling attempts to achieve a balance between constitutional rights and the pedagogical mission of public schools, arguing that school administrators must have the power to regulate behavior and preserve traditional rules and values. School officials have the authority to, “Censor, if there is a "reasonable" educational justification, any expression that does not properly reflect the school's educational mission.”14 What’s more, “School facilities may be deemed to be public forums [261] only if school authorities have by policy or by practice opened the facilities for indiscriminate use by the general public, or by some segment of the public, such as student organizations. If the facilities have instead been reserved for other intended purposes, communicative or otherwise, then no public forum has been created, and school officials may impose reasonable restrictions on the speech of students, teachers, and other members of the school community.”15 As a rule, “teachers do not have a First Amendment right to trump the curriculum mandated by the school board.” 16 It will be interesting to find out whether or not the actual curriculum being taught by Mr. Bennish was approved by the school board and whether or not the school board will retain its authority after all the hullabaloo. I only hope that my federal taxes aren’t going to support any school districts across the nation that allow this sort of one sided diatribe, whose sole purpose is to undermine the principles on which our Constitution was founded and in which I believe. Reference Links: 14 The
Supreme Court on "Hazelwood": A Reversal on Regulation of
Student Expression. ERIC Digest No. 8. Is
a teacher’s classroom a public forum? Nancy Salvato Web Site Contact Back to Top |
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©2004-2006 by their respective authors. Reprinted by permission. |
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