Thursday, February 02, 2006

Imam Teaches Propaganda at Diablo Valley College

(By Lee Kaplan)

Readers who follow academic infiltration by subversives on our college campuses are probably familiar with my previous article about my attendance in Imam Amer Araim's class, Politics of the Middle East 155B, during the last spring semester at Diablo Valley College (DVC), as well as my follow-up article after meeting with DVC's President Mark Edelstein, and Vice President for Academic Affairs Alice Murillo.

So what was the outcome of my investigative reports? Did Diablo Valley College decide to remove Araim from its list of part-time instructors for incompetence or for indoctrinating his students rather than educating them? Didadministrators take responsibility for course curriculum taught by the imam or make corrections like they should?

Nope. DVC's administration drew the wagons in a circle instead.

After meeting with college President Mark Edelstein and giving him time to "investigate" the matter, and not receiving a promised response as to the disposition of Araim's teaching courses, and repeatedly not having my phone calls returned, I called college Dean Lyn Krause to ask if Araim was still teaching Politics of the Middle East 155B. I was assured he was not. "The course catalog shows the course is not being offered this semester," I was told. I assumed that Araim, a temporary part-time faculty member, had been removed. But the student who tipped me off to Araim's teaching methods during a previous semester (which spurred me to attend Araim's course) did a little checking and found Araim still on the schedule for the Fall 2005 semester through Spring 2006, only now he was teaching three courses at DVC instead of just one. I called the dean back.

I then learned how things really operate at Diablo Valley College.

You have to hand it to the administrators at Diablo Valley College in Northern California, especially President Edelstein and VP for Academic Affairs Alice Murrillo, but also Sociology Department Dean Lyn Krause and Department Chair John Dravlin. When confronted with an imam who teaches blatant Middle Eastern fabrications against the United Statesand Israel in his classes, what do they do to take action? They increase his teaching load from one class the previous semester to three, including adding courses in Introduction to U.S. Government!

What's wrong with Araim, a Muslim imam, teaching Introduction to U.S. Government to lower level college students? Aside from the fact he may not even be a U.S. citizen (something the college district refused to reveal), the man has a track record of conveying to his students the impression that American foreign policy is only a matter of duplicity and opportunism against the Muslim world. He lauds democracy coming to the Middle East, but America gets no credit for it. What's more, Araim has no background in teaching or research on the U.S. government on his resume. A former diplomat for Saddam Hussein, his Ph.D. dissertation was on OPEC and the economics of oil.

When I attended his lecture, some of the juicier bits of knowledge imparted to students at DVC in Politics of the Middle East 155B included:

1) Israel is an "apartheid state" was taught repeatedly every session. (Israel is a pluralistic democracy with equal civil rights for all its citizens and does not practice apartheid like South Africa).

2) Women are not stoned in Iran. (Women are stoned in Iran for adultery and other offenses, including sometimes even for refusing to be raped).

3) Jews, Christians and women are not discriminated against in Middle Eastern Muslim countries. (Common knowledge, anyone who reads a newspaper knows this isn't the case).

4) Hamas and Hezbollah are "liberation" movements, not terrorist groups.

5) Jordan was not part of the Palestine Mandate of 1922 as promised in the Balfour Declaration and reneged by the British against the Jews.

6) Jewish Zionists prior to 1948 stole land from Arabs. (All land that was in fact legally purchased by the Jewish Agency).

7) Israel is a "colonial state" (It was set up by the United Nations much like the Arab states, colonies of Great Britain that were set up after World WarI and is not a colony)

8) U.N. Resolution 242 says that all land in the West Bank belongs to the Arabs (it does not say that per its author, Eugene Rostow).

9) Israel initiated all wars against the Arabs who were victims of Israeli aggression (the Arab League has refused to make peace with Israel for nearly 50 years).

10) The Sheba Farms region of Israel, an area Hezbollah uses as a reason to carry out terrorist attacks on Israel, belongs to Lebanon (the U.N. even signed off on the area as belonging to Israel when it withdrew from Lebanon in the 1980's).

11) According to the student who originally tipped me off to the class, Araim also stated that Saddam Hussein did not gas the Kurds, the Iranians did it.

12) The United States is "hypocritical" in its approach to democracy in Arab states such as Jordan and elsewhere.

13) Araim also provided reading material that claimed that reform Jews practice the Sabbath on Sunday (it's Saturday) and suggests that Jews are not the same as "Zionists."(This separation of Jews from Zionism is used by anti-Israel advocates to claim they are not really anti-Semitic).

14) Tiny Israel intends to conquer all the lands from the Nile River to the Euphrates in Iraq (we were given a one-hour lecture during the last class with this conclusion).

15) Sharia, or Islamic Law, as state law is compatible with democracy (despite its misogyny and denigration of religious minorities).

The Arab newsreel footage I screened in class was filmed in Iraq while Araim worked for Saddam Hussein in 1972 and showed Jews being hanged publicly in Baghdad was "propaganda" according to Araim, who denied the accuracy of the film while telling students that false history taught in a PLO propaganda film he presented earlier was based on actual facts. Araim had a habit in class of making personal attacks and calling me a "propagandist" when confronted with errors of fact or untruths, a highly unprofessional practice for a college instructor.

And Araim allowed information from Arab Internet websites to be presented in class as factual. But they were based more on totalitarian propaganda than facts. In lecturing on the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Araim stated that the organization, set up by Islamic countries to oppose Israel, was started after "Zionists set fire to the Al Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem." He got this information off the OIC website. In fact, a fire was set at the Al Aksa Mosque by a Christian tourist from Australia who had a history of mental illness and who was arrested by Israeli authorities and prosecuted. In another instance, Araim allowed a student during his presentation on Palestine to state the Palestinians were over 3,000 years old as a nationality and culture. This is untrue and something the student admitted he obtained from an Arab website without scholarly verification.

Araim's third class is titled International Relations Now, and may simply be a renaming of the course I exposed earlier, and possibly a place where Araim will again be free to teach students factually incorrect information about the Middle East.

It is possible that Araim knows no better, and was teaching from his "perspective" no matter how untruthful, as DVC President Mark Edelstein tried to claim in our meeting? If that was the case, he is at best--as an academic--incompetent. More likely, Araim's teaching is a way to indoctrinate students in his personal political goals against United States' foreign policy and against Israel in general. Claiming ignorance on Araim's part (as weak a defense as any) does not explain, however, his dissembling when confronted with the truth.

According to Dean Krause, who has advised me that he considers me a "troublemaker," "Araim was retained because there is a shortage of teachers available, and his `evaluations were all good.'" These included evaluations by students and fellow faculty members. Most students' knowledge of Middle East history and even current events can be questionable when it comes to their being under the influence of an instructor with an agenda. I asked Dean Krause, "As for fellow faculty members, how would they evaluate Araim's course content when they did not attend the class?" It seems Araim is a popular fellow and rather charming. Araim is alleged to have obtained his position from contacts made through an interfaith group located in the DVC's college district. The validity of course material or balance is irrelevant if one is a popular instructor.

Department Chair John Dravlin explained Araim's retention is because he has a Ph.D. from the State University of New Yorkand because he used to work for the United Nations. "He's overqualified for what we have," Dravlin explained to me. "Most of our instructors are only required to have a master's degree." When I told Dravlin that I could produce an article by another Arab Ph.D. that said that Jews use the blood of Christian children to make matzoh and that the United Nationsis corrupt, half of it composed of dictatorships (like Araim's former country under Saddam Hussein) and that Mohammar Gaddafi is on the Human Rights Commission, he claimed he had to dash to a meeting.

I decided to do a little more research on Araim. It seems he earned his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Binghampton. His dissertation was on the economics of oil and he is an expert on OPEC. He has no academic background in his resume on studies in U.S. government. In fact, as mentioned, the college administration refused to even tell me if he is a U.S. citizen.

Since he was teaching International Relations also, I checked what he did at the United Nations. He had worked as a diplomat for Saddam Hussein apparently (a good impartial educational background) but later left the dictator's diplomatic corps to work for the United Nationsas a "political affairs coordinator" dealing with "apartheid and colonialism" and had participated in the Durban Conference on Racism. "Political Affairs Coordinator" is a fancy title used by totalitarian groups for "propagandist." The United States was forced to withdraw from the Durban Conference because it was turned into an anti-Semitic diatribe against Israel's right to exist, which explains a lot about Araim's sentiments in the class room.

More -- much more -- here






A textbook case of making Australia's past a blame game

School's back. That means pressing uniforms, searching for the elusive school tie, scraping out last December's lunch from the bottom of the school bag and covering a new batch of textbooks. And, after last week's address by the Prime Minister, wondering what all the fuss is about when it comes to teaching our children about Australian history. So on Sunday I picked up a brand new history text book for first year high-school students. And, there, in chapter nine, under the heading of Australia 1788-1900: Colonisation and Contact are more than 30 pages devoted to the politics of shame. So this is what all the fuss is about.

Students learning about the colonisation of Australia are given a black and white portrait, so to speak. Black is good. White is bad. The textbook quotes a speech by Pat Dodson to describe the idyllic way Aboriginal Australians lived at the time "white invasion is just about to occur". "About three days in every week would be devoted to gathering your food," he says. "Hunting, collecting - a bit less in places of plenty, a bit more in the hard country. The rest of your time would be spent socialising, or in religious observances of different kinds." There is a "rich and complicated legal system" and the "children are more deeply loved than perhaps any children on earth".

Then, into this world comes the "white invader. Their first act is to say the land is terra nullius, that no one owns the land, that it is not used ... Thus begins the Australian Civil War." And that war continues to this day, Dodson says. The author of the text is on Dodson's side, complaining that "the myth of terra nullius" has been "left out of the history books". It is bad enough that this account is factually inaccurate. Terra nullius is not in the history books because, as Michael Connor has shown in his book, The Invention of Terra Nullius, it was a recent concoction. A bogus legal theory propounded to justify political objectives in securing Aboriginal land rights.

But even worse than the promotion of this legal mythology is the continued peddling of the romance of the noble savage. A pre-1788 utopia where much of the week is spent chatting among friends, bowing before spirits and loving children. Even for an alpha male such as Dodson, this is a stretch. One would have thought that, in between recounting the sense of community and sharing - and the bucolic pleasures that filled daily life before "the invasion" - students would also be told of the less sharing side to tribal life - the inter-tribal violence or the brutal treatment of women. But there is no rounding out of history here. Just a one-sided Disneyfication - more Fantasia than Mickey Mouse - of the noble savage. This is not just a dumbing down of history. This is ideology - inculcating a sense of shame in young students about Western civilisation.

There is no mention of British colonisation contributing anything much to Australia - no mention of civilised society or the rule of law. Instead, all the talk is of dark forces reaching Australian shores: forces that are individualistic and competitive and concerned with material gain. There are sneering references to Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Charles Darwin - as examples of Europeans who believed in the "superiority" of Western civilisation, over, say the hunter-gatherer existence of local indigenous people. Reading the text is like learning about Darwin's evolutionary theory in reverse gear. Progress is rather nasty and a source of embarrassment to the authors.

Last week, when John Howard criticised the way history is taught to Australian children, all he sought was some balance. Acknowledge the injustices to indigenous people, but also recognise the "great and enduring heritage of Western civilisation", he said. But the education commandos pounced. We've moved on from the PM's old-fashioned ideas of teaching, they complained. We're teaching children "more sophisticated historical skills, like using historical sources appropriately, questioning those sources, analysing and interpreting, looking at perspectives and interpretations", the NSW Board of Studies history inspector, Jennifer Lawless, said.

But if critical thinking is the aim, schoolchildren need critical information. They need to learn that historian Lyndall Ryan admitted that "historians are always making up figures" when she was challenged by Keith Windschuttle - author of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History - for inflating the number of Aborigines killed by white men. Instead, students are given a one-sided version that shuns critical analysis. This is history pressed into the service of progressive politics, imbuing students with political agendas, rather than encouraging genuine learning.

We know it is all about politics because the teachers unions have told us so. Last year Pat Byrne, the Australian teachers' union president crowed about the fact that progressive educators "had succeeded in influencing curriculum development in schools, education departments and universities". And she said those "conservatives" - presumably people such as Howard who are calling for a more balanced approach to teaching - "have a lot of work to undo the progressive curriculum". An audacious admission. And who can forget the less triumphant, but no less political, observation from Wayne Sawyer, a former chairman of the NSW Board of Studies English curriculum committee. He admonished teachers after the last federal election for failing to produce a more "questioning, critical generation" of students because they were now voting for Howard.

Brazen politicking is evident in how students are taught to read. In the politically charged nether world of academe sits Brian Cambourne, associate professor of education at the University of Wollongong. He is one of the driving forces behind the whole language approach to literacy where children are expected to learn to read by being immersed in literature rather than learning the sounds that make up the words. He has spoken openly about the whole language philosophy as "literacy for social equity and social justice". He regards literacy as innately political and language as simply a tool used by those interested in power and wealth. He says politicians criticise his philosophy because they "have become aware of just how threatening a school system which produced thousands of highly critically literate students might be to the current ways of power and wealth distributed in our society".

Indeed, Cambourne admits his educational philosophy is thick with his political views. "Most of the work I do is based on the political prejudices I have and these must of course impact on what I research, and how and why I teach the way I do," he says.

So, as you finish covering your child's school books, flick through them to see what all the fuss is about. There are many fine teachers trying to do their best with second-rate materials. But at least there is agreement on one point: there is much work to be done in undoing the progressive curriculum foisted on Australian schoolchildren.

Source

***************************

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

***************************

No comments: