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Gather around, children, because today we are going to hear a scary story about Muslim people trying to spread tolerance, and how that is really a plot against freedom, the Constitution, and the right of all good God-fearing Americans to crap their pants in terror whenever anyone with a suspiciously ethnic-sounding name opens their mouth for any reason whatsoever.
Like most recent stories of conservative pants-crapping for no good reason, this one comes to us from sunny Florida. Via The American Independent:
A coalition of right-wing groups are up in arms over a presentation made last fall at Tampa’s Steinbrenner High School by Hassan Shibly of the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (known as CAIR).
Shibly says the presentation in question was one of many he has made in an effort to teach students about tolerance and clear up common misconceptions about the Muslim faith.
Yes, CAIR gave a presentation on religious tolerance to high school children. The subsequent reaction from Very Serious Not-At-All-Crazy Right Wing Groups could be predicted from just that sentence, which combines the trinity of pants-crapping terrors: Muslims, tolerance, and teaching things to children. And so a group of conservative groups got together to issue their demands in the form of a pants-crapping press release seemingly designed as object lesson of why we might want to be teaching tolerance to schoolchildren before they turn into bitter, mean adults riddled from stem to stern with conspiracy theories and a compete lack of self awareness.
The press release does not pussyfoot around the dangers:
CAIR and their spokesman, such as Hassan Shibly, who regularly advocate for these groups and Sharia Law, are working to subvert American law, loyalty to America, American values, and our American heritage, and they have no place in our public schools.
Allowing CAIR access to our children is tantamount to advocating overturning the Constitution in favor of Sharia Law. This causes our school children to question their loyalty and patriotism.
We are assuming that giving CAIR entre’ into the Hillsborough schools was done without knowledge of who CAIR is. We trust you agree that this organization should not have access to our children, furthermore, that we can no longer tolerate the political correctness or ignorance which has allowed this injustice to be perpetrated on our children.
It is a well-worn fact of conservative discourse that CAIR is probably a terrorist front group of some kind. The evidence of this has been rather scant, but no matter; being sure of something is at least as good as being right about something, if not better. A presentation about tolerance, then, is secretly advocating Sharia Law, because anything any Muslim ever does, period, is advocating for Sharia Law (special exception: far-right conservative Muslims, where "conservative" in this context means the American political definition of the word, and not the rest-of-the-world definition of the world, but that quickly becomes a whole separate discussion unto itself.)
Especially suspect is any Muslim voice asking for religious tolerance. That right there is devil-talk. Tolerance for something is, according to the conservative mind, the same thing as submission to it. Americans are born with the God-given right to be assholes to anyone, and to discriminate against anyone, and to be intolerant towards anyone, so asking for tolerance is the same thing as being anti-American. It says right in the Constitution, somewhere, that we are allowed to discriminate as much as we like against whatever religions we like, and if you can't find that particular subclause it is because the liberals have been hiding it from you. Or something. I can't possibly decipher the entire conspiracy.
The results, though, are clear. Having a CAIR member speak to high schoolers about misconceptions about Muslims is, quote, "tantamount to advocating overturning the Constitution in favor of Sharia Law" works to "subvert American law" and "American values", and "causes our school children to question their loyalty and patriotism."
Another special note: I have no idea how Florida conservatives raise their children. I can only go by what they tell us, and what they are telling us is that their children are such shoddy examples of patriotism that all it takes is one Muslim fellow talking about tolerance to make them begin to question their loyalty to their own country. That either supposes supernatural powers to That One Muslim Fellow, or an egregiously weak commitment to country on the part of their high school children, or both. This makes sense; to hear conservatives tell it all it takes is one mosque in your general neighborhood to turn the whole damn state or region into a Sharian dystopia, so it follows that even a bare few words uttered by Americans of Muslim faith are so powerful as to turn even the staunchest of patriots into Islam-loving anti-American terrorist-loving bastards. Christian televangelists like Pat Robertson wish they held that much sway.
Let us look, then, at the remedies demanded by these conservative groups in order to rectify this dangerous tolerance-having and/or Sharia-enabling situation.
1. The School District sever all connections with CAIR and its membership to include Hassan Shibly.
2. We request a vetting process be implemented to ensure Islamic groups have no connections or affiliations to Muslim Brotherhood entities listed in Attachment “A” of HLF court documents.
These seem fairly straightforward. A demand to never speak to the devious group again, and the immediate implementation of a blacklist against groups deemed similarly threatening. Blacklists are timeworn staples of conspiracy conservatism, so no particular surprise there.
3. A list of all schools and classes which CAIR or other Islamic Groups have been allowed to speak to in the Hillsborough School District, be provided to this Coalition.
4. We request equal time with each of these classes to give a factual presentation by experts of our choice to speak on similar topics.
This, too, seems unsurprising. They merely want to have a comprehensive list of which schoolchildren may have been exposed to the suspicious pleas for religious tolerance given by these or any other Muslims, so that they may be allowed to make a countering presentation against religious tolerance, which is probably what the Founders would have wanted.
5. We request that all School Board Members to include the superintendant of Schools attend a briefing on “Islamic Indoctrination in America’s Public Schools” by our experts.
6. We request that a presentation on “Islamic Indoctrination in America’s Public Schools” be presented to faculty of each school in the district twice annually.
Now somewhere around this point you may be getting a little curious twinge, possibly in the region of your right eye. The United Conservative Groups (yes, that is the name) solution to perceived indoctrination at our schools is to demand, forthright, indoctrination at our schools. To their credit I suppose their problem was never with the indoctrination part, just with the message.
Instituting a traveling road show on "Islamic Indoctrination", appearing at each school twice a year to keep faculty in line, sounds a bit Orwellian for my own tastes. For starters, I question the expertise of the anti-tolerance experts in general, especially since the rest of this press release suggests they are perhaps paranoid conspiracy theorists who see "Islamic Indoctrination" in anything and everything, all the time, regardless of subject. No doubt high school math classes are full of Islamic indoctrination right up to the florescent lights, and you would definitely have to worry about music class if any American school could still afford to teach music, but I admit I would love to see a more full presentation of how Sharia was presenting itself in the American school environment.
Sharia football? Sharia sloppy joes in the cafeteria? Not ending every history class with a yelled "America, fuck yeah!"? No, I doubt it would be so obvious. I imagine the bigger danger is that somewhere, in some school, some Muslim child will not have the crap beaten out of him for being of a different religion. That seems to be what conservatives mean when they warn of impending Sharia, since it is the only one of those scenarios that might actually happen. Twice-yearly sessions to remind teachers that Muslim students should indeed be isolated and treated as suspicious would seem to be in order, I suppose.
The last demand is probably the most encompassing one:
7. We request that factual supplements be prepared in conjunction with our experts and textbook teams, as well as their implementation as soon as possible.
Ah, the final destination for any campaign warning about indoctrination at schools: a demand to change the textbooks to conform to the proper ideology. Or at least put an addendum in the damn things, just to make sure students learn the right lessons.
There are probably plenty of deeper things that could be said about all of this, but I think the obvious one is sufficient. Apparently there is a pressing need for school presentations about religious tolerance, because many of these kids won't learn a damn thing about it at home.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2009:
As everyone who follows the news knows by now, unemployment was up again sharply in December. Totally expected, of course, and, as nearly every economist is saying, very alarming. For instance:
"These numbers, back to back, of more than a half million a month suggest that the U.S. economy is in a freefall," said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Global Insight. "It’s scary, and it indicates that unless something is done and done quickly to turn this economy around, we’re looking at an awful situation this year." ...
"This is unprecedented," said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com. "It’s coast to coast. It’s everywhere. There’s really no refuge in this job market. There’s no safe place."
Not so. Just over a week from now, George Walker Bush will be unemployed, and I suspect his bank account will provide a refuge. Thanks to the Supreme Court, Bush managed to get one of the slightly less than 3 million (net) jobs created during his eight years in office. That's 375,000 jobs a year, the most pitiful record since 1939 when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started collecting the numbers.
Not just the worst record ever, mind you. But far worse. ...
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