A SERIES of children’s textbooks on Islam contains misleading and inflammatory rhetoric about the religion, and inaccurately portrays Muslims as inherently violent and deserving of suspicion, according to the Pennsylvania chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
Moein Khawaja: not a happy bunny
The textbooks, under the collective title of World of Islam, are published by Mason Crest Publishing. The blurb for the series declares:
Since the events of September 11, 2001, today’s society is more aware than ever of Islam, often with erroneous facts. This series seeks to educate and enlighten youth to one of the world’s most predominant religions in an easy-to-read format, along with colorful pictures and quotations.
Ah, but the books themselves are erroneous, complains CAIR.
Moein Khawaja, the chapter’s civil rights director, wailed yesterday:
Filled with incorrect information and deception, these books are contrary to the education mission of schools and libraries.
According to this report, it was not immediately clear where the series is being used, but Khawaja said complaints from council chapters across the country lead him to believe it is on bookshelves in about two dozen states.
Mason Crest partnered with the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute to produce the 10-book series, which is designed for ages 10 and older.
Institute vice president Alan Luxenberg, who wrote a book called Radical Islam for the series, defended the texts.
They’re taking things out of context to paint a picture that misconstrues the meaning of the books.
Among at least two dozen examples cited by Khawaja, the book “Muslims in America” says that:
Some Muslims began immigrating to the United States in order to transform American society, sometimes through the use of terrorism.
Foreign Policy Research Institute president Harvey Sicherman said that he is mystified by the reaction to the series, and that:
Well, yes, some people did come to the United States to commit terrorism, and I don’t know how one can quarrel with that sentence.
The institute cited several passages that it says shows there is no anti-Islamic bias in the books, including a description of Muslims as:
An integral part of the American mosaic.
Then there was the statement:
The great majority (of Muslims) reject the Islamist interpretation of their religion and are horrified by the idea of living under an extremist Muslim society.
Khawaja said the problem goes beyond isolated sentences to what he described as the series’ overarching anti-Muslim tone and message.
A book isn’t just a set of quotes – it’s a conclusion you walk away with.
He noted that a chronology in the book Islam in Europe starts with 1988 and lists ten events, seven of which involve extremist Muslims participating in bombings, hijackings or other violence.
Muslims have been in Europe for thousands of years. This is ridiculous.
Luxenberg said that while “maybe the chronology is too short,” the overall book is even-handed.
I don’t think we should be labeled as anti-Islamic.
Meanwhile, we learn from this report that a militant Islamic group in Nigeria has produced a video calling for Muslims to rise up “with the sword and the spear” against Nigerian Christians.
The 10-minute video on the Ansar al-Mujahideen forum – a website sympathetic to al-Qaeda – comes after more than 200 people, mostly Christians, died last week in massacres in villages outside of the central Nigerian city of Jos. More than 300 people – mostly Muslims – died in January during rioting in the same region.
Hat tip: BarrieJohn
A CATHOLIC adoption society has won a High Court battle over laws forcing it to consider gay couples as parents, according to a BBC report today.
Leeds-based Catholic Care had warned it would be forced to give up its work finding homes for children if it had to comply with the legislation.
Its plea to be allowed an exemption was opposed by the Charities Commission.
Same-sex adoption supporters pictured at gay pride rally
However, Mr Justice Briggs has allowed Catholic Care’s appeal and ordered the commission to reconsider the case in the light of his judgement.
The High Court ruling was met with dismay by gay rights charity Stonewall.
Jonathan Finney, head of external affairs at Stonewall, said:
It’s unthinkable that anyone engaged in delivering any kind of public or publicly funded service should be given licence to pick and choose service users on the basis of individual prejudice. It’s clearly in the best interests of children in care to encourage as wide a pool of potential adopters as possible.
Catholic Care, which serves the dioceses of Leeds, Middlesbrough, and Hallam in South Yorkshire, argued that the Equality Act 2006 went against the Catholic Church’s teachings on marriage and family life.
Other Catholic adoption agencies have changed their policies or closed.
The appeal came after the Church lost a battle against the introduction of the Sexual Orientations Regulations, under the Equality Act, which forced agencies to consider homosexual couples as potential adoptive parents.
Catholic agencies were given a 21-month transition period to comply with the new rules, which ended in December 2008.
The Bishop of Leeds, the Right Reverend Arthur Roche, welcomed the judge’s decision, saying it would:
Help in our determination to continue to provide this invaluable service to benefit children, families and communities.
He said the judgment confirmed that Catholic Care was correct in its reading of the law and that the exemption could apply:
To any charity subject to it being in the public interest. We look forward to producing evidence to the Charity Commission to support the position that we have consistently taken through this process: that without being able to use this exemption, children without families would be seriously disadvantaged.
He added:
Catholic Care has been providing specialist adoption services for over 100 years. We have helped hundreds of children through the recruitment, assessment, training and support for prospective adoptive parents, as well as offering ongoing and post-adoption support to families that give such security and love for some of the most vulnerable children in our society. The judgment today will help in our determination to continue to provide this invaluable service to benefit children, families and communities.
Hat tip: Marcus
AN 82-year-old Catholic priest, father Marques Barbosa, became an unwitting porn star when he was shown on Brazilian TV last week having sex with a 19-year-old altar boy.
He was the “star turn” in a report on the SBT TV programme Conexao Reporter which also included charges by three former altar boys that they had been sexually abused by local priests.
Barbosa was caught on a hidden camera in the north-eastern state of Alagoas.
After the act, the priest’s face is identified as he looks toward the camera and says:
Who’s there? Who is it?
After the show was aired, Alagoas bishop Valerio Breda ordered the removal from church work of priests Barbosa, Edilson Duarte and Raimundo Gomes.
Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi told AFP:
One was removed from his parish and faces charges in the civil justice system.
He added that the other two had been suspended from their duties pending an investigation.
Graphic video of Marques Barbosa’s abuse a man identified as Fabiano is being sold on the streets of the town of Arapiraca, according to this report.
Elsewhere in Latin America, a Spanish religious instructor was reported to have been jailed in Chile for possession of pornographic images of children.
A prosecutor said the priest, Jose Arregui, 53, would be tried for child pornography possession on March 24.
The church sex abuse scandal unravelling at Roman Catholic-run schools and institutions across Europe has now reached Switzerland, where senior clergy admitted yesterday that 60 cases were under investigation.
Abbot Martin Werlen, of the Benedictine Abbey of Einsiedeln, said reports of abuse had been submitted to the Swiss church authorities in the wake of the disclosures in Ireland, Germany, Austria, Poland and Holland.
He said the Swiss Catholic Church was investigating the cases, but nvestigations still had to show whether all the allegations of abuse in Switzerland were genuine.
In Germany, priests holding a service in a Catholic church in the Bavarian town of Bad Tölz were shouted at by outraged members of the congregation on Sunday for defending a fellow priest who had been convicted of sexually abusing adolescents.
It emerged last week that the convicted priest had been on duty in the Pope’s then diocese of Munich-Freising during the 1980s.
Meanwhile, The Times has been accused of being “shockingly anti-Catholic” in its coverage of the sex abuse scandal. Damien Thompson, blog editor for the Telegraph Media Group, took particular exception to this Times headline:
Pope knew priest was a paedophile, but allowed him to continue with ministry.
Raged Thompson:
Let me quote my colleague Cristina Odone, former editor of The Catholic Herald: ‘I have been shocked by the Times’s anti-Catholic coverage, which verges on the hysterical and fanatical. And I want to know: why is this happening?’
What I’d like to do is put The Times’s elder statesman, Lord Rees-Mogg, on the spot. How can he, as a former editor of the paper and a devout and distinguished Catholic, stand by as the paper he loves traduces the Holy Father?
Prize for best quote of the week goes to Christopher Hitchens. Writing for Slate magazine, he said:
The Roman Catholic Church is headed by a mediocre Bavarian bureaucrat once tasked with the concealment of the foulest iniquity, whose ineptitude in that job now shows him to us as a man personally and professionally responsible for enabling a filthy wave of crime. Ratzinger himself may be banal, but his whole career has the stench of evil—a clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel. What is needed is not medieval incantation but the application of justice—and speedily at that.
Hat tip: Name Withheld
Edit: Thanks to reddit, we found the video mentioned. It’s heavily blurred and isn’t in English, but if you have a desire to watch it, be our guest!
A PROPOSAL to introduce prison terms for men who beat their wives goes against the Koran and the teachings of the “prophet” Mohammed, according to the head of Algeria’s Superior Islamic Council.
Wife-beating for Dummies: the Koran
Qaher Sharif fiercely criticised the bill presented to the country’s head of state by Farouk Qustantiti, of the Consultative Council on Human Rights. A “stunned” and outraged Sharif told the Arab-language edition of the daily newspaper El Khabar:
This man’s aim is to violate a law of the Koran and of the Sunnah, and he meddles in subjects that are beyond his competence. H’s done it before with the death penalty, and now with beatings.
Sharif then asked:
What difference can it make to him [Qustantiti] what goes on between a man and his wife?
The President of the Islamic Council said that he was stunned by Qustanti’s proposal, because:
God has already pointed out precisely the way that a husband must behave towards his wife.
He quoted verses 34 and 35 of the Surah on women, in which men are advised to:
Admonish women, confine them to their bed and beat them should they commit ‘nushooz’.
So wives having new shoes is a crime in Islam?
Oh sorry, I misunderstood. Nushooz is a term used to describe both infidelity and a refusal of sexual intercourse.
Sharif pointed out that the text is so precise that it indicates the method of punishment to be used against the wife, and that this should be neither:
Too insistent, nor provoke disfigurement.
Hat tip: Alan
WEEKS go by without a pareidolia story, then three come at once.
After Marmite Jesus and bacon Jesus, we now have a tale from South Africa, where “Allah” has branded a cat. Allegedly.
Farouk Sha and Osama. Photo: S'bonelo Mgcobo, Independent Newspapers
Farouk Sha, a “professed animal lover and human rights activist” according to this report, says he cannot express the joy he feels when he sees the word “Allah” on his cat, Osama – named, as if you hadn’t already guessed – in honour of Islamic terrorist Osama bin Laden.
He said Osama’s marking is:
A gift from heaven with the sender’s name on it.
Osama (the cat, that is) was born a year ago with a marking on his ginger fur that looks like the Arabic word Allah. (Hold Osama upside down and it looks like the Big Mac sign). The mark has become more pronounced over time.
Said Sha:
I didn’t want to tell people about the sign; I wanted them to see it on their own. Everybody who has come to my house and seen Osama has seen the sign.
Other “artworks” on Osama include a moon and a star. But Sha doesn’t say whether there’s also a depiction of a Danish flag being torched, an adultress being stoned, a homosexual hanged – or a bomb – to further big up the marmalade moggie’s Muslim credentials.
Explaining why the cat had been named after the effete Osama bin Laden, Sha said some people considered the man to be a terrorist, but he was, in fact, a freedom fighter, and he thought it was appropriate to name the cat after him.
Sha has taken Osama to a mosque to verify the inscription.
We all are convinced that the sign is from God. I believe the Almighty creator has given me this gift.
And just when you thought that Sha had run out of stupid things to say, he remembered Osama’s “granny”, Twinkle, listening to the azaan (Islamic call of prayer).
My daughter came home from school one day and the radio was on. She carried Twinkle closer to the radio. The cats have been very receptive to prayer since.
Well, of course they’re attentive – Islamic prayers sounds like cats fucking, you berk!
Sha plans to take Osama on Islamic road shows. Any money raised from that effort would be used to help destitute and hurt animals, he said.
Ah well, his heart’s in the right place. It’s just his brain that’s malfunctioning.
Hat tip: Duncan W
A loony at large: Neil Horsley and his 'terrorist' sign
A CHRISTIAN fundie in the US has been arrested and charged with criminal defamation, making terrorist threats, and disseminating threats through the internet after he posted an “Elton John must die” video on YouTube.
The charges appear to me as crazy as the man himself. Neil Horsley, a 65-year-old fundamentalist who claims he is running for Governor of Georgia, didn’t actually call for the pop star’s assassination, he simply said when Elton John suggested that Jesus Christ might have been gay, he risked “the wrath of God”.
A while back we reported John as saying:
I think Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems.
In a fit of fatwa envy, homophobic Horsley – who also a fierce anti-abortionist – said that if John had blasphemed against Islam, a death sentence would have been issued.
[But] We are not taking out a fatwa, we’re reminding him that God literally killed people for lying.
Mad-as-a-March-hare Horsley said that John’s remarks in effect say:
The Lord Jesus Christ has perverted sex in order to reach orgasm … he achieves orgasm by receiving men’s penises in his anal orifice, or by sucking other men’s penises.
In the video shot outside John’s Atlanta flat, Horsley raged:
What Elton John has done is desecrate the image of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Oh, and while on the subject of demented Christians, I had an email last night from the troll Bob Hutton that had me in stitches. Hutton, who is obsessed with the Freethinker blog, wrote:
Hey Barry, I’ve been reading your ‘CV’ and note that you were once involved in a Gay Humanist group – I didn’t realise you were a poof. No wonder you get so angry at the Bible declaring the truth on this matter. You really MUST repent.
We know the man’s not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but given the fact that just about everyone on the planet knows that I was a founder member of the Gay Humanist Group (now the Gay & Lesbian Humanist Association) way back in the 70s, the penny has taken a heck of a long time to drop. But, having said that, for the longest time Hutton thought the Landover Baptist Church was a genuine Christian organisation.
Idiot!
Hutton, by the way, is the creator of a failed fundie blog called Gospel Truth. Check it out – it’s pathetic.
HAT TIP: Marcus
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
