-By Warner Todd Huston
A middle school in Smyrna, Georgia included in an assignment material that essentially shows 7th grade children that Islamic polygamy is a perfectly legitimate concept and that there is nothing wrong with the strict dress codes used to oppress Muslim women the world over.
The material was presented to the 7th graders at Campbell Middle School as part of a discussion of the school’s dress codes, apparently meant to use the ideas of Islamic culture for women’s clothing as some sort of example to compare how the school regulates clothing for its students in Georgia.
The concepts were presented in the lesson as a letter from a fictional 20-year-old Muslim woman named “Ahlima.” In this letter “Ahlima” tells readers that she wouldn’t mind if her husband took a second wife and also extolled the virtues of the burkha. She claims that American women are “horribly immodest” in the way they dress.
As to polygamy, the fictional Ahlima says, “I understand that some Westerners condemn our practice of polygamy, but I also know they are wrong.”
A father of one of the students was not very happy with the assignment. He complained that the lesson is “promoting or positively depicting their belief that polygamy” is acceptable. He also felt that there should have been some sort of disclaimer that we Americans don’t accept these concepts and he worried that the Muslim ideas were presented as completely acceptable.
Another page of the assignment explained the “seven conditions for women’s dress in Islam,” presenting all of them without discussion and, in essence, endorsing them as acceptable or normal.
The school told the WSB TV, Channel 2 News that it did not create the lesson plan and that it came from the state. The school pledged to review the material to see if it was appropriate.
But, it is not appropriate. Not at all.
First of all, this lesson plan is built on lies. The burkha, for instance, is not a requirement of Islam. It is a cultural practice that only some Muslim cultures observe. The burkha has nothing at all to do with Islam directly. Not all Muslims practice polygamy, either, so even that isn’t necessarily a strict Islamic idea, either.
But, worse, the idea that burkhas should at all be acceptable to an American is a slap against our own ideals and promotes the oppressive ideas of enemies to our culture as perfectly acceptable.
The culturally strict proscriptions against freedom forced on Islamic women are a crime against humanity, yet here we have our own schools presenting to our own children the idea that the oppression of women is a perfectly acceptable cultural choice.
It would be exactly the same if they had a letter from a female slave saying that she was OK with being a slave. That it was perfectly acceptable for her to be owned by someone.
We are teaching our children that our own principles are not the optimal principles. We are teaching our children that our own culture, our own ideals are not supreme. We are teaching our children that the oppressive ideas of Islam are just as good as American ideals.
This is a result of liberals trying to make sure Muslims know that we “like” them in a post 9/11 world. With this weak, kow towing we are also making of ourselves a bigger target because there is another cultural ideal in Islam. Muslims feel that such bending over backwards as this is a weakness to be despised. Such kow towing is looked upon as pitiful. Muslims feel that such groveling is not “nice” or “neighborly” but spurs them to imagine that they can easily attack and dominate such a weak-willed culture.
But, even that aside, it shows how the liberals that wrote these lesson plans despise America. It shows that they do not value our own culture. It shows that these liberals are always in search of ways to further tear down the United States and make of her just another nation with just another set of cultural ideas.
If we want to bring America back from the brink of the destruction liberals have led us to we need to take back our educational system and get back to a time where we are teaching our kids why the United States is the best nation on earth.
Unfortunately, today our schools are filled with lessons like this, lessons that teach our own children that the US is nothing special.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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