A group of teenagers armed with baseball bats and machetes attacked Australian teachers and students on Monday, injuring 18 people and forcing a high school in Sydney to be locked down, police said.
Five youths barged into the morning assembly at Merrylands High School in south-west Sydney, witnesses said, grabbing students before starting to smash windows at the school.
Five punks injure eighteen people and terrify hundreds.
When violence or threats of violence are considered legitimate forms of political or social expression, inevitably violence or threats of violence will manifest themselves.Terror has become an accepted form of political and social expression, that status granted by those who most profess to be non violent or peaceful. ... If we allow or excuse terror elsewhere, it is only a matter of time before that terror will manifest itself on our shores. What is terror here has to be regarded as terror everywhere, no matter what one might think of the 'cause.'
Mamacita of Scheiss Weekly talks about education, parenting and role models in my next Blog Talk Radio program today, and Siggy co-hosts.
With those two, what more can a Blog Talk Radio Show hostess want? Well, she wants you to listen to the podcast.
Please join us today at noon Eastern Time on Monday, June 11.
Update: We talked about schooling, parenting, and education. I got caught in the conversation and we talked for nearly forty minutes. You can listen to the podcast here
Tomorrow my BTR guests will be Brian Darling and Rob Bluey of the Heritage Foundation. We will discuss Venezuela and Latin America. Please tune in at 4:30PM.
Islamists, known as the Taleban, hold an area of the town
The BBC's country profile states,
The imposition of Islamic law in several states has embedded divisions and caused thousands of Christians to flee. Inter-faith violence is said to be rooted in poverty, unemployment and the competition for land.
Even the introduction of Islamic law in Kano did not stop Islamist terrorists from taking the law into their own hands. They killed the police that administer shari'a in Kano. With radical Muslims attacking shari'a police, what chance do the Christians have in peacefully co-existing with them?
This also points out the folly of those who believe that we can reach accommodation with radical Islamists. They do not act rationally, instead relying on violence and intimidation to extort the behavior they seek. Even fellow Islamists have no immunity from attack and annihilation. Islamists have begun to run wild in Nigeria, and unless something changes soon, it will follow Sudan in crumbling into civil war.
So many Americans graduate high school and college having learned what to think as opposed to acquiring the tools of critical, independent thinking. Likewise, they have learned little about our nation's history. As such, they fall prey to the rhetoric of political charlatans and quacks. Let's look at a couple of examples.
If any of the larger banks start to sell their dollars, then the price of U.S. securities will collapse. The price of the dollar in international exchange will fall. And if the Federal Reserve intervenes to moderate these results, then the U.S. money supply will explode to the upside. The decline in U.S. securities will be equivalent to a serious rise in interest rates.
Right now world central bankers are concerned about this problem. In international financial circles, it is the elephant in the room: the great big fact that everyone pretends will go away if ignored. But of course, if 78.43 is broken in the U.S. dollar index, this will be an all-time low, and a great deal of attention will be focused on the situation.
While I believe the scenario is rather unlikely, it can not be ignored.
Gov. Corzine was flying down the turnpike at 91 mph when the accident occured. Contrast and compare the media coverage with Dick Cheney's hunting accident.
The Tragedy of Islamic Indoctrination In British Schools
Adrian Morgan writes about what happens without the "establishment clause" of the American Constitution:
The demons of political correctness have so deeply infiltrated the National Curriculum documentation that each time Mohammed's name appears, the Arabic symbol for his name is displayed afterwards. Unit 5B Section 2 is intended to indoctrinate children thus: "Children should learn: why Muslims have instructions for worship, how Muslims show concern for others, how Muslims care for people in the community, that abstinence from food plays a part in religious observance." In Unit 5A, Section 2, teachers are told that their pupils must learn " to understand that the Qur'an is fundamental to Muslims because it is the 'word of God'." Note the characterization: the Koran "is" the word of God, not "it is believed by Muslims to be" the word of God.
Unit 5A, Section 1, instructs teachers to: "Ask the children to copy the Shahadah and write a short explanation of the beliefs it expresses." The Shahadah is the statement of belief that signals conversion to Islam. To make young children write out this declaration is a blasphemy against any other faith the child may belong to, including atheism.
This government-sanctioned political correctness led my sister, a teacher for 30 years, to tell her school that she would no longer teach the National Curriculum's version of religious education, and would teach only her specialist subject, history.
Go read every word.
Cross-posted at MNM, where a commenter mentioned an analogous situation in the USA.
Neo-Neocon's Romeo and Juliet post reminded me of when I was in school.
I went to an all-girls Catholic school in Puerto Rico, run by Vincentine nuns. When I first started at that school the nuns used to wear Flying Nun hats but the school was located in Santurce, not San Tanco. The nuns were addressed as Sor (Sister), and unlike other orders, kept their original names. I never saw any of them take flight but they were notoriously bad drivers. The only people taking flight were those who got in their way.
The nuns wore their flying hats which they later changed to regular veils, probably to save on starch, and made us wear the ugliest possible uniform and Bass penny loafers. In the lower grades we had to wear lace-up oxfords, uglier yet.
Being first short and skinny and later tall and skinny, I looked like a pale stick for all my school years - I looked awful in that thing. Have you ever had a nightmare where you show up naked at an important event? I have had nightmares where I show up wearing my old school uniform.
After I left school I have never purchased a pair of Bass penny loafers, either.
Being in that school for eleven years accounts for a lot of my ideosyncracies. One of the better ones is my love of movies.
A few blocks away from my school, El Metro (as in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, not underground/subway metro), the most modern cinema in the area, was located. The nuns took us on field trips to watch nun-approved movies.
I remember the time that we walked from the school to El Metro to see the re-release of Ben Hur. By the time we got to our seats I ended up in the next-to-last seat in my row, and much to my chagrin Sor C.G. (whose name I withold in case she ever reads this) sat next to me after everybody else was seated. Sor C.G. was one of the weirder nuns in the large gaggle of weird nuns from that convent. Well, Ben Hur got rowing, and Charlton Heston was looking Pretty Damn Good shackled at the oars, when much to my surprise Sor C.G. let out a deep deep sigh.
I wonder if she ever told that one in confession.
But back to Romeo and Juliet.
Ever-watchful for our virtue, one good day the school principal, Sor P. (name withheld to protect the guilty, again), came to our classroom during religion class. If memory serves me right, Sor C.G. was the religion teacher that year. Sor P. sat "inconspicuosly" in the rear of the classrom and at a strategic point in the class formally announced that none us girls should see Zefferelli's Romeo and Juliet.
Discreet glances were exchanged among us girls, and I for one made a mental note to go see Romeo and Juliet right away.
Sor P. went from classroom to classroom making the same announcement.
The next day must have been either a Saturday or one of the many holidays they have in Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico and France must be tied for record number of paid holidays), because four of my friends and I walked to the movie theater and saw Romeo and Juliet. All of our mothers, who had not seen the movie, approved of the excursion and some might have even been pleased at our sudden interest in high culture.
By the time our mothers caught on to the fact that R&J had a nude scene we'd seen the movie at least twice.
My friends and I loved the movie. We all let our hair grow to Juliet lengths (I had nearly-waist-long hair for all of my teens), and danced with jingle bells on our wrists. Stores started carrying dresses with Juliet sleeves and we talked our moms into buying them for us. I memorized the theme music and can still play it on the piano.
Romeo and Juliet was a huge success at El Metro and played for long enough that my friends and I memorized the dialogue.
Zefferelli should have sent the nuns a thank-you note.
The scheme in Britain is, of course, rather different. (It is not necessary to believe that such schemes have been consciously elaborated, incidentally; rather, they are inherent in the statism that comes naturally to so many politicians because of their self-importance.) The hoops that bind the government to the consultants who advise it in its perennially failing schemes of modernization are those of gold. As Craig demonstrates (though without understanding all the implications), the consultants need failure in Britain to perpetuate the contracts that allow them to charge so outrageously and virtually ad libitum (Craig suggests that $140 billion has disappeared so far, with no end in sight); and, in turn, the government benefits from having this rich but utterly dependent clientele.
The beauty of the system is that dependence on expensive failure reaches quite low levels of the administration: for example, all those “civilians” (as nonpolice workers for the police are called) in P.C. Copperfield’s police station, as well as the educational psychologists whom Frank Chalk derides. The state has become a vast and intricate system of patronage, whose influence very few can entirely escape. It is essentially corporatist: the central government, avid for power, sets itself up as an authority on everything and claims to be omnicompetent both morally and in practice; and by means of taxation, licensing, regulation, and bureaucracy, it destroys the independence of all organizations that intervene between it and the individual citizen. If it can draw enough citizens into dependence on it, the central government can remain in power, if not forever, then for a very long time, at least until a crisis or cataclysm forces change.
At the very end of the chain of patronage in the British state is the underclass, who (to change the metaphor slightly) form the scavengers or bottom-feeders of the whole corporatist ecosystem. Impoverished and degraded as they might be, they are nonetheless essential to the whole system, for their existence provides an ideological proof of the necessity of providential government in the first place, as well as justifying many employment opportunities in themselves. Both Copperfield and Chalk describe with great eloquence precisely what I have seen myself in this most wretched stratum of society: large numbers of people corrupted to the very fiber of their being by having been deprived of responsibility, purpose, and self-respect, void of hope and fear alike, living in as near to purgatory as anywhere in modern society can come.
Good news on Iraq: Senate Democrats are moving to rewrite history, by limiting the Iraq war authorization they voted in 2002. Good news how? Well, if you are a surrender enthusiast, it's a step in the right direction! But if you believe the United States must fight and win in Iraq as in all the theaters of this generational war on Islamic extremism, then every move the anti-war Democrats make to undercut a wartime president and troops in the field is a shot in the foot that will drive Americans farther from them.
More good news about Iraq: Sen. Joseph Lieberman says the Democratic measure to undercut the troops could make a Republican out of him. This highly principled Democrat's moral stance is an example the rest of them should follow, but the bad news is, they won't. But Hillary's new embrace of defeatism may be just the thing to underscore what a bankrupt position it is. She's not the only 2008 hopeful playing politics with war.
Allyson, who will be my guest in next week's Blog Talk Radio, emailed me with this:
Remember that myth that "America is (supposedly) the most racist country on the planet"? Well, someone recently translated South Korean elementary schoolbooks.... and you'll never guess what they found
Showcased in bookstores between biographies of Andrew Carnegie and the newest treatise by China's president are stacks of works built on a stereotype.
Another title teases readers with "The Legend of Jewish Wealth." A third provides a look at "Jewish People and Business: The Bible of How to Live Their Lives."
And some of the books use J P Morgan and J D Rockefeller as examples of Jewish businessmen.
Fausta was born and raised in Santurce, Puerto Rico and is a long-term resident of Princeton, New Jersey. She discusses New Jersey, taxation, current events, and how news are reported in the French and Spanish-language media at Fausta's Blog.
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