I made some technical remarks about her research on 24th. but readers may also be interested in an alternative to her kneejerk reaction to the old “white Australia policy”. See here for a more philosophically sophisticated look at the issues involved

A PERTH professor whose study found people who fly Australian flags on their cars are more racist than those who don’t, says she has received over 70 critical emails which include demands that she go back to her “own country”.

Brunei-born University of WA Professor Farida Fozdar [Judging by the name she is ethnically an Indian Muslim], who moved to Australia when she was seven, said she was shocked by the national reaction to her study which also spread as far India and the United States.

“Some emails have been quite polite and I’ve been able to reply and we’ve actually had quite a positive interaction out of it which, I really really value,” Professor Fozdar said.

“But some are straight out lots of swear words and suggesting that I should go back to where I came from.

“I’ve also had a couple of emails from people implying that I’m the Grinch that killed Christmas and that now nobody is going to fly a flag because they think it shows that they’re racist.”

Professor Fozdar, a sociologist and anthropologist, said that although the study was reported “relatively accurately” in the media, some people have misinterpreted its findings.

“What has struck me most is that the media has reported the research relatively accurately in most cases, perhaps apart from some headlines, but people have taken it up in the wrong way,” Professor Fozdar said.

“People have taken it as though I was saying that anyone who flies a flag on their car for Australia Day is racist and that flying the flag generally is a racist thing to do and that certainly wasn’t what I was saying.”

Professor Fozdar said the study revealed flag-flyers were significantly less positive about Australia’s ethnic diversity than “non-flag flyers” but that the attitude is not shared by all Australians.

“The fact that there were significant differences doesn’t mean that everybody who flys the flag feel negative towards minorities but it means that a larger proportion of them did compared with people that weren’t flying flags,” she said.

Professor Fozdar said many people ignored her findings that the majority of both flag-flyers and non-flag flyers, interviewed by her research team, felt positive about Australia’s ethnic diversity.

“But that’s not what gets picked up by people,” she said. “That statistic was there, in a lot of media reports, but people took out of it that I’m saying they shouldn’t fly a flag for Australia Day because it’s racist and that we shouldn’t celebrate Australia Day. “That was just nowhere in the research and so that is what has surprised me.”

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

Abdullah Faaruuq, a Muslim “spiritual advisor” and chaplain from Boston-based Northeastern University, was a key speaker at a fundraiser for al Qaeda’s Ma Barker, the criminal female terrorist named Aafia Siddiqui, also known as “Lady al Qaeda.” This man, Faaruuq, is living off American taxpayers yet advocates for his followers to use “the gun and the sword” to advance Islam in America.

The fundraiser for Siddiqui was held at the Islamic Center of Worcester, Mass. on Dec. 8 with the stated goal of raising $30,000 to assist this female terrorist convicted in 2008 of attempting to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan.

As Steve Emerson of Family Security Matters reports, Abdullah gave Siddiqui high praise.

“What a brave woman she continues to be, and how much her bravery and her faith and her belief warrants our support at this time,” said Faaruuq, an imam at Roxbury’s Mosque for the Praising of Allah. “It is said that we’re trying to raise $30,000 tonight. I would say it’s better that we’ve raised your awareness and raised your ire, as your anger against a government who would level the charges that they have against this woman and they say she is guilty. I would say she’s only guilty of defending herself.”

In addition to lauding Siddiqui’s “bravery,” Faaruuq also condemned American soldiers, the very people who defend America, as “kafirs,” meaning infidels.

“And if my mother was in the same place,” he said, “she would have took (sic) her West Indian machete and cut her way through those kafirs.”

According to the Northeastern University website, “Imam Abdullah serves as Northeastern University’s Muslim chaplain, as well as spiritual advisor to the Islamic Society student group.” Sadly he is advising students at a public university in the ways of violent jihad. And our taxes go to fund his actions.

Imam Abdullah has for some time been a controversial figure. As part of a violence-advocating, jihad-pushing, terror-funding mosque that was helped to come to fruition by public officials and politicians in Massachusetts, Abdullah has been advocating violence against Americans for years.

No wonder radical Islamists think America is the “weak horse” in the world. We are with our own taxes funding our own home-grown terror supporters like Abdullah.

So I am fairly sure that the Left-led authorities in Norway will succeed in declaring Breivik insane not because that is a good diagnosis but because they need to. They desperately need to keep him OUT of jail. He would make many converts there and that could lead to more atrocities. Further, it is comforting to think of him as a lone madman rather than someone who may have a point.

A PSYCHIATRIC report on Anders Behring Breivik found that the confessed gunman is insane, meaning he could avoid prison over July’s twin attacks in which he killed 77 people, Norwegian prosecutors said today.

“In such instances that the person suffers from such a serious disorder that it would not be warranted to sentence him to prison … he can be ordered to stay in mental health care institutions,” prosecutor Inga Bejer Engh was quoted as saying by AFP.

The 243-page assessment was made after 13 interviews with Breivik, an interview with his mother and an examination of his medical history. The experts also reviewed police questioning and video from the reconstruction of the shooting rampage on Utoya island, the Dagbladet daily reported.

It found that the 32 year old over time developed “paranoid schizophrenia,” according to another prosecutor, Svein Holden.

Holden said the report concluded that Breivik had “grandiose illusions whereby he believes he is to determine who is to live and who is to die.” He “committed these executions out of love for his people, as he describes it,” Holden said.

The report will be examined by a team of forensic experts to ensure it meets standards, and then a court will rule on whether Breivik can be held responsible, AFP reported.

Breivik, 32, has confessed to carrying out the July 22 twin attacks. First, he detonated a car bomb outside the government buildings in central Oslo that house the offices of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, killing eight people. Then he went on a shooting spree at a youth camp on Utoya island, killing 69 mostly young people.

But he refused to plead guilty, saying that the attacks were “atrocious but necessary” in his campaign against multiculturalism and Muslims in Europe.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

(The New Age) Climate change at face value may seem to have nothing to do with gender-based violence. But there are a few poignant points to think about, especially when considering the Zimbabwean scenario.

So, hot-cold-wet-dry-snow-no snow, it all causes women to be assaulted, all because 20,000 people took unnecessary fossil fueled plane rides for a climate vacation conference

More than three quarters of the female population live in communal farming areas where they constitute more than half of the farmers and provide 70% of the labour. Not only is the work of women farmers essential for food security, but most women are unpaid family workers.

Yeah? Welcome to the 3rd world sh*tholes, er, developing nations. If only there was a way to get them out of poverty.

For Zimbabwe, the past two decades have been characterised by extremes of weather. During this time, the country has gone through 10 droughts, resulting in less fresh water and destroyed biodiversity. In addition, our agricultural zones have now shifted. While some communities had to cope with a dry and sparse landscape, others have experienced the opposite as devastating floods persistently hit the lower Guruve.

See? You drove your SUV to the store, causing drought AND floods, which never happened before 1980.

Climate change worsens the situation for those living in poverty, creating a vicious cycle. Disasters due to climate change can take away people’s basic needs for survival and their dignity, as well as undermine any progress made in reducing poverty.

Wow, dignity? Those of you who drove your cars to work today should be put in jail. How dare you cause weather to happen?

Given that the majority of Zimbabwean women live in rural areas and make up the bulk of the labour force in the agricultural sector, there is going to be increasing feminisation of poverty. There is going to be a serious loss of livelihood to these women, all blamed on what is legally termed acts of nature.

Women will have to travel longer distances to fetch water, face greater challenges in terms of sanitation needs and bathing, for instance, thus becoming vulnerable to rape. Youths too and young girls are not going to be spared this ordeal. School-going girls are going to experience challenges in their education, possibly missing classes as they spend more time fetching water, or working in exchange for food.

This actually sounds much like the Occupy movements. They live in squalor, rarely bathe, have sanitation needs, and have been sexually assaulted and raped. But, moving on, the Warmists always amuse me, because they have this notion that there were no droughts, no floods, and perfect, homogenous weather prior to (insert date cited here), and it is going to get worse 50-100 years from now (which cannot be proven, and will have been forgotten about). They are truly climate flat earthers.

You know what is the biggest danger to women? Progressivism. Put women in the company of male Progressives, and they are sexually harassed, sexually assaulted, and raped. Progressives have this knee jerk faith in multiculturalism, which leads to tolerance of notions such as Sharia law (which treats women as second class citizens, allows them to be raped and beaten, among others) and honor killings. In today’s “feminist” world as pushed by Lefties, women are more violent, fight more, and end up in jail more. The Lefty ideals are bad for women.

Net of the attitudes and other characteristics students bring with them to college, the small changes reported in students’ political orientations (on a continuum from left to right) virtually disappear.

In other words, college students end up a bit leftist because they start a bit leftist, not because their profs “raise their awareness.”

While college fails as a leftist re-education camp, it does have measurable effects on two narrow areas:

1. “[S]tudents’ racial, ethnic, and multicultural attitudes and values”:

The link persists in the presence of a wide array of controls, including those reflecting students’ precollege attitudes and values, and across various outcome measures, including cultural awareness, acceptance of different races and cultures, commitment to promoting racial understanding, support for busing, viewing racism as a continuing problem, and increases in openness to diversity broadly defined.

2. Gender attitudes. College increases support for equal economic opportunity for women and intolerance for date rape, and decreases support for the view that “women’s place in in the home.”

Bottom line: Whether you love P.C. or hate it, don’t overrate it. Colleges nudge students’ views on multiculturalism and sexism. But they don’t turn moderates into liberals, or liberals into socialists.

SOURCE

Changes in expressed attitudes may not mean much — particularly in the area of race and racism. Since LaPiere’s study in the 1930s, psychologists have known that the relationship between expressed attitudes and behavior is weak to non-existent. So the kids may learn to say the “right” thing but how they act when free to do so will be another matter.

Note also that Right/Left orientation is highly hereditary so again little real change is likely as a result of the college experience — JR

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

“Students in a Texas public high school were made to stand up and recite the Mexican national anthem and Mexican pledge of allegiance as part of a Spanish class assignment, but the school district maintains there was nothing wrong with the lesson.

It happened last month in an intermediate Spanish class at Achieve Early College High School in McAllen, Texas — a city located about 10 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border.

Wearing red, white and green, students had to memorize the Mexican anthem and pledge and stand up and recite them in individually in front of the class.

That didn’t go over well with sophomore Brenda Brinsdon. The 15-year-old sat down and refused to participate. She also caught it all on video: “I just thought it was out of hand, I didn’t think it was right,” she told The Blaze. “Reciting pledges to Mexico and being loyal to it has nothing to do with learning Spanish.”

When Brenda made clear she would not stand up and recite the pledge, she was given an alternative assignment: an essay on the history of the Mexican revolution.

School district spokesman Mark May defended the presentations, saying it’s a state requirement for upper-level language classes to teach about foreign culture.

According to the state’s Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards, students are expected to gain “knowledge and understanding” of other cultures and use the language to demonstrate understanding of different practices and perspectives. There are no specific requirements about learning to recite pledges or anthems.

Source

There are certainly other ways of teaching Western Spanish and Mexican history

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

When is a national park not a national park? When it is “themed” toward one small segment of the population by a government infected with PCism. That is what U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar did when he advocated recently for “Latino” themed national parks and historical landmarks.

One might ask if Salazar is Interior Secretary of the right country with such a suggestion?

To carry through with his penchant for identity politics, Salazar has also pushed the National Parks Service to forget about those evil dead white guys and try to find more places for our historic landmarks that are associated with women and minorities.

Less than 3 percent of all the national landmarks that we have the highest designation you can receive as a historic landmark are designated for women, Latinos, African Americans or other members of minority groups, Salazar said in a meeting with reporters last week. That tells you that the score is not even.

The timing for this story is, of course, suspect. Just when Obama is launching a new campaign for president, here comes his Interior Secretary pandering to Hispanics and minorities.

Imagine that.

So, what is one of the first new minority themed areas Salazar is ballyhooing? A paean to unions with a Cesar Chavez historic landmark.

To continue the left’s efforts to Balkanize the United States, Salazar will preside over the construction of a National Museum of the American Latino. Reports are that the project would cost $600 million. But you know darn well that the final tally will be double that — at least — due to the common waste, cost overruns, union skullduggery, and government failures.

This is just one more example of the left’s desire to separate Americans one from another and to make us hate our collective history and set us against each other.

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.

Washington (CNSNews.com) — Cecilia Munoz, the White House director of intergovernmental affairs, compared the federal crime of being in the country illegally to jaywalking.

“If you were running the police department of any urban area in this country, you would spend more resources going after serious criminals than after jaywalkers. DHS (the Department of Homeland Security) is doing the immigration equivalent of the same thing,” Munoz told the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute (CHCI) conference on Monday.

Munoz was referring to the administration’s new policy of “prosecutorial discretion,” outlined in a June memo from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, which falls under DHS.

Under the new policy, immigration officials will prioritize deportation orders, acting only on those involving people convicted of serious crimes or those who pose a national security or public safety threat.

The memo also directs ICE agents to consider how long an individual has been in the U.S., whether that person has a spouse or children who are U.S. citizens, and whether that person has a serious criminal record. Crimes victims, witnesses to crimes, or people who are charged with minor traffic violations, would avoid deportation under the ICE guidance.

Interestingly, the Obama administration had been, quietly, doing a pretty good job in deporting illegals (as well as going after the companies that hire them, which is the best way to stop illegals. No jobs, they won’t come). But, there is a tough election coming up, and Obama is losing support, including among Hispanics, so, he and his team decided that they would pander by ignoring a large section of people who have broken America’s laws, and are taking American jobs, using American services that they didn’t pay for, and causing problems for Americans. They’re all lawbreakers, and, shockingly, jaywalking is actually a crime which people can be ticketed for. A minor crime, but, still a crime. Is using a fake ID a minor crime? Sure. Until real American’s have their lives ruined because an illegal is running around pretending to be that American.

Sure, sure, they aren’t all bad people. There are surely lots more like Antonio Diaz Chacon, who saved a 6 year old girl from a would be kidnapper. But, that’s not the point. If they want to be in the United States, they need to do it legally. Oh, and stop demanding that the US change in order to accommodate them.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

An elementary school in Fort Collins, Colorado came under fire last week for having placed in the school a smaller sized Saudi Arabian flag in a higher, more prominent position than the flag of the United States. Many locals called this a disrespectful display and even wondered if it was part of some effort at anti-American indoctrination.

Colorado blog Greeley Report first noted the flag controversy by posting a photograph of the lobby display calling the positioning of the two flags “an outrage” and saying how the disrespect to the U.S. flag “shows how the indoctrination process continues without your consent or knowledge.”

Bauder Elementary School Principal, Brian Carpenter, told the Greeley Gazette that this was simply a careless mistake. Not only was nothing meant by the placement of the flags, but the matter was quickly corrected to have the U.S. flag hang higher than the others in the lobby.

But what was the Saudi flag even doing in the school in the first place?

According to the school, the purpose of the international flags is to recognize the nationality of the many students in the school who come from other countries. Carpenter said the school has many parents from other countries who attend Colorado State University… Carpenter said the school has approximately 20 other flags besides the U.S. flag throughout the building.

There doesn’t seem to be any reason to imagine that this school had any intention of demoting the importance of Old Glory, especially to give the Saudi flag a place of higher prominence. I see no reason to think that the school is engaging in any direct anti-Americanism.

However, there is still a problem here. The whole reason these flags of other nations were there in the first place is something that as a culture we should stop doing. This whole idiotic celebration of everyone’s “heritage” is a dangerous and self-destructive habit that we should end forthwith.

Over the last few years many European nations like France and England have seen their cities burning to the ground in riots caused by the same idiotic indulgence in multiculturalism as being displayed in the school in Fort Collins.

There is absolutely no reason whatever to have flags of other nations hanging in an elementary school. We are Americans, not Saudis or Mexicans. The more we push this unhealthy focus on distant heritage in the classroom the more we risk diluting any connection our young citizens have with this country.

There is nothing wrong with being interested in genealogy and family history, of course. But these interests should be the subject of things better done at home or at the very least if it has to be a part of the school curriculum as a single classroom project that can be done once and then left behind while other subjects are pursued.

There should be no large, permanent displays of other nation’s flags and other nationalities in our schools.