On a page by itself, we find this inside the front cover of Al Gore’s latest climate fraud promotion book: “I’m offering you the choice of life or death. You can choose either blessings or curses.” –Deuteronomy Chapter 30, Verse 19

Let’s imagine that a Republican former vice president (say Dan Quayle or Dick Cheney) authored a similar book telling us that apocalypse was at hand unless we shoveled massive amounts of public money toward companies they’ve heavily invested in. Let’s say the Republican-authored book also prominently featured the Bible verse above, suggesting that Quayle or Cheney was offering the reader the choice between life or death.

In the scenario above, would the mainstream media give Quayle or Cheney the same respect and free book promotion airtime that Gore has received in recent weeks?

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Posted by John 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

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Byam Elementary School apparently has a gift shop they arrange every year during the holiday season. But in the interest of political correctness, religion must of course be promptly removed — we wouldn’t want to anger the atheists, after all — and Christmas is the holiday that’s most in the crosshairs.

After meeting with members of the Byam Elementary School PTO, two mothers asking to put the holidays back into the school’s annual holiday gift shop say Byam isn’t budging.

Kathryn McMillan and Kathleen Cullen, who both have children at Byam, asked school officials to allow all holiday items at the gift shop following a ban on Santa, candy canes, stockings, and all Christmas, Hanukkah and other “religious items.”

But a meeting with some PTO parents on Thursday night grew heated as emotions got in the way.

Red and green tissue paper to wrap presents was also crossed off the list because it looked too “Christmasy,” McMillan said.

“One of the parents said, ‘If we allow Santa, what do we say if a child brings in a swastika? Do we allow that too?’ ” McMillan said. “All I could think of was, are you kidding? You’re comparing a Christmas ornament to a swastika? It seems as if reason is lost somewhere and I just hope we can find it again.”

Superintendent Donald Yeoman told The Sun on Tuesday that the rules for the gift shop are under the authority of Byam Principal Jane Gilmore. Ultimately, said Yeoman, the policy for the gift shop was set so no child would feel left out.

“It’s operated under those same rules for a number of years with success and without complaint,” Yeoman said.

Until now.

Gilmore did not return a reporter’s phone call yesterday.

McMillan and Cullen have asked that if the children can’t celebrate their traditions – whatever they may be – at the holiday gift shop, then maybe the school should move the gift shop to another time of year.

Not all Chelmsford schools have adopted the same policy as Byam. The South Row Elementary School, and the former Westlands Elementary that closed last year, had no restrictions on gift-giving.

“It makes sense that the school probably makes the most money by holding the gift shop over the holidays,” McMillan added. “So all we’re asking is that if you’re letting kids buy gifts for the holidays, let them donate stuff that celebrates those traditions and use it as a teachable moment so these kids can learn.”

McMillan and Cullen will appear before the School Committee on Tuesday, Nov. 24.

It seems like these parents are the only ones who possess any reason whatsoever. But, as always, there is the one parent who gets OFFENDED!! for their children’s sake, and must ban Christmas, Santa, Christianity, and anything that might even resemble it. But going so far as to link Santa Claus to Nazi swastikas is taking it further than I think I’ve seen before. I mean, really, let’s see… we have Santa Claus, a saint who has grown into a myth, a man who believes in kindness and giving. And then there’s Nazis, who were responsible for the torture, starvation, slavery, and murders of over six million people. How does one’s mind link Santa Claus and Nazis? When someone mentions Christmas or Santa, how screwed up do you have to be to automatically think that letting a kid celebrate that in school means that you’re opening the door to celebrating Nazis? I mean, that’s one hell of a leap there. On top of that, the rules seem more than a little outrageous. You can’t even have red or green wrapping paper because it just might remind someone of Christmas? Good Lord, this takes worshipping at the altar of political correctness to a whole new level.

And for what it’s worth, I think the suggestion of McMillan and Cullen seem perfectly sound to me. If they won’t let children celebrate their respective holidays at the gift shop — Christmas, Hanukkah — then why not just move the gift shop to a different time of year and avoid the whole issue? Instead, the school has seemingly gone out of their way to deliberately snub religion. It’s simple, though. The school wants to capitalize on the holiday season without having to actually deal with those pesky holidays, and they know that having the gift shop in the middle of, say, September just wouldn’t be as profitable. I don’t begrudge them wanting to make money, but it seems hypocritical to want to make money off of the holiday season — and also by taking advantage of the festive, giving holiday spirit of parents — while being completely unwilling to include the holidays they’re capitalizing on.

And while surely if enough parents complain enough, the school will change the rules, it’s disturbing enough that this would even happen. This was a country built on faith-based principles, after all — and now, we have more and more schools trying to keep faith out of the public eye in any way, shape, or form.

Jane Gilmore, the religion hating principal of Byam Elementary School.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!

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The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said Wednesday that it will be unable to continue the social service programs it runs for the District if the city doesn’t change a proposed same-sex marriage law, a threat that could affect tens of thousands of people the church helps with adoption, homelessness and health care.

Under the bill, headed for a D.C. Council vote next month, religious organizations would not be required to perform or make space available for same-sex weddings. But they would have to obey city laws prohibiting discrimination against gay men and lesbians.

Fearful that they could be forced, among other things, to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples, church officials said they would have no choice but to abandon their contracts with the city.

“If the city requires this, we can’t do it,” Susan Gibbs, spokeswoman for the archdiocese, said Wednesday. “The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular. For us, that’s really a problem.”

Several D.C. Council members said the Catholic Church is trying to erode the city’s long-standing laws protecting gay men and lesbians from discrimination.

The clash escalates the dispute over the same-sex marriage proposal between the council and the archdiocese, which has generally stayed out of city politics.

Catholic Charities, the church’s social services arm, is one of dozens of nonprofit organizations that partner with the District. It serves 68,000 people in the city, including the one-third of Washington’s homeless people who go to city-owned shelters managed by the church. City leaders said the church is not the dominant provider of any particular social service, but the church pointed out that it supplements funding for city programs with $10 million from its own coffers.

“All of those services will be adversely impacted if the exemption language remains so narrow,” Jane G. Belford, chancellor of the Washington Archdiocese, wrote to the council this week.

The church’s influence seems limited. In separate interviews Wednesday, council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3) referred to the church as “somewhat childish.” Another council member, David A. Catania (I-At Large), said he would rather end the city’s relationship with the church than give in to its demands.

“They don’t represent, in my mind, an indispensable component of our social services infrastructure,” said Catania, the sponsor of the same-sex marriage bill and the chairman of the Health Committee.

The standoff appears to be among the harshest between a government and a faith-based group over the rights of same-sex couples. Advocates for same-sex couples said they could not immediately think of other places where a same-sex marriage law had set off a break with a major faith-based provider of social services.

The council is expected to pass the same-sex marriage bill next month, but the measure continues to face strong opposition from a number of groups that are pushing for a referendum on the issue.

The archdiocese’s statement follows a vote Tuesday by the council’s Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary to reject an amendment that would have allowed individuals, based on their religious beliefs, to decline to provide services for same-sex weddings.

How pathetic. D.C.’s stance is basically that the Catholic Church should abandon its principles if it wants to keep working with the city, because this is going to pass whether they like it or not, and they have to make this awful choice — but they, of course, are the bad guys. This is, of course, the liberal meme, because anyone who is against gay marriage is prejudiced and backward and wrong and might as well be the KKK. Check out this explanation from Feministing:

The closing of a major homeless shelter and budget cuts have worsened the situation in a city already struggling to serve its poor and homeless residents. As someone who organizes for access to abortion I have obvious problems with gaps in the services provided by Catholic Charities. But that does not discount the vital work they do for the 68,000 D.C. residents who rely on Catholic Charities for shelters, health care, and food programs.

The Archdiosese is making a clear statement: it considers keeping rights from same sex couples more important than the needs of this city’s most vulnerable. Their willingness to use the lives and health of 68,000 people in need as pawns in their fight for the right to discriminate is unconscionable. D.C. needs more social services, not less. I hope the Archdiosese can put aside the politics of hate for a moment to recognize what I would think they would consider a moral obligation to do vital life saving work.

With all due respect, this isn’t a choice the church can fairly make. They didn’t ask for this bill, and their input was completely ignored when it came to amendments in the bill. The passage of this bill puts Catholic Charities in the worst kind of situation. For the Catholic Church, this isn’t a political situation, which is what liberals want to make it into. For the Catholic Church, this is a religious issue, it’s a moral one. The church cannot just abandon its principles, and that’s what liberals are forcing the church to do. And if the church caves on this, it won’t stop here. Liberals will start putting the pressure on about abortion, and performing gay marriages, and who knows what else. Where will it stop? It’s disgusting that liberals are putting the blame on the church here, when they are the ones being forced between a rock and a hard place. The church is not the one using homeless people as pawns; the city is. And it is wrong for the government to be legislating religious beliefs, which is basically what has happened here. This is, at its core, a subtle attack on our rights to religious freedom. And apparently, there is no one who is going to stand up for religion in this case.

If this is the change you voted for, then I hope you’re happy.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!

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Last week Mary Fitzgerald argued that climate change is a feminist issue on the basis that population control is a way to prevent the situation spiralling out of control. And, she posited, this could be achieved by giving more women more autonomy over their own bodies, through improved access to contraception and abortion.

I’m not going to get into the arguments around whether population control is a good solution to climate change. Others have already done so; George Monbiot’s piece barely more than a month ago, for this newspaper, is a great place to start.

Ensuring all women have full reproductive freedom and reproductive justice is a necessary goal in its own right moving towards a more equal and just world. I get that it might be tempting to hitch this issue to climate change, which has so much political capital.

I thought she wasn’t going to get into that issue, which she discusses for two more paragraphs after the first three? Anyhow

But Fitzgerald is completely right that climate change is a feminist issue. Everyone stands to suffer if climate change is allowed to spiral out of control, of course, but a gender analysis of both the impacts and causes of climate change shows that globally women contribute less to the problem and yet are likely to be hit especially hard.

Poor people are likely to bear the brunt as the climate changes and 70% of the world’s poor are women. According to one estimate, 85% of the victims of climate disasters are women. Another study found 75% of environmental refugees are women. (Statistics from the Women’s Manifesto on Climate Change).

Gotta love the source of the study. Here’s a clue for you, Ms. Jesse McAbe: you enact all your crazy global warming plans, and the women in the poor countries will suffer way, way, way more.

After some more quibbling about how this is a feminsta issue, we end with

So, yes, climate change is a feminist issue; women are on the front lines of climate change impact and need to be part of creating solutions. And women all over the world are in dire need of access to full and real reproductive justice. But linking the two by advocating population control as a solution to climate change isn’t the way to achieve either of these aims.

Only in Liberal World can we link access to abortion around the world to globull warming. Sigh.

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Such thinking was once dominant in Anglo-Saxon philosophy schools but the great expansion of tertiary education in recent decades has meant that many less rigorous thinkers have been employed as philosophers, some even being third-rate enough to find enlightenment in the words of an obsolete economist called Karl Marx. So philosophy schools are now replete with people who seem to think they are being profound when they say: “There is no such thing as right and wrong” or “There are many realities”. To an Anglo-Saxon empiricist, such statements are simply confused.

Such confused thinking is usually described (rather fancifully) these days as “postmodernism” but for historical purposes it is probably best subsumed under the broad category of “existentialism” — and there were many prominent existentialist thinkers in the first half of the 20th century, particularly in Germany. And many existentialist thinkers at that time were sympathetic to National Socialism (Nazism), just as their counterparts today are solidly in favour of all sorts of Leftist thinking. So existentialist thinking and Leftism have always been intimately associated among many who call themselves philosophers. And it should therefore be no surprise that prewar existentialists sound very profound to existentialists today.

The Nazi connection is however embarrassing. Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, DeMan and others sound very good and wise and profound to Leftist philosophers today so how do you cope with the Nazi connection? Easy: In the traditional Leftist way of dealing with all inconvenient facts — by ignoring it.

One of the holier of today’s existentialists has however recently upset the applecart by pointing out that the great god Heidegger was a Nazi and calling for all Heidegger’s thinking to be denounced and renounced. Leftists are not letting go of such an inspiring (to them) figure as Heidegger, however. What Heidegger says is central to what they say, so to denounce Heidegger would be to denounce most of their own thinking. And there the matter rests at the moment. A small excerpt from a NYT story about the matter below. That Nazi thinking is one subset of socialist thinking is, of course, never acknowledged:

For decades the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has been the subject of passionate debate. His critique of Western thought and technology has penetrated deeply into architecture, psychology and literary theory and inspired some of the most influential intellectual movements of the 20th century. Yet he was also a fervent Nazi.

Now a soon-to-be published book in English has revived the long-running debate about whether the man can be separated from his philosophy. Drawing on new evidence, the author, Emmanuel Faye, argues fascist and racist ideas are so woven into the fabric of Heidegger’s theories that they no longer deserve to be called philosophy. As a result Mr. Faye declares, Heidegger’s works and the many fields built on them need to be re-examined lest they spread sinister ideas as dangerous to modern thought as “the Nazi movement was to the physical existence of the exterminated peoples.”

First published in France in 2005, the book, “Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy,” calls on philosophy professors to treat Heidegger’s writings like hate speech. Libraries, too, should stop classifying Heidegger’s collected works (which have been sanitized and abridged by his family) as philosophy and instead include them under the history of Nazism. These measures would function as a warning label, like a skull-and-crossbones on a bottle of poison, to prevent the careless spread of his most odious ideas, which Mr. Faye lists as the exaltation of the state over the individual, the impossibility of morality, anti-humanism and racial purity.

The book is the most radical attack yet on Heidegger (1889-1976) and would upend the philosophical field’s treatment of his work in the United States, and even more so in France, where Heidegger has frequently been required reading for an advanced degree. Mr. Faye, an associate professor at the University of Paris, Nanterre, not only wants to drum Heidegger from the ranks of philosophers, he wants to challenge his colleagues to rethink the very purpose of philosophy and its relationship to ethics.

At the same time scholars in disciplines as far flung as poetry and psychoanalysis would be obliged to reconsider their use of Heidegger’s ideas. Although Mr. Faye talks about the close connection between Heidegger and current right-wing extremist politics, left-wing intellectuals have more frequently been inspired by his ideas. Existentialism and postmodernism as well as attendant attacks on colonialism, atomic weapons, ecological ruin and universal notions of morality are all based on his critique of the Western cultural tradition and reason.

I go into some detail about the confusions of “postmodernist” thinking here

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, DISSECTING LEFTISM, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . List of backup or “mirror” sites here or here — for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is “down” or failing to update. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)

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With increasing threats, lawsuits and exposure over what constitutes a ‘legal Christmas season’ in this country, it is astounding albeit wonderful, that the current White House administration, President and Congress have not decided to remove the word Christmas or Christ from the upcoming tree lighting ceremony in Washington D.C.

Current reports on the NPS.gov webpage have the traditional ceremony of the National Christmas Tree Lighting happening on December 3rd this year at the Elipse, south of the White House grounds in Washington D.C. Each year the National Park Service and National Park Foundation sponsor the tree lighting ceremony that helps kick off a four week Christmas celebration in the U.S. Capital.

Kudos to Barry for keeping it as such, but, you know there would be apoplexy were he to rename it the National Holiday Tree.

In early October, school children in Arizona were asked to make decorations for the National Christmas Tree. Those who made ornaments referring to Christ or Christmas were told they had to redo their artwork in order to leave out Christ. After the Alliance Defense Fund became involved, sending a letter to the NPS stating that banning such ornaments was unconstitutional, the NPS agreed and changed their mind on the religious ornament ban. Children have constructed thousands of ornaments this year, thankfully now without fear of rejection due to their religious depictions on them. The ornaments will be placed on the nearly 65 foot tree that will grace the grounds near the White House starting December 3rd.

As many conservative and tradition-loving Christians look forward to various tree lighting ceremonies during the upcoming Christmas season, some still hold their breath waiting to see which extremist anti-Christian organization will throw a fit over someone else celebrating their own religion and sharing those celebrations with the rest of the majority in the United States.

It has almost become a game, waiting to see who will do what. The writer, Karen McCracken (cool name!), then offers up even more examples, then offers some advice

While it is absolutely important to stand up for our rights to worship and celebrate as we see fit – no matter our religion – the meaning of Christmas is not removed when the word Christmas is removed from the name of an event. (Such as what has been done to the Hollywood Christmas Parade this year; recently renamed The Hollywood Santa Parade.) The God who is my Heavenly Father is not taken away when a Christmas Parade is taken away from the community nor will Christ disappear merely because His name is removed from a worldly event.

She is correct that the season is not about those things, and shouldn’t be about those things. Jesus is in our heart. The season is about His message. Unfortunately, there are those that attempt to turn the entire thing into something secular that should only be practiced in the privacy of our own homes, rather than acknowledging the reason for the season.

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“It would be easy to miss among the yucca and Joshua trees of this vast place — a small plywood box, set back from a gentle curve in a lonesome desert road. It looks like nothing so much as a miniature billboard without a message.

But inside the box is a 6 1/2 -foot white cross, built to honor the war dead of World War I. And because its perch on a prominent outcropping of rock is on federal land, it has been judged to be an unconstitutional display of government favoritism of one religion over another.

Whether the Mojave cross is ever unveiled again — or taken down for good — is up to the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Next week, it will get its first major chance to divine the meaning of the First Amendment command that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

If the court reaches the constitutional issues at hand, all sides agree it could provide clarity to the court’s blurry rules on church-and-state separations. It could also carry important implications for the fate of war memorials around the country that feature religious imagery — the Argonne Cross in Arlington National Cemetery, for instance, or the Memorial Peace Cross in Bladensburg.

The Mojave cross’s protectors, which include veterans groups and the federal government, say the symbol is a historic, secular tribute; its original plaque from the 1930s said it was erected to honor “the dead of all wars.” They argue that Congress has taken the steps to distance itself from any appearance of endorsing a religious display.

But the American Civil Liberties Union, Jewish and Muslim veterans, and others say government actions have only deepened the problem. In an effort to avoid the lower courts’ rulings that it must come down, Congress has designated the site the country’s only official national memorial to the dead of World War I, elevating it to an exclusive group of national treasures that includes the Washington Monument and Mount Rushmore.

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Posted by John 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 (John Ray) here

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**Update** below from children’s book author Charisse Carney-Nunes

As school kids in New Jersey are being indoctrinated to think that Barack Hussein Obama is a suitable replacement for Jesus of Nazareth, the extremist leftist website FireDogLake rose to defend the propaganda. But even the left-wingers over at FDL must realize how indefensible their support of this indoctrination effort in Jersey is because a recent post they made to defend the incident is weak tea, indeed.

At the B. Bernice Young Elementary School in Burlington, New Jersey, the author of the book “I Am Barack Obama,” a children’s book propagandizing kids about the president, was allowed the opportunity to teach kids a couple of cult-like songs about The One. The author, one Charisse Carney-Nunes, claims to have been a Harvard classmate of President Obama.

Carney-Nunes wrote an absurdly hortatory series of songs for Black History day for the grade schoolers to sing at the Jersey elementary school, one of which appropriated a stanza of the ages old Christian standard, “Jesus Loves the Little Children” — suitably altered to make Barack Obama the focus instead of Jesus Christ, of course.

Barack Hussein Obama
He said Red, Yellow, Black or White
All are equal in his sight
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Nice, eh? Barack as Christ goes down well on a school day, doesn’t it?

In any case, after the fire storm erupted on the right leaning blogosphere about this outrageous indoctrination of school children, FireDogLake rose to defend their Obammessiah.

So what was the lefty website’s defense of this propagandist’s effort?

It went sort of like this: “Yeah, well kids were forced to sing O-Cultish propaganda, sure, but there was a school named after George W. Bush in Texas, so THERE!”

That’s right, folks. The reply to this propagandizing of our kids was OK to FireDogLake because some school in Texas was re-named after Bush once. I don’t know about you but it seems to me that re-naming a school is a bit different than forcing kids to sing songs that tells them that Jesu-Bama Loves the little children, all the children of the world, doesn’t it?

**Update** from children’s book author Charisse Carney-Nunes

I have received a press release from the author involved in this school incident. It is presented in its entirety below:

Statement From Hoverfly Media Regarding Charisse Carney-Nunes and
Recent Events Surrounding Bernice Young Elementary School

Washington DC (September 25, 2009) — Charisse Carney-Nunes was invited to Bernice Young Elementary School by the Burlington Township School District because of her status as an award-winning children’s book author. Charisse presented all of her books, including her recent book I Am Barack Obama, a book capturing the example of President Obama to highlight children’s personal power to change the world.

Charisse did not write, create, teach or lead the song about President Obama in the video. The song was presented to her by a teacher and students as a demonstration of a project that the children had previously put together.

Charisse feels it is unfortunate that an event put together with sincere intentions to encourage literacy while celebrating the contributions of African Americans to our great nation has been become political fodder, and hopes cooler heads will prevail.

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Doctors left a premature baby to die because he was born two days too early, his devastated mother claimed yesterday.

Sarah Capewell begged them to save her tiny son, who was born just 21 weeks and five days into her pregnancy – almost four months early.

They ignored her pleas and allegedly told her they were following national guidelines that babies born before 22 weeks should not be given medical treatment.

Miss Capewell, 23, said doctors refused to even see her son Jayden, who lived for almost two hours without any medical support.

She said he was breathing unaided, had a strong heartbeat and was even moving his arms and legs, but medics refused to admit him to a special care baby unit. …

Medics allegedly told her that they would have tried to save the baby if he had been born two days later, at 22 weeks.

When medical professionals are reduced to government bureaucrats, saving lives takes a back seat to regulations.

Meanwhile, in a country where socialist thugs have not yet seized control of the healthcare industry…

[Miss Capewell] was shocked to discover that another child, born in the U.S. at 21 weeks and six days into her mother’s pregnancy, had survived.

Amillia Taylor was born in Florida in 2006 and celebrated her second birthday last October. She is the youngest premature baby to survive.

Lucky for Amillia she made it out before ObamaCare, which is likely to make the womb a very dangerous place.

On a tip from Bernie D. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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An educational foundation in the UK has announced plans to distribute to high schools a free book that highlights the scientific and cultural legacies of Muslim civilization. “1001 Inventions: Muslim Heritage in Our World” is the creation of the Foundation for Science Technology and Civilization (FSTC), a Manchester-based organization set up to raise awareness of the contributions of the Muslim world to modern civilization.

FSTC said the contribution that Muslim and other civilizations have made to the modern world has been widely overlooked and that its team of academics has focused on debunking the myth of the so-called “Dark Ages of Civilization.” “The period between the 7th and 17th centuries – which has been erroneously labeled ‘the Dark Ages’ – was in fact a time of exceptional scientific and cultural advancement in China, India and the Arab world,” Prof. Salim Al-Hassani, chief editor of the book, said. “This is the period in history that gave us the first manned flight, huge advances in engineering, the development of robotics and the foundations of modern mathematics, chemistry and physics.”

The foundation said it hoped to distribute 3,000 copies of the book to UK schools by October and is seeking public support for the campaign through a sponsorship scheme.

Last month, British evolutionary biologist, popular science author and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins announced plans to distribute free DVDs to high schools across the UK. “While the Dawkins campaign, supported by the British Humanist Association, positions science and religion as opposing forces, the 1001 Inventions project reminds us that for 1,000 years the religious and the scientific were comfortable bedfellows and led to unprecedented openness to new ideas and social change,” the FSTC said.

The foundation said it was not challenging Dawkins with the free book but only wanted to “encourage debate about the relationship between science, faith and culture.” It said FSTC has campaigned for school curriculums to acknowledge the scientific achievements of Muslim civilization for more than a decade. “Whilst the Dawkins DVD teaches young people about the experimental scientific method, it fails to point out that it was pioneered by a religious physicist called Ibn-Al Haytham, who saw no conflict in being both a Muslim and a scientist,” Prof. Al-Hassani said. The book comes with a DVD, a poster set for classrooms, a free Teachers Pack and lesson plans.

Responding to the initiative Jon Benjamin, chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the representative organization of Anglo-Jewry, said: “Foundations can distribute materials to schools, but that does not mean that schools will or should use them. We would expect the DCSF [Department for Children, Schools and Families] to monitor carefully what is made available to children for appropriateness and balance.”

The project has been accused of being Islamic propaganda by a London-based think tank. “This organization calling itself the FSTC is not an educational project. It is a dawah project. That is, it is Islamic propaganda,” said Douglas Murray, director of the Center for Social Cohesion, a non-partisan organization that focuses on issues related to community cohesion in the UK.

“There is significant ignorance these days, in the Britain, and the West in general, about our own scientific and cultural heritage. Organizations like the FSTC aim to step into the gap created by that ignorance and claim that the roots of our culture do not lie in our Greek and Judeao-Christian heritage, but in Islamic history.”

Murray accused the FSTC of mixing propaganda with scientific history. “There are those who would claim that no good whatsoever has come from the Islamic world, such claims are demonstrably ignorant. But it is also ignorant and indeed ridiculous to mix propaganda with scientific history as the people behind this project seem to be doing.”

A spokesperson from the Department for Children, Schools and Families said schools could use the material at their discretion.

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Posted by John Ray. 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 (John Ray) here

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