Call Hijackers 'Freedom Fighters'

[Herbert Spencer]

And let's call stupidity "education." Anti-Christian bigots henceforth shall be known as "diploma mill experts."

Teacher Tells Students to Call 9-11 Hijackers “Freedom Fighters”
Todd Starnes
Feb 27, 2013

An Advanced Placement World Geography teacher at a Texas high school who encouraged students to dress in Islamic clothing also instructed them to refer to the 9-11 hijackers not as terrorists – but as “freedom fighters,” according to students who were in the class.

Students at Lumberton High School were also told to stop referring to the Holocaust as Genocide – instead they were told to use the term “ethnic cleansing.”

John Valastro, the superintendent of the Lumberton Independent School District, tells me that the teacher did absolutely nothing wrong.

“What is more dangerous – fear and ignorance or education and understanding,” he asked. “From our standpoint, we are here to educate the kids.

Valastro said the teacher involved is a 32-year veteran who was simply following state teaching guidelines.

“I don’t think my freshman-level teacher was trying to politicize radical Islam or anything like that,” he said. “I don’t think our teacher has...to my knowledge ever converted a single student to Islam.”

The Islamic lessons in the small public high school generated national attention after a photograph of four female students wearing burqas surfaced on Facebook.

April LeBlanc’s 15-year-old daughter was one of the students in the photograph. She told me that many parents in the district feel betrayed by school officials.

“My biggest thing is not the burqa,” she said. “That was the key to opening up the rest. It’s scary how far they dove into the Islamic faith. It’s scary what they taught my daughter. Who’s in charge of this? How did our superintendent let this slip through the cracks?”

LeBlanc said the students were told that they could no longer use the terms suicide bomber or terrorist. Instead, they were instructed to use the words “freedom fighters.”

“This teacher taught her that a freedom fighter is when they give their life for the Holy War – and that they’re going to go to heaven,” she said. “They were saturating these kids in Islam and my daughter is an American Christian child.”

Madelyn LeBlanc told me that it was clear her teacher was very uncomfortable lecturing the students.

“I do have a lot of sympathy for her,” the 15-year-old said. “At the very beginning she said she didn’t want to teach it but it was in the curriculum.”

Her mother added that it was her impression that the teacher did not agree with the quote about calling the terrorists freedom fighters and laced her lecture with sarcasm.

During a lesson on Judaism, LeBlanc said the teacher told the class, “Students, I’m supposed to be politically correct and tell you that the Holocaust was not Genocide. It was an ethnic cleansing.”

LeBlanc said her daughter kept detailed notes of every classroom lecture and as she read the transcripts she became disturbed.

“Really,” she asked. “They can’t call the Holocaust Genocide? I was more upset with that than the lessons on Islam. It made me sick.”

And then came the comparison between the 9-11 hijackers and the freedom fighters.

Madelyn said a young man sitting beside her was stunned.

“He was shocked that we had to call them that,” she told Fox News. “He laughed and asked the teacher, ‘Is that a joke? Are you serious? Why do we have to call them that? That makes it sound okay (what they did) And it’s not.’”

Madelyn said the teacher didn’t know how to respond.

“She said it was something we have to learn for the end of the year testing,” she said. “I’m sure it was very difficult for her to do.”

Madelyn said the lesson about freedom fighters made her feel “terrible.”

“That made it sound like what they were doing was okay,” she said.

The superintendent also defended the lesson on freedom fighters.

“The whole idea behind this particular lesson – do you call yourself a freedom fighter or Islamic jihadist – or whatever it is you want to be called – you’ve got to put things in perspective,” the superintendent said. “We’re trying to teach the kids to discern for themselves that one thing can be called many different things.”

Valastro said it’s important for students to understand context.

“We might see it as terrorism, but from the Islamic side they might call it jihadist or freedom fighter,” he said.

The superintendent said he was not aware of the specific comments made about the 9-11 hijackers – but conceded there was only one side to the attack.

“I do agree it was a terrorist attack,” he said. “But in several classes across this country, you’re going to have a make-up of students from all over the world in your class. We teach it as an act of terrorism – whereas they are teaching it to their kids as a revolutionary event.”

LeBlanc said she was especially bothered by the lack of emphasis on other religions. She said there were hardly any lessons on Judaism and none on Christianity.

“I wondered how it was okay for them to go so in-depth into a religion from the other side of the world but it was not okay for them to be like that with Christianity,” she said.

“I try to stay open-minded,” she said. “I don’t want my daughter to be ignorant about the world. My kids watch the news with us. We make them aware. I don’t even mind the high school teaching these things.”

But, she added, there was no balance.

“They can talk about how important Mecca is – but why aren’t they talking about how important Christianity was to the founding of the nation,” she asked.

LeBlanc and other parents said they feel betrayed.

“We trusted these people,” she said of the school system. “It scares me. I feel like our school is being infiltrated. How can this not be a sign? We’re talking about Lumberton, Texas. We’re talking about a small town with Christian churches on every street corner. Right in our small school this is going on.”

[ham]

Eh? Let's just look at the parting words -now edited- of Rambo III's end credits: to the brave mujahedeen.
PFFT!

[Albert Hidel]

Union control freaks, Big Ed power grabbers and statists? Sounds like the accreditation cabal.

Malkin: Rotten to the Core, Part III: Lessons from Texas



By: Michelle Malkin
3/1/2013 11:45 AM

Texas is a right-minded red state, where patriotism is still a virtue and political correctness is out of vogue. So how on earth have left-wing educators in public classrooms been allowed to instruct Lone Star students to dress in Islamic garb, call the 9/11 jihadists “freedom fighters” and treat the Boston Tea Party participants as “terrorists”?

Here’s the dirty little secret: Despite the best efforts of vigilant parents, teachers and administrators committed to academic excellence, progressive activists reign supreme in government schools.

That’s because curriculum is king. The liberal monopoly on the modern textbook/curricular market remains unchallenged after a half-century. He who controls the textbooks, teaching guides and tests controls the academic agenda.

That is how the propagandistic outfitting of students in Islamic garb came to pass in the unlikely setting of the conservative Lumberton, Texas, school district. As Fox News reporter Todd Starnes noted this week, a 32-year veteran of the high school led a world geography lesson on Islam in which hijab-wrapped students were banned from using the words “suicide bomber” and “terrorist” to describe Muslim mass murderers in favor of the term “freedom fighter.”

Madelyn LeBlanc, one of the students in the class, “told Fox News that it was clear her teacher was very uncomfortable lecturing the students. ‘I do have a lot of sympathy for her. … At the very beginning, she said she didn’t want to teach it, but it was in the curriculum.’”

But the headline-grabbing injection of moral equivalence into social studies and American history is just the tip of the education iceberg.

Top-down federalized “Common Core” standards are now sweeping the country. It’s important to remember that while teachers-union control freaks are on board with the Common Core regime, untold numbers of rank-and-file educators are just as angered and frustrated as parents about the Big Ed power grab. The program was concocted not at the grassroots level, but by a bipartisan cabal of nonprofits (led by lobbyists for the liberal Bill Gates Foundation), statist business groups and hoodwinked Republican governors. As I’ve reported previously, this scheme, enabled by the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” funding mechanism, usurps local autonomy in favor of lesson content and pedagogical methods.

One teacher described a thought-control training seminar in her school district titled “Making the Common Core Come Alive.” A worksheet labeled “COMMON CORE MIND SHIFTS” included the following rhetorical muck:
–The goal of curriculum should not be the coverage of content, but rather the discovery of content. … If done well, Common Core will elevate our teaching to new heights, and emphasize the construction of meaning, while deepening our understanding of our students.”
–”In our classrooms, it is the students’ voices, not the teachers’, that are heard.”

Blah, blah, blah. In practice, Common Core evades transparency by peddling shoddy curricular material authored by anonymous committees. It promotes faddish experiments masquerading as “world-class” math and reading goals. Instead of raising expectations, Common Core is a Trojan horse for lowering them. California, for example, is now citing Common Core as a rationale for abandoning algebra classes for 8th graders. Common Core’s “constructivist” approach to reading is now the rationale for abandoning classic literature for “informational texts.”

Claims that Common Core bubbled up from the states are bass-ackward. A shady nonprofit group called “Achieve Inc.,” stocked with federal-standards advocates who’ve been around since the Clinton years, designed the materials. They were rubber-stamped by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and subsidized by the Gates Foundation.

In states like Texas, which rejected Common Core, similar secretive alliances prevail. The Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative, a nonprofit group led by government officials, designed the “CSCOPE” curriculum now used in 80 percent of the state’s schools. The state Board of Education, local schools and parents were denied access to the online CSCOPE curriculum database — which was exempted from disclosure rules. In fact, dissemination of the lessons was considered a crime until earlier this month. Only after parents and teachers across the state blew the whistle on radical CSCOPE lesson plans (including designing a new flag for a socialist lesson) did the state take steps to rein in the CSCOPE zealots.

Grassroots activists in Indiana, Alabama, Utah and nearly a dozen other states are now educating themselves and their state legislatures about the centralized education racket, whether it’s under the guise of Common Core or any other name. Last week, in response to a passionate parent-driven protest, the Indiana state Senate passed legislation to halt Common Core implementation. Anti-Common Core bills are moving through the Alabama state legislature, where lawmakers are especially concerned about how Common Core’s intrusive database gathering would violate student privacy.

As Texas goes, so goes the nation. The fight against the federalization of academic standards is a national education Alamo.

[ham]

As I’ve reported previously, this scheme, enabled by the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” funding mechanism, usurps local autonomy in favor of lesson content and pedagogical methods.

Race?
You mean the other dictionary entry, right?

[Winston Smith]

Texas.....WTF?

Texas School Forces Students To Recite Mexican Pledge
March 2, 2013 by B. Christopher Agee

One student in a Texas high school is taking legal action after she said she was reprimanded for not participating in a class recitation of the Mexican pledge of allegiance and national anthem.

Fifteen-year-old Brenda Brindson’s suit, filed by the Thomas More Law Center, contends that administrators violated her constitutional rights by forcing her to salute a foreign nation’s flag.

While the same school district has a written policy against coercing students to recite either the American pledge of allegiance or the U.S. Declaration of Independence, somehow verbally expressing loyalty to another nation is compulsory.

Richard Thompson, president of the TMLC, said this incident is indicative of “a sad trend in public schools across our nation to undermine American patriotism,” though he said he finds it “encouraging to see students like Brenda stand up for America despite pressure from school officials.”

Such pressure reportedly included Brindson’s teacher issuing her a failing grade on the assignment and forcing her to listen to a wave of schoolmates pledge allegiance to Mexico.

According to her lawsuit, Brindson even tried to compromise with her teacher, requesting to instead salute the American flag and recite its pledge in Spanish.

The student, fluent in Spanish and the daughter of a Mexican immigrant, is a proud American and contends that pledging loyalty to any other nation is unacceptable.

She gets no argument from me.

American Student Punished for Refusing to Recite Mexican Pledge
Feb 27, 2013
By Todd Starnes

A Texas high school student has filed a federal lawsuit against her school and her teachers after she was punished for refusing to salute and recite the Mexican pledge of allegiance.

The Thomas More Law Center filed the suit on behalf of Brenda Brinsdon alleging the McAllen Independent School District violated the 15-year-old girl’s constitutional rights when she was forced to recite the Mexican pledge and sing the Mexican national anthem.

Click here to read the lawsuit.

Brinsdon, who is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant and an American father, refused. She believed it was un-American to pledge a loyalty oath to another country.

Ironically, the school district has a policy that prohibits a school from compelling students to recite the American Pledge of Allegiance.

The district also has a written policy that excuses students from reciting text from the Declaration of Independence if the student “as determined by the district, has a conscientious objection to the recitation.”

“There is a sad trend in public schools across our nation to undermine American patriotism,” said Richard Thompson president of the Thomas More Law Center. “But it’s encouraging to see students like Brenda stand up for America despite pressure from school officials.”

The TMLC told Fox News the district ignored its own rules when Brinsdon refused to recite the pledge of a foreign country.

What’s most troubling is the different treatment for someone wanting to opt out of reciting the American Pledge of Allegiance compared to someone as a matter of conscience wants to opt out of reciting the Mexican pledge,” spokesman Erin Mersino told Fox News.

A spokesman for the McAllen Independent School District told Fox News they had not seen a copy of the lawsuit.

The recitation of the Mexican pledge and the singing of the Mexican national anthem was part of a 2011 Spanish class assignment at Achieve Early College High School. The teacher, Reyna Santos, required all her students to participate in the lesson.

When Brinsdon refused to back down – she was punished, the lawsuit alleges. She was given an alternative assignment on the Independence of Mexico. The teacher gave her a failing grade – and then required the student to sit in class over a period of several days to listen to other students recite the Mexican flag.

The lawsuit states Brinsdon offered to recite the American pledge in Spanish but the teacher refused her request.

“It’s astonishing that this Texas school would deny Brenda her right of conscience and free speech not to pledge allegiance to a foreign country,” said Thompson. “Too many Americans – including those of Mexican descent – have suffered and died protecting our nation.”

And while she is fluent in Spanish and English and is proud of her Mexican heritage, Brinsdon is a “true-blooded American,” Mersino added.

Mersino said it was especially troubling to watch video of students in the class standing up, extending their arms straight out, palms down and reciting the pledge of a foreign country.

“It’s disturbing – it truly was troubling,” she said.

[Winston Smith]