Although MIM is composed entirely of atheists, we do not favor bombing any Third World madrassas until after the Air Force has finished with the madrassas inside u.$. borders.
"Boys, raised without fathers, were sent to religious schools, or madrassas, taken away from daily village life and away from the influence of women,"(1) says the New York Times. What a shock: the New York Times apparently has seen no gender segregated schools in the u$A. Nor has it thought of the interpenetration of the military with countless schools in the u$a.
The Boston Globe--owned by the New York Times--is another paper hammering on the madrassas. "Since the Sept. 11 attacks, madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan have achieved global notoriety for producing thousands of young men dedicated to holy war."(2) The Boston Globe goes on to call for Indian government interference in India's madrassas.
It's hard to know who started it, the government or the New York Times, because the two have inseparable approaches to foreign affairs. "Secretary of Defense" and nutcase Donald Rumsfeld put it this way in an October 16th 2003 memo: "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"(3)
We won't bother mentioning other newspapers like the USA Today, where an internal investigation found that Jack Kelley fabricated a story about student-terrorists at a Pakistan madrassa.(4) MIM has known for a long time that reporters at major newspapers doing stories about foreign affairs find it far easier to confirm and embolden the imaginations of the Pentagon and State Department than to figure out what is actually happening in the world.
Organizations such as the National Review condemning the madrassas are complete hypocrites in favoring Christian schools in the united $tates. That's obvious. The Crusader bible-thumpers that constitute about 30% of the u.$. population need no explanation. The New York Times hypocrisy is that it advocates war on the madrassas without advocating war on the religious schools and Pentagon here. It's an example of how the Zionist agenda through the courtesy of neo-conservative intellectuals has dove-tailed with the bible-thumper agenda.
After the steady drumbeat for war on the madrassas, at least the New York Times also reported the U.$. bombing of a madrassa.(5) We can say the New York Times got what it wanted.
There are many colleges in the u$a where 10 or 20% of the cars in the parking lot will have Defense Department clearance. Air Force ROTC itself says it has detachments in nearly 1000 colleges.(6) We can't help thinking that Bush sees the war in Afghanistan and Iraq as partly like a semester abroad program for rural white youth.
Since the turmoil of the 1960s, an increasing number of colleges have become outright extensions of the Pentagon. Rather than a series of articles on madrassas, the New York Times should be directing its attention to how the government finds war to be the solution for all problems.
The American revolutionaries who wrote the Bill of Rights all knew about the problem of having standing armies. The most militarist of those revolutionaries managed to stave off an amendment banning permanent standing armies. Hamilton in the Federalist Papers acknowledged popular opinion at the time this way: "The people of America may be said to have derived an hereditary impression of danger to liberty, from standing armies in time of peace."
Yet even while holding out for federal power and the possibility of a standing army, Hamilton never imagined the situation today of having a huge military with a budget bigger than the economy of most countries year after year. "Schemes to subvert the liberties of a great community REQUIRE TIME to mature them for execution. An army, so large as seriously to menace those liberties, could only be formed by progressive augmentations; which would suppose, not merely a temporary combination between the legislature and executive, but a continued conspiracy for a series of time. Is it probable that such a combination would exist at all? Is it probable that it would be persevered in, and transmitted along through all the successive variations in a representative body, which biennial elections would naturally produce in both houses? Is it presumable, that every man, the instant he took his seat in the national Senate or House of Representatives, would commence a traitor to his constituents and to his country? Can it be supposed that there would not be found one man, discerning enough to detect so atrocious a conspiracy, or bold or honest enough to apprise his constituents of their danger?"
It's astonishing, but in Hamilton's day it was very difficult to obtain the funding and men willing to serve in a standing army. George Washington had a hard time of it even in emergency. Today the economy has advanced and indeed there has long been an army "so large" as to have the ability to "menace" "liberties." Hamilton imagined that before enough time for the militarists to plan an attack on liberties had passed, the military would be dissolved anyway. Hamilton would have no choice but to conclude that indeed Congress today has long been full of "traitors" for their continuous excuses for funding the military.
What Hamilton understood very well was that having too many troops in a country over a long time created pressure on the economy and public opinion. Even having too many military veterans in a society could make that society the kind of place no one wanted to live in. That's all written in black and white even by the most militarist white people of that day, who would be considered wild-eyed hippie-anarchist-peacenicks today. There is no way that the "founding fathers" could ever imagine that military schools would penetrate into every nook and cranny of society in the "United States."
Yet, that's not all. Where there are not ROTC courses substituting for what people should be learning in college, there are religious courses filling in, just as in madrassas. The difference of course is that in many Islamic countries, the people are poor and have no choice in educational matters other than madrassas. Here, religion has taken such a hold that students actually choose to go to religious colleges. One might well ask which country is more fanatic, the one where there is no choice but madrassas or the one where a large portion of a well-funded education is madrassas.
Among the goals of the madrassas in the united $tates is to make people ignorant of biology. 29% of Amerikans say they are conservative Protestants, the kind that are bible-thumper fodder. The colleges they support come up with replacements for teaching evolution in school. One replacement is "intelligent design,"(7) and of course they aren't talking space aliens but god.
The sign reads: "Bible Factory Outlet: 75% off." As long as capitalists can make a profit, they don't care if people are made dumb. Christian bookstores abound in the Bible Belt of the South and Midwest, but even in cities ranking in the top 100 in size such as Chatanooga, TN, there is not a single real bookstore to be found, just endless rows of churches.
The most conservative of the Christian colleges stress that they have the highest probability of keeping students born-again upon graduation. The defection rate from born-again Christianity is apparently highest at public schools but also fairly high at some Catholic and Protestant schools.(8) We can say that these evangelical colleges have students self-selected to be stupid and narrow. There's no other explanation for why higher education so tends to eradicate religion.
In March, the federal government told the state of Montana that the "no child left behind law" does not require teaching Darwinian evolution. It left open the door for "intelligent evolution;" even though, Montana asked if it was required to teach intelligent evolution. It's amazing this idiocy goes on and the anti-communists have the nerve to say Mao politicized science. They attack Stalin for supporting Lysenko, who at least was a scientist good with plants. These Christians in the united $tates are supporting "god" instead of biology at a time when the knowledge of evolution and genetics is much better than in Stalin's day.
As in China under Mao, the government in the u$a is making decisions on what to fund. In the u$a's case, the wrong decision has been made to fund teaching of "intelligent design." On the other hand, there is no way around the fact that such decisions end up being made politically. A majority of the u.$. public wants to teach children fairy-tales about the origins of species.(9)
In March, the Ohio Board of Education voted to allow Christian creationist teachings to criticize Darwin's theory of evolution in biology classes. There is an excellent explanation of the politics behind that in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.(10) Theocratic conservatives in Iran's Islamic Republic, er, at the National Review have also called for teaching "faith-based" "science" against Darwin.(11)
One in ten Amerikans attend private schools. 85% of those students are in religious schools.(12) There are 7.6 million Catholic school attendees.(13) The college situation is also bad in the united $tates. In the years 1990 to 1996, college enrollments grew fastest in religious colleges: "Undergraduate enrollments at religious colleges grew by 11 percent from 1990 to 1996 and continue to climb, according to the U.S. Department of Education. At public schools, undergraduate enrollments increased by 4 percent during those years. Enrollment at nonreligious private institutions rose by 5 percent." (14) The most reactionary group of born-again madrassas constituting the 104 colleges of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities have enrolled 1% of u.$. college students and grew 47% in enrollment in the 1990s.(15)
Notes:
1. http://www.williams.edu/AnthSoc/wamp-nyt.htm
2. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/04/04/rumors_of_jihad/
3. http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Rumsfeld_Memo_16_October_2003
4. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/27/schools.htm
5. http://www.cursor.org/stories/oldnews.htm
6. http://www.afrotc.com/colleges/ A list of Army ROTC schools is here:
http://www.armyrotc.com/schools/index.htm
7. http://slate.msn.com/?id=1006213#ContinueArticle
8. www.sbuniv.edu/~khopkins/WhyStatistics.pdf
9. http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2004/03/11/news/top/news01.txt
10. http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/news/107926172824530.xml
11. http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/west200404010900.asp
12. http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/2001330.pdf
13. www.ncea.org/newinfo/faq/
14. www.freep.com/news/education/
15. From:www.washingtontimes.com/national/20030908-121538-4058r.htm