Tuesday, June 10, 2008


"Jihad" redefined

We read:
"A new report issued by the American Textbook Council says books approved for use in local school districts for teaching middle and high school students about Islam caved in to political correctness and dumbed down the topic at a critical moment in its history.

"Textbook editors try to avoid any subject that could turn into a political grenade," wrote Gilbert Sewall, director of the council, who railed against five popular history texts for "adjust[ing] the definition of jihad or sharia or remov[ing] these words from lessons to avoid inconvenient truths."

Sewall complains the word jihad has gone through an "amazing cultural reorchestration" in textbooks, losing any connotation of violence. He cites Houghton Mifflin's popular middle school text, "Across the Centuries," which has been approved for use in Montgomery County Schools. It defines "jihad" as a struggle "to do one's best to resist temptation and overcome evil."

Source

Osama bin Laden obviously uses a very different textbook.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

JIHAD = CRUSADE, there's no difference except the word used by the religion performing the act.

Anonymous said...

Bin Laden uses the same definition (which is indeed a direct translation of the term from Arabic).
He just interprets it differently in as to mean the destruction by any means of everything that could tempt him and the spreading by any means of Islam (as when there's only Islam there's no temptation towards other faith systems). And most Muslims use that same definition.

Anonymous said...

anonymous 1,

Do you realize what you're saying? Let me put it this way:

JIHAD = CRUSADE
JIHAD = ASSAULT
CRUSADE = SELF DEFENSE
therefore ASSAULT = SELF DEFENSE

The Crusades were a response to the Muslim jihad which had been conquering the middle east and Europe from the mid 600's to around 1100 when the first crusade was launched as the direct result of a cry for help from the Byzantine emperor. That's not to say that the crusades were perfect, far from it. However, the crusades were, first and foremost, a defensive war against the jihadists.

Equating jihad and the crusades is like saying that a woman who fights back against a rapist is no better than the rapist. Can you honestly claim that a woman who refuses to fight back and is strangled to death with her own pantyhose is somehow morally superior to the rapist?

IMHO, the person who refuses to defend the innocent is no better than the criminal. Not only do they allow harm to the current victim, thereby acting as a sort of accessory to the crime, but they also allow harm to come to the criminal's future victims by not acting to prevent those harms when the opportunity presented itself.

Anonymous said...

Ever notice that policical correctness only applys to the United States, England, France, or countrys that are for the most part white. For sure not in the middle east, Africa or Mexico. Ever wonder why that is. Almost reads like a plan to me. Stormewaters

Anonymous said...

It is a plan Storm. It's a plan to take advantage of weak, stupid people, which puts us at the top of the list!