Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (45696)	5/20/2004 3:19:22 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793915

DoJ on the Wrong Side LGF An Oklahoma public school district will allow a sixth-grade Muslim girl to wear the symbol of her oppression by Islamic male society, and the Justice Department is on the wrong side: U.S., Okla. Settle Muslim Head Scarf Case. WASHINGTON - A sixth-grade Muslim girl in Oklahoma can wear a head scarf to school under a settlement between the school district and the Justice Department, officials announced Wednesday. The six-year agreement, filed in U.S. District Court in Oklahoma, also requires the Muskogee Public School District to change its dress code to allow exceptions for religious reasons. “This settlement reaffirms the principle that public schools cannot require students to check their faith at the schoolhouse door,” said R. Alexander Acosta, assistant attorney general for civil rights. Here’s Amir Taheri on the hijab and its true significance: All these and other cases are based on the claim that the controversial headgear is an essential part of the Muslim faith and that attempts at banning it constitute an attack on Islam. That claim is totally false. The headgear in question has nothing to do with Islam as a religion. It is not sanctioned anywhere in the Koran, the fundamental text of Islam, or the hadith (traditions) attributed to the Prophet. This headgear was invented in the early 1970s by Mussa Sadr, an Iranian mullah who had won the leadership of the Lebanese Shiite community. In an interview in 1975 in Beirut, Sadr told this writer that the hijab he had invented was inspired by the headgear of Lebanese Catholic nuns, itself inspired by that of Christian women in classical Western paintings. (A casual visit to the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, or the Louvres in Paris, would reveal the original of the neo-Islamist hijab in numerous paintings depicting Virgin Mary and other female figures from the Old and New Testament.) Sadr’s idea was that, by wearing the headgear, Shiite women would be clearly marked out, and thus spared sexual harassment, and rape, by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian gunmen who at the time controlled southern Lebanon. Sadr’s neo-hijab made its first appearance in Iran in 1977 as a symbol of Islamist-Marxist opposition to the Shah’s regime. When the mullahs seized power in Tehran in 1979, the number of women wearing the hijab exploded into tens of thousands. In 1981, Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic, announced that “scientific research had shown that women’s hair emitted rays that drove men insane” (sic). To protect the public, the new Islamist regime passed a law in 1982 making the hijab mandatory for females aged above six, regardless of religious faith. Violating the hijab code was made punishable by 100 lashes of the cane and six months imprisonment.

To: LindyBill who wrote (45696)	5/20/2004 11:21:04 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793915

STAGGERING FAIL RATE IN SPECIAL ED By KENNETH LOVETT and CARL CAMPANILE NY POST There are several things wrong with this little essay. The New York Post rarely, if ever, does serious factual checking, so one would want to check to see if the numbers cited are accurate and reflect the full tenor of the report. Second, the tests cited here are quite controversial. Should special ed students, some quite seriously impaired but still struggling, have the same tests as non impaired students? We are, I think, at the beginning of that conversation rather than the end. And, third, the amount of money put into special education is very slight, even in New York state, which, so far as I know, has one of the better, if not best such programs in the country.