Boreal
Boys in the Front, Girls to the Back
The Escalating Battle
for the Hearts and Minds of the Kids
Coming to a school near you, so please pay attention!
It is both a truism and a cliché that children are the future. Where that future will be shaped is in the classroom.
The public non-denominational school system in Canada is both the strength and the Achilles’ heel of our democratic collective. The strength can be found in schools where children are still taught that the human journey is a journey in the pursuit of knowledge through scientific enquiry and critical thinking. Each generation being responsible for taking that additional step in the direction of the elusive, ultimate truth, which, if ever discovered would mean the end of the human journey as we know it.
The empirical pursuit of knowledge about our universe and our place in it, a gift from the Greeks of antiquity rediscovered during the Renaissance and the period known as the Enlightenment, is facing a serious challenge from those who believe that this journey ended long ago and that we should now simply worship and wait for the promised reward for our uncritical acceptance of revealed truths, immutable facts communicated to a mortal by a god.
Most, if not all religions would like nothing better than to transform classrooms into centers of religious indoctrination instead of education.
Provincial governments across Canada appear more and more willing to support faith-based initiatives that seek to eliminate a child’s last refuge from the incessant bombardment of the word of God: the public school system.
Can democracy, the advancement of science, civilization itself survive too many generations raised to blindly follow instructions from humanity's alleged all-powerful, capricious and invisible friend.
If children are not exposed to and learn to appreciate the values inherent in a secular, democratic society free from religion’s more nefarious influence, what hope is there that our democratic, pluralistic form of government will survive the generations raised on a steady diet of God’s Words.
From: Teach Your Children Well
Cops in Schools! Who's To Blame?
Why police now attend my son’s Muslim prayer space at school by Shirren Ahmed, Globe and Mail, Apr. 26, 2017
My eldest son is in Grade 11 and attends Jummah at his high school (Peel school district). On Fridays, he gets up early, showers and wears clean clothes, usually jeans and a shirt that does not require ironing. Some weeks he is the khateeb, the person who delivers the sermon (or khutbah). He loves it and I am happy he has an opportunity to practice his faith in a safe space …
I never thought these Friday rituals would become a trigger for self-proclaimed secularists and I certainly never expected that Jummah would become a reason to manipulate and terrorize children.
Who is responsible for cops in schools? From Remembering Uzza.
Johnny: Sorry to interrupt, but what about mothers?
Gerry: What about them?
Johnny: I'm talking to Uzza.
Uzza: For mothers, standing up for Islam and encouraging their children to do the same has more to do with demonstrating to their sons and daughters that they are not the simpletons they are made out to be in the Koran, than any pleasure they might get from bullying their inferior.
Johnny: If we no longer have a secular school system it is thanks to these determined mothers who after indoctrinating their children sent them off to school with a mission they considered so dangerous that they demanded the presence of the police to keep whom they considered despicable secularists in check.
Gerry: That, and Motion 103 which gave rise to legislation which finally got the cops out of the schools by making it a serious crime to, among other things, objecting to student preachers spreading the Word and leading students in prayer on school property during schools hours .
Bob: [who finally clues in] Are you telling me that it is mothers who teach their children that girls are stupid?
Uzza: Yes, it is a mother's responsibility to expose her children to the entire Koran before they reach the age of seven or less. But the Koran does not say that women are stupid, only that they have difficulty remembering things and are inferior to the men.
Bob: Sounds like stupid to me.
Gerry: Bob, shut up, we are trying to have a serious discussion here. Sorry about that, Uzza, Bob can be a real jerk sometime.
Johnny: Bob has a point. The Muslim mothers I know are decent people, that they would perpetuate such a negative stereotype of their sex … I don't understand.
Uzza: That is because you have never read Alice Visits a Mosque to Learn about Judgement Day by Bernard Payeur where such incongruities are explained by the imam she meets there.
Johnny: But that book is banned for spreading lies about Islam.
Uzza: In the Islamic municipalities that ban is not enforced.
Johnny: Why not?
Uzza: It is important to know what others are saying about your religion, especially the pertinent observations you find in books like Alice Visits a Mosque. We know everything about you and you know next to nothing about us except what we would like you to believe. This willful ignorance on you part is why you are so easily taken in. You would like to believe that we are just like you, but we are not.
Johnny: [taken aback by the boldness of her response] Uzza, why are you here?
Extremism on Display at a School Board Meeting
Ontario school board’s Muslim support fuels hate, threats
The Globe and Mail, April 18, 2017
48:28 It is He Who sent forth His Messenger with the guidance and the religion of truth, that He may exalt it above every other religion. Allah suffices as Witness.
2007 was the year men decided their interest would be better served if they sent women to man the barricades. That was the year of the Hérouxville Fourteen. It was an inspired decision. The motion introduced by women in the Canadian Parliament and in the Ontario legislature condemning Islamophobia and racism in the same breath is the result. Misogyny never had more determined and effective champions, and now they are targeting the public school system.
One of the many women who showed up in support of the Peel schools board's decision to allow male students to both preach, and demonstrate through worship females' inferiority on school property during schools hours, wore a t-shirt with a warning about what to expect if we refuse to accommodate the misogynous teachings of the religion of truth within the public school system, or everywhere for that matter.
You should be able to make out the all caps promise "RESPECT EXISTANCE OR EXPECT RESISTANCE" The Arabic is assumed to make the same threat, and not contain any deliberate typos.
Glenn Lowson/The Globe and Mail
There are three overriding conditions which mandate active resistance on the part of believers, the most worrisome and intimidating for the Western World is the third prerequisite, "to remove any government that will not allow the free practice of Islam within its borders" (the other two conditions you will find in Killing Unbelievers Halal).
The Religion of Truth will not be denied. Ms. Khalid, in refusing to change a single syllable in her motion, displayed the same uncompromising self-righteous defiance demanded by Allah if His religion is to triumph over all other creeds as the young woman in the t-shirt and her fully and partially cloaked co-religionists in the background.
The Party Line is a Lie
When I wondered aloud if he’d consider not going to Jummah, he paused for a nanosecond before snorting at my suggestion.
“Stop going to Jummah? Seriously? Nah.”
“Mama,” he said, looking me square in the eyes, “if a guy came to our Jummah and started spewing hate and being violent, he would literally have 300 brown and black kids jump at him.”
Why police now attend my son’s Muslim prayer space at school by Shirren Ahmed, Globe and Mail, Apr. 26, 2017
South Asian children, brown kids, are the majority at the school in question and the most visible and vocal protestors against the attack on the secular public school system are their parents.
Ms. Ahmed's insinuation that it is white people who are most likely to be beaten up, in quoting her son, is in keeping with the "party line" which seek to obfuscate what the struggle is all about by pretending it's about race not religion.
The Cluelessness of a School Board Exposed
A Toronto-area school board is cautioning its staff and students to be vigilant after an inflammatory video was found circulating online offering a $1,000 reward for a recording of Muslim students using hate speech in Friday prayers …
In the video, Mr. Johnston claimed that hate speech in the Friday prayers would be in Arabic and would go unchecked by staff supervisors. But the Peel board countered by saying that the sermons are in English.
Reward video latest wrinkle in Peel board’s religious tensions, The Globe and Mail Published Friday, Mar. 31, 2017.
Nowhere is the cluelessness of the people making the decisions pertaining to devotions to Allah during schools hours on school property more evident than in the Peel School Board's response to Mr. Johnston's incendiary challenge, that "the sermons are in English."
Daily devotions to Allah all begin with the short relatively benign surah i.e. chapter The People:
THE PEOPLE
114 An-Nâs
In the Name of Allah,
the Compassionate, the Merciful
114:1 Say: “I seek refuge with the Lord of the People,
114:2 “The King of the people,
114:3 “The God of the people,
114:4 “From the evil of the slinking whisperer [Satan],
114:5 “Who whispers in the breasts of people,
114:6 “Both jinn and men.”
This recitation is followed by a selection of revelations (immutable facts communicated to a mortal by a god) which usually change from day to day so that in a year of so, the entire Koran will have been recited as a prayer.
The Koran is a short book riddled with incitement to violence and cruelty. An often quoted excerpt, and for good reason:
The Koran is a shorter book than the Bible (by a factor of ten); pound for pound, it no doubt features more exhortations to violence. So if you ask which book is “worse” in terms of belligerence, you might say that qualitatively the Hebrew Bible (and hence the Christian Bible) takes the trophy—thanks to that unrivalled embrace of genocide in Deuteronomy—but that quantitatively the winner is the Koran, at least in terms of the frequency of belligerent passages, if not in absolute numbers.
And if, on top of the verses espousing violence in the terrestrial world, you add verses gleefully envisioning the suffering of infidels in the afterlife, the Koran wins the quantitative competition more decisively.
Richard Wright, author of The Evolution of God, on the exhortation to violence and the celebration of cruelty in the Koran compared to the Bible.
Students, during prayers, over time, will repeat most of what many of them will have mouthed as children under the insistent tutelage of their mothers.
The Paved Road
Exposing Students to a Beating and Stoking Parents' Prejudices
Life in jail for son's murder over Koran studies
A mother who beat her seven-year-old son to death when he failed to memorise passages from the Koran has been jailed for life, for a minimum of 17 years.
The judge said she had beaten him for three months leading up to his death, adding: "The cause of the beating was your unreasonable view that he wasn't learning passages quickly enough."
BBC January 7, 2013
Sharia law does not normally condone beating children for religious reason until they have reach the age of ten. And then, it is incumbent on the father to deliver the beating for, after the age of seven a child becomes the father's responsibility to indoctrinate into the ways of the religion.
Narrated Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-'As:
The Apostle of Allah (peace be upon him) said: Command your children to pray when they become seven years old, and beat them for it (prayer) when they become ten years old.
Abu Dawud
In a perverse way, by accommodating prayers in school, school boards may be promoting domestic violence and intolerance, for a student who skips the prayers may get a violent reception at home for doing so.
Slandering Her Benefactors
The sponsor of Motion 103 which accuses Canadians of racisms and Islamophobia came to Canada from Pakistan as a child and was elected to Parliament before the age of thirty. Her success would not have been possible if Canadians are what she says they are.
An interview with University of Montreal Professor Nadia El-Mabrouk on Radio-Canada about the mosque murders, one of many Muslims who would deny the slander.
What really hurt me was that it was so easy to blame everyone for the massacre. When talking about other tragedies such as those committed in the name of Islam we are careful not to generalise. In this instance however, we gave the impression that all Quebécquers were responsible. That hurt me, because I have always been welcome here, so I felt I had to speak out … to say no, that Quebécquers are not racists, that they are not responsible [for the murders].
Tunisian-born Nadia El-Mabrouk is a member the Quebec Associations of North-Africans for Secularism (my translation of Association québécoise des Nord-Africains pour la laïcité) and a contributing author to What you don't know about the course on Ethics and Religious Culture (my translation of La face cachée du cours Éthique et culture religieuse).
A Lie Exposed in Real Time
Bias towards those who would rather answer to a higher law has been the norm in Canada since a 1980 Supreme Court decision made it an imperative that the preferences of those who wish to live their lives according to revealed truths be accommodated everywhere.
The Supreme Court of Canada has been extremely diligent in putting into practice what the Charter later explicitly recognised as the Supremacy of the Church over the State. The acceptance of the face-covering-veil, the niqab, during the citizenship ceremony a testament to the enduring legacy of discrimination in favour of believers, not the other way around as Motion 103 would have it.
On the day that Parliament voted for a resolution which gave credence to the lie that the religious, e.g. Muslims are discriminated against, events in Toronto provided real time proof of the opposite. That same afternoon, the Ontario Liberal government issued a statement in support of the Peel District School Board's decision to allow the religion that will not take no for an answer to hold religious services on school property during school hours.
It did this in spite of an animated protest the day before against an undertaking which gives Islam a beachhead where thoughtful parents expected their children to be safe from the bombardment of the word of god. This may explain why some protesters took issue with that intractable book in their insistence that the Board respect its primary mandate and to leave religion out of an ostensibly secular public school system.
Police intervened at a Toronto-area school board (Peel) meeting on Wednesday evening after members in the audience shouted anti-Muslim rhetoric, tore pages from a Koran and stepped on the religious text.
Globe and Mail, March 23, 2017
Intimidated by an unwavering persistent religion, politicians at all levels of government have and continue to surrender rights they should be defending leaving their constituents to take matters into their hands. This is not a good thing.
Bernard Payeur