Perry Mafia Punked, "Beclowned" Indeed - Atlas Shrugs

Perry Mafia Punked, "Beclowned" Indeed - Atlas Shrugs

This supposedly tough part of the Perry/Aga Khan curriculum, which you can find in full at this cached link here, is actually not at all the Islamorealistic presentation that Ace and Stein claim it to be. It does contain the material that they quote, but note that in all that, and in all the rest of it, there is absolutely nothing about the Qur'an's or Muhammad's exhortations to violence.

Again, why does that matter? Because if you don't identify the root of the problem correctly, you will continually apply the wrong remedies. The idea that Islam is a Religion of Peace that has been hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists has led the U.S. to all sorts of policy errors, foreign and domestic: pouring billions in Pakistan, supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, treating stateside Islamic supremacist groups with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood as neutral civil rights organizations, etc. If the exhortations to violence and subjugation of unbelievers under Sharia that are contained in Islamic texts and teachings were acknowledged in the public sphere, Muslim groups in the U.S. could be challenged to show what they're doing to teach against such things, and investigated for sedition where appropriate. Instead, law enforcement and government officials constantly trust individuals and groups that are untrustworthy, because they don't understand the smooth ways in which they're being deceived.

Still, all in all, the material Stein presents on the curriculum is fairly good. But there is a curious thing: the picture one gets of curriculum from Geller and from Stein are wildly divergent. Stein claims that this is because Geller quotes from "brief summaries of lengthy training seminars," while he presented the "entire lesson plan." But that's not actually the case. Go to the cached link of the main page for the curriculum. It says this:

In April 2004, the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) and UT-Austin finalized a grant proposal that created the partnership that became known as the Muslim Histories and Cultures Program (MHC). Much has happened since the inception of the partnership. Creation and implementation of a model was of prime importance. MHC recruited and directly trained 80 teachers affecting approximately 15,150 students of World History and World Geography in ten key Texas districts during the two sessions conducted in 2005 and 2006. The purpose is two-fold 1) to fulfill Governor Rick Perry's desire to better educate Texas teachers on Muslim topics and 2) to train teachers to use a cultural lens approach to understanding other cultures. Governor Perry was instrumental in getting this program off the ground.

It adds -- and note this well -- that "the curriculum for this project was developed at Harvard University and modified at the University of Texas at Austin." Now this is apparently referring to the curriculum for the training of the 80 teachers in the two sessions conducted in 2005 and 2006. And this material is very, very bad. It contains all the material Geller quoted, including a whitewash of Muslim Spain (debunked here) and the use of texts by the likes of Carl Ernst, John Esposito, and Michael Sells. Carl Ernst is the academic propagandist who actually traveled to Tehran in 2008 to accept an award from Iran's genocidally antisemitic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. John Esposito is a Saudi-funded pseudo-academic who has cooked data about Islamic moderates. Michael Sells produced an edition of the Qur'an that left out all the violent and hateful bits. And they're by no means the only questionable authorities that this curriculum invokes.

But wait a minute. Remember, "the curriculum for this project was developed at Harvard University and modified at the University of Texas at Austin." But Stein claims to present "the curriculum that resulted from the Perry/Khan partnership," and specifically, "the lesson plan that deals with Islam and the West, past and present." Stein says that "the lesson plan was written by Ronald Wiltse," who is "a retired history teacher in San Antonio." But is Wiltse's lesson plan actually part of the Perry/Aga Khan curriculum at all? Only peripherally -- at best. Look back at the main cached page for the curriculum. It says that "MHC recruited and directly trained 80 teachers affecting approximately 15,150 students of World History and World Geography in ten key Texas districts during the two sessions conducted in 2005 and 2006," and that "the responsibilities of the participants are...to create lessons concerning Islamic topics with a 'cultural lens' approach tied to their grade level to share with other teachers."

The Plot thickens.