Fishawi, Jeddah

Science, or 'ilm, which gives us the English word Alumni/ae

Unfortunately I listened to NPR(National Public Radio)'s "Fresh Air"(it should be called "Smog") interviewing a British photographer for the New York Times in Iraq talking about the US torturing people to find out houses where bombs had been made that killed US soldiers, and then an interview with a Professor at Boston University about Lebanon. I looked up this professor because he was so wrong on Lebanon and found that he has endorsed the MESA(Middle East Studies Association) letter writing campaign to free some Iranian Americans academics being held in Iran prisons.

I think that will be enough NPR and MESA to last me a good 5 years. Then I went to Juan Cole's Blog and found that he just cut and pasted some goverment translations of jihadist websites, because he is "interested in religions," as he says on his web site, I guess. That will be enough Juan Cole to last me a good 5 years, too. And, of course Arianna Huffington or whoever her tweedle dumb rival on the "right" may be, are totally out of the question, and always will be.

The US seems to be totally
locked
into the outlook of the Democratic and Republican parties, the twin parties of war.
The US
media just sees everything in the light of this war on terrorism and in the interests
of the
war on terrorism.

There are no jihadists anywhere in the Middle East. We are just people living our
lives.
There are no "madrassas" teaching people to be jihadists or
"wahabists" There are just
schools, like anywhere else!!! Muslims are just like Christians...they go to mosque, pray, make the pilgrimage, but
they
are just ordinary people.

And while I'm on the topic of Madrassas, maybe indeed the very crusades were against
scholarship. Yes, people have forgotton that Averroes was too much for the Bishop of
Paris and St. Thomas Acquinas. Arabic numerals were too much for the popes. The
beginning of learning, which the Arabs brought to Bologna, Sorbonne, Oxford was so
popular and free-thinking(Aristotle, Dialectics, Materialism) that the feudal church
had to
put a stop to it. So they organized the crusades, to drive back Europe to the pre-
Avicennian ages. The crusades backfired, though, because the christian soldiers
found a
land where christians and jews were tolerated, and learning was tolerated, too. The soldeirs came back with a
renewed thirst for LEARNING. AT WHICH POINT FERDINAND AND ISABELLA STARTED THE
SPANISH INQUISITION TO STOP THAT. And America is the brainchild of Ferdinand and
Isabella, as we all learn in kindergarden--and don't learn much else after that.
We're lucky
if we get to the pilgrims in sixth grade.

So, in other words, yes, the Americans are against madrassas--they are against
schools
just as the pope and the crusades were. They don't want people to go deep into
Aristotle,
Dialectics, or anything deep, because that might lead to more people being literate
and
politically literate. The war on terrorism is plain and clear cut: it is against
the people of
Iran having electricity in the remote villages so that they can read and learn at
night. it is
against the people of Iraq being able to defend themselves against Israeli attacks on
their
efforts to produce electricity to the extent that the US is going in to set up a
police state
like downtown Chicago, LA, or Detroit, in Iraq. It is against Saudi Arabia doing
anything on the world political arena
but sell oil to Japan through Exxon Mobil(All this talk in the US about
"independance from
Saudi Arabia" is "talk under censorship" as I see it, because none of
the gas in the US
comes from Saudi Arabia. I have seen the way the Israelis treat educators. The
Americans
are no different. They hate to see other people getting any education, unless it be
an
education that will regurgitate the Americana of NPR(National Public Radio) and MESA(Middle East Studies Association).

Sorry for the rant
13Jun2007 27 Jumadi Awal 1428 last day of school