Tough, smart LiveJournalists take on mean Islamic textbooks
It's always entertaining when the Chronicle's Editorial LiveJournalists go international.
Today's effort was especially good, displaying the sort of naïveté that we haven't seen since LiveJournalist Georgsson was shocked that her neighbors didn't want her leftovers:
[A]ccording to The Associated Press, "hate-hunters" from Pakistan to the Persian Gulf have begun to scour their nations' textbooks and demand that vitriol and intolerance toward other cultures be culled.
As with most reformers in the Islamic world, these activists do dangerous work. But they rightly see their efforts as a way to break Muslim countries' debilitating cycles of conflict with outsiders, as well as a way to modernize. "We are fighting for the future of Islam. Children are sometimes being force-fed a diet of hate, anger and intolerance," Pakistani Ahmed Salim, one textbook watchdog, said. Salim is the leader of a movement in his country to remove what it perceives as violent and extreme material from children's textbooks. Such activists were barely stirring in the Muslim world just a few years ago. But the psychological shock of 9/11, mixed with the material traumas of U.S. military actions in the region and internal terror, galvanized some Muslims to look critically at what their children learn in school. They're determined to excise messages that might twist those youngsters into violent or intolerant adults.
[snip]
It's essential that Saudi Arabia and similarly closed societies heed Islam's reformers and sap the poison that their children are imbibing in school.
Don't you just love how matter-of-factly the LiveJournalists dispense their pronouncements from on high at 801 Texas Avenue to radical Islamists everywhere?
I bet the cycle(s) of violence will be disrupted now that the tough, smart LiveJournalists have weighed in.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 01/03/06 11:08 PM | Houston Chronicle | Print | Comments (2)
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