Mark Steyn at his best.
Excerpt:
... The California schools superintendent who wanted his Eighth Graders to turn in essays arguing that the Holocaust didn't happen is called Mohammad Z Islam. That's why they got the assignment, not because they wanted to turn themselves into the Oxford Union. As Laura Rosen Cohen pointed out, there are all kinds of lively topics Mr Cooke might propose for our schools: Did Mohammed exist? What's the deal with his nine-year-old bride? But in the real world even mild questioning of whether Islam is a "religion of peace" is beyond the pale, and across the Continent the Holocaust is disappearing from school curricula.
That's the problem. There's no point winning an Oxford debate if the other side win[s] everything else.
Imponderable question of the week: why is L.A. schools superintendent Mohammad Z. Islam still employed?
I saw that story. Really shocking stuff. I thought I was the only one who noticed that the superintendent of the school system was called Mohammad Islam and his spokeswoman had a Muslim name too, but I guess that just makes me a silly Islamophobe. I'm sure it has nothing to do with their Holocaust denial.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I don't think Mr. Islam is the superintendent of LA schools. This story took place in a smaller city out in the desert.
Joey
Which one of our regular visitors once accused Dr. Egnor of being a holocaust denier? Was that Bachfiend? I can't remember.
ReplyDeleteI'm actually less shocked by this than most. I live in the Detroit area which has a large population of Muslims. I'm not far from Dearbornistan which is the North American headquarters for the Hezbollah fan club. Even mentioning the holocaust in the wrong company is enough to start a fight. They consider the whole thing a big lie fabricated to garner sympathy and steal Palestine.
JQ
JQ,
DeleteNo, it wasn't i. Although, I have accused Egnor of a lot of things - with perfect justification. Such as his ignorance of science, lack of logic, distorted knowledge of history, poor reading comprehension, bizarre definitions of words amongst others.
Says a guy who believes that the universe just exploded into existence, that life naturally appears from non-life and then gradually evolved. Who needs observable, testable evidence when we can make data fit the ideolo... er, theory, right?
DeleteHow's this for hypothesis?
Explosion + Matter = Galaxy
Elements + Time = Life
Because science.
It’s a start Michael, now make a prediction based on one of your hypothesis and test it to see if it’s true.
DeleteLet’s see how that worked in Practice, simplified of course. All galaxies are moving away from each other. If they originated from a single point the temperature would have been very high and the early universe would be opaque to radiation. At some point as the universe expanded it would cool sufficiently to allow hydrogen and helium ions to combine with electrons and become transparent, that light should still be visible red-shifted to much longer wavelengths.
Let’s have a look, and there it is, the cosmic microwave background radiation, just as predicted by the “exploding “ universe theory known as the big bang. People have tried to come up with alternate explanations for the background radiation, but none has ever survived scrutiny.
Yes, because science. Ignorance and incredulity are no excuse.
-KW
And rendered in poetical language, KW, that goes: 'And God said, let there be light, and there was light'.
DeleteNo contradiction between the Big Bang and Genesis.
No contradiction? Apparently you haven’t read Genesis David, because in Genesis there are people around about a week after it’s “big bang”.
Delete-KW
“When men choose not to believe in God, they do
Deletenot thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” - GK Chesterton
It's POETRY, KW. Ever hear of POETRY?
DeletePot, meet Kettle. If this guy was named Jesus Christlover and was teaching cliamate change denial or intelligent design Egnor would be calling him a bold hero of academic freedom.
ReplyDelete-KW
You’re in denial of reality every bit as much as Mr. Islam if you can’t see that opposition to teaching evolution in this country is driven entirely by conservative Christians and Muslims who see it as undermining their religion. You and Mr. Islam are broth defending your faith at the expense of truth and reason.
Delete-KW
I support teaching evolution. Teaching evolution means teaching the strengths and weaknesses of the theory.
DeleteI want schools to spend more time, not less, on evolution. You want it taught as dogma, not science.
Sure, I’d love them to “teach the controversy” because if done honestly every student would end up with a much better appreciation of how science is done, see where the preponderance of the evidence lies, understand that evolution is true, and know that ID is a deliberate re-branding of creationism in a failed attempt to lend it scientific credibility.
DeleteOf course you’re not being honest. When you say “teach more evolution” what you really mean is “allow Cristian educators and bureaucrats to introduce material into the classroom that is designed to undermine evolution and strengthen faith in God.”
-KW
You juxtapose evolution and belief in God.
DeleteA tacit admission that evolution-- Darwinism to be specific-- is your atheist creation myth. Revealing.
More observationally supported hypothesis with converging lines of evidence from multiple disciplines than myth really, but I can certainly understand why you’d want to disparage it to make it more directly comparable to your religion.
Delete-KW
"observationally supported hypotheses"-- 'everything came from nothing, for no reason, and survivors survive'.
DeletePotent science, that.
Even your mischaracterization is more reasonable than the “lonely super being decides to make some worshipers” hypothesis.
Delete-KW
Actually, this story is only the tip of the iceberg. And, BTW, typical of "professional journalism" today.
ReplyDeleteWho is Mo-Z Islam? If you are thinking "rap musician". you're wrong. He's the interim Superintendent of the Rialto Unified School District.
Now why might Rialto have an interim Super in the first place. Well, back in 2013, Mr... oops, sorry! "Dr" Harold Cebrun, Real Superintendent, was placed on administrative leave. One of his minions in the administration (the "accountant") was caught stuffing lunch money into her bra. As it turned out, this little kerfuffle eventually resulted in a finding that $3 million dollars had been embezzled from the District.
The next sequence of events was a barrage of racist hate mail directed toward "Dr" Cebrun, who is black. The locals had been mailing him death threats, some with a Mexican flag, others with a drawing of a gorilla. Life must be wonderful in the Land of the Rainbow Coalition.
But that was not the first racist incident. In the spring of 2013, "[A] girls' bathroom at Rialto High School was also covered with graffiti attacking black students... San Bernardino City police investigated the incident. The school is [79] percent Latino..."
Well, despite his vocal denials of wrongdoing and the barrage of racist hate mail which mysteriously emanated fro a majority-minority school district in an overwhelmingly hard-left Democrat district (Maxine Waters won Rialto in a landslide victory), "Dr" Cebrun decided to throw in the towel and took "early retirement", which the taxpaying waitresses, pool boys, housekeepers, and yard men of California will be paying for the rest of his life.
Mr Islam was appointed as interim Super by the board, with one notable dissent complaining that Mr Islam completely lacked a teaching background. Mr Islam,a Bangladeshi native, remarked on his appointment that "My mission is to change the status and condition of Rialto."
Well, Mr Islam, you've certainly done that.
As an aside, the Maxine Waters mentioned above...???
DeleteYes, she's this Maxine Waters:
WASHINGTON -- Top federal regulators say they were taken aback when they learned that a California congresswoman who helped set up a meeting with bankers last year had family financial ties to a bank whose chief executive asked them for up to $50 million in special bailout funds.
Representative Maxine Waters, [Hard Left] Democrat of California, requested the September meeting on behalf of executives at OneUnited, one of the nation's largest black-owned banks. Ms. Waters's husband, Sidney Williams, had served on the bank's board until early last year and has owned at least $250,000 of its stock.
--- NYT (via HuffPo)
Ahhhh, Democrats. Fightin' for the Little People.
" why is L.A. schools superintendent Mohammad Z. Islam still employed? "
ReplyDeleteProbably the same reason you're still employed. Being stupid and a bigot is not always a fireable offense. (For example, being too stupid to figure out that the guy works 50 miles east of LA, not in LA itself.)
Are you another of Egnor's intrepid Band of Foreign Trolls?
DeleteThe Los Angeles Combined Statistical Area consists of the entirety of the counties of Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, San Bernardino, and Riverside
--- Wiki: Greater Los Angeles
Rialto is in the Riverside–San Bernardino–Ontario MSA, one of 3 MSAs in Greater Los Angeles.
By the way, you should visit there sometime. LA is a big place.
LA is a big place, but Riverside ain't part of it. It's 60 miles east of the city.
DeleteYou should visit one day and see for yourself. If they ever let you out.
Hoo
I know where Riverside is. I visited LA on business on a regular basis.
DeleteThat's an amusing comment coming from you, Mr "Press 1 for Q or Z". :-)
If you knew where Riverside was, Gramps, you'd know that it is pretty far from L.A. I've been to L.A. and to Riverside.
DeleteHoo
I know exactly were Riverside is, QorZ. And yes, it is a long way from downtown. But everything's a long way in LA. So what? Big place. They invented sprawl. Maybe it just seemed like a really, really supercolossal long way given your cultural background? LA often strikes first-timers that way. Why, some whole countries are smaller than LA!
DeleteThe regional term is defined to refer to the more-or-less continuously urbanized area stretching from Ventura County to the southern border of Orange County and from the Pacific Ocean to the Coachella Valley in the Inland Empire. The US Census Bureau defines the Greater Los Angeles area to include the entire Los Angeles county, Ventura County, Orange County and the two counties of the Inland Empire [Riverside and San Bernardino], making up the "Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside, CA" Combined Statistical Area.
--- Wiki
If they didn't have signs, you wouldn't know when you passed from one suburb to another.
But I'm done with you for today. You should take it up with Wikipedia and the Census Bureau. I'm sure they'll give your opinions all the weight they deserve. I know I do. Get back to me when they've responded.
The wriggling worm can never admit he’s wrong. He’s got far too much pride for that. Instead he just frantically cuts and pastes anything that he thinks is even close to supporting his argument.
DeleteDon’t you see, only an ignorant fool wouldn’t be aware of the “Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside, CA Combined Statistical Area.” that he just found. Take that!
-KW
Popeye: "can never admit he’s wrong"
DeleteWhat, specifically, was I wrong about, Popster?
'The City of Southern California', I've seen it called. In sources dating back a hundred years. Our urban sprawl was invented and made possible by the Pacific Electric Railway, which made one 'city' of a multitude of 'cities'. So, yes, in many ways Riverside and San Bernardino are part of 'L.A.'.
DeleteThought Experiment:
ReplyDeleteHere's the maginary situation...
A girls' bathroom at Hattiesburg Mississippi High School was covered with graffiti attacking black students. Hattiesburg police investigated the incident. The school is79 percent white.
Choose the most likely outcome-
(a) It would have only been reported locally (as the Rialto situation was)
(b) It would have made the national news multiple times with graphics of the bathroom walls, footage of weeping parents, interviews about the Tea Party with various and sundry racial identity groups, and groveling of school officials until someone was arrested and punished.