Storm Track Infiltration: Textbooks and Jihad Merit Badges

The camel’s nose is the tent, folks. Will we permit the camel to follow?

CASE #1: The American Textbook Council examined the coverage of Islam in seven widely adopted world history textbooks used in grades seven through twelve. In February 2003, it published its findings in a review, Islam and the Textbooks.

Since 2003, several reports have documented bias and evasions in world history textbooks. Textbooks misrepresent Islam past and present, critics agree. They contain fallacies and untruths about jihad, sharia, slavery, status of Muslim women, terrorism, and international security. These reviews independently reach the same conclusions. Most conspicuously, history textbooks whitewash the meaning of jihad. Houghton Mifflin's seventh-grade text, Across the Centuries, has come in for singular criticism. Houghton Mifflin's books dominate the nation's largest state, but they are in no way worse on this score than competing textbooks. Textbooks make no distinction between sharia and Western law, and they pretend that women are making great strides in the Islamic world, when all evidence indicates otherwise. Social studies textbooks ignore the global ambitions of militant Islam. They fail to explain that Muslim terrorists seek to destroy the United States and Israel. They omit geopolitical goals that include theocracy and world domination by religion.

And how could this come about? You guessed it.

Islamic organizations led by the Council on Islamic Education act as domestic textbook "censors." Strictly speaking, since only governments censor books, the Islamists are merely agents of suppression, using educational publishers to do their bidding. Publishers ignore those who press them about motives, funding, legal status, and strong-arm tactics on the part of their Muslim "consultants."

The latest example.

The latest evidence of Islamist influence is California's adoption of History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond. According to the History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond front matter, the chief author-advisor on Islam is Ayad Al-Qazzaz, professor of sociology at California State University, Sacramento. Al Quazzaz is a Muslim apologist, a frequent speaker in Northern California school districts promoting Islam and Arab causes. Al-Qazzaz also co-wrote AWAIR's Arab World Notebook. AWAIR stands for Arab World and Islamic Resources, an opaque, proselytizing "non-profit organization" that conducts teacher workshops and sells supplementary materials to schools. With History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond, TCI is trying to sell a textbook to California schools that takes dictation from Islamist sources. The proximate question is whether the state's department of education and state school board will let this happen.

CASE #2: Even the Boy Scouts are not immune to the proselytizing of Jihad. In a post entitled Jihad Merit Badges For Boca Boy Scouts?, PipeLineNews called attention to the radical European Muslim community's newfound interest in youth scouting and how some of these recruits found themselves being used as instruments of terrorism in the 7/7 London bombings. It is therefore with a certain sense of alarm that we note this same phenomenon taking place in the United States.

When the Islamic Center of Boca Raton applied to the Gulfstream Council http://www.gulfstreamcouncil.org/0support.html for a charter to incorporate a Boy Scouts of America troop, they joined the approximately 95 Muslim troops nationwide. The BSA's national spokesman Gregg Shields told the Sun Sentinel that: "Boy Scout troops do not require that members adhere to a particular religious faith, as long as they profess belief in a higher power. We make so attempt to interpret God or the practice of religion. Really it's the role of the scout's family and his religious leaders. But what if the scout's family and religious leaders preach and practice jihad? This seems to be the case with ICBR, since the same website page which advertised the newly chartered troop also carries a piece claiming: "…it is the month of Jihad, and the first decisive battle in Islam, the Battle of Badr, occurred during Ramadan…"The same page which contains the Ramadan/jihad claim also announces a Boy Scout camp retreat with a sleepover on the ICBR grounds, perhaps a good opportunity to inspire the fledgling troop with tales of Mohammed's military conquests "...additionally the Messenger of Allah victoriously entered Mekkah during this blessed month" and explain why the "first decisive battle of Islam" represented only the beginning of a jihad to which they remain religiously obligated to wage.

And the activities of these troops are troubling.

Muslim scouts have been instructed on how to conduct Da'wa in a scouting situation, including being told to pray outside their tents in order to awake curiosity which then might lead to questions about religion. "The Muslim troops, in some ways, serve as goodwill ambassadors for their religion and people. They reach out to peers who might have little or no understanding of Islam and whose exposure to it comes from television images of terrorism and Muslim extremists. A Muslim Girl Scout troop from Santa Clara was featured in an ad campaign, "We're Americans and We're Muslims," sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. A picture of smiling Muslim troop members from a recent multicultural fair at the Islamic Center adorns the 2005 annual report of the Girl Scouts' San Diego-Imperial Council.

“In an age were cowardice borne of ACLU threatened lawsuits rules supreme, common sense and self-preservation are now mislabeled bigotry and discrimination. One must wonder if Muslim scouts and their leaders who succeed in convincing non-Muslims to convert to Islam will be given jihad merit badges?”