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[Mike]

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15762

The ABC's of Anti-Americanism
By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 9, 2004

Pop quiz: Who's responsible for the attacks of 9-11? If you said the
United States, you're well qualified to teach American students about
the defining historical event of their lives. That, at least, is the
conclusion reached by Dickinson College.

This September, in a bid to resolve the lingering dilemma over how
best to broach with students the subject of the attacks, and terrorism
generally, the Carlisle, Pa-based college sponsored a contest.
Together with the Smithsonian Institution, the college invited
educators across the country to submit lesson plans proposing creative
ways to teach the subject of September 11. The four winning
entries—one each for the elementary school, middle school, high
school, and college level—were expected to share a common purpose. As
explained by the contest's director, Dickinson professor and former
Brookings institution scholar Douglas Stuart, they had to help
American students "confront and make sense of, the horrific events of
that day."

So went the official rules. But if the contest's eventual winners are
any indication, there was yet another, unspoken criterion: the lesson
plans had to encourage students in the notion that the terrorist
attacks, however horrific, were the direct consequence of an
abominably misguided U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East.

Call it Blame America 101. Outspoken leftist activist and fifth grade
teacher Bob Peterson, whose plan to teach 9-11 at elementary schools
was selected as one of the four winning entries, urges students to
consider the attacks "in the broader context of global injustice." To
wrap their young minds around terrorism, Peterson contends, they must
first untangle the "tough questions," such as, "Why do they hate us?"
Another winner, Iowa middle school teacher Tracy Paxton, recommends a
vocabulary lesson. Among the words she believes shed light on the
nature of terrorism are, "Al Qaeda," "Saddam Hussein," "stereotype,"
"Taliban," and, ominously, "Right wing."

Equally politicized is the lesson plan of Oregon high school teacher
Masato Ogawa. A proponent of "multicultural" studies, Ogawa's lesson
teaches students about the legislation prompted by September 11, the
Patriot Act. Far from a dispassionate discussion of legal issues,
Ogawa's lesson exhorts teachers to present the Patriot Act against the
backdrop of the Japanese internment during World War II. Finally,
there is David Mednicoff. To teach his winning course, "Explaining
Terror: The U.S. and the Middle East," the University of Massachusetts
professor, a strident critic of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East
who has accused Israel of backing the Iraq war in order to ethnically
cleanse Palestinian Arabs, relies on a book by Fawaz Gergez. Gerges,
it may be remembered, is the prominent Middle East studies professor
who, prior to 9-11, downplayed the danger of militant Islam and
assailed the U.S. government for "inflating" the importance of Osama
bin Laden.

Taken together, the winning lessons hint at an attempt to sow in
American students disapproval with U.S. policies. Indeed, it hardly
exaggerates the heavily anti-American pitch of these lesson plans—held
up as models for teachers across the country—to venture that the
masterminds of 9-11 would have little quarrel with their account of
the attacks.

Take Bob Peterson, for instance. The author of a book charging
Christopher Columbus with genocide, Peterson is not shy about what he
calls his "left-liberal" politics. But Peterson, who counts a video by
the left-wing Canadian magazine Adbusters among his preferred
instructional tools, dismisses the suggestion that his lesson plan
amounts to little more than an exercise in left-wing indoctrination.
"My approach would be to offer a broad range of opinions that
challenge the received wisdom of society," says Peterson in an
interview. "If the kids left my classroom parroting a left-liberal
perspective I would not find it satisfying. I want kids to ask the
‘why' questions. I don't want to turn out left-wing students."

A review of Peterson's lesson plan, however, suggests he may be doing
just that. For example, Peterson regards as beyond dispute his view
that the terrorists that perpetrated 9-11 are animated by legitimate
grievances against the United States. Peterson defends that position
by explaining that he accords his students ample license to voice
opinions to the contrary. Peterson's actual lesson plan tells a
different story. Explanations for terrorism that run up against
Peterson's leftist politics seem to be actively discouraged. Consider
this typical exercise, aimed at getting elementary school kids
sympathize with terrorists, which Peterson describes in his winning
plan:
"As a class, we brainstormed why people might dislike the United
States. Many students parroted President Bush's claim that terrorists
hate us because of our freedoms. I suggested that matters were more
complicated and that throughout the year we would explore this topic."
More complicated? One might point out that a cogent case can be made
for the president's assertion. After all, al-Qaeda's contempt for
women's rights, their murderous antipathy to Jews and Shiites, and
their well-documented intolerance of all secular authorities
constitutes nothing if not a fundamental hatred of core American
freedoms. Peterson rejects this argument as superficial. Yet his
ostensibly "more complicated" account of the buildup to September 11
is anything but. Quite the contrary: To an uncharitable eye, it seems
largely to parrot the claims of al-Qaeda propagandists. Listen to
Peterson's account of the following lesson, which he calls for
elementary school teachers to replicate:
"I mentioned that many people blame the United States for sanctions
against Iraq that have led to the deaths of some 500,000 children.
Hands shot up with a multitude of questions and comments. Not
surprisingly, we got bogged down on the concept of sanctions and the
Gulf War. After a half hour we put our remaining questions - including
one by a girl who wondered if the sanctions were a form of terrorism
because they led to children dying - in our Questions notebook and
moved on."
What seems clear is that kids are coached to come to predetermined
conclusions about U.S. policies; namely, that they give rise to
terrorism. For his part, Peterson maintains he's not teaching kids to
blame American first. "I don't throw stones at the United States," he
says, "We try to understand all perspectives." Skeptics may be
pardoned for wondering whether an instruction that seeks to explain
terrorism as a response to far more nefarious American actions is
consistent with that aim. Moreover, as Peterson himself concedes, the
majority of students leave his classroom convinced that the driving
force behind the world's problems—problems they have been taught to
believe fuel terrorism—is the United States.

Next to Peterson's introduction to U.S.-bashing, Tracy Paxton's
multiculturalism-inspired instruction seems downright appropriate. But
it too is not without its questionable aspects. In one activity, for
example, Paxton encourages middle school students to compare and
contrast the United States with, in addition to several Middle Eastern
countries, al-Qaeda. How a terrorist network can sensibly be compared
to a democratic country is puzzling. Paxton, for her part, seems
untroubled by such questions. Instead, she stresses that her lesson
plan seeks to engage students by arousing their emotions. "The
emotional aspect of this lesson is important to kids this age. They
are vulnerable, confused, and anxious to escape inside themselves,"
Paxton explains an email.

That being the case, Paxton's insistence on making words like "right
wing" the stuff of a suggestive vocabulary lesson—at the glaring
exclusion of words such as, say, left wing—seems like little more than
a calculated attempt to cultivate in kids a distrust, if not outright
hostility, to conservative politics. On this point, Paxton is evasive.
"I hope they take an understanding of basic vocabulary so as to be
able to follow news reports, understand lectures and the material they
read about 9-11 and terrorism," she says. "I want them to be find a
way, or the words, to express their emotions—be it confusion, anger,
frustration, sadness, etc—about 9-11 and the terrorism in our world
today."

Few would contest the admirableness of that mission. What they may
take issue with is that Paxton's lesson plan does more than merely
urge kids to get in touch with their feelings: it also exploits those
feelings to instill a politically motivated understanding of 9-11.

Parallel criticism might be leveled at the high school lesson plan of
Masato Ogawa. Initially stumped as to how to teach students about
9-11, Ogawa solved the problem by instead making the Patriot Act the
focus of his class. The idea, according to Ogawa's lesson plan, is to
prod students to think about the U.S. government's "use of authority
during wartime." But Ogawa's approach—comparing the experiences of
Muslim Americans after September 11 to one of the most execrable
excesses of the U.S. government, the Japanese-Americans during World
War II—seems like a recipe to stir opposition to the legislation among
high school students. If he disagrees, Ogawa, who did not answer
repeated requests for an interview, does not say so.

Somewhat more forthcoming is the University of Massachusetts' David
Mednicoff. Critics have charged that "Explaining Terror," Mednicoff's
winning lesson plan, is troublingly true to its mission, explaining
terrorism as a logical response to American foreign policy in the
Middle East. Confronted with this criticism, Mednicoff bristles at the
implication that his course has an underlying agenda. "My interest is
in having students ask and answer for themselves questions about the
possible connections between terrorism and September 11," he says in
an interview. "I do not indoctrinate my students; my students have no
idea what my politics are."

That may well be true. But even the briefest online sleuthing would
disclose the fact that Mednicoff, besides being a severe critic of
U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, has routinely alleged that
this policy laid the seedbed for the terrorism of 9-11. Here, for
instance, is how Mednicoff sums up his philosophy on teaching students
about 9-11: "What students need is an introduction to Middle Eastern
History, politics, a set of questions about what the United States'
role in the region has been in the past and whether its reasonable to
make connections between that role and what happened on September 11."
In December of 2003, Mednicoff made a similar point on the Web site of
the Chronicle of Higher Education: "[T]he problem is that most
Americans, and government in particular, seem uninterested in
addressing the connection between American foreign policy general
tendencies and unilateral practices and this anger."

Asked if he believes the real culprit of 9-11 is U.S. foreign policy,
Mednicoff, though more circumspect, does not shrink from his views.
"The fact is that there are a lot of people in the Middle East whose
views of the United States are colored by 20th century western
colonial involvement in the region. And that's the view many of my
students tend to take away from the class." Pressed if this is not
clear evidence that "Explaining Terror" adds up to a short course in
anti-American ax-grinding, Mednicoff is adamant. "What I am doing is
in no sense indoctrinating my students, but rather empowering them to
arrive at their own conclusions," Mednicoff says. "I believe, as an
educator, in letting students make up their own minds. And my specific
goal is that they get exposure to a variety of experts."

By any reckoning, however, Mednicoff's notion of variety is strikingly
limited. As one of the main books of his course, for instance, he uses
"America and Political Islam" by Fawaz Gerges. A professor of Middle
East studies and a regular feature on television, Gerges spent most of
the 90s advancing his pet theme that the U.S. government, actuated by
an irrational fear of terrorism, was exaggerating the potential threat
posed by militant Islam. September 11 had conspicuously little impact
on Gerges's perspective: today, he accuses the U.S. government of
using the threat of militant Islam to wage a "unilateral military
onslaught against Iraq." One might justifiably wonder whether
grounding a class on terrorism in books that proclaim it a monster of
America's own making does not suggest to college students that it is
in this context that they ought to view the attacks of 9-11. Mednicoff
has no time for such criticism. He heatedly dismisses the idea that
his class promulgates a specific conception of terrorism, one informed
by an unshakeable disdain for U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
His reasoning, however, is revealing. "If my students come to raise
concerns about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, then it is a
function of their own conclusions—it comes out of a sense of what's
true."

Such statements serve to reinforce the notion that the winning lessons
plans collectively draw on an anti-American animus. It is a notion
that is not lost on David Commins, a professor of history at Dickinson
who helped oversee the college's contest. That such an animus is
indeed in evidence in the winning entries is clear, Commins
acknowledges. "There's the assumption that U.S. foreign policy is
responsible for the attacks of September 11," Commins says. "I do
think that's something that is present in the discussion."
Nonetheless, Commins believes that this is less the result of any plot
to influence the teaching of 9-11 across the country than a simple
matter of selection. "In terms of the several dozen lesson plans that
came before the judges, not one of them stated a view other than that
was the result of U.S. foreign policy. That may be the result. But it
was not the intent."

That explanation supposes that the judges had no preference for the
content of the lesson plans. However, the comments of MaryEllen
Salamone, president of Families of 9-11 one of the contest's four
judges, suggest that the eventual winners conformed to the judges'
conception of terrorism. In an interview with USA Today, Salamone
revealed that like elementary school teacher Bob Peterson, she was
looking for a more complicated explanation of terrorism. "I don't
think it's helpful for children to think this [9-11]... happened for a
reason," Salamone said. Other judges, who included Alison Zimbalist,
head of the New York Times Learning Network, a Web site for teachers
of grades 3-12, seemed to share Salamone's views. What's more, David
Commins notes that, as one of the contest's organizers, he would have
rejected lesson plans that took the view of al-Qaeda terrorists as the
agents of irrational hatred. "If there had been lesson plans that
presented the point of view that these people were rabidly
anti-American, and who would carry out attacks no matter what, I would
not have included it," Commins says.

How the inclusion of lesson plans that are overtly anti-American
qualifies as any kind of improvement is unclear. Commins parries this
criticism by explaining that, whatever the view of the judging panel,
the contest's entries uniformly described terrorism as the outgrowth
of American policies in the Middle East. According to Commins, there
was not a single exception. Nevertheless, Commins cautions that this
should be seen as the fault of Dickinson's contest. Rather, he
surmises, it has to do with the conformity of political views among
American educators. "If there's an ideological point of view, that
emerged in the educational community. I really think it's a matter of
the culture of education." Even so, Commins defends the winning lesson
plans as an alternative way to teach students about terrorism. "The
great thing about this country is that's not like Syria," Commins
says. "Everything is not one way."

[Copperhead]

And since when is calling a spade a spade "anti-American"? And why do
right wing nutjobs so vehemently protest being identified as such when
they so stridently work to be that way?

There's nothing new going on today. The "Patriot Act" is just a
rehashing of the good old Alien and Sedition Acts that the
Democratic-Republicans thankfully managed to get overturned in at the
turn of the 19th century. Any of the "You MUST support the troops,
and anything you say against the government destroys their morale"
rhetoric could be coming from the mouth of Congressman Abraham Lincoln
during the war with Mexico. The only difference is now it's all
scarier because we don't have someone like Jefferson to come along and
get the country back on track, and the military industrial complex
runs everything through puppets like Bush and the Inquisition Six.

Take a look in a history book and tell me if I'm wrong. This country
goes to war with somebody just about every twenty years or so, ever
since the French and Indian War. It's because that's what our economy
is based on, and the good old boys who change their club name every
now again (they were The Federalists in the beginning, but now go by
Republicans) get back into control regularly enough to keep it that
way so they can line their pockets and maintain power. Most of the
presidents have been silver spooners, and members of the same clubs in
the Ivy League, and are probably related to each other more often than
not.

It ain't all what you read in the paper and see on TV.