Leftists are adamant about the separation of church and state. But the separation of mosque and state? Well, not so much.
Case in point: A video has recently emerged of non-Muslim, Danish third-graders repeatedly dropping to their knees as they’re taught Islamic prayers and are instructed to yell “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is [the] greatest”).
According to Danish website Document, the offending institution was Thyregod elementary school in southern Jutland’s Velje municipality. The incident occurred in November 2018, but the video has only recently come to light. In fact, Sputnik reports that it was shot by a Sudanese mother who’d defied orders not to video the indoctrination; she later uploaded it to the Internet.
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As Document relates (auto-translated and edited for grammar and style), explaining that the classroom’s curtains were drawn for the exercise:
A large group of school students (primarily ethnic Danish) are set up behind a small African boy who is dressed in Muslim clothes and has brought a prayer rug.
“First I show, and then we do it,” says the Muslim boy. The school teacher gathers his students and tells them: “We’ll watch first.”
Students watch while the Muslim boy demonstrates Islamic prayer. Suddenly, he is interrupted by a woman’s voice close to the chamber/mobile, which says: “And then you say Allahu Akbar.”
… “Allahu akbar? Let’s try it,” says the younger class teacher to the students .
What would the reaction have been if one little intrepid Dane, speaking Truth to power, had at that akbar moment instead exclaimed “Jesus is Lord!”? Would he have been charged with a Hate Crime™ or “racial offense”? (Of course, Islam is not a race, but certain social engineers have essentially tried to declare it such.)
The principal of Thyregod (hey, at least God is in its name) school, Gert Hougaard, defended the Islamic exercise. “‘Looking at the legislation, it says that we must spread the knowledge of different religions, including also the practical understanding,’” MM.dk quotes him as saying — “‘so yes, I think was a good way to teach children about religion.’”
Yet as Islam expert Robert Spencer notes, one problem is that “these programs always go in only one direction.”
“When do the Muslim children learn Christian prayers?” he rhetorically asks. “When does everyone learn Jewish prayers?”
Where Muslim youths are concerned, the answer is likely “never.” Could you imagine Islamic kids being instructed to shout “Christ is King!”? The Muslims wouldn’t stand for it — never mind kneel for it.
Tragically, the Danish situation is no outlier, as Islamic indoctrination occurs throughout the West. For instance, there have been Islamic immersion courses in California and Oregon public schools, and numerous stories of a similar nature come out of Europe. Notably, a video (below) of native Dutch children being instructed to pray at a Netherlands mosque outraged parents in 2016.
Returning to Denmark(istan?), Zero Hedge’s Tyler Durden reports that Danish People’s Party’s Martin Henriksen “asked [Thyregod] school management if they intended to teach pupils Islam’s ‘dark sides and widespread fundamentalism,’ in addition to its ‘massive religious and social control.’” This is a valid question (with an obvious answer) — but there’s a deeper one.
The Swedish detective TV series Wallander features an episode in which the authorities point out to a Muslim jihadist, who’s upset about portrayals of things Islamic, that Christian ideas and symbols are also frequently condemned. His very sober response was (I’m paraphrasing), “If you don’t believe enough in your religion to defend it, that’s your problem.”
It was an example of art imitating life. Just yesterday I mentioned that, say what you will about Muslims, they’re not milquetoast about defending their ways. They believe.
Westerners believe, too — “in shallow things, shallowly,” to quote columnist Bret Stephens.
It’s not that we lack passions; it’s that we lack principles. Thus do we tend to have passions for preferences.
“Principles” here refers to beliefs one doesn’t bend on not because “Dude, it works for me,” but because he believes they have a basis in the unbending: Truth. You may prefer broccoli but accept asparagus as substitute, or even eat a hated food so as not to offend a host. But we wouldn’t (I should hope) be party to human sacrifice, rape, or torture no matter the fashions or feelings. For the same reason, a believing Christian won’t take the Lord’s name in vain.
Yet when ceasing to believe in Truth and descending into moral relativism — which has swept the West — true principle logically can’t exist. This is when everything becomes preference, when “Truth” becomes taste.
This is reflected in so many things. With sex, it’s try it and you may like it; maybe you’re straight, but, then again, perhaps you’re homosexual or bi. You may be “cisgender,” but also could be “agender,” “two spirit,” “neutrois,” or one of scores of other “identities” (tastes are varied, you know).
This is precisely what we see in beliefs in curricula, too. Divorced from Truth, the moderns’ purported idea is to just expose students to different cultures and faiths, with the implication that they’re all flavors of the day (though the powers-that-be definitely have their favorite flavors).
It’s much like supposing the rules of human nutrition don’t exist (and, consequently, not imparting them to children) and then simply exposing kids to different ingestible items with the implication, “If it tastes good, eat it.” Could you be sure they wouldn’t gravitate toward junk food? Might they even at some point imbibe poison?
Or it’s like neglecting to properly teach children science, but merely portraying the authentic variety, the Soviets’ Lysenkoism, the Nazis’ racial theories, and alchemy all as equally valid.
It may be fine in certain contexts (e.g., teaching older, sophisticated students) to study even the mistakes of the past (and present) so that we’re not damned to repeat them, to paraphrase Santayana. But this must be done under the light of Truth — by those already inculcated with it — so that the mistakes are viewed as mistakes.
After all, would we bring Nazis and KKK members into schools to “explain how they practice their beliefs”? If everything is relative, why not?
That this isn’t done, and that there’s obvious educator prejudice against Christianity, makes many conclude that leftists’ moral relativism is a façade; their behavior can be quite absolutist, you know. Yet note what I mentioned earlier: It’s not that moderns’ don’t have passions.
It’s that their passions are preferences.
So they favor Islam and subordinate Christianity, preach equality while practicing double standards, rail against racism while impugning whites, or sneer at sexism while maligning manhood. Do not, for a moment, think that relativists are constrained by, for instance, an idea that Christianity and Islam would have to be equal in a relativistic universe.
Rather, what frees them is that in a relativistic universe, contradiction can be no worse than consistency. Blind to Truth and with nothing but man’s passions to govern his passions, feelings can become king and everything relative to oneself.
So the Muslims’ higher power is Allah and secular Westerners’ higher power is often the state — led by people whose higher power is too frequently their own egos. We’ll see who wins.
Photo at top: screen-grab from video
