Taliban Not Fit for Student Consumption
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The Wash Post had an article today describing how an Arlington middle school had canceled a mock UN discussion in which one team would represent the Taliban point of view. At least one parent had objected, saying it was an “abuse of the academic freedom that we all cherish.” Apparently we don’t cherish academic freedom enough to actually practice it if the topic is in any way objectionable, at least not in Arlington County.
Well, I am no fan of the Taliban but the US is heavily engaged in their country and is trying to kill them so it would seem that a little knowledge about them might actually be a good thing. The Taliban do have a certain constituency inside Afghanistan and many Afghans appear to prefer them to the government that the US is supporting. Ignorance may indeed be bliss, but I would think that teaching students that there might well be two sides (or more) to an argument is not intrinsically harmful and might actually result in some of those being educated realizing that bombing the natives does not always make for the best foreign policy.
Filed under: Foreign policy
Not always in agreement with the sensationalism of this publication; it usually just seems divisive and ignorant. This, however, I am in perfect agreement with. It’s a shame people can’t recognize the importance of understanding the motivations of other cultures/nations/political units’ actions, especially those we face off with in military conflict, and there is no better way to understand than to have a meaningful debate. Why are we there? Why do they resist our presence? I never received a meaningful response to any of these questions when I was in school… guess I just hoped better things would come for the younger generation.
One who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be in danger in a hundred battles.
One who does not know the enemy but knows himself will sometimes win, sometimes lose.
One who does not know the enemy and does not know himself will be in danger in every battle.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
[...] is this a partisan issue. This has been a problem during much of the Bush administration, and on “The American Conservative” Philip Giraldi defends the Swanson school exercise in seeking to have children represent the Taliban’s views. [...]
In American schools, children discuss history, sometimes take mock roles on political issues, but recently one Arlington, Virginia school’s exaggerated relativist views led to plans to teach children how to represent hate. The teachers involved apparently believe that hate groups that stand against universal human rights represent a “political” issue, and to offer all perspectives from the world at a mock United Nations exercise, the voices that hate human rights should also be expressed. (It is no small irony that this was just days after the widely ignored Human Rights Day on December 10.)
According to reports in the Washington Post, Arlington, Virginia 8th grade teachers Eric Tarquinio and Christine Joy saw nothing wrong with this, until parents of students who were to represent the voices of hate complained to the school. After that the event was canceled, with the Swanson Middle School Principal Chrystal Forrester and the teachers expressing their regrets on bringing up issues of a “sensitive nature.”
I have not yet been specific about the hate ideology that children were to represent. In fact, it should not matter. If children were being asked to represent a hate ideology of racial supremacy, misogyny, Nazism, anti-Semitism, anti-Christianity, Islamophobia, etc., the natural response should have been the same – why would any taxpayer-funded public school teachers be seeking to have children represent ANY ideology of hate – for a mock United Nations event? What do children really learn when their teachers think it is legitimate exercise to represent ideologies of hate – as a legitimate expression of political views?
Too much of academia and too much of America consciously refuses to acknowledge some anti-human rights ideologies as ideologies of hate. Some hate we just won’t talk about. We will even ignore that some hate is hate at all. This is a dangerous and serious problem in America today.
The hate ideology that was to be defended by some Swanson Middle School children was the Islamic supremacist hate of the Taliban. The Washington Post describes the Islamic supremacist Taliban hate group merely as an “Islamic fundamentalist group” indicating that children who were to represent the Taliban hate group’s views were to help “pose solutions to the conflict in Afghanistan.” (Let’s not forget that this is the same Washington Post that gives editorial space to supporters of Hamas, Hezbollah, and most recently to wife-beating defender Sheik Ali Gomaa to speak on “modernity” and women’s rights in Islam.) Washington Post reporter Valerie Strauss defended the calls for children to represent the views of Islamic supremacist Taliban as “an intriguing and legitimate exercise.”
Can you imagine teachers asking children to represent other forms of hate to help “pose solutions” to conflicts? How many teachers would still be employed in public schools if they instructed children to defend the views of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan, for example? Can you imagine newspaper writers defending the idea of having children represent the racial supremacist hate of the Ku Klux Klan as a “legitimate exercise”?
Of course not, because Americans understand and recognize white supremacism as hate. But Islamic supremacism by those who hate both non-Muslims and other Muslims is something we won’t talk about, won’t recognize, won’t even acknowledge the existence of, even as our President calls for more of our young men and women to fight and possibly die in fighting against such advocates of hate, while at the same time, other parts of the administration seek to promote negotiations with such advocates of hate. In every case, there is not an acknowledgment of the Taliban’s ideology as one of hate. Some argue if there are many advocates of the Taliban’s ideology of hate, then it must be a legitimate political ideology, failing to remember that at one point in America’s history there were 4 million members of the Ku Klux Klan hate group. All Americans should know that having quantities of adherents never rationalizes or legitimizes ideologies of hate.
Nor is this a partisan issue. This has been a problem during much of the Bush administration, and on “The American Conservative” Philip Giraldi defends the Swanson school exercise in seeking to have children represent the Taliban’s views. Philip Giraldi states that “I would think that teaching students that there might well be two sides (or more) to an argument is not intrinsically harmful and might actually result in some of those being educated realizing that bombing the natives does not always make for the best foreign policy.”
He is right about one thing – we need to understand the “argument” of the Taliban – but we need to understand it as one of hate against our universal human rights. But what he, the Swanson school teachers, the Washington Post, and so many others fail to grasp is that there is a big difference between understanding the “argument” of hate and legitimizing hate as legitimate political dialogue and legitimate “cultural” difference. We have one omni-culture of humanity based on our universal human rights and dignity for all. Any “culture” that defies our universal human rights challenges the most basic truths inherent for all human beings. That is no different what the ideology of hate is or where it is located.
This embarrassing incident to Swanson school demonstrates the depth of the denial on this ideology of hate that not only threatens the human rights of people in Afghanistan and our soldiers, but also threatens the human rights of people in America and around the world.
Our teachers, newspaper writers, and political pundits (on both sides) need to brush up on lessons of their own regarding the truths that we hold self-evident — for all people.
Children should never be taught how to defend or rationalize hate.
Because we know that ultimately – Love Wins.
American schoolchildren don’t even know their own culture and heritage.
My initial comments disappeared, as they often do at TAC, and I would like to think they were a shorter version of what I read from Jeffrey Imm.
But in the end, I think Mr Imm said it better than I could have.
A very interesting debate. I know Swanson middle school very well. I used to go to Washington Lee high school which is located in the same neighborhood and I know Model UN mock debates very well too because I used to participate in them.
I do not know exactly which side of the debate to pick. If I were a parent, I probably would not have found it so offensive.
I guess the question to ask is the following: Is there a difference between learning about someone and representing that someone? If the students representing the Taliban view understood that its a mock debate, they would certainly not internalize the Taliban view point and may in fact learn some stuff about the Taliban that they would otherwise not. But that said, I wonder what exactly they would have come to learn about Taliban and Afghanistan in general.
If all they had learn is that Afghanis are passive objects who were suppressed by the Taliban, I fear these kids would not have appreciated Afghanistan’s history at all and just come to think of Afghaniston through discourses of female oppression, and images of the burka.
That takes me to my personal distaste of Model UN. Model UN creates this culture of extreme arrogance and show off among our youth. Dressed in ties and talking as if they are the future Henry Kissingers of the world, they act like they know it all. Just the way they talk, the way they behave reveals the disgusting amount of showoff culture that Model UN nourishes in them.
I used to participate in Model UNs but by my senior year, I started hating Model UN. And that’s because you do not actually learn anything out other than to act like a presumptious nerd.
I would rather have a scholar on Afghanistan teach me about Taliban than to participate in Model U.N.
[...] have to be a fan of the Taliban to understand the value of learning more about their views, writes Philip Giraldi in American Conservative Magazine. “Ignorance may indeed be bliss,” but “teaching students that there might well be [...]
Sher Afgan Tareen – if you had read my initial comments (the ones that disappeared), you might have changed your mind.
But my comments that were censored contained a disqualifying reference to assigning students to defend the activities of an organization that advocates homosexual union between adults and children.
Where Mr Imm illustrates drawing a line between advocating that which teaches love and that which teaches/practices hate; I attempted to illustrate that it is OK for a parent to object to having a student “role play” where the student must advocate for that which is immoral.