Netherlands Weighs Financing Koran School In Afghanistan

Part of the "No Terrorist Left Behind" initiative.

Mullah Omar's home province, and no Madrassas? Tells one where the Taliban put education (heavy sarc)

Why not just directly transfer funds to the Taliban, and to al Qaeda? Just eliminate (in a manner of speaking) the middle-man (TM Geico)

What the world needs now is more, more Koran schools. Only 1.2 billion people are Muslims and we really need to go for the whole 6 billion plus to achieve world peace.

Perhaps if the infidel world would quit funding such insanity Islam would finally die out. If all the infidels disappeared Islam is sure to follow, because it will have finally lost the crutch that keeps propping it up with neverending stupidity.

Perhaps the Dutch can get some of the British trained imams to teach there. that way we will know for sure that only peaceful islam will be taught. hahahahahahahahaha, that is so funny.

"with the result that children now end up at madrassas just over the border in Pakistan. There they receive Islamic education that is influenced by the extreme Taliban"

Well shoot, there goes nasperm's "leave pak out of it, we're peaceful" theory.
Proof is in the pudding and you just got called out.

Notice how the children recieve "islamic" education but somehow that education is used for "extremist" islamic organiztions in the future.
Hmm, I wonder what is going on here?, just can't place my finger on it, it couldn't be the koran could it?, no, all those peaceful moslems want is "death", or maybe it's our "death" they really want, I just don't know.
In one hand they say they want death, but then run and hide when we offer it to them, just doesn't make sense to me.
You see, they want to die but they also want us to die first!, how fair is that?.
I want them to die first, is that so bad?

Well we are doing something equally stupid in the UK. Funding Pakistan Madrassas in the hope they might be nice to us.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/20/nterr20.xml

"Mr Blair, on a visit to Pakistan yesterday to discuss anti-terror policy with President Pervez Musharraf, more than doubled assistance to the country from £236 million over the next three years to £480 million.

The extra money will go mainly towards encouraging moderate Muslim education in the network of Madrassa religious schools, which are blamed for turning many young people to extremism."

Better ideal 'Why not finance a Christian school'?

"Uruzgan currently has no official Koran school"

.....The Muslims have killed the teachers and blown up the old school,,,fools.......

The weird thing is, according to the Taliban's published "rules for education", they'll burn down these schools too. Can't do anything nice for these folks.

I mean "rules for engagement"...

Very slightly O/T but concerns breathtaking stupidity and dhimmitude/collaboration.

From the Sunday Times Culture section Review of Books.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-2550492,00.html

A man with a score to settle
REVIEWED BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS



WHAT'S LEFT? How the Liberals Lost Their Way
by Nick Cohen
Fourth Estate £12.99 pp296
It is not until quite near the end of this mordant and instructive polemic that Nick Cohen comes right out with his own confession: “My instant reaction to the 9/11 attacks was that they were a nuisance that got in the way of more pressing concerns. Throughout the 1990s, I had been writing about the overweening power of big business and how it could corrupt democratic governments. I had lambasted new Labour for its love of conservative crime policies and attacks on civil liberties for years. Attacking Tony Blair was what I liked doing — what got me out of bed in the morning. Accepting that fascism is worse than western democracy, even western democracies governed by George W Bush and Tony Blair, sounds very easy in theory, but it is very difficult to do in practice when you are a habitual enemy of the status quo in your own country.”

He might have left it at this. After all, there are thousands and thousands of middle-aged lefties for whom their once-revolutionary “credentials” are all they have left to show for a lifetime of “activism”, and who could not face their friends — or, perhaps, their students — if they found themselves endorsing a war fought by British or American soldiers. (I myself remember repressing a twinge of annoyance at the idea that the assault on civilisation represented by the 9/11 attacks would drive my anti-Kissinger book from the front page where I still believe it belonged.) But Cohen goes further: “I wanted anything associated with Tony Blair to fail, because that would allow me to return to the easy life of attacking him.”

It is this sentence, and its implications, that make his book an exceptional and necessary one. Cohen has no problem with those who are upset about state-sponsored exaggerations of the causes of war, or furious about the bungled occupation of Iraq that has ensued. People who think this is the problem are not his problem. Here’s his problem: the people who would die before they would applaud the squaddies and grunts who removed hideous regimes from Afghanistan and Iraq, yet who happily describe Islamist video-butchers and suicide-murderers as a “resistance”. Those who do this are not “anti-war” at all, but are shadily taking the other side in a conflict where the moral and civilisational stakes are extremely high.

There are two possible sorts of “left” reaction to a dilemma like this. One is to seek out the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world — the Kurdish revolutionaries in Iraq, say, or the Afghan women’s movement — and to offer them your solidarity whether Bush or Blair will do so or not. (Some things, as Orwell wrote, are true even if The Daily Telegraph says they are true.) The other is to say that globalisation is the main enemy, and that, therefore, any enemy of that enemy is a friend. In this twisted mental universe, even a medievalist jihad is better than no struggle at all. Cohen has decided to adopt the first position, and to anatomise and ridicule the second one. The result is an exemplary piece of political satire, in which the generally amusing and ironic tone should not lull you into ignoring the deadly seriousness of the argument.

It is not absolutely necessary to have a personal stake in a discussion like this, but it does help. Cohen started out trying to defend the honour of the left, and attempting to appeal to its better traditions. He swiftly found that this made him the target of the most hysterical slander, from people whose hatred of liberal democracy has a long and sordid ancestry. He then lowered his head, clenched his teeth, steered into the storm and embarked on the toughest struggle an old leftist can ever undertake: a confrontation with former comrades who suspect him of “selling out”. What probably began as a long essay has now metamorphosed into a full-scale settling of accounts.

It’s all here: from the pseudo-radicals who said there was nothing to choose between Nazi imperialism in Europe and British rule in India, through the supporters of the Hitler-Stalin pact, all the way to those who defended Slobodan Milosevic as a socialist and those who took, quite literally took, money from the bloody hands of Saddam Hussein. Just in the past decade or so, had this “anti-war” rabble had its way, we would have seen Kuwait stay part of Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo cleansed and annexed by “Greater” Serbia, and the Taliban retaining control of Afghanistan. You might think that such a record would lead its adherents to be dismissed as a silly and sinister fringe, but instead it is they who pose as the principled radicals and their opponents who are treated with unconcealed disdain in the universities and on the BBC.

This betrayal (because there is no other word for it) has been made possible in part by a degraded version of multiculturalism. The hard left has junked its historic secularism, to say nothing of its principles of equality for females and homosexuals, to make common cause with Muslim outfits some of which are associated in other countries with the extreme right. It has done this by the use of nonsense terms such as “Islamophobia”, which are designed to give the no-less nonsensical impression that Islam is some kind of persecuted ethnicity. But the vile attacks by Islamists on the Jews (Britain’s oldest minority) and on India (Britain’s most important democratic ally after the United States) show the truly reactionary and hateful character of the opportunist alliance between failed ex-Stalinists and fanatical theocrats. For Cohen, as for some others of us, this is no longer a difference of emphasis within the family of the left. It is the adamant line of division in a bitter fight against a new form of fascism, at home no less than abroad.

I think he is right to identify the opening of this crisis with the events in Bosnia and Kosovo, because in that instance it was America (pushed by the supposed “poodle” Blair) that used force to prevent the annihilation of a Muslim community. Those who opposed that rescue operation, and who yet denounce the fight against Bin-Ladenism and its allies as “targeting” Muslims, have given the game away and shown that they hate only Anglo-American policy, to a degree that results in blindness. Meanwhile, Israel is always and everywhere to be denounced (and not always wrongly) while the other product of British partition policy during 1947-48, the part-rogue and part-failed state named Pakistan, is never indicted in the same way for its numberless bigotries and aggressions. This is bad faith, and needs to be unmasked as such. Cohen’s book is an admirable example of self- criticism and self-examination, using intellectual honesty as a means of illuminating a much wider canvas.

Do not feel that you have to be a leftist or liberal to read it, because it engages with an argument that is crucial for all of us, and for our time.

Read on... books:

Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman (Norton £9.99)
A huge influence on Cohen’s ideas

Azar Nafisi
In copy additional to the above review, under the heading Odd Bedfellows, reference was made to Azar Nafisi's book being dedicated to Paul Wolfowitz. The dedication was made to her parents and family. We are happy to put the record straight.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. What’s Left? is available at the Books First price of £11.99 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

The school perhaps will teach that special "moderate" version of the Qur'an, that "moderate" version of the Hadith, that "moderate" version of the Sira, that Dinesh D'Souza believes are the versions available that produce those "traditional Muslims" with the traditional values so much akin to those of the "conservatives" Dinesh D'Souza descries, and so unlike those on the cultural left that Dinesh D'Souza decries.

Perhaps such a Dutch-funded Qur'anic school, with its special editions of Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, will turn out those "moderate Muslims" who are, we are told by some, not merely "part of the solution" but the "solution" to the problem of "extremists" or, as they have been identified -- last week in London for example, as "Islamists" as opposed to simple believers in Islam.

One would like to have a clear indication of exactly what texts would be used in this Dutch-funded school that would differ from the texts that, say, a Taliban-allied mosque in Quetta or Kandahar would use, and in what ways the teachings about Islam woulld differ from the teachings about Islam in such a Taliban-run school.

A complete list of the Qur'anic passages that will be excised, of the Hadith stories that will be exluded, of the details of Muhammad's life that will remain unknown to these students in this new, improved, Dutch-Infidel-funded school, should be set down in writing, and in great detail, by those local Muslims making this earnest request --- no request too amazing, too bizarre -- of their long-suffering apparently endlessly deep-pocketed Infidel benefactors.
They can set it down in Pashto, or whatever other local language they would like. Translators are standing by.

"The Netherlands is considering financing a Koran school in Afghanistan."

.......The Netherlands should refer the Muslim school building financing to Saudia Arabia...Let the Muslims finance their own schools...No sense in spending honest folks tax dollars to build Muslim schools in foreign countries...That is the responsibility of the House of Saud...

How about funding a modern school instead. Perhaps one that teaches reading, math, sciences, multiculturalism and tolerance of others ? The Dutch could even humbly request that girls be allowed an education at any school they fund.
Subsidizing anything that promotes Islam is insane.
Any Western investment needs promote Islamic tolerance of our culture, as we have been tolerant of theirs. Without this, the Netherlands school funding will be much more wisely spent preparing for World War Three.

What does funding mean exactly? I witnessed a few construction projects in Afganistan (schools in Patika). I would estimate the total cost at about $ 1,000 to $2,000 as long is its local labor not the blood sucking KBR. Rudimentry frame covered with mud. About another hundred for korans and what not. I wonder if they will import a teacher from somewhere, most likely Pakistan?

Anyway, there is really only one Koran, one sunnah, and one sira. If anything less then orthodoxy is taught, I am sure it will be gone soon.

The Dutch need to open soccer schools at home. They never win the World Cup. LOL.

TheOmegaMan,

"Better ideal 'Why not finance a Christian school'?"

My first thought. My second thought: Exactly how many moments would it be before a Christian school in Taliban land (and any people in it) were blown to smithereens?

I'm assuming no little goats will be following any little Maryams to the proposed school - or am I in the wrong here? Will girls be allowed in the Netherlands' Madrassa?

Girls allowed in?

Only without their heads!

Thanks, Dutch folks.

Robert who should us dhimmis elect in the 2008, election> Realistically, I want Tom Tancredo, but I think that's a pipe dream........

"The Netherlands is considering financing a Koran school in Afghanistan."

"with the result that children now end up at madrassas just over the border in Pakistan. "

"There they receive Islamic education that is influenced by the extreme Taliban,'

Well, DUH! That's EXACTLY whre the Taliban is - the headquarters : In Afghanistan!

Is the islamic trying to fool us by saying this, or are the Dutch stupid on top of having a short memory?

And BTW, when they say children, I bet they don't mean, girls.

From the Koran straight to rocket-science.

A typical case of misguided, ignorant Dutch tolerance.

Here's a song:

http://sheikyermami.com/2006/12/20/tolerance/

"All in all it's just another brick in The Wall."

Or should that be "another brick for them to bash our heads with".

Talk about paying for the knife used to cut off your head.

Typical....... hardly any money is given to the old people here but we this we can do........

i am from the Netherlands btw, and i say this

MY LAND HAS GONE NUTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

MUSLIM LEADERS HAVE BILLIONS OF MONEY! LET THEM PAY!!!!!!!!!!!