Beena Sarwar's Updates on the Curriculum of Hate

With permission from Beena - her updates on the Curriculum of Hate. Please read and circulate so this spread of hate and untruths can be checked.

1. Pakistan's `curriculum of hate'

Last Sunday, Dr Farrukh Saleem's weekly column in The News focused on what he called `Curriculum of Hate'. He always writes well, but this brief column was particularly stunning for the revelations it contained about what is being included in Pakistan's text books. The organisation he heads, the Center for Research and Security Studies is currently involved in analyzing Pakistan's primary and secondary school curricula which "facilitates the usurpation of genuine educational space by forces of hate, violence and that of extremism". The final Report, financed by the Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBF), an affiliate of the German Green Party, should be ready by the end of June 2008 and they are now seeking additional financial assistance to buy newspaper space and for a launch ceremony.

Some of you will remember the brouhaha created in 2003 by `The Subtle Subversion', SDPI's report on the same issue, edited by Dr A.H. Nayyar (who is working on Farrukh Saleem's current project also) & Ahmed Salim

The SDPI press archives have other related articles, but are missing Khaled Ahmed's 'The Poison in the Books we Teach', published in The Friday Times, March 19-25, 2004. Khaled was Editor of the Frontier Post in Lahore back in the early 1990s, and got Prof K.K. Aziz (now 80 years old, author of 'Murder of History') to write a series for the paper about how history is distorted in our textbooks.

To access my article on 'Jehad and the Curriculum' (includes previously unreported information about the kinds of material the Curriculum Wing was including, or not, in textbooks)

2. Ahmed Rashid's new book

Ahmed Rashid, author of the prophetic, pre-2001 "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia', has just published a new book, "Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia" (Viking, June 2008), which includes information about Musharraf having allowed a secret CIA base in FATA this January. Umar Cheema, a reporter with the News who is currently doing an internship with the New York Times filed a report from New York today summarising some of Rashid's main points, including about Benazir's controversial deal with Musharraf.

Rashid describes how the Bush administration remained soft on Musharraf despite all his follies and instead kept pushing late Benazir Bhutto to conform to the US-sponsored deal. "Two weeks before her death, Benazir Bhutto told me she was facing enormous pressure from the White House, particularly Vice-President Cheney's office, to conform, while there was no similar pressure on Musharraf to carry out his side of the bargain," Rashid writes in his new book. US officials refused to accept that the deal was dead or that Musharraf was double-crossing them, even though the US embassy in Islamabad had reported extensively on plans being drawn up by the ISI to rig the elections.

He also writes about the pressure Asif Zardari faced from President Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Musharraf to form a coalition with the PML-Q after the elections; however, the PPP had refused and announced an alliance with the PML-N, Rashid writes. For eight years, the State Department studiously ignored Benazir Bhutto, with even junior US officials declining to meet her lest their doing so angered Musharraf. The `friendly Muslim country' who had warned her about the plot to assassinate her was Afghanistan, according to Rashid. Afghan President Hamid Karzai later told Rashid: "She was very frank to me about the ISI and the role they were playing in undermining her." (Umar Cheema's report)

3. Afghanistan: BBC reporter gunned down

Sad news about the murder of Afghan journalist Abdul Samad Rohani - Committee to Protect Journalists has called on the recently appointed governor of Helmand province, Gulab Mangal, to press investigators to find his killers, according to a press release issued yesterday. Rohani disappeared on Saturday near the Helmand capital, Lashkar Gah and was found dead the next day, shot several times. He was the Helmand reporter for the Pashto service of the BBC and contributed to the Pajhwok Afghan news agency, the country's largest independent news service. "Helmand province lies along the dangerous border with Pakistan, and is home to Taliban and al-Qaeda militants, as well as a flourishing opium trade," says the CPJ press release, adding that the murder underscores the dangers Afghan journalists face while covering a local story with global implications.

In April 2007, freelance reporter Ajmal Nakshbandi was beheaded in Helmand by Taliban captors (the Italian reporter Daniele Mastrogiacomo with whom he had been working, was released; their driver, Sayed Agha, was killed a few weeks earlier). Taliban have denied killing Rohani.

4. Jihad Sheilas - ABC News special –

A long overdue link to a documentary Jihad Sheilas by my Nieman-06 colleague from Australia Mary Ann Jolley. The documentary was first aired in Feb this year. Amazing story of "two Australian women from the conservative heartland of regional Australia into the maelstrom of fundamentalist Islam" - Raisah Douglas, raised a Catholic converted to one of the strictest forms of Islam - and went on to marry five times (!!) and Rabiah Hutchinson, who converted to Islam and moved to Indonesia, Pakistan and finally Afghanistan, where she was living when the September 11 attacks took place. She married a man who has been described by some as a member of Osama bin Laden's inner circle. "In making this program available online, ABC News would like to emphasise that this is not a program about the Muslim community as a whole: it is a story of two women and their powerful personal journeys."

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Excerpts from Curriculum of hate Dr Farrukh Saleem

"European nations have been working during the past three centuries, through conspiracies on naked aggression to subjugate the countries of the Muslim world." Social Studies textbook for Class 7, page 43 (written by Professor Dr M H Bokhari and Syed Hassan Tahir):

"The economic system of (the) west was creating unsolvable problems and had failed to do justice with the people." This text was written by Muhammad Hussain Chaudhry,
Ali Iqtadar Mirza, Sheikh Anees, Rai Faiz Ahmad Kharal, Syed Abbas Haidar and Dr Qais. This is for students of Class 9 and appears on page 3:

Thirteen- and fourteen-year-old students of Pakistan Studies are being taught that "one of the reasons of the downfall of the Muslims in the sub-continent was the lack of the spirit of jihad (Class 9-10; Pakistan Studies, page 7)."

Imagine; thirteen-year-old Pakistanis are being taught that "In Islam jihad is very important…..The person who offers his life never dies….All the prayers nurture one's passion of jihad (Class 9-10; Pakistan Studies, page 10)."

"Always keep oneself ready to sacrifice one's life and property is jihad…..The basic purpose of all submissions and jihad is to keep oneself follower of the good will of
Allah Almighty (Class 12; Pakistan Studies, page 4)." Dr Sultan Khan, Muhammad Farooq Malik, Rai Faiz Ahmad Kharal, Muhammad Hussain Chaudhry and Khadim Ali Khan

Our 'Curriculum of hate' is, hopefully, not producing suicide bombers but it is definitely breeding closet bombers who wholeheartedly support the ideals of suicide bombers being produced elsewhere. In essence, the two -- suicide bombers and closet bombers -- have a strange symbiotic relationship whereby the parasite cannot survive without a receptive host. And, the receptive host is all around us -- courtesy the ministry of education, government of Pakistan. Why is our ministry of education so bent upon preparing our kids for death and not for life?