We Don't Need No Education

Photo credit: omegamanha from morguefile.com

After reading the following article http://www.kentucky.com/latest_news/story/946537.html
about a Kentucky teacher who showed the film “Fitna” to his class on 9/11, I think I’m now officially old. Back in the eighties when I was in high school, a teacher got fired for letting her students watch Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, which is basically a 90 minute music video for stoners, on a non-instructional day. http://www.pinkfloyd-co.com/band/interviews/art-rev/art-wallcase.html. In 2009 a teacher is able to show a gruesome, hate-filled 15 minute piece of propaganda and get a slap on the wrist.

I watched “Fitna” on YouTube and it’s kind of like “Faces of Death” with a xenophobic message tacked on the end. It actually says that just like we defeated Nazism and Communism, we have to defeat Islam. But Islam is one of the world’s major religions and the other two are failed political parties. Making people hate an entire religion sounds a lot like holocaust talk to me. Yes, by all means, work on defeating the radical Islamic terrorists but don’t lump every Muslim in the world in with that bunch. Most Christians don’t want to be associated with the hate of people like abortion doctor murderers or Reverend Phelps and his God Hates Fags campaign, so why would they want to judge Islam by its most radical faction?

The teacher said in his defense that he wanted to generate a discussion about the dangers of extremism but since the complaining student said the film made her hate Muslims, I don’t think he mentioned the extremism of the makers of “Fitna”. Along with the hate, she also got nightmares from seeing a beheading, an execution, bombings, blood, dead bodies and worst of all, discussing female genital mutilation with her high school teacher. When I was in junior high, the rumor was that an office girl at T.K. Stone middle school in E-Town got suspended for playing "We Don't Need No Education" over the intercom system. Ah, those were the good old days.