"Outrage" - that is the only word to describe the feelings of BNP supporters and members of the independent Trade Union Solidarity to the persecution of Mark Walker. We carried calls on this site for lovers of freedom to write to the Head teacher and join the protest picket called by Civil Liberty this Monday (3 September). We have been flooded with emails and calls on the subject. Not only are groups and individuals up and down the country letting their feelings be known to the head but they are sending messages of support and encouragement to Mark care of the school. One supporter wrote:-
"I think it's time to draw a line in the sand. This kind of political persecution is unacceptable in a modern democracy. It's like the Head at Sunnydale thinks she is living in Soviet Russia. I sent my message of support to Mark Walker on a postcard because I wanted everyone there to know my feelings. What's happening there is a disgrace. Don't let them grind you down Mark!"
The General Secretary of Solidarity, Pat Harrington, commented:-
"The employer in this case has acted in an arrogant, confrontational manner. Our Brotherhood is angry at the persecution on politcal grounds of a Union official. It is just plain wrong that because someone is a member of the BNP they should receive less favourable treatment than other staff. That's discrimination plain and simple. I am very concerned at the toll this has taken on Mark and his young family We welcome the involvement of Civil Liberty in championing Mark and will work with them to uphold his rights".
If you have not yet sent your letter of protest to the Head teacher here are the details again:-
Sue Byrne
Sunnydale Community College
Middridge Lane
Shildon
County Durham
DL4 2EP
Tel: 01388 772526
Fax: 01388 773184
general@sunnydaleschool.co.uk
Tags:
A mistake that saved the truth
ReplyDelete'Ianus' La Resistance! correspondent Poland
14th August 2007
How Turkey has converted Western literature to Islam
Usually we tend to think that mistakes are something bad, harmful and undesirable. We take precautions to avoid them. Some go even further. They are so afraid or ashamed of their mistakes that they hide them or if it is not possible any longer they simply deny them. Denying one's mistakes restores a very comfortable feeling of infallibility and moral and intellectual superiority to those who have committed them. They feel after all that mistakes are bad and they must have nothing to do with them.
But on second thoughts one might marvel if on the contrary there isn't something quite positive, useful, even beneficient in mistakes? Don't they often contribute to the dislosure of the truth? Can't sometimes more be inferred and gained from a casual mistake than from a most loudly advertised 'success story' we're often so fed up with looking at the world around us? Think of times of turmoil, upheaval, subversion , erosion of inherited values, of war and treason. Aren't such times moving closer and closer to us? Think what would have happened if Hitler or Stalin had made no mistakes? If all their plans had been carried out as they wished - without a single blunder, a single leakage? After all it is what they were after, weren't they? Infallibility and perfection. Unfortunately for them there were always some minor defects, leakages or inadvertance of this or that person close to them which helped dislose the dark truth behind. Some of these persons were praised in major newspapers, in newsreels , in school books. But later they were unmasked as "people's enemies" or "foreign agents" or "traitors" and had to disappear from the scene together with the newsreels, books and newspapers which were frequently re-edited and re-introduced into the archives to serve as a "documentary" evidence that the Wise Leader had never had anything to do with them.
Now don't we still –fortunately enough !- encounter such mistakes in most unexpected places? Perhaps many still remember an incident which took place in Turkey last year. First the Prime Minister in person Recep Tayyip Erdogan and then his Minister of Education Assoc. Prof. Huseyin Celik got furious at some publishers –mainly the latter's old friends from the "Ilkbiz Publishing House" from Istanbul. They threatened to sue and punish them with prison sentences. The publishers were accused of ... an attempt to Islamize classical Western literature. It might seem strange that it was not the Saudi Religion Police but the "secular" Turkish Ministry of Education that took that essential step towards the final ideal of Islamizating everything as in Turkey it may be considered as a crime. It may be construed as an implicit attack on one of the pillars of Ataturk's Republic – "secularism". Indeed, what was so bad about it was that the news spread to the West where the belief in Turkish "secularism" could be undermined. The West might finally understand that at home Turkish kids have nothing to learn "multiculturism", "tolerance" and other catchy values forcibly imposed on the West from. Now , instead, owing to the Islamisation of classical Western Literature the young Turks would necessarily see in it just another reincarnation of Islam they anyway all adhere to. Yet among many strange things in the news was the quote by Minister Celik : "We cannot check the content of the books every day. But if there is slang and swear words, we will sue them for using the ministry logo" . Not a single word of Islamisation - just "slang and swear words" ...in classical Western literature !
And in fact what we learned about the questionable passages were no swears or salacious phrases but quite arresting words :
"Pinocchio says "Give me some bread for the sake of Allah," and gives thanks to 'Allah'" (...) D'Artagnan while on his way to see Aramis is stopped by an old lady who explains: "You can't see him right now. He is surrounded by men of religion. He converted to Islam after his illness." (... ) Eleanor H. Porter's "Pollyanna" confirms her belief in the Muslim apocalypse, while La Fontaine's fisherman prays using Muslim terminology to catch more fish." Several more books have been garbled, like La Fontaine's fables, and Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables." Not even Anton Chekhov or Oscar Wilde were spared. Ingenious Islamic phraseology was introduced into their works.
All of this would have probably never been uncovered if some journalists from the Turkish newspaper "Radikal" had not by chance or by some hints learnt of the secret project. Before the beginning of the Turkish school year at the end of August 2006 the Turkish Ministry of Education had sent an order to its publishing houses to re-issue "100 Essential Readings" which included excerpts from the most important classical Western writers and children's literature. The collection was to serve as a textbook in schools across the country. Obviously enough , in Turkey no publisher would dare introduce any essential changes to the books without the previous explicit wish or consent of the Ministry. The idea of the new edition was that the works should avoid anything that might allow doubts and inconvenient questions to rise in the young minds through contrasting the positively presented Christian values of the classical writers and the Islamic values surrounding and shaping the Turkish mind from the very first to the very last moment of life. The solution was simple – Western books had to be "improved" and their ideals made submissive to the dominant Muslim value system. But through an unforeseeable coincidence the brilliant idea turned out to be a painful mistake.
After the reports in "Radikal" also other newspapers took interest in the case. Parliamentary discussion was initiated with opposition seeing their chance. Engin Altay, the deputy of old Ataturk's Republican Party, asked "if the books of shame will be pulled from the shelves of school libraries," demanding an unambiguous reply from ￇelik. Moreover he had the cheek to publically accuse the ministry of something which most observers considered as evident , namely of contributing , if not ordering , the garbled version of "100 Essential Readings". Now the Turkish Government had to act. It found at once a convenient scapegoat. It was not the respectable Minister, educated in London and other Western universities. He did not order or sponsor the project. No! The government was not responsible for that! It was the arbitrary and incompetent "Ilkbiz Publishing House" that had impudently disregarded the wise and "secularist" guidelines of the ministry. It was to blame for the scandal. But the Ministry's denigrated honour had be restored and, besides, all the traces of the crime had be obliterated , bookshops and libraries purged. "We will sue them for using the ministry logo !" said Celik to his electorate in the province of Van. No one questioned the official version spread by the government. It is not advisable to do that in Turkey.
This was all just a mistake of course, wasn't it ? Some busybody read what was intended just for children, not for him and then told someone else and the newspapers made a scandal of it. It might have never happened though and we might have never learnt that Turkish children avidly reading Alexandre Dumas or Carlo Collodi read different authors, different stories and learn quite different moral lessons from what we did in our childhood while reading the same writers.
We might never learn either that for many Islamic scholars Shakespeare was a Moslem. The case is clear : his name is - after all - a combination of two Arabic words for glory and greatness "Shaikh" and "Pir", isn't it?
Some witty observers suggested as a joke that because of that necessary revisions of his works should be done as quickly as possibly. Instead of sticking to the false works we should discover the ancient originals : "A Mid-Summer Night's Bombing", "Shahid of Venice", "The Merry Wives of Osama" "Hamas, Prince of Denmark" and "The Taming of the Jew". The revisions should be undertaken not by the Saudi Religion Police Literature Department , but by the EU-oriented Turkish Ministry of Education that has already shown its consummate expertise and innovativeness in the realm of literature.
It might sound like a joke , but history likes perversities. A thing told as a joke today may tomorrow become a dismal reality.
All in the name of religion, but God has a wry sense of humour!
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Harry.
http://www.motionbox.com/video/player/1f9ad9b41b1ee792