FOX is not news...but we knew that

I seldom deliberately watch Fox News, but when I do, it is often out of morbid curiosity. I mean, I have seen it enough to know that in most of its programming there is a bias and agenda that outweighs any mission to get the facts straight or be anything like "fair and balanced," but sometimes an issue comes up that makes me think they might not be wrong...and then...

In this case, it is in the reporting of the case of Caleigh Wood, a high school graduate appealing a case that stemmed from a world history class she took as a junior.

Reports on Fox and other news outlets of their ilk say that she was made to write an "Islamic conversion prayer,"  as WND quoted the Thomas More Law Center's legal team on this matter...

"As a Christian and 11th-grader at La Plata High School in Maryland, Caleigh Wood was taught that 'Most Muslims' faith is stronger than the average Christian.' She was also required to profess in writing, the Islamic conversion creed, 'There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.' Ms. Wood believed that it is a sin to profess by word or in writing, that there is any other god except the Christian God. She stood firm in her Christian beliefs and was punished for it. The school refused her request to opt-out or give her an alternative assignment. She refused to complete her anti-Christian assignment and consequently received a failing grade," 

...and the next thing you know, reports are even saying that she was forced to "recite" the prayer (known as the Shadaha), the recitation of which would have turned her into a Muslim!

She took the principal to court over this and lost. She appealed and lost. She (and the TMLC) went all the way to the Supreme Court of the US...and her appeal was rejected. That is the news item I was reading.

After reading the Fox article I thought for a bit. I am an atheist who supports the First Amendment, and I personally object to the use of "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and "In God We Trust" in any official use, so I would not want schoolkids to be forced to recite any prayer. The Fox article, through it's use of quotations, was able to express the opinion that no schoolchild should be forced to say a prayer that is not part of their religion, and that it was a "double standard" to not allow Christian payer in school and yet allow this to happen.

Could Fox be right, just this once? Could I actually be agreeing with what Fox said? I decided to click on the video in the Fox article to see if there were more details.

I could not get past the first two minutes.

The host of the program asked the first guest why the Supreme Court would reject this case. The fellow was upfront about how he was not in the meeting and does not know the specific reason why they would reject the case. Then he went on and put the decision in a greater context of Islamicizing America, as if the newly-conservative court, the one that for which a submitted judge was ignored for the better part of a year so that a Republican president could submit a known conservative, would have an "Islamic agenda."

The next guest was an "Muslim scholar," Zuhdi Jasser, president of something called the American Islamic Center for Democracy. He fell over himself decrying the allowance of the prayer in school as a violation of the separation of church and state and gushed thanks over the TMLC for standing up and going to bat for this girl.

They did make a show of acting lie they were explaining the legal basis for the original decision, something called the "Lemon test," but did not go into detail over what that was or that it was the precedent set in Lemon vs. Kurtzman. I thought they were going to talk about "If you squeeze it, does it taste like a lemon" or something.

So I decided to look into the issue a bit more. What kind of public school would really force a kid to say a prayer that turns people into Muslims? Would simply saying one sentence turn you into a Muslim?

So in the course of a very brief Google search I found this article from "the Free Speech Center at MTSU" and the actual court documents of the decision in the 4th Circuit Court and the Lemon case.

It turns out that what was being described was not what was happening at all. As part of a five-day section of a world history class that focused on Islam. The specific complaint was about the moment in the class in which, in an exam, there was a "fill in the blank" question in which one had to fill in two words in the sentence that was the Shahada.

So I looked up the Shadaha. Apparently, yes, saying it is the minimum one needs to do to accept Islam as one's faith. As it says in islamreligion dot com...

"Becoming a Muslim is a simple and easy process.  All that a person has to do is to say a sentence called the Testimony of Faith (Shahada), which is pronounced as:

I testify “La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammad rasoolu Allah.”

"These Arabic words mean, “There is no true god (deity) but God (Allah), and Muhammad is the Messenger (Prophet) of God.”  Once a person says the Testimony of Faith (Shahada) with conviction and understanding its meaning, then he/she has become a Muslim."

I think that filing in a couple of words in that sentence in a written exam in school is not exactly the same as saying something "with conviction" in the eyes of any god that may be listening and any legal authority that may care.

Apparently the courts feel the same way. The "Lemon test" is not some variant of "If it looks like a duck..." but rather a three-step process by which one asks certain things about the context in which religious information is used/disseminated/tested in school to determine if it constitutes a violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits the government from establishing a religion.

The MTSU article linked above breaks down the three steps of the Lemon test and, one by one, shows how the case passes the Lemon test as not a violation of the First Amendment. Here is the link again so you can check it yourself.

So there you have it. Not even the 5-4 conservative majority in the Supreme Court found the young woman's case to have enough merit to warrant hearing the appeal.

A simple Google search of her name will find plenty of pictures of her. She is young, blonde, beautiful, and had nicely-done makeup. I am sure she will be able to get whatever she wants in life if she asks nicely, so long as she is not asking a court to rule against the Constitution and legal precedent.

So what the heck is the point of championing such an obviously flawed case? I mean, Islam is a big part of the world in which we live, and learning about it can only help us. If we understand it, we will be able to deal with the people who believe in it in a more appropriate manner (and i can say that whatever you believe that manner to be. Knowing your enemy is as important as knowing your friend).

But there are already people who are scared of Muslims. After all, the 9-11 conspirators were Muslim. A lot of the world's oil is controlled by Muslims. If we can destroy or scare away all the Muslims, then we will protect ourselves from future 9-11s and be able to take all the oil, right?

Well, if you follow that logic, then we ought to vote for those candidates that talk toughest against Muslims. Then who cares if those candidates relax pollution standards, causing increased incidents of asthma in inner cities, cancer in Klondikes, and medical problems in Michigan. But the corporations that don't have to spend extra money minimizing and properly disposing of their waste will make more profits. And maybe some of those profits will trickle down to the workers, maybe not, but more importantly, no more Muslim problems!

And that is just one of the many other issues supported by the same candidates who demonize Muslims and are supported by Fox News which I find objectionable.

And so the business executives sponsor the networks that make the Muslims look bad so the candidates that talk tough against them can get elected and loosen up pollution restrictions to they can make more money. Whether or not most Muslims are suicidal plane-hijacking terrorists or oil sheikhs or if we should learn abut history and the people around us unimportant.

And Fox News is not "news." It is an entertainment/opinion channel with an agenda.

A few thoughts about 9-11

Just a few thoughts about 9-11

For those who don't know yet, I took a bunch of pictures from my windo and rooftop of the Twin Towers burning and collapsing on september 11, 2001. You can see them in my Facebook albums.

First off, it was a terrible, horrible day. More died than at Pearl Harbor, and far fewer people committed the act. Even more people suffered, physically, emotionally, psychologically, and financially.

And every day that the incident gets further away, memories of it fade, and more and more mistakes, misinformation, and crackpot ideas find it capable to gain traction. People who were not there, are too young to have been there, who only see what the Interwebs have to show us, are finding it easy to accept things that fit clever conspiracy theories that support agendas.

Here are a few things I think are true, based on what I saw that day and what I have read and seen from reliable sources. I am dispensing with weblinks and things because I only have so much time in my life to dedicate to this.

Those were commercial airliners that crashed at all four sites. They were hijacked by terrorists, and the people on them all died.

The burning airplane fuel was hot enough to weaken the steel, and the weight of the buildings above the weak points made them break. That's why one building tilted the way it did, and the building that was struck higher up collapsed later.

The front of 7 WTC at ground level was taken out by debris fro the other towers. There were fuel oil tanks to power the generators for the police command bunker in the building (which wound up never being used). Those tanks caught fire, weakening the structure, and it collapsed. The reason the front of the building went down first was that the front of the structure was taken out, as I already said.

There was not the time in any security lapse for anyone to plant as many explosives as would have been needed for a “controlled demolition” of that magnitude.

He “squibs” in the collapse of the towers are the air, furniture, and debris being blown out the windows as the ceilings collapse, one by one, and the top of the building falls on them.

Those little squibs further down? The whole freakin' building is collapsing. You don;t thing that maybe the ceiling in an office somewhere collapses and blows out the window as a result?

The reason steel beams and other debris fell slower than the building is physics. The building was going straight down, and there was nothing strong enough to stop all that mass. The building was collapsing from the overall destruction. As steel beams snapped and other, less massive things bounced off other things, they went flying wherever there was room to fly, which was away from the building. The force projecting them outwards combined with air to slow their trajectory downwards.

The “vibrations” you see in the building in that new video? That is the shadow of the smoke from the fires.

The hole in the side of the Pentagon was where the fuselage went through. The slits where the wings went through are hidden behind the pile of debris. There are pieces of the airplane even in a photo on the cover of a French book claiming that there was no plane.

That was not a bomb on the underside of the second plane's fuselage. That is a bump that is part of the plane's design.

That little bulge that comes out of the other side of the tower in that video shot from the helicopter is debris blowing through the building and out the other side. It is absurd to think that the half-dozen pixels that are roughly the same shape as the nose of a plane could be the nose of a plane slipping past the “masking” line in the video. There are plenty of pictures and video of the plane hitting the tower from other angles that show the explosion out the other side.

And you don't see the plane earlier in that video because it was too damn small.

To say that the grainy, low-res video still shows something other than the plane just before it hits the building it is supposed to be because a row of pixels looks like the sun is hitting it at a different angle is ridiculous. Those few pixels of an object in motion can easily look like something they are not.

The “moving bridge” and other background elements are because the cameraperson is trying to keep focused on the towers as the camera moves, not because it is a composite image.

The slightly out-of-synch timing of the explosions from second plane strikes from the various networks is because the network feed to one network might simply be a second slower than the video feed to another network.

The plane did not disintegrate before it hit the building because 1) the plane had not been going that fast that long, it was accelerating to that speed, and 2) just because industry standards say you should not fly it that fast does not mean that it will not hold together long enough to crash into a building.

Those were people jumping out of the towers. I have friends who were there and saw them.

Those silhouette sculptures were public art.

There are plenty of pictures of plan wreckage at the Twin Towers.

There is someone who says that certain pictures of certain victims used other pictures of those same people and faked the backgrounds, showing side-by-side comparisons. First off, why would anyone do that? Secondly, look closer, there are little differences in the lighting or the angle. Do you think it is impossible for someone to have more than one picture of themselves taken under similar lighting conditions at similar angles?

No, there was no message sent out to all the Jews who worked in the WTC to stay home that day.

No, no one “surfed” down as the building collapsed.

The picture of the man on the roof as the plane is about to hit is a fake. The roof wasn't open, the observation deck was on the other tower, the plan is in much too sharp focus, and the guy is wearing a winter coat and hat on a very warm sunny day.

There are no secret camps holding the passengers, the victims' families were not paid off. Nobody recruited nearly 3,000 families to pretend that they had relatives that died.

There is plenty wrong with this country, the administration of George W. Bush, and everything else that led up to the circumstances that inspired and allowed the events of that day to happen, and plenty wrong with the reactions to it and the events that followed it, and there are far more Afghans and Iraqis dead, military, civilian, and “terrorist,” and American military personnel that have died since, than Americans who died that day, for what it's worth.

Those of us who were there saw the planes, saw the live footage, saw the damage, lost friends and relatives. To claim that there were no planes, that there was a government conspiracy, etc, not only cheapens the tragedy, but gets in the way of finding out why the tragedy really happened, and taking a sober and responsible look at what has happened in response since then.