Thursday

eBay prohibits textbooks for homeschool teachers

Lumps them with illegal drugs, bootleg recordings, prompting avalanche of complaints from customers

A new policy by Internet trading behemoth eBay that bans homeschool teachers' texts from its auctions is prompting a tirade of complaints from the company's faithful customers.

"Really the homeschooling community is a huge participant in eBay when you get to thinking about it," said one customer who was identified as ''angels*wings'' on an eBay blog. "We buy textbooks naturally but we also purchase items like microscopes, slides, globes, maps, manipulatives, educational games, reading books, supplies for our classrooms, stickers, idea books, folders, sheet protectors, school supplies, software, educational movies, models, post cards, the list is enormous."

The policy, which is inclusive of all teachers' texts, was made known recently as those who were auctioning various books watched as their postings were deleted.

Another homeschooler on the blog said she questioned eBay when her listings were cancelled.

"They told me that it fell under their heading of 'illegal, dangerous, offensive, or potentially infringing,'" she said. "What are they thinking? I have a mess of curriculum here that I can't sell, and needing money from it to buy curriculum for the new school year."

The response from the company was posted for others to see.

"As you may know, eBay does not permit items that are illegal, dangerous, offensive, or potentially infringing. Additionally, eBay has just recently made the decision to prohibit the sale of Teacher's Editions of textbooks and solutions manuals that are intended solely for use by teachers. Since eBay strives to be a level-playing field, all Teacher's Edition textbooks, manuals and guides will be covered under this policy. Unfortunately, home schooling Teacher's Editions are not exempt from this policy and this policy will apply to all grade levels."

The company continued that those products often contain "special answer keys, exams, teaching tips, and guides."

And, it noted, "multiple organizations and publishers have voiced their concern to us over such books that may only be purchased through educational institutions by teachers."

"Where do they get off telling me that I don't have the right to buy, sell, or own a teacher's manual??? How could I teach my children without it???" another blogger asked.

Still another reported having a few 2006 teachers' edition textbooks for college classes pulled from the site.

"Now I'm stuck with them," the writer said.

"We are a major buying and selling force on eBay & once I got to thinking of all the things we purchase just for ourselves and our school it's amazing," said Angelwings. "I'm in the same boat as many of you. I've got three grade levels of books here I need to sell in order to purchase our supplies for next year."

WorldNetDaily did not get an immediate response from eBay about the situation. The website accepts e-mail questions but responds in 24-48 hours.

Its website explanation is straightforward.

"Teacher's editions of textbooks and solutions manuals that are intended solely for use by teachers are not permitted by eBay."

And it notifies users that "listing cancellation, forfeit of eBay fees on cancelled listings, limits on account privileges, account suspension" are all possible results.

"As a homeschooler I believe this directly discriminates against me since I have used Ebay numerous times to both buy and sell homeschool curricula. As a budget conscious homeschooling mother I like to buy used materials as often as possible. This means buying the teacher's materials used on Ebay and purchasing new workbooks directly from the publisher or distributor," Dana wrote.

eBay did offer a recourse for further concerns:

"We appreciate the fact that you may disagree with eBay's decision to establish this policy. If you would like to see these policies change, or have suggestions on how to make the site better, you may want to submit your feelings by completing the form at the following URL."

eBay's overview of prohibited items includes animals, artifacts, autographed items, academic software, bootleg recordings, credit cards, drugs and paraphernalia, government IDs, lockpicking devices, human remains, police-related items, used clothing and used cosmetics, among others.

One blogger noted that public school interests have been opposing homeschooling more and more, as homeschooling has grown substantially in recent years. Recent estimates have put homeschool attendance in the U.S. at more than 2.5 million. And the same comment noted book publishers also dislike having the products re-sold.

A public school teacher defended the policy, saying she cannot get a teacher's edition from a publisher unless she provides proof of her teaching employment. "It is quite costly for publishers to research and develop curricula and it is copyrighted."

But there also are other auctions that do allow the sale of homeschool texts. One location, which does require purchasers to be 18, is Schoolbookauction.com. Another one is Homeschoolbid.com and observers said there are many more available through an Internet search.

The Home School Legal Defense Association said it was aware of the situation.

"We have received many complaints about the eBay policy and we are actively working on a solution," Media Relations Director Ian Slatter told WND. That group is the largest organization of homeschoolers in the United States, with more than 80,000 member families.



Sourse: WorldNetDaily.com

Illusions of Prosperity

"There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose." - John Maynard Keynes

During the final two decades of the twentieth century, the U.S. economy was the envy of the world. It created 30 million new jobs while Europe and Japan were creating virtually none. It imposed its technological and ideological will on huge sections of the global marketplace and produced new millionaires the way a Ford plant turns out pickup trucks. U.S. stock prices rose twenty fold during this period, in the process convincing most investors that it would always be so.

Toward the end, even the federal government seemed well run, accumulating surpluses big enough to shift the debate from how to allocate scarce resources to how long it would take to eliminate the federal debt.

As the coin of this brave new realm, the dollar became the world's dominant currency. Foreign central banks accumulated dollars as their main reserve asset. Commodities like oil were denominated in dollars, and emerging countries like Argentina and China linked their currencies to the dollar in the hope of achieving U.S.-like stability. By 2000, there were said to be more $100 bills circulating in Russia than in the U.S.

But as the century ended, so did this extraordinary run. Tech stocks crashed, the Twin Towers fell, and Americans' sense of omnipotence went the way of their nest eggs. The federal government is borrowing $450 billion each year to finance the war on terror as well as an array of new or expanded social programs. The dollar, meanwhile, has become the world's problem currency, falling in value versus other major currencies and plunging versus gold. The whole world is watching, scratching its collective head, and wondering what has changed.

The answer is that everything has changed, and nothing has. The spectacular growth of the past two decades, it now turns out, was a mirage generated by the smoke and mirrors of rising debt and the willingness of the rest of the world to accept a flood of new dollars. Just how much the
U.S. owes will shock you. But even more shocking is the fact that we're still at it. Like a family that has maintained its lifestyle by maxing out a series of credit cards, America is at the point where new debt goes to pay off the old rather than to create new wealth. Hence the past few years' slow growth and steady loss of jobs.

So why say that nothing has changed? Because today's problems are new only in terms of recent U.S. history. A quick scan of world history reveals them to be depressingly familiar. All great societies pass this way eventually, running up unsustainable debts and printing (or minting)
currency in an increasingly desperate attempt to maintain the illusion of prosperity. And all, eventually, find themselves between the proverbial devil and deep blue sea: Either they simply collapse under the weight of their accumulated debt, as did the U.S. and Europe in the 1930s, or they keep running the printing presses until their currencies become worthless and their economies fall into chaos.

This time around, governments the world over have clearly chosen the second option. They're cutting interest rates, boosting spending, and encouraging the use of modern financial engineering techniques to create a tidal wave of credit. And history teaches that once in motion, this process leads to an inevitable result: Fiat (i.e., government-controlled) currencies will become ever less valuable, until most of us just give up on them altogether.

Now, what does a collapse in the value of the dollar mean for your finances? Many things, mostly bad but some potentially very good. First, it hurts people on a fixed income, because the value of each dollar they receive plunges. Ditto for those who are owed money, because they'll be paid back in less-valuable dollars (hence the disaster about to hit many banks). Bonds, which are basically loans to businesses or governments that promise to make fixed monthly payments and then return the principal, will be terrible investments, since they'll be repaid in always-depreciating dollars. For stocks and real estate, the picture is mixed, with a weak dollar helping in some ways and hurting in others.

The only unambiguous winner is gold. For the first 3,000 or so years of human history, gold was, for a variety of still-valid reasons, humanity's money of choice. As recently as 1970, it was the anchor of the global financial system. And since the world's economies severed their links to
the metal in 1971, it has acted as a kind of shadow currency, rising when the dollar is weak and falling when the dollar is strong. Not surprisingly, gold languished during the 1980s and '90s, drifting lower as the dollar soared, and being supplanted by the greenback as the standard against which all things financial are measured. But now those roles are about to reverse once again.

In the coming decade, as the dollar suffers one of the great meltdowns in monetary history, gold will reclaim its place at the center of the global financial system, and its value, relative to most of today's national currencies, will soar. The result: Gold coins, gold-mining stocks, and gold-based digital currencies will be vastly better ways to preserve and/or grow wealth than dollar-denominated bonds, stocks, or bank accounts.

That, in a nutshell, is the story.

Regards,

James Turk for The Daily Reckoning

Editor's Note: James Turk has specialized in international banking, finance and investments since graduating in 1969 from George Washington University with a B.A. degree in International Economics. He is the author of two books and several monographs and articles on money and banking. He is the co-author of "The Coming Collapse of the Dollar"
(Doubleday, December 2004).

In addition, James Turk is the Founder and Chairman of GoldMoney.com. Since 2001, thousands of individuals and companies have used GoldMoney to buy gold to protect their wealth from today's financial uncertainties. Many of them have also found GoldMoney's patented process of digital gold currency payments to be an ideal payment solution for online commerce.

To learn more about GoldMoney, see here:
http://goldmoney.com/?gmrefcode=dailyrec

Google offers free book downloads!

Google Inc. has expanded its controversial book search service to allow people to download whole copies of books in PDF format to their computers with the ability to print them out.

The feature went live today on the service's Web site, said Adam Smith, group product manager of Google Book Search and Google Scholar.

The books available for download will only be those that are in the public domain and not protected by copyright, Smith said. Until now, people have been able to read these public-domain books on the Google Book Search Web site, but they could not download and print them, he said.

Google will not allow downloading of copyrighted books, not even those whose copyright holders have granted Google permission to display their full text, Smith said.

The vast majority of the public-domain books available for download have been scanned as part of the library project of the Google Book Search service, Smith said. For the project, Google is scanning portions of the collections of some of the world's largest academic libraries, including Google partners Harvard University, Stanford University and Oxford University.

However, critics say Google can't scan copyrighted books it obtains from the libraries unless it gets permission from the copyright holders. The issue is at the center of two separate lawsuits brought against Google last year, one by The Authors Guild Inc. and three authors, and another by The Association of American Publishers on behalf of five of its members: The McGraw-Hill Cos., Pearson Education Inc., Penguin Group (USA) Inc., Simon & Schuster Inc. and John Wiley & Sons Inc.

Source: (IDG News Service)

Bush's back door Prohibition.

Just like travelers to Saudi Arabia, Americans and foreigners flying to the United States now find themselves banned from carrying on board the aircraft French brandy, Scotch whiskey, Spanish sherry, Irish cream, and Scandinavian aquavit. That was the situation yesterday at Copenhagen's Kastrup Airport.

There is something incredibly phony and suspicious about the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) "security" restrictions on items allowed on board airplanes. Although passengers are prohibited from bringing liquids and gels on board aircraft there are no hand searches of carry-on bags to ensure compliance with this rule. But just show a duty free store cashier a boarding pass for the United States and try to buy liquor, wine, or beer, you get a firm "not on flights to the U.S." and you're then shown a DHS warning sign prohibiting all liquids. Shades of the 1920s and the height of Prohibition. But buy cigarettes, of course, and there is no problem. After all, the Virginia and North Carolina tobacco growers and manufacturers are big time donors to and members of the flocks of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the other mega-church used-car salesmen across the tobacco belt.

The no alcohol or liquids (including duty free perfumes and colognes) prohibition does not apply to flights from Europe to Australia, Africa, Asia, or other parts of Asia.

DHS considers bottled or canned spirits sold in the heavily secured, sanitized, and duty free sections of international airports to be potential terrorist weapons. At least those who brought about Prohibition were more original in claiming alcohol was the devil's elixir and would lead to eternal damnation in hell. The only relief yesterday was Scandinavian Airlines showing the film "V for Vendetta," uncut and uncensored. The film, of course, is full of references to the scare tactics of the neo-cons. In the movie, V sums up the current neo-con fright campaign when he states the government controls the people through "coercive conformance." Yes, it is all part of the mix: removing shoes and belts, no liquids or gels, act as though the government is doing you a favor by allowing you to exercise your right of free travel and movement, do exactly as the DHS screeners say or else, in other words: conform!

From Carrie Nation to Michael Chertoff: Religious kook prohibitionists use any excuse to push temperance. Nation attacked saloons with a hatchet. Chertoff attacks duty free shops with idiotic travel restrictions.

No one knows what those who believe that astral beings appearing in some Middle East dust bowl two to four thousand years ago bearing messages from the ether beyond Earth will pull next on the American people, but anything is possible.

Meanwhile, the good people at Jack Daniel's (Jack was a good Democrat), Remy Martin, Campari, Pernod, Jacob's Creek, Sandemans, Stolichnaya, Carlsberg and other distilleries, wineries, and breweries will have to continue to lose U.S. market share because of the influence of the Christian fundie Dapper Dan mega-church ministers, bearded and robed soothsayers, and other delusional crackpots who now dictate policies to the Bush administration.

Another Bush regime "weapon of mass destruction" -- Carrie Nation would've been proud.

Anyway, welcome to "Saudi America" where a bottle of Harvey's Bristol Cream is now considered a weapon of the "bad guys."


Source: WayneMadsenReport.com

Wednesday

Drugged from Birth



The federal government wants to perform mental health screening on infants and get them started on drugs which they will take for their entire lives, if the drugs don’t kill them first. And you’re going to pay for it, whether you want to or not.

Already, children as young as 3, who wind up in the foster care system, are receiving psychiatric drugs for such disorders as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or depression, with over 60% of foster children in Texas, nearly two-thirds in Massachusetts, and 55% of foster children in Florida on as many as 16 different psychiatric drugs.

Where did the drive to medicate every child in the United States begin?

It began in Texas, with the Texas Medication Algorithm Project, an effort to create “one size fits all” treatment for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression.

The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons says that the “TMAP algorithm guidelines for psychotropic drugs are not backed by scientific evidence, but rather on self-interested opinion. Indeed the scientific evidence contradicts all claims made about the superiority of the drugs recommended by TMAP as first line treatment — these drugs have not been shown to be either more effective or safer than non-drug interventions or existing, cheaper, old drugs. TMAP guidelines were formulated by a consensus panel whose opinions were solicited by pharmaceutical companies that sponsored TMAP. The TMAP formularies recommend the drugs manufactured by those companies that are all on patent, very expensive, and have no better safety or effectiveness profiles than older, cheaper drugs that themselves are not very safe or effective.”

Yet under programs being pushed by a little-known federal government agency, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the discredited TMAP algorithms, originally designed for adults, would be used on children.

In SAMHSA’s Action Agenda, based on current Bush administration policy, the government wants to “fundamentally alter the form and function of the mental health service delivery system in this country” by implementing the recommendations of the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health.

One of these programs, which is already in operation, is Foundations for Learning, which was added into the No Child Left Behind Act at the last minute by the conference committee. According to Dr. Karen R. Effrem, of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, it “provides federal funds in the form of grants to states and other agencies to provide preschool screening, parent education, social services, home visits, transportation and curriculum to support ’social and emotional development’” for children from birth to age 7. A child can receive these services if the child has been removed from child care, Head Start or similar programs for behavioral problems, or is at risk of being removed from such programs, or if one of the child’s parents has depression or another mental illness.

“The criteria for diagnosing mental disorders are very vague in general, but are extremely vague and inaccurate for children,” Effrem wrote. “These grants will further subsidize the labeling and drugging of an alarmingly large population of young children with potent medications that have not been studied in that age group.”

Oh, and there’s one other little point. “The federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in mental health and early childhood issues and the record of success of these types of programs is abysmal.”

The NFC recommendations include a wide variety of mental health programs targeted at children as young as age 3, and early intervention for some children from birth.

Michael Ostrolenk, a licensed psychotherapist and public policy consultant who founded the Medical Privacy Coalition, wrote, “Their influence [of the mental health establishment over government] causes our children to be labeled in infancy, and it creates a never-ending market for psychiatric drugs. The long term effects of these drugs on the brains of our children are unknown. They also create a market for other drugs used to treat the chronic side effects like obesity and diabetes, and they will be needed throughout the lives of those affected, enhancing drug company profits while bankrupting taxpayer funded programs. As these programs multiply, the use of politically motivated labeling and drugging for children who do not comply with the indoctrination of the federal curriculum will increase. Brave New World will appear less and less like fiction unless these programs are stopped.”

It appears that dumbing down the schools wasn’t enough to get everyone in America to be conforming, subservient little sheep. Now they want to drug all of our children into submission. Baa.

Source: Homeland Stupidity

EFF Sues Barney to Defend Online Free Speech



Barney the purple dinosaur may teach kids a lot about playing fair, but his lawyers need a lesson in fair use. Now EFF is fighting back on behalf of one website owner to stop Barney's lawyers' abuse of copyright and trademark law.

On August 23, 2006, EFF asked a federal court in New York to uphold Stuart Frankel's online parody of Barney as non-infringing protected speech. Stuart posted the parody on his website in 1998, and Barney's lawyers have repeatedly sent him baseless cease-and-desist letters over the last four years.

This isn't the first time Barney's lawyers have wrongly threatened web publishers. In fact, they sent one of their unfounded threats to EFF in 2001, when we mirrored another non-infringing parody. At that time, EFF sent a response, which attempted to correct Barney's lawyers' prehistoric understanding of copyright and trademark laws. We also publicized their threats and sent out a call for others who had been threatened by Barney. That's when Stuart first contacted us.

EFF hopes this case will help put an end to Barney's unfounded threats once and for all, and serve as a lesson to other overreaching rights holders.

Legal Documents

Press Releases

Other Resources


Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation

Dispatches from the Drug War

By: Michael Hampton

Every year the War on Drugs sends over a million people to prison for non-violent crimes, wastes billions of dollars, and perpetuates the cycle of violence in our cities.

Why is it still going on? And what can be done about it?

Five thousand current and former police officers have the answer and spell it out in this video.

“The guilt, regret, and introspection apparent in these former cops is striking — and admirable,” wrote Cato Institute policy analyst Radley Balko.


It’s time to admit the War on Drugs was bad policy then, is bad policy now, and needs to end, and the sooner the better, says Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

Ending the War on Drugs would virtually eliminate the violence from our streets overnight, ending the shootouts between police and drug dealers, as well as wrongful police raids on innocent people, not only saving money but saving lives as well.

It would free our police to go after real violent criminals, such as murderers, rapists and the like. It would prevent people who have done nothing to harm anyone else from ever seeing the inside of a prison, where they don’t belong in the first place. And while legalization alone won’t undo all the damage to our country the War on Drugs has caused, it would be a very good start.


Source: Homeland Stupidity

Taxes to pay for increased propaganda

*** The number of PR staff employed by the British regime has increased from 300 to 3,200 under the leadership of Blair and his inner circle. The regime spends hundreds of millions of pounds of tax-payers' money each year on propaganda, and this "PR" budget has been rising steeply. ***

Taxpayers are funding the wages of spin

The Government's addiction to "spin" - the manipulation of information and publicity to achieve favourable press coverage - has become a distinguishing feature of Labour's tenure of office. One of the most profound sources of disillusionment with New Labour is the belief that its entire approach to governing has been ruled by the priorities of public relations.

This obsession with appearance over reality - with what voters can be made to believe has happened, as opposed to what has actually occurred - has created a degree of distrust and cynicism in the electorate that is quite unprecedented in modern British political history.

While politicians have often been dishonest, especially in revelatory moments of personal scandal or professional incompetence, they have not previously been assumed to be systematically misleading as a matter of course. This is the first government in living memory that has made the capacity to deceive (or at least to distort) a measure of its own professionalism: ministers are actually promoted on the basis of how successfully they have mastered the mysteries of illusion, diversion and concealment that constitute the spin doctor's art.

The disgust and alienation of voters who now tell opinion pollsters that they scarcely believe a word that any government spokesman utters can only be reinforced by the figures that we publish today.

Not only have the numbers of press spokesmen in government departments and quangos hugely increased since Labour came to power, but the cost to the taxpayer of the Government's own publicity operation has trebled since 1997, reaching £322 million last year. This sum covers the funding of the marketing and advertising budgets used to promote government policies and initiatives - which inevitably have a party political advantage for Labour.

In effect, the taxpaying voter, regardless of his own party allegiance, is subsidising the promotional activities of the party in power.

Among the Whitehall departments most heavily fortified with public relations spokesmen are those whose contentious policies might be thought to need assiduous handling: the Ministry of Defence (229 spin doctors), the Department for Work and Pensions (181) and the Home Office (145). The distribution of press staff is, in other words, carefully calculated for political consequences.

This insidious culture of press manipulation has infiltrated virtually every institution in the public sector: museums, cultural institutions and community agencies have all learnt the formula. It will take a dedicated effort by any future government to avoid playing the same game.


SOURCE

Daily Telegraph, "Taxpayers are funding the wages of spin", 30 August 2006.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/08/30/dl3001.xml


FURTHER READING

Daily Telegraph, "Spending on spin trebles under Blair", 30 August 2006.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/08/30/nspin30.xml
Spending on Government spin has trebled under Labour and taxpayers are now supporting an army of more than 3,200 press officers.
...
When Labour came to power in 1997, just over 300 fully-fledged press officers were working in Whitehall, although that figure excluded a small number of other public relations staff.
...

Critics have expressed concern that Government spending on advertisements and public relations tends to peak in election years, prompting suspicions that Labour is using public money to sell its key policies to voters. For instance, the Central Office of Information budget rose from £200 million in 1999-2000 to £295 million in the 12 months before the 2001 election. In 2003-04 a total of £317 million was spent but the figure rose to £343 million in the run-up to last year's election.
...
Oliver Heald, the shadow Cabinet Office secretary, said he was astounded that the Ministry of Defence employed 229 press officers and other PR staff. The Home Office has 145 press and information officers, yet it has been unable to avoid a series of PR blunders in recent months over immigration and crime. [These "blunders" may in fact be deliberate, for example feeding public fears about immigration to secure public acceptance of future policy changes, because the regime is known to use "leaks" and other means of creating headlines to influence public opinion.]
...
The Tories emphasised that the figures did not include the 77 politically appointed special advisers working for the Prime Minister and his Cabinet colleagues.

Mr Heald said the Government employed 18 press officers in its 24-hour Media Monitoring Unit, which raised further questions about Mr Prescott's decision to obtain a Commons pass for his son, David, a lobbyist.

Mr Prescott defended the decision at the weekend by saying that his son had been employed over the summer to carry out media monitoring.
...
Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and their army of quangocrats have bankrolled a bloated army of spin doctors, politicising the Civil Service and creating a corrosive culture of spin in Whitehall."
...

Monsanto Buys ‘Terminator’ Seeds Company

The United States Government has been financing research on a genetic engineering technology which, when commercialized, will give its owners the power to control the food seed of entire nations or regions. The Government has been working quietly on this technology since 1983. Now, the little-known company that has been working in this genetic research with the Government’s US Department of Agriculture-- Delta & Pine Land-- is about to become part of the world’s largest supplier of patented genetically-modified seeds (GMO), Monsanto Corporation of St. Louis, Missouri.

Relations between Monsanto, Delta & Pine Land and the USDA, on closer scrutiny, show the deep and dark side of the much-heralded genetic revolution in agriculture. It proves deep-held suspicions that the Gene Revolution is not about ‘solving the world hunger problem’ as its advocates claim. It’s about handing over control of the seeds for mankind’s basic food supply—rice, corn, soybeans, wheat, even fruit, vegetables and cotton—to privately owned corporations. Once the seeds and their use are patented and controlled by one or several private agribusiness multinationals, it will be they who can decide whether or not a particular customer—let’s say for argument, China or Brazil or India or Japan—whether they will or won’t get the patented seeds from Monsanto, or from one of its licensee GMO partners like Bayer Crop Sciences, Syngenta or DuPont’s Pioneer Hi-Bred International.

While most of us don’t bother to reflect on where the corn in the box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes or the rice in a box of Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice come from, when we grab it from the supermarket shelf, they all must originate with seeds. Seeds can either be taken by a farmer from the previous season’ seeds, and planted to produce the next harvest. Or, seeds can be bought new each harvest season, from the companies which sell their seeds.

The advent of commercial GMO seeds in the early 1990’s allowed companies like Monsanto, DuPont or Dow Chemicals to go from supplying agriculture chemical herbicides like Roundup, to patenting genetically altered seeds for basic farm crops like corn, rice, soybeans or wheat. For almost a quarter century, since 1983, the US Government has quietly been working to perfect a genetically engineered technique whereby farmers would be forced to turn to their seed supplier each harvest to get new seeds. The seeds would only produce one harvest. After that the seeds from that harvest would commit ‘suicide’ and be unusable.

There has been much hue and cry, correctly so, that this process, patented ‘suicide’ seeds, officially termed GURTs (Genetic Use Restriction Technologies), is a threat to poor farmers in developing countries like India or Brazil, who traditionally save their own seeds for the next planting. In fact, GURTs, more popularly referred to as Terminator seeds for the brutal manner in which they kill off plant reproduction possibilities, is a threat to the food security as well of North America, Western Europe, Japan and anywhere Monsanto and its elite cartel of GMO agribusiness partners enters a market.

The Curious History of Delta & Pine Land

Delta & Pine Land is a company that, despite the pine in its name, has deep roots. Founded in 1888, it has its headquarters at One Cotton Row in Scott, Mississippi, nestled between Goat Island and Choktaw Bar Island on the Mississippi River, near the Arkansas border. However, the people running things at Delta Pine are anything but your typical Mississippi black-dirt cotton farmers.

In 1983, Delta & Pine Land (D&PL) joined with the US Department of Agriculture in a project to develop Terminator seeds. It was one of the earliest experiments with GMO. It was a long-term project. The US Government has been serious about Terminator beginning more than two decades ago.

In March 1998 the US Patent Office granted Patent No. 5,723,765 to Delta & Pine Land for a patent titled, Control of Plant Gene _Expression. The patent is owned jointly, according to Delta & Pine’s Security & Exchange Commission 10K filing, ‘by D&PL and the United States of America, as represented by the Secretary of Agriculture.’

The patent has global coverage. To quote further from the official D&PL SEC filing, ‘The patent broadly covers all species of plant and seed, both transgenic (GMO-ed) and conventional, for a system designed to allow control of progeny seed viability without harming the crop’(sic).

Then, in a manner reminiscent of Big Brother in George Orwell’s novel, 1984, D&PL claims, ‘One application of the technology could be to control unauthorized planting of seed of proprietary varieties…by making such a practice non-economic since non-authorized saved seed will not germinate, and, therefore, would be useless for planting.’ D&PL calls the thousand-year-old tradition of farmer-saved seed by the pejorative term, ‘brown bagging’ as though it is something dirty and corrupt.

Translated into lay language, D&PL officially declares the purpose of its Patent No. 5,723,765, Control of Plant Gene _Expression, is to prevent farmers who once get trapped into buying transgenic or GMO seeds from a company such as Monsanto or Syngenta, from ‘brown bagging’ or being able to break free of control of their future crops by Monsanto and friends. As D&PL puts it, their patent gives them ‘the prospect of opening significant worldwide seed markets to the sale of transgenic technology in varietal crops in which crop seed currently is saved and used in subsequent seasons as planting seed.’

Instead, the farmer or the country whose farmers depend on Monsanto patented GMO seeds must pay a license fee to Monsanto each year to get new seeds. ‘No tickee, no laundy,’ as the old Brooklyn poet would say.

Terminator is the answer to the agribusiness dream of controlling world food production. No longer would they need to hire expensive detectives to spy on whether farmers were re-using Monsanto or other GMO patented seed. Terminator corn or soybeans or cotton seeds could be genetically modified to ‘commit suicide’ after one harvest season. That would automatically prevent farmers from saving and re-using the seed for the next harvest. The technology would be a means of enforcing Monsanto or other GMO patent rights, and forcing payment of farmer use fees not only in developing economies, where patent rights were, understandably, little respected, but also in industrial OECD countries.

With Terminator patent rights, once a country such as Argentina or Brazil or Iraq or the USA or Canada opened its doors to the spread of GMO patented seeds among its farmers, their food security would be potentially hostage to a private multinational company, a company which, for whatever reasons, especially given its intimate ties to the US Government, might decide to use ‘food as a weapon’ to compel a US-friendly policy from that country or group of countries.

Sound far-fetched? Go back to what then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger did in countries like Allende’s Chile to force a regime change to a ‘US-friendly’ Pinochet dictatorship by withholding USAID and private food exports to Chile. Kissinger dubbed it ‘food as a weapon.’ Terminator is merely the logical next step in food weapon technology.

The role of the US Government in backing and financing Delta & Pine Land’s decades of Terminator research is even more revealing. As Kissinger said back in the 1970’s, ‘Control the oil and you can control entire Continents. Control food and you control people…’

In a June 1998 interview, USDA spokesman, Willard Phelps, defined the US Government policy on Terminator seeds. He explained that USDA wanted the technology to be ‘widely licensed and made expeditiously available to many seed companies.’ He meant agribusiness GMO giants like Monsanto, DuPont or Dow. The USDA was open about their reasons: They wanted to get Terminator seeds into the developing world where the Rockefeller Foundation had made eventual proliferation of genetically engineered crops the heart of its GMO strategy from the beginnings of its rice genome project in 1984.

USDA’s Phelps stated that the US Government’s goal in fostering the widest possible development of Terminator technology was ‘to increase the value of proprietary seed owned by US seed companies and to open up new markets in Second and Third World countries.’

Under WTO rules on free trade in agriculture, countries are forbidden to impose their own national health restrictions on GMO imports if it is deemed to be an ‘unfair trade barrier.’ It begins to become clear why it was the US Government and US agribusiness which during the late 1980’s pushed at the GATT Uruguay Round for creation of a World Trade Organization, with its supranational arbitrary powers over world agriculture trade. It all fits into a neat picture of patented seeds, forced on reluctant WTO member nations, under threat of WTO sanctions, and now of Terminator or suicide seeds.

A closer look at who runs and owns Delta & Pine Land is instructive.

Arkansas Politics and D&PL

The largest shareholder in D&PL is the Stephens Group of Little Rock, Arkansas. Here is where things become interesting indeed.

The man who is Chairman of the Board of DP&L is Jon E.M. Jacoby, who came to DP&L as representative of the Stephens Group. Jacoby is a Director and Vice Chairman of The Stephens Group LLC, the Arkansas-based private equity firm owned by the Stephens family.

The Stephens Group prides itself on being the nation's largest investment bank outside Wall Street, based, of all places, in little ol' Little Rock, in hillbilly land, Arkansas, one of the poorest states in the United States. Stephens Inc. is also one of the biggest institutional shareholders in 30 large multinationals including the Arkansas based firms Tyson Food, the world’s largest chicken industrial factory operation and the infamous Arkansas giant, Wal-Mart.

Jackson Stephens, who founded the group with his brother, Witt, were more than just lucky Arkansas bankers and billionaires. Stephens evidently built his career and fortune by being connected to the ‘right’ people. He was a US Naval Academy classmate of Jimmy Carter and during the Georgia bank scandals of President Carter’s Office of Management & Budget chief, Bert Lance, it was Jack Stephens who stepped in to bail Lance out of an extremely embarrassing financial debacle with Lance’s old bank, National Bank of Georgia.

How Stephens helped Jimmy Carter’s fellow Georgia buddy, Lance, is the interesting part. Stephens introduced Lance to a Pakistani businessman, Agha Hasan Abedi. Abedi was the founder of a curious Luxembourg-registered, London-based bank called BCCI.

In 1990, BCCI was convicted of money laundering for the Columbian Cocaine Cartels in Miami.

In October, 1992, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released an 800-page report on the BCCI collapse. They called the BCCI scandal, ‘the largest case of organized crime in history, spanning over some 72 nations,’ adding that it represented an ‘international financial crime on a massive and global scale,’ and that the bank ‘systematically bribed world leaders and political figures throughout the world.’

The Senate report concluded that among the provable charges against BCCI were ‘BCCI's criminality, including fraud…involving billions of dollars; money laundering in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the America; BCCI's bribery of officials in most of those locations; its support of terrorism, arms trafficking, and the sale of nuclear technologies; its management of prostitution; its commission and facilitation of income tax evasion, smuggling, and illegal immigration; its illicit purchases of banks and real estate; and a panoply of financial crimes limited only by the imagination of its officers and customers.’

Jackson Stephens was no casual business acquaintance of BCCI’s Agha Hasan Abedi. In response to the concerns over Jackson Stephens' involvement in BCCI, the Ohio Attorney General noted in a 1993 report, ‘Stephens' name has been linked to securities violations that allegedly occurred when the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), a foreign bank dominated by Pakistani financier Agha Hasan Abedi, acquired stock and control over the Washington-based First American Bank.’ In 1991, Stephens joined BCCI investor Mochtar Riady in buying BCCI's former Hong Kong subsidiary from its liquidators.

The Stephens Group was well-connected to another interesting Asian banking group, the billionaire Indonesian Riady family of Moktar and his son James Riady, who own the Lippo Bank in Indonesia. The Riadys are Chinese-Indonesian businessmen who, of all places, moved to Arkansas in the 1970’s, despite holding billions of assets in Asia. Stephens and Riady hit it off and soon Stephens and Riady bought a bank in Hong Kong. Stephens then invited Riady to invest in a Little Rock, Arkansas bank called Worthen.

BCCI and Jackson Stephens, chairman of the Stephens Group of Arkansas were well known to one another. Stephens Group board member, Jon E.M. Jacoby, today Chairman of Delta & Pine Land, and still a Vice Director of The Stephens Group, was a very senior, trusted member of the Stephens’ inside circle for more than 35 years.

Jackson Stephens’ Stephens Group financially staked Sam Walton when he started Wal-Mart in 1970. Stephens also financed Tyson Foods to become the agribusiness global giant it is today. Jon Jacoby, as senior executive of the Stephens Group, had arranged the 1970 Wal-Mart deal. Jon E.M. Jacoby and Jackson Stephens went way back.

Jacoby was Vice President of Stephens Inc. in the early 1990’s, shortly after the BCCI scandals and early into the Presidency of another Jackson Stephens protégé, former Arkansas Governor and recipient of Stephens’ political largess, William Jefferson Clinton.

When an Arkansas reporter questioned Jacoby on allegations of Clinton’s alleged corruption as Governor of Arkansas, Jacoby quipped, “You see a girl walking down the street. You can say, ‘There goes a beautiful girl’ or "There goes a whore.’ What the hell's the difference? They've both got legs.”

Arkansas politics is known for its colorful metaphors and its colorful politicians like William Jefferson Clinton. It’s good to get a little of the flavor of this Arkansas colorfulness to get a better picture of Delta & Pine Land.

Stephens Group, Tyson Farms and Other Arkansas Fairy Tales

A tangled web of relations links the Stephens Group and Delta & Pine Land of Scott, Mississippi with another satellite in the agribusiness orbit of the influential Stephens Group. The Stephens Group is also linked intimately with Arkansas-based Tyson Foods, the US’ largest agribusiness processor of industrialized chicken meat, and arguably one of its most unsanitary ones.

Tyson Foods curiously emerged from the recent Avian Flu (H5N1) virus scare as a winner, using the lie that their factory farm mass-bred assembly-line chickens were more ‘sanitary’ than free-roaming small farm chickens of Asia.

Washington Administrations, at least since the Presidency of Bill Clinton, seem to have a love affair of some sort with Tyson Foods.

It began when Clinton sought to name an Arkansas crony, Mike Espy, to be his Secretary of Agriculture. Before Clinton could submit Espy’s name to the Senate for confirmation, however, Espy was sent to Arkansas for a meeting that would decide if Espy had the right stuff. The meeting was with Don Tyson, head of Tyson Foods.

Tyson apparently concluded that Espy indeed had the right stuff, at least as far as Tyson was concerned. Soon after being named head of USDA, Espy enacted measures significantly weakening Federal chicken waste and contamination standards. That opened the floodgates for expansion of Tyson Foods chicken factory farms into the huge concentrations of chicken waste and rivers overflowing with toxic pollution in Arkansas and beyond.

The Wall Street Journal on May 28, 2003 reviewed the allegations surrounding then-President Clinton and his wife, Hillary. They detailed some relevant points from the Clintons’ Arkansas days:

1977

Hillary Rodham Clinton joins the Rose Law Firm. Jackson Stephens joins with former Carter administration budget director Bert Lance and a group of Mideast investors--later identified as key figures in the corrupt Bank of Credit & Commerce International--in an unsuccessful attempt to acquire Financial General Bankshares in Washington, D.C

1978

October: Mrs. Clinton, now a partner at the Rose Firm, begins a series of commodities trades under the guidance of Tyson Foods executive Jim Blair, earning nearly $100,000. (author’s emphasis). The trades are not revealed until March 1994.

November: Bill Clinton is elected Governor of Arkansas.

The Rose law firm was the house law firm of Jackson Stephens’ Stephens Group investment bank in Little Rock. To be the corporate law firm of the Stephens Group was no casual affair. It implied a deep trust relationship and perhaps more. As one crony of Jackson Stephens put it at that time, ‘Jackson Stephens? He’s the man who owns Arkansas.’

The head of the prestigious Rose law firm in Little Rock in those days was C. Joseph Giroir jr. In 1977 Giroir hired a young lawyer named Hillary Clinton to work for Rose. It was all one cozy Arkansas-Indonesia family back then.

The Wall Street Journal commentary on the Clinton years had the following entry for 1987, as Clinton was still Arkansas Governor:

1987:

Officials at investment giant Stephens Inc., including longtime Clinton friend, David Edwards, take steps to rescue Harken Energy, a struggling Texas oil company with George W. Bush on its board. Over the next three years, Mr. Edwards brings BCCI-linked investors and advisers into Harken deals. One of them, Abdullah Bakhsh, purchases $10 million in shares of Stephens-dominated Worthen Bank. (author’s emphasis).

Jackson Stephens’ political largesse was non-partisan: Democrats Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and then Republican George W. Bush, the man now in the White House as Monsanto seeks approval to take over the Stephens Group’s Delta & pine land.

In December 1992, just after Clinton had been elected President in a campaign financed at critical points by Jackson Stephens and friends, including the Indonesian-American Riady family, Vince Foster, an Arkansas friend of the Clinton’s, and a law partner at Hillary’s Rose law firm, met James McDougal. Foster arranged for McDougal to buy the Clintons' remaining shares in Whitewater Development Co. That land deal was focus of Congressional investigation of the Clintons. McDougal was loaned the money for the purchase by Tyson Foods counsel Jim Blair, the long-time Clinton friend and commodities adviser who in 1978 had ‘tutored’ Hillary in her fabulously successful commodities speculation. The loan by Tyson’s Jim Blair to McDougal was never repaid.

No sooner did Bill and Hillary Clinton move into the White House, and the Tyson Foods-approved Mike Espy took over as US Secretary of Agriculture, than Hillary’s former law partner, Joseph Giroir, set up a corporation. It was called Arkansas International Development Corporation (AIDC). In fact, it appears that the AIDC was set up to do joint ventures with the Indonesian Lippo Group of the business partners of Jackson Stephens, Mokhtar and James Riady.

The Arkansas International Development Corporation brokered a deal between Indonesia’s Lippo Group and Arkansas’ Tyson Foods that opened Indonesia to import Tyson Foods industrially-produced Arkansas factory farm chickens. One food Indonesia does not need to import is certainly chickens. The cheap Arkansas imports destroyed the fragile economy of domestic Indonesian small family chicken farmers.

Another project of AIDC was to issue bonds to build an airport in the Arkansas backwoods for the sole purpose of shipping Tyson Farms chickens to Indonesia. Recall that Clinton’s wife had been profiting from the trading advice of Tyson Foods since October 1978, a month before her husband became Governor.

Under the Clinton Presidency, agribusiness, especially agribusiness tied to the Stephens’ interests, made huge advances.

Agriculture Secretary Espy was forced to resign in October 1994, and was indicted on charges of accepting bribes and other gratuities. Among the charges against him were making false statements, concealing money from prohibited sources, illegal gratuities, illegal contributions, falsifying records, interstate transportation of stolen property, money laundering, and illegal dispersal of USDA subsidies. The largest corporate offender was Tyson Foods. Tyson had illegally offered Espy $12,000 in airplane rides, football tickets and other payoffs. Espy got off because the law makes it easier to convict a briber than a bribee. Tyson paid the government $6 million to close its case.

Tyson had been enthusiastic supporters of the Clinton family for years. In 1994, Time reported that a senior pilot for Tyson, Joe Henrickson, had been grilled for three days by the Espy Independent Prosecutor, Dan Smaltz, and FBI agents. They grilled the Tyson pilot about earlier transfers of cash to the (Arkansas) Governor's (Bill Clinton) mansion. According to Time, Henrickson claimed to have carried white envelopes containing a quarter-inch stack of $100 bills on six occasions.

Time magazine reported that, ‘In one case, [Henrickson claimed] a Tyson executive handed him an envelope of cash in the company's aircraft hanger in Fayetteville and said, 'This is for Governor Clinton.’ Arkansas has its political traditions and the Stephens and Tyson families are evidently skilled practitioners of that art.

The real interest in Jacoby’s Delta & Pine Land

By now the question comes, what is so attractive about the Stephens Group’s Delta & Pine Land that Monsanto makes its second bid to add it to its global genetically-engineered seeds empire?

It’s the patent Delta & Pine Land, together with the US Government, holds--Patent No. 5,723,765, titled, Control of Plant Gene _Expression. The USDA through its Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) in Lubbock, Texas, as already noted, has worked with Delta & Pine Land since 1983 to perfect Terminator GMO technology. Patent No. 5,723,765 is the patent for Terminator technology.

One year later, in early 1999 Monsanto, the largest producer of GMO seeds and related agri-chemicals, announced it was acquiring Delta & Pine Land along with Delta’s Terminator patents.

In October 1999, however, following a worldwide storm of protest against Terminator seeds that threatened the very future of the Rockefeller Foundation’s ‘Gene Revolution’ Dr. Gordon Conway, President of the prestigious Rockefeller Foundation, met privately with the Board of Directors of Monsanto. Conway convinced Monsantom that for the long-term future of their GMO Project, they must go public to indicate to a worried world that it would not ‘commercialize’ Terminator. Development of the genetic revolution and genetic engineering as a research area had been the project of the Rockefeller Foundation over decades, along with researchers in the family’s Rockefeller University.

The Anglo-Swiss Syngenta joined with Monsanto in declaring solemnly that they would also not commercialize their work on GURTS or Terminator suicide seed technology.

That 1999 announcement took enormous pressure off of Monsanto and the agribusiness GMO giants, allowing them to advance the proliferation of their patented GMO seeds globally. Terminator could come later, once farmers and entire national agriculture areas like North America or Argentina or India had been taken over by GMO crops. Then, of course, it would be too late. The Rockefeller-Monsanto 1999 press conference was clearly application of classic Lenin Bolshevik tactics—Two Steps Forward, One Step Back…

Despite the Monsanto declaration of a moratorium on Terminator development, the US Government and the again independent Delta & Pine Land refused to drop their Terminator development.

In 2000, a year after the Monsanto Terminator moratorium announcement, the Clinton Administration’s USDA Secretary, Dan Glickman, refused repeated efforts by various agriculture and NGO organizations to drop the Government’s support for Terminator or GURTs. His Department’s feeble excuse for not dropping support for the work with Delta & Pine Land was that it allowed the US Government to put ‘leverage’ on D&PL to ‘protect the public interest.’ Six years later it became clear: the only leverage the US Government had put on D&PL’s commercialization efforts on GURTs had been to lever it into commercial reality.

Delta Vice President, Harry Collins, declared at the time in a press interview in the Agra/Industrial Biotechnology Legal Letter, ‘We’ve continued right on with work on the Technology Protection System (TPS or Terminator). We never really slowed down. We’re on target, moving ahead to commercialize it. We never really backed off.’

Nor did their partner, the United States Department of Agriculture, back down on Terminator after 1999. In 2001 the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) website announced: ‘USDA has no plans to introduce TPS into any germplasm…Our involvement has been to help develop the technology, not to assist companies to use it.’ As if to say, ‘see, our hands are clean.’ Then they went on to say the USDA was, ‘committed to making the [Terminator] technology as widely available as possible, so that its benefits will accrue to all segments of society (sic)…ARS intends to do research on other applications of this unique gene control discovery…When new applications are at the appropriate stage of development, this technology will also be transferred to the private sector for commercial application.’ Terminator was alive and well inside the Washington bureaucracy.

In 2001, the USDA and Delta & Pine executed a Commercialization Agreement for Terminator, its infamous Patent No. 5,723,765. The Government and Delta & Pine Land were not at all concerned about worldwide outcry against Terminator.

That announcement came two years after Monsanto had dropped its planned takeover of D&PL, with its Terminator patents.

The world was left with the (misleading) impression that Terminator was dead. Reality was it was anything but dead. Seven years later, long after public outcry against Terminator technology had died down, Monsanto re-entered and bought Delta & Pine Land and its Terminator patents.

Delta & Pine Land’s global net

The key scientific member of the Delta & Pine Land board since 1993 has been Dr. Nam-Hai Chua. Chua, 62, is also head of the Rockefeller University Plant Molecular Biology Laboratory in New York, and has been for over 25 years, the labs which are at the heart of the Rockefeller Foundation’s decades-long development, and spending of more than $100 millions of its own research grants to create their Gene Revolution. Until 1995, Chua was also a scientific consultant to Monsanto Corporation, as well as to DuPont’s Pioneer Hi-Bred International. Chua is at the heart of Rockefeller’s Gene Revolution. And, clearly, Delta & Pine Land and their research on Terminator have been in the center of that work.

Delta & Pine Land is well-placed globally to proliferate its suicide seeds now, with the corporate and financial clout of the giant Monsanto company. Delta & Pine already has subsidiaries including D&PL Argentina, D&PL China, D&PL China PTE in Singapore, Deltapine Paraguay, Delta Pine de Mexico, Deltapine Australia, Hebei Ji Dai Cottonseed Technology Company in China, CDM Mandiyu in Argentina, Delta and Pine Land Hellas in Greece, D&M Brazil Algodao of Brazil, D&PL India, D&PL Mauritius Ltd.

This vast global network combined with Monsanto’s dominant position in the GMO seeds and agri-chemicals market along with the unique DP&L Patent No. 5,723,765, Control of Plant Gene _Expression, now give Monsanto and its close friends in Washington an enormous advance in their plans to dominate world food and plant seed use.

F. William Engdahl is Contributing Editor of Global Research and author of the soon-to-be-released book, Seeds of Destruction: theDark Side of Genetically-engineeredFood. He also authored ‘ A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics,’ Pluto Press, He may be contacted at his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.


Source:

Why Jihad U?

By Joe Kaufman

On the website, Why Islam (www.whyislam.org), there are found many things that would shock even the least squeamish of individuals. Anti-Semitism, homophobia, terrorism and misogyny abound. At the Muslim Students Association (

MSA) of the University of South Florida (USF), an advertisement for Why Islam has been placed prominently on the group’s office door. The question must be posed to the MSA and the university – Why?

Walking across the campus of USF, one finds a number of reminders of the school’s most storied professor, Sami Al-Arian – the ever-growing Computer Science and Engineering Department, where Al-Arian taught class; The Castor Building, named after the USF President that refused to fire Al-Arian, Betty Castor; and the numerous newspaper boxes bearing the logo of the Oracle, the campus newspaper where Al-Arian’s case was debated and debated again. All of these entities provide memories of a nightmarish USF history where Al-Arian led a terror cell for Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), but each in its own right has moved on, looking to provide a more positive atmosphere for the school’s future. However, one Al-Arian remnant refuses to part ways with the past. That group, the Muslim Students Association (MSA), continues, to this day, to publicly defend Al-Arian.

Atop the website of the MSA of USF, sits a color flyer for a February 2006 rally for the release of Al-Arian from prison. At the time, he was in the Hillsborough County Orient Road Jail, which is where the rally was taking place. Today, he is being held at the Federal Corrections Complex in Coleman, Florida. Listed on the flyer as speakers for the rally were, amongst others: former Congressman Paul Findley, who adorned the cover of his book, ‘Silent No More,’ with the name and picture of convicted terrorist Abdulrahman Alamoudi; Eric Vickers, who resigned from his position as the head of the American Muslim Council, after he was exposed for calling the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster “an act of divine retribution against Israel;” and Nihad Awad, the Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who, in March of 1994 – the same year he co-founded CAIRdeclared his support for Hamas.

While the MSA is advertising Al-Arian’s innocence, the group is actively advertising another radical Islamist cause, right from its university office. On the door of what the MSA calls its “Prayer Room,” one can’t help but notice a purple and white sign under the “MSA” letters, stating to its viewers, “www.whyislam.org, Explore it!”

Why Islam is a project of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), an organization founded in 1971 through the national MSA. ICNA was created specifically to emulate the violent Muslim Brotherhood of Pakistan, Jamaat-e-Islami, a group that has reported ties to Al-Qaeda. The “Registered” and “Administrative” name and organization for the Why Islam website is farrukh.net, a mirror (replica) site of Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan Media (JIP Media) dedicated to the works of Maulana Muhammad Yusuf Islahi, a Jamaat leader. In September of 2001, a little over a week after the 9/11 attacks, the Jamaat logo was mysteriously pulled from the farrukh site. What is not mysterious is the amount of hatred that pervades its offspring, Why Islam.

According to its website, the Why Islam project consists of: 1. a toll-free hotline with eight associates standing by to answer questions, 2. the website, 3. a network of volunteers used to establish contact with prison inmates, 4. billboards on public highways, 5. ads in community newspapers, and 6. Why Islam booths in malls. All of these things make Why Islam appear to be a good-natured civic organization, working for the betterment of its community. Nevertheless, when one sees how pervasive its propagation of hatred and violence is, there is an entirely different picture painted of the group.

Within the Why Islam site’s section ‘Gender Issues,’ there is contained an article entitled ‘Gender Equity in Islam,’ written by an individual named Jamal Badawi. In the piece, Badawi discusses the case for when it is alright for a husband to beat his wife. He states, there are times when “a wife persists in deliberate mistreatment of her husband and disregard for her marital obligations. Instead of divorce, the husband may resort to another measure that may save the marriage…” He then quotes from the Quran: “As to those women on whose part you fear disloyalty and ill conduct, admonish them (first), (next) refuse to share their beds (and last) beat them (lightly).” Badawi describes this as a “permissible beating.”

There are numerous links on Why Islam that are more than disturbing. They include:

  • Islam Online (www.islamonline.net), a site that features live dialogues with Hamas leaders and a ‘Fatwa Bank’ (religious ruling) section stating, “Hence, we are allowed to kill every Israeli until they stop this mass killing and paganism. It is only then that we can stop our attacks on the Israeli civilians but our Jihad against the military will never stop till they leave our land and give us back our holy site, Al-Masjid Al-Aqsa [Jerusalem].”
  • Islam Q & A (www.islam-qa.com), a site run by Sheikh Muhammed Salih Al-Munajjid, who writes on it, “The Jews distorted the religion of Allaah, killed the Prophets and disbelieved in Allaah. They are plotters, conspirators and traitors. They are partners in the destruction of some nations’ economy and the spread of corruption among the Muslims, and other evil actions… Allaah will heal the hearts of the believers by killing them all.”

Why Islam maintains a website forum, where people can express their ideas concerning the religion. Numerous users of the forum have been banned by site administrators for performing such actions as posting “Offensive words” or for “Cursing or Mocking the Prophet Muhammad.” Regrettably, bans for bigotry or the promotion of terrorist groups and acts seem to be nonexistent.

Hate statements against Jews and gays are prevalent on Why Islam. Deserves2Die writes, “…the Truth is that there cant be Peace, Becoz the Whole World knows Jews taking over a Muslim Land illegally (Following footsteps of their Jewish Forefathers)…” Indiangirl writes, “YOU CANT BE “GAY” AND A MUSLIM… thoughts of homo-ness are caused by the shaitaan… wanna know why we hate and despise ‘you guys’?... who are you trying to blame for ur homo-ness? ONLY YOU ARE TO BLAME, AND ITS UR JOB TO GET OVER IT.”

One frequent poster that goes by the name NEWUSER writes numerous messages lauding Hezbollah and Hamas. Every one of his posts sports a revolving Hezbollah logo, a Hezbollah banner that reads “Leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah / Hezb’Allah is Lebanon,” and a Jewish star with a red line through it. Some of his statements include:

Other Hamas and Hezbollah praise on Why Islam comes from:

The main problem with all of this terrorist talk is if users or readers of the forum start taking the information to heart – possibly wanting to become terrorists themselves. One poster, TrueMu’min, in a thread entitled ‘Questions on martyrdom,’ tells a fellow poster, “Rhoda, I hope that I die as a martyr.

Again, the question is why? Why would the MSA advertise such a site as this? And why would USF allow it?

Just outside of the MARSHALL CENTER, where the MSA of USF is housed, is a memorial for Martin Luther King, Jr. called MLK Plaza. In the middle of the memorial rests a bronze bust of the civil rights leader, with an inscription that reads, “INJUSTICE ANYWHERE IS A THREAT TO JUSTICE EVERYWHERE.” If the University of South Florida was at all concerned at what is going on within its institution, it would take measures to see that the MSA ceases its promulgation of terror – Sami Al-Arian, Why Islam or otherwise. Without doing this, USF – a school that at one time employed the present leader of PIJ, Ramadan Shallah – a school that once earned the reputation of “Jihad U” – might as well tear down the MLK memorial, because its meaning would be rendered nil.


Joe Kaufman is the Chairman of Americans Against Hate and the host of The Politics of Terrorism radio show.

Source: FrontPageMag.com