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I was walking around the block and I saw your posts against bullfighting , I was, to say the least, happy that you found a place to express your point of views on bulls. I also read from these quotes concerning "Islam" that the latter is next to bullfighting as to the things you dislike most. Nevertheless, as a Muslim, an Italian-American who converted to Islam in 1992 and still growing strong, with a very good knowledge of the Arabic language and just another member of a 1 billion strong community (http://www.religioustolerance.org/isl_numb.htm )I am a bit disappointed at the comments over a religion you seem to know very little about.

However, as it is your right to express your point of view, it is also mine to answer you as long as I express myself in a correct manner which is, by the way, Sunnah. That being said, let me respond that if you were ever to read the Prophetic Narrations which deal with how a person should deal with his or her fellow man, what the sins of the heart are and how people should avoid them, how people should prepare themselves for prayer, how seeking knowledge is compulsory for men and women, how you cannot accuse a person without factual evidence as well as witnesses, the rights of women over men among many different subjects then you might have a different outlook concerning Islam and not just quote a Somali girl whose main quams with Islam are ignorant Muslims who know very little of the Quran or the Sunnah or Ayatollah Khomeini who was just put in Iran as the Shah was getting too cockey and a communist regime there wasn´t in the best interest of the US.  

As a Westerner I find Islam spiritually enrichening, answering all my questions for this life and the hereafter. I have personally lived the miracle of Islam on a daily basis and despite what a lot of opportunists say just to get their picture taken and a few bucks it is the religion that most people convert to.

Finally, I will finish by saying on a peronal note that my wife is a beautiful Spanish-Syrian woman who has blessed me with two beautiful daughters, she is a wonderful mother who is also majoring in Near Eastern studies, who wears a headscarf because she wants to and in 13 years of marriage has hit me only 4 times .

Anyways, take care and read my letter with a grain of salt.

John

I think my lecture of your posting was on the beam but I am willing to concede that I may be wrong. As far as quoting Khomenei, he was a political leader of a minority in Islam and he was definitely not the Prophet. He was also provided safe passage to Tehran to govern by the Western powers, something that isn´t in his favour as far as I am concerned. However, there are religious leaders who keep a lower profile and who practice what they preach and they have following because people see many good things in them. Even Khomeini had good characteristics and this is why many people supported.

Could his arrival to power have been avoided? Maybe. Had the same western powers who boast about their democracy and civilized values not support the infamous Savak secret police during the Sha´s regime, maybe things would be different.

And as far as Salman Rusdie is concerned I think the crap he wrote wouldn´t have even left the printing press if Khomeini didn´t give his fatwa. Who knows, maybe they´re in on it together.

Concerning the Dutch theatre writer, I know very little about the case. I don´t know who killed him and I haven´t seen the details. All I know is that the facts speak for themselves. When the Western democracies were committing genocide in Iraq, the expats living in Arabic - Islamic countries lived freely and comfortably. They were treated with respect and weren´t bothered at all. They even enjoyed and enjoy more security and personal safety than in their home nations.

Now let´s look at the behaviour of Western countries in the Arab world. Or let´s sum it up in a few words: Blood, blood, blood ... Tell the Iraquies you are afraid someone will kill you for something you might say and they will pee in their pants laughing. They can´t even walk out in the street without giving their family members a final farewell. The American and British don´t even respect the sanctity of their homes. These are facts.

After 9/11, anyone with an Arabic name was a suspect. I couldn´t get a security clearance to work as a translator because I had studied in Makkah. Whereas their are individuals in the Islamic world who are ignorant and give Islam a bad name, Western nations institutionally support punitive sanctions on whole countries and armed intervention resulting in the death of millions of people. Can you explain that to me?

Going back to the topic concerning Islam, read the biography of the Prophet by Martin Lings.

Ciao,
John

To be honest, I have many Jewish friends some of them Israelis and I am very anti Zionist. if Khomeini got there by refrendum then it was the beginning of a real democratic process. We can surely say that present day Iran is a true democracy, whether we like it or not.

As far as what happened in Munich, Palestinians have suffered a lot more than Israelis having been the victims since the beginning of this conflict.  An example is the hundreds of Palestinian villages that were erased from the map by Zealots armed with the finest western weaponry. The issue is pretty clear to me. However, the Israelis have been better public relations then the Palestinians.  

No, it´s John. 75% Italian and 25 % English background (that´s if Dodge is an English name).

2 women trying to become gondoliers

VENICE, Italy (UPI) -- There are now two women trying to break into the all-male world of gondoliering in Italy.

German-born Alexandra Hai has been trying for 10 years to be allowed to ply Venice's canals at the helm of a gondola and now a local woman, Alessandra Taddei, has joined her in seeking admission to the city's first official gondoliering course, the ANSA news agency reported Tuesday. They are up against 127 men who have signed up.

They are going through week-long trials to determine who gets the 40 places in the course.

The women declined to discuss how things are going for them.

"I don't want to discuss how it went this morning. We can talk about it in ten days' time," said Hai.

There are 425 gondoliers in Venice -- all men.

Roddie

Justices Limit the Use of Race in School Plans for Integration
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
Voting 5 to 4, the Supreme Court declared that public school systems cannot seek integration through measures that take explicit account of a student’s race.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/washin...?th&emc=th

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN G. ROBERTS JR., in the majority opinion on school integration.

Roddie

Israel Drops Rape Charges as President Agrees to Quit
By ISABEL KERSHNER
Published: June 29, 2007

JERUSALEM, June 28 — The Israeli government has dropped rape charges against President Moshe Katsav in exchange for his agreement to step down and to plead guilty to lesser charges, the attorney general, Menachem Mazuz, announced Thursday.

Mr. Katsav, 61, will receive a suspended sentence and will pay a total of $11,695 in compensation to two of the women who accused him, Mr. Mazuz said. One of them had worked for Mr. Katsav when he was tourism minister in the late 1990s; the other worked in his office in 2003 and 2004. Mr. Katsav will plead guilty to committing indecent acts without consent, sexual harassment of the two women and harassing a witness.

He is expected to resign on Friday. His seven-year term as president, a largely ceremonial post, was to end in July. Shimon Peres is expected to take office as president on July 15.

The announcement of a plea bargain caused debate and expressions of anger from Israelis who said Mr. Katsav was being treated too lightly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/world/...?th&emc=th

Roddie

Leaving the Brothel Behind
New York Times ^ | 1/19/05 | NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Posted on 01/19/2005 7:28:26 PM PST by wagglebee

BATTAMBANG, Cambodia

A year ago, a pimp handed me a quivering teenage girl. Her name was Srey Neth, and she was one of the hundreds of thousands of teenagers who are enslaved by the sex trafficking industry worldwide.

Then I did something dreadfully unjournalistic: I bought her.

I purchased Srey Neth for $150 and another teenager, Srey Mom, for $203, receiving receipts from the brothel owners. As readers may remember, I then freed the girls and took them back to their villages.

Now I've come back to find out how they coped with freedom.

At first, it turns out, everything went well for Srey Neth. Our plan was for her to start a shop in her village, near Battambang. She invested $100 I had given her to build a shack and stock it with food and clothing. For a few months, business boomed.

The problem was her family. Srey Neth's parents and older brothers and sisters had a hard time understanding why they should go hungry when their sister had a store full of food. And her little nephews and nieces, running around the yard, helped themselves when she wasn't looking.

"Srey Neth got mad," her mother recalled. "She said we had to stay away, or everything would be gone. She said she had to have money to buy new things."

But in a Cambodian village, nobody listens to an uneducated teenage girl. Indeed, the low status of girls is the underlying reason why so many daughters are sold to the brothels. So by May, Srey Neth's shop was empty, and she had no money to restock it.

"It was our fault," her father told me, looking ashamed. "It was not Srey Neth's fault."

Srey Neth worried about her father, who was coughing up blood from tuberculosis. She also worried about her older brother, who could not afford to get married, and about the family debts, which could cost her family its land.

It was that kind of concern for her family that had led her, at the suggestion of a female cousin, to sell herself to the brothel in late 2003 and send the proceeds home.

This time, she thought about looking for work as a dishwasher in neighboring Thailand for $1.50 a day. A trafficker said he could smuggle her into Thailand and get her a dishwashing job, but only if she promised him $100.

Some 700,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year, and that's often how they end up in the sex industry: they assume debts and then, when they cannot quickly repay the money, gangs force them into brothels - where they are stuck until they are dying of AIDS.

Fortunately, I'd arranged for American Assistance for Cambodia (http://www.cambodiaschools.com), an aid group, to keep track of Srey Neth. It offered her something less risky: a move to Phnom Penh to learn to be a beautician. So, with money sent to the group by New York Times readers a year ago, Srey Neth started in the beauty school.

That's where I met her again. She was beaming, and she proudly told how she had learned to give manicures and haircuts. She placed third in her class in applying makeup, and she's even studying English. She bubbles with happiness in the way a teenager should.

"I'm happy with Srey Neth," said the beauty school's owner, Sapor Rendall. "She studies hard."

Ms. Rendall added that there was only one problem with Srey Neth: "She doesn't want to do massage. ... I've talked to her about it many times, but she's very reluctant."

Massages are routine in beauty shops in Cambodia and are not sexual, but for Srey Neth, they scream danger. I'm delighted.

Srey Neth cut my hair - I was her first paying customer - and she is excitedly talking about starting her own beauty shop so she can support her family again. She says she'll call it Nick and Bernie's, after me and Bernard Krisher, the chairman of American Assistance for Cambodia.

Today Srey Neth steers clear of the boys trying to flirt with her - she's still deeply distrustful of boys and men - but she has learned to laugh again. She is a happy, giggly, self-confident reminder that we should never give up on the slaves of the 21st century. I couldn't be more proud of her.

Roddie

Back to the Brothel
New York Times ^ | 1/22/05 | NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Posted on 01/22/2005 12:33:13 PM PST by wagglebee

Poipet, Cambodia — After I purchased Srey Mom from her brothel for $203 a year ago and brought her back to her village, the joy was overwhelming. Her parents and siblings had assumed she was dead, and they shrieked and hugged and cried.

I had doubts about the other sex slave I had purchased, Srey Neth, and who in fact is thriving and is now preparing to become a hairdresser. But I was pretty sure that Srey Mom would make it.

So I'm devastated to say that a year later, I found Srey Mom back here in the wild town of Poipet, in her old brothel. She's devastated, too - when she spotted me, she ran away to her room in the back of the brothel until she could compose herself.

"I never lie to people, but I lied to you," she said forlornly. "I said I would not come back, and I did. I didn't want to return, but I did."

Yet, sadly, such an experience is common. Aid groups find it unnerving that they liberate teenagers from the bleak back rooms of a brothel, take them to a nice shelter - and then at night the kids sometimes climb over the walls and run back to the brothel.

It would be a tidier world if slaves always sought freedom. But prostitutes often are shattered and stigmatized, and sometimes they feel that the only place they can hold their head high is in the brothel.

Srey Mom, too, has zero self-esteem, but in her case no one in her village knew her background, and she was clear of debts. The central problem, as best I can piece together the situation, is that she was addicted to methamphetamines, and that craving destroyed her will power, sending her fleeing back to the brothel so that she could get her drugs.

Over the last year, an aid group looking after Srey Mom, American Assistance for Cambodia, gave her several more chances, once bringing her to Phnom Penh to enroll in school to become a hair dresser. But each time, Srey Mom fled back to drugs and the brothel.

"Ninety-five percent of the girls take drugs," Srey Mom told me. Some girls inject morphine, but brothel owners worry that needle holes make girls look unsightly, so methamphetamine pills are most common.

Some brothel owners welcome addiction, because it makes the girls dependent upon them. But Srey Mom said that is not true of her brothel owner, Heok Tem, whom she calls "Mother."

"Mother doesn't want us to use drugs," Srey Mom said. She has an eerily close relationship with Mrs. Heok Tem, and these days that emotional bond keeps her in the brothel as much as do her debts. Mrs. Heok Tem seems to feel genuine affection for Srey Mom and truly helped in the effort to get Srey Mom to start a new life, but she also cheats Srey Mom ruthlessly - I examined the brothel's account books - and rakes in cash by pimping the girl, which exposes her to AIDS.

"It's wrong," Mrs. Heok Tem admitted. But for now, she says, she needs the money.

Srey Mom still says her dream is to start life over in her village. "I want to go away," she said. "I don't want to stay here long. I'm not happy here. ... I will just look after my younger sisters. I'm already bad, and I don't want them to become bad like me."

I don't believe it will ever happen. I hate to write anyone off, but I'm afraid that Srey Mom will remain in the brothel until she is dying of AIDS (36 percent of girls in local brothels have H.I.V., and eventually it catches up with almost all of them). I finally dared tell her my fear. I described some young women I had just seen, gaunt and groaning, dying of AIDS in Poipet, and I told her I feared she would end up the same way.

"I'm afraid of that, too," she replied, her voice breaking. "This is an unhappy life. I don't want to do this."

Maybe that's what I find saddest about Srey Mom: She is a wonderful, good-hearted girl who gives money to beggars, who offers Buddhist prayers for redemption - but who is already so broken that she seems unable to escape a world that she hates and knows is killing her.

President Bush declared in his inaugural address that "no one deserves to be a slave" and that advancing freedom is "the calling of our time." I can't think of a better place to start than the hundreds of thousands of girls trafficked each year, for this 21st-century version of slavery has not only grown in recent years but is also especially diabolical - it poisons its victims, like Srey Mom, so that eventually chains are often redundant.

Roddie

Money for Nothing

By BARRY SCHWARTZ
Published: July 2, 2007, in The New York Times

Philadelphia

NEW YORK CITY has decided to offer cash rewards to some students based on their attendance records and exam performance. Diligent, high-achieving seventh graders will be able to earn up to $500 in a year. The plan is the brainchild of Roland G. Fryer, an economist who has been appointed as “chief equality officer” of the city’s Department of Education.

The assumption that underlies the project is simple: people respond to incentives. If you want people to do something, you have to make it worth their while. This assumption drives virtually all of economic theory.

Sure, there are already many rewards in learning: gaining understanding (of yourself and others), having mysterious or unfamiliar aspects of the world opened up to you, demonstrating mastery, satisfying curiosity, inhabiting imaginary worlds created by others, and so on. Learning is also the route to more prosaic rewards, like getting into good colleges and getting good jobs. But these rewards are not doing the job. If they were, children would be doing better in school.

The logic of the plan reveals a second assumption that economists make: the more motives the better. Give people two reasons to do something, the thinking goes, and they will be more likely to do it, and they’ll do it better, than if they have only one. Providing some cash won’t disturb the other rewards of learning, rewards that are intrinsic to the process itself. They will only provide a little boost. Mr. Fryer’s reward scheme is intended to add incentives to the ones that already exist.

Unfortunately, these assumptions that economists make about human motivation, though intuitive and straightforward, are false. In particular, the idea that adding motives always helps is false. There are circumstances in which adding an incentive competes with other motives and diminishes their impact. Psychologists have known this for more than 30 years.

In one experiment, nursery school children were given the opportunity to draw with special markers. After playing, some of the children were given “good player” awards and others were not. Some time later, the markers were reintroduced to the classroom. The researchers kept track of which children used the markers, and they collected the pictures that had been drawn. The youngsters given awards were less likely to draw at all, and drew worse pictures, than those who were not given the awards.

Why did this happen? Children draw because drawing is fun and because it leads to a result: a picture. The rewards of drawing are intrinsic to the activity itself. The “good player” award gives children another reason to draw: to earn a reward. And it matters — children want recognition. But the recognition undermines the fun, so that later, in the absence of a chance to earn an award, the children aren’t interested in drawing.

Similar results have been obtained with adults. When you pay them for doing things they like, they come to like these activities less and will no longer participate in them without a financial incentive. The intrinsic satisfaction of the activities gets “crowded out” by the extrinsic payoff.

An especially striking example of this was reported in a study of Swiss citizens about a decade ago. Switzerland was holding a referendum about where to put nuclear waste dumps. Researchers went door-to-door in two Swiss cantons and asked people if they would accept a dump in their communities. Though people thought such dumps might be dangerous and might decrease property values, 50 percent of those who were asked said they would accept one. People felt responsibility as Swiss citizens. The dumps had to go somewhere, after all.

But when people were asked if they would accept a nuclear waste dump if they were paid a substantial sum each year (equal to about six weeks’ pay for the average worker), a remarkable thing happened. Now, with two reasons to say yes, only about 25 percent of respondents agreed. The offer of cash undermined the motive to be a good citizen.

It is as if, when asked the question, people asked themselves whether they should respond based on considerations of self-interest or considerations of public responsibility. Half of the people in the uncompensated condition of the study thought they should focus on their responsibilities. But the offer of money, in effect, told people that they should consider only their self-interest. And as it turned out, through the lens of self-interest, even six weeks’ pay wasn’t enough.

Obviously, the intrinsic rewards of learning aren’t working in New York’s schools, at least not for a lot of children. It may be that the current state of achievement is low enough that desperate measures are called for, and it’s worth trying anything. And we don’t know whether in this case, motives will complement or compete.

But it is plausible that when students get paid to go to class and show up for tests, they will be even less interested in the work than they would be if no incentives were present. If that happens, the incentive system will make the learning problem worse in the long run, even if it improves achievement in the short run — unless we’re prepared to follow these children through life, giving them a pat on the head, or an M&M or a check every time they learn something new.

Perhaps worse, the plan will distract us from investigating a more pertinent set of questions: why don’t children get intrinsic satisfaction from learning in school, and how can this failing of education be fixed? Virtually all kindergartners are eager to learn. But by fourth grade, many students need to be bribed. What makes our schools so dystopian that they produce this powerful transformation, almost overnight?

Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, is the author of “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less.”

Roddie

Protecting children from sex offenders is the topic of STOP Sex Offenders at http://www.stopsexoffenders.com. The site offers links to you state's sex offender registry. You'll find articles about child and family safety, as well as information that can help parents talk to their children about potentially dangerous situations. Additionally, you'll find the latest news about sex offender legislation.

Roddie