Sub teacher fired for 'wizardry'

I hope Jim Piculas was a bad substitute teacher, but the excuse his supervisor offered for firing him was a doozy.

Substitute teacher Jim Piculas does a 30-second magic trick where a toothpick disappears then reappears.

But after performing it in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land 'O Lakes, Piculas said his job did a disappearing act of its own.

"I get a call the middle of the day from head of supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, 'Jim, we have a huge issue, you can't take any more assignments you need to come in right away,'" he said.

When Piculas went in, he learned his little magic trick cast a spell and went much farther than he'd hoped.

"I said, 'Well Pat, can you explain this to me?' 'You've been accused of wizardry,' [he said]. Wizardry?" he asked.

(Hat tip: Pharyngula)

A closer look at Islamophobia

Andrea Elliott won a Pulitzer last year for her amazing series "Imam in America." In today's New York Times, she tells another powerful story about American Muslims. Her subject is Debbie Almontaser, who last year started an academy that would teach Arabic to its students, Arab American and those of other ethnicities.

Weeks before classes even began, though, Almontaser resigned as its founding principal. Here's why:

Ms. Almontaser, a teacher by training and an activist who had carefully built ties with Christians and Jews, said she was forced to resign by the mayor’s office following a campaign that pitted her against a chorus of critics who claimed she had a militant Islamic agenda.

In newspaper articles and Internet postings, on television and talk radio, Ms. Almontaser was branded a “radical,” a “jihadist” and a “9/11 denier.” She stood accused of harboring unpatriotic leanings and of secretly planning to proselytize her students. Despite Ms. Almontaser’s longstanding reputation as a Muslim moderate, her critics quickly succeeded in recasting her image.

The conflict tapped into a well of post-9/11 anxieties. But Ms. Almontaser’s downfall was not merely the result of a spontaneous outcry by concerned parents and neighborhood activists. It was also the work of a growing and organized movement to stop Muslim citizens who are seeking an expanded role in American public life. The fight against the school, participants in the effort say, was only an early skirmish in a broader, national struggle.

“It’s a battle that’s really just begun,” said Daniel Pipes, who directs a conservative research group, the Middle East Forum, and helped lead the charge against Ms. Almontaser and the school.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, critics of radical Islam focused largely on terrorism, scrutinizing Muslim-American charities or asserting links between Muslim organizations and violent groups like Hamas. But as the authorities have stepped up the war on terror, those critics have shifted their gaze to a new frontier, what they describe as law-abiding Muslim-Americans who are imposing their religious values in the public domain.

Mr. Pipes and others reel off a list of examples: Muslim cabdrivers in Minneapolis who have refused to take passengers carrying liquor; municipal pools and a gym at Harvard that have adopted female-only hours to accommodate Muslim women; candidates for office who are suspected of supporting political Islam; and banks that are offering financial products compliant with sharia, the Islamic code of law.

The danger, Mr. Pipes says, is that the United States stands to become another England or France, a place where Muslims are balkanized and ultimately threaten to impose sharia.

“It is hard to see how violence, how terrorism will lead to the implementation of sharia,” Mr. Pipes said. “It is much easier to see how, working through the system — the school system, the media, the religious organizations, the government, businesses and the like — you can promote radical Islam.”

Mr. Pipes refers to this new enemy as the “lawful Islamists.”

They are carrying out a “soft jihad,” said Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a trustee of the City University of New York and a vocal opponent of the Khalil Gibran school.

This is ridiculous. Pipes has a point when Pew contains details like this or a protest at UC Irvine carries messages like this. But not when it comes to preventing American Muslims from enjoying the religious freedom most of us have in this country.

How easily Pipes and Wiesenfeld overlook that wherever Jews have lived (and, of course, this is before they were expelled or worse) they have taken their unique cultural observances, like not working or handling money on the Sabbath. And what about Christian doctors who refuse to perform abortions? How are these examples different than using a bank compliant with sharia, or having a footbath at NYU or not transporting a passenger carrying alcohol?

These politically motivated attacks fall into the category of Islamophobia. I first wrote about this fear of everything Islam last spring, and I received a ton of hate mail for it. This post should turn up some gems.

French dislike president's Holocaust curriculum

PARIS — President Nicolas Sarkozy dropped an intellectual bombshell this week, surprising the nation and touching off waves of protest with his revision of the school curriculum: beginning next fall, he said, every fifth grader will have to learn the life story of one of the 11,000 French children killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

“Nothing is more moving, for a child, than the story of a child his own age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who, in the dawn of the 1940s, had the bad fortune to be defined as a Jew,” Mr. Sarkozy said at the end of a dinner speech to France’s Jewish community on Wednesday night. He added that every French child should be “entrusted with the memory of a French child-victim of the Holocaust.”

Adding to the national fracas over the announcement, Mr. Sarkozy wrapped his plan in the cloak of religion, placing blame for the wars and violence of the last century on an “absence of God” and calling the Nazi belief in a hierarchy of races “radically incompatible with Judeo-Christian monotheism.”

Education Minister Xavier Darcos explained later that the aim of the plan was to “create an identification between a child of today and one of the same age who was deported and gassed.”

The Holocaust is already taught in French schools, but some psychiatrists and educators predicted that requiring students to identify with a specific victim would traumatize them.

Secularists accused Mr. Sarkozy, who is already under fire for his frequent praise of God and religion, of subverting both the country’s iron-clad separation of church and state and the national ideal of a single, nonreligious identity for all.

Political opponents dismissed the plan as his latest misguided idea, unveiled without reflection or consultation. Some historians argued that ...

The list of detractors in this New York Times story goes on and on. Frankly, I think Sarko's plan is a good one. I wonder what the French would say if he suggested Holocaust comic books.

German students handed Holocaust comic

German students will soon be given a Holocaust textbook published in a most unusual format -- that of a comic book.

The comic books trace the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany's descent into barbarism through the eyes of a Jewish family.

In full-colour panels, the family members use the internet to trace their lost relatives, victims of the Holocaust. Pictorial flashbacks graphically show Hitler and his henchmen as well as the horrors of his war and the gas chambers.

The Search, as the comic book is entitled, is the first attempt to use a graphic novel as an aid in teaching history in Germany. The comics are being tested in public schools in Berlin and in North Rhine-Westphalia for the spring 2008 semester.

Pupils in years Seven through Ten will be given the graphic novel as teaching aids, and it was unveiled on the 75th anniversary of Hitler becoming chancellor on January 31, 1933.

Recent surveys show that Germans under age 20 have an appalling lack of knowledge about 20th Century history.

While all of them know and recognise Hitler, only one in three was aware of what the word "Holocaust" means.

And fewer than one in ten could identify Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels or other Nazi henchmen.

Terms such as the Sudeten Crisis or the Siege of Stalingrad were unknown to all but a handful of pupils.

Almost none could give the date of the start of World War II, and fewer than 20 per cent could name the four Allied Powers which occupied post-war Germany.

So most educators have welcomed the move.

"We are very excited about this," one school administrator told RTL Television. "There is an appalling ignorance among teenagers about anything prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989."

I hope the Escapist makes an appearance.

Hey Karl Rove: What happened to two Jews, three opinions?

Yesterday, I added to my story list the fact that many Jewish Angelenos are upset with American Jewish University for inviting Karl Rove to speak at its vaunted Public Lecture Series. Then today I opened The Jewish Journal and saw that Rob Eshman had dedicated his column to that exact topic, and I realized how much better a story like this reads when it has the voice of someone who is allowed to inject their opinion.

Something has happened in the Jewish community, all across the political and religious spectrum, and it isn't good.

Somehow too many people in the Jewish community have become stuck in a very dangerous place: their comfort zone.

They are loathe to confront and really hear ideas that differ from their own, and they cleave to the company of voices that echo their preconceived ideas and long-formed opinions.

A few people have picked up on this.

"There was a time," Haaretz's Gideon Levy said in an interview with The Nation, "when you'd ask two Israelis a question, and you'd get three different opinions. Now you only get one."

In The Jerusalem Post, columnist Larry Derfner noted the problem in Israel, where public opinion fell into "lockstep" behind the war in Lebanon, the invasion of Iraq and the criticism of the National Intelligence Estimate report on Iran. How different, Derfner writes, from the Israel of old, where robust public debate was the norm.

"This is a society that's been brainwashed by consent," he wrote. "And when all hands are raised together, it not only enhances certainty, it offers the added comfort of unity."

J.J. Goldberg, The Forward's brilliant executive editor, wrote that the national Jewish debate is similarly afflicted. In fighting nouveau anti-Semitism, he wrote, "It doesn't help when Jews ignore or deny Israel's genuine shortcomings. It doesn't help when they overreact to criticism -- hostile, benign or just clumsy -- and intimidate their critics into resentful silence, reinforcing their enemies' worst stereotypes."

The response to Goldberg's essay? One organization head accused him of blaming the Jews for their own victimization.

And here at home things aren't any better.

When one parent thinks the other is going to Hell

Does it harm the children? Studies have found religious participation is good for people. Among adolescents, it increases self esteem, improves grades and keeps them from drugs and alcohol. So logically, it would seem, kids from intermarried couples would fare worse.

At least that is what two researchers at Ohio State though. With intermarriage all the rage, particularly with Jews, they published a study last month having expected the kids of "religious heterogamy" to suffer. But they found that the kids didn't have lower self esteem, grades or life satisfaction. (The same can't be said for the drug use.) Christianity Today has an online interview with one of the researchers.

When you ran the numbers, some of the negative anticipated effects of having parents with different religions didn't seem to be present. Do you have an opinion as to why?

This finding was especially surprising to us, because we figured that internalized well-being (such as self-esteem) would be more affected by religious heterogamy because youth would be less sure about beliefs and [would likely have] a weaker sense of identity.

I suspect that part of the reason that we did not find negative effects [in those areas] is that being raised in a religiously heterogamous family may actually be beneficial to youth in some ways. If interfaith parents teach their children that it is important to find a religion that best suits them [as individuals] and accept religious differences in others, then youth may actually develop a strong sense of identity and have an opportunity to find out which religious beliefs are important to them.

In addition, being raised in a diverse family is likely to increase one's tolerance and acceptance of others. These benefits likely have a greater effect on outcomes like self-esteem, life satisfaction, and school performance than delinquency, which may explain the results of our study.

'HATE MUSLIMS? SO DO WE!!!'

Posters appeared all over the George Washington University campus yesterday morning blaring the message: "HATE MUSLIMS? SO DO WE!!!"

Campus police moved quickly to remove the fliers, university leaders began investigating how they got there and student groups met last night to deplore the posters, which had a photo of an Arab and description of "typical Muslim" features such as "suicide vest," "hidden AK-47" and "peg-leg for smuggling children and heroin."

The posters managed to upset just about everyone on campus: Muslim students, other religious groups and conservatives who are hosting "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" later this month. Some questioned whether they were mocking the conservatives, pointing to fine print at the bottom -- "Brought to you by Students for Conservativo-Fascism Awareness" -- and a postscript recommending a BBC video on the politics of fear.

Any subtleties were lost under the gigantic headline, though.

"I was just really shocked that this sort of hatred exists on our campus," said Najah El Bash, a sophomore from New York who is one of the leaders of the GWU Muslim Students Association. "You never think this would come so close to home, from people you're in classes with. . . . It's scary." It had to be well-planned, she said, for so many posters to go up so quickly.

This story from the Washington Post has been getting some good global play. The article reports that the posters were likely put up to mock the Young America's Foundation, which is hosting the upcoming Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week at GWU, a national campaign getting a lot of attention. Jihad Watch is reporting that IslamOnline is using this story as proof that Americans hate Islam:

University campuses across the United States are becoming the stage for an anti-Islam campaign that includes hate posters and a series of activities to rally students against the alleged threat Islam poses to the US and the world.

Forget Passover -- The Debate's Over

It's difficult to imagine the California High School Speech Association holding its annual tournament on Christmas, so why is this acceptable?

Last May, when it was discovered that the next tournament, which long ago was scheduled for April 18-20, 2008, would conflict with the first night of Passover, Jewish leaders requested a date change from the California High School Speech Association (CHSSA), an independent group that organizes the event. They were ignored.

After additional attempts to change the schedule failed, Jewish leaders this week issued an "Action Alert," asking people to contact the CHSSA and their school districts to pressure organizers to reschedule the tournament.

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"I find this astonishing and frustrating, and I take that as a slap in the face to the Jewish community," said Southern California Board of Rabbis executive vice president Rabbi Mark Diamond, who competed as a high school student on the debate team. "There is an attitude here that is profoundly disturbing, a total unwillingness to grapple with the issues, to even apologize for the mistakes and to work with people of good will toward trying to resolve this. There seems to be an attitude of, 'Tough. Too bad. Life is filled with difficult choices.' And I do not accept that."

The world of 'classical Christian education'

There is a so-called "classical Christian education" movement afoot in America. I'd never heard of it, but then again, I purposefully avoided attending an overpriced evangelical high school or college. Anyway, The New York Times Magazine said in a lengthy article yesterday that this movement is so, and, therefore, it must be. Here's the colorful lede:

Every Friday afternoon in Moscow, Idaho, a strange commotion overruns Main Street. A stream of young men and women parade down the sidewalk, wearing black academic gowns that billow and flap as they walk. Some pore over Latin textbooks or thumb flashcards of ancient Greek vocabulary, nearly tripping at the curb. They are students at New St. Andrews College on their way to disputatio, a weekly assembly held in a movie theater downtown. The college itself has no room large enough to accommodate all 150 students at once: it occupies a single unassuming brick building a few blocks away, one that a stranger might mistake for the refurbished husk of an old savings and loan. Passers-by on their way to the Pita Pit or Hodgins Drug barely give the students a second glance. Not a few residents, however, have fought hard to keep them out of downtown. Founded in 1994 by the elders of a fast-growing and radically conservative church, New St. Andrews represents a new philosophy of evangelical education — one that has inspired a national movement and makes local liberals nervous.

The students and teachers call what they are doing “classical Christian education.” They believe it’s much more than memorizing Latin declensions and Aristotle’s principles of rhetoric, though they do plenty of that. Doug Wilson, 54, the pastor who spearheaded New St. Andrews’ founding, puts the college’s purpose simply: “We are trying to save civilization.”

The intersection of God and grades

In the latest addition of UCLA Magazine, which went online today and should be in the mail for alumni, I have a cover story about the intersection of spirituality and scholarship.

I've written here that religion gets passing grades on college campuses, even secular ones like my alma mater. In this article, I focused on four students -- a Christian, a Jew, a Hindu and a Muslim -- and told their stories through the findings of the largest national study of college student spirituality.

Brandon Kuiper arrived at UCLA with a strong Christian faith and an inquisitive scientific mind. He didn't believe in evolution, but he was intent on studying neuroscience. Something was bound to give, but the biggest spiritual crisis in Kuiper's 20 years came not from South Campus but from studying the philosophy of Voltaire and Hobbes and Kant and Freud.

"I was reading that stuff and I thought, ‘This makes so much sense.' I had to stop and evaluate why I am a Christian and what I believe," he recalls. "I remember thinking, ‘What if I've been wrong all along?' "

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There's certainly no shortage of seekers. A study by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) found that three-fourths of freshmen are "searching for meaning/purpose in life" and that half are either "seeking" or "doubting" their spiritual understanding of the world. Forty percent said it was very important they follow a set of religious teachings.

"It is the nature of the beast of people that age. It's just part of being a college student," says Alexander Astin, co-leader of the "Spirituality in Higher Education" study and an emeritus professor of higher education. "College students are on a developmental adventure."

My favorite vignette was that of Marco Gonzalez, a Mexico Jew who arrived at UCLA with little understanding of his heritage. That led him to the Chabad House (I guess all their outreach on campus does attract some students).

On a Wednesday night, Gonzalez enters the upstairs classroom at Chabad and pulls out his textbook, Jewish Essentials: A Spiritual Guide to Jewish Life & Living.

"In the last couple of classes, we learned about the paramount importance of the Torah," Rabbi Dovid Gurevich, the Chabad campus co-director, says. "The Torah was received at Mt. Sinai, and the next holiday we celebrate, Shavuot, reminds us of that. That is very nice, but we have to make it practical and real ... We have to learn ways to make it real in our daily lives."

Tonight Gonzalez and three other students learn about the mezuzah (a sacred parchment hung on door posts to make holy the room inside) and tefillin (the boxes containing passages of the Torah and the leather straps Orthodox Jews use for prayer).

On college-ruled paper, Gonzalez takes detailed notes. "I want to be able to pass on these traditions to my children," he says. "I want to know what I'm talking about, so that when they have questions I don't have to say, ‘Ask a rabbi.' "

Gonzalez departs about 9:30 and heads straight to Powell to finish studying for a midterm the next day on international relations of the Middle East. But he doesn't mind staying up late and getting up early if it means not missing the time at Chabad.

"I would rather go to Chabad and learn it and enjoy it there, and just put in some extra time into my classes," Gonzalez says. "I've been taking the class at Chabad, and it's almost like having another class for school. But it's a more important subject. It is the subject of our lives."

The art for this story is amazing, and, to be honest, does a good job embarrassing my reporting. Let's hope the Bruins football team doesn't add insult tomorrow.

Scary evangelicals?

Remember that post from earlier this month about Patrick Henry College? Well, today the author of "God's Harvard" debates on Slate whether American's should be scared of "Evangelical Elites" with "a real, live evangelical who worked at the White House and lived to write about it."

I certainly met some Patrick Henry students who would be happy to establish a theocracy. But they tend not to be chosen for White House jobs. As you well know, there is usually an inverse relationship between vocalized extremism and political success, which is why the impending theocracy thesis is not all that convincing. That said, the Bush administration accomplished something unique in American history. It provided formal training for hundreds of what I call the evangelical elites, the first generation of conservative Christians who take political power for granted and feel entitled—in fact, compelled—by their faith to hold public office.

Patrick Henry kids were usually transformed by their White House internships. They went out drinking with Republican staffers or argued with them about Iraq. Theologically, the first thing to go was the six-day creationism. But they didn't change their views about homosexuality or the environment or taxes, or the overall view that a Christian could feel at home only among Republicans.

I'm waiting for David Kuo's response.

The saga of Patrick Henry ... College

The story of tiny Patrick Henry College, a school in Virginia that has a high percentage of students that were home-schooled by conservative Christian parents and has become a feeder for government internships, has gotten a lot of mileage.
I mentioned it in a story two years ago about Christian parents choosing to home-school their children. But, of course, I was not the first to the story. Hanna Rosin was. And now Rosin has a book about PHC titled "God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America," reviewed this week by Newsweek.

The book originated with an article Rosin wrote two years ago for The New Yorker. Here's the lede:

In the last days before the 2004 Presidential election, Patrick Henry College, in Purcellville, Virginia, excused all its students from classes, because so many of them were working on campaigns or wanted to go to the swing states to get out the vote for George W. Bush. Elisa Muench, a junior, was interning in the White House’s Office of Strategic Initiatives, which is overseen by Karl Rove. On Election Day, she stood on the South Lawn with the rest of the White House staff to greet the President and Mrs. Bush as they returned from casting their votes in Texas. Muench cheered along with everyone else, but she was worried. Her office was “keeping up contact with Karl,” and she knew that the early exit polls were worse than expected. Through the night, she watched the results, as Bush’s electoral-vote total began to rise. The next morning, after Kerry conceded, she stood in the crowd at the Bush campaign’s victory party, in clothes she’d been wearing all night, and “cried and screamed and laughed, it was so overwhelming.”

I found Muench in the Patrick Henry cafeteria at lunchtime one day a few months later. She is twenty-one years old and has clear, bright hazel eyes and sandy-brown hair that she straightens and then curls with an iron. Patrick Henry is a Christian college, though it is not affiliated with any denomination, and it gives students guidelines on “glorifying God with their appearance.” During class hours, the college enforces a “business casual” dress code designed to prepare the students for office life—especially for offices in Washington, D.C., fifty miles to the east, where almost all the students have internships, with Republican politicians or in conservative think tanks. When I met Muench, she was wearing a cardigan and a navy skirt. The boys in the cafeteria all had neatly trimmed hair, and wore suits or khakis and button-down shirts; girls wore slacks or skirts just below the knee, and sweaters or blouses. Most said grace before eating, though they did it silently and discreetly, with a quick bow of the head.

Muench told me that she loved working for Rove—answering the phone and having a senator on the line, meeting Andrew Card, the chief of staff (“He’s a nice guy”), and Vice-President Dick Cheney (“He’s really funny”). She took a bus from Patrick Henry at six every morning to arrive at the White House by seven-thirty. Her work with Rove, she told me, affirmed her belief that he was a political genius.

In her sophomore year, Muench had become the first—and, so far, the only—woman at Patrick Henry to run for a student-government executive office, when she entered the race for vice-president. Campaigns are unusually intense at Patrick Henry; candidates hire pollsters and form slates. One of Muench’s friends, Matthew du Mée, was on an opposing slate, and the race caused a strain. (Both lost.) Muench’s internship with Rove has given her a reputation, much envied on campus, as someone worth knowing. The day we spoke, a sophomore leaned across the table and asked, “How much do you make, starting salary, working on the Hill?”

“I’m not sure,” Muench said.

“I heard one of the graduates working for Joe Pitts is making, like, thirty-two thousand dollars. That’s not that much.” (Pitts is a Republican congressman.)

“Well, it’s not too bad if you’re a single person,” Muench told him.

“Do you have any intentions of running for office?” the sophomore asked.

“Yes,” she said.

At that moment, Muench’s cell phone rang. It was Cheney’s office, calling to thank her for volunteering for the Vice-President’s Christmas party, and to ask if she would allow her name to be put on a list for future openings.

Muench, like eighty-five per cent of the students at Patrick Henry, was homeschooled, in her case in rural Idaho. Homeschoolers are not the most obvious raw material for a college whose main mission, since its founding, five years ago, has been to train a new generation of Christian politicians. Politics, after all, is the most social of professions, and many students arrive at Patrick Henry having never shared a classroom with anyone other than their siblings. In conservative circles, however, homeschoolers are considered something of an élite, rough around the edges but pure—in their focus, capacity for work, and ideological clarity—a view that helps explain why the Republican establishment has placed its support behind Patrick Henry, and why so many conservative politicians are hiring its graduates.

It's a long story -- not by New Yorker standards, but still long -- but it's worth reading the rest. And if you do, let me know what you think are the benefits and dangers of a small school like PHC being such a feeder of young politicos.

Does ritual meditation belong in schools?

An editor once told me to avoid quoting officials from Americans United for Separation of Church and State because, he said, they lack any constituency and its executive director, the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, often looks like a caricature of a religious libertarian.

But this morning, as I listened to a report on NPR's Day to Day about more public schools teaching children transcendental meditation, and as I began to ponder how I would blog about the religious implications of such a school program, a lawyer involved with AU was quoted on the segment saying much of what I had been thinking:

"It's not the business of the public schools to lead kids to inner-peace through a spiritual process. ... If you teach transcendental mediation, you open the floodgates and allow any spiritual or religious group to have access to formal teaching of its edicts in public schools."

The goal of the program is to "reduce stress, increase focus and bolster achievement," and the principal of the inner-city school featured on the report said that attacks on TM as religious ritual are overblown. "I'm a Baptist. ... I have one God."

Still, I have serious reservations about a movement reportedly spreading to 100 schools nationwide by next year. School prayer cannot be institutionally driven when it is Christian or Muslim or Jewish in theme. So why would religious prayer be OK when it has roots in an eastern religion?

Tangentially: A great episode from the third season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" -- they're all great -- is "The Special Section," in which Larry David gives Richard Lewis his meditating mantra, "Jai-ya." The phrase, which Larry had said thousands of times before, is not actually something that brings peace, but causes more of the chaos common to Larry David's life. It means "F--- me."

Jews and Arabs working together

A Jewish attorney is suing two Brooklyn schoolgirls on behalf of his Arab client, a 10-year-old boy the girls allegedly bound with tape and tossed in a closet. That would be a little more interesting in Israel, but this story is still a whopper. From the NY Daily News:

The boy suffered "severe personal injuries - humiliation, ridicule and gross embarrassment" from the incident in his fourth-grade classroom at Public School 114 in Canarsie on Oct. 26, said his lawyer, Michael Lazarowitz. The suit blames the city and Education Department for failing to supervise the school. Education officials declined to comment.

Lazarowitz said the girls attacked Abdulla from behind, taped his arms behind his back, put tape on his nose and mouth, then locked him in the closet.

As Abdulla, who was born in Yemen, struggled, Lazarowitz said the girls hurled "racial and ethnic slurs to the effect - 'go back to your country, we don't want you here.'"

And I thought I had elementary school bad.

Why are terrorists so dumb?

Tim Harford, Slate.com's "undercover economist," tries to answer that question (and doesn't do very well) in a weekend article dubbed "Dumb Bomb."

He focuses on the recent botched bomb-plot in London and Glasgow, which was allegedly planned by a bunch of doctors and medical professionals. This shouldn't be a surprise, he says, because Osama bin Laden is an engineer from a wealthy family and his lieutenant is a physician; scholars have found terrorists tend to be well educated (this too is not explained).

If there is a link between poverty, education, and terrorism, it is the opposite of the one popularly assumed. We should not be surprised to find that terrorists can add up, read, and even write prescriptions.

What is more surprising is that the attackers in London and Glasgow were so incompetent. Claude Berrebi and Harvard economist Efraim Benmelech studied—there's no nice way to put this—the human-resources policy of Palestinian terrorist groups. They found that older, better-educated terrorists secured more important suicide missions and killed more people. Having more than a high-school education doubles the chance of escaping capture, for example.

If the terrorists in this case do turn out to be the doctors and other professionals who are, as I write, suspected of the crime, it would demonstrate that even years of education and experience do not guarantee a successful attack. Blowing up innocent people is obviously harder than it looks, and for that we can all be grateful.

Conservapedia: The wiki with a Fox News attitude

The newest online encyclopedia is called Conservapedia. Its homepage includes daily Bible verses and historical quotes and offers breaking news, such as this tidbit today: "Democratic Congressional Approval Ratings Worse than Bush's."

It's like Wikipedia, only through a conservative lens. Try searching for evolution, for example, and you'll be redirected to "Theory of evolution" and informed that "a majority of the most prominent and vocal defenders of the naturalistic evolutionary position since World War II have been atheists."

Conservapedia defines environmentalists as "people who profess concern about the environment" and notes that some would want to impose legal limits on the use of toilet paper.

Femininity? The quality of being "childlike, gentle, pretty, willowy, submissive."

A hike in minimum wage is referred to as "a controversial manoeuvre that increases the incentive for young people to drop out of school."

And the state of the economy under President Bush? Much better than the "liberal media" would have you think: "For example, during his term Exxon Mobile has posted the largest profit of any company in a single year, and executive salaries have greatly increased as well."

With fewer than 12,000 entries and typos galore (the misspelling of Mobil above; the mayor of L.A. is referred to as "Anthony Varigoso"), Conservapedia isn't about to supplant Wikipedia — which boasts 1.8 million articles in English alone.

But the all-volunteer site has several thousand active readers and writers. (Founder Andy) Schlafly encourages his students to use it as a reference, saying that the articles are more concise than those on Wikipedia. On the home page, just above the daily Bible verse, he tallies total views: 12.3 million and counting.

This story is from today's LA Times, which garners reporter Stephanie Simon her third-straight day of getting mentioned on The God Blog.

Religion safe at secular universities

A study appearing this month in the journal Social Forces reports that the widely held belief that religious students abandon their faith at a altar of secular colleges is flat wrong.

It’s not that colleges necessarily encourage faith, said (Mark D. Regnerus, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Texas and an authors of the study), but for all the talk about how intellectuals are out to destroy students’ relationships to their religions and God, the main obstacles to such relationships have to do with maturing and how young people spend their time. “Some kids were bound to lose [their faith] anyway and they do,” Regnerus said. But the evidence suggests that college isn’t responsible.

Last month, the International Herald Tribune surveyed scholars, academic administrators and students and found that not only were students not losing their faith, but they were pursuing it more fervently than any other time in recent history.

(Hat-tip: Bible Belt Blogger)

Anti-Darwinist is national school board shoo-in

There is one person running for president-elect of the National Association of State Boards of Education, the NY Times reports -- a member of the Kansas school board who supported efforts to not teach evolution.

The candidate is Kenneth R. Willard, a Kansas Republican who voted with the conservative majority in 2005 when the school board changed the state’s science standards to allow inclusion of intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism. Voters later replaced that majority, but Mr. Willard, an insurance executive from Hutchinson, retained his seat. If he becomes president-elect of the national group, he will take office in January 2009.

The group, based in Washington, is a nonprofit organization of state school boards whose Web site (www.nasbe.org) says it “works to strengthen state leadership in educational policymaking.”

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“We don’t set curriculum standards or anything like that,” Mr. Willard said of the national organization, adding that it handled issues like advising state boards on how to deal with governance concerns or influxes of immigrant students or ways to raise academic achievement among members of disadvantaged groups.

He said, though, that he personally thought students should be taught about challenges to the theory of evolution, like intelligent design. And while he said he had not heard of a possible challenge to his candidacy, Mr. Willard added that he was not surprised by it.

“Some people are mindless about their attacks on anyone questioning anything Darwin might have said,” Mr. Willard said.

As I've written before, plenty of scientists -- though not the majority -- see no conflict between evolution and the creation of life by God above.

Religion aces college

Despite what many conservative religious parents believe – I know; I grew up with them – American universities are not brainwashing their children to be godless intellectuals. According to the International Herald Tribune, which interviewed dozens of university officials, "students are drawn to religion and spirituality with more fervor than at any time they can remember."

University officials explained the surge of interest in religion as partly a result of the rise of the religious right in politics, which they said has made questions of faith more talked about generally. In addition, they said, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, by Islamic zealots underscored for many the influence of religion on world affairs.

And an influx of evangelical students at secular universities, along with an increasing number of international students, has meant that students arrive with a broader array of religious experiences.

Gomes said a more diverse student body at Harvard had meant that "the place is more representative of mainstream America."

"That provides a group of people who don't leave their religion at home," he said.

However, UCLA's Spirituality in Higher Education study reported in 2003 that college students have high levels of spirituality -- but that schools typically do a poor job supporting it.