|
Page < 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 >
CAPEEM
Fights Discrimination Against Hindu Children with a Lawsuit
California Parents for
the Equalization of Educational Materials (CAPEEM) has filed a
complaint in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of California
against the California State Board of Education and the California Department of
Education. The complaint is about Hindus and children's
civil rights, derogatory portrayal of Hinduism & Ancient Indian Civilization
and violation of Federal and State laws and statutes, as well as the
California Department of Education (CDE) and State Board of Education (SBE)
guidelines. The complaint was filed with the Federal Court on Tuesday, March
14th, 2006.
The civil rights of Hindu schoolchildren are violated by advancing an inaccurate
and derogatory picture of Hinduism in sixth grade school textbooks. California
Department of Education and State Board of Education meetings on the matter
failed to address Hindu concerns. Hindus are being
discriminated.
Various Hindu groups and parents participated in this process since the Sixth
grade History-Social Sciences textbooks came up for adoption last year. After
being let down by the CDE and SBE, the parents decided to move the court and
restore civil rights and forbid discriminatory practice against Hindus. Most
importantly, the school children are the ones who will be suffering damage due
to derogatory presentation in the textbook. Many students, from past and
present, have spoken to CDE and SBE about their experience in the classroom and
that what is taught in the school has nothing to do with what they know and
practice at home.
Venkat Balasubramani filed the complaint on CAPEEM’s behalf. Balasubramani is
an attorney who has worked in the past with public interest groups including the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on
civil rights matters.
(source:
Federal
Lawsuit Claims California Textbooks Violate Hindu Civil Rights -
hinduismtoday.com).
Please
make a Donation -
Hindu American Foundation Launches Defense and Education fund Drive
A
Textbook Debate Over Hinduism
When
Abhijit Kurup began learning about Hinduism at his Claremont
middle school, he could barely
recognize his own religion.
Textbooks portrayed the 6,000-year-old tradition
as a religion of monkey and elephant gods, rigid
caste discrimination and oppression of women, he
said.
"It
degraded my religion," said Kurup, now a UC Riverside freshman. "I
felt a mixture of anger, embarrassment and humiliation."
(source: A
Textbook Debate Over Hinduism - By Teresa
Watanabe,
LA
Times Staff Writer February 27 2006).
Fraudulent
Distorians?
Refer to
Creationism
By Any Other Name… - By Romilla Thapar
and Michael Witzel - outlookindia.com
Hindutva groups
would like Hinduism - one of the world’s
oldest major religions, with approximately 800 million adherents
worldwide, to be treated with the same consideration and respect as
Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism.
(Note:
Anything wrong with that? Ms.
Thapar?
California’s
official educational standards contain specific policies on this,
which assert, CA
State
Law [Education Code 60044(a) and Subsection (b)], and the Standards
for Evaluating Instructional Materials for Social Content (2000 Edition) clearly
state the following guidelines for textbooks:
'1.
Adverse Reflection. No religious belief or practice may be held up to ridicule
and no religious group may be portrayed as inferior.'
'2.
Indoctrination. Any explanation or description of a religious belief or practice
should be present in a manner that does not encourage or discourage belief or
indoctrinate the student in any particular religious belief.').
Refer to Eminent
Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud
is a book by Arun
Shourie. - The book explains how a group of academic historians, of
Marxist persuasion, has been tweaking Indian history and also lining its own
pockets in the process. Note: Last December, a
Kansas University Professor of Religious Studies, Paul
Mirecki, who enraged Christian bigots by lampooning the Biblical
version of Creation, was beaten up; he told police that the men who
beat him made references to his controversial statements in this regard.
Watch
Sex
crimes and the Vatican - videogoogle.com. Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress -
By Howard Zinn
Hindu-baiters
"Hindus
worship talking monkeys and throw widows into fires" ?
 Sandhya
Jain author
of Adi
Deo Arya Devata. A Panoramic View of Tribal-Hindu Cultural Interface
and
eminent columnist in the
mainstream English Media of India, she has written eloquently about Hinduism
and has
remarked on this issue:
"Old Hindu-baiters from
both countries (USA and India) gang up to abort a necessary correction of school
textbooks in California.
We are thus faced with the old
colonial reconstruction of Indian history, which diminishes the fabulous
achievements of Hindu civilisation and the unity of its social
constituents, and deconstructs it into a disparate mosaic whose different
components do not amount to a cultural coherence.
America's Hindu
community has long borne the burden of a humiliating and incorrect depiction of
Hindu religion and culture; parents have faced young children saying they are
ashamed to be Hindus.
Why,
for instance, should devout Hindus accept that their children be taught that
"Hindus worship talking monkeys and throw widows into fires". Why
should the primordial stories in Hindu scriptures be branded as 'myths'
when the scriptures of monotheistic traditions are
said to come from Only One (mutually exclusive) God(s)?
Unfortunately,
unlike Islam and Judaism, America's Hindus lack political clout. Hence they were
hopelessly out-manoeuvred by professional Hindu-haters led by Prof Michael
Witzel of the Harvard Sanskrit Department. As Harvard University ignored
protests that Herr Witzel
was misusing the varsity letterhead to pursue a political agenda, Hindus should
settle scores by forcing closure of the Sanskrit Department by ensuring that the
professor gets no students for two successive terms.
Sadly, the California
school board allowed this process to be hijacked by Herr Witzel, who claimed to
be a religious scholar, though he is a non-Hindu, a known Hindu-baiter, and
proponent of the discredited Aryan Invasion Theory. Yet Witzel
and Thapar erode
their already dubious academic credibility by claiming that NASA and ISRO
satellite imagery of ancient riverbeds along the famed route of the Saraswati do
not prove the existence of the river in Vedic times. "
(source:
Sunset in Sacramento - By Sandhya Jain March 7 2006 Edit Page dailypioneer.com). Please refer to
chapters on Hindu Culture, Quotes, Sanskrit, Yoga and
Hindu Philosophy.
Refer to Bigotry
and Prejudice: the Depiction of Hinduism in the West
- By Rajeev Srinivasan - rediff.com.
Refer to
Racist article in Times - My Own Private India - By
Joel Stein
"Eventually, there were enough Indians in Edison to change the culture. At which
point my townsfolk started calling the new Edisonians
"dot heads." One kid I knew in high school drove down an Indian-dense
street yelling for its residents to "go home to India." In retrospect, I
question just how good our schools were if "dot heads" was the best racist
insult we could come up with for a group of people
whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose. "
Selectively harp on Hinduism
How
are other faiths represented in American textbooks?
 Why
don't our (Indian) pseudo secular
journalists and scholars (eg. Now,
Multicultural Hindutva -
By Raja Rajagopal and 'Palpable
Falsehoods'
- By Vinay
Lal) give no consideration to how other faiths are represented in these
textbooks.
They just selectively harp on Hinduism
and seek to scrutinize this faith in a manner that no other religion, least of
all Christianity, is subjected. What does the Bible say about Slavery
and Women?
For more on Prof. Vinay Lal refer to
http://www.uclaprofs.com/profs/lal.html
Refer
to California
School Text Issues: Students Debate With Prof. Michael Witzel At
Harvard University - Lokvani.com. Refer
to South
Asian Bleeding Hearts Association.
Watch
Sex
crimes and the Vatican - videogoogle.com. Refer to QuickTime trailer
and Part One of the film The
God Awful Truth.
Refer
to World Conquering Creeds - By Dr.
Koenraad Elst - chapter on Glimpses
XVI
Refer
to Swamy's
wake-up call to Hindus - newstodaynet.com.
Page < 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 >
|
