Daily Dose - 020601 - RACIAL PROFILING, Rotten News, ID TEN ERROR, DDL, Hey Martha

RACIAL PROFILING

Once again, to ensure we Americans never offend anyone -- particularly fanatics intent on killing us -- airport screeners will not be allowed to do racial profiling. They will continue random searches of 80-year-old women, little kids, airline pilots with proper identification, Secret Service agents who are members of the President's security detail and 85-year old Congressmen with metal hips. To test whether you are politically aligned with this viewpoint, please take the following test:

In 1979, the US embassy in Iran was taken over by:
(a) Norwegians from Ballard;
(b) Elvis;
(c) A tour bus full of 80-year-old women; or
(d) Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 1983, the US Marine barracks in Beirut was blown up by:
(a) A pizza delivery boy;
(b) Crazed feminists complaining that being able to throw a grenade beyond its own burst radius was an unfair and sexist requirement in basic training;
(c) Geraldo Rivera making up for a slow news day; or
(d) Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed by:
(a) Luca Brazzi, for not being given a part in "Godfather 2;"
(b) The Tooth Fairy;
(c) Butch and Sundance who had a few sticks of dynamite left over from the train mission, or,
(d) Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40.

In 1998, the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by:
(a) Jerry Springer show rejects;
(b) Hillary, to distract attention from Wild Bill's problems;
(c) The World Wrestling Federation to promote its next villain: "Mustapha the Merciless;" or
(d) Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40.

On 9/11/01, four airliners were hijacked and destroyed by:
(a) Bugs Bunny, Wiley E. Coyote, Daffy Duck, and Elmer Fudd.
(b) The Jamaican bobsled team
(c) Mr. Bean, or
(d) Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40

Yes, we have some nutcases of our own and most of them have met their deserved fate. But don't you agree that we should spend our resources where they are likely to do the most good?

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Rotten News... (true)

Jihad for Kids
February 4, 2002

The Children's Club

It’s a show that won't make the Saturday morning lineup on any American network. But it has had a prominent slot on Palestinian TV. The program lacks the same slick production value of an American children's show, but it's just as influential. It's called The Children's Club.

It comes complete with puppet shows, games, songs and a very chilling message about becoming a suicide bomber. A little girl sings in Arabic about her ultimate ambition in life.

(Song Translation) “Oh sing my sister constantly about my life as a suicide warrior.”

Another girl screams about preparing to die.

(Song Translation) “I foresee my death, but I march quickly. Am I afraid? Life has little value because I'm returning to my lord and my people will know I am a hero.”

That message is repeated again and again in song and verse.

(Song Translation) “I will come at the time of drought with my best efforts bring a machine gun, violence anger, anger, anger...”

The children, most of them elementary school age, shout a message of violence.

“I will return with the dawn of tomorrow. It is my conviction of launch a jihad.”

Girl shouting a message of violence (Song Translation) “When I wander into Jerusalem, I'll turn into a suicide warrior in battle dress, in battle dress, in battle dress.”

A teacher cheers them on, “Bravo, bravo, bravo.”

If you're like most Americans, you had no idea that the show existed, but the Children's Club is no secret to Israelis.

“I am still shocked every time I see it,” says Hela Crown-Tamir who lived in Israel for 19 years.

“Imagine a teacher telling them bravo, "Crown-Tamir says, "because they're going to grow up to be a militant Islamic suicide bomber.”

Crown-Tamir moved back to The Tampa Bay area to escape the violence that ruined her travel business. She says Americans are just now waking up to the realities Israelis have been facing for years, that children are trained as suicide bombers. Because it's so dramatic, some Israeli groups have used excerpts from The Children's Club to produce a campaign against Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat.

But are Palestinian children really educated this way? Or is this just an Israeli propaganda tool? We contacted several Islamic groups in the Tampa Bay area, but no one from any of those organizations would even agree to watch the tape.

But University of South Florida professor Abdelwahab Hachiche did agree to watch it.

“I always keep a reasonable degree of skepticism about anything I see or anything I read.”

Hachiche is an internationally recognized expert on Mideast terrorism. He's also an Arab and a Moslem. Until we gave him the tape, he'd never heard of the show. And while he says he has no idea who produced it, he says the translations are accurate and the problem is real.

“And the indoctrination and the danger of indoctrination is very, very serious.”

Dr. Hachiche calls this kind of teaching nothing short of infanticide. But he hopes children growing up in today's Islamic world will ultimately reject these messages of hatred.

“On both sides the younger generation are looking for true leaders who will have the courage to overcome this passion that is leading to mutual destruction.”

Still, in the mid-east the violence continues. And now even in America we're looking terrorism right in the face-- listening and wondering if this is the voice of the future.

*********

The Mosque to Commerce

Bin Laden's special complaint with the World Trade Center.
By Laurie Kerr
Posted Friday, December 28, 2001, at 8:58 AM PT

We all know the basic reasons why Osama Bin Laden chose to attack the World Trade Center, out of all the buildings in New York. Its towers were the two tallest in the city, synonymous with its skyline. They were richly stocked with potential victims. And as the complex's name declared, it was designed to be a center of American and global commerce.

But Bin Laden may have had another, more personal motivation. The World Trade Center's architect, Minoru Yamasaki, was a favorite designer of the Binladin family's patrons—the Saudi royal family—and a leading practitioner of an architectural style that merged modernism with Islamic influences.

The story starts in the late 1950s, when Yamasaki, a second-generation Japanese-American, won the commission to design the King Fahd Dhahran Air Terminal in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. His design had a rectilinear, modular plan with pointed arches, interweaving tracery of prefabricated concrete, and even a minaret of a flight tower. In other words, it was an impressive melding of modern technology and traditional Islamic form. The Saudis admired it so much that they put a picture of it on one of their banknotes.

For Yamasaki, an architect with a keen mathematical mind and a taste for ornamental pattern-work, this brush with the intricate geometries of Islamic architecture was inspiring, and he began to incorporate arabesques and arches into his work. For the next 12 to 15 years he played with Islamic forms in projects as diverse as the Federal Science Pavilion at the Seattle World's Fair, the Eastern Airlines Terminal at Logan Airport, and even the North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, Ill.

Yamasaki received the World Trade Center commission the year after the Dhahran Airport was completed. Yamasaki described its plaza as "a mecca, a great relief from the narrow streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area." True to his word, Yamasaki replicated the plan of Mecca's courtyard by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city's bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two enormous, perfectly square towers—minarets, really. Yamasaki's courtyard mimicked Mecca's assemblage of holy sites—the Qa'ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca's.

At the base of the towers, Yamasaki used implied pointed arches—derived from the characteristically pointed arches of Islam—as a transition between the wide column spacing below and the dense structural mesh above. (Europe imported pointed arches from Islam during the Middle Ages, and so non-Muslims have come to think of them as innovations of the Gothic period.) Above soared the pure geometry of the towers, swathed in a shimmering skin, which doubled as a structural web—a giant truss. Here Yamasaki was following the Islamic tradition of wrapping a powerful geometric form in a dense filigree, as in the inlaid marble pattern work of the Taj Mahal or the ornate carvings of the courtyard and domes of the Alhambra.

The shimmering filigree is the mark of the holy. According to Oleg Grabar, the great American scholar of Islamic art and architecture, the dense filigree of complex geometries alludes to a higher spiritual reality in Islam, and the shimmering quality of Islamic patterning relates to the veil that wraps the Qa'ba at Mecca. After the attack, Grabar spoke of how these towers related to the architecture of Islam, where "the entire surface is meaningful" and "every part is both construction and ornament." A number of designers from the Middle East agreed, describing the entire façade as a giant "mashrabiya," the tracery that fills the windows of mosques.

In the early '70s, as the trade towers were nearing completion, Saudi Arabia was awash in oil revenues, and the state embarked on a massive modernization and building campaign. Yamasaki was premier among the many foreign architects hired during this period. Unwilling to take on too much work, Yamasaki decided to accept just three choice projects in Saudi Arabia: the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency head office, the Eastern Province International Airport, and the King Fahd Royal Reception Pavilion at Jeddah Airport. In all three projects he continued his explorations in melding traditional Islamic form with modern materials, methods, and functions.

As a scion of the Binladin contracting firm, destined to inherit some portion of its vast operations, Osama Bin Laden would certainly have been aware of Yamasaki's Saudi Arabian projects. Indeed, his family may have built them. (Minoru Yamasaki Associates won't say, but the Binladens were involved with almost all royal construction.) While Osama was in college in the mid-'70s, Yamasaki was designing his second generation of Saudi work, and the World Trade Center—then the tallest building in the world times two—came to completion in New York. This period was the high-water mark both for Yamasaki's world reputation and for the Saudis' national construction plan—which in Saudi Arabia must have brought a heightened sense of importance to the World Trade Center.

Having rejected modernism and the Saudi royal family, it's no surprise that Bin Laden would turn against Yamasaki's work in particular. He must have seen how Yamasaki had clothed the World Trade Center, a monument of Western capitalism, in the raiment of Islamic spirituality. Such mixing of the sacred and the profane is old hat to us—after all, Cass Gilbert's classic Woolworth Building, dubbed the Cathedral to Commerce, is decked out in extravagant Gothic regalia. But to someone who wants to purify Islam from commercialism, Yamasaki's implicit Mosque to Commerce would be anathema. To Bin Laden, the World Trade Center was probably not only an international landmark but also a false idol.

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ID TEN ERROR

Young Judy, the editor of a trivia publication, was having trouble with her computer. So she called Prem, the computer guy, over to her desk. Prem clicked a couple buttons and solved the problem.

As he was walking away, Judy called after him, "So, what was wrong?"

And he replied, "It was an "ID ten T" error."

A puzzled expression ran over Judy's face. "An "ID ten T" error? What's that?.. in case I need to fix it again??"

He gave her a grin...

"Haven't you ever heard of an "ID ten T" error before?"

"No," replied Judy.

"Write it down," he said, "and I think you'll figure it out."

She wrote..... I D 1 0 T

_________________________

DDL

THE DINNER

There was a young man named Skinner,
Who took a young lady to dinner.
They started to dine
At a quarter past nine,
By twenty to ten it was in her.

Not the dinner,
It was Skinner.

There was a young man named Tupper,
Who took a Young lady to supper
They started to dine
At a quarter past nine,
By twenty to ten it was up her.

Not the supper,
And not Tupper,

It was a son-of-a-bitch named Skinner.

_________________________

"I stopped believing in Santa Claus when my mother took me to see him in a department store, and he asked for my autograph."
-----Shirley Temple

__________________________

The Muppet Show was banned from TV in Saudi Arabia because one of its stars was a pig

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"I saw a woman wearing a sweatshirt with 'Guess' on it. I said, 'Thyroid problem?'"

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Hey Martha (true)

Tuesday, February 12, 2002

Anti-terror lottery proposed

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) -- Take that, Osama bin Laden.

A bill introduced Monday in the Minnesota House would put bin Laden's image on a state lottery scratch-off ticket. Players would discover any winnings by scratching off "and thus obliterating," as the bill notes, bin Laden's face.

Sixty percent of the proceeds -- the maximum allowed under the state Constitution -- would go to anti-terrorism efforts.

The sponsor of the bill, Rep. Rich Stanek, is a Minneapolis police officer who also is pushing for a broad new state security plan. It has a price tag of $25 million to pay for training and equipment, although a state budget deficit has made funding scarce.

Stanek said he's gotten nothing but positive reactions to the bill.

"Can you imagine the guys sitting in the American Legion, how they'll respond?" asked Stanek. "They might go out and buy 100 tickets."

If the bin Laden idea falls through, Stanek said he still wants a themed lottery ticket. Like what? "Three cruise missiles is a winner. I don't care."