Busting the Anthrax Myth

WASHINGTON – More than four years after a stunning report about America’s vulnerability to a nuclear electromagnetic pulse attack was released to Congress, the House Armed Services Committee will hear testimony from the scientist who issued the warning and who believes Iran is pursuing such an option.

William R. Graham, President Reagan’s top science adviser and the chairman of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, will update the committee Thursday morning.

Graham warned in 2005 that Iran was not only covertly developing nuclear weapons, but was already testing ballistic missiles specifically designed to destroy America’s technical infrastructure with the aim of neutralizing the world’s lone superpower.

The radical Shiite regime has conducted successful tests to determine if its Shahab-3 ballistic missiles, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, can be detonated by a remote-control device while still in high-altitude flight, Graham said in his report.

Graham said then there was no other plausible explanation for such tests than preparation for the deployment of electromagnetic pulse weapons – even one of which could knock out America’s critical electrical and technological infrastructure, effectively sending the continental U.S. back to the 19th century with a recovery time of months or years.

Iran would have that capability – at least theoretically – as soon as it has one nuclear bomb ready to arm such a missile.

The stunning report was first published in Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, the premium, online intelligence newsletter published by WND’s founder.

Iran surprised intelligence analysts by describing the mid-flight detonations of missiles fired from ships on the Caspian Sea as “successful” tests. Even primitive Scud missiles could be used for this purpose. And top U.S. intelligence officials reminded members of Congress that there is a glut of these missiles on the world market. They are currently being bought and sold for about $100,000 apiece.

Others agree with Graham’s sobering assessment.

“A terrorist organization might have trouble putting a nuclear warhead ‘on target’ with a Scud, but it would be much easier to simply launch and detonate in the atmosphere,” wrote Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., in the Washington Post in 2005 after reading Graham’s report. “No need for the risk and difficulty of trying to smuggle a nuclear weapon over the border or hit a particular city. Just launch a cheap missile from a freighter in international waters – al-Qaida is believed to own about 80 such vessels – and make sure to get it a few miles in the air.”

The Iranian missile tests were more sophisticated and capable of detonation at higher elevations – making them more dangerous.

Detonated at a height of 60 to 500 kilometers above the continental U.S., one nuclear warhead could cripple the country – knocking out electrical power and circuit boards and rendering the U.S. domestic communications impotent.

In 2005, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security chaired by Kyl, held a hearing on the electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, threat.

“An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack on the American homeland, said one of the distinguished scientists who testified at the hearing, is one of only a few ways that the United States could be defeated by its enemies – terrorist or otherwise,” wrote Kyl “And it is probably the easiest. A single Scud missile, carrying a single nuclear weapon, detonated at the appropriate altitude, would interact with the Earth’s atmosphere, producing an electromagnetic pulse radiating down to the surface at the speed of light. Depending on the location and size of the blast, the effect would be to knock out already stressed power grids and other electrical systems across much or even all of the continental United States, for months if not years.”

The purpose of an EMP attack, unlike a nuclear attack on land, is not to kill people, but “to kill electrons,” as Graham explained. He serves as chairman of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack and was director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Graham told WND he could think of no other reason for Iran to be experimenting with mid-air detonation of missiles than for the planning of an EMP-style attack.

“EMP offers a bigger bang for the buck,” he said. He also suggested such an attack makes a U.S. nuclear response against a suspected enemy less likely than would the detonation of a nuclear bomb in a major U.S. city.

A 2004 report by the commission found “several potential adversaries have or can acquire the capability to attack the United States with a high-altitude nuclear weapons-generated electromagnetic pulse (EMP). A determined adversary can achieve an EMP attack capability without having a high level of sophistication.”

“EMP is one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences,” the report said. “EMP will cover the wide geographic region within line of sight to the nuclear weapon. It has the capability to produce significant damage to critical infrastructures and thus to the very fabric of U.S. society, as well as to the ability of the United States and Western nations to project influence and military power.”

The major impact of EMP weapons is on electronics, “so pervasive in all aspects of our society and military, coupled through critical infrastructures,” explained the report.

“Their effects on systems and infrastructures dependent on electricity and electronics could be sufficiently ruinous as to qualify as catastrophic to the nation,” Lowell Wood, acting chairman of the commission, told members of Congress.

The commission report went so far as to suggest, in its opening sentence, that an EMP attack “might result in the defeat of our military forces.”

“Briefly, a single nuclear weapon exploded at high altitude above the United States will interact with the Earth’s atmosphere, ionosphere and magnetic field to produce an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) radiation down to the Earth and additionally create electrical currents in the Earth,” said the report. “EMP effects are both direct and indirect. The former are due to electrical systems, and the latter arise from the damage that ’shocked’ – upset, damaged and destroyed – electronics controls then inflict on the systems in which they are embedded. The indirect effects can be even more severe than the direct effects.”

The EMP threat is not a new one considered by U.S. defense planners. The Soviet Union had experimented with the idea as a kind of super-weapon against the U.S.

“What is different now is that some potential sources of EMP threats are difficult to deter – they can be terrorist groups that have no state identity, have only one or a few weapons and are motivated to attack the U.S. without regard for their own safety,” explains the commission report. “Rogue states, such as North Korea and Iran, may also be developing the capability to pose an EMP threat to the United States and may also be unpredictable and difficult to deter.”

Graham describes the potential “cascading effect” of an EMP attack. If electrical power is knocked out and circuit boards fried, telecommunications are disrupted, energy deliveries are impeded, the financial system breaks down, food, water and gasoline become scarce.

As Kyl put it: “Few if any people would die right away. But the loss of power would have a cascading effect on all aspects of U.S. society. Communication would be largely impossible. Lack of refrigeration would leave food rotting in warehouses, exacerbated by a lack of transportation as those vehicles still working simply ran out of gas (which is pumped with electricity). The inability to sanitize and distribute water would quickly threaten public health, not to mention the safety of anyone in the path of the inevitable fires, which would rage unchecked. And as we have seen in areas of natural and other disasters, such circumstances often result in a fairly rapid breakdown of social order.”

“American society has grown so dependent on computer and other electrical systems that we have created our own Achilles’ heel of vulnerability, ironically much greater than those of other, less developed nations,” the senator wrote. “When deprived of power, we are in many ways helpless, as the New York City blackout made clear. In that case, power was restored quickly because adjacent areas could provide help. But a large-scale burnout caused by a broad EMP attack would create a much more difficult situation. Not only would there be nobody nearby to help, it could take years to replace destroyed equipment.”

The commission said hardening key infrastructure systems and procuring vital backup equipment such as transformers is both feasible and – compared with the threat – relatively inexpensive.

“But it will take leadership by the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department, and other federal agencies, along with support from Congress, all of which have yet to materialize,” wrote Kyl, so far the only elected official blowing the whistle this alarming development.

Kyl concluded in his report: “The Sept. 11 commission report stated that our biggest failure was one of ‘imagination.’ No one imagined that terrorists would do what they did on Sept. 11. Today few Americans can conceive of the possibility that terrorists could bring our society to its knees by destroying everything we rely on that runs on electricity. But this time we’ve been warned, and we’d better be prepared to respond.”

The Homegrown Young Radicals Of Next-Gen Jihad

By Marc Sageman

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/06/AR2008060603501_pf.html

We are fighting the wrong foe. Over the past six years, the nature of the international Islamist terrorist threat to the West has changed dramatically, but Western governments are still fighting the last war — set up to fight an old al-Qaeda that is now largely contained. Unless we understand this sea change, we will not be able to ward off the new menace.

The version of al-Qaeda that Osama bin Laden founded is a fading force. After a week in which five detainees who allegedly planned the Sept. 11, 2001, atrocities were arraigned before a U.S. military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, it’s worth remembering that the terrorists behind 9/11 were mostly young, well-educated middle-class expatriates from Muslim countries who had become radicalized abroad, especially in the West. Such key 9/11 plotters as Mohamed Atta, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ziad Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi met and became radicalized as students in Hamburg, then went to Afghanistan looking for al-Qaeda. But over the past six years, most of the professional terrorists who fit this profile have been eliminated during the U.S.-led manhunt for “high-value targets.” The few that remain are huddled in the Afghan-Pakistani border area, struggling to extend their reach beyond Pakistan.

That old guard is still dangerous and still plotting spectacular attacks. But it is the new wave that more urgently requires our attention. This cohort is composed of homegrown young wannabes who dream of glory and adventure, who yearn to belong to a heroic vanguard and to root their lives in a greater sense of meaning. Inspired by tales of past heroism, they hope to emulate their predecessors, even though, for the most part, they can no longer link up with al-Qaeda Central in the Pakistani badlands. Their potential numbers are so great that they must now be seen as the main terrorist threat to the West.

This threat is not well understood by U.S. policymakers. After 9/11, I realized that spectacular instances of collective violence such as terrorism and the Holocaust tend to be the product of small-group dynamics, not individual action. (As a former CIA case officer who ran programs in Afghanistan in the 1980s, I learned how hard it was to motivate groups to perform field operations.) I began putting together graphs and charts to see how friendships and kinship groups had shaped al-Qaeda’s networks. I was able to recognize these concepts precisely because of my isolation from the U.S. government, which was focusing on old, top-down, command-and-control theories. And I worry again today that those charged with protecting us are not being imaginative or rigorous enough to understand the next generation of jihadists.

Unlike their pre-9/11 predecessors, today’s would-be terrorists are usually the poorly educated teenage children of unskilled and secular Muslim immigrants. They have been born, raised and radicalized in their host countries (unlike, say, Atta, an Egyptian who recoiled at modern Germany). This new generation’s youth culture celebrates a sort of “jihadist cool.”

Consider the “Hofstad Netwerk” in the Netherlands, which I believe is typical of this new wave. It consists mostly of young people who were born in Holland or immigrated to that country very early in life. They met around their neighborhoods, in Internet cafes or in online chat rooms, then self-radicalized through their admiration for the supposed Islamist heroes fighting the West. One man linked to this cohort, Mohammed Bouyeri, repeatedly shot the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004 on an Amsterdam street. Other members of this informal network reportedly planned to murder prominent Dutch politicians and bomb the Dutch parliament, a nuclear power plant and Amsterdam’s international airport.

Or consider another network that sprang up in placid surroundings: the group of second-generation immigrant men and youths in the Toronto suburbs who Canadian authorities allege plotted to set off truck bombs in Toronto, bomb the Canadian Parliament and kill Prime Minister Stephen Harper. They reportedly spent time praising their terrorist heroes on the Internet and living out mujaheddin fantasies by playing paintball games in rural Ontario.

What makes next-gen terrorists tick? How did these ordinary kids come to be so attracted to political violence? The process of radicalization consists of four prongs, which need not occur in sequence. Here’s the recipe: having a sense of moral outrage; seeing this anger as part of a “war on Islam”; believing that this view is consistent with one’s everyday grievances; and mobilizing through networks.

Many Muslims feel a powerful sense of moral outrage at the treatment of their coreligionists, be it the sight of U.S. troops killing Muslims in Iraq or the aftermath of police harassment of local mosques. To lead to political violence, a next-generation jihadist must come to believe one simple sound bite: that there is a “war against Islam.”

Unlike their fanatical predecessors in the old al-Qaeda, the new terrorists are not particularly religious. The defendants in the Hofstad trials, the March 2004 Madrid bombing trial, the Toronto case and the many trials in Britain are not intellectuals, let alone Islamic scholars. Many became religious only a few months before their arrests, and some are not religious at all. The new generation is not likely to be swayed by abstract arguments. Young jihadist wannabes do not go to Iraq to have theological debates; they go there to blow themselves up.

The problem has been worse in Europe than in the United States. In the land of the American dream and the melting pot, a broader, more inclusive view of American-ness undermines the jihadist insistence that the U.S. government is at war with its Muslim citizens. Notwithstanding some ugly jeering by nativist bigots and some clumsy profiling by law enforcement, ordinary Muslim Americans simply do not feel some “war on Islam” in their daily experiences.

But things are far less cheerful in Europe. The children of unskilled Muslim immigrants there face discrimination across the continent, resulting in striking unemployment rates. Many non-Muslim Europeans resent having to compete with Muslim immigrants for low-level jobs and worry that poor immigrant suburbs mean higher crime rates. Anti-immigrant sentiment, which propelled far-right parties to win around 20 percent of the vote in contests in France, Austria and Switzerland in recent years, only reinforces the message of rejection — and produces grist for the terrorists’ mill.

There are many angry young Muslims in the world, of course. What transforms a tiny number of them into terrorists is mobilization by networks. Until a few years ago, these networks were made up of face-to-face groups: local gangs of young immigrants such as the Hofstad group or expatriate students such as the Hamburg cell that planned 9/11. These cliques of friends became radicalized together. The group acted as an echo chamber — amplifying grievances, intensifying members’ bonds to one another, deepening their rejection of the values of the host society and making it easier to gradually separate themselves from it.

Over the past two or three years, face-to-face radicalization has started to be replaced by online radicalization. People’s beliefs used to be changed in small cliques; now they are being altered in jihadist Internet forums. These forums have become virtual marketplaces for extremist ideas — the “invisible hand” organizing terrorist activities worldwide. They are transforming the terrorist movement, attracting ever younger members and women, who can now join in the discussions.

The West has successfully contained the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11. But al-Qaeda has adapted from the bottom up, producing a network that’s scattered, disconnected and decentralized. The new jihadist movement doesn’t have an operational leader, but it is every bit as dangerous as the old one.

Marc Sageman is a sociologist, forensic psychiatrist and scholar in residence at the New York Police Department. He is the author of “Understanding Terror Networks” and “Leaderless Jihad.”

ACT for America
P.O. Box 6884
Virginia Beach, VA 23456
www.actforamerica.org

One of the best thinkers on the subject of Islam and its threats to non-Muslims is Bill Warner, affiliated with the Center for the Study of Political Islam.

Mr. Warner has recently published a series of commentaries entitled “An Ethical Basis for War Against Political Islam.” We took special note of his latest newsletter in this series, “Strategy – A Way to Defeat Political Islam.”

As you read the commentary below, please note our comments in red.

An Ethical Basis for War Against Political Islam

This newsletter is one of a series on the subject-Newsletter #10

Strategy–A Way to Defeat Political Islam

Moral Purpose
Before we discuss strategy, we must declare our moral purpose. Our moral purpose is to defend the very existence of the culture of the Golden Rule, an ethical civilization, from the 1400-year assault by the dualistic ethics of political Islam. We must stop the continued killing of kafirs, the enslavement of humanity and the spread of terror by Islam.

The Situation
Islam represents 20% of the world’s population and is growing. Islam is united, has a vision, a strategy and successful tactics.

Political correctness and multi-culturalism rule our world. Our government will not help in this war and instead gives aid and comfort to the “minority” Muslims. Our government is staffed by multiculturalists who will give every edge to Muslims. Our schools have been occupied by the Muslim Brotherhood and the dhimmi leftist professors.

Kafirs are divided into Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist, conservative and liberal. Each of the divisions has further divisions. The relations between the groups is marked by historical rivalries and hatreds. No group comprehends the suffering of others at the hands of Islam. So not only do none of the victims know their own story, they do not know the story of the others.

The Muslims have a great momentum. They are taking over by birth and immigration. We have fewer children while Muslims have huge families. Osama bin Laden has 53 children. Demographic statistics show that France will become Islamic in the year 2020. Run the population numbers.

Islam knows us well. Islam knows our history, secret shame, rivalries and hatreds, weaknesses and divisions. Kafirs don’t know anything about Islam. We may fear and dislike it but that is just “feelings”, not knowledge. Our so-called experts (none of whom know the actual doctrine of political Islam) make apologies and tell us that all of Islam’s problems are caused by our poor governmental policies.

We are filled with cultural self-loathing, demoralized, fatalistic, nihilistic, too fat and too rich. (Wealthy people are weak at war, they have too much to protect.) We have lost the mind of war and feel that “peace” is the moral high ground. We are pacifists in the face of jihad. Our artists extol the virtues of peace with no knowledge about what happens when peaceful people are vanquished.

A Strategy for the Weak
At this stage of our intellectual and emotional development, our strategies are limited. We are too weak to attack Islam and need an opening strategy for now.

First, we must learn the doctrine of political Islam. We must know the enemy. We must also know who our allies are and who are the allies of Islam. We have two sets of enemies-the far enemy, Islam, and the near enemy-those who apologize for Islam, the dhimmis.

The thought of actually attacking Islam is too frightening at this stage of the game. However, we can make flanking attacks on our enemy’s allies, the apologists. Even dhimmis can think about attacking or pressuring the near enemy.

We can make a flanking attack on our enemy by attacking his strategies. We must expose Islam through its doctrine from the Koran, the Sunna (the Hadith and the Sira). According to Sun Tsu in The Art of War, attacking your enemy’s strategy is the highest level strategy. And Islam’s strategy is laid out in the Trilogy. We now have the weapons, the books exposing their strategy.

Another principle of Sun Tsu is to shape the enemy. Islam always poses as a religion to cloak their politics . It is useless to attack a religion, so Islamic politics are under the radar. We must shape Islam as a political doctrine. We must attack the far enemy-political Islam. This means that we attack Mohammed, not Allah.

So we have a slogan for our opening strategy:

Build community [this is the mission of ACT! for America]

Expose the far enemy [this is the mission of American Congress for Truth and part of the mission of ACT! for America]

Attack the near enemy [organize and mobilize through the local chapters]

Community [The objective of ACT! for America is an informed, organized and mobilized community]
We must form ourselves into a community. The term kafir civilization has been used in this work, but this is not an historic fact, it is just a concept. However, we must make ourselves conscious of who we are or we will lose.

When the Orthodox church in Bethlehem was destroyed by the Palestinian jihadists in 2002, no one protested. The American Christians did not protest, the Hindus did not protest, nor did the Jews protest, the TV/print media did not protest. But when a mosque in Iraq got hit by American fire, everyone knew it. All of Islam protested, along with their apologist allies. Moral: the Muslims are organized. Kafirs do not even know they who they are.

This must change. There are many ways for this to change, but one that we need is a Web network community-call it kafir Web community.

The kafir Web community must carry out the functions:

Web site community

We have hundreds of Web sites that speak out against Islam. Each stands alone. There is an informal group of people who may visit different sites and carry information from one site to the other, but each site is an island unto itself. Imagine that all of the anti-Islamic sites were members of a community site list-serve. In this way, Web site owners could communicate among themselves. This could serve two functions. One, we could mobilize, focus and coordinate tactics during special times such as the Mohammed cartoon attacks. Two, there are materials that it would be good for many to publish at the same time. For instance, if this pamphlet were to be spread by the site network to all the sites, then it could be read simultaneously across the globe. You get a much better strategic impact from speed and a broad front.

And who knows what else can happen as site owners communicate with each other?

Personal Community [ACT! for America chapter leaders and chapter activists]
At this time most people personally know only a few people from church or another social group who are working in some way against Islam. Even if you wanted to meet someone else from your town how would you do it? This is a geographic grouping. Another grouping could be writers, scholars, translators or jihad history buffs. We need a way to form special communities (actually the Web site community is a special case). We need to use the Web to form local communities.

The Swarm Community [ACT! for America members and our outreaches to other like-minded organizations]
We Kafirs usually act as individuals, but we must have ways to unite and attack as a pack or swarm. Islam does this with great effect. When they need e-mails or phone calls, they use the Islamic community, not individuals.

Swarm software would link a community of intellectual warriors with projects. As an example, a project could be to protest the way an event was portrayed in a newspaper. Let’s further assume that the event came from a news-wire and so is in many papers. We need a way for one writer to send a letter to all of those who need it.

Local Politics [ACT! for America chapters and their members engaging on a local and community level]
You live in a small town and wake up one day to find that Muslims, who moved here a few years ago, are pressuring and making demands to use the school for prayer during Ramadan. The ACLU howls if the Bible is taught in schools, but makes no protest about the Islamic school usage during Ramadan

Or: you live in a city and when reading the paper, watching TV or talking to a friend find out that Muslims are making demands that we change to accommodate Islam. You feel helpless and afraid. Everything about these events seem wrong, but no one in the media or government will even give guidance on how to protect our very civilization.

Multi-culturalism says that even wanting to preserve your culture is biased thinking. Political correctness says that any talk about Islam that is negative or judgemental is hate speech or racist.We really don’t even know exactly what it is we are losing, but we are losing. We are losing a war that is not allowed to be spoken of.

We must form a political community. We must have organizations that works at the pure grass-roots.First and foremost, we need ways to teach people what is going on. Islam will make demands on every area of our lives. Education, politics, customs, medicine, art, law, funding will all have demands and pressure to change to be more Islamic.

National Politics [ACT! for America having a congressional lobbyist backed by the national grassroots organization, which will effect change]
Saudia Arabia and other Islamic nations spend billions of dollars each year to spread Islam in the US. And what do we have to oppose this multi-billion dollar political organization with a 40-year head start? A few volunteers with no budget and no support. Who is going to win?

We must have national organizations that can support local politics. We must lobby about national issues such as immigration and the massive Federal welfare programs for Muslims.This means money. We must move from amateur status to professional status. We must also have state and local organizations that can deal with lobbying at the state and local level.

Click here to continue reading this article

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In yet another example of how school textbooks are painting a whitewashed, sanitized picture of Islam, the story below describes how a defender of this approach defines “jihad.”

Reza Aslan, a “religion scholar,” defines “jihad” as “to do one’s best to resist temptation and overcome evil.” She goes on to say, “how you interpret [jihad] is based on whatever your particular ideology, or world viewpoint, or even prejudice is.”

Indeed! And those like Aslan are doing everything they can to cover up how the holy books of Islam “interpret” jihad.

Here are just a few examples from one of the two most authoritative Hadith (Sahih Bukhari), the sayings and traditions of Mohammed. This Hadith is regarded as holy in Islam. Let’s see how Mohammed “interpreted” jihad.

• “The man who fights so that Islam should dominate is the man who fights for Allah’s cause.”
• “To battle non-Muslims in jihad for even one day is greater than the entire earth and everything on it.”
• “I have been directed to fight the non-Muslim until every one of them admits, ‘There is only one god and that is Allah.’”
• “Anyone who arms a jihadist is rewarded just as a fighter would be…”
• “If a man, motivated by belief in Allah and the promises Allah makes, gives a horse to be used for jihad, he will be rewarded on Judgment Day…”

Do these sound like exhortations to struggle against “temptation” to you?

Council: Montgomery schools cave to pressure with Islam book

Leah Fabel, The Examiner
2008-06-07 12:21:05.0
http://www.examiner.com/a-1429570~Council__Mongtomery_schools_cave_to_pressue_with_Islam_book.html

Washington, D.C. -

A new report issued by the American Textbook Council says books approved for use in local school districts for teaching middle and high school students about Islam caved in to political correctness and dumbed down the topic at a critical moment in its history.

“Textbook editors try to avoid any subject that could turn into a political grenade,” wrote Gilbert Sewall, director of the council, who railed against five popular history texts for “adjust[ing] the definition of jihad or sharia or remov[ing] these words from lessons to avoid inconvenient truths.”

Sewall complains the word jihad has gone through an “amazing cultural reorchestration” in textbooks, losing any connotation of violence. He cites Houghton Mifflin’s popular middle school text, “Across the Centuries,” which has been approved for use in Montgomery County Schools. It defines “jihad” as a struggle “to do one’s best to resist temptation and overcome evil.”

“But that is, literally, the translation of jihad,” said Reza Aslan, a religion scholar and acclaimed author of “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam.” Aslan explained that the definition does not preclude a militant interpretation.

“How you interpret [jihad] is based on whatever your particular ideology, or world viewpoint, or even prejudice is,” Aslan said. “But how you define jihad is set in stone.”

A statement from Montgomery County Public Schools said that all text used by teachers had been properly vetted and were appropriate for classroom uses.

Aslan said groups like Sewall’s are often more concerned about advancing their own interpretation of Islam than they are about defining its parts and then allowing interpretation to happen at the classroom level.

Sewall’s report blames publishing companies for allowing the influence of groups like the California-based Council on Islamic Education to serve throughout the editorial process as “screeners” for textbooks, softening or deleting potentially unflattering topics within the faith.

“Fundamentally I’m worried about dumbing down textbooks,” he said, “by groups that come to state education officials saying we want this and that - and publishers need to find a happy medium.”

Maryland state delegate Saqib Ali refrained from joining the fray. “The job of assigning curriculum is best left to educators and the school board, and I trust their judgment,” he said.