Under The Hill

Robrief no. 1: Muslims Demand Gallaudet U to Accommodate Them!
Imagine… one day in the future, deaf Muslim students attending Gallaudet University would demand university administrators to accommodate them by arranging separate classrooms and dorms for young deaf male and female students and to establish class schedules centering around Muslims’ 5-time-a-day prayer sessions. That would be too bad for tenured professors with their preferred class schedules and non-Muslim students would be forced to miss extracurricular or sport activities due to Muslim-arranged timely class schedules. Well, maybe not.

But that is exactly what the Muslim students at the Australian universities are demanding for:

Muslim university students want lectures to be rescheduled to fit in with prayer timetables and separate male and female eating and recreational areas established on Australian campuses.

International Muslim students, predominantly from Saudi Arabia, have asked universities in Melbourne to change class times so they can attend congregational prayers. They also want a female-only area for Muslim students to eat and relax.

But at least one institution has rejected their demands, arguing that the university is secular and it does not want to set a precedent for requests granted in the name of religious beliefs.

La Trobe University International chief officer John Molony said several students had approached the Bundoora institution about rearranging class times to fit in with daily prayers.

If some of the Australian universities would give into these demands, it could unfortunately set a precedence for Western, secular, progressive-minded universities to give in likewise, perhaps in the name of progressive diversity and cultural harmony, however sadly deluded. When I was at Gallaudet in the early 1990s, I have never seen or know any deaf student of a certain religious background, let alone a religious group he or she belongs to, ever made any demands to the Gallaudet administrators to arrange class or dorm segregation on account of religious beliefs. Perhaps, few did made private requests without actually affecting or changing anything for the rest of the student body. Regardlessly, Gallaudet have a diverse body of students from different backgrounds, however, it should not restrict the university, in some fashions, in order to accommodate someone’s specific religious or cultural beliefs (beside Deaf culture, that is. ;))

For years, Gallaudet have international deaf/HOH students from all over the world, with different cultural and religious beliefs and that makes Gallaudet very unique in every respect. I’d befriended or gotten to know several IDS who came from Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia and India, Muslim, Jewish, Christian and Hindu. Quite an experience to know where they’re coming from.

The only reasons I “imagined” about deaf Muslim students attending Gallaudet in the future is one: based on a presumed demographic and population shift in the next several years for an increasingly globalized environment of higher learning in the United States, which meaning more foreign students from other countries coming to the United States for the universities than American students. That’s one of the few hidden reasons, as I’d deducted in the beginning of the 2006 Gallaudet protest, why I. King Jordan wanted Jane K. Fernandez to be the next president of Gallaudet: she was more willing to recruit and attract a greater number of deaf/HOH students from other countries and to make Gallaudet a more globalized center of higher learning under her leadership. More international deaf students to attend and study at Gallaudet and attracting foreign investments translate that into more revenues for Gallaudet in the long term. That being said, I can only assume that the current President Davila and the Gallaudet BoT are of that same philosophy as the former tag-teamers, the Jordan-Fernandez.

The second reason: there may be a growing number of young deaf or HOH Muslims from economic successful Islamic countries or wealthy Muslim families who can well afford to send their deaf children to Gallaudet University in the future. As this point, I have no real statistic data on the actual numbers of deaf population worldwide, especially from Islamic countries. There is one but much of its data is outdated.

I still believe that Gallaudet University should be an unique place of higher learning and enriching opportunities for all deaf/Deaf and HOH students from different upbringings all over and not expected to accommodate certain people of a certain religion so to make Gallaudet more favorably to them and dismiss the concerns of the rest.

Give them an inch, they take a mile to run roughshod over for the good of a religious cause.

Robrief no 2: The real good reasons why the uproar over Kosovo independence.
I will be blogging about the real good reasons why there are so much tensions over the independence declaration of Kosovo, the angry Serbian-Russian opposition to it and the American-European steadfastness for Kosovo. As soon as I complete my investigation, you will see it here soon, perhaps this week and Ridor, I’m smiling from ear to ear about it.

Robrief no 3: Saving the best for the last - Ohio and Texas, the decisive states for Obama & Clinton
Hillary Clinton is claiming that Texas will be her “Alamo” against the Obamation machine but it will be Ohio that would decide her fate as a Democratic candidate for President against Obama. Next week, March 4th for both major decisive states, overwhelming Democratic. Watch for it.

Robrief no. 4: Porn spammers resort to new nefarious trick: phished names of your friends or relatives!
Lately, I’ve been getting very few porn spam emails with the names of my friends in the “from” address header, like if my friends have sent porn spams to me. I was like WTF? I checked the raw source option to see where it is coming from, since I already know my friends’ actual email addresses. Guess what? There’s none. Just as I had suspected: porn spammers may have somehow phished my Yahoo! emails from me for my friends’ real names and used their names to create spam mails as if it is coming from them! Nefarious! Does anyone have this new evil kind of spam problem lately?