Latest news with #indoctrination
Daily Mail
6 days ago
- General
- Daily Mail
Two sisters, 19 and 21, arrested by terror police for running 'virtual jihadi academy' for young women from their bedrooms
Two sisters have been arrested in Spain for allegedly running an online 'Jihadi academy' aimed at recruiting and training young female extremists. Police arrested the suspects on Monday in Alcorcon, south-west Madrid, in the home that they shared on charges of terrorist indoctrination. Cops also seized their computers, which are currently being analysed by terrorism experts. The women, aged 19 and 21, are believed to have run a virtual platform, that under the guise of providing religious teachings to Muslim women, actually operated as a 'jihad academy' that actively sought to recruit and indoctrinate members. Spain's Home Office said in a statement that the women had 'created a complex social engineering structure, where under the pretext of teaching religion, they indoctrinated other Muslim faithful. 'This virtual platform, which operated similarly to a jihad academy, primarily targeted the indoctrination of women.' Police began investigating the sisters last year after counterterrorism experts identified social media profiles managed by the siblings that shared radical and violent content linked to terror group Daesh. One of them pledged to 'wage Jihad' and even praised a violent attack on six women in the Barcelona underground last year. The young women are also said to have used encrypted messages to hide their digital footprint. One of the sisters has been remanded in custody while the other has been released on precautionary measures. Police have not ruled out further suspects. Their arrests come months after Spanish police arrested seven people, including four suspected 'jihadist influencers,' for alleged links to Islamist terrorism. The arrests were made in Madrid and Toledo, which is an hour's drive from the Spanish capital. Another arrest was made in Pontevedra in north-western Spain. They were accused of hiding their radicalism behind videos about physical training and self-defence, as well as ISIS material. One of the accused is believed to have a 'significant influence and accessibility... to disseminate jihadist ideology.' The arrests of the sisters in Madrid also comes months after ISIS families living in Syria's largest refugee camp declared the terror group is 'ready to rise again'. Since the jihadist organisation lost its final stronghold in Syria in 2019, tens of thousands of ISIS fighters and their families have been held in prisons and refugee camps in Rojava - the Kurdish-led autonomous region in northeast Syria. Now, the instability following the toppling of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) has created fertile ground for a horrifying ISIS resurgence. Back in February, military officials in Rojava told MailOnline that ongoing clashes between Rojava's Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and Turkish-backed militias may force camp guards to abandon their posts and head to the frontlines. If this happens, security at the camp could collapse and Islamic State could stage a breakout.
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion - Trump can't stop schools from teaching the truth
The Trump administration is seeking to replace education with indoctrination in America's K-12 public schools, demanding schools paint a fairy tale picture of the American story that focuses only on the good while ignoring the bad and the ugly. We owe our children better. Alarmingly, the administration wants to withhold billions of dollars in federal aid to schools unless they bow to its dictatorial demands. An executive order signed by President Trump, titled 'Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,' says that schools must instill in students 'a patriotic admiration for our incredible nation and the values for which we stand.' It denounces schools that teach 'anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies.' The order gives the federal government dangerously wide latitude to censor what it considers impermissible educational content. Another Trump executive order on schools denounces 'gender ideology' and 'the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa.' It is being used by the Trump administration to demand that transgender students be barred from athletic teams and restrooms that align with their gender identity. In addition, a memo sent by the U.S. Education Department to state education officials in April threatened to cut off federal aid to public schools unless the schools end their diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI programs, which the memo claimed are illegal even though no court has issued such a ruling. Republicans have long called for greater local and state control of public schools, and Trump signed an executive order in March claiming to 'return authority over education to the states and local communities.' But the Trump administration is acting like a national school board, seeking to exercise unprecedented control over how and what students are taught in an effort to sweep our nation's flaws under the rug. Fortunately, three federal judges have ruled separately that the Education Department cannot block aid to schools, rulings the department is expected to appeal. Teachers unions, civil rights groups and 19 Democratic state attorneys general have all filed lawsuits seeking to stop the aid cuts. Ironically, while denouncing indoctrination by the left, the Trump administration seeks to subject students to its own right-wing indoctrination, filled with false claims about an America without flaws — an America that has never existed. This propaganda amounts to educational child abuse and malpractice. Reality can be disturbing. But schools need to teach students about the world as it really is, giving them a truthful accounting of the past and present to enable them to recognize the challenges America faces and learn from injustices and mistakes 'in order to form a more perfect union,' as the Constitution puts it. Even our founders knew this union called America was flawed because it was formed by flawed men. It is simply dishonest to whitewash America's flaws, including slavery, the seizure of land from Native Americans, systemic racism and sexism, religious bigotry and anti-gay and anti-transgender bias. It is also dishonest to claim we live in a colorblind society where all forms of prejudice have disappeared and to deny that centuries of inequality still hold back marginalized groups. It is equally false to claim that efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in workplaces and schools are an illegal racist attack on white Americans, as President Trump has repeatedly charged. DEI programs do not tear anyone down — they simply open the door to the American Dream a little wider for groups shut out in the past and enable additional qualified people to compete for open positions. It is a blatant falsehood, perpetrated by those who claim to want to make our country 'great again,' that DEI requires employers to hire unqualified people of color and women. Germany and South Africa offer valuable lessons on teaching students ugly historical truths. Rather than trying to cover up or distort the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, German schools are required to teach students an accurate account of this horror. Similarly, South Africa requires schools to teach how European colonialists enslaved Black people there between 1652 and 1834 and how the white minority continued to oppress Blacks and deprive them of most human rights until the racist apartheid regime was replaced by democratic rule in 1994. Some Nazi death camps and South African prisons have been preserved as museums, so that their existence will never be forgotten. Educating young people about these atrocities is vital, because as philosopher George Santayana wrote in 1905: 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' We send our kids to school to be educated — not to be brainwashed with false and misleading lessons. Dictatorships like Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and Cuba infuse education with propaganda and indoctrination in schools, censoring content the government dislikes, limiting academic freedom and promoting a favored ideology. America should never emulate these totalitarian states. The truth is not a partisan issue. No presidential administration should try to put a political spin on the way schools instruct students about our history and about life today. If the Republican-controlled Congress will not halt the Trump administration's efforts to cut funding to schools that refuse to substitute propaganda for education, the courts should and probably will do so. A. Scott Bolden is an attorney, NewsNation contributor and former chair of the Washington, D.C. Democratic Party. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
