Tag Archives: Brainwashing

N.K. defector warns ‘Freedom is Not Guaranteed’ pervasive censorship is a warning

Galatians 4:16 “Have I then become your enemy by telling you the truth?”

Important Takeaways:

  • Survivor of Terrifying Escape From N. Korea Is Warning of ‘Brainwashing’ She Sees in America: ‘Freedom is Not Guaranteed’
  • Yeonmi Park is warning there’s a “brainwashing” unfolding in America, citing pervasive censorship
  • “I get censored on YouTube and Twitter because I talk about China,” she said. “Never in my life I thought in America I had to fight for freedom of speech. Even in America, the freedom is not guaranteed, and it’s slipping away every single day.”
  • “South Korea was the poorest country when they adopted the U.S. democratic system,” she said before differentiating between the Koreas we see today. “One is the 11th largest economy in the world, and the other country [does] not have electricity in the 21st century. Same potential. Same history. Same people under two different systems. One is communism; one is capitalism.”

Read the original article by clicking here.

Hong Kong to teach children as young as six about subversion, foreign interference

By Pak Yiu and Sarah Wu

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Hong Kong has unveiled controversial guidelines for schools in the Chinese-ruled city that include teaching students as young as six about colluding with foreign forces and subversion as part of a new national security curriculum.

Beijing imposed a security law on Hong Kong in June 2020 in response to months of often violent anti-government and anti-China protests in 2019 that put the global financial hub more firmly on an authoritarian path.

The Education Bureau’s guidelines, released late on Thursday, show that Beijing’s plans for the semi-autonomous Hong Kong go beyond quashing dissent, and aim for a societal overhaul to bring its most restive city more in line with the Communist Party-ruled mainland.

“National security is of great importance. Teachers should not treat it as if it is a controversial issue for discussion as usual,” the guidelines said.

Teachers should “clearly point out that safeguarding national security is the responsibility of all nationals and that as far as national security is concerned, there is no room for debate or compromise”.

After the 2019 protests in which many of the demonstrators were teenagers, Chinese leaders turned to re-education in a bid to tame the city’s youth and make them loyal citizens.

Head of the Professional Teachers’ Union, Ip Kin-yuen, said the guidelines would cause “uncertainty, ambiguity and anxiety” for teachers and enforce a “restrictive and suppressive” education style that does not foster student development and independent thinking.

Raymond Yeung, a former teacher partially blinded by a projectile during 2019 protests, described the guidelines as “one dimensional, if not brainwashing”.

Wong, mother of primary school children, said the law was “clamping down on people’s individual thoughts” and adding national security to the curricula created a climate of fear.

“I am angry. They shouldn’t be bringing this into classrooms,” said Wong, who declined to give her first name due to the sensitivity of the issue.

However, not all parents were opposed to the changes.

“It’s a good start, no matter who you are and where are you from, you have to love your country,” said Feng, mother of a six-year-old.

‘WISE OWL’

Children in primary schools will learn how to sing and respect China’s national anthem, and gain an understanding of the four main offences in the new security law, including terrorism and secessionism.

In secondary schools, pupils will learn what constitutes such offences, which can carry sentences of up to life in prison.

Some legal scholars have said the law’s language is broad and vague, and the range of activities authorities might see as potential threats to national security was unclear and fluid.

An educational cartoon video released by the government shows an owl wearing glasses and a graduation hat explaining Hong Kong’s institutional architecture, its duties to the central government in Beijing and the national security law.

At one point the video says “national security affairs are of utmost importance to the whole country,” while showing smiling faces of a student, a chef and an engineer.

Schools are encouraged to “organize various game activities, such as puppet theatre, board games … to establish a good atmosphere and improve students’ understanding of national security”, according to the guidelines.

The guidelines said kindergartens can help students learn about traditional festivals, music and arts and develop fondness for Chinese customs to “lay the foundation for national security education.” Kindergarten children were not expected to learn about national security crimes.

The Education Bureau said it accepted international and private schools had different curricula, but said they had a “responsibility to help their students (regardless of their ethnicity and nationality) acquire a correct and objective understanding … of national security”.

Schools should also stop students and teachers from participating in activities deemed as political, such as singing certain songs, wearing various items, forming human chains or shouting slogans.

Teachers and principals are required to inspect notice-boards, remove books that endanger national security from libraries and call police if they suspected any breaches.

The bureau said national security education will become part of subjects such as geography and biology to enhance students’ sense of national identity.

(Reporting by Hong Kong newsroom and Sarah Wu in Toronto; Writing by Marius Zaharia; Editing by Richard Pullin, Raju Gopalakrishnan and Michael Perry)

In Mosul orphanage, Islamic State groomed child soldiers

Math and English textbooks found in Islamic State facility that trained children

By Stephen Kalin

MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) – When the boys first arrived at the Islamic State training facility in eastern Mosul they would cry and ask about their parents, who went missing when the militants rampaged through northern Iraq in 2014.

But as the weeks passed they appeared to absorb the group’s ultra-hardline ideology, according to a worker at the former orphanage where they were housed.

The children, aged from three to 16 and mostly Shi’ite Muslims or minority Yazidis, began referring to their own families as apostates after they were schooled in Sunni Islam by the militant fighters, he said.

The boys were separated from the girls and infants, undergoing indoctrination and training to become “cubs of the caliphate – a network of child informers and fighters used by the jihadists to support their military operations.

The complex in Mosul’s Zuhur district, which had been home to local orphans until they were kicked out by Islamic State, was one of several sites the jihadists used across the city.

It is now shuttered, its doors sealed with padlocks by Iraqi security forces.

Islamic State withdrew before Iraqi forces launched a U.S.-backed offensive in October to retake the city, but during a Reuters visit last month there were still reminders of the group’s attempt to brainwash dozens of children.

A saying attributed to the Prophet Mohammed is painted in black on one wall, urging children to learn to swim, shoot and ride horses. Inside the building is a swimming pool, now dry and full of rubbish.

‘A’ FOR APPLE, ‘B’ FOR BOMB

In another room sits a stack of textbooks Islamic State had amended to fit its brutal ethos.

Arithmetic problems in a fourth grade maths book use imagery of warfare, while the cover bears a rifle made up of equations. History books focus exclusively on the early years of Islam and emphasize martial events.

Another textbook entitled “English for the Islamic State” includes ordinary words like apple and ant beside army, bomb and sniper. Martyr, spy and mortar also appear alongside zebra crossing, yawn, and X-box.

The word “woman” is depicted by a formless black figure wearing the full niqab covering. All faces in the books – even those of animals – are blurred, in keeping with an Islamic proscription against such images.

The orphanage worker, who was cowed into staying on after the militants took over in 2014, said girls who were brought to the center were often married off to the group’s commanders.

The man asked not to be named for fear of reprisals by Islamic State, which still controls the entire western half of Mosul. He was shot in the leg during recent clashes.

He said the militants, mostly Iraqis, taught the Shi’ite children how to pray in the tradition of Sunni Islam and forced the Yazidis to convert.

They memorized the Koran, were taught to treat outsiders as infidels and conducted physical exercise in the yard, which has since grown over.

OLD ENOUGH TO FIGHT

A pair of colorful plastic slides and swing sets now sit untouched amid shattered glass, casings from a grenade launcher and a suicide bomber’s charred remains – signs of the militants’ fierce resistance as they retreated late last year.

Reuters could not independently verify the orphanage worker’s comments. But local residents gave similar accounts, and Islamic State has published numerous videos showing how it trains young fighters and even makes them execute prisoners.

New batches of children arrived at the Zuhur orphanage every few weeks from outside Mosul, including a few from neighboring Syria, while older boys were sent to the town of Tel Afar west of Mosul for intensive military training for duties including with Islamic State’s courts or vice squad, residents said.

“After six months at the camps, some of the boys came back to spend a weekend with their younger brothers. They were wearing uniforms and carrying weapons,” the orphanage worker said, fingering black and yellow prayer beads.

One of the boys, Mohammed, was killed last summer during the battle in the city of Falluja, west of Baghdad, he said, recounting how the other children wept upon learning the news.

A few weeks before the Mosul offensive began, Islamic State canceled lessons and sent the boys to guard an airfield near Tel Afar which pro-government forces later seized, he said.

“I told them, ‘If you see the army, drop your weapons and tell them you are orphans. Maybe they will spare your lives'”.

(Editing by Dominic Evans)

Iraqi judo coach saved his black belt when Islamic State stormed Mosul club

Displaced Iraqi boys leave a tent school set by United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) at Hassan Sham camp, east of Mosul, Iraq

y Ulf Laessing

GOGJALI, Iraq (Reuters) – His black belt and membership card were all that Iraqi judo coach Ali Mahmoud managed to save when Islamic State stormed his club in Mosul, turning the gym into an arms training camp for fighters.

A veteran judoka practising the modern martial art since the age of five, Mahmoud saw his career as coach ending when the militants banned judo as “un-Islamic” after they seized Iraq’s the city in June 2014.

As the 39-year-old arrived one night at his Karama club in the Samah district to train for a tournament in Georgia, the fighters seized the gym.

“Daesh (Islamic State) accused me of training police and soldiers to fight them,” said Mahmoud, who has fled the city since Iraqi forces launched a campaign in October to retake it.

“They saw me as enemy,” he said, showing his membership card from the Iraqi judo federation licensing him as coach in the northern city. He once won a national championship in his age group in 2012, he said.

To keep in shape Mahmoud tried discreetly exercising in public parks at night but gave up after a patrol of the Hisbah — the militants’ religious police enforcing their extreme rules such as flogging people caught smoking — stopped him.

“I was only doing simple workouts but they warned me to stop, saying what I was doing was wrong,” he said, standing at a market in the Gogjali suburb where he fled with his family when fighting reached his neighborhood.

“With one of my sons I was working out sometimes at home but I never invited anyone as it was too dangerous,” said Mahmoud who lost contact with his former judo mates during the two and a half years of Islamic State control.

“Some got killed, others fled,” he said. “Daesh (later) destroyed the club, looted everything.”

His account could not be verified as Samah remains a battle zone but several residents said Mosul sports clubs closed under Islamic State which seized such facilities to give young people weapons training.

Most youth gave up any activity — even street soccer — as parents fearing trouble kept them indoors. There were some limited exercises at schools run by Islamic State by many parents pulled them out worried they got brainwashed.

“I removed my four children from school after one year as they got trained in weapons and were taught wrong ideas,” said Walid Ahmed, a teacher. “So they stayed at home all the time.”

To get teenagers back to education and sports the United Nations has set up tent schools in camps for displaced people — dozens were dancing and singing at the Khazir camp east of Mosul.

“Daesh taught us things at school like counting bullets they were holding in their hands,” said Ahmed’s veiled daughter Marwa.

(Reporting by Ulf Laessing; Editing by Jermey Gaunt)

Kidnapped Girls Forced To Fight For Boko Haram

The BBC has reported some of the Chibok girls kidnapped in Nigeria are being forced to fight by the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram.

The broadcaster reported that Amnesty International said they were aware of 219 of the still missing girls who have been forced into fighting with the terrorists.

“The abduction and brutalisation of young women and girls seems to be part of the modus operandi of Boko Haram,” Netsanet Belay of Amnesty said.

A girl who escaped the terrorists told the BBC that Boko Haram would kill Christians in front of them as a way to cause fear in the girls.  The girl said that when she refused to marry a terrorist, they killed the men.

‘They were Christian men. They [the Boko Haram fighters] forced the Christians to lie down. Then the girls cut their throats’, the unidentified teen told the BBC.

“(The girls) told us: ‘You women should learn from your husbands because they are giving their blood for the cause. We must also go to war for Allah.’’

Reports last week say that two teenage girls who were forced to commit suicide bombing attacks in Nigeria were Chibok girls captured by Boko Haram.

ISIS Kidnaps 500 Children

Islamic terrorist group ISIS has kidnapped 500 children and Iraqi officials are concerned they’re being trained to be suicide bombers.

Farhan Mohammed of Anbar’s Provincial Council told reporters that ISIS was able to kidnap over 400 children from their region in less than a week.

“Daesh [Arabic acronym for ISIS] has kidnapped at least 400 children in the western province of Anbar and taken them to their bases in Iraq and Syria,” Mohammed was quoted as saying by the Christian Post.

The terrorists also kidnapped 120 children from schools in the northern part of Nineveh province.

ISIS has been releasing videos to social media showing children who are being indoctrinated by the terrorists.  They call their camps training for “cubs of the caliphate.”   The Iraqi Human Rights Commission estimates that 1,000 children have been trained by the terrorist group.

“They use children because it is easy to brainwash them,” Rami Abdulrahman, the head of the Syrian Observatory, told Reuters. “They can build these children into what they want. They stop them from going to school and send them to IS schools instead.”

Nigeria Army Rescues 234 More Female Captives

The Nigerian Army’s successes against the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram continued this weekend with the rescue of more captured women.

Military officials say that 234 more women and girls were taken from a Boko Haram stronghold in the Sambia Forest.  The total number of women and children rescued in the last week from the terrorists reached 527.

The girls and women are being given counseling to help them with the brainwashing attempts of the terrorists.  Some of the women actually fired on the troops, leading officials to say that after forced marriages and long captivity, some of the women have been successfully convinced they are part of the terror network.

The military was unable to say if any of the captives were part of the 200 schoolgirls taken from Chibok that led to the #BringBackOurGirls campaign.   The leader of Boko Haram had said those girls would be sold to other members of Boko Haram.

“I abducted your girls,” Shekau said in a 57-minute video earlier. “I abducted a girl at a western education school and you are disturbed. I said western education should end. Western education should end. Girls, you should go and get married. I will repeat this: western education should fold up. I abducted your girls. I will sell them in the market, by Allah. I will marry off a woman at the age of 12. I will marry off a girl at the age of nine.”