Moderate Muslims, we are told, consider jihad a personal struggle for spiritual purity.

Americans ignore the facts that over 100 references in the Koran refer to jihad as genocidal slaughter of unbelievers with only one quote referring to an internal struggle[1]. (Source: www.shoebat.com)

Muslim violence (jihad) supersedes peaceful contemplation in every country now ruled by Islam. Americans are too distracted, too comfortable, to pay attention while Islam gains a strategic foothold.

The American approach to Islam is a perfect example of inattentional blindness.[2]

Arien Mack and Irvin Rock, psychologists, first showed that people who were paying attention to something else in their line of sight were “blind” to something that was right before their eyes.

U. Neisser, D. Simons, and C. Chabris, experimented with viewers watching a film. Viewers were focused on counting how many times a basketball was passed from one team member to another, while someone walked through the scene wearing a gorilla suit.

A surprisingly large percentage of subjects did not notice something as obvious as a person in a gorilla suit moving through the scene they were observing, if they are paying attention to something else. (Several examples of these experiments can be viewed on the Visual Cognition Lab page of the University of Illinois.)

What does this mean for you?

Pay strict attention: your children’s lives depend upon your focused attention to discipline.

Consider your self discipline and their discipline plan.

While you are teaching your children Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, Muslim children learn lullabies and poems about flying body parts and rolling heads.

Here is an example:

“Sharpen my bones into swords, for I am a bomb, I shall eat the flesh of my (Israeli) occupier, O Killers, your blood is ‘Halal” for us, (meaning “kosher” or all right to spill)[3]

Oh, you say, “that’s not me. I’m aware of everything: I’m plugged into news 24/7. I know what is a threat to my family.”

Every country in history which has fallen has done so because of failure to perceive a threat.

Let’s look at some brief lessons in military history, you can research further through Wikipedia:

1. Carthage – fell after this city-state’s council failed to recognize the threat Rome posed. They allowed Hannibal’s victory over Rome to slip away simply by not reinforcing Hannibal when he had the upper hand.

2. Rome – many theories here, most show the failure to recognize a threat either from within or outside Rome itself.

3. Greece – the most famous lesson of recognizing a threat was told in the recently fictionalized movie 300. Recognizing the threat where his countrymen did not, Spartan King Leonidas led a personal bodyguard of 300 Spartans to hold a strategic thoroughfare named Thermopylae.

300 by Frank Miller, Lynn Varley Read more about this book…

4. Persia – failing to recognize Alexander the Great’s tactics as a threat the entire Persian empire was captured by this young Greek king.

Back to the present

“All four major Islamic schools of thought agree that jihad is not merely a personal struggle, but a call to wage war on the infidels by all means possible: giving money and recruiting and training people are also means of jihad.”[4]

It is not only your Christian faith at risk when you’re not looking. It is your life and the lives of your children.

Discipline is not just for kids. It is for you, the adult, first.

Do you “relax” for hours after work with flickering pictures and telephone chatter? Do you understand that you are being hypnotized into a passive, shallow thought pattern?

Print media requires more logic from you.  (See “Twilight of the Books, by Caleb Crain, The new Yorker, December 24 and 31, 2007)

Are you really going to study this, or will you dance past these issues into your chocolate paradise of brain fog?

Do you feel uncomfortable when someone needs to be confronted with facts? Like Pilate when he confronted Jesus, do you wonder, “What is truth?” Have you found ways to learn and grow smarter your whole life, or are you stuck in a high school low effort mentality?

Before you can discipline and teach your children, you must have a plan.  Stress Free Discipline provides a tots-to-teens plan for life skill mastery and lifelong family teamwork.

What’s a parent to do?

To begin:  I suggest you need to simplify your life and read more, with and for your children. Restrict the phone calls, the ipod, the wireless flood of distractions which pacify but do not satisfy your mind. See the tech junkie quiz at rd.com/tech.

Right now a flood of raw data makes you anxious because you cannot use it all or digest it, but you keep trying.  Distractions, as good as they may be, may be a real threat to your thought life.

Inattentional blindness can kill you.  Pay attention.  Read up.  Prioritize.

As manager of a senior apartment complex, I learned a lot about the pressures, perks and pitfalls of aging.

One resident, call her Mary, has focused for years on life according to her feelings. She dwells on her son’s murder, her husband’s infidelity, T.V. and slurs, imagined or real, on her heritage. The bipolar critic who lives downstairs has added to years of unforgiveness, swelling Mary’s bag of complaints. Mary drops that bag on anyone sympathetic enough to stay in range.

Victim-hood for Mary has become a comfortable cloak for reality.  For half of my 64 years I created my own reality like that.  It doesn’t work.  It is not real.

At U.C. Berkeley I majored in fiction and creative writing while getting my degree. Picture Berkeley in the 60’s: the Vietnam War, Student Rights, Free Speech, Kennedy’s assassination. To that heady brew I added Buddhism, self-hypnosis, automatic writing, Transcendental Meditation. Did you know that if you are adept at T.M. you can levitate?

My liberal friends and I felt that a group of loving people with our intelligence could resolve the world’s problems. Our parents had been too materialistic, unaware, uneducated. People were, after all, basically good.

It was only a matter of culture—American culture—that enslaved their spirits. Not a Christian at that time, I felt that Christianity was just a mythical crutch to make weak people feel better.

Generosity and service to others would shore up the life style and attitudes of those downtrodden unfortunates who were victimized by our culture.

Hiring quotas, pay equalization, more welfare and social engineering were our answers when my peers and I wore the power hat.

Teaching, my profession, progressed during the 19 years I was in it through a series of stages.

Grades were a problem.

The military and business worlds needed some useful kind of sorting device to categorize high school graduates so they could do their jobs: defend our country and raise the bottom line for shareholders. They needed some sort of predictability.

But grades were a big problem. Grades discriminated between educable mentally retarded and high level thinkers.

People FELT bad when they were labeled with a grade, and they aimed lower in life. They got depressed and discouraged.

Grades pounded the life out of a person’s self image and thus their future. No caring educator wants to do that.

Coursework and in-service education for teachers stressed solutions to self-worth problems in order to bring teachers into an enlightened interaction with students. Sarcasm, negative body language and other destructive baggage were rightfully removed from the student-teacher relationship.

However, drop-out rates, drug use and teen suicide kept climbing. It did not compute.

Schools were not making a positive difference.  More administrators were added in order to help teachers do their job. Curriculum gurus lowered P.E. requirements and dropped art, music and vocational education in favor of academics.

After all, academics were high status and status made students feel good. Everyone ought to be able to attend college, gaining high status and bigger pay, if they so desired. Even my remedial fisherman in Alaska, who could not grasp basic concepts of Senior Economics, had to be dragged through the course with incredible accommodations, hints and outright answers to every test question. The Special Education teacher saw to that.

Nobody was left out: an excellent fisherman had to get a diploma just like everyone else. His goal was to be an attorney. His true inability and our failure to be truthful doomed him to years of fruitless accommodation until the Bar Exam truthfully rejected him.  Did we do him a favor by eliminating realistic boundaries?

Reality and truth were not our objectives as educators.

Our questions given any choice were not “Is it true? Is it right?” but “Can we make it work? How will it feel?”  Feeling good about your self was the objective.

However, drop-out rates, drug use and teen suicide have kept climbing.

Our true levels of practical life skills such as Math, English, and Science have dropped dangerously in relation to students around the world at the same age and stage.

Our students cannot compete in a global marketplace where “feel good” has no place.  Furthermore, we now find that false self esteem is tied to school shootings (April 2001, Scientific American), low production and skyrocketing divorce.

America has done such a good job of shoring up self image that unrealistic expectations rule the home, schools and workplace. Feelings have gained control of thinking: they play ping-pong with the brain.

Mary was so disturbed by her feelings that she became more and more unhappy.  Finally her unhappiness threatened her ability to remain in an independent living apartment.  The “brain-pong” had to stop.  Mary accepted the county’s offer of counseling and has changed her attitude.

What Mary, educators and I did not realize was that feelings are the culprit.  Emotions in the driver’s seat cause life wreckage.  The brain-pong has to stop before the damage is permanent.

Christianity has become for me a standard for measuring truth about our selves.  We are born greedy and selfish, and only the Lord’s input can made us generous, unselfish and happy.  What do you know!

In giving, we receive.  In loving we become beloved.  In submission to Christ we become powerful.