Topic: WorldNetDaily
An April 15 WorldNetDaily article by Bob Unruh keeps up his tradition of smearing anyone who allegedly objects to homeschooling as Nazis by dropping references to Nazis and Hitler in asserting the purported motivations of German objections to homeschooling. For instance, Unruh describes "homeschool families under attack from a government that has held the activity illegal since before the Nazi juggernaut failed to conquer the world," later adding that "Adolf Hitler issue[d] the dictate when his government, in one of its first actions when he came to power, took control of all educational institutions and issues." Unruh seems to want to imply that the German government is a bunch of Nazis, a claim for which he has no actual evidence, since, as we've noted, he has never talked to anyone from the German government for any article -- or any source that wasn't pro-homeschooling, for that matter -- in his series on German homeschooling.
Unruh also includes a number of unverifed and unchallenged claims in his article, mostly made by Michael P. Farris, cofounder of the Home School Legal Defense Association and president of Patrick Henry College, a higher-education school for Christian homeschoolers. Unruh reports a claim, presumably from Faris, that one German family "s paying a fine each month for refusing to turn children over to a mandatory public school system that advocates alternative sexual lifestyle choices and promotes other beliefs objectionable to Christians." But neither Unruh nor Faris offer evidence that the curriculum the family is allegedly protesting "advocates alternative sexual lifestyle choices" -- a presumed code word for homosexuality. As we've also noted, discussion of homosexuality in schools does not equal "advocacy."
Unruh also claims that, according to Faris, "the largely Muslim Turkish population in Germany numbers in the millions, and members have not assimilated." He then quotes Faris saying, "What we were told was in many German cities the de facto legal authority is (Muslim religious) sharia law, not German law." Again, neither Unruh nor Faris offer any evidence to back up their claims.
Unruh's pro-homeschooling bias -- his own children are homeschooled -- is continuing to keep him from telling the full, fair and honest story about the German issue. And it's not as if the roughtly 30 years Unruh spent at the Associated Press before joining WND didn't teach him how to do that.
