A backlash against American Muslims is leaving a mark on some of the nation's youngest minds.

After seeing presidential candidate Donald Trump call on television for barring Muslims from entering the country, 8-year-old Sofia Yassini checked the locks on her family's home in Plano, Texas, imagining the Army would take them away. She raced to her room and stuffed a pair of Barbie dolls, a tub of peanut butter and a toothbrush into a bag. She insisted on bringing boots for the long boat ride she imagined was coming.

When her mother, Melissa, arrived home from her work as a human resources manager, Sofia ran into her arms and cried.

"I want people to understand the impact that their words have on these children," said Melissa Yassini, who described the experience in a Facebook post that had been shared more than 21,000 times as of Monday. "We often forget, we're waging war on one another with words, and we're adults. We can take it. The kids are suffering with this. They go to school every day and they're afraid to tell people they're Muslim. This has to stop."

Anti-Muslim sentiment was building in the days before 14 people were killed Dec. 2 in the massacre at a disability center in Southern California by a Muslim couple investigators say were inspired at least in part by the Islamic State group. Some governors had already said they wouldn't allow Syrians fleeing civil war into their states because of extremist fears. Experts say Trump's call Dec. 7 to keep all Muslims from entering the United States — a plan he said would apply only temporarily and to non-citizens — only fanned the flames.

Parents say their children hear disparaging remarks in their own communities, see hateful bumper stickers and T-shirts, and have had friends abandon them because of their faith.

Ahad Khan, 12, came home from school in rural Westminster, Maryland, in tears because his best friend called him a future terrorist who couldn't be trusted, according to Ahad's father, Raza Khan.

Khan, the chairman of the science department at Carroll Community College, shared Ahad's experience in an open letter to Trump on Facebook. As of Monday, it had been shared more than 4,300 times.

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Sofia Yassini, 8, right, gets a hug from her mother Melissa Yassini after posing for a photo outside …

"He is the engine right now for that fearmongering," Khan said in an interview. "I don't think he realizes that his words matter. He doesn't realize the damaging effect his words can have on people, especially kids."

In the minds of children — many long on imagination and short on political understanding — phrases like "total and complete shutdown of Muslims" can be traumatic, experts say.

"Children expect that society will be nurturing and protective," said Mark DeAntonio, a child psychiatry professor at the University of California Los Angeles. "Statements implying detainment or exclusion for arbitrary reason like race ethnicity or religion create anxiety and trauma."

Some children have questioned their faith and place in American society.

Kafumba Kromah, of Minneapolis, said his 8-year-old daughter asked him: "Why we are Muslims? Why can't we be what everybody else is?" His daughter encouraged him to cancel a trip to his native Liberia for fear he would be barred from returning.

Mehnaz Mahmood, of Dallas, said her 7-year-old son urged her to switch to a black-and-white hijab — so she would look more like a nun — after they were subjected to anti-Muslim remarks outside his school this week.

Sam Madi, of New Orleans, watched coverage of Trump's remarks with his 11-year-old son. He said he feared anti-Muslim sentiment would set back progress in integrating Muslims into American society. Zane Madi plays soccer and spends most weekends with his mother helping the city's homeless.

"We're not prepared for this," said Madi, whose father fled Iraq in the 1970s. "We're not prepared to sit and educate our children why they're not any different from anybody else. I don't think any parent is prepared for that. I don't care what religion you believe or don't believe."

Parents needn't shoulder the burden themselves, said Patricia Greenfield, a psychology professor at UCLA. Teachers should talk about not generalizing Muslims and ask children to reinforce their friendships with Muslim students, she said in an email.

As Khan, the father in Maryland, tucked his son in last week, he left him with the words he recited when he became a U.S. citizen two decades ago: "One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

"I don't know why, I don't know how people forget that," Khan said later, fighting back tears. "We have to; otherwise we're dividing ourselves."

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Sisak reported from Philadelphia. Reach Mike Sisak on Twitter @mikesisak. See some of his work at http://bigstory.ap.org/journalist/michael-r-sisak .

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This story has been updated to delete an incorrect reference to investigators saying the couple in the San Bernardino shooting had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group; only one of the couple is believed to have done so. This story has also been updated to correct the first name of Raza Khan's son to Ahad, not Ahed.

(NaturalNews) The brain-dead leftist media isn't really in the news business anymore. It's actually in the business of zombie control... with the zombies being, of course, the leftist libtard obedient propaganda swallowers who are easily fooled by sleight-of-hand trickery being paraded as science. (Then again, there are also CONtards on the right who are easily fooled by fraudulent "GMO science," so the criticism deserves to be equally distributed across the political establishment...)

If you've ever has the misfortune of listening to the libtard leftist media, you've probably heard the claim -- repeated like a mantra chant to Gaia -- that "97% of scientists believe in man-made climate change" (or some similar paraphrased version of this fraudulent claim).

Fortunately, there's a book by Mark Steyn that helps sort out the truth from the fiction. It's called A Disgrace to the Profession and features short essays and articles by scientists who speak out against the global warming / climate change hoax being perpetrated on the world.

What follows is the shocking explanation behind the so-called "97% consensus" statistic being spouted everywhere by libtards and libtard scientists (and yes, the term "libtard" is intended to be offensive... especially to libtards...).

The 97% consensus claim is total science FRAUD based on selective editing of the survey data

From "A Disgrace to the Profession":

An opinion survey of earth scientists on global climate change was conducted by Margaret R K Zimmerman, MS, and published by the University of Illinois in 2008.

Aside from his support from Dr Pantsdoumi, Mann often claims the imprimatur of “settled science”: 97 per cent of the world’s scientists supposedly believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming requiring massive government intervention. That percentage derives from a survey conducted for a thesis by M R K Zimmerman.

The “survey” was a two-question, online questionnaire sent to 10,257 earth scientists, of whom 3,146 responded.

Of the responding scientists, 96.2 per cent came from North America.

Only 6.2 per cent came from Canada. So the United States is overrepresented even within that North American sample.

Nine per cent of US respondents are from California. So California is overrepresented within not just the US sample: it has over twice as large a share of the sample as Europe, Asia, Australia, the Pacific, Latin America and Africa combined.

Of the ten per cent of non-US respondents, Canada has 62 per cent.

Not content with such a distorted sample, the researchers then selected 79 of their sample and declared them “experts."

Of those 79 scientists, two were excluded from a second supplementary question. So 75 out of 77 made it through to the final round, and 97.4 per cent were found to agree with “the consensus”. That’s where the 97 per cent comes from.

So this is a very Michael Mann “reconstruction”: just as a couple of Californian bristlecones can determine the climate for a millennium, so a couple of dozen Californian scientists can determine the consensus of the world.

Nonetheless, the compilers also invited comments from respondents and published them in the appendices. In terms of specific scientific material, the hockey stick attracted three comments - one blandly positive, the other two not so much.

Wow, you mean the 97% consensus number comes from just 75 scientists that were hand-picked from an email survey?

Yep. Out of all the hundreds of thousands of scientists in the world, only 75 of them were selected to "count" for the climate change survey.

Not quite the "settled science" you've been told, is it?

So if I send out an email survey to 1000 people, and then I hand-pick the 75 responses I like the best, then can I proclaim those results to be "settled science" too? Will Al Gore champion my cause and demand billions in reparations from first world nations on my behalf?

Of course not. The very idea is total fraud. Yet this is the science fraud upon which the entire mainstream media and government climate frenzy is based.

It's all just climate quackery.

Learn more at ClimateDepot.com. And monitor all the real-time breaking news on global warming and climate change at these FETCH.news websites:


ClimateScienceNews.com

Alex Pietrowski, Staff
Waking Times

The court of appeals in Lyon, France, has found agribusiness giant Monsanto guilty of poisoning a man named Paul François. François is a farmer who claimed that he suffered a multitude of ailments, including headaches, memory loss, neurological problems and stammering, after he unintentionally inhaled Monsanto’s herbicide, Lasso.

François used Lasso for over 15 years, and in 2004 accidentally inhaled the product. After the incident, the farmer began getting severe headaches and experienced moments of mental absence and an inability to speak.

The chemical’s effects on François were so severe that he fainted, was hospitalized and fell into a coma. François was diagnosed with monochlorobenzene poisoning by his doctors, who found that the chemical permanently damaged his brain. Monochlorobenzene makes up 50% of the herbicide Lasso.

It is worth noting that the herbicide was prohibited in France and the rest of the European Union in 2007, and at the time of the incident, it was already banned in Canada (since 1985), Great Britain and Belgium (since 1992).

During the court hearing, Monsanto’s attorneys repeatedly claimed that the herbicide Lasso was not dangerous. François claimed that the company was aware of the toxic nature of the herbicide but failed to adequately warn about the potential health risks.

AUSTIN, Texas (CN) – Austin, Texas is the latest city to face a federal class action lawsuit accusing it of re-instituting debtors’ prisons by jailing people who are too poor to pay fines for traffic tickets and petty misdemeanors.

Such lawsuits have mushroomed in the past year, in the aftermath of the protests of the white-on-black police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Ferguson and several neighboring cities were accused of targeting black drivers for traffic stops, and jailing them, and “debtors’ prisons” lawsuits have sprouted all over the United States. They typically challenge the constitutionality of a local jurisdiction’s practice of jailing people who cannot afford to pay fines for petty offenses, and attribute it in part to racial discrimination.

Such lawsuits have been filed against Georgia; New Orleans; San Francisco ; Benton County, Wash.; Alexander City, Ala.; Douglas County, (Omaha) Neb.; and Jennings, Mo., a neighbor of Ferguson. Ferguson agreed to stop doing it after receiving a scorching report from the Department of Justice.

In the Austin lawsuit, lead plaintiffs Valerie Gonzales and Maria Salazar say Austin violated their rights to counsel, due process, and equal protection.

Debtors’ prisons “create a racially skewed, two-tiered system of justice in which the poor receive harsher, longer punishments for committing the same crimes as the rich, simply because they are poor,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which has taken on such cases elsewhere.

Lead plaintiff Gonzales says the Austin Municipal Court jailed her in August because she failed to pay traffic tickets accumulated over nine years. Gonzales, who takes care of five disabled children, was unemployed when she was arrested and living near the federal poverty line.

Gonzales says she and her husband could not afford to pay the tickets because of their modest income and the costs of feeding and sheltering their family. She acknowledges she drove without a license, and received tickets for it, but says the reason she could not obtain a valid license was that she could not afford to pay her traffic tickets.

Once she was arrested at the scene of a car accident due to outstanding warrants for unpaid tickets.

“At the jail, the officers treated her as they would treat a dangerous mentally ill person because she was crying as a result of the car accident,” the complaint states. “They handcuffed her, stripped her naked, forced her to wear a mask over her face, and locked her alone in an observation cell. After about thirty minutes, one guard concluded that this harsh treatment was unnecessary. Officers then allowed Ms. Gonzales to dress and took her to a hospital to be checked for injuries from the car accident. After Ms. Gonzales returned from the hospital, she waited more than twelve hours to see an Austin Municipal Court judge.”

But the judge was not sympathetic, and told her she would go to jail if she could not pay $1,000 that day. The judge did not ask about her ability to pay or her ability to complete community service, and did not consider reducing the debts, the complaint states.

Nor, she says, did the court inquire about her ability to afford an attorney, take any steps to appoint one for her, or obtain a waiver of her right to counsel. She says she had no attorney when she entered pleas on her underlying traffic tickets.

Gonzales was in jail for two days before she was able to find pro bono attorneys, who said she was being unconstitutionally incarcerated and should be released. The court subsequently found Gonzales to be indigent and agreed to release her with credit for jail time and said she could work off the remaining debt by completing 395 hours of community service.

But Gonzales says she had just started a new job, could not afford to pay her court debt and that it would be a hardship for her to perform the community service. The court told her if she did not perform 18 hours of community service per month, a warrant would be issued for her arrest.

Plaintiff Salazar tells a similar story to that of Gonzales. Salazar, who is pregnant and the sole caretaker for six children, has no job and receives public assistance for housing, food stamps, and Medicaid. Her household income is near the federal poverty line.

Salazar says she received a multitude of tickets from Austin over an 11-year span. The tickets include six for speeding and eight for offenses resulting from poverty. Like Gonzales, Salazar repeatedly was ticketed for driving without a license and car insurance, and says she was unable to obtain a license or insurance unless she paid off all of her traffic tickets.

After police arrested her on outstanding warrants from her unpaid tickets, the municipal court judge ordered her to perform 336 hours of community service to satisfy the debt. She says that is difficult, due to her pregnancy and childcare responsibilities.

And, as in Gonzales’s case, her judge did not ask about her ability to pay, her ability to complete community service, her ability to obtain counsel, nor did the judge appoint counsel or her or consider reducing her debts. She too says she had no attorney when she entered pleas on her traffic tickets, and that she never waived her right to counsel.

Salazar says she is at risk of being jailed again.

The women say the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Constitution protect people who are prosecuted for petty crimes, including Class C misdemeanors.

“The Due Process Clause requires courts to hold an ability to pay hearing before jailing a poor person for failure to pay a criminal judgment debt. … The court must inquire into the reason the person failed to pay and consider alternatives to jail, such as tailoring the debt to the person’s resources,” complaint states.

The women say the Austin Municipal Court has a policy of fines and fees that can cause the costs of a simple ticket to increase dramatically.

For instance, the court has a $25 per ticket fee when a person wants to set up a payment plan. So a person with three tickets would pay an extra $75 to gain more time to pay a debt that he or she is too poor to pay up front.

The court also imposes a $50 “capias pro fine” for an arrest warrant when a person misses a deadline to make payments or perform community service. The women say the court has a policy of demanding on-the-spot payments to clear such warrants.

The myriad fees and fines can cause a single traffic ticket for failure to signal a lane change to rise from $66 to more than $500, according to the complaint.

“Class C prosecutions in Austin Municipal Court trap people who are too poor to pay in an endless cycle of accumulating debt. The court burdens people who are too poor to pay with additional fees and logistical hurdles at every step of the process, then arrests people who cannot pay and denies them the procedural protections required by the Constitution. For people who are too poor to pay, the almost-inevitable result of this system is jail time,” the complaint states.

The women say the Austin Municipal Court collects more than $30 million from more than 150,000 Class C misdemeanor cases each year. Many of the previous class actions claim that the cities use traffic tickets to fund their courts, and target black drivers to do it.

Data show that the Austin Municipal Court rarely waives debt in these cases. Between September 2011 and September 2015, the court waived debt just 11 times in more than 600,000 cases. During this time, it jailed more than 2,000 people.

Gonzales’s and Salazar’s attorney Rebecca Bernhardt said the Austin court has to make some changes.

“First, it needs to make fair and thorough determinations of individuals’ ability to pay, based upon their income, expenses, and dependents.

“Second, the most important alternative to full payment of the fine is reducing and/or waiving the overdue balance of fines and fees for people too poor to pay.

“Third, it should make payment plans more accessible, by not charging a fee for payment plans, and by tailoring payment installments to ability to pay.

“Fourth, when assigning community service, the court must ensure that the community service order is appropriate for the person and that the person’s economic circumstances that made fines impossible to pay do not also make community service impossible to perform.

“Finally, the court may also consider dramatically decreasing its use of arrest warrants and regularly rescheduling missed hearings when someone missing their initial appearance.”

Bernhardt said the goal of the lawsuit is “to change the practices of the City of Austin Municipal Court, to ensure that it follows state and federal law and comports with the city’s self-identified goals of inclusion and equity.”

A spokeswoman for Austin said: “The city is familiar with and has reviewed the allegations in the lawsuit. We’re prepared to defend the city and are confident that Municipal Court officials and staff are complying with all appropriate laws in this matter.”

Gonzales and Salazar seek class certification, declaratory judgment, an injunction and attorney’s fees.

Bernhardt is with the Texas Fair Defense Project. She is assisted by attorneys with the University of Texas Civil Rights Clinic, in Austin, and attorneys with Susman Godfrey, in Houston.

Written by Ryan Kocian of www.courthousenews.com