JOSEPH KLEIN: ISLAMIZING THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-klein/islamizing-the-public-schools/print/
The Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is pressuring public schools in this country to make special accommodations for Muslim students and to deny comparable accommodations for students of other faiths.
For example, CAIR’s instructional material for teachers entitled “An Educator’s Guide to Islamic Religious Practices” advises schools to permit Muslim students who wish to attend Friday congregational worship (known as Jum’ah) to “request a temporary release from school.”
In Michigan, CAIR went beyond dispensing general advice from its guidebook. In April, 2013, it pushed for public schools in Dearborn, Michigan to accommodate Muslim students who wish to comfortably pray on school grounds and to allow Muslim students to leave early on Fridays for Jumu’ah prayers.
The school superintendant caved, and CAIR got its wish.
Just a few months earlier, the same CAIR Michigan branch had complained that a Detroit area elementary school was being too accommodating to Christians when it allowed its teachers to distribute permission slips for parents to sign so that their children could be released to attend off-site Bible studies classes.
In his letter to the school district, CAIR-MI Executive Director Dawud Walid wrote in part:
School staff and teachers are not to serve as advocates for one particular religion or congregation within a religion by passing out slips inviting parents to give permission for their children to attend religious instruction. . . According to the United States Supreme Court, the First Amendment clearly requires that public school students and their parents are never given the impression that their school/school district prefers a specific religion over others or sanctions religion in general.
CAIR’s sanctimonious, hypocritical letter worked. It intimidated the school district into offering an apology.
In California, the Islamists have already won in their efforts to get special treatment for Islam in the public schools.
For example, several years ago seventh-graders at a San Francisco-area school were required to “become Muslims” for two full weeks as part of California’s world history curriculum. This included professing as “true” the Muslim belief that “The Holy Quran is God’s word,” reciting the Muslim profession of faith — “Allah is the only true God and Muhammad is his messenger” —and chanting “Praise be to Allah.” Just imagine what would happen if a public school told Muslim students to become Jews for two weeks and recite the traditional Jewish prayer: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
Yet, in 2006, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in California dismissed a case brought by outraged parents even though Supreme Court decisions have kept religion out of public schools for decades. In a brief memorandum opinion, the appeals court concluded that the activities did not constitute “overt religious activities that raise Establishment Clause concerns.” The Supreme Court apparently forgot its own precedents when it refused to take an appeal from the 9th Circuit decision.
While allowing Islamist indoctrination in public schools, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld another public school’s ban on a student performance of an instrumental version of Ave Maria at their high school’s graduation, because the performance could be seen as endorsing religion. These judges saw no inconsistency in allowing Muslim prayers in the classroom, while upholding the banning of a one-time performance of a Christian-themed instrumental classic.
CAIR also sends its own lecturers into the public schools to indoctrinate impressionable students with Islamist propaganda and wants Muslim educators to have a say in textbook selection to spin the Islamist narrative in history and social studies texts.
On November 29, 2011, for example, Hassan Shibly, CAIR Florida Executive Director, taught more than 400 Steinbrenner High School students, whose world history teacher asked Shibly to specifically cover sharia law and the mission of CAIR itself.
We can be sure that Shibly left out of his biased presentation the part about sharia law’s call for violent jihad against the “infidels.” No doubt he also omitted CAIR’s connection to the Muslim Brotherhood or its alleged part in the Holy Land Foundation terrorist funding case.
While CAIR sends its own representatives into public schools to indoctrinate students with its Islamist spin, it uses the legal system to bully teachers who dare to bring up examples of terrorists committing violence in the name of Islam. For example, CAIR’s Washington state branch accused a well-respected Washington public school teacher of being “racist.” CAIR complained that the teacher, while instructing her students about the dangers of bullying last October, used the terrorist groups Taliban and Hamas as examples of organizations that employ violence to “bully people.” CAIR called for a federal investigation and demanded information “regarding curriculum, approved texts and materials, internal correspondence, and past complaints against the district.”
“Often one complaint is indicative of a larger pattern of biased education,” said CAIR-Washington’s civil rights coordinator, Jennifer Gist, in a statement. “We are requesting public records from the district to review their materials and past complaints, in an effort to analyze the quality of equal education it affords its students.”
So far, the Washington state school district has stood up for its teacher. Let’s hope it doesn’t end up bending to CAIR’s will and that more public schools in this country resist the Islamists’ bullying, even if the Obama administration follows it usual course and supports the Islamists’ position.
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