Muslim Re-Education

Coming soon to an elementary school near you: mandatory indoctrination in Islamic customs and practices. According to The Kansas City Star, third-, fourth- and fifth-graders in Herndon, Virginia, are to be given lessons in the three Rs: Reading, ‘Riting, and Ramadan. During this instruction, public school children will play act being Muslims, and, perhaps unwittingly, convert to Islam.

Pupils from a nearby Muslim school will visit classes in the town’s public schools to educate their counterparts in Islam. They will be accompanied by something called “a multicultural trainer” named Afeefa Syeed.

In Herndon, during this month of Ramadan (which began Friday), there will be explanations of the fasting month and “role-playing” that requires students to recite Muslim sacred words and imitate their prayer practices. However, whether the speaker understands what he is saying or not, one is considered to have converted to Islam if he confesses a belief in Allah — and this conversion is considered irrevocable. The penalty for apostasy (and much else, from adultery, to homosexuality, to dating anyone in the Islamic world aside from the intended partner of arranged marriages, often made between first cousins) is death.

Multicultural trainer Syeed explains, “For teachers and administrators, as well as fellow students, explaining Ramadan helps the school accommodate the religious requirements of the holiday.” Why American children should be strong-armed into imposing “the religious requirements of the holiday” for proselytizing Muslims isn’t addressed. Neither do authorities explain why Islamic prayers have suddenly become part of the curriculum for children attending American public (e.g., non-sectarian) schools, while discussions of Christianity are ruled off limits.

The Star also reports, “The Council on Islamic Education, a nonprofit organization based in California, plans to release an updated version of its booklet ‘Muslim Holidays,’ which was first published in 1997, for the more than 4,000 teachers nationwide who have used it.”

With Ramadan taking place this month, many schools are arranging for Muslim students to sit in the library during lunchtime so they won’t be forced to be around food. (“See how special and holy Ahmad is? He is purifying himself for religion through fasting. Isn’t that lovely, boys and girls?”)

The Kansas City Star quotes the multicultural specialist Syeed, who also uses a globe in her presentation to show students that Muslims live all over the world, as saying her lesson plan ‘The Seven S’s of Ramadan’ highlights aspects of Islam that children of other faith backgrounds can relate to, like patience, peace and gratitude. “It’s really just to define who we are on our own terms” Syeed says, “and make the connection with a much larger, universal aspect.”

The Herndon school district is not an isolated pocket of Islamic indoctrination. The Assist News Service reports that 7^th graders in Byron, California, were given special assignments in Islam that included faith-related role-playing. (Try to make it a two-way street by having Muslim kids role-playing Christian Crusaders, and the ACLU would have you drawn and quartered.)

Billed as a “Social Studies” class, it required seventh graders to memorize verses of the Koran and to pray, “In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful,” and to chant, “Praise to Allah, Lord of Creation.”

According to Rev. Miles of the Religious News Service, students will be required to memorize 25 Islamic terms and six Islamic phrases. They will also learn 20 Islamic proverbs, the Five Pillars of Islam and to be familiar with 10 key Islamic prophets and disciples. Students were presented with true/false questions that required them to affirm tenets of the Islamic faith as objective fact. The handouts used in the course, according to ANS, are reported to include a history of Islam and the life of its founder, Mohammed (doubtlessly bowdlerized for shockable young minds). But last year, although a federal judge ruled that the Byron Union School District could continue its three-week curriculum that required 7^th graders recite Muslim prayers, the school abandoned the project because it created an outcry.

As Front Page Magazine Managing Editor Ben Johnson documents in his just published book 57 Radical Causes: Teresa Heinz Kerry’s Charitable Giving, Teresa Heinz Kerry has funded a similar curriculum — complete with confessions of belief in Islam — for use in the Pittsburgh public schools.

Whoever, or whatever organization, is behind these confident insertions of Islamic customs and religious rules into American civil life, the object is clear: to present Islam as another thread in the tapestry that is America, and this colonization of American history has been going on quietly for some time.

One such curriculum claims the Muslims discovered America before Columbus and intermarried with Algonquin Indians, even rising to the level of chiefs.

Others give Muslims a role in Columbus’ discovery of the New World. Stephen Schwartz, writing in Tech Central Station in a piece entitled Columbus Day Dreams, says there is now a mission underway to assert that Columbus hired a Muslim navigator to guide his ships. This is described by Schwartz as “a fantasy version of the Spanish-financed maritime explorations, as part of a campaign to establish an American Islamic heritage dating from the beginnings of our history.”

The source of this rumor was: The U.S. State Department. On August 23, 2004, Phyllis McIntosh wrote an article entitled “Islamic Influence Runs Deep in American Culture” in the State Department’s publication Washington File. In this government publication, she stated, “It is likely that Christopher Columbus, who discovered America in 1492, charted his way across the Atlantic Ocean with the help of an Arab navigator.”

Responds Schwartz, “How such a thing could be ‘likely’ when the history of Columbus’ voyages has been established by documentary methods for five centuries, with no mention anywhere of Arab or Muslim participation, is baffling, to say the least.”

Phyllis McIntosh races on breathlessly to claim that the squash blossom jewellery of Southwestern American Indians is so close to Arabic calligraphy that there must be a connection. She also claims with a straight face that the boots worn by the archetypical American hero, the cowboy, were designed by Muslims in southern Spain. She also claims that Muslims who stayed on in Spain after the Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula had immigrated to the New World in the 1500s, although Schwartz says that this was impossible because the Spanish descendants of converted Jews and Muslims were strictly forbidden to emigrate to the New World.

There are legitimate instances of Muslim influence on American history. It seems well documented that some of the early black slaves kidnapped in Africa and shipped to America may have included some Islamic adherents taken from largely Muslim countries — who were sold into slavery by their Arab slave trader co-religionists. (No doubt, this accounts for the popularity of that touching Negro spiritual, Swing Low, Sweet Shari’a.) However, it is not a fact the PC educational crowd has chosen to highlight.

It would be laughable if these prevaricators did not have an army of co-dhimmis who are only too happy to endorse fake American history to advance the Islamic cause in North America and another army of leftist teachers and principals who earnestly believe in indoctrinating children in multiculturalist propaganda. It should be noted that in this multicultural paradise, the dominant religion and culture is increasingly an Islamic one.

The camel is making progress in its effort to get inside the tent and take over. It got its nose under the edge when, a few months ago, the close-knit Polish Catholic town of Hamtramck, in Michigan, was forced by their dhimmi town council to endure Muslim calls to prayer in Arabic broadcast over loudspeakers six times a day. The Muslims said their calls to worship their god in an alien language were roughly equivalent to Christian church bells. A few months later, a hospital in Maine kowtowed to demands of Somali refugees that hospital gowns be modified to bring them in line with standards of modesty decreed by Islam. New johnnies were designed on the double, not only with an extra flap but also an interior sarong.

The dhimmis rewriting American history, tradition, and public school curricula are known to us. What is more interesting is, who is powering this agenda with financing? Certainly, where there are megabucks being handed around with lavish abandon, the Saudi Royal Family can’t be far away. The Council on Islamic Education, which contributes to “Washington File,” includes members of the Wahhabi lobby.

Certainly, there is nothing wrong with a study of comparative religions, but many parents believe it is inappropriate for children in third — or even seventh — grade to have the certainties of their religion degraded into just one “belief system” among many; this denigrates their parents’ home religious instruction. Comparative religion is a subject for those who have developed a sophisticated ability to think outside themselves, usually around 17 or 18. And it is of interest mainly to those of a philosophical turn of mind. It is not for everyone and it should not be imposed. And certainly, children of any age should not be forced to choose a Muslim name over the Christian (or Jewish!) name their parents gave them. This is an invasion of the child’s identity. For the public schools to unwittingly convert children to any religion is rightly forbidden by the U.S. Constitution.

And assaulting children with false history to enhance the self-esteem of a minority population is a betrayal of children, of learning, and of the historic mission of Western education.