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| Gaffney: Close Brooklyn Madrasa |
| 2007-08-18 |
| Frank Gaffney | August 13, 2007 The story of the public school in Brooklyn that is poised to become a taxpayer-underwritten, Islamist recruitment and indoctrination center took a dramatic turn last week. The principal-designate of the so-called Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA), Dhabah "Debbie" Almontaser, was forced to resign after she defended a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "Intifada NYC" – making clear her radical ideology and proclivity for dissembling. Send her to Gaza. The question is no longer whether Ms. Almontaser was, as her critics in a group of parents, teachers and concerned citizens called the Stop the Madrassa Community Coalition have insisted, determined to use the KGIA to advance her theo-political agenda. Her claim that "intifada" actually meant nothing more than a "shaking off" and that its use in connection with New York City was unobjectionable was so preposterous – not to say alarming – that her supporters, notably Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Public Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, found it impossible to ignore the outcry. Even before Ms. Almontaser was obliged to resign, however, she ran into problems with respect to another part of her agenda: Last week, the Board of Education felt constrained to reject her effort to make the school's kitchen "Halal," the Muslim equivalent of kosher. Unfortunately, at this writing, it appears that the rest of Dhabah Almontaser's plan for the Khalil Gibran International Academy remains intact. If the school opens as scheduled in September, it will, as a practical matter, have to operate on the basis of her curriculum, with the teachers she has hired and utilizing her selections of Arabic-language textbooks. Presumably, the same would be true of her plan reported in the New York Post last week to have "retired Arabic-speaking community members converse with the students during lunch periods" – although we are being assured that such interlocutors will be subjected to "background checks" before being given access to KGIA's students. Tax dollars for the Muslim agenda. The inadvisability of allowing the Almontaser influence to persist after her departure is made clear in an "Executive Summary" of her program, the only document about KGIA provided to date in response to a Freedom of Information Law request submitted by a member of the Stop the Madrassa Coalition, John Matthies of the Middle East Forum's Islamist Watch. A scathing critique of this summary is provided by two other coalition members, William Mayer and Beila Rabinowitz, who note on their blog, PipeLineNews.com: "[It] is actually a manual for creating an Islamist vocational school, one in which every activity is planned around creating social activists with an Arab supremacist mindset, in the mold of KGIA's activist/principal Dhabah Almontaser." Mr. Mayer and Ms. Rabinowitz observe that "nearly every party and organization involved with KGIA does not just represent Arab Muslims, but hard core Islamists with a definite agenda." For example, according to Ms. Almontaser's Executive Summary, an organization known as the Arab-American Family Support Center "will have a constant presence on site" providing a "site coordinator" as well as staff members who will: serve as "student advisors and Arabic language teachers," offer "social services," and develop the "extended-day Arabic language and cultural arts programs." If that were not enough, the AAFSC's director, Lena Al Husseini, also continues to serve on the KGIA planning committee. Ms. Al Husseini and her organization are closely tied to other Islamist groups, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and the Muslim Students Association (MSA). CAIR and ISNA were recently designated as un-indicted co-conspirators in a terrorism-financing case. The usual suspects. The MSA is the youth wing of the ISNA. Like its sister organizations, the AAFSC promotes the image of Arab-Americans and Muslims as victims. In the words of Ms. Al Husseini's predecessor at AAFSC, Emira Habiby Browne: "There's a sense of being targeted, profiled and harassed. There's fear that no matter what you do, you are suspected as a potential terrorist. No one feels secure – even in their own homes." Should taxpayers be asked to underwrite the exposure of public school students to a pedagogy rooted in this sort of separatism, victimization and grievance? Or as the anti-"orientalists" write: misrepresentation of the "other." |
| Posted by:McZoid |
| #5 It would be a really terrible thing if that |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-08-18 21:07 |
| #4 Better question: why doesn't Frank Gaffney run for President on a center-right Republican ticket? |
| Posted by: McZoid 2007-08-18 13:50 |
| #3 Why don't we just start buying them bombs. Excelent idea, short fused, and timers rigged to read wrong. |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2007-08-18 10:52 |
| #2 There's a sense of being targeted, profiled and harassed. Y'know, hon, you folks have become caricatures of yourselves. If I was you, I'd be embarrassed. If this was actually happening, you'd know. Believe me, you'd know... |
| Posted by: tu3031 2007-08-18 10:21 |
| #1 Sounds nice, is it going to open on September 11th? Why don't we just start buying them bombs. |
| Posted by: bigjim-ky 2007-08-18 10:12 |