A Madrassa Grows in Brooklyn
- From: jose <josefsoplar@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 25 Apr 2007 09:21:04 -0700
Brain washing begins in Brooklyn. Madrassas are terrorist training
camps for the despicable cult of Islam.
A Madrassa Grows in Brooklyn
By Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 25, 2007
Come September, an Arabic-language public secondary school is slated
to open its doors in Brooklyn. The New York City Department of
Education says the Khalil Gibran International Academy, serving grades
six through 12, will boast a "multicultural curriculum and intensive
Arabic language instruction."
This appears to be a marvelous idea, for New York and the country need
native-born Arabic speakers. They have a role in the military,
diplomacy, intelligence, the courts, the press, the academy, and many
other institutions - and teaching languages to the young is the ideal
route to polyglotism. As someone who spent years learning Arabic, I am
enthusiastic in principle about the idea of this school, one of the
first of its kind in the United States.
In practice, however, I strongly oppose the KGIA and predict that its
establishment will generate serious problems. I say this because
Arabic-language instruction is inevitably laden with pan-Arabist and
Islamist baggage. Some examples:
Franck Salameh taught Arabic at the most prestigious American language
school, Middlebury College in Vermont. In an article for the Middle
East Quarterly, he wrote: "even as students leave Middlebury with
better Arabic, they also leave indoctrinated with a tendentious Arab
nationalist reading of Middle Eastern history. Permeating lectures and
carefully-designed grammatical drills, Middlebury instructors push the
idea that Arab identity trumps local identities and that respect for
minority ethnic and sectarian communities betrays Arabism."
For an example of such grammatical drills, see the just-published book
by Shukri Abed, Focus on Contemporary Arabic: Conversations with
Native Speakers (Yale University Press), one chapter of which is
titled "The Question of Palestine." Its intensely politicized readings
would be unimaginable in a book of French or Spanish conversations.
The Islamist dimension worries me as well. An organization that
lobbies for Arabic instruction, the Arabic Language Institute
Foundation, claims that knowledge of Islam's holy language can help
the West recover from what its leader, Akhtar H. Emon, calls its
"moral decay." In other words, Muslims tend to see non-Muslims
learning Arabic as a step toward an eventual conversion to Islam, an
expectation I encountered while studying Arabic in Cairo in the 1970s.
Also, learning Arabic in of itself promotes an Islamic outlook, as
James Coffman showed in 1995, looking at evidence from Algeria.
Comparing students taught in French and in Arabic, he found that
"Arabized students show decidedly greater support for the Islamist
movement and greater mistrust of the West." Those Arabized students,
he notes, more readily believed in "the infiltration into Algeria of
Israeli women spies infected with AIDS...the mass conversion to Islam by
millions of Americans," and other Islamist nonsense.
Specifics about the KGIA confirm these apprehensions, including its
roster of sponsors and enthusiasts. The school's key figure, principal-
designate Dhabah ("Debbie") Almontaser, has a record of extremist
views, as William A. Mayer and Beila Rabinowitz have shown at
PipeLineNews.org.
Arabs or Muslims, Ms. Almontaser says, are innocent of the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001: "I don't recognize the people who
committed the attacks as either Arabs or Muslims." Instead, she blames
September 11 on Washington's foreign policies, saying they "can have
been triggered by the way the USA breaks its promises with countries
across the world, especially in the Middle East, and the fact that it
has not been a fair mediator."
At a community meeting with the New York Police Department
commissioner, she berated the NYPD for using "FBI tactics" when
informants were used to prevent a subway bombing, thereby polarizing
the Muslim community. For Ms. Almontaser, it appears, preventing
terrorism counts less than soothing Muslim sensibilities.
She calls George W. Bush a "nightmare" who is "trying to destroy the
United States."
Rewarding these views, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a
foreign-funded front organization, in 2005 bestowed an honor on Ms.
Almontaser for her "numerous contributions" to the protection of civil
liberties.
Her intentions for the KGIA should raise alarms. An Associated Press
report paraphrases her saying that "the school won't shy away from
sensitive topics such as colonialism and the Israeli-Palestinian
crisis," and she notes that the school will "incorporate the Arabic
language and Islamic culture." Islamic culture? Not what was
advertised - but imbuing pan-Arabism and anti-Zionism, proselytizing
for Islam, and promoting Islamist sympathies will predictably make up
the school's true curriculum.
To express your concerns about this planned Arabic school, please
write the New York City chancellor, Joel Klein, at
JKlein@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
.
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