Mayor Starts Madrassa?

MAYOR STARTS MADRASSA? 14946 - Shulman

The New York City Dept. of Education is setting up a grade 6-12 school
with "a multicultural curriculum and intensive Arabic language
instruction." Sounds innocent to the unaware. But beware!

Daniel Pipes, who learned Arabic, realizes the need for others to.
Unfortunately, Arabic-language instruction usually comes with Islamist
and Arabist doctrines. The school's designated principal, Dhabah
Altmontaser, is demonstrably extremist. She claims that the
perpetrators of 9/11 were not Arabs and Muslims unless they were set
off by (their perception of) the US being unfair. (That doesn't
justify picking on innocents.) New York police use of informants to
prevent a subway bombing antagonized Muslims here. We New Yorkers
were more concerned with preventing terrorism. She asserted that "the
school won't shy away from sensitive topics such as colonialism and
the Israeli-Palestinian crisis." She also said that the school would
incorporate Islamic culture, which is not what originally was proposed
for the school's mission. (Think she'd reveal that the Muslims are
among the greatest colonizers?)

Middlebury College graduates who study Arabic "leave indoctrinated
with a tendentious Arab nationalist reading of Middle Eastern
history. In "...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."

The Arabic Language Institute Foundation claims that knowledge of
Islam's holy language can help overcome the West's "moral decay."
Their idea is, learn the language and be brought nearer to
conversion. As compared with Algerian students taught in French,
those taught in Arabic "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." (NY Sun, 4/24, p.5). How low they are to think Israelis
are so low!

Islamists complain about any useful counter-terrorism methods.
Security officials need American Muslims' help in culling out the
supposed minority of Muslims who are terrorists (and Islamists). If
they maintain solidarity with the Islamists, then they are not
moderate. As for teaching Arabic, we need scholars, not Arab
propagandists who pick a curriculum like ones from Arab
dictatorships. We also need to train students in skepticism and to
resist false indoctrination.

By 5/4, the tardy NY Times weighed in. In quoted opponents' general
cry of alarm, and omitted almost all of their facts and specific
concerns. Without the facts, the conclusions seemed merely alarmist.
This alarmism was pitted against assurances that all they wanted to do
was to teach the language and explain the culture objectively (Julie
Bosman, 5/4, B1). Naturally the school's supporters sounded more
reasonable. The Times' out-of-context quoting slants for Islam.

.

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