Islamic School Projects

The Islamization of America is proceeding at speed as the political and educational elites are desperately playing catch-up with Europe’s looming immigration and refugee disaster. We have just learned that Paul Ryan’s “House-passed omnibus [bill] will bring in nearly 300,000 Muslim migrants in the next 12 months alone, including roughly 170,000 who will be permanently resettled…” The political nomenklatura on both sides of the aisle are hastening the ruination of the country. As Roger Simon remarks, “Europe is in a double-bind situation that we are not.  As their domestic populations decline, they have to admit a substantial amount of Muslims to support their welfare states.  We do not need this.” However, there are no doubt electoral and fiscal considerations that would profit, on the one hand, the political fortunes of the Democrats (as well as “fundamentally transforming” America according to Obama’s sinister intentions), and on the other, the financial prospects of those involved in migrant resettlement programs and of employers seeking a low wage labor force.

The education establishment is no less complicit. Common Core, which has been enthusiastically embraced by both Brahmin and shudra, effectively mandates the study of Islam, which often takes precedence over the traditional focus on American and Western history. As columnist and author Edward Davenport reports for Freedom Outpost, “An astounding 32 pages of the World history textbook are devoted to Muslim cavitation. Students in two Texas schools–Cross Timbers intermediate and Kenneth Davis–will be required to learn Arabic…thanks to a 1.3 million grant from the Department of Education’s Foreign Language Assistantship program.” Much of American political and military history has been airbrushed out of the materials students are expected to master. Qatar has also been lavish in promoting Islamic propaganda at the expense of objective scholarship; indeed, Qatar Foundation International, directed by Islamic apologist Tariq Ramadan, funded the “One World Education” concept from which Common Core originated.

Davenport points out that “Title VI of the Higher Education Act has become a ‘magic carpet’ for Saudi influence over American schools. Title VI requires Middle East study centers receiving federal funding to engage in cultural-exchange programs with U.S. schools. Outreach coordinators, funded by the Saudis, then create lesson plans for American K-12 teachers.” Publishing giant Pearson Education, which advertises itself as designing “education products and services to institutions, governments and direct to individual learners” and certifies teachers, dominates a significant part of the Common Core industry. According to the Washington Times, Pearson is owned by the Libyan Investment Authority, which controls 26 million shares in the company. The Times concludes: “The $632 billion the federal government spends each year on public school ‘education’ is being wasted on violating the First Amendment, by the federal government instituting a religion through the teaching of Islam in public schools.” The Federal “Race to the Top” initiative, part and parcel of Common Core, has ensured the precipitous chute to the bottom.

What we are observing are the effects of a macropolitical strategy, reinforced not only by curricular structures and testing practices, but by the ostensibly innocent maneuvers that feature on the mirco-tier of educational procedures. The nexus between sectarian politics and partisan education is now firmly entrenched in the American cultural mindscape, and we can see how this plays out on the level of primary and high school “learning projects.” We have read accounts of elementary and high school students pledging allegiance in Arabic, observing Muslim holy days, being drilled in Islamic vocabulary, prayers and culture, being taught the five pillars of Islam and world history from an Islamic perspective, reciting the Shahada (“There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is the messenger of Allah”) and being taken on field trips to mosques (but not to churches, synagogues or Hindu temples).

A recent controversy illustrating this tendency involves high school students in Blaine, Minnesota, instructed to perform a song in their Christmas concert that includes the Arabic phrase Allahu Akbar, which CBS considerately explains in its report on the event “means God is Great.” No, not quite. As Carol Brown comments in American Thinker, it means “Allah is supreme. As in Islamic supremacy.” It is also the cry uttered by legions of jihadists as they commit their acts of terror, slaughtering innocents at will. But students, to the detriment of all of us, are not informed about the implications of the phrase.

Another such controversy involves a homework assignment in Arabic calligraphy given to students at Riverheads High School in Staunton, Virginia, in which they were required to copy out the Shahada. Parents objected and the school briefly closed down on the ridiculous pretext that such objections posed a “risk of harm.” Several articles have circulated dealing with the row, one of the most interesting by political commentator Rick Moran. While acknowledging that “whoever designed that lesson plan is clearly out of touch with the sentiments of parents and others in the community,” Moran’s summation of the episode conveniently skirts the critical issue. “[T]his a huge overreaction by parents,” he writes; “You can’t close your child off from the rest of the world simply because you have a different notion of God or politics.  That leads to kids who are half-educated and narrow-minded – hardly a recipe for success in life.”

Moran is right, but only up to a point—at which his argument falters and lapses into a kind of special pleading owing to what it leaves out of the equation. Certainly, students may with educational advantage transcribe the Shahada, but only if they are also directed to copy out another ayah from the Koran which reveals an equally crucial aspect of Islamic theology and balances the ledger. For example, passages from suras which command believers to kill Jews and Christians if they do not convert or pay the Jizya tax (Koran 8:12; 47:4), practice taqiyya, or lie to strengthen the faith (Koran 3:54; 9:3; 16:106; 40:28), follow the verse of the sword which enjoins the faithful to kill and be killed for Allah (Koran 9:5), or to kill apostates (Koran 2:217; 4:89), among innumerable other such bloody injunctions. The Shahada may be the doctrinal basis of the faith but it is not the essence of the faith, which is to be found in the Medinan Koran and the Hadith. Clearly, students are not being taught about the composition of the Koran, that is, its earlier Meccan and later Medinan components, nor about the principle of nasikh, or abrogation, in which a later, often violent passage supersedes an earlier one. Probably none have a clue about the Hadith—and neither, I suspect, do their teachers.

I can see no objection to learning about Islam if students are given the full story, which is far more complex and troubling than they are led to believe. At this stage in the educational burlesque that is being enacted, truth, honesty and genuine scholarship are plainly contra-indicated when treating the historical category of the program (as is the case across the board). And the reason for this is evident. Truth, honesty and genuine scholarship would provide a Common Cure for Common Core.

But government officials and school administrators, typically men and women without spines, moral convictions, historical awareness and general intelligence, are committed to advancing the syndrome until it can no longer be reversed. It is perhaps no exaggeration to assume that the day may come in many schools across the country when the Shahada replaces the Oath of Allegiance.

First published in PJ Media.