Islamic Schools in USA teach hate for America, Israel, Christianity and Judaism

[Ronbo]

Islamic Schools Teaching Homegrown Hate

Wednesday, February 27, 2002
By Kenneth Adelman


NEW YORK — Can it be true? That Islamic schools in the United States teach hatred towards American Christians and Jews?


The Washington Post on Monday revealed that one such school outside Washington, D.C., uses textbooks teaching 11th graders that "the Day of Judgment can't come until Jesus Christ returns to Earth, breaks the cross and converts everyone to Islam, and until Muslims start attacking Jews."

Other accredited Islamic schools in America have world maps on classroom walls that exclude Israel. Some such schools promote class discussions that portray Usama bin Laden as "simply the victim of … prejudice" against all Muslims in America.

These astonishing facts were broken by Post reporters Valerie Strauss and Emily Wax in their front-page piece, too tepidly entitled, "Where Two Worlds Collide: Muslim Schools Face Tension of Islamic, U.S. Views."

But their reporting was anything but tepid.

Americans generally assume Islamic hate teaching resided "out there" — in Cairo or Riyadh. And yet it's right here — in the elite Islamic Saudi Academy just outside Washington, D.C. "At stake," the two ace reporters say, "is how the next generation of Muslims coming of age in the United States will participate in the country they live in."

As with all educational institutions, the stakes are high. But the prospects here are low.

I don't know precisely what new immigrant schools taught when waves of Catholics or Jews first flocked to America. But I suspect they adopted and spread the basic American values — tolerance, freedom and patriotism.

Surely not the hatred propagated in many Islamic studies classes. At the Al-Qalam All-Girls School in Springfield, Va., seventh graders learn that Usama bin Laden may be not a villain but a victim of Americans' biased views toward great Islamic leaders. Hence "some students question the government's claim that bin Laden is responsible for the terrorist attacks — disputing that videotapes actually show him taking credit."

The Post reporters questioned "Fawzy, a 19-year-old who will graduate from George Mason University in 2003, [who] … wonders whether the United States just needed someone to blame and picked a Muslim. 'A lot of the students can't make up their minds if [Usama] is a good guy or a bad guy,' Fawzy said. 'The thing is, we don't have any real proof either way. I think a lot of people feel this way.'"

Classrooms of the Washington Islamic Academy, which teaches kindergarten through fourth grade, feature world maps without Israel. "Upstairs in Al-Qalam girls school, the word is blackened out with marker, with 'Palestine' written in its place."

When the reporters asked about this, academy officials "defended the maps, pointing out that some of the students are refugees from Palestine and want their heritage represented."

These school officials attempt to delegitimize Israel. I would delegitimize them — removing them from any role in shaping the beliefs and instilling knowledge in young Americans.

With the massive immigration of Muslims over recent decades — primarily because of the wretchedness of most native Islamic states — these parochial schools are increasing. Throughout America now are 200 to 600 Islamic day schools, teaching at least 30,000 full-time students and thousands more on weekends. The Washington Islamic Academy, outside the nation's capital, teaches some 1,300 kids, including children of Arabic-speaking diplomats.

It may rank among the worst of these academies, as it is funded by Saudi money. Its high school textbook, in the reporters' words, "says one sign of the Day of Judgment will be that Muslims will fight and kill Jews, who will hide behind trees that say: 'Oh Muslim, Oh servant of God, here is a Jew hiding behind me. Come here and kill him.'"

According to Strauss and Wax, "Several students of different ages, all of whom asked not to be identified, said that in Islamic studies, they are taught that it is better to shun and even to dislike Christians, Jews and Shiite Muslims.

"Some teachers 'focus more on hatred,' said one teenager … 'They teach students that whatever is kuffar [non-Muslim], it is okay for you' to hurt or steal from that person."

What can be done about this outrage?

First, reveal it, for which Valerie Strauss and Emily Wax and the Post deserve a Pulitzer Prize. Other reporters and top media outlets should follow in their steps.

Second, stop the accreditation of these hate schools. This, too, the reporters investigated when contacting an official at an accrediting agency of the Islamic Academy. His response was typical bureaucratese: the Secondary and Middle School Commission of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools "does not delve into curriculum extensively but … would be 'concerned' about such material being taught."

Well, he can stop being "concerned" and start de-accrediting the place.

Third, stop the Saudi funding. After Sept. 11, we were shocked to realize that "our friends, the Saudis" gave us Usama bin Laden, 15 of the 19 terrorists of Sept. 11 and more than 100 of the 150-plus terrorist leaders now confined in Guantanamo Bay cells. They also fund the Islamic schools spreading hate around the world towards Christians, Jews, America, freedom, and our sacred values.

Now we learn that Islamic hatred is being spread here at home, molding young American minds in what is shaping up as a real fourth column.

Kenneth Adelman is a frequent guest commentator on Fox News, was assistant to U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from 1975 to 1977 and, under President Ronald Reagan, U.N. ambassador and arms-control director. Mr. Adelman is now co-host of TechCentralStation.com.

[Star]

From a Western Minaret

By Michael Wolfe,7 January 2002

Islam: The Next American Religion?
(reprinted from beliefnet.com)

The U.S. began as a haven for Christian outcasts. But what religion fits our current zeitgeist? The answer may be Islam.

Americans tend to think of their country as, at the very least, a nominally Christian nation. Didn't the Pilgrims come here for freedom to practice their Christian religion? Don't Christian values of righteousness under God, and freedom, reinforce America's democratic, capitalist ideals?

True enough. But there's a new religion on the block now, one that fits the current zeitgeist nicely. It's Islam.

Islam is the third-largest and fastest growing religious community in the United States. This is not just because of immigration. More than 50% of America's six million Muslims were born here. Statistics like these imply some basic agreement between core American values and the beliefs that Muslims hold. Americans who make the effort to look beyond popular stereotypes to learn the truth of Islam are surprised to find themselves on familiar ground.

Is America a Muslim nation? Here are seven reasons the answer may be yes.

Islam is monotheistic. Muslims worship the same God as Jews and Christians. They also revere the same prophets as Judaism and Christianity, from Abraham, the first monotheist, to Moses, the law giver and messenger of God, to Jesus--not leaving out Noah, Job, or Isaiah along the way. The concept of a Judeo-Christian tradition only came to the fore in the 1940s in America. Now, as a nation, we may be transcending it, turning to a more inclusive "Abrahamic" view.

In January, President Bush grouped mosques with churches and synagogues in his inaugural address. A few days later, when he posed for photographers at a meeting of several dozen religious figures, the Shi'ite imam Muhammad Qazwini, of Orange County, Calif., stood directly behind Bush's chair like a presiding angel, dressed in the robes and turban of his south Iraqi youth.

Islam is democratic in spirit. Islam advocates the right to vote and educate yourself and pursue a profession. The Qur'an, on which Islamic law is based, enjoins Muslims to govern themselves by discussion and consensus. In mosques, there is no particular priestly hierarchy. With Islam, each individual is responsible for the condition of her or his own soul. Everyone stands equal before God.


Americans, who mostly associate Islamic government with a handful of tyrants, may find this independent spirit surprising, supposing that Muslims are somehow predisposed to passive submission. Nothing could be further from the truth. The dictators reigning today in the Middle East are not the result of Islamic principles. They are more a result of global economics and the aftermath of European colonialism. Meanwhile, like everyone else, average Muslims the world over want a larger say in what goes on in the countries where they live. Those in America may actually succeed in it. In this way, America is closer in spirit to Islam than many Arab countries.

Islam contains an attractive mystical tradition. Mysticism is grounded in the individual search for God. Where better to do that than in America, land of individualists and spiritual seekers? And who might better benefit than Americans from the centuries-long tradition of teachers and students that characterize Islam. Surprising as it may seem, America's best-selling poet du jour is a Muslim mystic named Rumi, the 800-year-old Persian bard and founder of the Mevlevi Path, known in the West as the Whirling Dervishes. Even book packagers are now rushing him into print to meet and profit from mainstream demand for this visionary. Translators as various as Robert Bly, Coleman Barks, and Kabir and Camille Helminski have produced dozens of books of Rumi's verse and have only begun to bring his enormous output before the English-speaking world. This is a concrete poetry of ecstasy, where physical reality and the longing for God are joined by flashes of metaphor and insight that continue to speak across the centuries.

Islam is egalitarian. From New York to California, the only houses of worship that are routinely integrated today are the approximately 4,000 Muslim mosques. That is because Islam is predicated on a level playing field, especially when it comes to standing before God. The Pledge of Allegiance (one nation, "under God") and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (all people are "created equal") express themes that are also basic to Islam.

Islam is often viewed as an aggressive faith because of the concept of jihad, but this is actually a misunderstood term. Because Muslims believe that God wants a just world, they tend to be activists, and they emphasize that people are equal before God. These are two reasons why African Americans have been drawn in such large numbers to Islam. They now comprise about one-third of all Muslims in America.

Meanwhile, this egalitarian streak also plays itself out in relations between the sexes. Muhammad, Islam's prophet, actually was a reformer in his day. Following the Qur'an, he limited the number of wives a man could have and strongly recommended against polygamy. The Qur'an laid out a set of marriage laws that guarantees married women their family names, their own possessions and capital, the right to agree upon whom they will marry, and the right to initiate divorce. In Islam's early period, women were professionals and property owners, as increasingly they are today. None of this may seem obvious to most Americans because of cultural overlays that at times make Islam appear to be a repressive faith toward women--but if you look more closely, you can see the egalitarian streak preserved in the Qur'an finding expression in contemporary terms. In today's Iran, for example, more women than men attend university, and in recent local elections there, 5,000 women ran for public office.

Islam shares America's new interest in food purity and diet. Muslims conduct a monthlong fast during the holy month of Ramadan, a practice that many Americans admire and even seek to emulate. I happened to spend quite a bit of time with a non-Muslim friend during Ramadan this year. After a month of being exposed to a practice that brings some annual control to human consumption, my friend let me know, in January, that he was "doing a little Ramadan" of his own. I asked what he meant. "Well, I'm not drinking anything or smoking anything for at least a month, and I'm going off coffee." Given this friend's normal intake of coffee, I could not believe my ears.

Muslims also observe dietary laws that restrict the kind of meat they can eat. These laws require that the permitted, or halal, meat is prepared in a manner that emphasizes cleanliness and a humane treatment of animals. These laws ride on the same trends that have made organic foods so popular.

Islam is tolerant of other faiths. Like America, Islam has a history of respecting other religions. In Muhammad's day, Christians, Sabeans, and Jews in Muslim lands retained their own courts and enjoyed considerable autonomy. As Islam spread east toward India and China, it came to view Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism as valid paths to salvation. As Islam spread north and west, Judaism especially benefited. The return of the Jews to Jerusalem, after centuries as outcasts, only came about after Muslims took the city in 638. The first thing the Muslims did there was to rescue the Temple Mount, which by then had been turned into a garbage heap.

Today, of course, the long discord between Israel and Palestine has acquired harsh religious overtones. Yet the fact remains that this is a battle for real estate, not a war between two faiths. Islam and Judaism revere the same prophetic lineage, back to Abraham, and no amount of bullets or barbed wire can change that. As The New York Times recently reported, while Muslim/Jewish tensions sometimes flare on university campuses, lately these same students have found ways to forge common links. For one thing, the two religions share similar dietary laws, including ritual slaughter and a prohibition on pork. Joining forces at Dartmouth this fall, the first kosher/halal dining hall is scheduled to open its doors this autumn. That isn't all: They're already planning a joint Thanksgiving dinner, with birds dressed at a nearby farm by a rabbi and an imam. If the American Pilgrims were watching now, they'd be rubbing their eyes with amazement. And, because they came here fleeing religious persecution, they might also understand.

Islam encourages the pursuit of religious freedom. The Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock is not the world's first story of religious emigration. Muhammad and his little band of 100 followers fled religious persecution, too, from Mecca in the year 622. They only survived by going to Madinah, an oasis a few hundred miles north, where they established a new community based on a religion they could only practice secretly back home. No wonder then that, in our own day, many Muslims have come here as pilgrims from oppression, leaving places like Kashmir, Bosnia, and Kosovo, where being a Muslim may radically shorten your life span. When the 20th century's list of emigrant exiles is added up, it will prove to be heavy with Muslims, that's for sure.

All in all, there seems to be a deep resonance between Islam and the United States. Although one is a world religion and the other is a sovereign nation, both are traditionally very strong on individual responsibility. Like New Hampshire's motto, "Live Free or Die," America is wedded to individual liberty and an ethic based on right action. For a Muslim, spiritual salvation depends on these. This is best expressed in a popular saying: Even when you think God isn't watching you, act as if he is.

Who knows? Perhaps it won't be long now before words like salat (Muslim prayer) and Ramadan join karma and Nirvana in Webster's Dictionary, and Muslims take their place in America's mainstream
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Michael Wolfe is the author of books of poetry, fiction, travel, and history. His most recent works are a pair of books from Grove Press on the pilgrimage to Mecca: "The Hajj" (1993), a first-person travel account, and "One Thousand Roads to Mecca" (1997), an anthology of 10 centuries of travelers writing about the Muslim pilgrimage. In April 1997, he hosted a televised account of the Hajj from Mecca for Ted Koppel's "Nightline" on ABC. He is currently at work on a four-hour television documentary on the life and times of the Prophet Muhammad.

[Ronbo]

.... we keep hearing about all those converts to Islam in the USA, but we don't see many Mosques, but we do see a church on most street corners.

BTW, if the Muslims really think that they can takeover the government and institute an Islamic nation, I think they are ill-advised for holding such a belief because the separation of church and state is a long accepted principle of USA government.

Speaking of converts: I understand that Christian missions in the Islamic World -- where they are allowed to exist -- do a good job in the convert business.

They would do even better if not for the Muslim habit of killing the ministers, priests and nuns and burning down the churches...

[Star]

Originally posted by Ronbo
.... we keep hearing about all those converts to Islam in the USA, but we don't see many Mosques, but we do see a church on most street corners.

BTW, if the Muslims really think that they can takeover the government and institute an Islamic nation, I think they are ill-advised for holding such a belief because the separation of church and state is a long accepted principle of USA government.

Speaking of converts: I understand that Christian missions in the Islamic World -- where they are allowed to exist -- do a good job in the convert business.

They would do even better if not for the Muslim habit of killing the ministers, priests and nuns and burning down the churches...

Christianity is a dead religion in the west - churches solely serve as a place to celebrate births/weddings/deaths.

The name of God is only taken as a token symbol - without the meaning behind it - because you claim to believe that man was descended from single cellular entities - and that the universe was created by a chance big-bang.


Christian missionaries inacted enough ineough inhumane acts through the passage of time - which you are all too happy to forget about now.


The fact that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the west is borne by Western Media sources - hence if anything the figures are more likely to be downplayed rather than beign exaggerated.


Doesnt matter about Islamic state or not - the key thing is what ppl believe in - the rest we don't need to concern ourselves too much about - whatever follows naturally...