A Hamas-linked group partners with public schools.
In 1993, Ibrahim Hooper, director of strategic communications for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said that, “I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future. But I’m not going to do anything violent to promote that. I’m going to do it through education.” Twenty-five years later, CAIR could be making headway on that goal, through its relationships with US public school districts in at least three states.
CAIR — an Islamist group and United Arab Emirates-designated terrorist organizationthat bills itself as a defender of civil rights — has achieved special concessions for Muslim students and launched the inappropriate insertion of religion into publicly-funded education. Meanwhile, pushback from parents and outside organizations is building.
Seattle Public Schools’ partnership with CAIR’s Washington chapter is the latest incident to cause controversy, but the relationship dates back to at least 2011, when CAIR-WA sent the district a letter proposing accommodations for Muslim students and classroom lessons on Islam. Then as now, CAIR-WA claimed to be fighting “anti-Muslim bullying.” To that end, in 2012 and 2013 the organization contacted the school district to complain about “Islamophobia” among teachers.
That approach eventually paid off. In a Ramadan crowd-funding campaign in May of this year, the CAIR-WA chapter outlined its plan “to provide educational training for teachers and staff on things like Ramadan, Eid, and how educators can support Muslim students in the classroom.” Accordingly, that same month, CAIR-WA ran a “professional development session” in a Seattle high school that “addressed providing identity-safe spaces in schools for Muslim families” and “how to support students during Ramadan.”
In July, the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund (FCDF), a legal advocacy group, sent a letter to the Seattle school district warning that partnering with CAIR and “discriminating in favor of students based on their religion” was a violation of the First Amendment that, if continued, would lead to legal action. (This was no empty threat: CAIR’s National Executive Director, Nihad Awad, admittedin 2016 that distributing the group’s publications to schools is “both a religious and educational exercise.”) FCDF then filed a public records request asking for emails between school officials and CAIR staff.
In a similar situation, the FCDF sued the San Diego Unified School District in 2017 on behalf of several local parents, alleging that its relationship with CAIR set up a “subtle, discriminatory scheme that establishes Muslim students as the privileged religious group.” That partnership began with an all-too-familiar “anti-Islamophobia bullying initiative” developed by CAIR’s San Diego chapter, focusing on Muslim holidays, “safe spaces” for Muslim students, and staff training about Muslim culture. […]
Read the full story from Front Page Mag
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