Sunday, April 02, 2006

The Difference Between Teaching About Moslems and Jews in Public School

Last year, a public school in Scottsdale, Arizona was teaching about Islam using the textbook History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond. A concerned parent posted a comment to Daniel Pipes' website about the way Islam was taught:
The school has spent approximately 5 weeks of the third quarter grading period teaching Islam to 12 and 13 year olds. The children had to write a full biography on the life of Muhammad, using the information from the textbook - an extremely indoctrinating exercise. This biography will be a large portion of their grade for the 8 week period. Michael H. Hart's top 100 list of the most influential people in the history of the world was presented to teach that Muhammad was #1, Sir Isaac Newton was #2 and Jesus was #3. The school hosted two professional Muslim speakers, from the Islamic Speakers Bureau of Arizona, to speak to all 7th grade social studies classes. This took one whole day. The Muslim speakers brought prayer rugs and taught the children to pray the Muslim way. I also believe that there were recitations from the Koran and possibly an Islamic "fashion show".
The parent had other concerns as well, in terms of how the errors and bias of the textbook. The major concern, of course, is that the whole program was a thinly disguised attempt to prosletize.

Something similar happened at a school in California:
Elizabeth Christina Lemings, a teacher in the Byron, Calif., Union School District, was unaware of the course until her seventh-grade son brought home the handouts. Obtained by ANS, the handouts include a history of Islam and the life of Mohammad, its founder. There are 25 Islamic terms that must be memorized, six Islamic (Arabic) phrases, 20 Islamic proverbs to learn along with the Five Pillars of Faith and 10 key Islamic prophets and disciples to be studied.

ANS reports that students are to pretend that they are Muslims, wear Muslim clothing to school, stage their own jihad via a dice game and pick out a Muslim name (to replace their own) from a list of 30.
Contrast this with the way the Holocaust was taught in a school in Florida:
Father John Tinnelly said his son was forced to stand in the back of the classroom and not allowed to sit because he was wearing the yellow star."

He was forced to go to the back of the lunch line four times by an administrator," Tinnelly said.

Tinnelly said the experiment upset his child.

"He was crying," Tinnelly said. "I said, 'What are you crying about?' He said, 'Daddy, I was a Jew today.'"

Other parents and children shared similar stories, Tinnelly said.

"They were told that they could not use the water fountains," Tinnely said. "There was even a sign supposedly at one water fountain (saying) if you're wearing a yellow star , you can't use this water fountain."

Tinnelly said he believes it is important to teach the Holocaust, but apparently little was learned during the experiment.

"I tried to talk to my son and I asked all of these questions and the only thing he said is, 'Daddy, the only thing I found out today is I don't want to be Jewish,'" Tinnelly said.
Granted, Jews are not into prosletizing and our goal is not to go into the public schools and indoctrintate. However, there is nothing wrong with inculcating pride in being Jewish--and the place to start is with our own children.

As Jonathan Rosenblum put it in an article in December 1997:
Of course, awareness of our history is for some the impetus for a deeper investigation of their Judaism. They read the litany of pogroms, mass suicides, and forced exile in the Book of Fire at the Diaspora Museum, and ask themselves: How could my ancestors have chosen, in generation after generation, the near certainty of exile or pogrom for themselves and their children? What was the source of their power?

But unless they can move beyond history and tap into that power themselves, the momentary arousal will dissipate. 'Don't tell your children, 'It's shver (difficult) to be a Yid," Rabbi Moshe Feinstein used to counsel parents. Teach them instead that it is the greatest privilege to be part of the sliver of humanity chosen to bear God's most precious gift to the world.

Only those who experience themselves as having been chosen for something other than suffering can transmit their Judaism to yet another generation.

UPDATE: See Snopes on the article about the school in California, which does not say the story is true--nor false--but 'not quite':

What World Net Daily refers to as "ASSIST News Service" is the public relations arm of Assist Ministries — despite the use of the term "news service," ANS should not be mistaken for one of the legitimate wire services, such as Associated Press or Reuters. The contents of its article should thus be taken with a large grain of salt.

Even so, there is something to what it said. Granted, that "something" is distorted and overstated, but the core element is present.

...We think the Byron School District erred badly on the side of liberalism in how it chose to teach this segment and that it displayed an appalling lack of sensitivity to the fears that even more will be drawn to the fundamentalist Islamic faiths that spawned the terrorist attacks on America if Islam is made attractive enough, but that's a judgement call, not a matter of fact. What can be argued is whether the line separating teaching about a religion and teaching the religion itself was blurred by how the district chose to fulfill the Islamic history element of the Grade 7 social studies curriculum. Whether that line was actually crossed remains a matter of debate (the district is not at this time addressing charges that it had students memorize Koran verses), but it must be said if the shoe were on the other foot — had the portions of world history centering on the spread of Christianity been taught in similar manner — the outcry would have been thunderous.

Also erring in this drama, however, was Assist Ministries, which used this incident as a platform for publicizing its agenda. World Net Daily left out many of the more extreme statements from the Assist Ministries press release, ones that would have made the intent of the ANS piece clear from the beginning:


Crossposted at Israpundit

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I had to read this post twice because I could not believe it, and was sure I must have misread it.

This is pure insanity, you are freaking me out.