The shame of it all (August 10th, 2007 update)

Submitted by Rebecca Moulds (Egypt), Aug 15, 2007 at 06:53

Dhabah Almontaser's resignation from the Khalil Gibran International Academy indicates that she realised she was in a losing battle and bowed out as gracefully as she could. Mayor Bloomberg's wishy-washy announcement amounted to no more than "Here's your hat, what's your hurry" .

It is a sad fact that most Muslim schools perpetuate Islamic thinking, while teaching the language at the same time. Any Muslim will become excited that the student of Arabic will someday accept Islam, in fact, they assume that this is a matter of course, as personal experience has taught me. The people of the United States had better come down from whatever Blackberry high they are on and wake up to the fact that Islam is trying very hard to take over the West in any way it can. I have many moderate Muslim friends, but they do not push Islam on anyone, as they have lived in the States, Canada or Europe, and the subject of converting never occurs in their conversation; they are not out to conquer the world in any way. However, do we really need to take a chance with this new school even opening? A foreign language school should be just that: learning a foreign language, not having religious teaching surreptitiously slipped into the program, as we know could very well be the case with this school. However, with Ms. Montaser's resignation, does this guarantee that this won't happen?

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