Arab-American school draws fire in NYC

Criticism over Islamist Muslim content causes public Arab-American school to draw fire from New York City residents

PRB News assignment reporter Debra Ferrell reported Friday, Feb. 8, on a growing organized effort to stop Islamist Muslim bias in New York.

The Islamist, Shari’a law view gets play, but Christian values and history don’t get the time of day…

“No one could get away with teaching Christianity in American public schools the way that Islam is being insinuated into the curriculum there,” observed Sara Springer, a New York City teacher and co-founder of Stop the Madrassa Coalition.

Stop the Madrassa is actively investigating and sharing information on the Khalil Gibran International Academy, which opened September 4, 2007 in Brooklyn NY.

This school shares space with the Brooklyn High School for the Arts and the Middle School for Math and Science Explorations.

KGIA is a public school supported by American tax dollars, and its mission is to teach the Arabic language and culture to New York schoolchildren. The state is no stranger to dual language schools - it operates more than 70.

But KGIA has attracted a landslide of negative publicity that the other schools have not, thanks in part to its controversial leaders and their connections to a variety of groups pushing militant agendas linked to extreme Islamist Muslim concepts - as well as known jihad terrorists.

As recently as last month, Stop the Madrassa has publicly called for the Department of Education to shut down KGIA since it “isn’t viable and not functioning safely,” a Stop the Madrassa statement said.

“The school had a very low enrollment of 50 pupils initially,” Springer said. “A department of education spokesman said they had 110 students enrolled and closed the application process.

“Apparently at a later date, administrators enrolled 10 special education students but didn’t provide them with a teacher, which is against the law,” she added.

“Parents are complaining that there’s chaos, and the learning environment isn’t conducive to educating children.”

Further investigations reveal that the school’s Arabic teacher admitted to supporters that KGIA has no curriculum, and she was copying and pasting Arabic letters for worksheets from Google sites.

“The school’s premise was to be an Arabic language and cultural school,” Springer said. “It’s evident that they didn’t plan at all if they have no curriculum for teaching the language.”

Springer questioned if the lack of educational scholarship left wide open doubt as to what was the intended purpose of the school.

That concern was perhaps best answered by Council on American Islamic Relations spokesman Ibrahim Hooper.

In a statement to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Hooper said, “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.”

Are there Christian Action Network supporters and interested others who can report on their schools and districts? Forward your story ideas to fisher@christianaction.org 

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