Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2004

WASHINGTON – Parents who are furious that their children are receiving indoctrination in Islam in their schools have yet to hear support from most of the same left-wing groups that loudly lecture Americans on what they call “separation of church and state,” a phrase that appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution.

Thus far, not a peep out of American Civil Liberties Union, Moveon.org, the misnamed People for the American Way or many others of their ilk. ACLU continues to refuse NewsMax's request for comment.

The lone prominent liberal voice who has publicly protested the double standard is Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Front Page Magazine, an outlet for David Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom, says Lynn finds that adding Muslim religious recruitment to the three R’s is “too hard to stomach.”

“This project,” he declares, “falls well short of neutrality" required of government schools when dealing with religion.

ACLU's guidelines on religion in the classroom are believed to have led to the Islam classroom activity slipped into the curriculum. If one reads the document it could be interpreted to “swing both ways,” as parents have complained. That way, when Christianity is presented, the restrictive sections are enforced. When Islam is presented, other sections suggesting latitude are applied, as apparently has happened in the school systems of California, Alabama and individual school districts elsewhere, perhaps in your own community.

That “open to interpretation” language might have accounted for a statement by Nancy Castro, a top official of the school system in Byron, Calif., who told Assist News Service that the course in Islam reflected state requirements.

Byron is at the eye of this storm. Parents and students there have filed a lawsuit in the case that appears headed for 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, thanks to the Thomas Moore Law Center of Ann Arbor, Mich.

Requiring that students pray to Allah and stage their own jihad meets California standards?

Two years ago NewsMax’s Inside Cover quoted government schools superintendent Peggy Green as insisting: “We are not teaching religion. We are teaching California state-mandated standards with state-adopted textbooks.”

At that time, we also cited a Washington Times report that pupils in middle school in San Luis Obisbo were ordered to pretend to be warriors fighting for Islam.

Then and now, there were and are parents who do not want to be quoted by name for fear their children would get the “pay back” from teachers or other school authorities.

Some protesters even fear for their safety. One mother told us she had been threatened so severely she felt compelled to change her name.

Again, quoting Front Page, the textbook “Across the Centuries” and its accompanying curriculum “have students memorizing and mimicking Islamic prayers and theology. But when it comes to learning about Judaism, no comparable engagement with its traditions or literature is taught. Christianity is given short shrift, treated as a mere sub-topic of Judaism and history of the Roman Empire.

“Oh, with one exception: when examples of religious atrocities and crimes are given, every single evil deed is an act of committed Christians. Not a single atrocity or evil deed is anywhere ascribed to Islam.”

All of this has led the San Gabriel Valley Tribune to editorialize that teaching children how the world’s religions have shaped world history “makes for a well rounded curriculum,” but that “asking students to practice religion as part of the school lesson” is a distortion of the learning process and crosses the line.

As NewsMax has noted, another troubling aspect of ACLU's guidelines is that Abdurahman Alamoudi, arrested and jailed without bail on charges linked to terrorism (which he denies), had input along with other, mostly left-wing, organizations and individuals.

In our next installment, we will deal with national security aspects of Alamoudi’s arrest and any new developments in this indoctrination story, which has been mostly ignored by the mainstream media with the exception of Fox News Channel.

Editor's note:
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