New York City’s school chancellor wants an Islamic public school

Aug 28, 2007 / 07:13 am

The New York City Department of Education approved a proposal to open a publicly funded Muslim school. The decision, however, is not going by unchallenged.

The Thomas More Law Center announced yesterday that it will represent a group of citizens opposed to the Sept. 4 opening of Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA).

The Law Center will act as co-counsel with attorney David Yerushalmi, who filed a Freedom of Information Act request on July 23, asking for more details about KGIA. Yerushalmi’s requests have gone unanswered to date.

The Law Center claims the school is nothing more than a thinly disguised incubator for Islamist radicalization. Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Law Center, said an NYPD Intelligence Report warned Americans of the same thing about two weeks ago.

The school will immerse its students in Islamic culture and has three fundamentalist Islamist imams on its Board of Advisors, as well as other promoters with connections to militant Islamic organizations, the Law Center pointed out.

“Rather than use the public school system to assimilate Muslims and other immigrants into American culture, New York City is doing everything it can to keep them isolated – a target rich environment for recruiting potential new homegrown terrorists and a recipe for a future 911 disaster, according to my read of the NYPD Report,” cautioned Thompson.

The Law Center also noted that New York City School Chancellor, Joel Klein, who is aggressively promoting this Islamic school, also refused to allow two Christian students to display a Nativity Christmas. This is “another example of how political correctness is leading to a malicious double standard when it comes to religious expression in public schools,” said Thompson.

The Law Center argues that several factors, including an executive summary of the KGIA proposal, point to the school as anti-American, anti-Christian, and anti-Jewish.

Some of the school’s promoters have ties to questionable Islamic organizations, including the Council of American Islamic Relations. The group’s founder and chairman publicly stated in 1998: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith but to become dominant. The Quaran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”

Imam Talib Abdul-Rashid of the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood is on the school’s advisory board. The Muslim Brotherhood website contains the ominous slogan: "The Qu’ran is our constitution/Jihad is our way/And death in the way of Allah is our promised end."

Klein has attempted to assuage citizen fears that KGIA is a madrassa [Islamic religious school] by promising to monitor the school for any religious violations. However, once the school is operational, any attempt to monitor for religious expressions, may be challenged as a constitutional violation as such monitoring for religious material is arguably an excessive entanglement with religion.